carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm carol massar. jason: i'm jason kelley. we are here in new york. carol: this week, a special double issue "the elements." jason: on the 150th anniversary of the periodic table, businessweek looks at the business, economics, and politics and how they are getting stronger.

carol: from fighter jets, computer chips, lasers, and the market for nitrous oxide cold brew. joel: what we decided to do was cover every single element on the periodic table because ultimately, these are all business stories. this is the story of business. carol: you took us places -- there were a lot of surprises for us and we think of the periodic table as old and it is such a bigger thing and it means a lot today. joel: it is the wrong way to think about it. if you associate it with high school chemistry class and get anxiety, forget about it. we wanted to make this fun because things like helium, party city is closing stores because there is a helium shortage and yet there are entrepreneurs who are trying to solve that problem, for lithium and you think about battery

technology and what electric vehicles will be possible, for hydrogen for that matter. everyone of these things we take for granted like a computer chip and how many elements are required to actually make this. they are hidden in plain sight and yet, they are absolutely fundamental to the modern economy and the future of business. jason: put this in the perspective of, sort of a year of business week. how does this fit into the broader editorial mission? joel: i think a lot of what we do is trying to get behind the stories, right? one of the ways i think this has played out is the trade war. rare earths have come up as a hot topic because china controls a lot of the supply chain for them. there has been concern about what it means when rare earth might only come from china.

where else can you get these things? when we talk about rare earths, the periodic table of elements. donald trump's preferred acquisition is so resource rich that one of the reasons it has become such a fascinating topic is because it is packed with the future of where we think these rare earths will come from. carol: thinking about how it was the building blocks for so much but we think about it differently, especially in the climate change environmentally conscious world. we think of it in a different way. joel: and carbon is one of the elements, as well. carbon is an absolute workhorse. there are a lot of elements that are totally useless or we don't have uses for yet, and yet there is carbon which we think might have even more potential in terms of how we are able to sequester it and build things in the future. carol: have fun with it. jason: one of the ways this is the joel weber businessweek, it is very character driven.

you have people through which you tell these stories. entrepreneurs, some people you are not sure at the time whether they are on the up and up but clearly, these are people with a lot of ambition. joel: one thinks he has the next great new jewelry and it is a little dicey. we will see what becomes of it. there is another guy who basically hordes elements he thinks there will be a market for in 20 years' time. you suddenly need something to make a photocopier with a new material, and he's the guy that cornered the market and you will have to be dealing with the middleman, effectively. so it really speaks to, we think about how do we tell stories that stick with you long after you've read them?

often times, one way we do that is by finding characters who want to start reading about them come you can't look away because of how fascinating they are. that gets us back to the table ultimately because it is endlessly fascinating. how it came to being and that it continues to resonate. jason: there is a character behind the creation of the table in his own right. carol: dimitri mendelev. you think about how few things in business stick around for 150 years. not that many, and he created the greatest org chart in business history. carol: we are spreading the coverage over a couple of weeks. this is a double issue you have done. i know you can't pick a favorite but is there a story you saw it and thought, this is what i envisioned? joel: they are all special, but peter's opening remarks, why matter still matters is

incredibly illuminating about why this is so crucial for business. i think austin's car story and -- austin carr's story and the jewelry guy. we have so many pitches for helium. carol: i think jeff muskus described it as the existential crisis of party city, helium. joel: your balloons will be on the floor. jason: the special elements issue is also interactive online. carol: you can search stories by the elements on the periodic table. you can also find the remarks, why the periodic table is more important than ever. >> i am peter coy. you might ask, what does "bloomberg businessweek" magazine know about the periodic table of elements and why are we devoting an issue to it?

there is a connection to the elements and not just gold and silver. there is also silicon, which gives us silicon valley, lithium for batteries, uranium for nuclear energy, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium which help us grow crops. carbon is full of vitals for life, and a huge pain in the climate change that. you may think we live in a virtual world where value is created by ideas, but it takes dozens of elements to make the computers that house all those ideas, and the more technology advances, the more elements we find uses for. that is why the 150th anniversary formulation of the periodic table, matter still matters. jason: rare earths in the u.s., china tit-for-tat. carol: and why greenland is trump's treasure island.

jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪ carol: welcome back to

"bloomberg businessweek." i'm jason kelly. carol: i'm carol massar. join us every day on the radio starting at 2:00 p.m. wall street time and catch up on the daily show by listening to our podcast on apple podcast, soundcloud, and bloomberg.com. jason: and online at businessweek.com and through our mobile app. this week, we are breaking down businessweek's special elements issue including how rare earths are part of that never-ending u.s.-china trade war. carol: the metals are necessary for all kinds of consumer and industrial including smartphones, cars, solar panels, m.r.i.'s defense technology such as spider jets. check this out. china accounts for only 70% of the global supply.

jason: taylor riggs is helping us break it down. taylor: there is a rare earth metal etf because this is bloomberg. 20% of this is rare earth so it gives us a gauge of where we are. march 2018, the start of the trade fight, and on top you are looking at the price of the etf falling as investors are concerned about demand for these products that make a lot of consumer electronics and batteries. very interesting on the bottom in blue, you have fund flows into that etf. you are seeing investors really buy into this. i bet, maybe hoping the tariff fight will be resolved and they won't see tariffs on the rare earth metals. carol: a great illustration of what has been going on. rare earths also help explain why president trump is interested in taking greenland off of denmark's hands. editor julian goodman breaking that down. >> from the greenland perspective, it is important for them to develop this mining

operation because they have been trying to become independent from denmark for a long time. they achieved a big step in that in 2008 and passed a referendum that devolved more powers to greenland and now they need to develop the economy that is small and since there is so much international interest in these rare earth metals, that is a big part of their plan. >> but it hasn't happened so far? jillian: development has been slow because of the hostile environment, but as international attention picks up, the momentum behind it, interest in it except. that might accelerate. carol: what i also thought was interesting is china already has some investment there. jillian: they do, and the u.s. geological survey has been on the ground for months. the announcement by president

trump -- admission by president trump he was interested in buying greenland came as a surprise to a lot of people that they have been laying the groundwork for a while. carol: it didn't quite make sense. jillian: and yet we've had a diplomatic mission there since mandy u.s. geological survey has been on the ground so it has been in the work. carol: let's talk about the pictures because it is a photo essay and you sent a photographer there and got a bunch of pictures. you see how it was a tough territory in terms of developing. he saw pictures of the rare earth minerals, the potential -- it seems there is a lot. jillian: exactly, it is a ton of potential. one of the images we have is a desk image where we have these rocs that are glowing fluorescent under blacklight. this mineral we are seeing that is a glowing in the rocks indicates the presence of rare earth metals. you can see a lot of them are glowing so you can see visually there is a lot of potential for mining exploration. carol: there has been some mining done in the past but it had been abandoned? jillian: denmark in the 1980's banned uranium mining as part of the nuclear nonproliferation action and that was recently overturned in 2013 but that hasn't gotten started again.

jillian: there are a lot of the area around marshak is particularly rich. carol: you've been working on this for a while and just over the last couple of weeks, we are all talking about greenland. jillian: it really fell into our laps, which is nice. carol: what do you think in terms of our audience and our viewers and listeners, the take away from this? jillian: it does bring the global interest in greenland and the global interest in these metals, the extent to which they are found in greenland and all the various international claims kind of brings it all together. jason: coming up, more from our special issue "the elements." how one man's passion for what seemed a useless element helped build the digital world. carol: fitbit expands it shifts -- and it shifts from hardware

to software. we sit down with the ceo james park. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪ jason: welcome back to

"bloomberg businessweek." i'm jason kelly. you can listen to us on radio on sirius xm channel 119, and on am 1130 in new york, 106.1 in boston, 99.1 fm in washington, d.c. and am 960 in the bay area. carol: in london on dab digital and the bloomberg business app. on the anniversary of the periodic table, bloomberg businessweek suggests why it might be the most important

chart in history. jason: it covers all of the elements including germanium and why one man's passion for it helped build the digital world. here is editor dan ferrara. >> he was obsessed with germanium and while other people were working on silicon, he said germanium is the stuff. his particular passion was creating a form of germanium that was of such incredible purity and quality. carol: he was working at bell labs, although he really had to push his case, make his case. they were pushing it to the side and finally, go work on it but he had to work in the lab. kind of cloak and dagger, had to do it in off-hours in the middle of the night, clean up the lab before he left. daniel: like i said, he was obsessed with the use of germanium. people who were slightly more elevated were working with silicon and he said you are missing it.

you ought to be using germanium and his peers allowed him to basically shift his work schedule so he worked overnight to work on purifying the germanium crystal and there was an aha moment when he got it right and ok, you can come back to work in the daytime and we will use this product and it really did change the company's approach. carol: in doing this story, working with the reporter, editing it, what stuck out to you? this is not an individual we talk about. it is not a scientist that is a household name. this is somebody working behind the scenes but what he did was dramatic. daniel: i think people who know the history of the technology, they in fact do know his name. he's just below the level to where he is a household name but his contribution was significant.

carol: he ended up having a dedicated lab for growing this in particular. daniel: think of that. what is it like to grow germanium crystals for a living? that was his passion. carol: there was a fun moment -- he eventually, the end of 1952, he left and went to texas instruments. they were focusing on transistor technology. tell us about his time there. daniel: at bell, they had been doing germanium but it became evident that silicon would be a superior product for certain types of application. particularly, it was producing a lot of heat for military applications. there was a shift to silicon, and he did that work -- despite his passion for germanium, he led in the shift to silicon and was the shift to the production of the early silicon transistors which became a phenomenon.

there is an anecdotal story about him wowing the crowd by pulling a silicon transistor from his pocket. carol: because we are going to do this thing, and by the way, i've got a treasure. what is interesting and any scientist, the work he did on germanium helped in terms of what he was able to do at t.i. he was adding a dance level because of what he had learned. level becauseced of what he had learned. daniel: he was all about. purifying, making perfect crystals. he switched materials but he was a germanium man. carol: i'm reminded that there were these people who kept on to something in science are looking at the periodic table and saying we can do something, think of what it has brought us to where we are today.

daniel: what is also fascinating is if you think about bell labs in the 1940's, it is full of amazing people who are collaborating or in some instances not getting along, and there are a lot of very smart people working together to bring us to where we are now. jason: from the start of the digital world to what next. a lot of elements in this. we go outside this week's issue to our sit down with fitbit cofounder and ceo james park. carol: the company has struggled to compete in the smart watch market against apple and samsung, shares are down 85% since its ipo price in 2015. jason: in an effort to convince investors that got it going on, fitbit is shifting its business model with the launch of a new subscription service called fitbit premium, part of a new fall fitness lineup announced earlier this week. >> we have a lot of new exciting announcements today across devices and services. it is all in support of our company's mission to make everyone in the world healthier and in particular, to make

health accessible to everybody. at the same time, we are in the middle of transforming our company from being a purely a device company to being a service and device company with more predictable revenue streams. premium is an important step in the transformation. between announced the all in one comprehensive health service that takes data right from your wrist and turns it into actionable and personalized guidance and coaching that helps you get more active, eat better, and sleep better. kate has programs, insights, content, coaching, motivation in the form of health games, a health report you can take your daughter. carol: it is no longer this many steps. you did this, so here is something else. james: it is what is beyond the metrics and the data? and we coach you to the next step and that is what we have been hearing our users want from fitbit. jason: tell us more about that

because clearly this is a response to the market. what did you specifically see and hear from your previous product that got you to this? james: it is not so much from the market but our customers. we collected a lot of data from our users. we see how well they are doing, how much weight they are losing, how much sleep they are getting. we felt like focusing more on software and services aspect of health was really the next step in getting our users to become healthier. we have taken to the limit what we can do with just giving people metrics and they really needed to understand what to do with that data. carol: what i do wonder, and i agree. i think the health care area, there is going to be a day where almost everybody has some kind of device tracking their health care metrics at this point. you are competing with some really big players.

