Business Daily: AI, biohacking, global labour shortages and deepfake fraud

26:19That's the biohack. And that's the pitch. In a world that won't slow down, humans are looking for a shortcut to keep up. Chuck is now expanding into the Hamptons, Atlanta and Miami. He's targeting what he calls the industrial athlete. That's you, the office worker, the filmmaker, the person staring at a screen for 12 hours a day. Do you worry, you know, obviously the term biohacking is becoming more well known. Do you worry that it's a fad or do you think it's here to stay? It's definitely here to stay. True biohacking is the engineering of the human experience. How do we help the individual master who they are with what they already have, which is themselves?

27:01If you think that biohacking requires you to be super wealthy or the top 1%, I want to crush that. The price point here is equal to three personal training sessions a week. So anybody that's paying for a personal trainer in this area three days a week, you reallocate that same money and you get 10 times the scenario. But at least nowadays when people hear the word biohack, they have some association. Some of it is extreme, but it's helped us because there becomes a point of reference. I've heard that word before. And I think for most scenarios, it creates a sense of curiosity. As I walk out of Midtown Biohack, my muscles aren't sore and my abs aren't screaming.

27:44Just this lightness, like the mental fog got sucked out. Chuck's bet is simple. Once you feel the mountain air, you're hooked. because in 2026, we're not just looking for health, we're looking for the upgrade. So if we're going to talk about biohacking going mainstream, if we're going to talk about whether we should actually be doing this stuff, we have to separate the science fiction from the science fact because right now it feels like a free-for-all. I wanted to find the adult in the room, someone who isn't trying to sell me a subscription box, but who's actually studying the mechanics of getting old.

28:23I've just got in the elevator and I'm on my way to the apartment of Dr Nier Bazelai. He's the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I met Nier at his home. It's light, it's airy. Honestly, it's the kind of place where you just feel healthier. So you have a beautiful home. Thank you. I hope it helps my longevity. And that's the dream, right? That everything around us, our homes, our habits, our hacks, can somehow keep the clock from ticking. I asked Nihau how he even got started in this. I thought, wow, getting old is like the biggest biological adventure that I could ever think or imagine.

29:07It was science fiction. And I knew that this is the question that I want to get into. For people listening to you and I talking right now, they just want to know as they hear about biohacking, as they're curious about it, maybe they want to try it out. Is it safe? First of all, a lot of your listeners are doing biohacking, right? If you have high cholesterol and you lower that, that's biohacking. And if you have diabetes and if you have hypertension, you do biohacking. Okay, so biohacking is not a curse word. What confuses us is those biohackers that are A, very intensive, or maybe we should say they're really trying more than to biohack their aging.

29:53They want to be immortalists maybe or they fear death a lot. And because of that, they're using maybe unconventional or unproven treatment that could be also dangerous. But it's not just billionaires or influencers trying to outsmart death. This industry is coming for the rest of us too. Shelves are flooded with powders and pills promising to turn back the clock. And according to Nir, when it comes to what is actually in those bottles, we're flying completely blind. Most of the things that are marketed out there, we don't know if they're safe and we don't know if they're safe in combination. That's a problem.

30:34There's lots of companies that are marketing lots of supplements or vitamins or other things that they market as a longevity drug. And that's a problem because we don't know if that's true at all. So it's not necessarily that they're bad. It's just we don't have enough information to understand it right now. Correct. We don't have enough information to understand it. And they should have the ability to do clinical studies so they can show for real that they have a good effect. When an individual is studying himself, and eventually it's all personalized medicine, but all we'll know about the individual is what happened to them.

31:28When we talk about science, you have to take a group and divide it to two. One will get the chemical, the drug, the supplement, the vitamin, and one will get a placebo. And they will have an outcome. They'll decide what outcome they want to show. if there's a statistical outcome to what they're doing, we'll accept it as science. But if you don't have that, it's hope. It's not even a promise. I'm sure that some supplements out there will prove to be good, but a lot of them will prove to be dangerous. With increased attention on biohacking, with the industry expected to kind of quadruple over the next decade, What do you think are the upsides and the downsides?

