This is Bloomberg business Week Inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week Podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio.
Hi everyone, Happy New Year, and welcome to the Bloomberg Business Week Weekend Podcast. As we head into twenty twenty four, we'll look at what's ahead in the world of business, tech, and society more broadly, while also reflecting on some of the biggest stories of the year that was. We begin with one of the major themes of twenty twenty three,
the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence. The job networking platform LinkedIn estimates that these skills needed for jobs are expected to change by at least sixty five percent by twenty thirty as AI accelerates workplace change. Bloomberg News Deputy team leader for US Equities, Jess Manton, and I recently caught up with LinkedIn Chief operating Officer Dan Shapiro, who joined us to discuss his predictions and big ideas for the
job going forward. And you'll recall that LinkedIn is a business unit of Microsoft, which gives Dan and his team keen insight into the application that has taken tens of millions of us by storm. Well, artificial intelligence has been transforming the workplace.
We know that, Jess.
It's also been transforming in this stock market. I mean, look at what the vidiot has done so far this year. Plus we got the likes of Microsoft and Alphabet higher as a result of people being bullish when it comes to AI. By the way, LinkedIn is estimating that the skills needed for jobs are expected to change by at least sixty five percent by the year twenty thirty. This AI accelerates workplace change.
Wow.
Yeah.
Joining us is LinkedIn Chief operating Officer Dan Shapiro, who joins us on Zoom from Mountain View, California. We like checking in with Dan every few months, particularly at the end of a year, because LinkedIn is out with some predictions about what twenty twenty four is going to look like. Dan, Good to have you back. How are you good.
It's great to be here.
Yeah, it's really good to have you with us. Hey, before we get to predictions, can it give us so where we are in terms of jobs in the economy Because the bond market and the equity market are certainly telling us one thing, and that's a soft landing is coming. What is the data at LinkedIn, which you have a plethora of tell.
Us, Well, the labor market remains pretty tight, at least within the professional ranks on a global basis, and obviously that varies quite a bit by sector and by industry. You've seen a number of tech companies, particularly private tech companies, pull back, but then if you go into sectors like healthcare or services, those businesses continue to grow.
So it's been a pretty big mix.
But I think perhaps one of the most interesting trends has been that people moving jobs and switching between companies has come down by quite a bit, so many companies are experiencing attrition at a historical low.
Now.
The interesting thing about attrition is that it's like water behind a dam. It always tends to pay off at some point. So I think it's pretty likely that sometime in the next twelve months you'll see attrition or just movement of professionals between companies to start to come back up, and more people will open up and look at new job opportunities.
That's really interesting. It's coming on the back of what we saw and that latest jewel support that fell below nine million. It had been pretty elevated still is. So that's pretty interesting. Giving that backdrop there, What do you think are some of the biggest concerns among jobs switchers at this point, because we talked so much about when it comes to even though inflation coming down though, but that wage growth still strong. So obviously you would think
that's helpful for people who want us switch jobs. What wo does the wage picture tell us?
Well?
I think when the future is uncertain, you hold onto your chair. You want to make sure you have stability in your life, when it feels like the world around you is a little more chaotic, and so I don't think it's surprising that as the economic backdrop has been a little bit less certain, a little more opaque, that people have tried to really stay true to the job
that they already have. But as people get more confident in the future, as the economy starts to pick back up, as the soft landing perhaps comes into clearer view, I think people will open up again.
Hey, let's talk a little bit about wage pressure, because when you say the way that the market is tight, at least for the professional ranks, It makes me think about wage pressure and again going back to the macroeconomic conditions out there and what exactly the FED chair is trying to do with telegraphing rate cuts in the next year.
Do you see kind of what the FED sees and what the data tell us at LinkedIn that, even though professional ranks it's still very competitive, are we still seeing the wage pressures like our potential employees still in the driver's seat?
Dan, I don't have access to the wage data that the FED does, but what I can tell you is that it is not the environment that it was just a short years ago. A few years ago, you saw some incredible raises that people were getting when they jumped from company to company, and that's just not happening at the same rate that it was before, at least within professional ranks.
Now.
I'm sure that there are certain disciplines where that might be happening. And if we get into AI in a second, you're definitely seeing that within AI technologies, where there are people that are deeply skilled in large language models and prompt engineering and data infrastructure, and there's going to be an insatiable appetite for that kind of talent all over the labor market. But more broadly, I think it's a different environment than it was just a few years ago.
So we're beginning to see even more so some of those lagged effects from those FED hikes stand, even though we're waiting on potentially more next year.
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see where it all nets at. I was following the news just like everyone to see what the recent releases are, and it'll be interesting to see as there's more predictability about what the Fed's doing and perhaps a rate decrease changes hiring plans.
So Dan, let's get to AI and talk about some of the effects that AI is having on jobs. I mean, you're a great guy to talk to you. We should note that I did mention Microsoft. Microsoft is, of course the parent company of LinkedIn, and Microsoft is certainly going all in on AI.
At LinkedIn, are you guys.
Getting to use AI tools that Microsoft is developing? Kind of explain the relationship that you have with the parent company.
Absolutely, As you mentioned, we're a business unit within Microsoft. More broadly, and I think that this is a moment where that's been wonderful for our LinkedIn's members and customers. Before the world saw chat ept in November of twenty twenty two, we got to see some of the new large language models that were coming out of the Open AI relationship, and it absolutely struck us, just like it
struck the whole world at large. And as a result of that, we've had an opportunity to embed many of those capability is into a whole variety of products, Helping job seekers find jobs, helping recruiters engage with candidates, helping salespeople prepare for meetings by doing research on companies, helping
marketers build campaigns. I mean, it's sort of remarkable about this technologies is how ubiquitously applicable it is and also how easily it can be integrated into existing tools that people.
Are already using in their daily lives.
So it's absolutely permeated our product portfolio. And my big prediction for twenty twenty four is that while last year was very much about learning about what this new technology could do, this is going to be the year where companies and individuals start to use AI to truly differentiate themselves relative to the competition.
What industries do you expect to see stronger job growth due to the adoption of AI versus those that won't.
Well, I think every AI and we've said in the last deck that every company is becoming a tech company of sorts, whether you're in retail or services or manufacturing. I think we're going to find the same thing with AI. Every company is going to be forced to figure out how their strategy is going to be shaped by AI and how their team is going to change how they
work as a result of AI. One of the things we say at LinkedIn is that AI is going to impact every job and every team, and I think twenty twenty four is going to be the year where we figure out where that really comes to bear in different industries.
What do we have to do as professionals to be prepared for the AI revolution?
Well, let's talk about it at two levels.
As an individual, my advice to everyone is just get started, download some of the apps, play with the technology, maybe use it for personal use, to use it for some professionals. You find one thing that you find useful, because my experience is that some people they can feel paralyzed. It feels like this new thing, they're not sure how to make use of it, and feels it can change in so many ways. But if you can find one habit
to deploy on a daily basis. Then you can start to learn how this technology can make a difference for you, and then you can figure out how to embed it in a broader range of things in your life. I also think for job seekers, this is going to be a skill that's expected by employers. I was speaking with a head of recruiting at a large company in Chicago recently, and one of the things that she said is that it's one of the primary factors that they're starting to
use and they're hiring processes. Are you comfortable it's using some of this new AI technology because they want they want talent on their team that's comfortable with it, and you're going to start to see a mix of people that are both comfortable and then others that are reluctant.
I'm curious your view now that we're getting past the pandemic, because work from home was such a hot topic at that point and so many employees we're doing that. What does that look like now when it comes to negotiating through the job process.
Well, it's been a ynamic situation. I think when the pandemic happened, you saw a lot of companies start to embrace more flexibility. You saw a lot of opening of remote roles, and as there was a time period just a few years ago where twenty percent of the job openings on LinkedIn were remote.
But as we've gotten past.
The pandemic phase and things have become more endemic, you've seen remote openings come down in some industries below ten percent, and so you start to see that remote roles are becoming less available on average. But there is still a lot of discussion about flexibility, and that's a place where each company defines flexibility a little bit differently, so it really varies company to company and industry to industry.
