carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm carol massar. oliver: i'm oliver renick. carol: facebook's image for a future. and rupaul's drag economy, that's a fun story. oliver: all of that ahead on "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

oliver: we are here with bloomberg businessweek editor-in-chief megan murphy, let's start by talking about the opening remarks section. this examines the philosophy behind to some of the biggest companies we know, in particular, facebook and google and what really their priority or mission is. megan: this piece, we strive to be controversial and this piece is provocative in the sense that they've talked about being that only instrumental in the way you conduct yourself online and your everyday tasks, but also reinforces for good in the long term evolution of humanity. what ashlee vance, who has written this piece really talks about is can you make that a legitimate claim when you have become the biggest single driving of advertising dollars and trying to get people to click on ads known to humanity. oliver: the thing interesting about this is is not necessarily new for a company to try to have some sort of philanthropic mission. right? megan: our own company has a philanthropic mission.

oliver: it's very different because of facebook's nature. we talked with sarah frier about sheryl sandberg and her role of bringing emotion to the company. emotion.aying people came there to work for this, but they are try to give you look like ads. megan: you have to look at what google was when it started. it made it more efficient to find the things you wanted on the internet. facebook was a way to find girls at the beginning for mark zuckerberg. and it morphed over the years into -- as ashley calls it, a giant public scrapbook of people's lives. in part, there's an argument on the side of the industry that -- are they responsible as platforms for being transformative receptacles of this kind of philanthropic mission? or have they just morphed so far beyond their original starting mission that now they encompass so much of how we actually live our lives daily basis.

there is an argument to made that facebook through ai artificial intelligence and virtual reality will take the place of so many other disruptive technologies in our life. google, you look at now, alphabet and the range of everything they are involved in from driverless cars and transit and how that will develop in the future. that's a huge part of it as well, if we do imbue these titans to say you are just advertising companies and you need to take responsibility for that, that would undersell them. at the same time, they do take such a huge share of that market and that's 90% of the growth. i think they are grappling with it just as much as everyone else. oliver: let's talk about the cover story in the future section, it's very interesting. this is a battle going on between amazon and walmart, perhaps online and perhaps also in store with amazon branching out a little bit. megan: it's a long battle between amazon and walmart which is made these noted missteps in trying to transform its online presence. this is a beast that was

equipped to sell things in giant store boxes and is never been good with competing with nimbler small competitors. kitchen sinkn the it, they acquired companies and reconfigure the strategy many times. they have the head of jet.com that's heading that strategy right now. oliver: there's a lot of moving parts to have to come into place and get those details. we talked to reporter and author brad stone. brad: e-commerce is a huge market, and it is still early. it's about 10% maybe, or early double digits of all of retail. you see big retailers flailing and of course, smaller operators all around the country. amazon is the leader, we all

know mighty amazon, but the story is about walmart, the biggest retailer in the world with a lot of assets, all those physical stores and warehouses and distribution centers. over the years, it never really deployed them successfully to kind of make headway online. the story is really about the investment, the best that -- the bet that current walmart ceo has made on the internet. i think they can be a serious contender, and they are doing some interesting things, particularly in these new developing areas like groceries. carol: they picked up jet.com and they also got their chief chiefr, founder, now he's in charge with everything, were a lot of things that walmart in terms of e-commerce. brad: right, mark is ironically enough a former amazon executive. it's the kind of back story that

makes this so interesting. he started a company that a lot of people might know, not by its official name, but by some of its brands like wagged.com or particularly diapers.com. walmart try to buy this company in 2009 and amazon swooped in and grabbed it. mark lori worked at amazon for about a year and a half, left, and started jet.com. some people may know jet.com from its profligate advertising, it was tapering ads all over buses and subways. oliver: what did jet.com do before they came in with walmart? brad: i can tell you one thing they did, they raised and spent a lot of money. and a lot of people thought they were going to leave a crater in the ground, this was a company that was kind of representative of silicon valley profligacy, but with the website it was first of all, he created a very

