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Subject to change. And this is Andrew Peach with World Business Report.
Welcome. Today, talks between President Zelensky of Ukraine and the U .S.
Vice President J .D.
Vance are getting reaction from Ukraine's former economy minister.
Why does President Trump want to close the Department of Education?
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater because kids need this funding.
It's $80 billion that goes directly to kids.
And YouTube is 20 years old today.
The thrill of working with Google was you didn't just get a guess of how many people might have watched.
They could tell you exactly who had watched around the globe and for how long, what bits they liked and what bits they didn't.
Let's start in Munich, though, with that meeting between President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and the US Vice President J .D.
Vance. Ever since Russia's full -scale invasion two years ago, there have been questions about the funding for Ukraine's war effort, particularly among Republicans in the US.
Today, Vice President J .D.
Vance told delegates at the Security Conference that European countries must play a bigger role in the future.
We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security, and normally we mean threats to our external security.
I see many great military leaders gathered here today.
But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it's important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, the threat that I
worry the most about vis -a -vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor.
And what I worry about is the threat from within.
Mr Vance also suggested that Washington could impose economic sanctions on Russia if it refused to agree what he called a good peace deal with Ukraine.
President Zelensky said he didn't think the US had a peace plan yet and that the only Russian he would talk to about it was the President Vladimir Putin.
I will not meet with Russians, I don't know if they're happy or not happy with this, but I will not, it's not in my plan.
I will meet with Russians, with only one Russian guy, with Putin, only after we will have a common plan with Trump, and we will sit with Putin and stop the war.
Only in this case I'm ready to meet, not in other compromises platforms.
Well, I've been talking to Ukraine's former economy minister and now president of Kiev School of Economics, Timothy Mielov.
It's just, you know, overwhelming.
I mean, it looks like the news gets old before I finish reading it, you know?
Yeah. Before you've got to the end of the sentence, it's changed.
Yes, it's just unbelievable.
And I think the, basically, I think the Trump administration is swinging it, swinging it.
You know, it's just, they don't know what they are doing, at least that's how it feels.
In the beginning, I thought there was a big plan, some kind of brilliant strategy behind that.
Now it looks like they simply talked to some guys, you know, like President Putin, you know, asked what he wants, said things, you know, to him.
then came back, asked Zelenskyy and others, Europe went into shock, you know, then vans walked back, some remarks.
I mean, the only real thing is that there is conversation and President Trump mentioned some people who are going to be negotiating.
I think that's the only thing that we have.
Right. I mean, there is a conversation going on and I suppose it is a strategy to try and bounce everyone into some progress.
You know, even if what you're saying is right and there is no specific plan.
If you can, you know, bounce the thing into action, that might be an achievement.
I agree with that, actually.
Getting something moving forward, yes, that's an achievement.
And perhaps that's the only thing that so far has been achieved.
We will see if Russia is willing actually to negotiate in good faith.
By good faith, I mean not necessarily that they're going to mean what they say, but at least to really negotiate and try to get to a settlement.
And then the involvement of the US is interesting as well, because the Trump administration seems very keen to get the deal to get to the end point.
And of course, from Ukraine's perspective, that risks giving too much away.
Yes, you know, a quick deal basically means that we, all of us, you know, Europe, NATO, Ukraine, the US, please Putin, you know, because the US currently has very little leverage over to a settlement.
And then the involvement of the U .S.
is interesting as well, because the Trump administration seems very keen to get the deal, to get to the end point.
And of course, from Ukraine's perspective, that risks giving too much away.
Yes. A quick deal basically means that all of us, Europe, NATO, Ukraine, the US, please Putin, because the US currently has very little leverage over Russia and has all the leverage over Ukraine because Ukraine relies on its support both militarily and financially.
So, you know, a better deal would require getting some time to build leverage over Russia through sanctions, through finding some vulnerabilities, establishing some relationships.
So, yeah, it feels like the deal is being rushed and that worries me.
I was watching President Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference earlier.
He was asked, basically, how is all this going down in Ukraine?
and he said well largely in ukraine people are just getting up and going to work trying to do business sometimes that's going quite well at the moment he was painting a picture of people in ukraine basically getting on with their lives as you have to after such a long period of conflict it's absolutely true
for ukrainians it's a marathon you know for the rest of the world at least in terms of the news and the public perception ukraine gets on the news then disappears then there's fatigue, then something happens, then it's again on the news.
So it's a roller coaster.
For Ukrainians, we get bombed every day or every second day.
People die around us.
We have to live through this.
We have to maintain military.
We have to maintain economy.
We have to keep on, you know, keep going.
