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CBS Sunday Morning : The Money Issue

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley
The Truth Network Radio
July 28, 2019 10:30 am

CBS Sunday Morning : The Money Issue

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley

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This broadcaster has 330 podcast archives available on-demand.


July 28, 2019 10:30 am

Our annual special broadcast that looks into the many ways we earn, spend, invest, waste, lose, and go without money, featuring guest host Martha Teichner, originally broadcast on May 5, 2019.Calling it quits: When leaving your job is the right thing to do; Work remotely? Tulsa, Oklahoma wants you (and your laptop) to move; Many happy returns; CBD: On a real market high; Celebrity Edge, Celebrity Cruises' brand-new, billion-dollar cruise; Keeping up with Kris Jenner; Safecracking: The right combination; A slice of the pizza business

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Dream, design, and build with Tough Shed. Good morning. Jane Pauley is off today. I'm Martha Teichner, and this is a special edition of Sunday morning. It's the money issue, our annual look at how we earn, save, and spend, and my chance to finally put my economics degree to use. And when it comes to earning money, who among us hasn't thought at least once of going into the boss and declaring, I quit, with Tony DeCopel, we'll meet some people who have done just that. Come Monday morning, a lot of us will be sitting here when we really dream of sitting here. Do you think the fantasy of quitting your job is more prevalent today than it was a generation ago?

I think it is. The best part was turning in the beeper because they can't get me anymore. Calling it quits, ahead on Sunday morning. By contrast, Tracey Smith is keeping up with Chris, Kris Jenner, a celebrity mom who just never seems to quit. Love him or not, the Kardashians have built a billion dollar empire with little more than hard work and tenacity, both of which they probably learned from their mother. What's the best piece of business advice you've given your kids?

If someone says no, you're talking to the wrong person. Keeping up with Kris Jenner, ahead on Sunday morning. A product fancy as a potential cure-all is growing into a very big business. Lee Cowan investigates the hype around hemp. You've likely heard about CBD, a cannabis compound that for some has become as necessary as oxygen itself. We are projecting this market to hit $22 billion by 2022, and this market had almost no products. Nobody knew what it was even two years ago. Is it a fad, a curiosity, or is there potential for something much more?

The ABCs of CBD, later on Sunday morning. Ever have the urge to sail away? More and more cruise lines are betting big time that someday you will. Guess how many people will go on cruises this year?

30 million. So how do cruise lines woo passengers? By offering them the excitement of experiencing the next big thing. This gives you a perspective that you get nowhere else on board the ship.

And of course, this has never been done before. Ahead this Sunday morning, floating cities. We'll have those stories and more all coming up when our Sunday Morning podcast continues. Not that we're recommending it, mind you, but more than a few disenchanted workers these days are mustering up the gumption to tell the boss, I quit. So how's that working out for them?

Our cover story is reported by Tony DeCopel. In 2009, Bill Murphy Jr. landed a top level law job making big bucks. But when he showed up for work, I realized pretty quickly I wasn't the right person for that spot. What was it about a competitive six figure income wasn't attractive to you?

Yeah, I know that's a question a lot of people would ask. That's right. On his very first day, Murphy already wanted out. I recall going to the orientation and, you know, one of the speakers got up. Hi, I'm John Smith. I've been here for 21 years and three months. So that means I have, you know, eight years plus to retire. And that became a running joke with a few of the other speakers that got up.

But that's not really what you say. If you love your work and you only want to come in there every day. So rather than count his own days behind a desk, he did something you won't find in most career playbooks. He quit on day two, telling his boss, You know, I am really very sorry. I can tell that I made a big mistake in accepting this job.

The move was radical, but the mindset not so uncommon. According to a recent CBS News poll, more than half of Americans with full time jobs say they daydream at least once in a while about leaving those jobs behind. Do you think the fantasy of quitting your job is more prevalent today than it was a generation ago?

I think it is. And for many people, it is a fantasy, unfortunately. Michelle Singletary, who writes about personal finance for The Washington Post, says employers are largely to blame. I think the companies broke the contract because they made us expendable at every level.

I mean, it got to the point where they could boost their stock prices by firing people. And people are saying, if that's the case, I don't owe you my entire life. That may help explain why some employees now put early retirement at the top of their to-do list. But making that happen takes work. You've got to save a substantial amount of your salary, you know, almost a 40, 50, 60 percent. We met Singletary at a bookstore in the sort of New York City neighborhood where window shopping is the only shopping you can do if you plan on quitting your job.

