At the ready?

27:42has got Elon Musk who's taken his son X with him, which is not what I would choose to do on a business trip with quite such a time difference. I imagine that's really, really hard. But do you think that's the kind of business commercial connections that these two superpowers need to be making? Well, he's probably got a bit of childcare with him, so he probably doesn't have to worry as much as we would have to if we took our kids on a business trip. So, yeah, he's probably not so worried about that. But I agree. I think at the end of the day, talking is always a good thing. If we can be speaking to each other, hopefully finding some resolution, some common ground, then that's got to be positive.

28:23Is it the kind of thing where those rising trade tensions between the US and China kind of filters back to you, has an impact on you? Can you see it in your bottom line or is it more that it changes the business environment that you're working in? Not yet. Yes, I think that's not something that we have felt in our business. But I just think generally stability globally is a factor in most people's businesses. You know, you just want things to be running well and know that your product is going to get to where it needs to be on time. Know that your supplies are going to get to you on time. And, you know, when things happen like wars or...

29:04The last six years. The last six years is a good example, yes. And it does seem to feel like there's been one thing after another to cope with as SMEs. But I think that keyword with resilience is really critical. And I think that SMEs in the UK demonstrate that on a daily basis with all the challenges that are thrown at us regularly. That's that resilience to be here. I mean, SMEs are the lifeblood of the UK economy. And we saw that in COVID when we were called upon to support the NHS and other initiatives to provide critical products. You know, we did step up and support those drives. And, you know, I think as we move forward and we're looking at defence, you know, SMEs are being called upon again to support.

29:50And that's why it's frustrating when we don't feel that level of support coming for government. You know, they want us to support with our products and our expertise and our knowledge, which we're delighted to do. but perhaps it would be nice if it wasn't quite so hard. Frances, wouldn't it be nice if everything wasn't quite so hard? Do you think there's genuinely the possibility of a reset in relations between the superpowers? I think it's more that the whole kind of global power structure is kind of realigning itself and I think that China certainly is building alliances with other countries kind of outside the US power structure.

30:32So the way I see it is that the US is having to work harder to maintain dominance and is being fairly brutal about it in some cases and other countries and there are other alliances going on. So I think the whole structure is shifting in ways that are not entirely predictable but that actually might create, I don't know, a more, well, there's certainly a more interesting world. It's definitely that. But, you know, perhaps a world in which trade operates differently and that creates opportunities for businesses. I wonder where we'll be this time next week. I think the Friday look back is always interesting, isn't it?

31:15To kind of get our expert views on everything that kind of hits us throughout a week. Frances, thank you very, very much. But this is where we say thank you so much for being with us on our Friday panel. But we let you crack on with the rest of your weekend. Thank you, Francis. Pleasure. Francis Coppola, independent economist and regular on our Friday panel. Emma Hockley from Big Bear Plastics. Obi-Ejie Kemi from Carmenak. Stay with us. Loads more to come. Before we go to the news, though, I've just got to do a little few of your texts and your tweets about advice for the young. Some really, really good advice.

31:51Some really nice advice coming in. And I like this from Kevin the Milkman in London. My advice to school leavers Fliss is that there's no such thing as a job that's below you. Don't be afraid to roll up your sleeves and do some graft if needed. Somebody else, my advice to anyone entering the workplace, max out the workplace pension from day one. When you get to my age, 63, you'll have a nice pension pot built up. This is really, really good advice. Dave and Brum, maybe a little bit more cynical, says, my advice, until you're trained, realise the true value you are to a company and don't think the world owes you a living.

32:24You did it. You wrote the book. But now what? If you're struggling to figure out how to get your manuscript published, Christian Faith Publishing is here to help. They are an author friendly publisher that works with writers just like you. People with a message, a story, and a purpose. They will guide you through the entire process. Editing, cover design, page layout, printing, distribution. Your book can be available in bookstores and online everywhere readers are looking. And the best part, they review your manuscript for free. Stop wondering what to do next and start moving forward. Visit christianfaithpublishing.com today to get your free publishing guide.

33:03I'm here on the job site with Dale, who's a framing contractor. Hey, good morning. Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We're here where he needs us most. Yep, they sure are. We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs, It's all in one place with coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down. It's all right. We're so far up here. Look at me. Take a deep breath. No, I'm good. So good. Get a commercial auto insurance quote today at Geico.com and see how much you could save. It feels good to Geico. Wake Up To Money with Felicity Hanna.

