Meet The Most Fascinating People In The World

list with reporters and editors around the world. Brett Vegan, thanks for being here. Yeah, my pleasure. So Brett. In November, the world's population past eight billion people. How do you go about picking fifty of them? Wow, well we start with all eight billion, and then we go to seven Now, um, well, we are fortunate. We have a huge newsroom and I have at my disposal reporters and editors who know everything

about everything. And starting in the spring, really so we go back to almost June when we start putting this together, we start reaching out to people. They start nominating people that they think are really exemplary for the work that they've done this year. So basically, Our goal is to find people who have a metric or a data point from this year that really stands out. So we break

the list up into five broad categories. So the first one, since we're Bloomberg Business Week West, we go with business, right, Um. Then we have science and technology, we have finances, we have entertainment, and then politics. Some of them are names that you know that are doing things that you probably weren't aware of. Some of them are names that may

sound new and are doing really incredible things. And then other things other people are doing totally mind blowing things that you've never heard about and are crazy, and we get really excited about them and put them on the list. I mean that is one of the things that I like about this list that it isn't just like the usual suspects. Yeah, there's some famous people. I think Tom Cruise is on the list this year, but like you say, kind of for an underspect, why you Tom Cruise on

the list? Well, Tom Cruises on the list West because actually Top Gun Maverick is not only his biggest movie ever, but it's the biggest movie of the year. So that's actually a great example of someone who everybody knows. But the sequel to The Night SI movie is taken in about one point four six billion dollars. I like the way you say about one point force yet about one point four six billion at the box office. So it's the highest grossing film of the year and of his

entire career. When you think about like Tom Cruise, you know, think about all the major movies he's had, so for this to be number one all time merited him a spot on the list. What's interesting about Cruise also is he's kind of an exception to the world because one of the really cool things about this list is, um, a lot of these people just never heard of and they're doing really interesting things that you wouldn't ordinarily know about it, right, I mean, I think about someone like

Nicholas Bloom. Okay, he's a professor at Stanford, and he's on our list this year because he has become the go to person for companies that are really looking to try to figure out how to deal with return to work hybrid work models, and more than a hundred institutions met with him this year, from Wall Street banks to startups to the I m F really looking for his guidance on how do we manage our workforce, and that's

a big issue. A lot of people, you know, conflicted about having to go back game companies want I'm in people who are used to working at home from the pandemic that they don't want to go back exactly. And someone like Francesco Bellettini, right, that's not a household name. She runs the fashion house St. Laurent. So what's interesting about that. And she's a good example of something that I like to put on this list. And this is

the sixth year we've done it. So she is leading ys L and they actually had a better year like year over year return than a lot of other fashion houses and companies that would sort of be in their universe because they were a little bit less dependent on China than some of their competitors were. So she actually had a really good year. She and her team sort of increased sales in the first nine months of this year more so year over year than they had in

the past. And one of the reasons we put this list together and why like doing this so much and finding people like this is this sizes into a larger story, really is a COVID story. So her success in many ways is not only because people want to buy, say Laurent clothing, which they do, but they want people to buy more of it. But also because when you're a little bit less dependent on China than your competitors, you

have an opportunity to do better. So here at the Big Tag Podcast, we have made a list of the Bloomberg five from the Bloomberg fifty. Because we just don't have enough time to go through the whole list. I encourage everyone to go to Bloomberg dot com and see the whole list, but we've chosen five who really intrigued us among the other intriguing people. So the first person on the Big Take B fifty list is Asia Pinky Cole. Can you tell us about her? Yeah? So Pinky Cole

is the founder and CEO. And I don't know is this a family program list? It is a family program, but it's in the top. It is in the name. So the name of her restaurant chain is called Slutty V and they're based out of Atlanta, and she's the founder and CEO. And this is kind of an Irreverend burger chain. The names of the burgers are like one night Stand things like that. Um In preparation for this podcast, West. I actually went to the Slutty Vegan that opened in Brooklyn,

