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The global push into infrastructure, breaking the IPO logjam in text.
The financial stories that sheep.
Are work cutting inflation without losing jobs. Do we need rate cuts and if so, how many? Investing in a time of geopolitical turmoil.
Through the eyes of the most influential voices.
Ten Rogueff economists at Harvard, former FDIC had Shila bet Ge CEO, Larry Kulp, San Francisco FED President Mary Daily Bloomberg.
Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
Tesla moves forward after all Goldman finally gets out of retail and everyone's trying to figure out where inflation is headed. This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. This week Wes Edens bright Line breaks ground on the nation's first truly high speed train line.
This is now the beginning of the high speed rail industry in the US.
Sir Clive Gillinson of Carnegie Hall on what it takes to make one of the world's great concert halls not only survive but thrive.
You always go for the vision, go for something that is irresistible.
And Tony James of Jefferson River capital on making sure New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn't turn into your grandmother's attic.
We're trying to be current. We don't want this to be your grandmother's attic.
We start with the ever present question of inflation and where it's headed with Peter Boris, chairman and CEO of Computer Trading. So Peter, welcome back. Good to have here. Every week we get new data on inflation points one way or the other, but in a larger sense, you often look at what you call the Seven Seas and commodities, one of those telling you right now, first.
Of all, thanks for having me. The seven Seas are relatively consistent, that inflation is going to be persistent for longer. You're starting to see some of the seasonal commodities potentially breakout. Cattle one see corn, the other sea that have been relatively weak, the stronger seas coffee, cocoa, and crude. They've been relatively stable after having fairly large moves.
And what's driving that right now? I mean, what are the forces? Why do you look at the seven Seas?
I look at them as the ac which is the consumer in terms of is the consumer going to have to substitute their spending for more on staples where demand is inelastic, and that then is going to lead to less discretionary spending across the board. And so then I look at bigger picture stocks like Visa, MasterCard, Costco, Target to see if the consumer strength is still there. Those
stocks have demonstrated a little bit of weakness. So that is the conundrum, the ninth c of the pressure on commodities and potential weakness of these consumer stocks, which definitely puts the FED in a box.
So if there's a breakout in some of the seas and the commodities, that puts pressure on Visa and MasterCard bigcause people don't have as much money to spend it Target, for example, they have to spend it on food.
Yes.
Yes, And so those stocks in particular are a good measure of consumer strength. And you see that in weekly data that you can get from JP or Bank of America compares to a week over week or year over year as the strength of consumer spending.
Now, some stocks that have really felt a lot of pressure just recently have been the big tech. What is going on with them? Do you think?
Well, first of all, there's the trading aspect to it, so you know, there's the old saying, right, what goes up must come down. So you've basically had a really big move, You've corrected. Technically, a number of these stocks have broken key levels, and if they don't reject those levels and start their uptrended again, that could mean that the leading aspect of the technology relative to other stocks is ending, which can hurt the large cap indices because there's such big weights.
What does this all say the FED? I mean, I could speculate that actually a little bit of tightening financial conditions would not be a bad thing for the FED right now because they've been going the other way.
I think the FED is sprinting in place, very very challenging because you have this tug of war. But it's hard to say that you should be easing when you've just had record highs in bitcoin, record highs inequities, and you've seen gasoline prices go up and potentially now these other commodities breaking out. So they're stuck in my mind of not doing anything probably the rest of the year.
Gold doesn't begin with the sea. Last time I recalled, when you talk about record highs, we've had some record highs in gold. Is that a useful indicator in your experience over time where inflation might be heading, because often you think that's where you go if you think you got inflation.
So I am not one that particularly favors gold as an indicator of what's going on with inflation. By the way, the correlation between gold and the S and P has been fairly high, so you would think, ooh, that's a cross current. People tend to look backwards. So in the seventies, when gold was really strong and inflation was high, there weren't really a lot of other instruments to use to hedge against inflation. But today there are many more instruments.
You can short bonds in the futures markets, you can participate in individual commodity markets, or you can actually participate through options or futures in the equity market.
So I don't think.