So what about when it comes to actual long term hybrid work and flexibility here? This is something that I know our colleagues and certainly our listeners and viewers are really interested in. I've seen from what I've observed anecdotally and from also to people who have the data here that it does certainly feel like we're back to this. You know, not necessarily everyone's in the office five days a week, but gone are the days of like two
or three days a week in the ya. I mean, we're in the office four days a week at a minimum. It seems like, and I'm not even speaking for Bloomberg. I'm speaking like me, like I have to be here every day because of what I do. But it does seem like everybody I talk to in New York City, it's this is the norm rather than the exception. What are you seeing in terms of jobs that are advertised on LinkedIn and sort of the experience of your members.
It's interesting how geographically specific this trend is. So if you're in New York, if you're in Europe, if you're in Asia Pacific, you see that things in many places have gotten back a little bit closer to where they were pre pandemic, where people are in the office, you know, four and in some cases five days a week. I think you do see environments where a fordance of flexibility
has definitely gone up. There's a greater understanding of people coming in or leaving at certain hours, or needing to work home and life around each other. A little bit more on the West Coast, the environments a little bit differently. You see more companies embracing a less frequent office participation,
and it really varies by the industry you're in. So you know, it's one of the things that I encourage anyone that's going through a job seeking process is just to make sure you understand what's important to you and
understand the norms that exist at the company. And interestingly enough, sometimes the norms that are written down on paper are not the norms that are practiced, and so it's always good to not just talk to the HR team, but talk to some people on the team that you're working with to understand how teams really operate.
So who do you think has the upper hand now? Job seekers or employers?
Oh well, it's a much more balanced market.
If two years ago I would have said job seekers or in the dream seed buy and large, it's a much more balanced situation now. You know we're talking about AI before. If you're if you have AI skills and you are in such demand and by employers, than you are very much in the driver's seat and you're seeing companies pay very substantial sums to find AI talent. I think that's going to can persist, if not get worse
as we get into twenty twenty four. But I think in lots of other places it's much more balanced.
Can you talk to us about what AI skills particularly are and how do you acquire them absolutely.
So I think there's two ways to talk about AI skills. I think the first is, in the broadest sense, if you are in sales, if you are in marketing, if you're in engineering, if you're in accounting, if you're in recruiting, your employer is going to want you to be comfortable with AI such that they can bring it into your
day to day process. And so I encourage every job seeker to use AI in some way such that you can bring a personal story into your interview about how you've used AI to use any number of any number of tasks and having an understanding of how that might help you be more productive as an employee. So it's not that you're learning AI as a technical skill, but you're learning how to apply it to your day to day interactions. I think every employer is going to be
looking for people with this kind of capability. And then beyond that, you get into much more technical realms and you're talking about do you have understanding of machine learning? Do you have an understanding of large language models for particular kinds of neural networks? And you're seeing an influx of people from technical backgrounds learning these kinds of AI specific technical skills to have access to some of these incredible opportunities that are now starting to emerge.
Hey, Dan, I want to shift years and just end sort of about LinkedIn's business because as COO, you have
a seat right a front row seat there. Colleague Sarah Fryar, who covers who is the Big Tech team leader for Bloomberg News, wrote an article back in August about how LinkedIn has been gaining engagement as Twitter now known as X and Facebook face stagnation, and she shared the stat that LinkedIn shared that in the spring of this year, users shared forty one percent more content on LinkedIn than they did in the same period in twenty twenty one.
Can you give us an update about engagement on the platform and what you're seeing in the second half of twenty twenty three.
Well, more people are using LinkedIn every day for a wider range of things. We crossed a billion members on the platform recently, which is amazing. I joined the company's employee back in two thousand and eight we had less than twenty million members. Acrossing a billion as an incredible milestone. And you know whereas years ago, LinkedIn was a place to create a profile, maybe build connections. Increasingly, it's become a place to share and consume professional knowledge. So we
see people giving updates on their industries. Conversations around AI are up over seventy percent year on years, so we see a lot of people understanding best practices of a applying AI in their industry. And then, you know, as you might expect in for companies or people that have been displaced from a job perspective in the last year, you see people finding jobs on LinkedIn, which is one
of our core use cases. So engagement this year has been fantastic and we're really excited to chart our paths to the next billion professionals.
Hey, Dan, happy holidays. It's always nice to check in with you. Really appreciate you joining us on Bloomberg Business Week this afternoon. That's LinkedIn Chief operating Officer Dan Shapiro. If you're watching, you saw him joining us on zoom from non View, California. Jess, it's going to be a yearfold with AI. That's a pretty and I certainly have that you're listening and watching Bloomberg Business Week.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
As we continue our New Year's weekend edition of the program. We wanted to you examine what's ahead in our fight against carbon emissions. More than sixty percent of US electricity comes from fossil fuels, that's natural gas colon petroleum. About twenty one percent comes from renewables like wind, solar, and hydropower. The rest, well, it comes from nuclear energy, which has remained stagnant over the last decade at about nineteen percent.
This all according to the US Energy Information Administration. Our next guest is among the growing chorus of experts who argue that governments have to go nuclear in order to reach net zero goals. Maria Korsnik is the CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute. It's a trade association that advocates for more nuclear power generation. Bloomberg News Cross Asset reporter Emily Grafeo and I got her take on the path forward for the Sector's.
Say, you have to look at the value of nuclear quite frankly right. It's that seven twenty four around the clock. Not only is it carbon free, it's highly reliable, and I think we don't talk as much about the value that you're getting. These power plants are built not for forty years, not for sixty years, eighty years, one hundred years, and so you really have to look at the complete
picture that you get when you build nuclear. Yes they're large projects, Yes they're going to cost in order to make that happen, but the value that they bring to the system is really incredible. And again I think we just need to shift a little bit more to the value conversation.
So you were at COP twenty eight, can you give us a sense of the narrative around nuclear energy? Was the consensus that this is green energy? Like? How were people actually talking about this form of energy?
Absolutely?
In fact, you know, some are coining this the nuclear cop you know, and I've been to the last few COPS, and I would just describe nuclear as a little bit trying to get a seat at the table, trying to create some conversation this cop. You know, we're in the sort of official.
Documents from COP.
We're in what's called the stock take, you know, paragraphs about nuclear, about wind and solar together being what's required. The fact is that you know, nuclear was never officially credited and mentioned in the way that it is here. Tripling nuclear was a pledge that was signed by twenty four plus countries. The IAEA had a pledge on just crediting nuclear for being part of the decarbonizing solution, over
forty countries sign that. So I would really say this cop was sort of a real, real recognition of the value that nuclear is going to bring. And quite frankly, we're not going to get anywhere close to the commitments if we don't include nuclear in the solution.
We have to be there.
I think people are still scared of nuclear. I have to tell you I grew up and people who've heard me talk about this before apologies, but I grew up near a nuclear power plant in California. It's actually the last online nuclear power plant right now, Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obisco County. We would have siren drills.
Once a year.
I think it was the first weekend in September at noon, when you know, the sirens would go off to to you know, warn people like, Okay, this is what would happen if there were some sort of nuclear meltdown. People had iodine pills at their disposal. Is that, you know, and they grew up, you know, thinking about Chernobyl three Mile Island. You know, get what's the safety around this stuff. For people who say, wait a second, I'm a little scared.
Of nuclear, yeah, honestly, it's incredibly safe. And you know, I also, I'll say, grew up around this nuclear I've operated plants. I've been a nuclear plant operator. I've been a site vice president in charge of one plant. I've been a chief nuclear officer in charge of five reactors at three locations. And I just say I know nuclear from the inside, and I would live next to a nuclear plant any day they're in. They're incredibly safe and
especially as compared to other technologies that we need. And I would also say that you know, nuclear uses the fewest critical minerals. Nuclear uses the lowest land space, if you will, for the volume of energy that it produces. From a life cycle perspective, it is in the lowest use of carbon for the whole life cycle of the plant.
It's clean energy.
And you know, in terms of carbon free and in terms of other emissions and jobs, you get a lot of jobs with nuclear. There are little economic engines for the local community.
I think to a lot of people it's almost perfect. But I think a lot of people would also say, what about the waste. We still haven't figured out what to do with nuclear waste.
