‘I’m concerned about American women ’

Welcome to the weekend!

After just over a year in business together, two food companies have announced an end to their partnership. One will refocus on its “hot-off-the-line, melt-in-your-mouth” products, and the other on its World Famous Fries®. Which companies are they? Find out with the Pointed quiz.

Don’t miss our World Famous Audio Playlist, available in the Bloomberg app. Then check out this Bloomberg Originals video on quantum computing, and this one on the dirty business of monkey laundering. Both just won Emmy awards.

Don’t miss Sunday’s Forecast, in which we look at China’s response to the Iran conflict. For unlimited access to Bloomberg.com, please subscribe.

Techno-Optimization

Anti-doping policies have been in place in top-level sport since the 1960s, but Aron D’Souza is not a fan. The Australian lawyer says hypercompetitive athletes will dope anyway, and a blanket ban forces them to experiment with unlicensed treatments. So in 2023, D’Souza co-founded the Enhanced Games, a sports startup that aims to hold its first competition next year. The goal? Compete with the Olympics by embracing (and selling) drugs to enhance performance. “To see a 60-year-old run a sub-10-second 100 meters, that would be tremendously impactful to our culture,” D’Souza tells Peter Guest. It would be proof “that the compounds work.”

There’s using technology to optimize humanity, and then there’s being mistaken for technology that’s used to optimize humanity. As the call center industry integrates AI to direct inquiries, soften accents and eliminate background noise, human call center workers are spending a growing amount of time reassuring customers that they are not in fact bots. One worker told Morgan Meaker that a customer quizzed him for 20 minutes about his hobbies: “[It was as if she wanted] to see if I glitched.”

As what it means to be a human evolves in the face of technology, so too is what it means to be a politician. Anyone aiming to win an election should be clocking Donald Trump’s charisma and media power, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown tells Mishal Husain. “You cannot be a thoughtful, good-on-television-sometimes, strategic person and think you’re going to win the presidency,” Brown said in an interview that also touched on the future of journalism, the sidelining of women in US politics and Princess Diana’s complicated relationship with the press.

Dispatch

Teichland, Germany
When the Jänschwalde power plant first rose from the fields of eastern Germany in the 1970s, it must have looked like a cathedral to coal. Six cooling towers — each taller than a downtown high-rise — billowed plumes of steam visible for miles, a symbol of the state’s industrial ambitions. Decades later, the complex remains iconic enough that the local heritage office just added it to a list of protected sites. But the designation presents a problem for operator LEAG, whose plan to turn Jänschwalde into a plant powered by natural gas is now in doubt.

Agree or Disagree?

MAGA doesn’t mean making profits great again. The Trump coalition always had anti-corporate elements, but now corporate America’s profits are slipping. Big Business and Trump’s populists could be waking up to a mutual dislike, John Authers writes for Bloomberg Opinion.

The golden age for employers is ending. For as long as most of us can remember, business has been able to call on a ready supply of foreign workers. But rising discontent with mass immigration could now become companies’ biggest domestic challenge, Adrian Wooldridge writes for Bloomberg Opinion.

H1-B Middlemen

Weekend Plans

What we’re watching at home: Squid Game Season 3. The Netflix show brought Korean TV dramas to the world, and exposed the woes of a stratified country. This season asks: If survival demands cruelty, what remains of humanity?

What we’re watching in theaters: F1. The $200 million movie is among Apple’s most expensive to date. Raising the stakes even higher, it marks the tech giant’s return to movie theaters since dialing back its earlier big-screen ambitions.

What we totally would watch: A Succession spinoff about the Cheng family, which controls one of Hong Kong’s top property developers. New World Development is staring down a leadership crisis after its heir stepped down as CEO.

What we’re eating: Beyond Meat’s steak tips, which have a “pleasant meaty flavor,” Michael Grunwald writes in We Are Eating Earth. It’s a highly readable book about food’s climate problem that also puts too much hope in the promise of fake meat.

What we’re playing: blackjack. So are Wall Street pros eager to incorporate game theory into how they navigate the markets. Before we get dealt our first hand, though, we’re reading up on how to count cards.

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