Gold is as much of inflation indicator as perhaps a supply and demand question for uncertainty in the global geopolitical And then non US central banks may have added to gold demand recently. Of course, that too, in the last week or so, has had a pretty significant correction.
Let me come back to your ninth see, I think it is conundrum what you said, yes, okay. As an investor, how do you invest into a conundrum? What do you do?
So it depends on your time frame. If you're younger and you have a long time frame, then do you sit back? And that's the nature of markets on average, right, there's a double digital client in the SMP every year. Of course, I'm always mindful of the six foot tall man that drowns in water an average out of five feet. So you have to be careful of averages because there are bear markets. But in that case, you stay the course.
If you're more like me and you're a trader and you've had a good run, I think the hardest thing in portfolio management and discipline is selling a winner or taking it down and rebalancing your portfolio. Is this a time to rebalance your portfolio where you have this conundrum combined with fed uncertainty, I think that makes a lot of sense.
Peter is so helpful, Always good to have you on Wall Street week and it's Peter Borsh of Computer Trading, Treasury Secutary Yell and travel to China. The criticize the government for subsidizing parts of its industry. But this week the IMF leveled us similar criticism at the United States and urge Europe not to follow suit, to take us through where Europe stands in the apparent race to subsidize were welcome now, Stephanie Flanders Bloomberg, Senior Executive editor for
Economics and Government. So Stephanie, welcome back. Great to have you with us. So tell us about this wonderful world of industrial policy. Sometimes we criticize it, and it looks like right now in the United States is embracing it. Where are we globally on industrial policy?
You know, this is one of those things where it's a fast moving a bit of economics, certainly of economic policy making. You know, for decades, certainly when I was first learning about industrial policy and economic policy, it was kind of a dirty word, certainly capital I capital p industrial policy because it was the idea, maybe more popular in the fifties and sixties, that governments could spot strategic
industries and invest in them. And the line I was always given that they were good at picking losers, they weren't good at picking winners, and that you could waste a lot of money doing that as a government, and if you were going to do it successfully, well, the only places that had done that were maybe places like Korea or Singapore where you had highly effective states and you had you know, these were emerging market economies that
had a path to follow. They could see what other countries had done, so they had less chance of getting it wrong. And what's changed. I think, you know, like so many things, has been upended by the different geopolitical outlook. You know that what you think of as even you know, what a winner would be in a context where you could have in ten or twenty years time a decoupled global economy really changes.
You know.
It could be you may have wasted a lot of money, and an economist might have said that is a big You've inefficiently used those resources, you're not making profits, You've produced excess capacity of a good in the global market from doing this industrial policy. But if in twenty years time you find that you're the only place with say a solar panel industry on one side of a big economic in the global economy, well maybe all that quote unquote wasted money will turn out to have been well spent.
So I think everyone's having to kind of rethink what success and failure looks like in an industrial policy context. But We certainly could be in for wasting a lot of money with these subsidies.
Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. How much of this do you think is triggered by China? Because China is now the second largest economy, some things that maybe beindest way of first. It certainly embraced subsidizing industry quite a bit. The Biden administration criticizes China greatea for that, but it's an enormous amount of money. How much of this is the rest of us being afraid that they will overwhelmed us?
Well? And I think it's also it's not just the fear, right, it's actually the reality in some key sectors. I mean, the green technology is a classic example. We're now looking at how much you know Chinese evs electric vehicles are just sort of swamping the global market. A lot of
subsidies have certainly gone into that. The European Union announced an investigation into ev They've already been burnt when it comes to solar panels because they European Union had invested a lot in developing, wanted to have a big domestic solar panel industry, was just wiped out of the water by China. There's the sheer scale of Chinese production. Now ninety percent of solar panels in Europe are made in China, and actually a very high proportion in the US as well.
So you know, China is driving this, but of course if you're Europe, it's also the Biden administration's response to China, things like the Inflation Reduction Act. You know, the Europeans have felt like they had to have their own thing. They announced the Net Zero Industry Act last year, was very explicitly about building the European domestic green energy systems and products so that they weren't going to end up reliant on China.