So if you're 25 right now and you have it in your head that you want to retire early, to be clear, the things you would have to do in order to save are, it sounds like not have kids. You can have kids. You can have five. How big is your house? Not very big.

Not too big. Can you go out to eat at restaurants? You can every once in a while. You're not going to be taking a $5,000 cruise, no. You essentially have to ignore every cue from our culture, every commercial on TV. My husband and I keep our cars until we're on a first name basis with the local tow truck drivers.

And we don't care. That's the sort of thing Susan Emerson might do. I remember telling my accountant, I'm going to save half of my income. He said, no, you're not.

Don't give me that. I said, watch me. Before retiring at age 47, she kept close tabs on everything she spent.

And we do mean everything. I had this little notebook. I bought a Coke. I wrote that down. You bought a Coke? You wrote it down? Yeah. Thanks to that tight budget and some savvy investing, Emerson, now 61, has spent more than a decade pursuing her lifelong passion, art.

They're interpreting disaster situations in a kind of fantastical way. To do that, she walked away from a career as a physician. How did it feel closing the door for the last time and driving out of that parking lot?

The best part was turning in the beeper because they can't get me anymore. When I read articles about people who retire early, it's often a doctor or a lawyer. Can a person with a regular job ever hope to retire early? Yes, absolutely. Early retirement isn't just for people making six figures. It's you, but it's you making different choices. Your early retirement may not be some big villa in Florida.

It may just be a nice two-bedroom condo where you live, you know, and a car that you have had for 20 years. How did your mom react when you told her? Oh, God, she had a fit.

Really? Yes. She told her friends that I had gotten sick and had to retire because that, I guess, seemed like a more acceptable reason to retire.

I don't know. Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi may help explain her mom's reaction. A famous quote attributed to him is woven deep into the fabric of American culture. Winners never quit. We've been brainwashed into thinking that quitting is somehow wrong.

It's somehow weak. Author Seth Godin is the anti-Lombardi. Life is short.

I think most of us would agree. He says quitting is often the best possible move because it frees us up to thrive where we're better suited. If you have a choice between being unemployed for one, two, three years or sticking with a job that's a dead end, most people are afraid of the unknown, so they will stick with that job. We met an individual who quit on his second day of work.

Would you advise such a thing? I'm not sure what the difference is between the second day and the 200th day. If I got a job working at a payday loan company, I wouldn't even last two days. Which brings us back to Bill Murphy Jr. After quitting as a lawyer, he went all in on a childhood dream, journalism. And it wasn't one of those ones that gets a million readers.

He's now a contributing editor at the publication, Inc. I would not go back. I have no regrets. And one thing's very clear, he's happy. You quit your way to a better life.

You know, I call it the joy of quitting. With home prices soaring in so many supposedly trendy cities, one perhaps less celebrated town is telling people it's definitely okay to make the move. Very okay.

Here's Connor Knighton. When I met Stephanie Hrabeski, she was busy packing up her small apartment in the middle of San Francisco, pausing to drool over three bedroom homes in the middle of the country. I'm dying for a porch, by the way.

I just want to like sit in a rocking chair. Is there anything that you could buy in all of San Francisco for $200,000? No. You couldn't even buy a parking space in San Francisco for $200,000. Hrabeski should know. She works in property management. But she works remotely, meaning she's mostly able to do her job from home. Or really, from anywhere. And then did you start to think, why am I working from one of the most expensive cities in the country?

Definitely. That's why Hrabeski made the decision to soon be living in a brand new state. Move to a brand new state. Oklahoma. Land of oil. Wide open prairie. Maybe a Route 66 sign or two. Right?

Well, that's only part of the story. Take me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to marry. Tulsa, a city of 400,000, has plenty of hip coffee shops, bustling bars, and is home to a thriving arts district.

It just doesn't get much credit for being cool. That's why, last year, a group here created an ambitious program to spread the word to the growing population of workers around the country who are able to work remotely. Take your laptop to Tulsa, and they will pay you $10,000 to move here. I think that going after remote workers allows us to identify really talented individuals who have the flexibility to work from wherever, and show them what Tulsa has to offer them. So you're originally from New Mexico, right?

