Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Bloomberg West 20160502

At the beginning of the season, are champions of englands premier league. Second placed tottenham drew 22 at chelsea. From bloomberg World Headquarters in new york, i am mark crumpton. Emily i am emily chang, and this is bloomberg west. Coming up, our exclusive interview with troy carter, ceo of the factory. We get his thoughts on whether winter is coming to silicon valley. Plus, how the granddaddy of the gaming industry Nolan Bushnell who created atari and centipede. We will ask them how gaming could change education. Could an Australian Academic potentially be the mastermind behind bitcoin . What does this mean for the future of the Digital Currency . Lead investors are continuing their caution towards tech specifically private valuations, pointing to a few bearish signs of a bubble. Have 25 toion still 75 further to fall. Bill gurley recently wrote in a blog that dirty term sheets have allowed some companies to continue raising money at higher valuations, promising bigger payoffs to new investors at the expense of old investors, which he says could lead to shares held by employees and some founders. There are 200 private companies valued at more than 1 billion, with uber being the biggest elephant in the room. I sat down for an exquisite interview with troy carter, founder and ceo of adam factory, an early investor in some of techs biggest unicorns bite uber and spotify. I started by asking if winter really is coming. Troy i think fall is here. I dont know if winter is necessarily here yet. We have on our light jackets right now, looking at the winter coats. I do think winter is definitely on its way. Emily if winter is coming, how does that play out . What we have seen, some down rounds, some flat rounds, some companies not able to raise at all. Troy i think we are going to see much more of it. We are already starting to see market corrections in the late stage an early stage side, as well. I think we are starting to see a lot of the younger entrepreneurs getting a lot smarter in terms of their business approach. Hyper,where it was about i think a lot of entrepreneurs are actually factoring in profitability and revenue and things like that. We are starting to see a correction in behavior. Emily youre an investor in dropbox. T, slack, and lets start with uber. Is uber worth 62. 5 billion . Troy ultimately, i think wilbur is going to be worth a lot more 62. 5 billion. When they do decide to go public, its going to be one of the largest ipos in history. I definitely think we are just seeing the beginning of uber. Emily what about dropbox, which is employed that has been plagued by writedowns from mutual funds . How significant are they . I definitelythey seem to be addo negative sentiment. Troy they have a very smart team in place. Drew is a fantastic founder, and i think they have an awesome product roadmap. I am bullish on the longterm with dropbox. Emily i want to talk about spotify. You were one of the first managers to embrace spotify, but the Company Still has challenges to overcome with many of the most prominent artists. How do those challenges play out for spotify . Do you think they can overcome that . Do you think they can succeed for the long haul . Troy i think they will get the biggest names. Ahead, i think spotify will definitely win the music streaming race without a question. I think the revenue pot is growing exponentially for artists. I wont even say necessarily for artists. I would say for content owners. Misconception is that spotify is not paying a lot of money. Spotify is paying a lot of money. That is one thing that the artists have to figure out with record labels sooner than later. I do see some changes in behavior there. Longterm, spotify is going to be in fantastic shape, and i dont think those artists will be able to reach broad audiences as you look at the next five years or so. If you are a big artist, and you are not on a platform but all of your fans are, i think you are going to be doing your fans a disservice by not being there. Emily beyonce just dropped an entire album with streaming rights exclusively on tidal. Is tidal stealing some of the thunder that spotify or apple music would have . Troy i dont think she dropped it exclusively on tidal. Youtube, i can listen to the entire beyonce album. Audio,ue is, with theres not such a thing as a real exclusive. Once you let the cat out of the bag, its going to be all over youtube. My argument is, what is youtube paying out to the artists for the songs that are up there illegally . Emily would you say that apple music has been a success . Troy they never made any grand proclamations about what they were trying to accomplish, but when you look at what they were able to do with drake and you look at what they were able to do with some of the other exclusive content and some of the talent they have been able to attract to the platform, jimmy ive been, dr. Dre, they are just a force to be reckoned with at apple. I think they have attracted a lot of talent that apple normally wouldnt have been able to attract. Judging from that level, i think they have been a great success. Also, i think they have been fantastic about educating consumers on streaming. The moment that apple put their stake in the sand, we saw spotify grow, as well. Those thingsone of where we are seeing everybody benefit from apples ability to educate consumers. Soging by that, i would say, far, its been successful. Emily season two of your accelerator program. You are just opening up for applications. How would you compare adam factory in the crowded landscape of start up accelerators . Emily i dont know if it is too crowded. You have a lot of entrepreneurs starting companies. I think the accelerator programs are fantastic, just to be able to give them that support that they need. Whether its funding, mentor ship, access to networks, i do innk theres a lot of value these accelerator programs. Emily what kind of founders are you looking for that can disrupt entertainment and culture . Troy our program is open to all kinds of founders. What we have learned from our network is that we have strong relationships in entertainment and with a lot of cpg and fortune 500 companies. We look for companies that we can plug and play into adam factory. Last cohort of companies, it was everything from a mobile streetwear marketplace to a sidestep effort to focus on merchandise. We transfer is doing large and serves as a media platform, as well. We look for companies we feel can fit right into our network, and we can help them from day one. Troy carter, ceo of atom factory. In what has become an epic stocks slide, mondays close in the red marks apples longest losing streak since july. Of 1998 it also means apple has wiped off. 80 billion in market cap over sessions. Ight apple is the worst performer in 2016 on the dow and on pace for its biggest yearly loss since the financial crisis. All of this began with an underwhelming Earnings Report in which apple posted its First Sales Decline in over a decade and forecast another one in the current quarter. Coming up, bitcoins alleged creator steps forward. Is it really him, and what does this Development Mean for the currency . The man who saw potential in steve jobs and laid the groundwork for the modern videoGame Industry, atari founder Nolan Bushnell, later this hour. Emily the Whatsapp Messaging Service was blocked in brazil for the second time in less than six months. A judge said whatsapp fail to comply with an order to turn over data in a criminal investigation and ordered phone companies to block the service. According to a newspaper, the fine for not cutting the service would have been 143,000 a day. Local Telephone Companies have agreed to comply with the decision. Turning to bitcoin, Craig Stephen wright, an australian entrepreneur, has identified himself as the creator of the currency. This announcement comes five months after Media Outlets reported he was the mastermind. Over the remain claim, as its pretty difficult to verify. Does this have an impact on the Digital Currency . Does it matter who created it going . Joining me, bruce benton, founder of the bitcoin foundation. Do you think it is or isnt him . Bruce theres not enough information to tell right now. The information he has released so far is interesting, but its not conclusive. Emily what would it take to confirm this . Why are there so many questions . Bruce it wouldnt take too much. There are a couple of transactions that should be done that would put peoples confidence at a higher level. We can never be 100 , but there are a few things that can be done, different transactions that would put aus at a high level of confidence. Emily why doesnt he do that . Bruce you would have to ask him. I understand there are problems issues. St or tax there are some very bright people on both sides who believe he is the founder. I am somewhere in between. I want to see more evidence before i make a decision. Emily it is believed that whoever created bitcoin does have a pile of it stashed away somewhere. How big is that pile, and when would this person potentially sell it . Bruce thats really key for the market, because it is such a large piece. It would be Something Like 980,000 bitcoins. Certainly, if he is the founder and decided to sell that, that would be huge news for the markets for sure. Emily does it matter . Does it matter who created bitcoin . Does having the identity of this person change the future of bitcoin in any way . Bruce the great news is no, it doesnt. It doesnt really matter at all. What bitcoin is at the end of the day is a ledger. Maybe very good ledger, the best ledger the world has ever seen, and all that ledger is is a statement of truth. Its a statement of who owns what. That statement is true whether the creator is craig wright or someone else. Regardless of that motivation, that ledger is very solid and wont change. Emily do you think that the true founder of bitcoin will ever be revealed with certainty . Bruce it will never be 100 certain because we have the potential somebody could be hacked or compromised in some or any number of other reasons. It will never be 100 . If craig wright were to do a couple key transactions, the confidence would be very high. He hasnt quite done that yet for most people in the industry. Emily give us a status update on the future of bitcoin in general . We know the valuation has fluctuated wildly. We talked about it a lot a year or so ago, and interest around bitcoin has really ebbed. What is the future of bitcoin . Bruce the interesting thing is because it is traded in a public way, that creates a lot of focus on the price. If the internet, if somehow you have been able to buy shares or coins off the internet of the or html, thatip would been very volatile, too. We see this volatility because of the nature of it being a new thing. Overall, what is important is the amount of new people entering this industry, the amount of venture capitalists investing in new startups, and that is very exciting. There are more and more bright people coming into this. I am here in new york. There are all kinds of serious banks and consulting firms who would have left this technology a year or two ago, and now they are very involved with huge teams looking into this. Emily if indeed the creator owns a 980,000 bitcoins, that would be on the order of 130 million based on todays price. Bruce fenton, thanks so much for joining us. Bruce thank you. Emily coming up, we hear from one of the Founding Fathers of computerized investing. David harding joins us on the model that beat the market. Luxury lifestyles, stepping into the tesla model s. We will take you behind the wheel later this hour. Emily a solar powered airplane is heading for arizona in the latest leg of its journey around the world using only energy from the sun. Swissmade Solar Impulse 2 took off from view, california for a 16hour flight to phoenix. The wings are equipped with 17,000 solar cells that power propellers and charge batteries. After phoenix, the plane will take two more stops in the u. S. Before crossing the atlantic. The Artificial Intelligence revolution seems to be upon us, but how can businesses and investors make use of it . Lets get to the Milken Institute global conference where Erik Schatzker is standing by with david harding, founder and ceo of winton. thank you. David and i are talking about. He rise of the machines Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning coming to investing. Explain. What does it mean . Your firm is at the forefront of it. David Companies Based here have Machine Learning on the billboard. Company, a quantitative systematic company, we had been in and around Machine Learning techniques for more than 20 years. I thought, if its all going on here, we should be here, too. ok, but we are at a point now i understand you have been making good use of Computing Technology for a long time. We do appear to be at a point or on the cusp of a point where Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are going to begin to build the long forecast . David computers continue to impress us more and more. Sometime around the 1980s, the u. S. Finally stepped up a little bit more. There was a whole Weapons Development program in 1985 and 1986. They started playing chess in the 1950s, computers. They have been doing clever things for a long time. Im not sure this is quite the discontinuity. Erik what does it mean, however, if the human is further and further away from the transaction . In other words, if machines are teaching themselves and reprogramming themselves, what does that mean for Financial Markets . Will they behave any differently . David i do think we are some way from that point. What Machine Learning is teaching us is that a lot of the things we thought were complicated and human are a lot easier than we thought they were. Human beings are not necessarily a lot of Human Behavior isnt necessarily intelligent. Erik particularly in investing. In investing, computers outfitted with simple algorithms have been most investors over the last 30 years. Erik the absurd conclusion to all of this is that you get to a point where if its machines versus machines, is that ridiculous, or if that is in fact where we are going, do we get to a point where the market is effectively perfect and there are no opportunities at all . David i think that is completely wrong. [laughter] in order to use computers to find out techniques for investing, you need a lot of data, and that data needs to be clean. The data that is being created needs to be cleaned, which is a thentaking process, and drawing inferences from that data is also a painstaking process. The chances of getting a computer algorithm and applying it is the chances of a champ chimp typing on a random keyboard. Erik if you are able to harness Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning, does that mean better returns . I think its just that the whole game is moving on. I think its a way in which things can be done by scientific discipline being applied to Financial Markets. It will be an improvement on how investing is done. It wont replace credit arbitrage or Something Like this. The opportunity to bring the scientific discipline to bear in Financial Markets, as in other areas of the economy, those opportunities are great. Erik david, great to have you here. David harding of winton. Emily, applying Artificial Intelligence to what he does as the systematic investor a systematic investor in Financial Markets. They Erik Schatzker from conference in l. A. , thank you. Check out our podcast for extra episodes of our longform show studio 1. 0. It has commentary from brad stone. Its available on itunes and and this week, we are talking startup Success Stories with the ceo of dropbox, andunder of airbnb, Founding Partner jessica livingston. Up next, atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell is trying to revolutionize video games once again. We speak to one of techs most influential pioneers next. [ soft music ] e. T. Phone home. When you find something you love, you can never get enough of it. Change the way you experience tv with xfinity x1. Shoah, ha ha. Ew artist. Show me top male artist. My whole belieber fan group. Its not a competition, but if it was i won. Xfinity x1 lets you access the greatest library of Billboard Music awards moments, simply by using your voice. The Billboard Music awards, live sunday may 22nd, 8 5 pacific, only on abc. Im mark crumpton. You are watching bloomberg west. Lets begin a check with a check of bloombergs first word news. They are ready and prepared to go back to the table a minute a cessation is in place. With these new mechanisms and the minute that the humanitarian blockade is opened up. Mark c. the meeting was held as deadly attacks in the Northern City of aleppo continued. Ted cruz faces a make or break moment for his campaign. He is in a desperate bid to overtake front runner donald trump in tomorrows indiana primary. Trump is the only candidate in the race who can reach the 1237 delegates needed. Bernie sanders says, by the end of the primaries, front runner Hillary Clinton wont have enough players delegates pledged delegates to win that convention. It could result in a contested convention. Global news, 24 hours a day, powered by our 2400 journalists in more than 150 news bureaus around the world. Im mark crumpton. Paul allen is in the australian capital as the countrys treasurer begins prepares to deliver this years budget. Good morning. Paul good morning. A big day here in canberra with a 35 billion budget deficit forecast. Little in the way of reformists reform is expected. Have one eyet will on the july election and another on preserving australias aaa Credit Rating when it delivers the budget later this afternoon. The reserve bank of australia holds its meeting today. Economists are split on whether or not the bank will lower the cash rate to one point 1. 75 after last week 1. 75 after last weeks surprisingly deflationary cpi. Bank that watching a posted a 2. 7 billion first half cash profit. That was much less than expected. Analysts hoped for 3. 6 billion profit. Thats the lowest result from the bank in almost six years. A lot to watch in australia today. I am paul allen for Bloomberg Kilby bloomberg tv here in canberra, australia. Emily this is bloomberg west. Im emily chang. If youve ever played a video game, you owe a debt of gratitude to Nolan Bushnell, who cofounded atari in 1972, and created cult classics like pong, which laid the foundation for the booming electronic gaming industry as it exists today. His biggest focus now is weaving games into the classroom, trying to make education as addictive as an atari game. Nolan bushnell joins us live from the Milken Institute global conference in that way in l. A. Say, can teach academic disciplines 10 times faster than they would learn it in the classroom with a 90 retention rate. How so . Nolan it turns out that, when games are played, it provides some context. Quite frankly, kids learn at their own speed. So, they play to mastery. Playing to mastery is really the key. No abcd. You dont complete the game until you understand it completely. Thats really important. Emily educational gaming is one of those ideas that seems like it is always just about to hit it big. Why hasnt it happened yet . Nolan i think that games are part of young peoples lives today. They spend so much time with their cell phones and with computers, their tablets, that they feel as comfortable learning using technology as they are in the regular classroom. Emily you are credited as being the founding father of electronic gaming industry, with and Everything Else you dont. Today, the most popular games are things like call of duty, gamesd theft auto, filled with a lot of violence. You think thats do you think thats the future of the Game Industry . Nolan actually, the violence of the games are decreasing. While there are some big wins, it is kind of cartoon violence. Big ones, it is kind of cartoon violence. Is one of theuto big exceptions. There are a lot of puzzle games that are good for your brain. The cell phone games that people play on the subway or on the school grounds, they are actually pretty good and not violent at all. Emily what about the medium . Virtual reality is Something Else that has been touted as being potentially transformative for the gaming industry. Do you think it will be transformative . If so, when will that happen . Nolan i think Virtual Reality has certain problems that have not totally been solved yet. Hink that they will be there will be Virtual Reality in arcades and public places. I think that the adoption in the home has to wait until the headsets are sub 200. And i see that being quite a ways off, particularly for the welldesigned and ready to go. And the systems right now go ahead. Whats theot vr, next big thing in gaming . What the next big shakeup what is the next big shakeup . I think augmented reality probably has a much more interesting area, where you can play with a bunch of your friends. I think its going to sort of take over the board game business and the party where people get together and have fun and play a game. With an augmented world in front of them. I think thats going to be very fun. Emily how big of a future do you think the console and console games have . Nolan you know, thats i have been expecting it to drop off for the last 10 years, so im probably the last guy that that. Answer i think pcs do a very good job of gameplay, but the consoles represent purpose built things that give access to people who are less technically literate, so i think they are around for a long time. Emily we have been talking a lot about diversity in the tech industry. Im serious about your perspective historical perspective. Why do you think it is women have largely been left on the sidelines of the Tech Revolution in the gaming industry particularly . Is there anything you remember from your early days that may be laid the groundwork for what we are seeing today that maybe laid the groundwork for what we are seeing today . Nolan i think it stems back to the number of women in the math and sciences in college and high school. I think a lot of women just choose to not go into the Hard Sciences early on. Im not sure why that is. I have five sons and three daughters. Tech, and alle in my daughters are not. Was equallyi supportive to both of those things. But i think that some of the great games i mean, if you have ever played centipede, donna, who wasy one of my great female programmers in the 1970s. Emily thats fascinating stuff, specifically that you have eight children. Presumably, your views on education and gaming are very important. Nolan bushnell, tech pioneer. Thank you so much for joining us. Coming up, a year after the zika thes first burst onto scene, we would take a look at the latest technology being used to fight this terrible disease. Emily back in september, some south american countries began reporting a sharp increase in the number of cases of microcephaly, a condition in which babies are born with abnormally small heads. Wasre long, the zika virus named. The disease rages on with cases 50ng reported in over countries. How can we prevent the further spread of the virus through technology . A started uses computer modeling a startup uses computer to prevent further breakouts. Wolfe, withs nathan a long background in epidemiology. Its been a year since the first case was reported in the americas. It doesnt seem that we are close to a vaccine, cure, or real treatment here. I mean, isnt that astounding to you . Han its interesting. If you actually think about it, in the last three years, we have witnessed tremendous academics epidemics. A year ago, it would have been ebola. The year before that would have been the coronavirus, like sars. Its interesting that our world is changing in fundamental ways. Population density is increasing. Human mobility is linking places. This means there will be an increasing frequency of these kinds of events in the years to come. Emily how is it that, in this day and age, an epidemic and still surprised entire population . Nathan if you think about it, there is a diversity of different viruses. The way i think of it is, currently, when we talk about these viruses, it would be like talking about weather. If we could only say words like Severe Weather event, and not earthquake. These are such fundamentally different kinds of events in how they spread. Emily you guys have been referred to as virus hunters. How do you hunt viruses . What can you do for zika . Nathan the right way to think of us is, we do risk analytics. We combine having boots on the ground in countries around the world that are disease hotspots with contemporary data science. We curate and aggregate hundreds of different data sources. We pulled this into a Software Platform where we provide visualization, modeling, and help to understand vulnerability, capacity for mitigation, and also the capacity to actually transfer some of these risks to insurance. Longer will it be before there is a cure or vaccine, even a simple way to test . Zika, for example, you will be seeing tests rolled in the near future. There was a sort of expedited fda approval. Tests for zika are pretty reasonable. Vaccine on the other hand this is something we will have to wait and see. Dengue has taken a long time. This is a viruslike virus like zika. We need to and rich the way we think about addressing these kinds of events to enrich the way we think about addressing these kinds of events. Every Major Corporation is holding vulnerability. Every government is also having to address these risks. We have the analytic framework now. Its not like you have to throw up your hands and say we cant address these risks. Its about pulling this information together and helping our customers to address these risks. Emily whats the next zika, the next virus that will catch us off guard . Nathan at any one moment, we are following a dozen of these. There continue to be ebola cases. There is a yellow fever outbreak. A similar virus, in the same family as dengue and zika, one of the largest yellow fever outbreaks in recent history, that has been incurring occurring in angola. From our perspective, it is really about catching these things ahead. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We are trying to come up with new mechanisms. Insurance is a really interesting one year. One here. Emily interesting stuff you are working on, metabiota, co nathan wolfe ceo nathan wolfe. Coming up, trying to provide gas without a gas station. Is it legal . Thats next. Emily tesla reports firstquarter results later this week. Besides the size of the bottomline loss, investors are closely watching for any updates on issues with production of the model s. This is tesla model x. This is teslas crossover suv. Sometimes, i dont trust love at first sight, not even when a car looks this good, so i decided to put the tesla model x through its paces for five days along the california coast. Was this just a crush or a lasting love affair . I first drove the 151,000 suv briefly in los angeles last year. At the time, i thought it was one of the best cars i had ever tested. But a 340mile road trip can make or break any relationship. One push of the button and the model x will automatically route your trip according to where the truth the superchargers lineup. It probably wont be the fastest route, but you know you