So this isn't just a list. You had to do some serious reporting. That's exactly right. I spent forty eight dollars on vegan burgers. It's really known for these overstuffed burgers. They have names again like manage Atoix or Hollywood hooker Um. And it started as a single food truck about five

years ago and not to become mini empire. Here's Pinky Cole in her own words, there's so many challenges in this industry when you talk about vegan food, like I'm paving the way right right, I'm one of those people in the space where I'm creating a lane where it really didn't exist in this capacity. So now you've got all these big businesses went to open up vegan concepts, which is cool for me because that's more fol for

me to eat. But then also the ingenuity of it and the organicness of the whole vegan movement is diluted. So what I'm doing to combat that it's monopolized in the market. I'm going to continue to create brands that people can appreciate when they get a really good experience and happen to get really good food that so happens

to be vegan. The thing that stood out to us about her is in the whole context of plant based meats, where they had a big splash, some of those companies, some of the leading companies, are having a really rough time now where initially they were very popular and now they're having trouble sustaining those businesses. And she is a

pretty big success. And of course, as we talked endlessly about sustainability and about the problems associated with eating me both you know, for your health and environment, these plant based meats seems like a pretty big deal and she seems to be catching fire in a way that isn't kind of like Penians like, you know, eat your peas. No, that's exactly right, and that's that's kind of why she started this, is that she is a vegan and she

wanted to eat vegan junk food. One of the cool things is that every person on the list that has sort of a right up in the magazine report goes and says what's interesting. And the person who wrote about Pinky Cole is Kate Crater, who's a Bloomberg food writer in London and here's what she had to say. Pinky

Cole is a force of nature. Are you see a lot of dynamic people in restaurateurs in the food industry, but not that many that really break out and just attract a crowd and attention and adulation and love up and down the board. And Pinky Cole is that person. At the start of this year, she had basically four locations in mostly in the Georgia area. By the end of next year, she'll have at least twenty one. Thing that's also great about Pinky is that she opens her

restaurants very often in places that are underserved communities. She really has her eyes on the black community. She started a nonprofit that aims to empower people of color who want to get into business and don't always have the connections or know how to start doing it. She really wants to bring more people into it, offer a lot of opportunities to people who haven't always had opportunities. She's not just saying it, she's doing it, and the impact

of that is superb. We'll be right back. Our second person we picked in our slim down list is in the finance category. That's dal Leap sing So. Dal Leap sing in February as a taught national security advisor to the White House, really played a very central role in efforts to cut Russia off from the global financial system after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Basically was able to freeze

more than half of Putin's six forty billion dollar war chest. This, of course, is a really a huge issue because I don't know that there's another event in this year that has had more far reaching global effects than Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Absolutely not. And he really helped turn Russia into basically the most sanctioned nation on Earth. The reporter who wrote about the leap seeing is Salia mosen Bloomberg,

senior Washington correspondent, and here's what she said. So, Putin has built up something like six hundred and fifty billion dollars that he has stored through his central bank in Europe, in the US, and in other currencies. He was building that up so that he would make sure he had a pool of resources to keep funding his war and his invasion as soon as U S sanctions came down the pike. But he did not see coming. Were two things.

The first one was that the US and the Group of seven would have the audacity to sanction a G twenty central bank. Russia is still part of the G twenty. To cut off a central bank from the global financial system of an economy that provides so much of our food and energy resources had the potential to shake global markets, and they did shake global markets. It showed Russia that the US and American allies are not afraid to stand up to him, even if it's a little bit of

self inflicted pain. And actually all of us saw that pain. We all experienced it through gas prices. Gas prices went really high. It added to inflation, and it made all of our summer vacations more expensive. And it was all to pay for the cost of pushing back against Putin in what some people saw could become World War three.