33:39Good morning. If you're just joining us on Wake Up To Money, we are about to hear from the boss of Raspberry Pi, who will cover all sorts of topics, but also was offering some advice to young people, how they can kind of future-proof their careers against AI. So I've been asking for your advice this morning, and you have been bringing it in buckets. Kevin Birmingham says, workplace wisdom, easy. Work to live, don't live to work. Andrew in Barrow and Furnace, home of Britain's nuclear deterrent manufacturer, he says, is talking about quite a long message. I can't read it all out, but says, my advice is keep on learning, be bold, Keep on moving in your role.

34:14Take every opportunity. Learn from those around you. I'm a big advocate, he says, of apprenticeships as you learn from experience. Your schooling is equally as important. Two night schools a week for four years never hurts. Interesting, interesting career story there, Andrew. Thank you for sharing. And let me see. Somebody who doesn't give their names. Advice for young and their careers. Paraphrasing Lord Baker. Find the flint which sparks your fire. Oh, I like that. I'm going to share that with my kids later. Well, we're talking about this because the founder, as I say, of one of the UK's most successful tech startups has been sharing his advice, but also telling me that high energy costs are putting pressure on British manufacturing.

34:52Eben Upton, who's the founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi, says this could ultimately push production overseas. Now, Raspberry Pi, if you're not familiar, it makes credit card sized computers that can be used for pretty much anything from learning to code to powering factory lines. More recently, its use for running AI programmes has been attracting investors. And in fact, the company's share price is roughly two and a half times higher than it was in March. Not bad. He says that his advice for young people is to do more maths. But before that, I began by asking him about those high energy costs. How are we able to manufacture Raspberry Pi in a cost-effective way in the UK?

35:29It's because it's a highly automated process, right? So you have a lot of robots. You have a lot of reflow ovens for soldering. Obviously, plastics manufacturers are fairly energy-intensive operation. You've got to melt the plastic and you've got to run the presses. And all of those things have energy as a significant input cost. I mean, we're extremely lucky we're not running a fertilizer factory or an oil refinery. And also, you feel that then the cost of domestic energy, the cost of energy in the home, has an impact on your labor cost. You have to pay people enough money to live. and if it becomes more expensive for those people to heat their homes, you have to pay them more money.

36:08So it just pushes up. And to the extent that it's unnecessary, it becomes a burden. Effectively, what you end up doing is you end up quietly electing to move manufacturing and heavy industry out of your country. And if you don't then account for the embedded carbon in the objects which would have been made in your country and are now made overseas and brought in, then you're falling victim to that thing that afflicts industry, afflicts business a lot, which is you get what you measure. And if you don't measure properly, then you get the wrong thing. Another big shift for Raspberry Pi has been your semiconductors.

36:47You're manufacturing your own chips to your design. And that's now more than half of your business, isn't it? And I want to talk to you about that because they're made in Taiwan, aren't they? And so that is a much more difficult thing to oversee. We're talking about manufacturing in Wales and production in the Midlands. And suddenly you've got this big chunk of your business happening, not here in the UK, but in Taiwan. Yeah, that's right. So it is, as you say, it is more than half of our business. Of course, it's more than half of our business by volume rather than by revenue. So these are 50 cent chips versus$50 boards.

37:22So we've come through this interesting moment over the last 12 months where strategically we feel like a semiconductor company now, right? but economically we are very definitely an electronics company, a board company. We have obviously a couple of wonderful partners in Taiwan. We have TSMC, the world's biggest and most successful foundry, Silicon Foundry. And then we work with a company called ASE also in Taiwan to package those devices for sale, for use in our products and for sale to other people. It brings a whole new element of risk though, doesn't it? Just in the last 24 hours, President Xi told President Trump on this state visit, the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations.

38:05That's according to the state broadcaster. And he said, if mishandled, the two nations could collide or even come into conflict, pushing the entire China-US relationship into a highly perilous situation. Do you have any worries about what might develop, what it might mean for the work that you're doing in Taiwan? People ask us sometimes, what's your mitigation? And the challenge is that it's not really a mitigatable problem, that there is such dependence, particularly for the – not actually so much in the sorts of chips we build. The chip that's in Raspberry Pi, one which is a 40 nanometer chip, was pretty much bleeding edge at the point where we launched that product.

38:42So over the course of 15 years, the bleeding edge has moved from 40 to 28 to 16 all the way down to 2 nanometers. Now, TSMC and critically TSMC in Taiwan, because TSMC do have factories outside Taiwan, monopolize the supply of those very, very fine geometry process nodes. President Xi is right. It isn't actually strategically feasible for the United States to abandon Taiwan because you can't afford to lose access to that technology. because it's increasingly, it has been the underpinning of our civilization for pretty much my entire life. It is doubly, particularly with the rise of AI technology, it is doubly the underpinning.