apple, samsung among them. you have significant market share, they have significant market share. how do you compete with those big players? james: first of all, we are the number two wearable brand in the world. people know the fitbit brand is being really focused on health and fitness rather than 100 other things, as well. the way we design our products and services reflect that. our products have a lot of battery life, ranging from five to seven days and that allows us to do sleep tracking. you can wear the devices 24/7 and sleep is such an important part of your health. for instance, there are a few new sleep features we are launching, including one that tells you with a simple number how well he slept throughout the night. we are launching a feature called smart wake each tries to wake you up at the right moment in the morning. carol: i love those kinds of devices because it gives you a better night sleep. james: we are trying to solve people's real problems and if we stay focused on that -- carol: you are not worried about the other guys?

james: we are, but first we have to worry about our customers and improve their health. to that extent if we can develop products and services that do that, the competitive element in some ways takes care of itself. jason: tell us about your conversations with investors because it goes without saying, you watched the stock price more closely than we do. investors are skeptical and have driven the price down. help us understand what you are saying back to them in terms of how this transformation and transition may portend better revenue and profits in the future. james: investors right now have a wait and see attitude, and i think we're knowledge that and understand it. we have some challenges earlier, being upfront with the launch of our versa lite product. that said, we learned lessons that we will carry forward but we are continuing to execute on a transformation and what

investors have to look forward to is -- for instance, with the launch of premium, we are hitting important milestones. the launch of premium will accelerate our transformation into a business that has more predictable revenue streams and we are doing things that even accelerate that. for instance, a deal with the nation of singapore bundles together hardware and services. carol: i understand you beat apple? james: we can't talk about the competitive element but the government of singapore is a very forward-looking nationstate and we are really happy to work with them to improve the health of their citizens. the next step, as well, is with the launch of premium in versa 2, we are bundling them together at retail and trying to france for the idea as fitbit as a -- trying to transform the idea as fitbit as a hardware company and solutions company includes hardware and software. carol: you can listen to more of our interview with james park on our business week extra podcast. jason: get that wherever you get your podcasts. still head, the editor behind the special elements issue.

carol: plus, a precious metal sparks demand for one of the rarest elements on the planet. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

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that everyone has for my dad. - [narrator] check out our huge selection of custom t-shirts and more, for teams, businesses, and every occasion. you'll even get free shipping. get started today at customink.com. ♪ carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." jason: still ahead, more from our special issue. it is the 150th anniversary of the periodic table. >> and it's not your normal issue or normal take on the table. jason: a huge relief to me. carol: and more on chemistry in -- its connection to business and how it's getting stronger. jason: it covers all of the elements, including those the

power electric cars. carol: and turning seawater into a cult culinary following. jason: for more on how this issue devoted to the elements and their significance on the world came together here is the , editor behind it all. >> last year, we started talking about doing something like this. we wanted to focus on metals and things bloomberg does really well. then we thought, why not do it around the periodic table? then we found out it was the anniversary. 150th carol: tell us about coming up with stories. >> the head of the commodities team was our first stop, asking people to send ideas of what is going on in the world of precious metals. in iron and other areas. we put the our network of writers and we said, hey, we are doing the entire table. they don't need to be long, some can be short.