Yeah, you know, I look at that a little differently. I'm so proud of nuclear for being able to account for all of its waste. You know, oftentimes we look at nuclear and say, what are you going to do? And I so well know what. We know where every piece of it is from all of the waste or all of the nuclear power that we've used since the nineteen sixties, we know where every piece of that is. And you're absolutely right. Some of the fuel that we have today, which we call waste, I would prefer to
say it's used fuel. And why do I say that? Because it can be used again in other types of reactors, and those other types of reactors are ones that we are trying to bring to the marketplace literally as we speak. And so I would say the used fuel you have today is a future resource and we should look.
At it like that.
What's next for nuclear in the US? Are we trying to build more reactors actively in this country?
So we're building some down in Georgia right now. One went online this year and the second will go online next year. And what we're in the process of doing right now, if you could imagine an innovation pipeline, chocolate block full of different designs, and that is coming out over the next five, ten, fifteen years. And these are partnerships between our national labs and private companies and very much one a beautiful, quite frankly innovation here in the
United States. And I'll tell you nuclear is not just being talked about in the United States. It's being talked about around the world. We just talked about cop but many other countries right now are looking to expand nuclear and they're looking at the United States to help them. So what we need to be doing here in the United States is bringing some of these innovations and getting them built so that these other countries can have a chance to see them and then choose which design they
want built in their country. At cop Poland for example, said, we already have six sites. At each site, we want four small modular reactors. We're teaming with a US company. We want to put twenty four in place.
Maria, I have to ask, what do you make of the price of uranium. It's up seventy five percent this year. I write about ETFs and commodities markets, and there's a lot of interest for buying into this nuclear energy uranium trade. But why is it up so much seventy five percent this year.
Well, a couple of things.
For one thing, we are I think that's an indication that people are bullish, if you will, as they look ahead for nuclear and I think also we're looking very much at ensuring that we have a solid and stable fuel supply as we move forward. You've seen that we want to invest in the US fuel supply here so that we have not only the mining but also conversion and enrichment services available to this industry, so that we have a solid supply as.
We move forward.
And so I think a lot of that is put attention on the front end of this fuel supply, and I think that's causing some of that price increase.
That was Maria Korsenik, a CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute. It is a nuclear industry trade association that advocates for more nuclear power generation.
She joined us on zoom from Washington, d C.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa Play Bloomberg.
Eleven thirty, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a new measure that allows state law enforcement to arrest migrants who enter the US without authorization. Mexican President andres Manuel Lopez Obrador am Low has accused the governor of using such measures for political gain ahead of the twenty twenty four US presidential election, and he says that his country will challenge the measure. No question that immigration as front and center
as we enter the twenty twenty four presidential election. In fact, swing state voters see US Mexico border security is a greater pity than the foreign policy crises that have increasingly dominated President Joe Biden's attention over the last few months. We're talking Israel, Hamas, and then of course what's going
on in Ukraine. This, according to an October Bloomberg News Morning Consule poll, what we've got with us a great voice to help us understand migration and also to help dispel what he argues are common myths and misconceptions around migration. Heinde Haas is Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He's also the director of International Migration Institute and the author of the new book How Migration Really Works, The
Facts about the most divisive issue in politics. Professor de Haas, good to have you with us this afternoon.
How are you.
I'm fine, Thank you well.
Thanks for stayd up late in Amsterdam and joining us. We really do appreciate it. Hey, if you go back in history, for pretty much as long as we've been had historical record, migration has been politically divisive. I mean, this is the type of thing that sparked wars in the past for orders. Why has it been so politically divisive?
Migration is this perfect issue to detract the attention away, distract the attention away from other issues where people aren'thappy about. And I think migration is the perfect scapegoad as well. But it also provides an opportunity for politicians to deposition themselves as strong leaders against the common enemy. So it is very attractive for politicians to draw the migration card. And we see that all across the West. But like
you said it's not something new. I mean, if you go a century back in the US, there was a lot of hostility towards Southern European migrants, Catholic migrants, Jewish migrants, German migrants, and you see that for all countries. So this phenomenon as such is not new. I think what it's worrying is the divisive an inflammatory language we're hearing
from politicians. Of course, migration comes with its problems, but it's now being sort of magnified to this essential threat to societies, and I think that is really problematic because the debate is more and more disconnected from what's happening on the ground.
Can you walk us through maybe some of the most common misconceptions that you hear about migration and what your responses would be to those.
Yeah.
Now, I think the most common sort of idea that many people share across the political world, from left to right, is this idea that the swelling mass of people from poor countries are moving to rich countries and that our borders are increasingly overwhelmed. And it's linked to this idea that poverty, inequality, warfare pushes more and more people to live their homelands now. Of course there are issues on the border, and certainly in the US case, that's not
something we can ignore. But if you zoom a little bit out and you look at the overall volume of migration in the world, we talk about three percent of the will population, and that percentage remained remarkably stable over the last century. Basically there have been clear shifts in
terms of directions of migration. If we don't really have evidence of migration as such as spinning out of control, although you'd get that impression of course if you look at particular border areas and the issues the US is currently dealing with. But I think if you zoom out, migration is essentially not driven by poverty and misery. The main driver of migration, also to the US has always
been the economy and particular labor demand. And what you see right now both in terms of legal any legal migration in the US, and I'll be disconnected to the fact that use in employment as is the fifty year low right now. Labor shortages are huge. We have an unprecedented peak of vacancies topic topping I think ten million right now, which is really historical records. And these things are connected. So this is not so much about a
sort of poverty push what people think. It is really primarily about there's opportunities, and that's always been the case. It's always been the case with immigration.
It sounds like you and you're making the point, Professor, that the US can absorb the immigration that we're seeing.
Well, I think the problem is that quite a lot of migration is undocumented. It's about the legal migration, and that reveals I think a huge issue all across the West. There is simply not enough political support for creating more legal channels for lower skilled migrants. And we need we sort of with the COVID pandemic that these people do
all sorts of essential jobs in the economy. But this is not the kind of migrants for which we give in our visas, which means that people find other ways to enter countries, and I think that is one of the biggest causes of the search and border crossings which you see. Besides of quarter, there's also people fleeing conflict. So to put it simply, the best way to really really curb migration is to wreck your economy, and we see indeed in times with high unemployment economic recessions, migration
goes down. When the economy does well, a lot of people come and it's partly what you see. And most of the migration also to the US is about legal migration, legal ten pporiary mirgant admissions to the US reach an all time high under the Trump presidency up to six million, and after a sort of COVID slack, it's back to five million of last year, and it reflects the actually
very good state of the US economy. So to put it differently, if you want, if you don't like immigration, that is the price you pay for being a wealthy, open market economy as the US. But the same goes for the UK and many other European countries.
So under the framework that you're working with that you know the only way to solve micration, you should well one way would be to wreck your economy. Obviously we wouldn't want to do that in the US. But underneath your framework, did you come up with ideas or solutions about I mean, we do have a lot of people trying to cross the border illegally. How do you solve that? How do you even begin to start finding solutions for that?
Well, you cannot do anything if you don't do anything about the demand factor, and I think what really shows that. Another thing sort of myth is that, you know, politicians get tougher and tougher in immigration. Yet it's true on the level of rhetoric, but if you look at practices, we haven't found in a huge research project any difference between left leaning and right leaning politicians in terms of
the policies they implement. For instance, a lot of particular Republican side, you hear a lot of tough talk on immigration. At the same time, labor enforcement is symbolically low in the whole of the US. Just one statistic, the number of employers that get prosecuted for employing undocumented migrants is somewhere between ten and fifteen a year. Without any zeros added, it is roughly the same chance of being hit by lightning.
And it shows to whatever you call it, that's call it the hypocrisy of politicians that you know, I have a lot of tough talk to say about immigration, but a lot of these yeah, and a lot.