And how much pressure is there in Europe? Do they need to do some sort of large fiscal infusion to really get competitive?
I mean, I suspect certainly. The International Monetary Fund would say it is as much about developing the single market and working as a cohesive block as it is about spending lots of money. Yes, there's going to need to be a lot of investment funds for green technologies, for decarbonizing the economy, potentially for taking advantage of digital technologies that Europe hasn't hasn't been able to do as well as the US.
Stephanie has always so good to talk to you. Thank you so much. That is Bloomberg's Stephanie Flanders. Coming up. Is America finally going to get one of those high speed trains we've envied in France and Japan. We talked with Wes Edens about his bold new bright Line venture that broke round this.
Week, so we think that the adoption rate for it is going to be rapid.
That's next time, Wall Street Week on Bloomberg.
This is Bloomberg worll Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
This is Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. The United States took a big step toward high speed trains this week when Brightline West broke ground on a twelve billion dollar project to build a rail link between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. And we welcome now the founder and chairman of Brightline. He is Wes Edens. Wes, great tip to have you with us. Thank you for joining us to tell us about this project bright Line West. It's
the second bright Line project after Florida. Give us a sense of how big a business this is in success.
Well, first of all, thanks for having me on David. You know, it's a great time for US. It's a great time for the rail business. And so, as you said, we broke around earlier today on Brightline West, which is the second train project for US, but it's the most. Notably, it's the first high speed train, true high speed rail that'll be built in America, and that's a big deal
in a monumental location. And I think, actually even a bigger deal is I really do think that this is now the beginning of the high speed rail industry of the US, which I think is massive. You opportunities and growth in front of it. So it's a really exciting time.
Given your investment tracker, you've checked how much demand there is out there potentially, and you've concluded it's big enough to support this and make it a good business. How much demand is there.
There's about fifty million trips that happen between Los Angeles and Las Vegas every year, about eighty five percent of those happened by car. And I don't know if you've ever done the drive from Las Vegas to La but it's a notably difficult drive. It's probably four hours in the best case. It's very very unreliable in terms of what the time actually is, and so there's a tremendous
amount of demand between these two cities. There's only one way to get there, which is on I fifteen, and so our train is going to go right down the middle of I fifteen, and we think it's going to have a massive amount of demand for people to make that trip.
This is not your first fora You have bridline up and running i've in Florida right between Miami and Orlando. What have you learned from that that will change what you do with Briadline West.
Well, i'd say.
Most notably learned that people like trains, right, so we have millions of people that are our train down there. The adoption a bit in South Florida and no awfter Orlando has been terrific. We opened the route from Miami all the way to Orlando recently. It was actually last September. The numbers have been fantastic and we're very optimistic about the future of that train. The biggest lesson, i'd say is that when we built that train, we basically use
the existing rail corridor for a portion of it. So basically from Miami up to Cocoa Beach. It's kind of a straight shot from south to north. At that point you turn left and then go across Throughte five twenty eight to the Orlando Airport. That's how the route has made what we did you know that because we had access to the train. It was version one point zero. As I said, it makes a lot of sense, but there's a lot of things about it that we think
can be improved on. In particular, there's a lot of rail crossings there because that runs up really US Highway one. So this train from Vegas to La will cite it in the middle of I fifteen. It's a big two hundred foot wide corridor but right in the middle of it.
And because of that, you.
Can put a fence around it, you can electrify, no rail crossings, you can go true high speed, so you know, north of two hundred miles an hour is kind of the objective, and that version two point zero is what we think makes sense for this quarter, and I think it's a good blueprint for what we should find success with in other parts of the country as well.
What's the time horizon you're looking at for these investments. I believe you're cash positive in Brightline out in Florida. Now you haven't recouped the investment yet, but your cash positive. How long until you actually recruit investment in Brightline or for that matter, bright Line West.
You know, I think from this point forward in bright Line East, it's all systems go. You know, we're adding more capacity this summer in June with more train cars, the same in the end of the year in December, and then the same again next year. And so with that you'll then get to higher ridership levels, higher revenues, and we think that that's a time in which we'll start to look at, you know, different alternative in terms of financing, bringing in equity, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Do you have a sense of when you would bring in other investors.