I am, yeah. Erin Belzley is the director of Tulsa Remote, a new initiative backed by the Tulsa-based nonprofit George Kaiser Family Foundation. Cheers! Its goal is to attract some new blood to Tulsa, with the hope that those who come might stick around. In addition to the 10 grand paid out over the course of a year, the program offers free communal office space and networking opportunities with other new arrivals. And do you have group meetings there, or is it more... Yeah, we do like our... Javier Ruiz is a content writer for a language learning website. He had been living in New York, but he was ready for a change of pace when he applied to the program.

It feels like it's time to calm down, or not be as in the hustle and bustle. You get older and you kind of want to think about what are you going to invest in for your future. In Tulsa, Ruiz can easily afford a house. He's one of 100 remote workers who were accepted into the program's first year. There were more than 10,000 applicants who came from a wide array of industries.

Obviously there's a large focus on technology, but healthcare was a huge area. We had a couple patent attorneys who applied who have the ability to work from wherever. We have a Harlem Globetrotter. I don't know if you heard about her.

Lele Thompson is one of the newest members of the Globetrotters. She was drafted right after college. Her new career is going to take her all over the world. I can live anywhere and fly into the games whenever I'm needed.

And so I had just a blank slate in front of me of where to go. For Thompson, the $10,000 bonus was certainly a selling point, but she was also looking for a city where she could make a difference. People move to Los Angeles all the time and it's like a tiny drop in a puddle. But maybe with this Tulsa Remote program, myself and the other members of our cohort can come in and really have a big positive impact on the city. That would be pretty cool. But in a city of 400,000, can 100 new recruits actually make a difference? Tulsa Remote is spending over a million dollars betting they can. I think that 100 people can make a difference, for sure. And I think that when those 100 people are so excited about making an impact and so ready to be part of a community, and you have a community that's so ready to welcome them, that there is plenty of a chance to have a huge impact.

When you told your friends that this was something you were thinking about doing, what was the reaction like? They were like, Tulsa? Why are you going to Tulsa?

But if the program succeeds, Aaron Belsley is hoping remote workers will soon be asking a different question. The people that live here are incredibly gracious and welcoming. There's plenty of opportunity, there's space. Why not Tulsa? In other words... You're doing fine, Oklahoma!

Oklahoma! What's in store for things we return the second time around? Rita Braver has the answer. Did you ever wonder what happens to things you return?

Or how about the stuff that brick and mortar stores or online merchandisers can't sell? These are chairs? Brand new chairs, right. What is this? My pillow.

That's right. It's literally everything from diapers to dinosaurs and anything in between. Curtis Grieve knows what will happen to all this stuff. You've got some paper goods here. He's a vice president of Inmar, which has 25 facilities and 5,000 employees around the country devoted to processing and reselling goods for what's known as the secondary market. And you're thinking, this is juicy stuff.

I can get rid of this. Money, money, money, money, money, money. Truckloads of stuff arrive and leave this Winston-Salem warehouse every day. Much of it is merchandise that traditional outlets just can't unload or outdated seasonal products. But a third of it is customer returns, mostly from online purchases. A typical brick and mortar store will return about 8% of their sales.

For e-commerce, that could be 25 to 40% in some cases. Inmar provides a service for companies inspecting and repackaging return goods that do go right back on the shelves. But a lot doesn't make it. What happens to that stuff?

Oh, that's my favorite kind of stuff. That's where we get to liquidate it. We're going to examine it.

We're going to make sure it's perfect. Inmar CEO David Mount says that the secondary market, selling goods of all kinds, has doubled in the past 10 years to $600 billion. In fact, there's so much of that stuff coming back from either e-commerce or stores that you could take all of the units that we process in one year and build a bridge from New York to Tokyo. The customers can be online sellers, outlet malls, discount or dollar stores, bodegas, small mom-and-pop shops, even flea market vendors.

And a lot of them come to Las Vegas twice a year for a big trade show. Let's try to make some deals, absolutely. So, of course, Curtis Grieve is there, too, looking to buy, sell or reconnect. I mean, I sell to Brady. With long-time clients like Brady Churches. He's CEO of Homebuys.

So what do you want for these? Based in Columbus, Ohio, with four discount stores around the state. We love to buy the treasures and pass the savings on to our customers. That's the most fun. What's over here?