Of these A lot of the big examples of this are in actually states where that are most aggressively rhetorically anti this migration. Who are migrants? Because in order to actually leave where you were born, leave where you're from, leave your family behind. That takes a person who's willing to make a lot of sacrifice and do these things and work, in my opinion, work very hard. What have you found in your research.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what we find. That was true in the past of Europeans going to the United States. It's still true for migrants. Migrants are what we call a positive selection of people in home countries, which means these are the exceptional people, the entrepreneurial people. Three percent of the low population migrates, that means ninety seven percent stays home. So migrants are almost by definition, those who want to take risks or entrepreneurial who want to improve
their lives. And that is still the case by and large. So migrants are a positive sub selection, and that is actually by research is found that immigration decreases crime, very contrary to what politicians say, because migrants are often very community business oriented. They don't come to countries to become criminals. And that's why we find in research the exact opposite of what politicians tend to claim.
But I want to get back to our conversation with Heinde Haash professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He's also the director of the International Migration Institute and the author of the new book How Migration Really Works. The fact is about the most divisive issue in politics.
Professor Dehas joins us from Amsterdam this afternoon. So, Professor, one thing that I wanted to discuss was public opinion and what you've found in different parts of the world where you've studied this, and how democrats, how Republicans in the US think about immigration as a political issue, because.
Your findings, I think would surprise a lot of people.
Yeah, what is interesting, it is indeed true is most people would expect that more Republicans think negatively about migration compared to Democrat leaning voters who tend to be slightly more positive. But if you look at trends through time, it really becomes interesting. In the US, clearly the share of people who look positively at migration on both sides of the political divide between Democrats and Republicans is actually growing.
So there is no sort of public backlash against immigration, which what you would think if you listen to politicians, and we find the same in Europe, and we can explain that because people get used to the presence of migrants'pheares often diminish and people start to think more positively about immigration. So there is no big public backlash against immigration. What you see is that the rhetorics have grown increasingly
tough by politicians. It is more on the level of political rhetorus that you see the huge polarization between a sort of pro and anti migration.
But is that rhetoric working, Does it lead to people changing their minds, does it lead to public opinion shifting, and is the lead of candidates being elected.
Well in the broad sense not. But there is of course a share of voters that is worried about immigration, that sees immigration is a big threat, and that vote is being mobilized, and that is still a significant share. But the interesting thing is that the share of people thinking more positive will do up migration is actually increasing. It may, of course be that people on the fringes may be emboldened by divisive, inflammatory language, and that is
of course a problem. It could spark violence and discrimination and racism. But overall, there is no clear trend towards growing sinophobia growing racism. The trend is rather in the other direction that is actually very surprising, and what it shows that there is I think there is a fair share of voters who wants to hear a different story because this pro anti division is simply not working anymore. Migration is of all times, migration comes with the share
of problems. It comes also with a lot of benefits. But it's not something that can just think away. And I always say to ask you know me, for instance, are you in favor against migration? To be like asking an economist, are you in favor against the economy. That's
not a serious way of talking about immigration. And that is partly why the debate is so incredibly stuck, because both camps sort of dig in, cave in, and cherry pick evidence, and there are not many politicians who dare to tell the true story about immigration, which bio neecessity is a much mon nuanced one than the one we usually hear when we listen to politicians.
So what did your findings find with the nuance of who actually benefits from migration in the countries that are bringing people in, that are seeing more migrants, who benefits there?
Well, migrants make the whole economy bigger basically, so the whole economic pie is simply growing. And if you look at average effects on wages, for instance, we find very very small effects, and there you can discuss about methods and data, but the fact the effect is so small that it is pretty insignificant. When you look at higher
and lower incomes, you see a clear difference. It is particularly already affluent that benefit most economically from immigration, because these are, of course the people using services migants provide, often owning businesses that help them to boost their profits. But the lowest income earners, amongst whom also many former migrants, of people living on minimum wage, for instance, don't benefit much from immigration, and in some cases they may lose
out a little bit. It doesn't mean that immigration is the cause for the long wage technotion we have seen for lower incomes in the United States. But it is in a way logical that people who earn really low wages have the feeling what's in it for me? Because these are also the people who see, of course the day to day consequences of immigration in their daily lives. So in that sense, the idea that they don't benefit as much from immigration as already effluent people is correct.
But it doesn't mean that migans take away jobs, or a response for the long term wage technoluan that we have seen in many Western countries amongst lower incommanders.
Professor de Haas, Let's say that by some imaginary force, you became in charge of immigration policy.
Here in the US.
No question, we face a crisis at the US Mexico border. How would you solve it?
I think I would organize a national debate about immigration, and it is a serious debate, and that should by definition be a debate about the kind of society and economy you want to live in, particularly when we look at lower skilled jobs, because there's broad support also in the US to allow people to come in who do higher skilled jobs, but is a fact of life and certainly in the future that we need also lower skilled immigrants.
So you can only solve this in two ways. Either you create more legal channels for lower skilled workers that will avoid a lot of misery at the border. And these policies that we've been trying to implement a border enforcement that go back more than thirty years, and we've been trying to do the same again and again and again, and it doesn't work because people are still attracted by jobs or you make those jobs not available anymore. I do enforce labor law, you know you're really going to
prosecute employers massively. I don't think that is very likely. I'd rather have a different debate about the kinds of jobs we create that are jobs that are not attractive for native workers, that attract migrant workers. We really need to think about how we organize our economy. For instance, if you think about care, who's going to take care
in the future of our children, our elderly. We need a serious debate about immigration where we no longer deny these economic realities, and on that basis we can make decisions. But we really cannot divorce the whole debate on immigration from a broader debate how to organize our economy. Well, that's a long story, it's a complex story, and that
is the whole point. I think we've seen too much politics of denial over the last thirty years, and that also explains the mess we're in, not just in the US, but also in European Union, where this real demand follow is killed labor, which is going to stay because of aging, because of increasing education of the native workforce. All indicators show that we really need a debate about this, but also a debate about work and jobs and for instance
minimum wage. These are all connected with immigration, and I cannot explain it fully, right, don't think well, no, I think this is a serious debate.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's been really helpful and you got to come back and join us once again. Heinde Haas's professor of sociology the Diversity of Amsterdam.
Check out his.
New book, How Migration Really Works, The facts about the most divisive issue in politics.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Well, the next guest has made his living connecting people. Sam Darwish is the co founder, chairman and CEO of one of the world's largest independent owners, operators and developers of towers, providing communication infrastructure in eleven markets, serving about seven hundred and seventy million people. He joins us on Zoom this afternoon. He's the CEO of IHS Towers. It's got nearly forty thousand towers across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Also the co founder and chairman of
the company. Good to have you with us this afternoon. Sam, How are you good?
Good?
Thank you?
How are you hey?
I'm doing really well.
Hey.
This is perfect timing for you to come on our program because we are our own tech Bloomberg technology team. That day and Matt Day and team wrote a piece about Project Kuiper earlier today about Amazon's fora into providing high speed internet, and he said, you know, Amazon's not just competing against the SpaceX and the SpaceX's starlinks of the world. He's competing with anyone out there right now providing connectivity. And that's a company like yours that provides
the infrastructure for connectivity. How are you seeing the landscape right now in the markets that you operate.
Look, we operate, as you said, we own forty thousand towers roughly across and fiber in the tens of thousands of kilometers, covering eight or nine million homes across our markets. Our markets are we operate in eleven countries across the world, covering roughly eight hundred million people, as you said, so we kind of like see the trends, understand what's happening.
The likes of Amazon and the likes of Google, the likes of Facebook do from time to time come to our markets trying to stimulate basically demand for their own services, but we haven't come. We haven't seen them come into our markets, kind of like with big statements or with big broadjat that could move the need of that.
Now, having said that, at the end of the day, I get startling.
I get all the.
Projects or the ideas of trying to create connectivity using satellite or nonterrestrial systems. But when it comes to basic propagation, basic wireless, there is no alternative to a tower on the ground.
Really, why is that?
Because you know, here, I am thinking to myself, this could be a prime moment for you know what you guys in the industry called leap frogging. Here the technology, you know, this infrastructure technology is so expensive. I don't have to tell you. You guys own and operate forty thousand of these towers. These are very expensive things to build and to operate. And then you have this other technology
coming in that essentially broadcast internet from the sky. Why is this not a serious concern to you at this point?
Because the technology has limitations.
I'll list a few.
