Making Moves In Food Delivery, Chess And Health Care

Transcript

ARUN RATH, HOST:

From NPR West, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Arun Rath. It's time for the New and the Next.

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RATH: Carlos Watson is the co-founder of the online magazine Ozy. Each week, he joins us to talk about what's new and what's next. Welcome back, Carlos.

CARLOS WATSON: Hey, Arun. Always good to be with you.

RATH: So a fun piece this week about a service that could be the next big thing in food delivery.

WATSON: Got to love it. Once again, the Bay Area is giving you special things, and this time not in technology but in food delivery. And a couple of young guys who are UC Berkeley grads - food obsessed - were finding that they couldn't get their favorite foods delivered. So they started a new service called Caviar, that, for a flat fee, is creating quite the Uber-like stir around San Francisco and now a little bit around Seattle and New York.

They've got a lot of your basics, whether they're fish tacos or pulled pork sandwiches, but they also have some of the higher-end restaurants who in the past have been a little bit hesitant about doing delivery who now have agreed to do it.

RATH: And I guess, a lot like the Uber car service app, it's just a very streamlined experience.

WATSON: Correct. So 9.99 - so it's kind of a flat fee, which, you know, that kind of varies sometimes. They also don't have the kind of neighborhood restrictions. Arun, you probably have called to order from places sometimes and they've asked where you are and they've said you're kind of outside of our zone. Well, that was one of the things I think these young guys were trying to tackle.

RATH: We do a lot of eating at our desks around here, so hopefully they'll get to L.A. soon.

WATSON: Sooner rather than later.

RATH: Another piece you have - there's a shirtless master in Sports Illustrated, which is not too unusual, except for the fact that this is a chess master - a 22-year-old chess master. Tell us about this guy.

WATSON: Chess is not always the sexiest sport. But the number one chess player in the world is a young guy from Norway named Magnus Carlsen who's becoming quite the sensation. He is not only a champion chess player but he's also a male model. And that's a very different look from, say, Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov, who were two other famous chess champions of the past. And as we speak, Carlsen is in the midst of a match with the current champion who has been the top player for years.

RATH: Right. And this guy, this young guy, he's kind of - it's kind of like boxing in that he's been waiting a long time to get that title shot. Everyone basically agrees that he's better than the current world chess champion, Viswanathan Anand.

WATSON: Better by quite a margin. And whereas you would expect some of the old-timers might have been a little bit jealous, a little bit of envy, instead, you ended up hearing guys like Kasparov and others saying, actually, I hope he does really well and puts chess back into the larger mainstream conversation.

RATH: Nice. And Ozy's been running this week a series of interviews with former President Bill Clinton, got some attention for some comments he made about the Affordable Care Act.

WATSON: Very much so. We - I had a good conversation with President Clinton last weekend here in California. And he reminded us that when President George W. Bush rolled out the Medicare Part D plan, that there also were a number of hiccups.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: This happened once before. It happened when President Bush put in the Medicare drug program for seniors, which was not as complicated but had exactly the same problem when it rolled out. It was a disaster. There were people who even lost their prescriptions for their existing medicine, and they fixed it.

WATSON: So that was his way of offering context to the current troubles with the healthcare.gov.

RATH: Carlos Watson is the co-founder of the online magazine Ozy. You can explore all of the stories we talked about at npr.org/newandnext. Carlos, thanks again.

WATSON: Arun, always good to be with you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.