What's this? We watched him snag close to 400 jackets in just a few minutes. These are a buyback. I'll return to a major retailer.

I'll buy all those. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Okay. These jackets are high-quality jackets. They're a major brand. I don't want to tell you the brand, but there's a horse and buggy involved in the brand.

I'll tell you that. He also got shirts to go with the jackets. How many of these do you have? We have 4,000. 4,000? If I took them all, what could I buy them for? Retail $99, he paid eight bucks apiece.

I have an adrenaline rush right now. I feel like I just won a million bucks. But nothing beats the recent thrill of landing some $2,000 wedding gowns and selling them for $199 each.

We even had some women come in the store and say, I don't even have a boyfriend right now, but for $199, I'm going to buy this dress today. Almost all of these products will find buyers, and what doesn't sell is often donated to charity. But there are still some goods that end up in incinerators or tossed along with other garbage at places like this landfill in Burlington County, New Jersey.

It's been here for a while, about 30-some years. Kevin Lyons, who teaches supply chain management at Rutgers University, says it's the same problem year after year. The number that I keep hearing is that there's something like 4 billion tons of unused goods that still ends up getting dumped in places like this.

That's correct. Instead of packaging it and maybe possibly getting it to the folks that might need it, it's easier for them just to get it off their books. Have things improved over the years? It has improved a little, but not enough to handle the glut.

But Curtis Grieve believes that companies like his will continue to expand. A lot of this product is really good product. It's as good as new. In some cases, it is new. As more and more buyers and sellers realize that one company's trash is other people's treasure. With more and more states legalizing marijuana, some folks are touting a cannabis cousin as a possible cure-all.

Lee Cowan has the story of a budding business. It looks like pot. Can be vaped like pot. Even eaten like pot. But pot it is not. It's called CBD, short for cannabidiol, a buzzy chemical compound that's on a real market high. I've never done this. So do you suggest starting off like a small bottle to sort of see how it goes?

Yeah, you'll work your way up from there. CBD is extracted from hemp in the same plant family as marijuana. But CBD won't have you microwaving pizza rolls at two in the morning because it contains very little THC, the stuff that gets you stoned.

I'd like to talk to you about that music you're using. It's essentially weed without the high. And those who swear by it say it's helping everything from arthritis to insomnia, anxiety to depression, and maybe much more. It sounds like it's almost too good to be true. Yeah, and I think for some people it might be, but overall, people are finding at least some relief.

It's at least taking the edge off if not totally helping them out. At CBD Cratum in Chicago, sales associate Elijah Olson can barely keep the shelves stocked. It's monumentally overwhelming just how many products there are. Bethany Gomez has been using CBD for her chronic pain.

We're seeing it in everything from taffies to gummies and caramels to coffee, pet treats, shampoos, bath bombs. Gomez also happens to be the managing director of the Brightfield Group, a market research company that has been tracking CBD sales. I have never seen an industry grow this quickly, and I've never seen an industry with so much headwind. Last year, the U.S. market hit about $600 million.

But Gomez forecasts that in as little as five years, it's likely to blossom nearly 40 times that, making CBD a $22 billion a year market. Over the past year, it's grown by more than 200% in the last year, and that was with the market being federally illegal until December 20th when the Farm Bill passed. Yep, the Farm Bill. Hemp, once a common crop in the U.S., got lumped together with marijuana and banned back in 1937. But last year's Farm Bill lifted that ban. So as long as it has less than 0.3% THC, and it's grown by licensed farmers, hemp is legal. You're all set.

Thank you. But that doesn't mean CBD derived from it is, at least not entirely. According to the FDA, it still exists. According to the FDA, it's still against the law for CBD manufacturers to make any health-related claims about their products. And companies that add CBD to food and beverages do so knowing they're operating in legal murky waters. That's because large scientific studies on CBD are way behind its newfound popularity. Even what dose to take is in question. We're having people consume this compound in large quantities, and we don't know the full health impact. Yasmin Hurd is a professor at Mount Sinai's School of Medicine in New York, where she says CBD is showing promise. But a healthy dose of skepticism sure wouldn't hurt. It's not going to work for everyone. No drug works for everyone. The FDA has approved one CBD drug called Epidiolex that's now in use to treat seizures associated with certain forms of childhood epilepsy.