The first is that as you're trying to penetrate a building or a structure sideways from a tower, it's much easier because you're kind of like going through windows and glass and this and that. If you try to do it from the satellite, you basically have to penetrate ceilings, like multiple ceilings. I mean that's a lot given the distances.
Also from the satellite to Earth, the satellite may be able to project the power, but the handset is kind of like small and it has limitations, and being able to penetrate back into the satellite again is another issue.
What kind of spectrum do you use?
Most of the carriers on the spectrum when you start interfacing with people, The size of the battery, how long can it last? I mean, those are practical limitations, and then compile that or add to all of this the fact that people need more and more and more capacity by the day, especially as some of these apps like like drones, driverless cars kind of like start to proliferate, We're going to need more capacity rather than less capacity. I mean, these satellites will not be able to provide
that capacity. Hem there are great solution stem like offshore rural urban mountains provide some bridge like in the Ukraine situation, for example, but they can't be a solution to the millions of people using their phone, for example, in Manhattan or Los Angeles or London or a legos.
Right, it's just too you know, apples and oranges. It certainly sounds like he sam, I wanted to talk a little bit about the types of technology that these towers are providing. When you think about the different markets that you're in, is this are we talking four G? Here are we talking five G? I mean, what is the sort of standard in terms of the equipment that you provide or that the folks who lease and use your towers end up using.
Simply put, there is no difference in the aspirations of carriers and people in our markets to where the United States or Europe is. Everyone wants the fastest, cheapest pipe. Everyone wants five G one one fiber to the home. Now, having said that, we are definitely behind. Our markets are largely in the four G cycle.
At the moment.
Most of the four G deployments have happened on our towers. They're selling it now to customers to upgrade from some markets two.
G, three G into four G.
Many of our markets like Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil have also seen five G spectrum licensing recently, so we're beginning to see commercial tryers or commercial pilots into five G, but five G is still still not the standard, so it's largely four G.
You guys offer six different solutions including new sites in building solutions, fiber connectivity, small cell infrastructure in urban areas. Where are you most bullish for your company?
For us, we think about it from a deployment point of view. What does the wireless network that carries a four G or a five G or eventually a six G what does it require? Initially, it used to require these macro towers, the big towers, you know, and that's what most of us US and some of our peers eight American Tower crown SBA focused on. But as you as rollout starts to change, especially with five G, more small cells will be needed. The DAAs becomes very important.
Fiber is critical as small cells start to kind of like cells start to get closer to each other, so the fiber connection to those locations become important. Also, we're seeing now compute and cash becoming very important.
At the end of the day.
Those towers are the closest really state possible to the eyeballs using a cell phone, So an element of computing could happen potentially some data center or our edge data center on on on these locations. But what I'm trying to tell you here there is no one size fit all kind of like solution.
You have to be ahead.
You have to look at the technology of the time in that country and what kind of rollout does it require. It always will require macro hours in our view, because that's kind of like the basic the umbrella cannot cover it.
But all these other types like.
Like small cell, like the in building, like the fiber will be required in different types and different instances.
Well, Sam, I could talk about this stuff all afternoon. I used to cover telecom, so I just love talking about connectivity and how people are getting connected around the world. I really appreciate you taking the time in joining us on Bloomberg Business Week this afternoon. Sam Darwash Darwish, co founder, chairman and CEO of IHS Towers, joining us on zoom this afternoon.
This is Bloomberg Business Week.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Plenty ahead in our second hour of this new year's weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, including a look at the weight loss drug phenomenon sweeping the US and what it means for businesses outside of big Pharma, Plus key takeaways from Sam Almon's abrupt Ouster and subsequent reinstatement in Open Ai, and the very best in luxury and culture from our friends at Bloomberg Pursuits.
First up this.
Hour, I look back at one of the most storied careers in the history of investing, Charles Munger, the alter Ego, sidekick and foyle to Warren Buffett for almost sixty years at Berkshire. Hathaway died a little over a month ago at the age of ninety nine. On the day of his passing, Carol and I spoke with Bloomberg News reporter Noah Bouhier, who covered Munger and Bill Smead, the founder in CIO of SMED Capital Management and a longtime Berkshire investor.
I wrote a letter to Buffett probably five years ago, just thanking him for how incredibly generous that him and Munger have been with all of us. I mean it literally changed our lives.
What do you mean by that?
Yeah?
Oh, by communicating the discipline that they practiced. They shared why they were doing what they're doing all these years in the writing, in the annual meetings, sitting there and taking questions for six hours, all the way way up into their nineties. It's like a gold mine of wisdom. But here was this incredible resource. Charlie Munger was the Solomon of our era. He was the wisest man in
the investment business. He was a cal Tech grad, Harvard law educated, started a law firm in Los Angeles, had a successful career in real estate, successful career in making common stock choices, and the right hand guy to the most successful investment selector and asset allocator of all time.
I mean he is.
You know, we just admired him so much, And then, of course we admired him immensely because he'd say exactly what he was thinking. And didn't really care very much Bill who he might offended the process.
You mentioned that you've been doing this for over forty years. What are some lessons that you've incorporated from Charlie Munger over these decades into the way that you manage portfolios and you allocid assets.
Yeah, we when we're talking to people. I'm here in New York talking to some possible new customers, and we tell them when it comes to value people, we hold our winners to a fault because compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. So if you can find a business, let's just right off the top of our head, pick Occidental Petroleum, who Monger and Buffett started buying in the last year and a half or two years. They're generating massive free cash flow, they're paying down debt with it,
but then they're also buying backstock. So, like Buffett says, over the years, if it's a company generating high returns on equity, high free cash flow buying back their stock, he ends up owning a larger and larger and larger part of the business as the years go by. That's what he did with Coke, That's what he did in an Americ Express that's you know what he did with a lot of different companies and holding your winners. The
fault is a key component of alpha. As I explained to people, you buy a stock at thirty and pay cash, the worst thing happened is it goes to zero. You lose thirty points of alpha. If you buy a stock at thirty and it goes to ninety and you sell it and goes to two ten, you lose one hundred and twenty points. And Buffett Monger taught that to people
as a powerful thing. It's it's much better to get a less spectacular company that you can hold all the way through a ten or fifteen times your money than it is a spectacular company that you might make five times in five years. But you've got to be smart enough to sell it and go to another project.
Well, and you're you know something. I want to ask you a little bit more too, about what Charlie Munger was to Warren Buffett, what he brought out, and Warren Buffett having said that, I want to bring Noah Bouhier into this because you know, Noah, it's one of those things where you think, as we're hearing from Bill, you know these are both brilliant men, successful men, and would have been on their own, but something about them together brought out even so much more.
Yeah, I think that's a critical point here is the combination of talents they brought to bear really was deeply important in the evolution of Berkshire. The other thing, just speaking as a journalist, the thing that I always found so amazing about Charlie Munger was his directness and his willingness to speak his mind, even if his opinion wasn't
necessarily a popular one. You know, as a as a business reporter and someone writing about investing, you always knew that Charlie was not just going to give you the piffy quote, but something that actually had some real substance behind it. And I think that's, you know, in large part, what has resonated with a lot of investors over time.
I mean, people would go One of the things that's underappreciated about Charlie Munger is is that deep into his nineties, people would go to Los Angeles to hear him speak at the annual meeting of a small publishing company called the Daily Journal.
Daily.
This was Buffett had nothing to do with this thing. They would just go to hear Munger alone. And I remember the first time I went to this thing, that were maybe one hundred or two hundred people, and you know, three or four years later word had gotten out and a couple thousand were going. I mean, you have to understand Charlie Munger was respected in his own right. It wasn't you know. He's often known for his affiliation with with Buffett, but he really did have his own loyal following.
To back up Noah on that, one of our favorite things is when it comes to climate change, he just said, why don't we just build a seawall?
Right?
That was his opinion.
It's like, okay, if it's real, let's do what they did in Amsterdam and just build a seawall in California and New York. And that's so simple and logical and less expensive. But that's Charlie Munger. It was always common sense, always won. The difference between the two men is Warren. Warren wants to die without any enemies. He has more
of an urge to be liked. It's a wonderful man, and he wants to be liked, whereas Charlie could care less if he's liked, right, he wants to share wisdom, share truth.
