Why ceo bob iger believes it superhero showdown, musical animation, and of course will pack theaters this fall. First to our lead, this week we brought you Bloomberg Technology from the conference in laguna beach where we had conversations with some of the biggest names in tech. Lets kick off with my interview with arianna huffington. We started talking about ubers volatile year and the changing role of travis kalanick. Arianna he is on the board, and he is very active. He obviously built uber into the juggernaut it is now. He passed the baton. He was the one who introduced darrah at the all hands when he took over as ceo. It was a very nice transition of power. He has been amazing. He has been handling all the problems, whether it is what is happening in london with the suspension of ubers license to the deal in process with softbank. He has been a great leader. Confidence and willing to show humility in the appropriate times and very committed to building a thriving culture and company. Emily you mentioned the situation uber is facing in london, multiple legal probes elsewhere. What approach do you hope to see dara take to regulation and the law around the world Going Forward . Arianna we need to do better at serving the communities where uber exists around the world. We need to make sure we add to communities beyond the value we already add in terms of mobility and in terms of jobs, which is not to be underestimated. The launch of 180 days of change allowingrted with drivers, which starts with allowing people to rebuild their relationship with drivers. Emily would you say the fractiousness of the board from the outside is now changing . Arianna the board is changing. We are now 11. We have grown. If they softbank deal goes through, the new governance measures that are going to be put in place, which include additional independent Board Members and a new chair, all of these things are really going to make sure that uber has a worldclass governance before going ipo in 2019. Emily we understand that you have been a close confidant for travis kalanick. What is your relationship with him . Arianna he is a friend. Im excited to see his journey. He is only 41. He has a lot of life ahead of him. Im excited to see what he is going to do. Emily we have recently seen the Harvey Weinstein scandal come out and how men can use their power. Companies approached sexualharassment in confusing ways. How do we put guardrails around what is tolerated and what is not . Arianna we see two issues here. One is to end the cult of the top performer. There is this cult in Silicon Valley and hollywood where, if you are delivering results or great performance, then a lot is forgiven. The other issue is for us to break the silence. People see things, and they do not say anything, especially if whoever is involved is someone in a powerful position. We see that in politics also. I would love to see more republicans speaking out about what is happening at the white house. So breaking the silence before the few courageous people, the courageous women who came forward andy Harvey Weinstein case, before it has to come to that point. Politics, you mentioned our president seems to be very divisive. What are your biggest concerns now that we are nine months into this Current Administration . Arianna my biggest concern is that so few republicans are speaking out. It was great to see senator mccain last night speaking out and of course it has been great to see senator corker speaking out. It is so much up to republicans. This is not a partisan issue. It really involves the safety of the country. We need republicans. Democrats, of course, but republicans have a lot more impact if they speak out about what is happening. Emily facebook, twitter, google, they are now having to answer to congress for russian meddling on their platforms. What is the responsibility of these companies when it comes to foreign actors weaponizing the tools they create . Arianna it is very important to increase oversight. Facebook is hiring more people, investing in Machine Learning to catch the creation of these fake accounts. Whatever you think of free speech, nobody wants to see fake accounts being started. I think there is another problem, which is what we are addressing. In the international economy, a lot of these companies have incentives to hijack more and more of our attention. We see that having incredible problems, especially when it comes to teenagers and college students. You saw the article in the New York Times over the weekend about the Mental Health problems among teenagers increasing dramatically. Emily you are announcing a partnership with samsung to turn a smart phone into a dumb phone. What do you mean by that . Arianna when you do not want to be interrupted like when you are with family or sleeping, then you can put your phone into what we call drive mode. During that time, you will not be able to receive calls, texts, notifications. If you have a vip list if you need to get a call from a child or a spouse, you will be able to do that. One is bidirectional. If you put it into drive mode, it will tell you when you are supposed to be out of it. It will also give you a mirror of your social media use. It will tell you you were on instagram for nine hours and ask if you want to change that. It will give you notifications and then shut you out. Emily what is the next step . Arianna it is our work with corporations. We are going to companies. We work to improve culture and outcomes in terms of both productivity and wellbeing. We are also a media platform which increases awareness around these issues. Both are bringing together the latest science and also new models. There are a lot of people who are practicing taking care of themselves and recharging. I have seen the impact this