we did silver and gold, we had our photo editor who just loves the stuff so she found some amazing photography to do with -- to go with it and it all took off from there. jason: how did you sort through that? i almost feel there is a matrix. you start with the table but you have to matrix over how you tell the stories. >> right, what will be most important six months from now. at the time we were discussing it, the helium shortage, everybody was talking about the party city balloons story and we had many ideas. we decided we have got one, how will this be solved. that was the approach we decided we wanted to take. we had a writer who had an idea about tanzania and its helium reserves. jason: what was the toughest one to get your head around? >> oh boy. in some ways, there were two. one was uranium because it is

such a powerful symbol of the table. there's the bomb, there's nuclear power, there are all of these byproducts. so that was one of them and it took us quite a while to decide we wanted to look at china and its nuclear reactor buildings. they are one of the only countries who are still gung ho about nuclear power. the other is carbon. as you would expect, there are so many we could have looked at. climate change, diamonds, anything. carol: everything, right? >> that's what we ended up doing. looking at carbon and special properties and how, in the era of industrial chemistry, how we have used it to create all of these products. carol: i think that's the slogan, living better through

chemistry. it's going to one era and a different one today. maybe we look at it differently. jason: the peter coy era. carol: chemicals, just putting chemicals and everything. think about it in cleaner fuel and energy and different types of building blocks. >> there is a lot of awareness now that we have been through this era. all of this excitement about silicon valley and the ideas and things we can experience. people are starting to think more about the ethics about the cobalt going into batteries, solar panels, these are good, where the rare earths we need for them and can we resolve the ethical issues around them? jason: in some stories, you get into this notion of diamonds, maybe they are not so cool.

that was a twist i did not see coming. >> yeah, and how do we prescribe diamonds to some things? -- how do we ascribe value to these things? diamonds are cool but there also , a story about marketing. so we have this german institute which is like osmium is rare and can be made beautiful. let's get on it. so we follow him as he tries to pitch his osmium. jason: we spoke with reporter austin carr. carol: who traveled to nevada to meet with an entrepreneur who is betting big on the element that could disrupt the diamond industry. >> there is a wizard behind the story, a crazy german guy. i thought it was a fake name at the beginning. he has been working on what we described as alchemizing one of the most precious metals on

-- one of the most rare precious metals on earth and making it into the next generation diamond. i don't know what you guys wear, but hopefully if you are wearing diamonds, he thinks that market will go kaput and his bet is to replace it with osmium. jason: who is he? >> he has a unique past. he describes himself as everything from a rockabilly singer to a serial entrepreneur to someone who has started 14 ventures. everything from an electric car company to an online tv company. he grew up in germany and have this long career in the business space but eventually got interested in commodities and got involved in gold-mining. randomly, at a commodities conference, he met this guy who we promised we would not name who developed this crystallization process to turn raw osmium, which can cause

lung damage to the point of dryland drowning which can state --, it can stain your corneas. highly toxic. taking that and crystallizing that, rendering it harmless, and turning it into something incredibly shiny. mirror gems. if you've seen them in person, they have this bluish, beautiful finish and they do sparkle more than diamonds. at the same time, you have to balance the cost. whether it's a long-term investment. there were only 38 kilograms imported to the u.s., compared to 60,000 kilograms of platinum. >> to hear wolf describe it diamonds are overhyped, they , estimate there are trillions of tons of diamonds. they are forever? no, they can burn. they are unique? not. no. the rapid rise of synthetic

diamonds are naturally cheaper -- dramatically cheaper than their natural counterparts. he has knocked down the entire diamond market. carol: they were brilliant in terms of creating a marketing machine to get everyone to buy diamonds. >> that is one of the compelling parts of this. the subsidiary for berkshire hathaway told me you can't just take shining rocks and throw the jewelry. you have to develop an emotional marketing story. the idea of an engagement ring as something synonymous with love and commitment did not exist. they had to develop that through marketing. the idea is you have to do that with osmium. it is one thing to have a natural element that is harder and has higher abrasion itistance, it is shinier,