The second thing that deletes things efforts contributed to was cutting off Russia from a very complicated system called Swift, which is basically the Gmail for banks and in financial institutions. When they send money to each other, they need to send messages, and those are secret messages because you don't want other people to know how and when into who you're moving money to. And the US then led an effort to encourage Europe to join them and tell Russia

you cannot use Swift anymore. Now, not all of Russia is banned from using Swift, some of the major banks are. But all of this to say that Delete sinks. Efforts that he led and spearheaded brought Russia in the first crucial months of the war to its knees. The ruble fell in the first month, and yes the ruble has recovered, but the overall picture of the Russian economy is one of devastation of really large human toll inflation, people losing their job bobs, all because they're cut off from the

global system. Okay, Brett, moving onto politics. This is a person who I think a lot of our listeners won't have heard of and has done something really extraordinary. And her name is Park G. Hume, right, So, she is an advocate for women's rights in South Korea, which is a nation that's really struggled with sexism and harassment. And she helped attract eleven thousand new members of them female and soul alone, to the center left Democratic Party right

after the presidential election in March. Park is a young woman, not yet thirty years old, and when the me Too revelations Me Too movement was really picking up steam. She got interested in those stories, went to journalism school, and with a partner, was able to expose a vicious online spy cameraing. And this ring was blackmail and girls as young as aged twelve, And these spy cameraings are a real problem. Basically, recording devices are put in bathrooms and

locker rooms and film women without their consent. And she was able to infiltrate basically one of these rings and wound up getting a pair of twenty six year old men sentenced to more than thirty years in prison each. That's kind of how she got started. She was doing that anonymously and eventually realizing that in order to have a bigger voice, she needed to sort of make herself known, and she became an advisor to Democratic Party's candidate in

this year's elections. Did she have a political future herself? Do you think that she has an interest in running? So she was named the interim coach here, which is really like kind of an astounding feat for someone of her age. But then the Democratic Party lost local elections, she resigned. She's a writer and an activist, and I have to imagine that there probably is a future for her in politics, but at this point hasn't said exactly

what those plants entail. No. Next on our list is science and tech, and the person who intrigued us is Tom Oxley. This is fascinating, Um, Toma. This whole thing is crazy. And I read Ashley Vance's stories the Reporter on this one, UM several times to make sure that I understood this correctly, and I'm still not sure I do. But basically Tom's company, which is based in Brooklyn's called synchron They are able to implant something into the brain of people who are suffering from a l S otherwise

known as Luke Garrig's disease. And it's essentially like during a coronary operation, like putting a stent in your heart. They're essentially able to do that in your brain and in doing that, it gets a signal that allows you to basically text using your thoughts. Here's Tom Oxley. The goal of a brain computer interface is to enable control of a personal device without having to use your hands.

That's critical for people who have injury or disease such as stroke als, spinal cord injury, who were not able to use personal devices like you are I. The way it works is it records the intended action directly out of your brain and then converts that into a Bluetooth signal to control your personal device. We had the f d A approval to kick off the clinical trial. We had to then figure out where we were going to do this, who was the right patient, who was the

right physician. SOO became the year when the first patient in the US was implanted with a permanently implanted brain computer interface. So I was dreaming about how we were going to make that happen, and it has happened. In one word, would be inspiring. Seeing our patient and learn how to use the device for the first time, achieve reconnection with their families has been nothing short of life

affirming for the mission that we're on. That to do list for three is now expanding our clinical trial to include six sites around the world. It's crazy. It's like kind of sci fi come to life. Yes, you mentioned Ashley Vans, the reporter who has written about this, and here's what Ashley said about Tom Oxley. Toms are really interesting character. He's he's an Australian, he's a medical doctor and he has a PhD. In this field, and so he's a bit of a rarity in that he's not

just a pure startup tech founder. He has this this deep background in this field. He's taken his company from Australia and based it in Brooklyn, and what's indicative of where this field is heading. He's raised tens of millions

of dollars in venture capital. And so we've gone from this period where this was this academic pursuit that was progressing very slowly, and now we're seeing these companies get tons of money um as people rush to this this future that's in the near term about helping people with disabilities, which is amazing. And then you know there is this kind of sci fi, possibly positive, possibly dark future where we're talking about humans with chips of their brain talking