has on their productivity and performance. Emily that was arianna huffington. Coming up, we will have more from laguna beach including our conversation with facebook vp of messaging products. David marcus, how the social media giant plans to become the default messaging app. That is next. This is bloomberg. Emily this week, bloomberg learned that facebook is looking to hire employees who have u. S. Security clearance. They want to eliminate the possibility of foreign actors of using facebook for social media campaigns before elections. Facebook declined to comment on this story. Sticking with facebook and one of the tech leaders in attendance at this years facebook vp of messaging products, david marcus. He was recruited personally by mark zuckerberg. I asked marcus how much revenue the company is driving into advertising. David we do not break out revenues for specific products, but i can say it is still very early in the developed for messaging as a business or facebook. The early signs are promising. If you redirect people from either a facebook ad, instagram ad, or a messenger ad, you will increase roi of your business objective. That we areod sign allowing businesses to create more conversations with the customers and generate more revenues. I have tons of examples for you, but a good one to share for instance is that tmobile is now selling data plans and devices on messenger, and they are saying a seven x conversion increase in comparison to traditional web shopping, because they are able to recreate the experience would have inside a store with ui elements inside messenger. Emily the competition in the chat space is heating up. You have got apple imessage, skype, and even whatsapp trying to own this relationship. How do you see messenger standing out amidst the competition . David it is a very different Geographical Split between different types of messaging apps. What we see is that whatsapp is really strong in certain markets like latin america or india. We are very strong in north america and western and central europe. I think one differentiation that messenger has is really groups today. When you create a group, you are never seeing phone numbers. It is always identities so you know exactly who youre talking to at any point in time. You can send media very quickly. When you add a device, it works flawlessly. You have all of these great chat extensions from creating a playlist with friends to playing games or making plans. You can do all of these things much better on messenger, and it is a key differentiator for us. We will continue to invest in groups and in real time. You can upgrade from texting to live video in groups. It is a really delightful experience with augmented reality. We really feel that we have a key advantage here, and we are going to continue to invest in it. Emily you have new features like location, polling, spotify, the ability to buy movie tickets on fandango, share recipes from the food network. How are these driving user growth . What trends do you see . David those experiences are driving engagement. Once you have those types of expenses you tend to stick with , messenger and create more conversations on messenger. When people actually get what they want, when we can infer intent from a conversation and then leverage m to suggest the right thing at the right time, what we see are that people are having a better experience and sticking around on messenger to create more groups and more conversations. Emily with m, you are referencing ai technology. Some people are saying that facebook seems to be a little behind when it comes to the home ai game. Amazon echo, google, these are products that are already in peoples homes. You think that facebook and Facebook Messenger have some catching up to do . David i think we are having a very different approach here. The current experience you have is that they suggest things that you want to do based off of conversation, and it is really popping up at the right time. As a result, we tend to not disappoint when you have an intent you want to complete. We only surface suggestions when we feel confident that this is what you want to do. The model we have been working on right now is the model we have been talking about with suggestions in conversations, and we are continuing to invest in bringing a more fullfledged assistant to market. We have been working on it for a while. We really want to ship something that is valuable and will not let people down. It is really important. This is one where we do not want to rush to market. We want to get it right. And once we get it right, we will ship it to the 1. 3 billion people on messenger and counting. Emily facebook along with google and twitter will speak before the House Intelligence Committee about russian meddling on the platforms. What responsibility does facebook bear here . What mistakes do you think were made . David one thing i want to say when those things come up, we have been talking a lot about the responsibility of the platform, and clearly we have a lot of responsibility given our reach. I want to highlight one thing. We talk about the downsides of the platform come but we never talk about the upsides. This is something i feel very passionate about. The number of people who connect with other people around the world that have an orphan disease like they have, and they can connect with them in ways that they cannot connect with friends or family, the fact that we had turned on safety alerts about 650 times since we launched it and have one billion notifications going to people to notify them everything is ok, and the fact that we have raised millions of dollars for harvey on the platform, these are things we do not talk about. There is so much goodness on the platforms. When we operate at this scale, there