Because we're getting close. And Hurd's own research suggests that CBD may also curb addictions to heroin and other dangerous opioids. So we really could be at a tipping point with the research anyway. The research to date gives us a big promise on which to build. Were you skeptical about it at first?

Absolutely, a hundred percent. Laura Fuentes is threading the needle between the scientific and the anecdotal evidence. I started making products way back, and we gave them to friends and family, and it started working. And I was like, what's happening here? It's working.

The one-time pharmacist jumped into the CBD market with both feet, trusting that the research and the regulation will soon follow. So you must have a pretty strong faith in what this does for you to... I do.

...give up your career to do this. I do. I have a really strong faith in it. You don't know exactly what the potential is.

Yes. But you know there's some potential. There's great potential. Thank you for calling Green Roads. This is Emily. Her company, Green Roads, is now one of the largest CBD makers in the country, cornering about a 10 percent share of the CBD market.

Its sales force is made up of mostly 20-somethings who feel like they're on the cutting edge of something big. I'm proud. I'm blessed. I'm grateful to say that we're at a 150 percent growth rate from quarter one 2018 to quarter one 2019.

Give yourselves a round of applause. National chains like CVS and Walgreens have announced plans to carry CBD products in some of their stores. It's already in department stores like Neiman Marcus. So analysts say it's really only a matter of time before CBD is as mainstream as Coca-Cola. A drug? A supplement? A fad?

CBD may just be all three. To hear captains of the cruise ship industry tell it, their fleets are on course toward ever more lucrative waters. Time for us to sail away. Behold, The Edge, Celebrity Cruises' brand new billion-dollar baby. Yup, that's what it costs to build a cruise ship these days, often even more. Thirty million people are expected to go on cruises in 2019, in spite of well-publicized outbreaks of disease at sea, freak accidents, even tragedies, like the toddler who fell to her death earlier this month. The number is up more than 12 million from a decade ago.

And we're still just scratching the surface. Richard Fain, chairman and CEO of Royal Caribbean, Celebrity's parent company, knows a growth industry when he sees one. In the United States, for example, only about 3% of Americans take a cruise in a given year. And if you go to Europe, it's less than half that level.

If you go to Asia, it's a fraction of even that level. Royal Caribbean's Symphony of the Seas is the world's largest cruise ship at the moment. Capacity? More than 6600 passengers, 2200 crew. It's five times the size of the Titanic.

Together, the big three, Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Norwegian, carry nearly 80% of the world's cruise ship passengers. The competition between them has been like an arms race, in which size matters. So back in the 70s, the concept was, let's design a ship that's essentially like a yacht. By the 1980s, we were saying, let's design something that's much more like a hotel, and has nicer rooms, nicer places to go, and more things to do. And today, we're talking about, this should be more like a city. So, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.

Why? The larger ship gives us some economy of scale. We could just take it in as more profit, but then we weren't giving them anything new. And new is the name of the game.

So, Royal Caribbean says it sinks about half what it makes from those economies of scale into innovation. Walk in. Come on in.

Welcome to the cave. Computer-aided virtual environment. This is hundreds of individual drawings brought together as one vision.

Using video game technology, the designers of the edge got to try out their ideas. And it's accurate to the point where one person noticed that the olives and the martinis are too small. This looks just like the cave. Just like the cave. So, welcome to the Grand Plaza in real life.

John Paul Lamb is in charge of all hotel operations aboard the edge. This isn't just any chandelier that we have here. This chandelier has thousands of different lights. We've got an incredible sound system here. We do a chandelier show a couple of times throughout every evening.

So music matches the light? You really have to see it. But the innovations are not just eye candy for the passengers. This is the state of the art.

It cannot be any better as we speak. The bridge, the domain of Captain Dimitrios Kefetzis, is more space-age than swashbuckling. I think everybody in their imagination is going to love it. Everybody in their imagination thinks that the bridge of a ship has a great big wheel. Let me show you what is left out of the big wheel. Teeny weeny little wheel. That's it.

That's all that's left. Unique in the cruise ship world, this super sophisticated touch screen. We can layer on the safety plan and you can see all of the different muster stations. This is the super highway of the ship.

We call this the I-95. Ever wonder what goes on below the passenger decks? And it goes all the way from the aft of the ship, the very back of the ship, all the way to the tip. It's over a thousand feet long and behind each door something amazing.