distinct brand, kind of a purple thing going on. it sold almost everything, it was somewhat amazon like, but had this idea that it could be a kind of discounter in a creative way. the prices might seems or standard for e-commerce, but then you could do a couple of things with what they call the smart card. you say i don't need it tomorrow or the next day, i can wait a week. or pile a lot of things into a box and they would pass the savings on to you. this is a very walmart like idea. let's use backend distribution to create savings for the customer. it wasn't really working, they were spending a lot of money and they raised may be almost $500 million in venture capital and the return customer numbers weren't great. but they had created a brand and the key thing here is that walmart, which had been searching for an online strategy and a differentiator for years saw in mark lori and what he created in jet.com a way to signal to the world that walmart was serious about the internet. carol: turning walmart's amazon

ambitions into a cover story was a work of the creative director. >> we had a great shoot of mark lori and his partner at walmart. we were sort of concerned that people wouldn't necessarily recognize who they are. and so we have the smiley guy, not sure if walmart uses him. oliver: i think they do, whenever there's a special. prices., rolling back serves very well. he appeared on most of the covers we've done about walmart. we brought them back except now he is sort of creeping up behind jeff bezos. carol: i initially saw it like trying to come up against amazon, which is really what the story is about. whether or not amazon is the big one in the e-commerce space and try to make some inroads. >> the idea of trying to beat them seems like a really tall order. we played it as if jeff was sort of the cover star. but walmart is maybe catching up to him. carol: up next, the long road

china still faces in the race to catch up with other developed nations. oliver: and why vote for a tax cut today could mean a vote for a tax hike down the road. this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

♪ carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm carol massar. oliver: i'm oliver renick. record numbers of chinese graduates are having a hard time finding the job they want. >> we were looking to bring to life this great transition that's been taking place in china for more than one administration now. the goal has been to shift the economy away from export led

growth to an economy that is powered more my domestic demand, and therefore, more insulated from international shocks. we looked at the service sector, which is now 43% of the economy in china. it's growing, like eight points from 2012. some of these policies are working. it still has a long way to go, because in developed economies, services are between 70% and 80% of employment. oliver: that is the sign of an economy in a country that is transitioning and moving from the sort of smokestack type jobs and industrial jobs to these services roles. what you point out in the story is that there's a bit of a hiccup now happening because the services jobs are not necessarily the ones that are going to be able to sustain the kind of high-end type of workers. >> chinese policymakers are trying to absorb different type of workers. some of them are new entrance into the labor force and china will graduate a record 8 million students this year from universities.

but then you have people who are being shed by the smokestack industries and then you are having farm laborers who are migrating to the cities. we are seeing a lot of low-end, low-paid, low skill jobs being created and those people are vulnerable and the businesses often go under, they don't have contracts a lot of these folks who are running restaurants. one of the fastest-growing categories is people who distribute flyers for new real estate development. you can see those people are not are well protected. it leaves people vulnerable. oliver: does this factor into economists and investors who worry about an economic slowdown, or does this apply to a certain part of the demographic community

not necessarily happy in the role they are doing? what is the larger impact on gdp growth? >> the initial reaction has been that people have been pleased to see the services sector has absorbed a lot of the layoff resulted in recent years, and we had one economist say it's actually performed better than in the previous round of mass layoffs in the 1990's. and you know, unemployment fell to a 14-year low in the first quarter of this year. so that's an indication that services are helping out. the longer term, if we're talking about the idea of creating a middle class and a consumer class, these trends about pay in this sector are not particularly positive. people would like to see more high quality, high-paying jobs. carol: treasury secretary steve mnuchin insists that president trump's tax plan will play for

