This podcast is originally published in BBC World Service in this address: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d0yx50
The ride-hailing company said it was responding to a ‘cybersecurity incident’ and that several internal systems had been affected. Margi Murphy is a cybersecurity reporter at Bloomberg News and updates us on the story.
Why do we have such an attachment to some of our favorite brands? We know brand loyalty is a marketing executive’s dream – but how have some of our kitchen cupboards seemingly become even more than that – more like old friends? The BBC’s Dave Reid investigates.
The UK competition authority intervened after Facebook’s parent company Meta applied to buy out the gif platform Giphy. Technology reporter Ryan Broderick gives us the background.
Will Bain is joined throughout the program by Tony Nash, founder of the AI firm Complete Intelligence, in Houston, Texas, and by Shuli Ren, Bloomberg Opinion reporter in Hong Kong.
Transcript
BBC
Hello and welcome to Business Matters on the BBC. World Service will be with you today. Thanks so much for ending your week with us. Most linking off today, though, for our two guests, tony Nash, founder of the AI firm Am Complete Intelligence, joining us from Houston, Texas. Tony, welcome back.
TN
Hi, Will.
BBC
Ending the week with us, and you can tell BBC Sport have been in the studio here before because I just saw flash through on one of the panels here, the Houston Astros, your beloved Houston Astros getting underway in momentarily the baseball and joining us.
TN
That’s right. They’re doing well.
BBC
Thank you, they are. And putting in your Yankees under a lot of pressure, too, which I know will give you even more pleasure, tony, absolutely, yes. Tony Nash in Houston, because this is right in your wheelhouse, Tony. I want to pick up that point that Margie made right at the end there. First of all, these companies, A, specialized in technology, b are some of the richest companies on the planet. How on earth does this keep happening?
TN
There are always new ways to hack you’re as strong as your weakest employees. Temptation, I guess. And it sounds like they got in through a phishing attack. And it’s hard to make things 100% secure. If people want access to the outside Internet, if they want access to emails, these sorts of things, you have to have some ways for people to get in, unfortunately. And it’s just not surprising everyone gets hacked whether they admit it or not. And so this was just a very visible hack on Uber.
BBC
Yeah, Uber have been doing something interesting, certainly, tony, in my reading around this, I didn’t know quite as much about this. Perhaps you could explain more to people, but they were using ostensibly kind of a team of their own hackers to kind of test for vulnerable points in their system over and over again. And actually, bizarrely, that might have proved to be one of the vulnerabilities here. Just explain first that how it works and then how that might have happened.
TN
Yeah, I mean, it’s good practice to have people trying to hack your system. It’s probably good to have contractors doing it and also alternate them from time to time because you have to have different thinking about your security because there will always be people thinking differently about your security. And so it’s a challenge, and you have to be very careful. So it’s really easy to second guess Uber and say they did the wrong thing, but I’m sure they are industry best practice and more. It’s just a matter of, on some level, bad luck.
BBC
No, really interesting point, actually. In our earlier sister show, World Business Report, we were talking to Chris Low, one of our financial analysts, who were saying actually the share price was reacting on perhaps exactly that, actually, maybe you were better prepared for this than others. So an interesting kind of wrinkle to that element of it. She’s the blessing and the curse of new technology that we always want something new and shiny to sell to investors and to customers when actually investing, ensuring what we’ve got might actually be better long term for the business. Yes, Tony, I could hear you agreeing with that too.
TN
Yeah, it’s not an easy balance. Right. And Uber is in kind of a weird place, coming out of Covet and trying to get their business at the same place as it was and more. It’s difficult for everyone. And again, everything you do to remain secure can potentially hamper your ability to get revenue. Those are not different sides of the same coin. But I think you have to be careful about your security kind of overwhelming your business needs. So it’s a real hard one.
BBC
So you don’t become too cautious, I guess, going the other way.
TN
That’s right. Exactly. So it’s a real hard one to look at Uber and go, oops, they did something wrong. There’s always something done wrong on the security side within businesses. Right. And so they’re no different. And like I said earlier, they’re probably better than most people.