doesn't burn. but you have to sell it as something that symbolizes love. that is how you are going to turn it from a rock into a long-term symbol of love. carol: i love that you brought up berkshire hathaway. they are looking into this. >> that's what i was told. the cmo told me he was very impressed with of the top the -- with the talk this guy gave in reno. other people were skeptical. we talked to a professor who was concerned about the claims about toxicity. whether it is completely immune for humans. jason: up next, the elements that drive electric cars. carol: plus, a frothy update to your cup of coffee. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." carol: join us every day on the radio starting at 2 p.m. wall street time. you can also catch up on our daily show. check out our podcast. find it apple podcast and bloomberg.com. jason: and you can find us online at businessweek.com and through our mobile app. back to our special elements issue. it is the 150th anniversary of the periodic table we have an in-depth look at why matter still matters. carol: and the elements of the power electric cars and the ethical concerns. if the 20th century was the age of the internal combustion engine, the 21st century will belong to the battery. by 2040, the majority of cars will be powered by batteries, they will emit far less pollutants than gas guzzlers. but the elements provide their own challenges. lithium is a water guzzler and

may not be worth the cost of mine. the industry may opt for the more environmentally risky method of pumping saltwater underground. nickel is used in lithium ion batteries, boosting energy density to let electric vehicles travel faster and farther. but is not clear whether minors in indonesia and keep a steady -- can keep a steady stream of nickel coming and cobalt presents an ethics problem. it helps to the battery cool during charging, but there are terrible conditions for miners in congo, the world's top producer. some workers are as young as four years old. for more on mining cobalt -- jason: we caught up with the writer behind the story in london. >> about two thirds of the world's supply comes from the drc. you have established mining companies there working broadly

the same kind of industrial mining practices you would see elsewhere. but also a large chunk of supply comes from much more informal mining methods where you have workers exploiting deposits by hand and often in very dangerous working conditions. up to this point, the industry has really kind of focused on how to solve the cobalt problem. really, the industry is in an early stage in working out how to tackle this problem. it is similar to the diamond industry's difficulty with blood diamonds, for example. coffee is something that

everyone loves and can't do without but there has been a very concerted effort in the agricultural industry to reassure consumers that they can buy coffee from sustainable sources. and if you look at at bmw etc., in the early stages of developing similar assurance systems to say there may be problems but we are certified our cobalt to make sure it is coming from reputable and sustainable sources. carol: smart, but i do wonder about this. we all know with electric vehicles are they easier to make? are they easier to be recycled? i think we need to think more about the environment. i know you dig into some of that. where are we going when it comes to that? >> exactly.

if you look at the demand projections for electric vehicles, people expect them to take off in the way mobile phones did, in the way microwaves or fridges did. so the question now, considering the size of batteries that go into these vehicles, the industry as a whole and consumers are looking with greater focus on what kind of toll that would take on the resources that go into these cars. for instance, if you are looking at lithium, it is perhaps very beneficial to be using it because it can be recycled. but in terms of the way it is produced now, a large majority comes from a desert in chile, one of the driest places on earth. you needed to extract the

lithium by evaporating it from brine water and extracting water from the water table in one of the driest places on earth perhaps is not an ideal alternative to the gas and oil industry we are leaving behind. jason: coming up, more from our special elements issue. why matter still matters, especially when it comes to food. carol: we talk about the power of salt and nitro brew. this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

♪ carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." jason: you can also 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. carol: a.m. 960 in the bay area, over in london on dab digital, and of course, through the bloomberg business app. back to our special double issue, a look at how the periodic table shaped and continues to shape business. we turn to sodium. jason: here's our contributor in d.c. on the salt king of america. >> he runs his own salt operation on the coast of oregon. he pumps in seawater from a bay, and through a series of processes, makes his own flaky

sea salt. this is what he does now and what he has for almost the last 10 years after bouncing around some tech companies and leaving silicon valley. jason: why salt? there is a great origin story here. carol: silicon valley to salt. jason: it is not a natural straight line. >> no, it is not. he was living in europe and going to business school. he had some extended family. at one point, he was making a dinner of whatever he could find cheaply and his girlfriend handed him some sea salt. he put it on his meal and he said it was one of the best meals he's ever had. simply because of the salt. when he came back to the states, he started looking around for other brands of sea salt and could not find anything. then he embarked on trying to make his own and i think his