We have heard a lot of talk throughout the three years from our partners, from Russia, from our enemies, from our opponents.
And, you know, not much has changed.
So I think Zelensky is right, except that I would put it differently.
I think what Ukraine should be doing is strengthening its military, as it has been doing before.
And what state is the Ukrainian economy in?
How quickly could it bounce back if some kind of peace of some sort was achieved?
That's a sort of difficult question, because it depends on the conditions for peace and depends on the sort of vibe around the recovery of Ukraine.
There could be two equilibria or two outcomes very simply if ukraine is being rebuilt and conditions are are good in a sense that the peace is durable then there will be economy uh developing business activity boost people will be coming back to getting their jobs you know ukraine will be rebuilding
so that's that's great but another alternative is there is uncertainty about whether the war is truly over is it just temporarily ceasefire the regions are depressed no one wants to invest and you know people are not coming back and some are leaving so you know both are possible and much will depend
on the conditions of the one security guarantees now this time yesterday on world business report i was bringing you news of president trump's plans for reciprocal tariffs retaliation for levies regulations taxes subsidies whatever put on other by other countries on u .s goods which washington deems
to be unfair well there's been plenty of reaction from all over the world of course today including this from the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
Unjustified tariffs on the European Union will not go unanswered.
And let me speak plainly.
We are one of the world's largest markets.
We will use our tools to safeguard our economic security and interests.
And we will protect our workers, our businesses and consumers at every turn.
Of course, we're ready to find agreements that work for all, to work together to make each other more prosperous and more secure.
Live to New York and Chris Lowe, chief economist from FHN Financial.
Chris, thank you for being with us.
Pretty punchy stuff from Ursula von der Leyen.
Yeah, absolutely, Andrew.
And, you know, I think, first off, a very good point about the need to protect workers and so on.
We're having similar discussions here on the North American continent with Canada and Mexico intent on protecting their economies, their people as well.
my sense is that the trump administration is using these tariffs as a negotiating tool primarily other than the tariffs on china so far most of them have been postponed after agreements on things like border security and a drug interdiction interdiction and that kind of thing i don't know what trump
necessarily wants from europe it's obviously different than what he wants here.
But I suspect that's the way it's going.
And I think that's also based on trading the way the markets here see it as well.
Yeah, I was going to say that, but not that much market reaction, either because people don't think it will happen, or because everything's priced in with Trump already.
Yeah. And I think it's also a couple of things happened this week.
One of them we have to is on the right track.
And the reason that's important is they're not focused on the tariff issue when they say that.
They're focused on this doge stuff, the cost cutting, the cutting out of corruption.
And, you know, if he wants a win with his voters, that's where he'll put his energy.
Interesting. And the other thing just to put to you is, you know, Trump makes the case, He made it articulately yesterday that there's no reason why tariffs should put prices up because he says either other countries will bring their tariffs down and we won't need them or people will move their production to
the U .S. Is that coherent?
Is that credible as an economic argument?
Well, yeah. I mean, based on economic theory, certainly if you put taxes in place, it's a one -time price increase.
But then things do seem to adjust out.
we had massive tariffs put on Chinese goods during his first term.
You can't even see it in the inflation data looking back at 2018 now.
So he has a point, but the other side of that, the flip side, is that if you do something that reduces global trade, it will reduce growth.
And we took a hit to growth in 2018, when those Chinese tariffs went into place.
So it's not cost free.
Chris, thank you. Have a good weekend.
Chris Lowe in New York, chief economist at FHN Financial.
So Donald Trump has dominated the week's headlines.
Surprise, surprise.
But with all the focus in recent days on his comments about the Gaza ceasefire, the conflict in Ukraine, the reciprocal tariffs and the suspension of USAID, this is something you might have missed.
There's also been talk of the Trump administration closing the Department of Education.
Now, to explain, in the States, schools are run by individual states.
So the department provides some oversight across the country.
I've been talking about this to Randy Rheingarten, who's president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Even Linda McMahon, who is the nominee for Secretary of Education today, talked about downsizing, not eliminating or dismantling the Department of Education, because symbolically, it will be a slap in the face to parents and to children everywhere that one of the first steps a new president does is to
say, no, I don't care about education.
I'm dismantling the department.
It's just wrong. Now, obviously, if Donald Trump were here, he'd challenge all of that and say it's nothing to do with not caring about our children's future or not caring about education.
He thinks the Department of Education is hopelessly inefficient.
There's a huge amount of waste with money being spent all over the place.
And he wants to set up some new structure that doesn't do those things.