BBC
I’m a sucker for a good deal. Shirley, don’t get me wrong. Tony, you wanted to come in.
TN
Well, they don’t have people as full time employees, and this isn’t really to defend Uber, but they do give people a lot of flexibility. Again, it’s really hard to look at that and say, oh, they’re such a terrible company. I don’t believe that. I mean, they’re a very popular company.
BBC
Absolutely. That was just only in the past life. Stock markets was very much your bag as well.
TN
Oh, yeah. And also servicing global curry companies. When I was at The Economist, we did work for those guys in 2007. I remember one of them calling me with a situation just like this, and they said, It’s not public. We saw this. What’s your view on this? So I called the chief economist at the time, and I said, hey, this is happening. Should we worry about this? He said, no, it’s probably just a blip. So these are very serious things. We all know what happened in 2007 and 2008. So these are very serious things, especially when a company like FedEx says it. And so we have to pay attention. And if they say it’s already happened or this is old information, then, great, we’re already well into it. That’s the relief that I come out of this with is if they say that it’s happened some time ago, even if it’s a few months, great, that stuff happened. We’ve seen China closing down, and we’ve seen the number of the impact on the supply chains. And the US already had two quarters of negative GDP growth, and we see what’s happening with energy prices, other things in Europe.
TN
So it’s no mystery that we’re in a recession, right? It’s no mystery at all. I’m glad that we’re seeing things like this. FedEx report come to confirm it.
BBC
Tony taking us neatly to exactly one of those issues, the sort of extra pillar putting the pressure on here, energy. Big development on that in Europe today because there have been dramatic developments in Europe’s largest economy. Germany has taken over local branches of Russia’s biggest oil company, where you raised it. It’s all of this that’s in the mix, isn’t it? This sort of mess around where energy is coming from, how people can get it, how much is going to cost.
TN
Yes, it’s a very big problem, to say the least. And energy is going to cost a lot this winter in Europe. There is no debate about that. And we see coal plants reactivated, we see more oil, we see desperation for natural gas. I’m in Texas. That makes us happy. But it’s going to be very difficult in Europe. The saving grace of this is the following. Countries like Germany have plenty of room within their national account to subsidize a lot of energy so they can subsidize something like one time their entire GDP. So there is room to spend at least with the German government and a few others. So northern Germany generally can help their people or northern Europe sorry, generally can help their people with some sort of subsidy to get through the supply type of issue.
BBC
And Tony, obviously in a sentence or two, interesting pressure on the US. To pump more reopen pipeline. Difficult politics, isn’t it?
TN
Yes. Please call DC and tell them to reopen pipeline.
BBC
So speaks of Texas Republican. That Tony Nash with us from Houston, Texas, the energy capital of the US. Of course, sheli ran also with us from Hong Kong. Pay more from both of them in the second half of business matters right after we get you up to speed with the latest worldviews two rapidly middle ageing men discussing gifts there you can see the problem in a nutshell. Ryan Broderick of the content minds podcast helping us out with that. Tony, that’s the issue, isn’t it? Something starts off being cool, and then we’re talking about it in our defense on business matters late at night on a business show on the world service and radio four. That’s when it stops becoming cool. Perhaps.
TN
Perhaps. I sent a gift yesterday and today on twitter. Here’s the thing. I know I’m not cool, so I’m not trying to be cool. I’m just trying to contextualize something that I said. So whether it’s cringey or not, I don’t think it matters. I think people do it. Some of them are a little bit annoying, but a good Austin powers gift every so often is kind of fun.
BBC
Well, this is where I wrestled with it in that interview, tony, because he’s actually from an American advert. I think he’s from a geico insurance advert. But I like the pig who sticks his head out the window and he’s got kind of sort of a toy fan that whizzes in kind of excitement, and I like to use that one pretty regularly. And then listening to Ryan’s interview back, I thought, probably going to have to retire that Shelley bluntest submissions I’ve ever seen in what is normally a fairly dull area, competitions and markets, authorities submissions. Would you maybe advise if you could perhaps be a little less honest in the future?