-- totally pay for itself. oliver: we separate tax facts from tax fiction. >> if you does look at left and right, the independent budget analyst who look at tax plans, it's pretty wide agreement that the cuts are so extreme, if they are passed as trump wants, that they would blow a hole in the budget and possibly cause trillions of dollars in extra deficits over the coming years. carol: budget busters. oliver: what is the gap between what the budget could be and versus what the economic projections for what growth could be? are they offer little or a lot? what year-over-year percent of gdp do they need to get this in the black? >> different people have different numbers. the committee for responsible

federal budget that it could take 4.5% annual growth to get to revenue neutral, to make the plan revenue neutral. long-term is actually less than 2%, maybe in the 1.8% range. the trump administration will say it doesn't take 4.5%, it takes closer to 3%, low 3%. but even that could be out of reach. there is a positive effect on economic growth from tax cuts in the short-term medium term. because you know, you induce more economic activity, that the typical projections or more in the tenths of a percentage point. there are some forecasts that build in the idea that we're going to have to pay this deficit back someday anyways, so actually, it could compete away by driving up interest rates and actually crowd out private investment, which could potentially make economic growth weaker in some scenarios. carol: you really need tax cuts and to raise revenues, right? >> you need to cut taxes and

simultaneously cut spending would be the way to make it revenue neutral. but that part is not very popular. certainly not with trump, he's not a natural small government kind of guy, as some republicans are. oliver: his first couple of efforts have not panned out. health care fell through, they could've found some cuts there but they didn't. it doesn't seem like they're going to get through anything easily at this point that doesn't have to do with cuts or budget. >> we end up with nothing on the spending cut side and big cuts on the revenue side, and that's how you get used trillion dollar -- these trillion dollar excess deficit. what does trump do at this stage? one possibility would be to find spending cuts. i don't really see that happening. another would be there some talk of possibly congress might change the budget rules to create a longer window and a

little more leeway for congress to be able to act. oliver: right now if it's a deficit for taxes, it's going to get killed after ten years. >> the way it works is if you want to pass in the senate with a simple majority is 50 votes, you need to show that it will not create deficits past the 10 year window starting from today. it looks as though -- if you don't do that, he will be 60 votes, which trump doesn't have. there's only 52 republicans in that aate, and on top of hawks them are budget who wouldn't go along with something like that. carol: if you do raise deficits, down the road, you have to raise taxes. >> is kind of reality that hits.

oliver: up next, new jersey's plan to tackle hurricanes and rising seas with firewalls. carol: in coal country, signing bonuses are the new thing. ♪

♪ oliver: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm oliver renick. carol: i'm carol massar. you can also listen to us on the radio. channel 1090. boston,ork, and more., d.c., oliver: in london and in asia. carol: in the politics and policy section, it's been more than four years since superstorm sandy battered the eastern united states. oliver: towns along the coastline are looking to build walls rather than relocate. >> after sandy, towns and coastal new jersey said how do we prevent this from happening again?

their answer mostly was build firewalls. it's a good approach and the short-term, but the short fuse moving in and the water keeps rising. we have to look at whether people have to move. oliver: let's talk about the numbers and rates. that's obviously going to be an important element. we heard about sandy being the storm of the century. but apparently it seems like they're going to try and prevent themselves and protect themselves from something that could happen within the century. right? >> there are two things. one is short-term events and storms and hurricanes and flooding. we know those will happen more often and be more intense. the second thing is sea level rise will be ongoing. we don't know the speed, some estimates say by 2030 we could have another foot of sea level. by the end of the century, you could have 2, 3, 4, 5 feet. the uncertainty makes it hard to plan.

please towns use federal and state money and basically build walls of sand and steel or berms as high as they can afford, and they hope for the best. it only lasts so long and the money that spent on infrastructure is money you can't spend on helping people move. oliver: lets talk about the moves, it seems like a reactionary thing, short-term. where exactly are they? the fees and costs to do this pretty fast. we are thinking bags of sand and stuff, but he gets pretty expensive. >> there are two 14-mile stretches where the army corps of engineers are building june and berm systems to block the incoming waves from hurricanes. each of those 40 mile sections cost about $.5 billion, in some cases, mostly funded by the feds. also smaller walls with steel built by the state for $25 million. there's a berm system that the