A whole room full of red wine. Chilling over here, pallets of aluminum water bottles. So when we launched EDGE, we made a commitment that we were going to eliminate all single-use plastics on board.

In an industry not known for environmental responsibility, the EDGE has its own recycling operation. There's a sewage treatment plant on board too. But what attracts passengers is that next big thing.

This is a first. There is no ship in the world that has put a platform on the ship. The magic carpet. A 90-ton platform that levitates up and down the side of the ship. We can take it all the way up to deck 16.

We can bring it down here to deck five or we can take it right down to deck one. You're on the edge of the EDGE. You're always looking at the ocean. That's what makes the ship special in the design.

Not a bad place to watch the sunset. Kim, would you stop taking pictures of yourself? Your sister's going to jail. It's the money issue on Sunday morning. Here again is Martha Teichner. Keeping up with Kris Jenner and her thriving television daughters is a job custom made for Tracey Smith. Consider the Kardashians.

Seen here at last year's Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. Sure, they may look and act like royalty, but unlike most royals, nothing you see here was inherited. Everything they have, from the glittery earrings to their pedicured toes, was earned through good old American marketing. We love what we do. And if there's any parallel to royalty here, it's maybe that the Kardashians have a queen. Do you ever think about what your life would be like if you didn't let the television cameras in?

Maybe boring. At 63, Kris Jenner is the matriarch of the media and merchandise empire, one that she, quite literally, gave birth to. All right, we're ready.

No, no, no. For much of the past 12 years, Jenner and her children have been living in the public eye. OK, Kim, it's your world. I just live in it.

Through their e-network TV series, Keeping Up with the Kardashians. My ear is gone! Are you ****? Oh my God, I'm going to cry.

Oh my God, I'm going to hear it. It's a reality show. But the realist part is that it's been a massive launch pad for her daughters.

The Kardashian-Jenner sisters have hundreds of millions of followers on social media, a TV show in more countries than the Peace Corps, and a collective fortune bigger than the Kennedys, built on things like makeup, clothing, and personal endorsements. How much of their business, how much of the money that your daughters bring in, is based on their endorsements of products on social media? Well, my girls are constantly getting offers to post something for a company or a brand on social media, so they have a fee for a post or a fee for a story, a fee for Facebook, a fee for, you know, they have a fee schedule.

Can you give me a ballpark on the fees? It's different. It's all over the board. I mean, it's definitely six figures. And sometimes if it's Kim or if it's Kylie, it depends on really what it is. Is it more than six figures if it's Kim or Kylie? Eh, if it's a pharmaceutical product, if it's something that you're going to drink or ingest or put on your body, or... And that was more than six figures?

Maybe. And maybe the sky's the limit. For example, daughter Khloe Kardashian is reportedly worth around $40 million. Kim is said to be worth around $350 million. And Kylie, the youngest, topped them all. She started her own makeup line in 2015. And this year, Forbes named her the youngest self-made billionaire on the planet. Is it fair to call her self-made?

I think she's self-made because, I mean, listen, my girls, you can say that certain things have been handed to them, but it takes a lot of work to do what they're all doing. So she may have the name, which is the leg up, and the notoriety of the TV show. Right. Right. But the money is all hers.

Right. We're talking about money, and the money she's made is her own. It began with her own savings. She put her own blood, sweat, and tears into it. It was her idea.

It was amazing what she did and what she showed the rest of us how to do it. Hey, Kourt. But it's not just about making money. We're sitting here with Todd Krim and Megan and Jen, and we're at our meeting about the turkey giveaway.

We listened in on a planning meeting for a Thanksgiving food giveaway. The Kardashians, individually and as a family, are said to give millions away for causes ranging from homelessness to Alzheimer's research. You know there are people who say that the Kardashians are all about materialism and vanity. Is this an effort to change that image? I don't think there's an effort to change an image. I mean, that's an image from some people. Other people see it a lot differently.

So I think people usually don't know what they're talking about. And when you start criticizing someone else... Why do you think you guys are the target? Well, I think that anybody... we're not the only target. Any person who's well-known and successful and are on social media is a target. And do you guys think you're a bigger target because you're a bigger presence on social media?

Maybe. But what I do know is we get up every day with appreciation and love and a work ethic that, you know, is stellar. And part of that work ethic comes from her. Chris Houghton worked as a flight attendant before she married attorney Robert Kardashian, with whom she had four kids, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé and Rob.