to computers and this kind of human machine hybrid. So we'll have to see where all that goes. The big advantage for Synchron today is the surgery that they used to put this into the brain is much less invasive than something that's being promised by like Elon Musk's neuralink, where you you actually have to cut through the skull and implant this computing chip. Synchron goes in through a blood vessel in your neck and and sort of threads this stent in it's it's kind of like an outpatient

type surgery. Um in the years to come, what the company really wants to do is increased the computing horsepower on its on its brain computer interface to let people do many, many more things. And and you know this is gonna be no easy task because you're talking about putting these chips on this tiny little device that all these wires wires in your brain. So that's that's the challenge ahead for this company. We'll be right back bread.

The final person on our slim down list of Bloomberg fifty is in the entertainment category, and it's Bryan Flores. Brian Flores was a head coach for the Miami Dolphins. The Miami Dolphins fired him. He was one of the very very few black head coaches in the NFL when he was fired. He has since sued the NFL. He's calling attention to what's known as is the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one black coach that since expanded to two for a head coaching position.

But his point because of an experience that he had was that this rule as a sham. The reporter who wrote about him is Ira boot Way. Let's listen to him when he got fired. And then they were down to one black head coach left in the NFL. That was Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Tomlin hired Flores as a linebackers coach, is one of his defensive assistants,

and that's where he is now. You know, Colin Kaepernick, who's mentioned in the case, it has been blackballed or at least many people leave blackballed by the NFL for taking a knee during the national anthem. And uh, there was some sense that Flores, by filing this suit, had sort of made it so he would never coach in the NFL again. But it's not true. He's in. He's

got an assistant coaching job. Which is interesting because part of what this lawsuit alleges is that black coaches they get a different treatment even when they do make it into the league. So they they if they fail, they're fired sooner. Right, there's a shorter opportunity. They're paid less and they're less often put into the pipelines that lead

to head coaching jobs. So you know, now he's a defensive assistant, which is what he was in two thousand and eight when he got his first job in the NFL. It's definitely, you know, not what he wants, and it will be very interesting to see whether he becomes a head coach again. The case right now, they're trying to decide whether it will stay in federal court where it was filed, or whether it we'll go into arbitration. Uh. And the NFL arbitration is decided by Commissioner Roger Goodell.

So Flora's his lawyers are saying he's biased, he's prejudged this. The NFL has already said this case is without Merritt, how could he possibly be the person to rule. The NFL says every coaches contract has language and that says you go to an arbitrator for something like this. So that's where this belongs. And that's right now. We don't know where kind of what will come next. The basic problem has not been solved by the Rooney rule, and this lawsuit actually has done in a way more than

the Rooney rule. So since Flores filed it, we've had Tampa Bay Bucks hired Todd Bowles, who's black Dolphins to replace Brian Flores, hired Mike McDaniels, who's bi racial, Houston Texans hired Love Smith who's black, and the Carolina Panthers put Steve Wilkes, who's also in this lawsuit, made him their interim head coach. So that's four hires since this lawsuit.

So arguably that's because of the public pressure that this lawsuit brought, because it was a very high profile case and teams had to answer for why aren't you hiring black coaches? So Brett Eye just running into on the street and I say, hey, the boomber of fifties out, what's the most interesting thing about it? Like, how would you sum up this year's list? Wow? So I would say the most interesting thing to me is that the

far reaching effects of the war in Ukraine. So we have Vladimir z A Lenski on the list obviously is the president of k correct Um. But then you start to think about people like Dalip Singh who are also really on the list because of the war in Ukraine. And then we have people like Robert Habeck, who is the economic Minister of Germany and had to spend much of this time figuring out where else they were going

to get energy from. So every year there are stories that pop up that do have these sort of far reaching impacts on the list, but none I don't think in the six years we've been doing this has had more than Ukraine Brett Vegan. Thanks so much for talking to me today. My pleasure. Thank you, thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take, the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio appp podcast,

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Original music by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.