first attempt was he bought one of those inflatable kiddie pools, filled it up with seawater and just plunked it in his backyard. after a month it was still seawater. carol: i was doing that the other day. you put the stats in your story, the global market for gourmet salt is 1.1 billion in 2016, expected to grow, we're talking about a decent market. >> yeah, and it's only growing. there is this interesting evolution of it. many did not think too much about sea salt but i spoke to dan, he is on the show "america's test kitchen." he was telling me that more and more chefs at restaurants are thinking about what sorts of salt they are using and this has trickled down to mainstream america. instead of just buying normal table salt, you go to the store and find different see salts. you can find pink himalayan

salts, these flaky salts, all of these different varieties. carol: was interesting is this pursuit of refining the taste. you did talk about the waters in the bay, and the oysters that had a positive impact. >> there's this great story of him driving around in his car with his great portuguese water dog, filling up buckets. he lands on the spot on the bay because there are thousands of oysters that are already pulling stuff like calcium out of the seawater. that, in itself, begins refining the seawater. so once he starts pumping it in, you already have seawater that is on its way to becoming good salt. jason: from what we eat to what we drink.

carol: how big names in the coffee business are using nitrous oxide to mix up your morning cup of joe. >> coffee is just beans that have been picked, roasted, and brewed. there is not that much you can do historically to take it coffee and yet nitrogen, here comes nitrogen. some certainly know it from beer, but what it does if you pump nitrogen gas which has no color or odor, if you pump it in, it creates soft bubbles and gives it a creamy flavor and slight sweetness. carol: different than a cappuccino machine? >> yeah, it's not strong enough for hot coffee. i think the pressure of the boiling water adds a texture of its own and then you add milk and that's creaminess. but for a nitro cold brew, there's definitely not milk in

it. more spoiler alerts, but nitrogen ads -- it's coming out of the tap. there is this gentle cascade of bubbles and it will form a foam on the top. carol: like a beer. >> yeah. a good nitro brew coffee will look like a beer. carol: where was it that summary -- somebody was sitting around with their cup of ice coffee and said wait, we can do something different. >> it blew up in seattle and there are different urban theories. according to one source, it might have started in queens with an experiment with a beer keg. but supposedly, the most popular theory is that it started in austin around 2012. someone with too much time, probably over caffeinated, took

his nitrous oxide and put it with coffee. the result captivated everybody. carol: let's talk about this. there are a couple companies that are pretty big players. one of them is out west in portland. talk to us about stumptown. >> exactly. everyone thinks as seattle as the coffee capital but it is a major player in the scene. it has really, really come up in a big way. so stumptown was also an early adapter and started playing around with kegs and nitrogen. by 2015, i think they introduced their first cans. what's cool is they have created these cans with a tiny widget that you can put nitrogen in. through force of nature, when

you pop open the can, the pressure from the gas explodes. so when you pour it out, you get that satisfying cascade of bubbles and everything. jason: bloomberg businessweek is available on newsstands now. for your labor day reading. carol: it's also online on businessweek.com. check out some great stuff online. jason: what is your must-read? carol: peter coy, i love it. the periodic table has been around 150 years and it takes us back to our chemistry classes. all those experiments. but it's an important table but even more than ever. jason: there was a character behind the periodic table, one of my favorites coming courtesy of austin carr. the details in that story, so rich. and who knows, maybe that's what you will be wearing. carol: maybe it's not diamonds anymore. jason: what you can find more -- you can find more stories online over the weekend. carol: and check out our

podcast. jason: more bloomberg television starts right now. ♪

taylor: i'm taylor riggs, in for scarlet fu. this is bloomberg "etf iq," where we focus on the access, risks and rewards offered by exchange traded funds. ♪ taylor: the big shorts. michael burry sees a bubble in passive investing. leaving smaller value stocks neglecting. we debate his call. tiffany, facebook, hasbro, all can be found in the renewable capital etf, tied to an oil tycoon, t. boone pickens. we asked the founder behind the fund w