What was it like from the different meetings you went to and just kind of seeing them up on stage, things that kind of stood out for you.
Well, there's hardly any better comedy routine that's ever been done, the back and forth. Of course, Munger had lots of the singers, but Buffett had plenty himself. And yeah, they played off fantastically. It was I had a next door neighbor that was four years ahead of me in school, and I had no brothers, three sisters, and he was one of four brothers. And here I are extremely close friends. But he's four years older than me in the same way that Longer was six or seven years older than
six years older than Warrent. Right, But yet you know, we met and we were finishing each other sentences. And that's the way these guys were. They were finishing each other sentences. They'd say the first part of the sentence and they didn't have to continue because the other guy already knew what the rest of the sentence was going to be.
This is that kind of relationship we.
Know, Bouhire.
I'm so glad you're with us because we've been reading from your obituary. You know, to Bill's point about this this idea of common sense and not you know, not
always needing to be liked. You mentioned this some of his donations, and this one's this one's at the top of mind from him because it's it's relatively recent, forty five hundred person dorm on UCSB's campus, which actually got a lot of people interested in dormitory architecture who didn't think that they would actually be interested in dormitory architecture.
But you know, here Monger is trying to solve this problem of student housing, and he got a lot of blowback to this idea, and ultimately they canceled it.
What happened in.
His later years, Munger used these donations that he gave the universities to play architect I mean, he was deeply, deeply interested in architecture, and you know, he had some pretty unconventional ideas that I think really bothered people, and it became its own, you know, subplot, it's own right. But like you have to understand, for Munger, he was an incredibly wide, widely read person. He wasn't as narrowly
interested in investing and you know, how to make money. Obviously, he spent a lot of time doing that, but he had an interest outside of it. The other thing I wanted to add and the stakes with in a slightly different direction. But like you know, for all that Munger would, you know, sit up on stage and sort of act
as the skull and the curmudgeon next to Buffet. He he did have a you know, a generous heart, and you know, when you talk to people who spent time with Charlie, you know he was a deeply nice and caring person, and you know, on some level, this sort of permudgeon stance he would take on stage and in public sometimes was a bit of an act, but it helped him make his point.
A truly wonderful conversation with Bloomberg's Noah Boo Hire and Smede Capital Cio Bill Smead more on our podcast feed on the Legacy of Charlie Munger.
We should note that shortly after Amonger's death, we also lost a pair of luminaries in the fields of geopolitics and law, respectively. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died at the age of one hundred and Sandra de O'Connor, the first woman to serve as US Supreme Court Justice, died just days later at ninety three.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us Live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us Live on YouTube.
It was perhaps the biggest story of the year in the tech sector, and one that transfers Silicon Valley along with the global artificial intelligence industry. Fewer than five days after Sam Altman's abrupt ouster from open Ai, Altman was
back at one of the world's most valuable startups. In the immediate aftermath of Altman's return, Caroly and I spoke with someone who knows quite a bit about this space and the broader implications of AI in our society, Andrew McAfee, Principal research scientist at MIT.
I think this is just a crystal clear case study of the importance of good old fashion, boring corporate governance and running a good board. This feels like a huge enforced error on the part of the Open Ai board, and I still don't quite understand it.
What is ultimately the important thing that we get odd of this, or how it ends in your view.
I don't think we're ever going to know all the details, but we do know that if you have an extraordinarily popular, very effective CEO at growing a tech company, the board might not want to fire that person with no notice, really without apparently engaging on a lot of back and forth with him, not for any fraud or misconduct or malfeasance,
but because of some other kind of vague problem. If the board is going to take that fairly rash step, they probably want to alert their major investors, their biggest business partners, their employee base, and give them time to get ready for all that they didn't appear to do any of that.
Whatever you think the board's duty.
Is, I can't see how it includes destroying that much value following out the employee base of the company. And if the mission of the Open AI Foundation is to advance safe AGI for humanity, I do not see how these actions support that mission at all.
You know, Tim was really smart in terms of our discussions that we've been having around this about what seems to be maybe at odds, and that is this debate about a need for balance of pushing generative AI, this technology, expanding exploring it to reach its potential, but with also having an ethical line because of the potential of it to do wrong. Although I would go back to you know, the Cold War and missiles and the battle to have the greatest and best in terms of military and how
that could bring the end to civilization. So I'm trying to kind of figure out what is at risk if we get this wrong?
Help me here, Yeah, whatever is at risk?
If your organization organization's mission is safe AI, and you believe apparently that a for profit company is not the right way to accomplish that mission, then doing things that let your CEO and again almost all of the employees wind up at an AI building for profit company that is not accomplishing the goals of your mission.
I personally am.
Not worried about the existential the alignment risk of AI. All very powerful tools bring risks and harms with and they demand vigilance, and we got to be careful about it. I don't think AI is any big exception to that trend or requires us to do radically different things.
We just have to be vigilant stop the bad uses.
That is really really surprising for me to hear from you, Andrew, because I hear from you know, the worst case scenario when it comes to this stuff is, Okay, what if AI developed some sort of super bug or biological weapon, or in fact, you know in the Elon Musk school, become sentient and more powerful than human beings.
Why does that not worry you?
I mean I read a lot of science fiction as a kid, too. I think terminators sci fi scenarios are not great guides to policy, are not great guides to using this very powerful, very beneficial toolkit. I do think that there is a risk that AI, for example, could be used to engineer bad bugs or bioweapons. Great, why are we focusing on AI and not gene editing and not gene sequencing technologies? And why are we letting anybody apply to molecular biology and genetic doctoral programs and distributing
that knowledge very freely? Again, there are risks in the modern world, let's not be naive about that. But singling out AI as the lynchpin that's going to make everything bad happen, I just think that's wrong. I think that's a misallocation of our effort. Okay, demonizing technologies that will be super beneficial to us, I think as allows the idea.
Well let's move away from the superbug concern and more to the concern that it will become a sentient being that is more powerful and smarter than us. Why does that not concern you?
We have so many more important things to worry about. We have to accomplish an energy transition in the twenty first century. We have too high a disease burden. There are too many people in dire poverty around the world. I believe that AI might be the most powerful tool that we've ever come up with to help us solve
these global planetary challenges facing humanity. And we're sitting around worried about the terminator when there's not a shred of evidence that AI has become sentient or taken control of anything that we don't want it to.
Bad sci fi mixed bad policy and.
To full transparency, you're working with Google on research related to the societal impacts of generative AI.
I am curious that what is.
The balance you all at Google are pursuing when it comes to generative AI reaching its potential but also being smart about it and careful with it.
Yeah, thanks for that, because I really want to make clear here I am just talking about my own personal views. I am not representing Google's views on this. I actually am not on top of everything that Google believes. What I do know that Google stance is that we need to be bold and responsible. I think we are in danger of walking away from the bold part in an overabundance of not just caution, but fear about things that
we just don't have any evidence for. I want to say this again, this is my view, not necessarily Google's view.
The thing that most concerns me about generitive AI is misinformation and the ability for bad actors to use that misinformation at scale to control outcomes like happens in social media. Exactly. It's not that different than a lot of accusations that we saw fly in the wake of twenty sixteen and
twenty twenty elections here in the US. But if you thought a bought army of people, you know in Eastern Europe with social media, we're scary, then what about an actual bought army of generative AI that's able to you know, do this stuff at scale?
Andrew, Now that's a harm that we should be worrying about because these are actual challenges and like you say, bad actors are going to weaponize generative AI to do all kinds of harm or try to do all kinds of harm. This is a real risk, it's a real harm. I have faith in our ability to deal with the harms that technology brings us. I think we can find ways to have trusted sources that will verify whether a
thing is a deep fake or not. All of us have the new sources that we run to when we see something that might be true or might not be true. We can strengthen those kinds of institutions and those kinds of responses. We can also educate people to be more discerning consumers of the news.
You know you talk about you know, you have faith to deal with the harms of this technology maybe will ultimately bring us. Should there there be some guardrails in place, you know, shamy once you know full you know, shame or full me one, shame on you for me twice, shame on you know.