32:19Look, the upside is that when the industry is increasing like that, it means that people know that aging can be hacked, okay, and they want it, okay? The challenge for us is how do we shift the huge jungle out there? How do we shift it so it's safe? So do you think it's ready for a consumer mass market? I think the consumer mass market is kind of happening. What we're hoping that we're not killing anyone on the road to success. Hope, not a promise. That's the line. But in the world of the Lolly family, hope is precisely what's for sale. When you listen to the medical establishment, they see a jungle of unproven supplements.

33:09But when you talk to Teresa Lolly, she sees a scoreboard. And according to her, she's winning. Teresa told me she tracks her ageing pace using tests championed by longevity mogul Brian Johnson. According to the data, she's only ageing at 78 % of the normal rate. He has the Olympics of longevity, by the way. And you have to test yourselves for two years to be able to qualify for the Olympics. I ranked top 96 in his Olympics, the longevity Olympics, because the tests show what is your aging pace. His aging pace is ultimately 47 percent. So per every year he's aging, he's only aging 47 percent. He does have a higher chance of potentially hitting that 150.

33:55I guess we're going to have to wait and see. We're going to live to that to see. You know, I feel like everyone is inching into understanding because there's so much proof now that biohacking works. If, let's say, an infrared sauna is available and it's great for detoxification, why not take advantage of that? If an oxygen bath is available and you can sink your body and oxygenate your body, get the health benefits of that, why not take advantage of that? But here's the thing. We don't actually know if Teresa's score means she'll live longer. We won't know until the clock actually stops. But the markets aren't waiting for the results.

34:34We are currently living through a biological gold rush. From the 40 ,000 membership at Equinox to the DNA-specific supplements in the lolly's kitchen, we're witnessing the birth of a multi-billion dollar economy built on the one thing you can't actually verify until it's too late. How much time do you have left? That was the BBC's Michelle Fleury investigating the world of biohacking for this special recorded episode of Wake Up To Money. And if you're enjoying what you've been hearing so far, well, please do subscribe to the Business Daily podcast feed as well as on Wake Up To Money. You might hear a little bit of me there and some other familiar faces from the BBC Business Department.

35:16It's on BBC Sounds as well if you prefer to get your podcast there. And if you don't do so already, well, make sure you start subscribing to Wake Up To Money too. Five star reviews as well on that one. Right, next, let's turn to a fascinating programme from Tim Mansell. In late 2022, 13 young people arrived in southern Germany from India. They had all signed up for a three-year apprenticeship in the meat trade, working at traditional family butchers across the country. Fast forward to today and that small group has grown to more than 200 young Indians working in butcher shops right across the south.

35:49And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are now ambitious young people travelling from Delhi, Kashmir and Assam to train as mechanics, truck drivers and even kindergarten teachers. It looks like the perfect economic trade-off, a German economy desperate for skilled labour and India, with its giant population of young people looking for well-paid careers. Tim has been finding out how this cultural and economic experiment is working out on the ground. It's quite a steep climb up here. It smells brand new. It is. It's still got the plastic wrapping on the seat. The Dold haulage company has just invested in its first two electric trucks.

36:35We're in the Black Forest, a few kilometres from the city of Freiburg. The man at the wheel is Sebastian Dold. His grandfather started the business in the 1960s. Today they operate 45 trucks as well as logistics and warehouse services. So right now we are driving through the village of Buchenbach towards the workshop where our mechanic AJ is working.

37:05Sebastian has just taken on two apprentices from India. One of them, AJ Kumar Chandapakar, is training to be a mechanic. He's from Hyderabad. AJ is 25. My father is a construction worker and my mother is a housewife. We came from like village background to city like 10 years ago. I completed my studies there. I studied mechanical engineering in India. But I have like no hands-on experience and I thought Ausbildung would be like a better role for me. Ausbildung is the German word for apprenticeship, training. AJ graduated from university in 2022 but says there was stiff competition for an appropriate job in India.

37:52There was also the question of how much he'd be paid there. In India, we don't get that much of income. So coming to Germany, one of the motivations for you was the salary that you would earn here. And also the standard of working, of the safety, the knowledge I get here and the technology that Europe has, I think India doesn't have that yet. Like, personally and professionally, in both ways, I think it helps me to grow. Is this the first time that you've left India? It's the first time I boarded a flight. I never left my state before. When I landed in Germany, it felt like a dream. Sebastian Dold is happy too.