In 1991, she split with Kardashian and married Olympic champion Bruce Jenner, and they had two girls, Kendall and Kylie. We got married and we didn't have a lot of money, but we had a lot of kids. And we had to get a big house and everybody was in private school.

So start there. And I was like, we got to figure this out. Were you lying awake nights trying to figure out... A hundred percent. Chris became Bruce Jenner's personal manager, booking speaking gigs for him as a way to raise cash. She basically stayed out of the spotlight... Say what you want, but I know what's best for my kids and my husband. ...until a friend told her that her crazy family life might make a good TV show. You shouldn't be on the pole. Oh my gosh!

So today I'm going to jail and I just want to get it over with and never have to worry about it again. And there never seems to be any shortage of drama in the Kardashians' lives. Oh my gosh. This girl thing's a lot of work. Yeah, you... Like Bruce Jenner's transition to become Caitlyn. And my feelings, it's about you and I just want you to be happy.

This makes me happy. Do you keep in touch regularly with Caitlyn? I don't.

No, I don't. The kids do. Yeah, the kids are good. But you guys, no? Not so much.

Jenner says she spends a lot of her time managing her children's careers, a self-styled momager who takes a 10% cut. Did you trademark the term momager? I did.

Yeah. Why? Um, I thought it would be such a good opportunity to maybe do something involved with momager. I just, you know, I do that from time to time because I feel like something's important and I want to protect it.

So what else do you have trademarks on? You are a little nosy nelly over here. That's my job. Whoa, I love that. Very good. Very good.

Can you tell me any of the other ones? Nope. And Chris, Chris, that smile right here, Chris. Today, Chris Jenner has more power and influence than any other momager out there. It seems the one thing she doesn't have is regret. What have you had to sacrifice? Privacy. But, you know, comes and goes.

Who cares? You don't feel like you've given anything up? I think I've gained.

I think I've gained relationships and friendships and closer relationships with my kids. And experiences and travel and being able to have the best home movies in the entire universe. To open a locked safe, possibly filled with riches, David Pogue tells us you need a pro with exactly the right combination of skills. In the movies, safe-cracking looks like this. In real life, it's a little calmer. Allad Israely is one of New York City's most accomplished safe-crackers.

It's taken him 15 years to get this good. It is true that you don't know what's inside this safe. I don't. Got it.

It's unbelievable. Do the honors. All right. There's a second door.

No! Oh, but it's open. But it's unlocked. It's another safe! Truth is, almost all the safes he's hired to open turn out to be empty.

Goose egg! Sorry, movie screenwriters. In the United States, how many people would you say are at your level? It's probably in the hundreds. Somewhere in the hundreds. Out of a hundred safes that people hire to open, how many stump you? Zero.

Zero. I'm too well prepared. Watch my finger on the door. Master safe-cracker Roy Waters lives in rural Pennsylvania in a house that's practically a museum of safes and locks that he's successfully cracked.

You can open almost any safe. Why don't you go to the dark side and be the guy who gets rich? It's not my style. I enjoy the people.

I enjoy the work. It's exciting to watch safe-crackers open safes using what's called manipulation. Using touch, sight, and sound as they turn the dial. But there's actually a more common technique.

The second way is by drilling a hole into the lock in the safe using a medical-grade borescope, viewing the internal mechanism, and then dialing the combination open while you're watching it. Did you eat your Wheaties today? Yes, sir. There you go. That's how Roy Waters is going to help customer Brett Cunningham, who found this safe in a scrapyard.

I can give you a list of people that's given it a world to try and get it open themselves. Oh, really? Yeah. It's time for the experts. Okay, I decided to drill it right here. And you'd probably prefer not to have people asking you questions while you're working, right? Oh, no.

It don't matter. There you go. If I unlock the lock, you open your own safe. Hey, and it's gold bars? Cash?

Empty bank bags. This safe kept Roy busy for a few minutes, but a lot says the cheap safes from home goods stores, not so much. The safes can be forced open in literally 15 seconds.

That's not an exaggeration with a couple of 18-inch progress. We do it on a regular basis. But with security, you get what you pay for. The less money you spend on the safe, the less security you will get. That is a fact. The art of safe cracking by both locksmiths and criminals has been in decline for 50 years. But for the master safe crackers who remain, the job does not end.