TN
It’s worth it. Not cool enough. Defense, right? Yeah, I don’t know. I think it sounds like they like Meta headquarters and they like the free meals and the massages and all that stuff, and they don’t want to have to go out in the cold again. I don’t know why else you would do that.
BBC
And in a wider sense, we see it in some of the sectors, don’t we? We were talking about it in the office, actually, about things like craft beer. You get to a certain stage, actually, and that none of your fans or the people who love your product necessarily want you to sell out to a big company, a giant company, but actually, they’re the ones who can facilitate growing more, getting more eyeballs, getting more users on your products.
TN
I’d love to sell it. To.
BBC
Come find complete intelligence, call Tony. We’ll link you all up. Well, we’re going to stick talking brands. Complete intelligence, obviously an excellent one. Surely if you’ve got a plug, you’ve got about 20 minutes left in the program as well that we can get to. Tell us about what the magic of Tabasco is. Louisiana’s pride and joy.
TN
Well, obviously you don’t know about the enemy between Texas and Louisiana.
BBC
Of course.
TN
It’S great, and Louisiana is fantastic. We love that stuff here and it’s really a Louisiana thing, but Texans really love kind of spicy Louisiana food and of course, Texas barbecue.
BBC
In terms of brand loyalty, what is it, Tony? What makes a customer exactly like Shirley says? Because most people are driven by price. So why is it just ease and comfort? Or is there something more hooky about it, something cleverer in the marketing?
TN
Yeah, I think it’s comfort and as much as it’s a feeling, right. I mean, there’s a particular type of condiment that I like that I’m not going to mention on here, but I like that my family knows that I don’t take anything else. I’ve been in since I was a kid, right. And we don’t get any other brands because they just taste different, and my palate is just articulated for that taste. But we grow up with these things and they give us a level of comfort. And I think about my kids grew up in Singapore. We spent 15 years there. So there’s a particular brand, for example, of soy milk that they like from Singapore that reminds them of Singapore. They don’t want Japanese soy milk or whatever. They want this particular brand of Singapore soy milk.
BBC
Play that piece a little bit, because obviously it’s a huge constitutional and historic moment here in Britain. But it’s interesting the kind of global grab that the story and the event has had for days now. Do you think perhaps some of those silver screen portrayals are part of that story, part of that reason why sure, yeah.
TN
I lived in London when Diana died, and I remember being in London when the Queen Mother died, and not so much Queen Mother, but these previous events really did get certainly Western attention, if not world attention. And I think there’s a fascination with the Royal family, but I think there’s also kind of a confusion of, like, what do they actually do? I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way. I think that’s a lot of the.
BBC
Rest of the world no, we’ve seen some pretty quirky constitutional stuff this week, haven’t we? Things that we’ve never seen in this country on the tele before, some of the sort of announcements and Privy Council meetings and things that television is giving us a view into.
TN
Right. And I think that is something that is interesting. It’s puzzling and people romanticize a lot of that.
BBC
Of course, Tony in the US is going to be a huge global television event come Monday with US networks, I imagine, are all piling on the plane as we speak.
TN
Yeah, I’m sure they are. I don’t really know, but I’m sure they are very well.
BBC
But there’s going to be an appetite for it is, and it’s going to do big numbers there. And TV news has become a lot about big events like that.
TN
It is. And all sorts of non expert experts will come up to talk about the Royal family to fill that time. I think what I would love to see is people just take it in, whether it’s on video or whether they’re there. This type of event obviously rarely happens, right? So don’t give me commentary talking over the live events, just kind of show us what’s actually happening and occasionally explain what’s happening, but really just let people take it in more than have this kind of rambling commentary about it.
BBC
Well, of course, if people do want to take it in, the BBC website, BBC TV and right here on the World Service is going to have plenty of coverage of that on Monday. Tony Nash, Shuli Ram, been a real pleasure to have you with us on business matters. As always, both of you, have a great weekend. And to all of you listening, the same, thanks so much for being with us. Bye.