And I would be happy to have a debate with Donald Trump in the White House about this.
You know, I did this with Barack Obama when he and I disagreed on different issues around the Department of Education or around what happens in schools.
And I asked for a meeting with him.
and we had a meeting about what really goes on in schools.
I've heard Donald Trump talk a lot about how he wants public education, and I've also heard him talk hyperbolically about the waste in the Department of Education.
Frankly, every department could be more efficient.
There's a difference between efficiency and evisceration.
So let's actually strengthen schools.
But government departments the world over are very prone to try and protect the status quo, aren't they, to say, let's keep everything as it is.
We're under attack from politicians, which I guess is why at least there's talk of the whole thing being scrapped and replaced with something else.
If you actually really care about education, the things that the Department of Education do are important.
So in the United States of America, what the federal government does is puts funding out appropriated by Congress for kids with disabilities, for kids who are poor.
They put funding out for kids who are going to college first generation in their families who can't afford college.
They put funding out for kids who are limited English language and are learning English.
They put funding out for rural schools.
So one of the things they just cut this week is the research on the science of reading, something that many, many, many Republican governors in the in the United States really want.
Should any of us protect the bureaucracy?
I want to protect the people who have actually been career civil servants and really care about students.
But let's work on efficiencies.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater because kids need this funding.
It's $80 billion that goes directly to kids.
Tell me about your concerns, Randy, about the access that the Department of Government efficiency have had to all the data and records that are kept by the Department of Education and other parts of government.
this is a gross invasion of privacy there are don't get don't throw the baby out with the bath water because kids need this funding it's 80 billion dollars that goes directly to kids tell me about your concerns randy about the access that the department of government efficiency have had to all the data and records
that are kept by the Department of Education and other parts of government.
This is a gross invasion of privacy.
There are many times the government uses or takes or you submit documents, you get a social security number.
That social security number is You know, something that is used a lot in the government to, you know, to make sure that your identity is matched with who you are.
The Department of Education, since the mid 2000s, early 2000s, took over the servicing of all student loans.
So anyone with a student loan in the United States of America has to give their financial information to the Department of Education.
If you're a parent and your kid is going to college, colleges use the financial system that the Department of Education has created for financial aid.
So you're talking about millions of people that give information to the Department of Education or to the Treasury for a specific purpose.
It shouldn't be taken from them.
It shouldn't be used and put in AI for another purpose.
Doge is taking this information, using this information, maybe weaponizing this information in violation of Americans' privacy.
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This is World Business Report with Andrew Peach here on the BBC World Service.
In renewable energy, the Holy Grail is an energy source that's always available Now solar and wind power don't actually fit the bill because there are times when the sun's down and it's not windy But in Southern California, there is a steady supply of ocean waves Now one company is aiming to harness
He is president and CEO of Alta Sea which is a non -profit that develops the sustainable ocean economy and right now, he's really excited about this blue sedan -sized piece of metal sitting on the pier waiting to get put in the water.
Its whole purpose is to bob up and down on the ocean's waves.
The top of it is connected to a giant piston that acts like a bicycle pump.
So as the float goes up and down, so does this bicycle pump arm.
When a bunch of these floats sit next to each other, they look like a series of piano keys that move up and down like scales every time a wave comes in.
And then the pressure created by that, instead of going into a bicycle tire, goes in here into these accumulator tanks.
Behind the piano keys are a series of what look like really long bright red scuba diving tanks.
They're just holding the pressurized air that gets shoved in there every time a wave comes in.
And when you want the energy, you release the pressure from here, it spins the turbine, and now you have stored intermittent renewables without a battery.
These floats are designed to attach to a breakwater or a jetty.
They'll be mounted to a concrete pier on the port's main channel.
They come from a company called Eco Wave Power.
Its founder, Ina Braverman, says most wave energy companies so far have failed because they've set up installations way out at sea.
That was extremely expensive because you need chips, you need divers, you need underwater mooring, you need cables.
It was breaking down all the time because in the offshore, you get extremely high waves, like tsunami waves.
In other words, Samantha Quinn with the climate solutions nonprofit Pacific Ocean Energy, says there is a lot of breaking and fixing in wave energy.
It is really, really difficult to work in the ocean and to have things operate in the ocean, especially things that have to move.
Because yes, the ocean moves, floats up and down, but it also jostles them side to side and the saltwater corrodes them.
On top of all that, different states and countries have different environmental regulations.
And so then you sometimes have to like redesign parts of your devices to be able to go into a specific location.
So it's expensive. It can only be built in specific spots.
It's prone to breaking.
And this pilot project will generate enough energy to power about 80 households.
So it's not even close to competing with, say, wind and solar.
But Quinn says that's not a fair comparison.
Those technologies are decades ahead in this race.
Solar and wind didn't just happen overnight.
It really did take a long time for those to be developed.
And we are following a very similar innovation path that solar and wind did.
The floaters at the Port of Los Angeles will get dropped in the ocean and brought online next month.
There isn't a penny of federal money going into the pilot project.
In fact, it was paid for in part by Shell, the oil company.
Now, YouTube is 20 years old today.
It was founded by three friends who'd worked together at PayPal.
Happened in a pizza restaurant in California.
The first video was one of them standing in front of some elephants at San Diego Zoo.
It's now had an estimated 14 billion videos uploaded.
YouTube is the most popular app among children and teenagers.
Could anyone have foreseen all of this 20 years ago?
John Farron is a former executive TV producer.
I did, and a few of us did, But a lot of people just thought, oh, who cares?
An example of this was Planet Earth had just come out.
I think YouTube was one year old.
And within a day of Planet Earth, hugely expensive production for BBC and Discovery, coming out on terrestrial television, it was available on YouTube.
And nobody thought this was interesting or important.
And it was getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of downloads already.
And that was basically YouTube's model then.
Although they said it was broadcast yourself, it wasn't.
It was basically, let's just let people pirate stuff and see what happens.
OK, so it started off with content that was already being produced, sometimes at great cost to other people.
What about the rise of the YouTuber, though, of the sort of self -generated content that it's probably best known for now?
Absolutely. So I was very, very fortunate that in December 2012, I was one of 12 producers who were actually commissioned by YouTube to make what for them was very, very expensive content.
It was a co -production with the BBC.
It was a factual entertainment series called Head Squeeze fronted by James May.
And we had to make 30 minutes factual entertainment a week.
And we were making it at something like 8 % to 10 % of the cost of what we would have been making television for.
But it was doing okay.
It was like the thrill of working with Google was you didn't just get a guess of how many people might have watched.
They could tell you exactly who had watched around the globe and for how long, what bits they liked and what bits they didn't.
And they had these incredible metrics and they were yet incredibly respectful of you as a creative and didn't tell you what to do.
They just said, this is what the metrics are telling us.
Do what you want. So what is it about YouTube that means the teenagers in my house will naturally go to that and would very rarely these days turn to terrestrial television with one or two exceptions, but YouTube is part of their daily lives.
Why? It was astonishing how long, what bits they liked and what bits they didn't.
And they had these incredible metrics, and they were yet incredibly respectful of you as a creative and didn't tell you what to do.
They just said, this is what the metrics are telling us.
Do what you want. So what is it about YouTube that means the teenagers in my house will naturally go to that and would very rarely these days turn to terrestrial television, with one or two exceptions?
But YouTube is part of their daily lives.
why it was astonishing even then they showed us some videos of how teenagers watch content and this was 2012 and they would be they would have a raft of maybe 15 videos running at the same time and they would give each one five seconds and then they would just swipe it and delete it and then occasionally
something would catch their attention they might watch it for two or three minutes full screen the attention span was just incredible and we were we were just not equipped as old school producers to deal with it.
And tell me about the market now and in the future because YouTube is still so strong.
It's got Netflix and other streamers competing with it in a way and the terrestrial TV channels are still there.
So what happens next?
I think YouTube wins.
I mean, basically it just comes down to where do you want to advertise.
So the model for streamers is already running out of steam.
Netflix are trying to say, oh, it's great to have adverts.
No thanks. We've moved beyond that.
Where would you want to advertise?
Would you want to advertise on something that is now so desperate as a medium that is actually advertising its own benefits?
Linear television now has adverts, advertising the benefits of linear advertising.
Or would you choose to advertise somewhere where they can tell you who's watching for how long and what bits they like?
I know where I'd go.
And that's the key to it, in business terms anyway, is the bespoke audience that it can deliver you as an advertiser.
It's all about brands and advertising.
In the end, linear television has just got to get over itself and understand that the world has moved on and the advertising buck has moved on and it's moved on where it can more efficiently deliver.
So when we get to the 30th anniversary of YouTube in 10 years' time, you think it'll be more dominant than it is now by the sound of it?
I do. And listen, don't get me wrong.
I don't think YouTube's a great thing.
I think that YouTube is the best of a bad bunch.
If you think what creatives get paid on Spotify, it's like, you know, 1%, I think, between 1 % and 3%.
What they get on TikTok is buttons.
YouTube is actually a reasonably good payer, but, you know, it's still, it makes a lot more.