In Maine, the job does have its charms. It seems like for you, the drama is more about opening the safe than what's in it. Oh, yeah. Forget what's in it. Is being a safe cracker as cool as it seems like it should be? Sometimes it can be very difficult.

That challenge is what keeps it interesting. To Luke Burbank now, who tells us thousands of people are making dough from dough. For one week every year, the center of the known pizza universe.

Is it Naples, Italy, or New York, or even Chicago? It's Las Vegas when the International Pizza Expo rolls into town. Bringing with it thousands of professional pizza makers, dough tossers, one TV reporter nervous about his waistline.

Let's do a little before weigh-in. And lots of aspiring pizzaiolos, which is Italian for people hoping to grab their slice of the pizza business. Well, I've always loved baking, and my four boys and I, we would every Friday make, you know, make pizzas, our pizza Fridays.

People like Sherry Neal. Her dream of opening a pizzeria started back when she was living in a small Oregon town, working as a baker. And I would get requests for pizza, and I would get a request for pizza, and I would get a request for pizza, because we just didn't have a great pizza place. Neal came to Vegas to join the ranks of the 42,000 or so people in the U.S. that own independent pizza parlors, and she's learning it won't be easy. There are just so many pitfalls in opening a place that it's amazing any place succeeds. In fact, according to recent studies, more than half of restaurants that open fail in the first few years. But Scott Sandler's shop, Pizza Head in St. Louis, is one of the success stories, and he's come to the Expo to extol the virtues of, of all things, vegan pizza.

Vegan and vegetarian is just growing like crazy. Sandler, who used to work on Wall Street, managing a very different kind of dough, was also teaching a class on what he calls restaurant math. A lot of people get into pizza and they're romantic about it, but they don't know what the hell they're doing.

They don't know margins. Anthony Falco knows margins and industry trends and really just about every aspect of the pizza business, and it's knowledge he'll share with you for a price, because, you see, he's an international pizza consultant, which, yes, is really a job. Most of the people say, like, that's awesome. I wish I had known that was a job and I could do it.

And I'm like, oh, it's really easy. Just spend 10 years working 80 hours a week building one of the most recognized pizza brands in, you know, the United States. Falco got his start at Influential Pizzeria Roberta's in Brooklyn, New York, and has now helped open restaurants on four continents, part of the global pizza industry, which is worth an estimated $144 billion, which is a lot, considering it's often sold at just a few dollars a slice. You can go pretty far on sauce and cheese. Like, the combination of hot cheese and sauce is pretty epic.

And you throw pepperoni on there. When they say bad pizza is still pretty good, that's what they're talking about, is the cheese sauce combination. The cooking of the delicious pizza is, like, the easiest, funnest part.

Consistency, operations, like, running a well-tuned machine is, you know, really the hard part. But the key, Falco says, to really, really good pizza is its base, the crust. Is this the perfect food? Yeah, this right here, this one, this pizza, this exact pizza is the perfect food. You know what I mean?

Just kind of like, okay, I'm good. Yeah, I mean, you got veggies, you got herbs, and, well, look, there you go, no tip sag. No tip sag.

Yeah, cheers. Aspiring pizza shop owner Sherry Neal has been thinking about her crust for years, literally. We're going to do a sourdough, and my starter, which is called a mother, is about 14 years old, so it makes an excellent crust.

Wait a second. The dough that you're going to use for your restaurant, you've had the beginnings of that dough for 14 years. Yeah, it's like my fifth shot. You have to feed it. Whenever we move, we move cross-country, and it was in the car with me the whole time. I fed it every day.

Oh, Korean barbecue chicken. Speaking of well-fed, I'd been feeding myself pizza for three solid days, and finally, it was time for a reckoning. And after three days of pretty much continuous pizza eating, oh boy. The result was a pleasant surprise, actually.

Just a couple of extra pounds. Who knows? Maybe it is true what they say, that what happens in Vegas really does stay there?

One can only hope. I'm Martha Teichner. Thank you for listening. Please join us again next Sunday morning. In New Hampshire, people really just kind of don't like Maggie Hassan. For more from this week's conversation, follow The Takeout with Major Garrett on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-01-27 19:48:21 / 2023-01-27 20:07:37 / 19

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