You know what I mean.
You know what I mean, Okay, George W. Bush Rich Sutchy.
But I guess my point is, whether it's social media, whether it's crypto, there's a lot of things out there that it's like, Oh, I guess we should have been doing this is there something we should have in place at this point when it comes to generative AI.
I think what we should have in place is a very agile system for becoming aware of the harms and dealing with the harms as they crop up. For example, after smartphones were out for a while, we learned that a bunch of losers were using them to take pictures up the skirts of women, you know, as they commuted to work on the subway.
We didn't not love a smartphone.
We didn't make smartphone makers apply for a license to use a camera. We didn't make all of us apply for a license to have a camera equipped smartphone around the states. Anyway, lots of legislatures acted really quickly to make that particular use of the phone illegal. Fast response to the harms that come up is my preferred approach
for dealing with these. I don't trust me, or you or anybody else to sit around right here and correctly anticipate all of the things that will happen and all of the effective ways to head that off.
I just don't.
That was our conversation with MIT Principal research scientist Andrew McAfee back in late November and on December eighteenth, Bloomberg reported that the OpenAI Board can now choose to hold back the release of an AI model even if the CEO has deemed it safe. The chat GPT maker revealed the arrangement as part of a new set of guidelines that it's implementing to help deal with AI risks still
to come. On Bloomberg BusinessWeek, we take a moment to savor our best experiences of twenty twenty three, from the theater to travel, to fine dining and everything in between. Our Bloomberg Pursuits team wraps up the year in luxury.
When we return. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Easter on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app, and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
No year end edition of this program would be complete without a comprehensive cultural review from Bloomberg Pursuits. We have a chance now to take stock of the finer things in life and also get a preview of some of the new and exciting attractions that we can expect in twenty twenty four. Very pleased to welcome in the editor of Bloomberg Pursuits, Chris Rouser, and to discuss some of the outstanding work that he and his team have done over the last twelve months.
Chris, it's always good to have you here.
The Pursuits team has published its best of lists for the year that was, and once again I asked my self the question, why am I not part of the Bloomberg Pursuits team, traveling the world drinking wine, trying on watches, driving cars, and going.
To the theater.
Tim, We're always asking you, Well, you actually say not, You're too busy busy.
Hey, I do want to start with the theater, though, because Sarah Rappaport goes to a lot of theater.
She sure does.
So.
Sarah is based in London, and so she gets to see all these amazing West End shows and independent shows out there, and she saw some of the really big hits that were there this past year, including Sunset Boulevard with Nicole Scherzinger, which I also saw when I was there for work. But her favorite show was a show called Operation Mincemeat, which is homegrown, like small cast musical about sort of this caper that the British pulls during
World War Two, they tricked their enemies. And it doesn't sound like something that would be like a really fun capery musical, but it actually really works.
Hey, I want to talk a little bit about time pieces. This is your area of expertise. Yes, that is before I met you, I used to call them watches.
Well, you know, you can only use the word watch so many times in one articles. You have to mix it up. That's also why you'll see the word horology. It's not a word I want to use, but it's.
One that you dose.
You know, you travel each year to an exhibition in Switzerland, don't you.
Yeah.
So there's a big trade show that happens in March or April and Geneva every year called Watches and Wonders and is where most of the big brands globally, especially the Swiss brands, show off their new time pieces for the coming year. And I always go and they do releases. They also do releases throughout the year at special events and dinners and fancy things. So I see most of the new watches that come out, you know, things from three hundred dollars to things that are one point eight million.
Dollars for a watch for a time piece.
For a time piece at that price point, it's definitely a time piece.
What is this mb and F Horological machine eleven that looks nothing like a watch?
Yeah, So mb and F is a brand that we write about a fair amount because it's one of our favorite brands. They have these watches that are very space age and swoopy, and they sort of reinvent how you tell time. So everything from you know, you don't look at the face of the watch, you look at an angle and there's a little window that tells the time and in a weird way, and they just don't really
look like watches, the watches. And so because they're so unique, they're really coveted and a small production, and they make these horological machines every couple of years and they're completely new movements, which means they're completely like they've reinvented the wheel. So my friend that works at NBNF came to Bloomberg and like was like, I smuggled something in for you. I want to show you this crazy new watch. We have,
the Horological Machine eleven. HM eleven, which is they call the Architect and it's a little round watch that looks like a UFO. It has four different sort of conical sections that have different little surprises in them. So one tells the time, one has the crown, one shows the power reserve, and one has a thermometer, a mechanical thermometer, So it's a thermometer that tells the temperature based on attention in a coil, which you have on your Apple watch.
But for a mechanical watch, that's pretty unusual. And I just love the way it looked. It's the only time I'll ever wear it because it's two hundred and thirty thousand dollars, but it definitely caused a sensation. There's sometimes I'll see a watch and be like this is.
But there's a problem with these, which is if somebody comes up and asks you what time it is, you have to like look through a little people and shake out.
Not really, I mean sometimes yes, but this one you can tell a time pretty easily.
Okay.
One of the people on your team who has among the most enviable jobs, I think is Nicki Eckstein, who gets to travel all over the world, stay in different hotels, all over the world. Interestingly enough, her favorite hotel this year was actually one here in the US.
Yeah.
So Nicki is our the Bloomberg's Travels are and she's been pursuits as travel editor for many years, and so this year she actually checked in a bunch of classics, like hotels that are not necessarily new but have been refurbished, like Clarridges in London and the Carlisle in New York and the Bristol in Paris, which are really fabulous hotels. But her favorite hotel was the Montage Palmetto Bluff, which is between Hilton in Savannah, and it's kind of like
a little community, little cottages and suites. And she went with there with her kids, and so she has she has two young kids. For a travel editor, that's like a whole different paradigm because you can't kind of go on these wild adventures. You have to really figure out how to do stuff and.
To check bags.
Sometimes when you have to nightmare, it's a nightmare scenario. And she just found that the Montage was like really wonderful for kids, had great activities for adults like boating the beach. They had every night, they had cooked giants'mores. The staff was super nice, and she just felt like it was such a treat in a way that sometimes hotels forget about these days.
If you were to think about the trends that we're going to see next year for hotels and for traveling, what's on your radar, what's on Nikki's radar, that's a great question. So travel is still travels booming, and it's really it's been coming back since the pandemic. People are switching their spend from buying things to buying experiences. We're seeing that continue some parts of the world or not are seeing travel soften, especially in the Middle East because
of the war. What companies are trying to do big hotel companies are trying to figure out a way to blend business travel and leisure travel because people are actually traveling less for business, but they are able to travel
more because their business is more flexible. So there's you're finding hotels that are cropping up basically like hotel communities near airports where people can go and kind of have a home base in a city where they can fly in, in and out easily, but it's almost like a residence area, like they're doing this in Atlanta, where you can you know, there's shared workspaces, there's amenities and stuff like that, so that this hotel can kind of be a home away
from home, doesn't feel so much like an anonymous place that you're just passing through, because people realize you can work from different places, your life can be more nomadic, and you're seeing countries do that too, like digital nomad programs that are still going strong. So we can't talk about travel without talking about dining. And Kate Crator, who used to be based here in New York, is now based in life in Yep and she gets to eat at different.
Restaurants for a living. She does. That is her job title.
What did.
It sounds better coming from you guys? What stuck out to her this year?
So she Kate lives in London and goes to all the amazing restaurants in London, and she is from New York. She's like the Queen of New York food. So she has eaten everywhere that's good here. But this year she went to South Korea and she went to Seoul, and she went to Busan, and she went to this place in Seoul called Born and Bread, where she had a twenty course meal that was just han Wu beef, which is a particular kind of beef that it's like wagu,
but it's just in creed. It's very difficult to get it outside of Korea, and this chef Min Kongwan serves it twenty different ways, so it's like the best beef in the world, twenty different ways, like melting, slices of chuck, like tartar, tons of different textures. And she said, just watching them cook it, because they cook it in front of you and then serving it to you, which really cardible.
Okay, I'm going to go eat there. That sounds good. Just go, Chris. We only have a minute left. Yeah, I want you to choose. Are we going to talk about art, wine or cars.