wont run out of juice. We were on our way. It was the start of something beautiful. The seat are situated high are situated high inside, but they are easy to access. The interior cabin is so quiet i could hear crickets outside as i drove, with the windows up. The car handles beautifully on the sandy beach. I will say that the battery gauge can be deceiving. It does not decrease at a stable rate, so you can jump down in range a lot quicker than you expect. We left this morning with a full charge. We have been driving for four hours or so. We are down to about 77 miles on the battery. I asked the car to find us the closest supercharger. We are driving there now. We should get there in about 12 minutes. Turns out i had some major time to kill. Hey, grandma. Oh, nothing much. How are you . Back on the road, i could focus on the field of the allwheeldrive, tested the 3. 2 second zero to 60 mile per hour time, and sprint the horsepower. It feels really fast when you push down the gas pedal. The brakes are regenerative, so you have to get used to their different feel. I never really did. The automatic front door can be tricky. They open when you least expect it. Of the trip, i realized the real question here is not should you buy this car, but do you want to join the electric lifestyle . You really do feel virtuous when you drive it. No fossil fuels here. But owning an electric car sex apsr time and energy car s your time and energy. It makes it harder to be spontaneous and free. You have to be ok with giving up the feeling of driving a mechanical car. But if you are that kind of driver, the kind that wants to be on the cutting edge of luxury and technology, you are going to all in love. To fall in love. Emily the days of driving miles to buy the cheapest gas prices could soon be over. Startups a gas livery gas delivery startup. It has Just Launched in San Francisco, despite having to clear a few regulatory hurdles. Welcomes chris aubuchon. Thanks for joining us. How does it work . You have a truck that drives around and fills up peoples cars . Chris its actually trucks. We have a knack have an app. Select where your vehicle is, and we come to you and fill up your car. It is the cheapest price of the three closest gas stations. Emily with a fee . Chris but sometimes there are no fees. The fees are zero dollars, 3, 5. Imagine this tough for f ford f250 with metal cases for gas in the back. Its got the hose and nozzle. Its got buckets in case there is a spill. Its a very elaborate sort of set up in a pretty compact given that it is delivering gas set up. Regulations are limiting certain places and certain times. Fundamentally, we have been able to service the entire silicon valley. Now that we have expanded to San Francisco, we are able to hit 99. 9 of all the customers. Emily the San Francisco Fire Department said this is not allowed. How do you get around that . Chris fundamentally, we are innovators. We are pushing the front edge of technology where technology is meeting with service. If this onlinetooffline i ts this onlinetooffline service. We are partnering with motorola multiple municipalities and regulators to make sure this is safe and meets the needs of the customers. Emily you talk to the Fire Department. They said it is not allowed, but it is not illegal. Explain. It is not said permitted. They said, if you see something they gave me a number to call. There is definitely a level of caution. It sounded like the Fire Department was saying not to do this. At the same time, i can understand, there is a department of transportation, weights and measures, the state fire marshal. There are a lot of different regulators who have to touch this, and a lot of them dont want to think about it unless the issue is forced. Thats where we get this over uberlike mentality. Chris the law itself is clear and we are compliant with all of the laws. Thats one thing i want to be crystal clear. Emily you guys think this could eliminate gas stations. How do you scale this in an economical way . Chris gas stations cost a lot of money, while a few trucks can service the same volumes in localized locations. It is a virtue of taking the brickandmortar and half virtualizing it. Eric we seen the number of gas stations going down over time. Emily you just came back from beijing. Apparently there is interest in china. Chris aubuchon, filld ceo. And our very own eric newcomer. Who is having the best day ever . Todays winner is frank potter frank zapata, the new owner of the guinness book of World Records flight on a hoverboard. He hovered for over one mile, nearly 10 times further than the previous record. It can reportedly hit speeds of 60plus miles per hour. If you are wondering why it didnt blow up, its not the same as the controversial hoverboard known to occasionally misfire. Congrats on that record. That does it for this edition of bloomberg west. Tomorrow, another big day of earnings from sprint, e. A. , and cbs. Thats all for today. Announcer from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Charlie we begin this evening with our ongoing coverage of the middle east. Vice President Joe Biden hiseled to iraq yesterday, first trip to the country in five years. The surprise visit comes at a moment of vertical turmoil in baghdad where Prime Minister Haider Alabadi is struggling to stay in office. It also raises concerns in the fight about isis. Burns, aicholas professor at the Harvard Kennedy school, previously under secretary of state for political affairs. In new york, jonathan