38:45We've been having interviews with AJ, I think two to three times, and his German was really good. He was motivated, very motivated. You could see that from the very first meeting we had online. Why did you recruit an apprentice from India? So the situation in Germany is quite difficult in terms of talent acquisition, because we're seeing lots of young people not really wanting to go into mechanic stuff, into truck driving apprenticeships. They just want to go to university because it's seen as a better way of education and a better career-related chance. But in reality, it's more or less the other way around because we're seeing a shortage, a huge shortage, when it comes to mechanics, when it comes to truck drivers, all these sorts of jobs.

39:47In fact, Dald has just taken on an apprentice truck driver, also from India. He arrived in January. The need for labour in Germany is apparently endless. There is a net loss of some 400 ,000 workers every year in the German labour market. We have a boomer generation which is now in large scale retiring. We don't have as many young workers joining the job market. So that's the gap which is actually explaining, I think, a big part of that labour shortage. This is Handeok von Ungern-Steinberg. He runs a recruitment agency called India Works, which identifies candidates in India for jobs in Germany.

40:34The company is less than two years old. Before that, Handeag worked in the Chamber of Crafts in Freiburg, which, rather like a chamber of commerce, represents local businesses in a wide range of trades. Basically, I was in charge of supporting companies in their fight against labour shortage, and I got a mail from India. An email? An email, which hit my inbox, and this email suggested that there is a recruitment company in India which supports in bringing in Indian talents for various kinds of industries and jobs. And we thought, let's give it a chance. The email had come from an Indian recruitment agency, Magic Billion, a company founded by Aditi Banerjee and her father.

41:20India, as you know, is a country with 600 million people below the age of 25. 600 million. And only 12 million come into the workforce every year. So there's a huge labour surplus in the country. They sent similar emails to cities all over Germany, but Freiburg was the only one to show any real interest. After our first conversation, we thought about certain job roles where we see desperate employers who are not finding young people to join the job. I contacted the head of the local butcher guild and I just introduced my idea and to say, are you up for something which sounds a bit awkward at first, to go to India to get actually young people and start something new.

42:10So he was enthusiastic? Everyone was enthusiastic, including the Butcher Guild itself, yeah. That the first people to sign up were butchers came as a bit of a surprise to the Indians. We were taken aback, of course, when we were told that the first pilot project that they wanted to start with was for meat processing. to bring in future butchery candidates. You can imagine for a country like India where the cow is a holy animal, it was a difficult first pilot to start with, I would say. What had you expected? We expected the typical technical roles, mechatronics, electronics and those kinds of roles.

42:50Nonetheless, in late 2022, 13 young Indians arrived in Germany to pioneer the project in a number of small butchers' businesses close to the Swiss border. We had a set of, I believe, five or six companies that were willing to try and test it, and then from that year onwards it just increased. Tell me about that increase. So there will be 200 apprentices starting in this year, meaning 26. From India? From India. 200? 200, yeah. We have signed a contract with the State Butcher Guild. So 13 in 2022, 200 in 2026. And that's just the butchers. For 2026, we have 775 enrolled candidates who have already passed their language certificate and language exam or are still undergoing training.

43:46Across the board in all sorts of different fields. Right, that is butchers, bakers, masons, road builders, construction workers. healthcare, truck drivers, electricians and more. Aditi Banerjee, who co-founded Magic Billion, joined Handeek in setting up India Works, where she's also a joint managing director. I think the Indian stereotype is often of doctors and engineers. Those were the kinds of people with the ability to move out of India. And perhaps that's the unique value proposition we bring where access to Indian youth can today be given for various job roles. You don't have to go outside of India only once you have a bachelor's or a master's.

44:33You can go even after you've completed your high school, age of 18. You can go and become an apprentice and then learn a skill trade where you'll be earning 10 times what you would be earning in India as a skill professional. We do everything together. We want to do something different. The head of the Butcher's Guild in this part of Germany, the man who Hande turned to for advice, is the energetic 65-year-old Jogi Lederer. Have you had a good idea? You'll find him behind the counter of his shop in Weil am Rhein, right on the Swiss border. He set this business up 35 years ago with just three people.

45:16Today there are 40. When that first cohort of 13 arrived from India in 2022, two of them came to Yogi.

45:30We just couldn't get young people anymore. And then India came to us and told us they had too many young people and they'd love to send them to Germany to learn a trade. And I realised right from the start that this was our last chance for survival. This was your last chance. What does that mean? When I started out here 35 years ago, there were eight butcher shops within a radius of 10 kilometres. Eight! Now I'm the only one left. All the others who decided not to go down this path are gone. I think what you're saying is that if you had not made this investment in young people from India, your business would have collapsed.