mayor of stafford township says he wants to build and could cost as much as $100 million to protect just five homes. -- just 5000 homes. people are still struggling with this question of what is the right amount and how do you decide which areas are too expensive? in theory people get the idea that's possible, no one wants to be the first one to say this area is too expensive. they prefer to keep fighting. oliver: rising prices are fueling optimism in coal country. carol: here's editor matt phillips. matt: coal prices used to make metallurgical steel have tripled. that's good news for areas that have been devastated by falling coal prices. there is optimism in certain counties and southern parts of west virginia that haven't had a lot of reason to be happy recently. the gossip these days is about signing bonuses and health care as opposed to layoffs. the question is what's behind

the rise in these prices -- trump or market forces? we found its predominantly market forces, if not entirely. there's been production cuts in there's a cyclone that cut the global supply to meet u.s. coal more valuable. we've seen some ipo's with coal companies which haven't happened in years. oliver: companies entirely based on coal. matt: that's right. coal mines a reopening in certain parts of west virginia. trump is certainly taking credit for this, but it doesn't look like his policies and rhetoric are really what is fueling the price increase recently. oliver: it's interesting, because commodities generally are pretty supply and demand. and you point out the supply is disruptive, which means higher prices. at the same time, i wonder would

be in ministries and trump talking about bringing this back. pretty much everybody said this industry is dead. maybe it's not because of trump, but were people wrong in terms of their trajectory for this industry? matt: long-term, this is something you don't want to own, especially in the united states. this goes down to natural gas prices. as the leading source of power and electricity generation in the u.s., that's not going away. crackers have figured out how to make profits off of lower prices, and as long as natural gas stays cheap, it makes sense to build a natural gas powered power plants. we don't know how long trump is going to be in office, and even if it is two terms, that's only eight years. big picture, this recent optimism seems like a dead cat bounce. natural gas isn't going away,

and that's really the threat to coal and its use for power. oliver: they are selling shares of the company, it's hard to sell a dead-cat bounce. once the longer-term picture they met argue might happen? matt: there are a kind of bankruptcies, they reorganized and when you saw coal prices start to pop up, technology has made the cost of operating in certain parts of the u.s. more efficient, so they figure they can take advantage of this window of higher prices with much, much lower cost and automation. it doesn't necessarily bring back the kind of jobs we saw even 10 years ago. but they figure there will still be demand for coal around the world, and we can export a lot, even if we are not using it

domestically. and that is what their bet is. oliver: how russian tv network rt influence u.s. elections. carol: this is bloomberg businessweek. ♪

♪ oliver: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm oliver renick. carol: and i'm carol massar. oliver: the english-speaking russian tv network rt is a master of ideology in disguise. carol: the latest -- the shadow brokers. oliver: all that ahead on "bloomberg businessweek." ♪ ♪ oliver: we are back with "bloomberg businessweek." editor-in-chief

megan murphy talking about must-reads. i love the headline, russian news. it says at rt, newsbreaks you. it is a great internet meme poking fun at russians. megan: this is a story about the network rt that is taken up so much of a role and the american election talking about sort of disruptive, political, networks and commentary worldwide, but it is something that american intelligence officials have pointed to as a network a part of russia's effort to disrupt the democratic process in 2016. the story shows how a real fly-by-night operator, mired in the depths of your cable, --going in and say, how much was this a concerted effort by russia to infiltrate western media, and how much is you can get a lot of attention for say crazy things?

it is probably more of the latter than the former. oliver: and a very timely story. fbi director james comey bringing up the influence again. this ties into a previous story you did a while back about the reemergence of rt, and being able to rebuild the brand and expand. this is at the end of the day, this is a growth story. megan: absolutely. pragda on the potomac as we called it. it is a story of this network that was started, you know, with the expressed intention of getting a sheen of credibility to russia and its viewpoint and transmitting it through people with british accents. muscovites with

english,ounding talk about these viewpoints, and talk about it from a credible sounding platform. what is interesting about 2016, or the recent coverage of the french election, it is how much the rhetoric has dialed to a particular viewpoint in an unnoticeable way. it is almost in a bbc's tone sometimes. but if you listen to the words than theot different reality. oliver: content versus presentation. let's talk about a great story about economics and the features section. it is about a person. it is trump's go-to economic person. megan: it is an interesting profile. one of the fascinating things covering the campaign is when you talk about trade as the defining element of 2016, and you see it reverberating in other countries, you never would've thought that would be

the issue that america would be so divided. protectionist jobs, manufacturing jobs. peter navarro has a strong voice and was the embodiment of this make america great again voice of donald trump's campaign. now, he did drift away from that. he has gone to different priorities, whether that is health care or tax. when you see that pendulum swinging, whether it will be the nationalist trump for the globalist trump, he says he is both. peter navarro is the nationalist trump. fascinating to see on that.of specrtum we talked to peter. >> actually being an economist. a phd economist, harvard university, talked for many years at the university of california since 1980 us -- since the 1980's. he has the credentials of a real economist, but he is not at all in the mainstream of free trade economics, which is why trump likes him.

oliver: doesn't mean he is not an economist? peter: there you go. that is what he can throw in the critics -- that is what he can throw in the face of his critics. i know how conventional free trade theory works, i teach this stuff. i don't happen to think that in reality, the picture is quite as rosy as you people would say. carol: but he has written several books and looks at trade. he is against global trade, correct? peter: i would not say he is flat out against global trade. he is against the way it is affecting u.s. today. he likes trade. he says the terms are bad for the u.s. and china, of course, is his big bug-a-boo.

if you hear trump talking about trade, very often what you are hearing is what peter navarro says. carol: it is a little extreme. there is a point he makes. he says countries that use dollars for trade purchases to buy american assets pursuant strategy by conquest by purchase -- that is pretty provocative. peter: he picked that up from warren buffett and ran with it. if you think about it, if you buy something from china, and china doesn't buy anything from you, then china has dollars, they had to do something with those. instead of buying our goods, they buy our assets, which could be treasury bonds, mortgage-backed securities, real estate factories -- that is what both buffett and navarro are talking about. acquiring assets in the u.s. with the dollars they get from

their trade surplus. oliver: now we are starting to hear the voice that we heard from the president. we talked about indebtedness to china. bad trade deals, unfair trade deals. let's talk about that word "unfair." we hear it a lot. how does peter navarro define an unfair trade deal? peter: one can be outright cheating where the chinese would violate the terms of their own deals by keeping out american products. there could be local content laws that are disadvantageous to the u.s. it could be subsidies, or could

be lax environmental laws that allow them to manufacture more cheaply. could be punitive bad conditions for workers. on the case for china, for a long while, china was holding down the value of its currency. no longer the case, but that period of time might have caused lasting damage to the u.s. manufacturing sector. oliver: the malware that is affecting hundreds of thousands of computers and could be the tip of the iceberg. carol: and the ride hailing app rivaling uber. oliver: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

♪ oliver: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm oliver renick. carol: and i'm carol massar. shadow brokers has released malware affecting hundreds of

thousands of computers. oliver: it will not be an easy problem to solve. >> they tried to auction off what they said was a big cash of of sort-ofche nsa-level hacking tools. carol: how do they appear? did they go online and say they have hacking tools? >> they said, guys, we have juicy stuff. they dropped one of the tools. i think it was a flaw in a firewall that cisco makes. cisco eventually confirmed this was a real flaw. this was a major, major problem. this time, when they released this cache, they released the password on medium, which we all have access to if we want to. it is basically a kind of blogging site for regular people. carol: talk about what they released.

>> they did not get the money they wanted. no one ponied up $1 million in bitcoin for its cash. eventually, in april, they posted this really bizarre medium post. this rant all directed at trump, president trump, saying, don't forget your base. these things are wrong," just remember, we are supporters and we want to see you get this right. and they released the password for this file online of this cash of tools, giving it away to anybody online. oliver: so these hacking tools --let's be specific, it -- is it about hacking different entities or the most easily hacked? what is the information you are buying if you were to go and download? are they tools or directional tools?

dune: you have tools to hack into, i mean, until a month ago, it was tools to hack into any windows computer. it is a whole framework of tools, a whole platform with funny names. "fuzzbunch." and then there are exploits to get into the computer. carol: so any windows computer here at cisco, in the government, the federal reserve, anywhere? dune: yes, but there is a big but -- microsoft released patches for these vulnerabilities in march. they didn't -- that was before this was made public and given away for free. carol: somehow, they were picked up that this stuff was coming? dune: that is the speculation. somehow they found out. these taxes were released in march. directly, that -- theoretically, that protects anything recent in

-- more recent than windows 7. there is a caveat to that because patching is notoriously --people don't patch. oliver: download software and reinstall it. carol: companies may not even be able to afford to do or think about doing it. dune: patching is free, but a lot of smaller companies to operate on older systems. and they don't have the money to upgrade, or use a specific system on a specific device. oliver: and in the technology section, ride-hailing app juno -- carol: that was a hard promise to keep your did -- that was a hard promise to keep. >> juno launched early last week and its pitch was creating a system identical to uber, but we treat its drivers really well, and give you the riders a better service and you would feel better about using it over uber.

which maybe you already feel and eventually all of the drivers would migrate over to juno. oliver: how was it doing things differently to make them a more driver-friendly service? >> the service was setting aside half of its equity for the drivers themselves and would accrue stock the more they drove with the company, and if it ever sold or went public, they would be in for this windfall. oliver: but? >> juno had a large exit last week. you think great, these drivers are going to get big checks? in fact, the company sent emails to the drivers -- this is how

the drivers found out it was sold -- and they said we have been sold and we voided all your stock, but are willing to give you somewhere in the range of $100 to $200. oliver: what was the original terms that the drivers said we want to do this stuff they were uber drivers. they said, i'm gonna do the exact same thing but i'm just going to use a different app. is there pushback weekly? >> it is not clear, but it does seem there is a way that juno probably structured this where there is not pushback legally. it was actually a little bit unclear if the way the program had been structured whatever would pass legal muster. uber has said it looked into given stock to its drivers at one point, and could not figure

out how to offer stock options to independent contractors. all of these drivers are independent contractors. oliver: there is a sever, legal issue that you can assign stocking gift stock to somebody that is not technically an employee, or you have to figure out a way to do that. what is the breakdown in terms of how that would work? >> so, juno said it could do it. uber decided not to -- so, juno said it could do it. uber decided not to. what came down to it was the stocks were set up to invest after the drivers drove for a certain amount of time. you had to put in a set amount of hours on the road for three years. juno did not make it as a company being three years old. so, none of those stocks had vested yet. normally, in a standard contract, what would happen is there would be something called a continuation clause, which says, if i am an employee for

a company that gets bobby for my -- that gets bought before my that company will make me whole by given the equity in the new company, or me the cash value-based on the acquisition value. oliver: interesting. what with that cash values be though shares? >> it is hard to tell. and it was unclear how these things were being handed out. but if company that sold for $200 million, and the drivers got half, that would be 100 million drivers -- $100 million. as new investors came on, the drivers would have had their state go down slightly -- their

stake go down slightly. carol: drag queen superstar rupaul creates a bustling drag economy. that story ahead on "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

♪ carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm carol massar. oliver: and i'm oliver renick. you can catch us on the radio. washingtonoston, d.c., and the bay area. carol: in the technology section, microsoft is out with a new laptop that something looks just as good as a mack. oliver: the company is hoping that they can buy it out of apple. >> you go back three years ago, it was an absolute disaster. investors hated it.

wanted them to get rid of it. there were tens of thousands of layoffs. but they have really fix the business, putting out interesting, innovative product. they are small sellers in terms of volume, but they are getting good reviews. oliver: what are they actually making? we have seen some microsoft phones, hardware in the past with some of their glasses. what are they doing that is really big? dina: they announced their first real laptop, all the other ones were domination tablet laptops. it is called the surface laptop and it is as beautiful laptop with an aluminum shell and this microfiber keyboard, targeted at college students. apart from a market that is unhappy that apple has not released a new macbook air or a new macbook pro and quiet he sometime. oliver: i was looking at it

before we spoke and it is a very attractive device. it looks great. but it does look remarkably like the macbook air. they are seizing on an opportunity because we have talked about this --there are a lot of customers that want apple to update the laptops in the computer hardware. but they've been focusing on phones mostly. dina: apple has apologized for neglecting their customer base and microsoft has come in. a lot that microsoft did was figure out where the opportunities were. they are putting the focus on, we don't want to do "me, too" devices -- we don't want to compete with our own hardware partners. dell and a number of other manufactures make windows devices. they wanted to focus on areas where they could do something they feel is unique and differentiated. where there is a market opportunity.

in terms of phones, they were basically telling us, they are not going to get back into that market unless they can do something different. they don't want to do something that looks like a me to device. oliver: over nine seasons, reality television show rupaul's drag race has -- carol: they draw crowds of 40,000. >> it is a group of drag queens that submit to be on the show, then they have weekly challenges when they have to sing, dance, or make outfits, and then they put it on the runway in front of judges. each week, there is usually an elimination. when it gets down to three queens, then gets into the finals. >> i'm thinking of one of the originals like america's next top model, is it within that mold? >> i would say so. actually, what i found most interesting watching the show is

there is actually a lot of put-ups. it is not about dragging everybody down. there is a level of cattiness but i wasind impressed with the psychology of it where they are working towards get at the core of who these people are and build them up and embrace their food diversity. oliver: talk about the convention. what goes on there. any time there are always businesses. whether retailers that go there to try to set up, and what is happening there? chandra: from what i can understand, it is a lot of drag supplies. synthetic breasts, dresses, skin tanning solutions, makeup, lots and lots of makeup, jewelry, wigs, heels --all of the elements that you would need to perform in drag. there is a panel for people presenting. world of wonder does their own.

teen vogue was involved with one. "everything you've always wanted to know about talking to -- another" oliver: that is the production company that does the show? chandra: world of wonder, yes. oliver: when we interviewed people about a drag-con, they said everyone is welcome here. you may not understand the culture, but they are welcoming everyone, close to everyone. there is one, the donald trump may not be welcomed. but there are different things going on. there is makeup lessons, there are opportunities for brands and product placement type stuff i imagine? chandra: absolutely. something i thought was amazing as well with this was the first time they did a kid's zone that was specifically for youth. sometimes, people know early on that they want to dress up in drag. another theme of the show is finding your time and knowing that they have a community of people. they made it family-friendly. i thought that was amazing actually.

carol: "bloomberg businessweek" is available on newsstands now. oliver: and also on bloomberg.com. but was your favorite stories that go on? carol: i enjoyed the story on rt, formerly known as russia today, grabbing eyeballs in gaining influence when it comes to u.s. elections, u.s. issues, and has ties back to the russian government and vladimir putin. the potential for influence. how about you? oliver: i like the one on amazon, but i will give it to peter coy's story on peter navarro. a very colorful portrayal of an economist. field.posed within his

carol: i love that he was a liberal. oliver: interesting character. bloomberg television starts right now. ♪ ♪

♪ emily: i'm emily chang and this is "the best of bloomberg technology." where we bring you all of our top interviews from the week in tech. coming up, apple missed on revenue. investors are concerned with falling iphone sales and business in china. we will break it all down. plus, as facebook nears 2 billion monthly active users, could an ad slowdown be nearing? we will hear from sheryl sandberg on the social network's earnings report ahead. and our extended sitdown with