39:24It's the underpinning of all of this prospective growth that people are hoping to get out of the AI revolution. We've talked about OpenClaw, this agentic AI. Now that's AI that can operate autonomously. Is that the next seismic shift? How is it going to shape and change our economy? There's a school of thought that says that this AI thing is naturally exponential, right, and that it's going to run away. We had this AI safety summit a couple of years, two or three years ago now, that Rishi Sunak ran. It was at Bletchley Park. And I went to the after party where Sunak was interviewing Elon Musk.

39:59And you listen to Elon Musk on the stage and he's saying, well, one of two things is going to happen. This is going to escape exponentially. 80 % chance it's going to it's going to usher in an era of unparalleled post-economic era of abundance 20 % chance it's going to kill us all He calls it the Terminator outcome doesn't he? Yeah there's the Terminator outcome and then there's the culture outcome It was interesting watching the novels of E &M Banks, anyone who wants to sort of understand the, I'll do it now, I've watched him sell the novels of E &M Banks from the stage but anyone who wants to understand what the good outcome looks like, the culture novels that Banks wrote sort of 20 or 30 years ago quite a good view of what a society that's kind of enabled by, kind of run by benevolent super intelligence might look like.

40:42So you have these people selling these two curves. I suspect what you actually end up with is in the middle. You get, you know, a fraction of a percent on global GDP growth for the next 20 years, which is amazing, right? The same sort of outcome that the internet has provided us with, you know, a groundswell under economic growth. There's a sort of a desire to believe in these kind of millenarian outcomes. In practice, it is normal technology. And I think what we've seen now is we've seen the wave of LLMs. We've seen the wave of sort of chatbots being helpful. I use these tools all the time. They're super helpful.

41:17I think the thing that's happened over the last six months is people have come to realize, yeah, providing some level of autonomy and some level of iteration. Because, you know, a chatbot, you say a thing to it, and then it says something to you. And then you say something to it, and it says something to you, and you are intrinsically in the loop with that object, giving the devices, whether it's something like Claude Code, which provides you with an agentic coding platform, a sort of somewhat self-sustaining coding platform, or something like OpenClaw, which gives you your own private agentic object that you can connect to a remote LLM to do the LLM magic and enter some of your data in some of your local environment.

41:54It does feel like that's the next wave. All of these things, though, I think the important thing to remember is they're sigmoids. They're not curves that scream away upwards or downwards. They're curves that they go up a bit and then they flatten off. And then whatever the next thing is will come along. But definitely we are in the agentic moment. And I should say, well, when we say LLM, I'm meaning large language model, which is how they've sort of learned to talk back to us. Another important aspect is what it means for the students that you began your career with. I mean, I was thinking in particular about A-level students right now sitting their exams, wondering what they should study next or where they should go next.

42:30What will future-proof them against this AI world that Raspberry Pi is helping to usher in? Oh, I think people should just do what they were doing before. I'm kind of a low-pass filter guy. I always say, what job do I actually do at Raspberry Pi? And I sometimes call it low-pass filtering as a service. like i i i i try to think really i try to think i do think i'm not sure i'm trying to but i do naturally think very very slowly um and i actually think that you know it's possible to get caught up in this this is this risk of damage right in this moment of incredible enthusiasm for what are genuinely incredible tools the idea that we should suddenly that you read in the paper you know what what guidance should give you give your child on on about how to what gcse's to choose in the context of an AI future.

43:18And it's like, we have no data to inform a rational decision on that. The answer is wait five years, wait ten years, and then maybe we might know something. But it's the advice I always give everyone, because I come from quite a quanti background, is do as much maths as you can. The only thing that people have a misconception about quantitative subjects, about science subjects, that they are narrowing somehow, that they will you're inevitably on the path to wearing a lab coat and they aren't they are broadening and not you know if you don't have aptitude for it don't do it but if you have aptitude for it however much aptitude you have and the big lesson was my lesson from arriving at Cambridge is everybody's got a ceiling right somewhere I found mine but however much ceiling you have on the quantitative side, you'll probably be well served as a person if you try to get close to that ceiling.

44:16Dr Eben Upton, thank you very, very much for joining us on Big Boss Interview. Thank you. Yes. And as you heard at the end there, the whole chat, and it was quite a long one because I had a lot of questions for him, is available on BBC Sounds right now if you look for Big Boss Interview. And I always say you should go and listen. But actually, he had so much to say about the economy, about academia, about manufacturing. It really, really is worth going and having a listen to that. Now, a government spokesperson told the BBC the government is supporting manufacturing through its industrial strategy and bringing down energy costs for businesses through its British industrial competitiveness and supercharger schemes.