46:15I wouldn't be in business today if it weren't for India. Those first two recruits have now finished their apprenticeships. They're still working for Yogi. In the meantime, he's taken on five more. One of those first two original recruits was Anika Maria Shazi. She'd taken a degree in computer science at university in Kerala. but she'd wanted to see the world. I have to say like these three years, like I learned a lot in my life because when I first came here I was only 21 years old. Now I'm becoming 25 years old. I finished my house building and I finished my house building with some good points and I'm so proud of it.

47:05Last autumn, Anika went home to India for a break It was the first time she'd seen her family for three years. She was away for three months. She had a project to renovate the family home. Before when I come here, that was my biggest dream. Either I need to buy or build a house or I need to renovate my house for my parents and my sister. And I did everything by myself, like every plan and everything. I bought every furniture, everything by myself. So I was so busy that three months, so I didn't even get to relax. So really I needed to, I'm looking forward to go next year again. So the money that you have earned here in Germany, you've used to renovate the house that your family lives in back in Kerala.

47:53Yeah, right. Annika is one of the trailblazers. Pratyai Saikia is following her path. He's a quiet, thoughtful man from the state of Assam with a degree in food technology. He is near the end of his own apprenticeship with Yogi Ledera. After I left school, I applied for an engineering course, but it was in food technology. I was doing my internship semester, but during the same time I came across this opportunity to do an apprenticeship in Germany. And why did you decide to come to Germany? What was attractive about Germany? I thought that maybe it would be a good opportunity to work in a country where, you know, all sorts of jobs are treated with equal dignity.

48:45Another thing was that in India, we have this perception of the German people that they are very hardworking. They are very strict with rules and regulations. They are like super good at it. I think that if we should learn something from someone, then we should learn from one of the best. Do you think that having a German professional qualification, that will give you a competitive edge later when it comes to finding other jobs? I'm thinking perhaps if you were ever to go back to India. But if I were to go back to India, I would have never come here in the first place. So another thing that I decided when I was going to come here, I thought that maybe I should build a future here and adapt to the life here.

49:38Butchers, bakers, haulage firms, what's next? Well, kindergartens. In Weil am Rhein, there are 19 of them. And at the town hall, the mayor, Diana Stöcker, has exactly the same problem as her counterparts in the private sector. We can't fill all the jobs. We have to have more people. And we are looking for kindergarten teachers all over Germany, but nowadays we miss them all over the country. So we have to look for solutions and getting them from abroad is one idea. Diana Stöcker has unapologetically taken a leaf out of Jurgi Lederer's book. Because I know Yugi, I was totally convinced that this is a great idea.

50:24And I told my employees here in my city hall, I want to do the same pattern, trying to recruit young people from India for the job as a kindergarten teacher. Have you actually found specific people yet or is that process now ongoing? Yeah, we started last year in October and we have already found five to six people. and actually two of them are already excellent in German language. Two men, actually, they're men. At the beginning I thought, oh, well, we will get Indian ladies coming to Germany, but actually those two we have found are men. The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was in India at the beginning of this year.

51:11He discussed security cooperation and the expansion of economic relations with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi. He also said the two countries were paving paths for orderly migration through training and study programmes, acknowledging that well-skilled workers would secure Germany's prosperity. Handirk von Unnensternberg appears to have picked a good moment to launch India Works. We started this company in 2024 and our goal was to bring in 10 ,000 people by the end of the decade, 2030. We are very confident that we are reaching this goal given the increase of numbers and also given that demographics is just worsening the situation in the job market in Germany.

52:04That was Tim Mansell reporting from Germany there. Well, finally this morning, we thought we'd bring you a taste of an episode Ed Butler made recently about deepfake videos of chief executives, which fraudsters are using to trick businesses out of millions of dollars. As part of the programme, Ed visited the offices of CloudGuard, a cyber security company based in Manchester, and its chief executive is Matt Lovell. Deepfakes are becoming very, very easy to do with the emerging technologies that are available. Before, and I'm going back perhaps three or four years, that technology wasn't mainstream now in order to deepfake, to actually generate video and audio quality of extremely accurate specifications.