Yeah, we have brought in, you know, modest investors. I mean, I'm a large investor in a personally, so I'm a big believer and I kind of eat my own cooking, so to speak with it and have for a long time.
I think that it's an investable project now, and so the the groundbreaking today I think signifies kind of the next layer of it, and I think that there will be some investment opportunities both on the debt and equity side in the upcoming kind of you know, months between now and the end of the year, and then I think as you get under construction, I think that there's lots and lots of different opportunities to grow the business
because this is something clearly can be replicated. Their city prayers around the country tell.
Us about the government role. We had Sexuary Boodagenche come out for the groundbreaking bright Lane West. How critical is the government? Can these happen without the government really supporting them?
I think the long term and the answer is absolutely yes. But I think that there's lots of examples of government playing pivotal role to getting new industries off the ground. So if you look at the history of you know, Elon Musk with his SpaceX, or the electric vehicles, or you know, subsidies for the solar business, there's lots of examples of things that started out being subsidized and then
turned into be you know, big robust businesses. And I think the train is going to follow those same footsteps. So you know, when you say government, really there's many governments involved. So it's really a coalition of local governments and state governments and federal governments, all of them playing in big role. Obviously, the federal government in the Department Transportation, you know, providing a three billion dollar grant, was a huge part of this, but frankly, so were you know,
the delegations from Nevada and from California. Frankly, the governor in Nevada, you know, my governm. Lombardo, who has been an incredible supporter the DOT, the Department of Transportations, our partner in Nevada for this project. So, you know, I like to think that it takes everyone to say yes and only one person say no to derail these kinds of projects. And fortunately we have such a compelling project that we've actually had nothing but yes.
So it's a really a good position to be in.
Okay, Wes, thank you so very much. That's west Edens. He's chairing of Brideline and Brightline West. The arts, including music, museums, photography, and more, contributed over one trillion dollars to the US economy in twenty twenty two, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and New York in particular is known for its performances and museums, but the very nature of the arts is going through fundamental changes in what is presented
and in how it is paid for. Change is triggered in part by a pandemic that forced most of us to stay at home. Sir Clive Gillinson has been the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall for nearly two decades, and he remembers well the dramatic moment when his legendary concert hall was once again open for business.
One of the most moving things is when we opened again after COVID. The emotion in the hall was astounding because Robert Smith, ou chairman, and I thought we should speak to the audience on the opening night and I literally said the first two words, which will welcome back. The place exploded, welcome back to Cardigi. And that emotion
has carried through. So firstly, I think the whole thing of live music and the impact of live music that is in the greatest possible shape, and you know, people love it, care about it, and I think they even today that emotion is still there about how they now value it in a way where you only value something when it's taken away from you. Are you Carnegie Hall fully back from the pandemic? Yes, the first year we had a reduced number of concerts last season. This season
it's the full number of concerts. We're back to the normal number of presentations and audiences are averaging ninety three percent. So we're I mean, you know, the fantastic response to what we're doing, and there's a real feeling of engagement with the music in a very powerful way.
It wasn't just performing art centers like Carnie Hall that were hit hard by the pandemic. Tony James of Jefferson River Capital serves as co chair of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a position he came to when the pandemic hit and hit the met particularly hard.
The Met, for example, lost one hundred million dollars in revenues over the two years, so that's hard to recover from. A lot of the arts scenes in New York depend on tourism. Our attendants from locals are all the way back. Our tenants from tourists are only in the seventies, and particularly Asian tourists. That's where we're really short, and so it's a bit of a struggle. We've had to find new revenue sources. We've had to be careful about costs.
But I think you know, as we've discussed in the past, David, I think arts are with New York, the gateway city, the wonderful city that it is.
The success of a great art center like Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Museum requires a balance, a balance between high culture that appeals to changing audiences and running a very large business with all the challenges of managing costs and attracting revenues that any CEO of a big complex company would understand. One of the things that strikes me
is your title, your executive and artistic director. It reminds me a little bit about that division between a publisher and an editor and newspaper.