44:52But that point that he was making that high energy costs are putting pressure on British manufacturing is one we've heard echoed this morning by Emma Hockley, Managing Director of Big Bear Plastics. Still with me and also still with me is Obi Edgikemi, Global Equities Fund Manager for Carmignac. Obi, we'll start with you. It's interesting, isn't it, kind of hearing from a very, very successful British entrepreneur, an absolute success story, a tech unicorn worth over a billion pounds with this business that he launched while working at Cambridge. But talking about just what kind of impact on growth on the economy those high energy costs could have.

45:33Yeah, fascinating insights. And especially for someone like myself, I graduated as a software engineer many, many years ago. So it's interesting to hear his insight. But I think, you know, the energy costs is a problem, but actually the exposure to just technology as a theme is a much bigger problem. I mean, when I look at the equity markets, let's take the US market, for example, a third of the companies in the US are technology focused. In the UK, it's less than 4 % of the listed index. So we have a massive underexposure to just technology, technology companies as a thematic. And that's one of the biggest barriers for some of the young people that are looking for work.

46:13We're much more services focused. So I think that the point about energy costs is a big one, but there's also this other element, which is, where are the big UK tech companies that young people can expose themselves to so that we don't have to focus on, you know, paltry GDP growth of 0.6 % when you've got companies that are growing at 40 to 50%. Much, much more interesting. Although you are absolute evidence that he's right when he told me that software engineers can go anywhere and do anything in the economy. Emma, what do you think? And listening to that, I was thinking particularly about his comments on the high cost of production and he specifically mentioned plastics.

46:47I mean, you've talked about how much more expensive your raw ingredients are. earlier on in the show but what about your energy costs what are you seeing um well we have seen energy go up and in the past we've seen big increases in in energy are you locked in like most businesses are aren't they they sort of lock in a fixed price we we have managed to to hedge our energy costs by buying as part of as a collective so that has helped us to avoid sort of any really sudden um difficult increases so we have managed to uh to manage that on this occasion But we are a very high energy business. We have big ovens and we mould some of the biggest parts in the UK.

47:28We mould plastic products up to three and a half metres by two and a half metres. It's a big oven. Which is huge. So very different to the products that Strupton was talking about. And we've had customers who have gone overseas for some products like that and have actually ended up coming back to us because of quality concerns and various other things not meeting expectations. So I suppose it really depends on what the product is. But I do think it's so important that we do retain manufacturing capability in this country. and you're in the midlands which is a bit of a bit of an engineering manufacturing hub isn't it for the uk so presumably you talk about being in a collective there for your energy bills presumably you've got lots of really like-minded businesses that you can kind of consult and work with and liaise with absolutely the midlands is a real um powerhouse space for for manufacturing and you know we're led by some incredibly impressive companies like jcb and jlr who are real world-class organisations and very inspiring companies.

48:39You go to their factories, they're just really impressive facilities and it's great to be a part of that culture. But there are big networks of Midlands manufacturing companies. There's organisations like Make UK and Made in the Midlands who bring them together. And it's always really interesting when you meet with other manufacturing leaders that really everybody's experiencing similar challenges and similar experiences. And it's always nice to have that feeling of solidarity because sometimes you do think, oh, it's not just me. It's not just us. It's interesting you mentioned JLR, Jaguar, Land Rover as well because actually we have had some results out from them and it's significantly improved quarter four performance in what has been a very challenging year, hasn't it?

49:25It's had a recovery in sales following that major cyber attack last year which caused profits to absolutely nosedive. But it says there that sales volumes jumped for the last three months after factories restarted production. So that is interesting as well. Right, let's talk about diamonds. What if you were scrolling online and you saw an advert for a diamond and you thought, yeah, I'm in the market for a diamond, I quite fancy that, but then you discovered it was actually synthetic. Earlier this week, the Advertising Standards Authority found that two companies had breached the advertising code by failing to explicitly state that their products were synthetic or lab-created in paid adverts earlier this year.

50:08Does it matter? Why does it matter? What does it mean? Let's talk to Harriet Kelsall, founder and chair of Harriet Kelsall, bespoke jewellery friend of the programme. Harriet, good morning. Good morning. Is it a bit nicer joining the show at this point? You've had a bit more of a lie-in than normally when we get you up and ask you to chat to us at 5am. This is very true. It's also my birthday, so I feel I've had a birthday lie in. Happy birthday, Harriet. Thank you very much. Thank you for being with us. Emma is new to the programme and will now sing Happy Book Noises. I was about to launch into it then.