52:48It takes minutes. I'm going to now walk around the table because Mina is here and she has in front of her a video I recorded. This was a few days ago, a clip of me explaining what deepfake was. Deepfake technology uses AI and deep learning to create highly realistic but fake videos images or audio it manipulates a person's lives so what have you been doing me so i was given the audio and video clip that you did yourself which is about 30 seconds long and i use that to kind of go a bit wild make you say things that you probably wouldn't say would you like to have a look yes please so this is the video deep fake quick check in on the deep fake story.

53:36It is about to go public and I just want to make sure everything looks okay on your side. So that's me saying something I really never said. Gosh. So how hard was that to do? Not very hard. A lot of the tools that we used are freely available. I'd say from receiving the audio clip and video clip of yourself to producing this would probably have taken about 30 to 40 minutes. to make it a little bit more realistic so it takes a bit longer just to clip the videos together but other than that no it's very very easy very fast yeah very scary as well yeah and it's fun it is i mean i remember when i was doing math hearing him say things that you probably wouldn't hear him say it is quite fun definitely i'm going to come back to you matt so imagine then that i'm i'm a bad guy and i really want to organize a very kind of sophisticated attack what am i spending and what's the kind of level of technology that I'm buying into?

54:36So at the most basic level for a simple single individual-led attack, you're looking at$500 to$1 ,000. The use of largely free tools for a more sophisticated attack, you're looking between$5 ,000 to$10 ,000. Right, so no pixelation, no little tiny jump cuts of movements, which is what you do sometimes see, don't you? Absolutely. Head movements, body language movements, stuff that may get called out or become more obvious and tested to prove. Blood flow, you were saying? Blood flow. So we're looking at pixelation. So a lot of the verification tools that we have available to us right now are looking at head turning, head angles, inflections on facial expressions, and particularly around pixelation of blood flow.

55:22So the camera will pick up a tiny bit of blood flow in your face, maybe when you strain your neck one way, and the AI can now impersonate those changes that the body naturally makes in those situations. In six months we've seen rapid changes within the tooling and particularly in the paid-for tooling if you're going to pay for a much more professional output. The accuracy and the intonation of people's voices and the ability to choose from that, to understand from different video clips and to harmonise all of those intonations is now so much more advanced and accelerating faster than our detection capabilities.

56:01Have you found businesses who fall and fall of this? I mean, you've literally lost a lot of money through DeepFace. There are numerous examples of businesses on a routine basis now, and also not in corporate environments. This is WhatsApp, this is videos in social channels or posting to elements that aren't protected by corporate security. That is where it's increasing and now the most prevalent. Automation, bots and other things are becoming standard in the generation of malware or defects that are being fired at companies. Is there equivalent AI generated tools to spot it? Simple answer, no.

56:44Attack vectors are accelerating faster than we can accelerate defence automation and protection against bots. I mean, you've met quite a few CEOs, CFOs, who've found themselves deep faked. How do they feel about that? I mean, typically, what kind of emotional response do you encounter in this situation? People are surprised. Are people moving fast enough to respond to the speed the threat is developing? Absolutely not. Surprised? I guess they feel vulnerable. It's a kind of very personal thing, isn't it? It's a very personal thing. It's now a very real thing. Matt Lovell from the cybersecurity firm CloudGuard talking to the BBC's Ed Butler there.

57:25Thanks so much for listening this morning. And if you've enjoyed any of these episodes you've heard this morning, well, do remember, you can subscribe to the BBC Business Daily podcast, wherever you get yours from, or you can find it on BBC Sounds as well. Sean will be back here on Wake Up To Money tomorrow, and I'll be in the chair on Friday. It would be great to have your company. Looking forward to speaking to you then. Thanks so much for listening. Wake Up To Money from BBC Five Live.

58:06Hello, I'm Nicky Campbell, and this could well be the podcast you've been waiting for. We are calling it Don't Say a Word, but it could be don't listen to that song, Don't read that book, don't watch that film, don't like that post, don't laugh at that joke. We're here to help you navigate, to make sense of it all, to keep up. If people aren't up to speed with all of the latest kind of politically correct lingo, they feel isolated and don't want to engage in a conversation, that should retreat into silos. If you sometimes sit on the fence because you're worried about giving offence. Hello, you found your podcast.

58:39Don't say a word, but do listen to this podcast with me, Nicky Campbell. Listen on BBC Sounds.