You have both.
You're responsible for the business as it were Accrdentyhill as well as the artistry give us the sense of the balance. How do you get the right balance between the business side and the art side.
I mean, it's a really interesting question because most organizations separate the two. The reason I would never ever do a job which was half of what I do is because I feel if you're involved in the artistic you want to be as expansive and imaginative and take risks, you know, and really travel extraordinary journeys with the music. Now, if you're the person responsible for the money, you're probably going to be cautious and keep saying I'm not sure we can do this, I'm not sure we can do that.
The good thing about doing the two together is if I want to dream, I've then got to be part of making sure that can happen as a business. So in a way, I think it enables you to take far greater risks because you're responsible for both.
You've been known throughout your career for taking some risks. I mean you were, of course a professional cello player back in the one Spring or extract.
Well, that was somebody else's risk.
But then you stepped up, not necessarily volunteering, but you stepped up to really take over a struggling organization, and you took risks from the very beginning. You've taken risks at card of your hall. How do you get the right balance, take your risk and we're not falling off the high wire?
Well, I mean, of course, the key thing about all risk is how you manage risk. I mean, you can't live without risk. And so you know, there's a famous saying which is you know, if you're not living near the edge, you're taking up too much space. Money follows vision. You always go for the vision. Go for something that is irresistible, that has to happen, and then there's a chance you can sell it to somebody else if it's good and the world can live without it. I mean,
it's very nice for it to happen. If it's only that, it's very hard to sell to somebody else. It's got to be irresistible.
Over at the Metropolitan Museum, Tony James says that the mission is to show the world great art, but to do that it needs to generate a great deal of revenue each year to support the facilities, including the two million pieces of art the met owns, only fifteen percent of which are on display at any given time, and to mount more than twice as many exhibitions each year as any other museum in the world.
About thirty percent of our revenues come from people paying to go in, buying food, buying stuff in so let's just call that revenues members as well, So that's about thirty percent. About thirty percent of our revenues comes from spin off from the endowment. We'd spend about four and a half percent of the endowment each year, but that's very restricted because people give you know, I'm giving this money, but the interest on it can only be used to
buy renaissance art or something. There's fun fund digs in Egypt, or there's all kinds of strange things, and then about forty percent. The remaining forty percent comes from contributions with different sorts. The problem the MET has is more one of the great things about the MET depending on on you want to look at it.
We sit on city land.
It was given a hundred fIF years ago, but we sit on city land, and the deal was that city residents can pay what you wish as you come in. So the average city resident pays less than ten dollars to come in for one of the biggest museums in the world. They can spend days there or weeks there, and whereas a tourist pays twenty eight dollars. So when you lose your tourism, you lose a lot of the reft of paying people honestly, and so that's been a challenge.
Coming up, we'll take a closer look at how centers of art and culture are changing what they present to adjust to changing audiences and what lies ahead in an increasingly digital world. That's next on Wall Street Week on Bloomberg.
This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
This is Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. There's more to sustain I mean, the cultural center of New York than presenting great art. Institutions like Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum must respond to the changing city and culture around them, reaching out to new communities and adapting to the new forms of expression that the digital world makes possible, and perhaps most of all, using the art to tell compelling stories for all of us.
We have transformed the whole. So I mean, firstly, we do much more storytelling. We started big festivals when I began, and one of the earliest things was to ask Jesse Norman an extraordinary thing, to create and curate a series about African American culture. And we've looked at a number of big stories. I mean, We've looked at migrations and how migrations created American culture. We've looked at afric futurism. We've looked at the role of women in music, but
more generally across the whole of culture. Now currently we're looking at the fall of Weimar Republican using that as a lens to look at the fragility of democracy all around the world, big big issue of our day. Next season we'll be looking at Latin music, So a huge amount of storytelling. And that's only one dimension.
I suppose if you're a tourist and you've never seen Haystack Van Goes Haystacks, you want to go see them in person. But because so much of our audience is local and we want them not to go once a year or once every three years, we want them to go every month. We wanted to come back, so we have to have things that they want to go see.
That's current. I just got back from Berlin last night, as you know, and they've got a wonderful contemporary art museum there and it's it's got beautiful paintings, one Picasso and one Magrie and it's a lovely collection of random, if you will, but very high quality contemporary art. But there's no theme to it. There's no story. We're trying to create things that have a story so that people
want to come. Oh, this is you know, the rivalry between deg and money and how they fed off each other and they were both friends and at one point enemies, and how money cut Dega out of one of the paintings and get them interested in the narratives and the Harlan and Renaissance Show has been a huge success of celebrating that whole wave of culture that's centered in New York, about the strength of Africa and the wonderfulness of African
American culture that's been spectacularly successful and was not very well known. That's where it gets people's interests. It's not just seeing an object.
As important as it is to preserve the best of what is time honored in the arts, it's just that important to recognize great art that is being created to the present day and in places that go well beyond the traditions we've lived with for so long, especially as the profile of audiences continues to evolve. What is your sense of how the profile and i'll say demographic profile of your audiences has shifted over their nearly twenty years.
It's hard to say we have so many audiences because we do so many different things. Were the best of every sort of music who we aspire to be? So in the some audiences which are very young, I mean, for instance, our a Futurism audience was very different, you know, and some up to seventy percent and never been in Carnegie Hall before. So you know, with each project, we develop new audiences and then we try and keep them
as part of our audience going forward. So I mean, I think the audience has grown in terms of diversity, but diversity meaning you know, not only race, but age, men, women, I mean, you know, nationalities, everything, And we want to be and represent the best of every sort of music, which means that we're going to be relevant. I mean there's something like one hundred and eighty nationalities in New York. I mean insane, it's the most diverse city in the world.
But we want to be relevant and meaningful to everybody.
If you think about what's called the Western canon of ours of the traditional they're all white male artists. A lot of them are from Europe, all the way back to the Middle Ages, through Renaissance to the Impressionism Old Masters.
Not a lot of diversity in that group.
And then we had sections of the museum dedicated to the arts of the Pacific in Asia, for example, but they were very discreet parts of the museum. I think the greatness of the mat is that we can integrate all these things.
If we went back twenty years ago and looked at the nature of the performers appearing on the stages here at Carnegie Hall and competitor today, how would it be different. How are you getting new young talent and where's it coming from? Well, we all the time.
Part of our job is obviously to bring you the most extraordinary established performers here, but at the same time we are always looking out for the most brilliant young players. So a few days ago we had somebody called Jan chan Lim who won the Van Clibn competition. He was nineteen. He's just turned twenty, so now he's an old man, of course, but he came in it was sold out weeks in advance. He's a dazzling player. I mean, he is going to be out of our life for the next fifty sixty seventy years.
Probably what we think of is the traditional patrons of the arts remain key to success of a place like the Metropolitan Museum, but they're now being joined by a new, younger and more diverse group of supporters.
We're building a new, modern, contemporary wing. It's just going to get a really exciting project for the city six hundred million dollars. You could spend two hundred million on one Jockamenty sculpture if you had to buy.
It, and we got to fill an entire wing on art.
So we depend on collectors, usually at the end of their lives, giving us their collections or parts of their collections. So that set of givers is not that hasn't changed very much. That's still not very diverse. It's old, it's predominantly white, it's very wealthy, almost definitionally. But the people that come in and give cash or go to benefits, that's you young and we make every effort to make that younger and more exciting and hipper. We're trying to
be current. We don't want this to be your grandmother's attic for true.
Centers of art have to be great programmers to present works in compelling ways, to tell stories. Beyond featuring what people have already come to appreciate, they also play a key role in educating us all and what we haven't seen, what we have yet to appreciate, what is new, what is different, and what is coming around the corner for me.
Education is not about audience development. Education is about giving every child the opportunity to have access to music. So we've got programs that are all around the country and serve kids everywhere. I mean, we now reach eight hundred thousand people a year with our education programs, probably the
bulk of those outside New York City. But if those people never come to New York, I think we've succeeded as long as music can be part of their life, you know, Whereas if you were looking at as an audience development, we would have failed miserably.
So you'll forgive me. This is Bloomberg. So we like to think about the business model too. When you talk about educating eight hundred thousand kids, how do you support that? Where's the renew for that?
Well, I mean there's two things. Firstly, to create it, you have to have partnerships. So we have partnerships all around the country with people who share our values. And you can't have partnerships without shared values. So we do all of that, and then we have to raise a
huge amount of money. I don't know the exact amount we spend on education every year, but out of a budget of about one hundred and twenty million a year, I would have thought we spend probably at least fifteen million on education, which is not much less than we spend on presenting concerts.
Like every business and institution, art centers are embracing what digital technology makes possible, expanding their reach and exposure to people in New York and around the world, such as, for example, Carnegie Hall's new streaming service called Carnegie Hall Plus, providing us the opportunity to enjoy great music in the comfort of our homes.
It's on Apple TV, it's on Amazon, Comcast, It's on ten different major platforms, so it's available to every home in America. Just about now. We're also going more and more international. And my view always is here we are. I mean, even though it's such an extraordinary city in New York, I don't know, I mean, what is it? Probably ninety five percent of the world's population will never come to New York, so what we do needs to be available everywhere to everybody. I never think that digital
is a competitor with live. The live experience is the greatest possible experience. It's of the moment, it's being created for you at that moment you're sharing it with other people. There's something magical and special about a great live performance, which is inspirational, but if you can't have access to that, then to have access digitally is a fantastic opportunity which we should give people as well, but it is not
a replacement. So I never worry about digital being something that's going to undermine people's wish to go to live performance.
The Metropolitan Museum is also using digital technology to gain more ready access to audiences around the world, but it's also designing a new wing of the physical museum with the future evolution of technology very much in mind.
We're trying to digitize every one of our significant pieces of work in high depth and make that free to the world. And our mission is to show the world great art, and it's not everyone's going to be able to afford to travel to New York, so we have to make that available to them digitally. The big question is when you build a new wing, is like, what's technology? This wing has to last one hundred years, so what what are we building for.
Finally, one more thought from Sir Clive Gillinson, Executive and Creative Director of Carnegie Hall about the Hall itself, how it came to be and what makes it an icon for performers of all sorts the.
World over and genuinely think that's the greatest concerts in the world, which is completely baffling in terms of acoustics. Yes, that's what I've always heard, and I mean what is as sotonishing is because of the sign. It's eight hundred seats. Most concertables are two thousand, and yet it feels completely intimate wherever you sit and people who sit right you know, because students will sit right at where you'll see it from the platform, right at the back, and you can
hear it as if it's in your living room. If you look up there, they can hear as well as anybody else in the entire hall. And you can have a massive orchestra making a huge noise and it works perfectly. It can carry any sound, any amount of sound. And yet you could just have somebody playing a lute here and you can still hear every sound.
So what goes into making a concert hall one of the greatest in the world. It turns out pretty much everything.
The reality is you cannot replicate a great concert hall because I mean every single thing counts. The density of the plaster on the wall matters, the carpet, what the padding in the seats is and we send these seats back to Canada to the manufacturer who made them in eighteen ninety one, because nobody dares touch anything that could affect the sound, So they go back to the same place that they were made one hundred and thirty whatever
it is years ago, and so on. You know, even when you have to put wires in the walls, the fact that you'll be changing the plaster, you've got to be careful that you try and get the right density of plaster.
But the unique combination of qualities that have made Carnegie Hall a legend around the world came together, almost by accident, created by someone unknown as an architect who'd never done this before, to please the wife of one of the world's richest men.
And this guy had never built a concert wor in his life. I read, you can tell me for the wrong. The fellow who was the architect was actually a cellist. He was you played cella, which of course is the reason why he was such a great act. He was the treasurer of Louise Carnegie's choral Society because she sang. Louise Carnegie sang it. The oratory of society there was no decent colstors. She said to her husband, as you do, would you be?
That does it? For this episode of Wall Street Week, I'm David Weston. This is Bloomberg seenor next week