Let's talk about cars, okay, because a lot of the great art exhibits from this year were like once in a lifetime things that are closing soon. So I want to recommend two of the cars that Hannah Elliot, our car columnists, tried out.
They're very expensive, but they are things in pursuits.
But they both they're both electric versions of very exciting cars, very top end cars, which will trickle down to influence the way that we drive the rest of our cars. So there's the electric g Wagon, which is Mercedes like off road, you know, really expensive. People love it. She was the first journalist to try it. She'd drove off road. She said it was incredible, the power. It was just
as capable as a combustion engine version, actually more. And then she drove the Rolls Royce Specter, which is there Rolls's first electric car, which she said is like the most Rolls Royce of Rolls Royces because it's silent, incredibly powerful and just super super luxurious.
I think she got to go to Town, South Africa to do that. Yeah, she did, because her life is also extremely difficult. Yeah, that's another enviable job.
Before we let you go, twenty twenty four, how's it shaping up in Pursuits Land.
It's going to be a really interesting year.
There's a lot going on. There's a lot of hotels opening, a lot of really incredible restaurants coming back. We do a list at the beginning of January of the year where we tell you where to go in twenty twenty four, and that we're working on that list now. We're finishing it up, and it's a really there's some really exciting places.
A lot of places in South America, Quito, Lima. I can't give away too much, but Halifax, which is a favorite of mine, so you've got to check that out on January second.
Okay, well, we're looking forward to that and we'll certainly have you back on the program to give us an idea of everywhere we should go to in twenty twenty four. Happy new year, Chris, and a big thank you as always to our Bloomberg Pursuits editor Chris Rouser, looking forward to what comes next from the best team out there covering.
Luxury and culture. You guys are the best.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business App, or watch us live on YouTube.
Unless you even live it under a rock.
Then you're familiar with the so called the weight loss drugs we go vio Zepic, zep bound, and monduro The weight loss benefits have been well documented, but now researchers are pushing this class of drugs that became famous for helping people lose weight and testing the shots across a spectrum of disorders, from Alzheimer's disease to sleep apneil.
We've talked about this.
They're also testing it out on alcoholism. However, in the case of alcoholism, Novo Nordisk, which is the Danish drug maker behind we go Vi, isn't even involved. Though one study is happening in its hometown. It didn't even agree to supply scientists with the medicines. Neither is Eli Lilly, which makes zep Bound and monduro Malomi Kresky and Madison Muller write about the alcoholics who are seeking a cure
from these drugs, but without Big Pharmer's help. Madison Moller is health reported for Bloomberg News, and she joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Broker's studio. It's so rare to see an example of a study that's not actually supported in some way by the manufacturer of a specific drug, especially one that's so lucrative.
What's going on here exactly?
I mean, you'd think that these companies want to study the drugs in as many indications as they can because for them, you know, that helps expand it to more patients, and you know, it's a clear business opportunity, but in
this case, we're not seeing that. And you know, one of the reasons that the experts and the scientists that we talked to for this story gave for that is that utilization of alcohol disorder drugs in the US is so low that the drug makers just don't see this as a good business opportunity.
Why has the utilization been low? I mean, couldn't there be a whole host of reasons. I mean, one, maybe they haven't been effective, right.
And I mean I was even surprised. I mean, I don't know if you knew this, but in the process of reporting this story, I didn't even realize that there were three or four alcohol on the market. I was like, oh, I thought there was one, or you know, and it didn't work or something. And these drugs do work, they're effective, but they're not there's side effects, and not every doctor, even like some addiction doctors, are not really well educated in how to prescribe these drugs to patients, how to
sort of oversee that process. There usually is a lengthy prior authorization, you know, process to actually even write a prescription, which doctors are busy and they don't even have time for resources to do and so there's a lot of barriers to get people on these drugs currently, you know, And that's not even getting into the stigma of all of this and the fact that people just sometimes don't believe that you should be using drugs to treat alcohol use disorder.
So is that a part of this story too, Yeah.
I mean, the stigma definitely is a huge thing, and that's something in the conversations with these scientists, every single one of them brought that up, and they were like, aside from the business case that these companies, you know, maybe don't see potential here, the stigma is still such a big issue. And that's an issue that you know, is there regardless of whether or not Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are supporting these studies. It's just a continuous problem for this field.
Is it being used off label for this right now? I've seen anecdotal tweets about this. I've seen anecdotal tweets that have said not by people who have alcohol use disorder, but they say basically, hey, I went on this and it stopped me from eating a lot. It stopped me from drinking a lot, right so.
Yeah, and I mean that's the reason why some of the some of these Interestingly, some of these studies happened and started, or the researchers were at least in the process of getting these studies going long before sort of the hype around these way laws drugs really took off
this last year. I mean, they had been looking at, you know, anecdotal reports from ozembic because ozempic, remember was approved several years ago, so they've sort of been hearing about this now for a few years from you know, psychologists and psychiatrists that have been talking about this sort of in their inner circles, and then there's there was also some pre clinical studies done and some early studies done in patients. So some of these researchers have been
looking at this for a while. The other ones heard about this just sort of within the last year from you know, anecdotally from people on Twitter being like I had no desire to drink after going on ozembic, and they were like, this is super exciting. We have to see what's going on here, and so they launched studies sort of as a result of that.
So you and Naomi Kresky, who's in our she's she based she's based in Berlin.
Berlin, Yeah, so she.
Helps cover this from the European angle. You both did some reporting actually in Denmark. Talk to us a little bit about what you found in terms of these like who's who are doing these trials and people who you and Naomi spoke to.
Yeah, so it was it was really fun to work with Naomi because she's obviously in brillant, so she was able to go to Copenhagen and talk to the researchers and patients and nurses and everyone that's helping run this study. And we also had help from colleagues in the Copenhagen Bureau who went out and talked to some of these
people involved in these studies as well. And then on the US side of things, there's like four or five studies happening at least four studies happening here as well, So I sort of went out and talked all the US researchers. And it's funny because they all met at a conference over the summer. It was, you know, some addiction conference, and they all came together and were like, oh wow, we're all studying this thing. They got dinner and they talked about it and sort of made sure
that their studies were lining up. And they've all continued to communicate since. And it's cool to see their excitement because some of them have been studying addiction alcoholism for decades and they were like, this is one of the most exciting times in the history of this field right now, because it's just it's sort of difficult to find breakthroughs because there's just not a lot of pharmaceutical companies funding these types of studies. There's not a lot of like in happening in this field.
Break down the science for us. You know, why do scientists and researchers believe that these GLP one agonists, Yeah, can actually help people who have alcohol use disorder.
Yeah, it's super interesting because they don't really know exactly why it should work yet. And that's one of the amazing things about these drugs is like we are when we've talked about this on the show, like seeing all of these other health effects, and a lot of times the answer is, we don't really know why some of them are happening. And in this case, we know that there's a connection in the you know, brain pathways that
regulate rewards systems. So when we eat food, the same feelings of pleasure that we get and maybe from other things from drinking, there's there's some interconnections in the brain that regulates those feelings of pleasure that we get from doing different activities, and so they think that the drugs are having an effect there, which we know that they do have an effect in the brain. I mean, they
make you feel satisfied after eating food. And so there's some other neuroscientists that I've talked to who think that the drugs could affect a person's strongest craving. So for some people that might be food. For some people that could be alcohol, for others, it could be other things. Maybe you know, it's just the drugs aren't really being used in that population.
That's interesting.
So the strongest let's say you're strongest s craving is or something that's not food or right, you know, alcohol, right, addicted to something else like yeah, drugs or something.
Yeah.
And one of the researchers we talked to in this story is also studying GLP one drugs in people who are addicted to nicotine and cigarettes, so similar there's a lot of different different things that you could used for well.
It's an incredible story. We love all of your coverage when it comes to these Madison Madison Mueller is health reporter for Bloomberg News. Check out our story Alcoholics seek a cure and we go v without Big Pharma's help. It's available on the Bloomberg Terminal and.
At Bloomberg dot com. This is Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
This is the Bloomberg Business Week podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and the Bloomberg Business App. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminale