We have been so focused on the auto sector. We had the auto show underway in detroit. When we think of self driving, we think of the auto manufacturers, but you also have to think about the paint manufacturers. That is what you guys write about this week . Jim this is a really interesting story, because we think this technology is all about sensors and hightech things and now some of the most oldschool companies around, paint manufacturers, are sort of key to the new technology. What it turns out that for all the sensors we are equipping newfangled cars with, Autonomous Vehicles need to be able to bounce off another oncoming vehicle or vehicles around and then they judge the distance between them, they do crucial to make this work. The problem is it turns out theres a blind spot these sensors have, and that is people cant read very well cars that are black or dark colored. Carol and there are a lot out there. Jim thats it. The bouncing needed to determine distance between things doesnt happen when things get black. So paint manufacturers are coming up with new ways to how to make things about back. Make things bounceback. They have taken inspiration from an unusual place. Julia from eggplants. Jim the eggplant. It turns out it is dark but grows in the sun and stays cool when it is picked. So an engineer at ppg figured out that is because the nearultraviolet rays go through the dark skin and bounce off of the white underside and come back. What they discovered is you can do paint that has a paint that goes through the dark outside, goes to a white undercoat and bounces back to the sensor and therefore, it can be used for Autonomous Vehicles. Julia i wonder what the challenges here would be if you have autonomous technology, electric vehicles, does that mean less vehicles on the road, but the amount of paint that is required for vehicle is far higher. Jim it turns out youre right. If you have autonomous and more shared vehicles, there are fewer cars and if i make paint, i will and therefore if i make paint, i will lose business. This is great, however, because electric cars particularly need lots and lots of paint and coatings. All the batteries and there are lots of batteries. The bottom of the car is almost completely batteries. All of them have to be wrapped in paint and coating. Carol what is fun about this story is paint is kind of hightech already. It controls temperature and so much more. I didnt know that. Jim but we have so many smart features built into the new cars now. Cars that can park themselves, cars that have the distance determination within the car, all those things require sensors and a lot of those sensors work better if they can either have special paints that are around the electronics or around the part of the car on the bumpers to allow the waves to go in and out. Julia ppg is working on barcodes to allow cars to identify each other, which is quite fascinating. I want to move over to the u. S. Cover story this week and talk about who would love to paint over the cracks. Travis kalanick. Jim it is quite a story. We have sort of got a look at the yearlong fall of ubers ceo and going from the hot startup the company that could do no wrong to the Company Everyone hated. It is an interesting tale because it is a tale of hubris, overreach, stubbornness and it says so much about Silicon Valley and so much about american business. Carol and it is a great thing about Travis Kalanick crawling on all fours. I am not going to give it away, but it is unbelievable. Brad stone has written a lot about uber in the past. Hes got a book out, and this is kind of an update of that story. We talked to brad. Brad one year ago, uber was writing high. Was riding high. It was a Company Valued at almost 70 billion. It was seen as this success, this unimaginable Success Story that transformed transportation around the world, but that was the public perception. And inside, there was a little bit of early worry that this company had gone too hard too fast for too long. And the one of the things they did, they took the first step toward hiring a professional manager, a guy named jeff jones, who came in as the president. He was a former target marketing guy. He came to uber. He only lasted a couple of months, but he decided to do some marketing surveys to see what the perception of the company was. Carol and uber had never done this. Brad of course not, that was way too conventional. Julia of course, some were voicing slight concerns. Others had no concerns whatsoever. Brad of course. Travis kalanick, the cofounder and ceo, felt pretty secure in his aggressive approach, but jeff conducted some Polling Research and they found that the more people knew about uber, about how it was run and who was running it, the less favorable a perception they had. So this meeting where Eric Newcomer and i start our story in businessweek this week is all about the meeting where they were talking about this. The question is, did uber have a pr problem or did it have a how the company was run problem . Julia a culture problem. Brad exactly, a culture problem. And this was before all of this stuff happened, they they were debating that. Ironically, bloomberg and my colleague, eric, we posted a video of the dashcam footage of Travis Kalanick over Super Bowl Weekend 2017 berating a driver. Carol talk about timing. So kalanick looks at that video and goes back to this meeting and starts crawling around on all fours. Brad this is when he saw the video. He is on his knees and is saying, im terrible, im horrible. But you know, its funny because that meeting had big ramifications, and we report on this in our story, which is about the unraveling of uber. One of the things was travis went and entered into a financial arrangement, a private financial arrangement with the driver that really alienated some of his colleagues at uber. Another thing that happened is he didnt really address the core problem. He continued to think it was a pr problem. Julia even at that point, after he had crawled on the floor for a little bit, he was like, we need new pr strategies . I want you to explain more about that financial arrangement with this driver, because you point out this was meant to be a conversation. He was going to go apologize and the thing got a little bit heated again and he started saying he would write a check to the guy. The other member of uber that was there was like, hold on a second. What is going on here . Brad right. That is one element and a previously unreported element of the saga, travis went to the driver. I might mispronounce his name. He was advised to spend a couple of minutes in the room with him, apologize and leave, and he debated him for an hour and agreed to give him uber stock. Ubers lawyers objected to that, and he ended up making a private payment. After he had gotten removed as ceo but was still actively involved in the company, there was some sense the media would report on this. And from afar, when he asked ubers global head of security, a guy named joe sullivan, to see if he could look at the emails of people who might be leaking this story, and now we are six or seven months later, a precipitating event that led in part to the entire 14member executive Leadership Team writing a letter to the board asking board members, but travis in particular, to step out of the daytoday. Carol turning the trouble into a cover image was the job of a design director. Chris there are no photos of him doing any of these things, so we hired this illustrator to do kind of a couple different scenes. This is definitely the most visually impactful one of him on his knees after he has watched this video of him arguing with the uber driver. Carol it feels like such a different cover for you guys. I looked at it, and i am so used to photographs or type, but there was a lot of white space. Chris we wanted it to be arresting and we used the typography to zero in on him. Have that weight of all those different events. Carol interesting that you say that, because is it the companys problems and ultimately, it turned out to be the ceo who was the problem. Chris definitely. He is falling and falling and falling and falling. Carol up next, kentuckys experiment with medicaid. Julia plus, gerrymandering gets its day in court. Carol this is Bloomberg Businessweek. Carol welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. Im carol massar. Julia im julia chatterley, and you can find us online at businessweek. Com. Carroll this summer, kentucky will begin requiring medicare recipients to show they are working. Julia we spoke to Matthew Philips about how the plan may unfold and what might be the outcome. Matt this is something conservatives have long wanted to do in their idea to shrink eligibility for medicaid and to make it harder to qualify for a lot of the social safety net that exists for poor and low income americans. So on january 12, President Trump gave states the ability to start experimenting with medicaid however they want. They have to apply for waivers, but a lot of that will include adding work requirements to that. The next day, they approved a kentucky request to do just that, which had been pending since 2016. So starting this coming summer in july, kentucky will be the first state in the union to require medicaid recipients to prove that they are working and if not, that they are disabled or pregnant or volunteering or in school. Julia very briefly, who does this actually apply to then and of those that are getting medicaid at this moment, who would be excluded . Matthew sure, so medicaid is the 53yearold federal and state program that is aimed at providing insurance for lowincome americans. Right now, 72 million americans are enrolled in medicaid. That spending is just shy of 700 billion and accounts for about 20 of total Health Care Spending in the united states. So it is a massive social Safety Net Program and right now, your income threshold, depending on where you are in the country, is about 138 of the poverty line, which amounts to about 16,000. That was expanded under the Affordable Care act under president obama and about 30 states, including kentucky, chose to expand medicaid. So those numbers went up starting about 2014. What we are seeing now is, on top of the gop effort in congress to undercut and repeal obamacare, kind of chip away at it, now the battle has moved to the state level. Kentucky is the first state to do this. There are nine other states that have similar waivers that are pending in front of the federal government that will probably be approved sometime in the next few months. So we will wsnt to see for 2018 and for the next few years, we will see this social experiment conservatives have been wanting to do to raise the eligibility for medicaid to save money and get people back to work. Julia also in politics, two redistricting cases are raising the odds at the Supreme Court may define some voting maps violate the constitution. We got more from peter coy. Peter gerrymandering is when you either pack all the voters from the other party into a certain district where they will be harmless, because you put them all in one place, or you will try to spread them out very thinly, but always in the minority so they cant win. Basically, it is a way of making sure your party gets more seats than the other one disproportionate to the actual support for the party in the state. Julia where were these cases and what will be heard this year . Peter they have already heard one case back in october involving wisconsin and redistricting the state assembly, and it was republicans that did it and the democrats objected. The case in maryland, the opposite. One single congressional district, a democrat districts where the republicans are complaining. Julia when these districts are opposite. One single congressional district, a democrat districts where the republicans are complaining. Julia when these districts are redrawn, what is the excuse given if not for political reasons . Carol and it is done every 10 opposite. One single congressional district, a democrat districts where the republicans are complaining. Julia when these districts are redrawn, what is the excuse given if not for political reasons . Carol and it is done every 10 years, isnt it . Peter right. On the state level, for purposes of congressional districting it is related to the census. One reason you draw lines is to make sure you have the same number of people in each district. The one person, one vote rule. You have to do that anyway. So then it comes down to where do you draw the line . Julia the shape. Peter there are many ways to get the same number of people in the district, and you can see some i believe it was massachusetts where the word gerrymandering came from. It looked like the shape of a dragon. But with modern software, they are getting more creative in finding ways to pack and crack. Those are the terms in the profession to get maximum advantage. Carol who is in charge of drawing the lines . I feel like in this day and age with computers and algorithms, you could just throw the data in and let a computer decide. Julia meeting all the requirements. Carroll right, make it fair. But who ultimately peter state legislatures do it. Here is the case. John roberts, Supreme Court chief justice, is very strong on the idea that he does not want the court to be politicized. Or even to be perceived as political. He wants to keep his hands clean because he said the credibility of the Supreme Court is very important and has to be preserved. Julia bipartisan. Peter yeah, and he is afraid if they start disallowing this redistricting, allowing that one, inevitably people will say they are being partisan. Julia up next, political instability is leading some bankers to seek friends in unusual places. Carol and Silicon Valley sees a brain drain to china. Julia this is Bloomberg Businessweek. Julia welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. Im julia chatterley. Carol im carol massar. Julia in the economic section, the u. K. s opposition party, the labour party, has been sought out by fund managers, ceos and bankers over the past six months. Carroll the reason may be simple. The prospect of labour winning power is starting to overshadow brexit as the biggest wildcard for investors. Julia here is our editor christina lindblad with more. Christina mcdonnell is not your typical politician. He has been a veteran of labour and hes a man who has waived the red book in debate in parliament and lists one of his interests as fermenting the overthrow of capitalism. Julia that will sit well with everybody. [laughter] carol talk about that, because business people, investors are more concerned about labour winning in the next election than they are about brexit. Cristina the partys performance in the snap election was a wakeup call to britain. Carol 40 of the vote. Cristina thats right, a High Water Mark that goes up to the 2000s. So i think the expectation is they have a very good shot of winning the next election, whenever that happens. One is not scheduled for years, but we know that mays government is very troubled, so it could come sooner. So i think there is a moment where it is like lets feel each other out, where we stand. It is an opportunity perhaps for business to go in and say these are parts of your agenda that make us really uncomfortable. Is there any room for flexibility in these areas . Also but i think one of the big issues is that the party the partys stance on brexit has been more flexible than mays conservatives. I think businesses and the Banking Sector are certainly attracted to that since they overwhelmingly opposed brexit. Julia traditionally, the labour party would have been proeurope, there is the debate on brexit that maybe if Jeremy Corbyn had taken a strong stance and we wouldnt be here in the first place. There is some strange irony. What extent are businesses now courting him, approaching him, trying to talk to him . Like you said, there are concerning policies when you look down the list, whether it is raising Corporate Taxes or reversing that Corporate Tax cuts we have seen, raising the level of personal taxes quite dramatically, borrowing, it is very labour. Old labour. Cristina it harkens back. So people are actively seeking audiences with corbyn and mcdonnell. I think more people have been talking with mcdonnell. Julia yes. Cristina it is a strange situation because lobbyists and some advisor firms dont have contacts into labour. They date back into new labour, so they are having to scramble a bit. Some people have resorted to the idea of trying to get a seat next to mcdonnell at events. [laughter] carol i love that. Cristina and goldman just sort of walked up to him at a conference and said we would like to have a meeting, and they are working on scheduling something. Carroll in the technology section, chinese engineers in Silicon Valley are moving back home in record numbers. Julia we talked to jeff muskas about the trend. Jeff they are getting tired of a bamboo ceiling, this idea there are not leadership roles available to them in the major Silicon Valley companies. Or at the very least, it is taking them too long to rise above the level of entrylevel engineering and deal with the kinds of grander problems that they see friends and colleagues back in china wrestling with. Julia and now tech has taken over finance as the most popular reason for these guys to go back home. Jeff according to a recent survey, it accounts for one in six expats going back to china. Julia at a time when xi jinping is cracking down on internet privacy and the approach for these companies, why is it so easy for these guys to start up their own companies . Jeff according to the headhunters, a big piece of that began with the 2014 ipo of alibaba. Now there is more money than ever flowing through chinese Venture Capital funds. Once in a while, even, there was briefly more chinese vc money than american vc money. Getting back to the bamboo ceiling question, chinese engineers seem to have a much better time raising money if they are in china. Carol and you do talk about the vc money flowing into china. Three of the five biggest startups are based in beijing. That gives a credibility when it comes to the startup world. Jeff absolutely, and the other piece of this opportunity question aside from the money, one engineer, according to our reporters, received 30 million in compensation for a fouryear deal. Carol whoa. That blew my mind. 30 million for a fouryear deal for an engineer. Jeff it really is pro athlete money. Or ceo. Carol like a sports contract, yeah. Jeff but the other piece to it, according to the industry we the engineers we spoke to has everything to do with what you are talking about in terms of the looser privacy laws, this idea that the 700 million chinese Internet Users privacy and data is much more accessible and usable than those of americans. Julia that makes total sense. When does this become a problem for Silicon Valley that they are losing all this talent to places like china, and i am sure it is going on in other countries, too. Jeff the thing Silicon Valley has to worry about in the long term is losing airelated engineers who, at the moment, are the most in demand of anybody in the valley or elsewhere around the world. That could take a while. Of the 850,000 ai engineers or ai related workers in the u. S. Right now. But one in 12 of 70,000 have chinese heritage of some kind. That is still more engineers then in china, it is about 50,000. Carol up next, the latest cosmetic innovation in china doesnt come in a tube or compact, it is found in a petri dish. Julia plus, a brave face from intels ceo at the recent cef conference, but the problems persist. Carol this is Bloomberg Businessweek. Julia welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. Im julia chatterley. Carol and im carol massar. Still ahead in this weekss issue, fixing intels chips. Julia making a fortune from mexican drug ballads. That is still to come on Bloomberg Businessweek. Julia we are back with assistant managing editor jim ellis and the editor of the business section here. In the more mustread section, beauty may be skin deep, but that skin matters. Jim it matters quite a lot. It turns out that humans all have very similar epidermis, but beneath that, there are lots of differences. Lots of ways that individual cells react differently depending on the race or nationality or locality of the person, and loreal, the french cosmetics company, is doing some very interesting work with that, looking at how it can tailormake cosmetics for chinese skin, and to do that, it has gone to the lab and are making chinese skin, growing it there. Carol and this is how they can play around with products, adapting existing products so they work well on chinese skin. James it turns out that when even if the products have the same name, they can have big differences for the Chinese Market or the u. S. Market, or even the european market. Revitalift in the u. S. Market and europe, it goes through getting rid of wrinkles. Julia it is a plumper. Jim it is a plumper, but the way chinese skin ages, it tends to plump up as women age. Instead, they are looking for flexibility and the ability to get rid of discolorations, but the name stays the same. You discover this when you grow skin and then test it and see how it reacts versus skin they have already been growing for europeans for years. Carol what is interesting is the skin they are developing, they are also creating another market where they are selling it to other Cosmetics Companies to do their own testing. James they are donating it to academic researchers, but selling it to other Cosmetics Companies. So this is it is a double business for them. Julia the other challenge is the chinese demand products be tested on animals. Carol the body shop is one that does not want to do that. Julia their brand is based on that. Jim this is the possibility of allowing Companies Like berts bees, who currently dont sell directly in china, to enter those markets because once you develop what truly is skin, you can test on that skin and dont have to test on animals. So we have already seen lots of Companies Getting excited about that and this is the wave of the future for skin care. Carol talking about futures, lets see what the future of intel is. This is another story we have a future i feel like this will end up being the big stories of 2018. It is about intel, and a group of researchers discovered a major, major flaw in intel chips. Jim what is so interesting about this is not the fact that we found a flaw. We find flaws in technology a lot, and in some ways that is a good thing. You are constantly trying to tighten things up, but the issue here was a google researcher actually discovered this flaw in intels chips. The thing is it is in the chips used in most pcs and most devices around the world. The sheer scale of this is what makes it so phenomenal, that all of a sudden and also what it involves. It involves the section of a chip where you carol like your passwords. Your information. Jim you put your information there, and they figured out a way to access that, things like passwords, security codes and that is a problem, especially a problem that intel knew for six months and never said anything about. Julia and there are whopping great share sales in that time. This is a fascinating story. Here is reporter max eskin. Max ces was about a week and a half ago. The Consumer Electronics show, the big gadget extravaganza and then, brian krzanich, the ceo of intel comes out for a short amount of time says something very serious, which is not quite an apology, but an explanation of this terrible security flaw that had been discovered days earlier. So it was a very awkward situation and the security flaw you could make an argument it is the worst security flaw in the history of computer chips. It is a really bad one. Julia what exactly did he say on that stage . Because as you said, this is huge. Max that is where the story goes, is that he didnt quite apologize, which was surprising because this is so bad. He thanked intels partners for standing with the company in the face of this security flaw and then basically tried to change the subject. What my cowriter ian king and i get into in the story is this isnt going to be an easy subject to change. Earlier this year, right at the beginning of the year, intel disclosed these two vulnerabilities. One is called specter, one is called meltdown. What they amount to is the most secure part of your computer, the part that basically everyone thought was uncrackable, is in fact crackable. It gets really technical really quickly, but it is the memory access by the kernel, the operating system on your computer and a group of security researchers, led by somebody at google but also working people all around the world, figured out how to get into it. Carroll what i love is that security researchers there was a thing floating out there that there may be a way to get in and no, intel could never have left a hole like this to get in, but they did. Max this is one of those ones where people were talking about it in theoretical terms and as we say in the story, and as bloomberg has reported previously, the security researchers looked past this because they assumed no one would miss this. Julia the accusation here is they put speed before security here and as you mentioned at the beginning, actually, most of their clients, their partners have been pretty tightlipped over the subject. Microsoft would be the one i would point to and came out and said fixing these flaws could mean delays. Max and it is important to remember one thing that happened is you have this bad flaw and then most of intels partners, with the exception of microsoft, publicly come out and stand arm in arm with intel. Carol kumbaya. Max but one reason we havent seen more stuff out in the open is because intel has a virtual monopoly on server chips. Server chips are the chips that basically run the internet. It is not the biggest, but probably the most important line of intels business. They still sell tons of cpus for personal computers, but they are basically the only game in town in server chips at the moment. And so amazon, microsoft, apple, all these companies that buy a lot of these chips dell, hewlettpackard they cant just break with intel. They have to work with this company because there is nobody else. The problem is there is not really anyway one of these flaws is patchable, sort of, but it will really slow down the chips. The other flaw is not really patchable and in any case, the only way we get past this is with a full chip redesign. That is going to take a long time. It is not the kind of thing they can just fix overnight. That is why you are seeing these big cloud providers publicly try to put on a brave face, maybe privately saying whoa, this is really bad. Julia up next, on the lookout for a bitcoin bubble and what may cause it to go pop. Carol plus, what might give high school and college a bad grade. Julia this is Bloomberg Businessweek. Julia welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek, im julia chatterley. Carol im carol massar. You can also find us online at businessweek. Com. Julia and the bloomberg mobile app. In the finance section, the big bitcoin question. Carroll from 900 to 20,000 to 10,000. What would it take for more of a selloff . You have seen incredible Price Movement in bitcoin in the past year. A year ago, it was under 1000. It went over 20,000 briefly last month and is now back at 12,000. It is not often you can see an asset that sees a bubble and a crash at the same time, but what we are looking at in this article is what are the kind of things that could dent that confidence in bitcoin . Because we are making the case that bitcoin is a belief. People believe in it, it is the First Digital currency that cant be stopped by governments or corporations and that is appealing to a lot of people. I think that is what got us from 2009 up to last year. With bitcoin, you have seen hacks and exchanges, hundreds of millions of dollars of bitcoin stolen, governments try to ban it. There has been a civil war going on among the developers who are essential to this for years and yet, none of that has stopped this incredible upward momentum. Carol one thing you do say is a risk, that would be be the Underlying Technology of bitcoin, and that is blockchain. Maybe having problems with that, because so far, we havent seen problems. That is the thing that makes bitcoin possible, the blockchain. It is a timeordered sequence of every transaction that has ever been done with a bitcoin. You know everything you can trace back the history of the bitcoin you just bought. And that is why the Digital Currency works. For the first time, that was the main breakthrough. So it is possible to go in and overwhelm that network of computers all around the world and try to change that history so you can pay for a yacht for 10 million of your bitcoin and go in and hack the network and take the bitcoin back and you still have your yacht. That is a silly example, but what is so interesting about this is if you can take over the network and have that much computing power, you might as well sit there and earn bitcoin for the transactions you verify. You get free bitcoin for every one you do, so the incentive it is fascinating that there is not an incentive to hack it, unless like from the batman movie, some joker type who wants to sow chaos in the world. That is possible, but it is interesting that every but we get to has a strong counter argument in my opinion. Carroll and now to another debate the cost and benefits of education. Julia opening the magazine this week, in remarks, peter coy considers the controversial theme of an economists economists new book. Carol the case against education why the Education System is a waste of time and money. Julia ouch. I think the title says it all. Listen in. Peter it is a theory that has produced a bunch of nobel prizes that signals education, having a degree, walking into an Employment Office with a diploma says stuff to an employer about your level of intelligence, your willingness to work hard and complete the fouryear degree and your degree of conformity, in a sense, in that you managed to work through a fairly rigid system and comply with all of its rules. Carol the boring classes, perhaps. Julia it is about this signaling effect and what you actually gain from being there. Peter from what you learned. The core idea is that if you believe in signaling, you could study anything. Sanskrit, cement mixing, and it will be perfectly fine as far as the employers are concerned because they are not paying you for what you learned in college, but just for the very fact that you have that degree. Julia he believes only 5 of americans should actually get a College Education. I mean, that is a headline. Peter that is pretty extreme. So a lot of people, i think, will read this book and be with him on a lot of his points and yeah, i went to college and spent a lot of time throwing frisbees around and dont know how much i really learned. How much of what i learned in history class or quadrilaterals whatever that stuff is, i dont remember. [laughter] julio the triangles, i know. Julia the triangles, i know. Square of the hypotenuse. Carol right, or algebra or geometry, how much do we use it on a daily basis . What is interesting as you also say all right, if says only 5 of people should go to school and you take away a lot of funding and support, college loans, who gets to go to school . Ultimately, the wealthy. Peter that is where i come to at the end of the piece. I believe that, as a libertarian who is very focused on getting government out of the picture and the free market will sort things out for the best, the people who should go to college will go to college because it will be worth it to them, but i am afraid about is the people who will have the money or the parents who have the money who will still see the benefit of college as a signal and make sure their kids go to school and you have lost the potential benefits of college for equalizing society. Julia but he does make the distinction between a vocational qualification and a degree. I think we need to make this point too. What does the evidence suggest about getting a College Education and your earning power Going Forward . Because we did this in the u. K. And promoted more people getting degrees, and you had people do things like beyonce studies as a College Course i exaggerate, but they didnt get a job afterward. Peter that is a strong point of his argument. If you are academically inclined, and you can learn a lot and do get that Human Capital benefit, but for people who arent, they actually could be better off learning a productive trade, heating, ventilating, and air conditioning, name it. And they will be happier. They will probably work harder because it will be something they have a genuine interest in, and their lifelong earnings could end up being higher than if they go into some liberal arts program and dont learn anything. Carroll up next, a mexican star earning fame singing about the drug trade. Julia plus, financier charles king on getting black people seen and heard in hollywood. Carol this is Bloomberg Businessweek. Carol welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. Im carol massar. Julia im julia chatterley. You can listen to us on xm radio and also in new york, boston, washington, d. C. And the bay area. Carol and in london on dab and in asia on the Bloomberg Radio plus app. In the futures section, a look at the semi official music of drug cartels. Julia they are known as narcocorridos, and record label twins music group has made this pretty dark genre its speciality. Carol here is reporter david peiser. David el komander is this guy named alfredo rios, and this guy has become a popstar. His claim to fame is singing these very violent narcocorridos. They are essentially mexican drug ballads. He sings songs about mexican drug cartels, drug activity among other things. He sings traditional romantic love songs as well. I guess his big claim to fame is that he really kind of narcocorridos have existed in mexican music for decades, but he really upped the ante and made them more violent, more graphic, and that is what made him famous. Carol right. You included some of the lyrics in your reporting and it is pretty interesting. I didnt realize this was such a popular mode of music. David yeah. I mean like any kind of music, it goes in and out of popularity or in cycles, but it is very popular. It has a huge following. Even shows in california, in atlanta these guys play all around the u. S. And they play to 5000, 10,000 people in mexico, some places in Central America they will be playing to 10,000 to 15,000 people. Carol and 100 million views on youtube. People are watching what he is doing. David it is a big market and yeah, youtube has been a huge part of it. These guys do very elaborate videos and make their videos into little fiveminute movies and they are very savvy about that. Julia but this is quite heartbreaking, i have to say. They are glamorizing something that has huge implications for the country. Obviously, we have seen the Mexican Government really crack down on this in the past couple of years. As you pointed out in the article, last year was the deadliest year for drugrelated killings we have seen in many years. So talk to us about the record label that he is actually signed to and what kind of pushback have they received on the music they are making . David the name of the label is twins and it is run by two guys who are twins. One of them now lives outside of l. A. And has an office in burbank. The other one has an office down south. The label has been very successful. El komander is kind of their big star, but as far as pushback, it is not as much as you might think. The best analogy is if you think about gangster rap here. Yes, there are people who are upset about it but for the most part, it has become part of the sort of musical landscape and i think narcocorridos in the same way have become part of the mexican musical landscape, with tradition going back quite a ways. Julia focusing on the entertainment business now, and this weeks game changer is charles king. Carol he was the first black partner at hollywood power Agency William Morris endeavor. Julia and now he is financing films in hollywood. Carol here is reporter lucas shaw. Lucas he is a guy from atlanta who went to vanderbilt and then Howard Law School and then worked in the mailroom of one of the oldest agencies in hollywood. He was inspired by barry diller, a couple of moguls who took the same path. Agencies have been the way to rise in hollywood, and he became the first black partner at the William Morris endeavor company after it merged. And he finally filled his dreams for filled his dreams of starting his own company, and specifically, bankrolling filmmakers of color. Hollywood had a reputation of this very progressive place, primarily has white directors, white male directors and charles has set out, both as an agent in representing the likes of tyler perry and others, and now a company trying to get black directors behind the camera. Julia he said he Still Believes casting in hollywood is about appeasement when people of color are hired rather than being fundamental change. How do you think he thinks he can change that specifically . Lucas i think he is hoping macro, his company, by selecting directors of color to make movies, those directors will then have a crew that is more diverse and a cast that is more diverse. If you look at what is happening in hollywood right now, there are a handful of powerful directors. The director of selma made a show for oprahs tv network, where i believe all of the directors and most of the writers and people on the crew were people of color. Charles is trying to do that not with just one director and one project, but with almost everything he does. While that is just a handful of project in a town of hundreds of projects at any one time, every Small Company makes a big difference. Carol lucas, what does he say about his path to where he is today . How hard was it for him to work up the ranks . Lucas i think he, like a lot of people in their 20s, had to kind of figure out where he wanted to go. He was in college, made money by modeling and acting, but always seemed to have this sense, or he says so now, that he was good at identifying talent and making deals for them behind the scenes. He seems like one of those people who was very driven and had a very clear sense of where he wanted to get from an early age. He made the decision to move to hollywood and work at a Talent Agency mailroom. He rose up the ranks there reasonably quickly and when he had the opportunity to start his own company, he did so. I imagine he faced his challenges like anyone else, but he was someone with a clear goal and focus early on. Carol Bloomberg Businessweek is available on newsstands now. Julia and online at businessweek. Com and our mobile app. We have to talk about the cover story. Carol yes. It is really all about the trials and tribulations and downfall of the companys cofounder Travis Kalanick and how you ultimately see investors and team kalanick, employers who were once behind him are not talking him anymore. Not backing him anymore, and that led to his downfall. Julia we talk a lot about this story, but this tracks the path before the media got hold of what was going on at the company. Such a huge disruptor, but at the core of it, perhaps a lesson to be learned about Management Structure as well. Carol it was a tough year in 2017 for uber and this story really breaks it down. Julia it really does. More Bloomberg Television up next. we use our phones and computers the same way these days. So why do we pay to have a phone connected when were already paying for internet . Shouldnt it all just be one thing . Thats why Xfinity Mobile comes with your internet. You can get 5 lines of talk and text included at no extra cost. So all you pay for is data. Choose by the gig or unlimited. And ask how to get a 150 prepaid card when you buy a new lg x charge. Its a new kind of network designed to save you money. Call, visit, or go to xfinitymobile. Com the following is a paid program. The opinions and views expressed do not reflect those of bloomberg, its affiliates, or its employees. Announcer the following is a paid presentation for the there are works relief parent if you are one of the millions of americans who suffer from muscle cramps in your legs and eat, relief is widely insight. Today im here to shared news that got me excited. It is called there are works relief. This lifechanging product is clinically proven to quickly relieve muscle cramps and prevent muscle cramps forth they