50:38Well, Harriet, I'm delighted to have you on on this important topic because you're running a jewellery business. Do you sell both kinds? Are you doing lab-made and sort of naturally produced? yes exactly we we sell both of these things and we see them both as valid you know products that are quite different from each other because even though obviously laboratory created or synthetic diamonds are chemically the same as natural diamonds they are made in factories I mean people call them laboratory grown but there are no white coats and pipettes these are sort of turned out in you know big industrial factories and so they're extremely different things than the diamonds that have formed for billions of years underneath the ground so yeah we see them as very different things and we just we we sell them very clearly we make sure everyone buying anything that's laboratory created knows what they're buying knows that these are obviously much cheaper products but also that you know what's going to happen with their value as an investment is quite different and so it's all very clear and the National Association of Jewelers issued some guidance on language which which the industry is using when they're behaving themselves which is very clear you have to you can't just say diamond when it's a laboratory made diamond you can either say synthetic diamond laboratory made diamond or laboratory created diamond and if you just say diamond that has to be a natural stone because otherwise it's obviously really confusing for the consumer.

52:15But does the consumer care? I mean, I'm just having a look. I've got a little tiny diamond on my engagement ring. Sorry, if my husband's listening, I've got a massive diamond on my engagement ring. And, you know, it's not huge. It's not something where I'm sort of thinking all the time about how it was formed deep in the earth's crust. It's just a, you know, it's a pretty stone, isn't it? Surely that's what most people are actually after with their diamonds. They want some pretty stones that they can propose with or, you know, put on other pieces of jewellery and they just want them to sparkle.

52:43Well, some do. And I think, you know, it's definitely true that lots of people like sparkle. But also, I suppose if we go back to what is an engagement ring, it's supposed to be a few things. And one of those things is a symbol of your love and your commitment. And probably the reason that diamonds became popular for engagement rings many centuries ago is because they are about, you know, durability, endurance, and also rarity. It's about marketing, isn't it? Diamonds were a relatively recent thing for engagement rings, weren't they? And it was just a really, really canny marketing campaign. Well, it has been recently, but actually diamonds were being exchanged as engagement rings in the 1500s and probably the 1400s as well, we think.

53:27And obviously they were more with the wealthy people because they were rarer. But yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right that De Beers jumped on that more recently and made it because diamonds could be available to everybody when they discovered a lot more mines and they were easier to mine. But even before then, they were still a desirable thing for an engagement ring, just less within reach. And of course, now laboratory-grown diamonds make them even more within reach because they're a fraction of the cost. With something like a one-carat diamond, it might cost between£5 ,000 and£12 ,000 usually for a natural stone.

54:03the same kind of laboratory-grown diamond might only cost£500 to£2 ,000. So it's a big difference in cost. I was going to say, absolutely huge difference in cost. If I sort of challenged you now, if we had two diamonds in front of us, one lab-grown and one naturally formed deep in the Earth's crust, would it take you time to work out, could you work out which is which? Yes, definitely. um with a naked eye probably not unless there was some very clear markers which you do get occasionally um with a loop possibly because you can sometimes see growth patterns within the diamond that show that it's grown a lot faster so a magnifying glass um and with specialist equipment absolutely definitely because there are there are there are strong differences between them um which i probably probably won't bore you with but um but there's a difference in the way they fluoresce which is you know how they hold ultraviolet light and also there are differences in in the in the types of diamonds of most lab diamonds are type 2a and you can you can sort of spot that with uh with various bits of equipment harriet fascinating fascinating to hear from you on this this morning and happy birthday i hope the rest of the day is fantastic for you harriet kelsell their founder thank you and chair of harriet kelsell bespoke jewelry thank you to her Thank you, of course, as always, to Obie Jukemi from Carmignac.

55:26Thank you, Emma, for your first outing on Wake Up To Money, Managing Director of Big Bear Plastics. Really, really enjoyed your insights this morning. Thanks to everybody who's been in touch with their wisdom for young people entering the workforce. I have enjoyed those. That's it for Wake Up To Money. Wake Up To Money from BBC Radio 5 Live.

55:48You did it. You wrote the book. But now what? If you're struggling to figure out how to get your manuscript published, Christian Faith Publishing is here to help. They are an author-friendly publisher that works with writers just like you. People with a message, a story, and a purpose. They will guide you through the entire process. Editing, cover design, page layout, printing, distribution. Your book can be available in bookstores and online everywhere readers are looking. And the best part? They review your manuscript for free. Stop wondering what to do next and start moving forward. Visit ChristianFaithPublishing.com today to get your free publishing guide.