are things that happened that should never happen on the platform, but we do have a clear, crystal plan on how we will go about it. We are hiring thousands of people to ensure that what happened on the platform doesnt happen again, and we are collaborating with special counsel in congress on these investigations, but we are taking this very seriously. We have a plan that both mark and cheryl outlined recently and , we are going to go after it very aggressively. Emily these platforms can be used for good, but they can just as easily be used for bad. When it comes to advertising, we are seeing blind spots in how facebook developed its advertising system. Whether it is targeting racists or fake accounts buying russian advertisements these are things , that facebook has apologized for, but as you continue to build out advertising capabilities in messenger, are you looking for ways that your platform can be abused, and are you taking steps to prevent it . David we can definitely be better at this. All of these things that are currently being raised are things that have made us realize that, as we roll new things out, we need to continue to be more thoughtful and try to over think how the platform can be used in ways that it was not designed for. Going forward, that is definitely what we are going to do. We tend to learn really quickly and fix things very quickly. We had done this in the past, and i have no doubt we will do it again this time. Emily that was facebook vp of messaging platforms, david marcus. Details on when gm might see a payoff from ridesharing investments. This is bloomberg. Emily automation in the drivers seat. Shares in gm have risen over the last year 45 . Deutsche bank expects a big push coming for gm self driving cars. I sat down with gm president dan and and asked him about this analyst call. Dan we actually think one of the big advantages we have today is that we have everything integrated under one roof. We have the advanced Software Engineering capability, the vehicle integration, the vehicle manufacturing fees, and what is allowing us to move so quickly is that we have all of that capability under one roof. That gives us that real speed advantage. Emily so you are saying that moving out of the mobility business is not an option now . Dan we are moving as fast as we can to get to commercial deployment of this technology. We believe the best way to do that is to have all of the capability under one roof. Emily investors are starting to realize gms ability to diversify, perhaps better than other automakers. Whether it be through ridesharing, self driving cars, some of these things are still out in the future. How does it all come together for you . And when . Dan when you think about shared mobility and automation, we believe there will eventually be automation in all vehicles along with electricity. It is back to the theme of having all the capabilities we have under one roof gives us a Real Advantage on how fast we can move and get this technology deployed commercially. Emily you have made a big strategic investment in lyft. How do you leverage what you have learned . Dan we have a very productive investment relationship with lyft which gives us a perspective into the ridesharing business. We think it is really in the early stages of shared mobility. We are just at the beginning, and there is much more to come. Emily uber has had some struggles over the last several months. Do you see some opportunities there . Dan in what sense . Emily opportunities to take advantage of a weakness . Dan we see ridesharing over all as at the intersection of autonomous. Ridesharing today accounts for 0. 1 of all miles traveled. 99. 9 of the opportunity, so it is still very early days. We think the Autonomous Technology we will bring to fruition is the key to unlocking a lot of that next set of opportunities. Emily why have you not bought lyft outright . Dan we have a lot of options when it comes to going to market. We could go to market in our own Network Capability in , different partnerships. All options are open at this time. Emily how do you decide which is the best . At one point do you now that you have learned all this, do you make a decision to move forward . Dan the closer it comes to being commercially deployed, the more clarity that comes. What really matters is to get the total vehicle profitable. We do believe in an all electric future at general motors, and we believe that in order for that to come to fruition overtime, we need to get the cost of battery electric cars down to in line or better than internal Combustion Engine cars. We, as a company, have the capability to solve that problem. We do still have a little more work to go. Emily when it comes to itself driving cars, gm has been able to move faster than i think a lot of people expected. When you say self driving cars will be on the roads in larger numbers in a few years, what you mean by a few years . Give us some more detail on the timeline. Dan i really cannot get more specific than that at this point in time. All i can say is that things are moving very quickly. We believe we have an interesting approach in having all the capability integrated in one place, and that is giving us the ability to move at speed. We feel we have an obligation to move this technology to commercial deployment as soon as possible because of the impact it could have on improving road safety. Emily that was gms president dan ammann. Coming up, more from the laguna beach conference. His predecessor John Chambers legacy as he plans to depart the company. The movie business may be in a world of trouble, but bob iger is confident that disneys portfolio of super hero films will pack a punch in the coming months. This is bloomberg. Emily welcome back to the best of Bloomberg Technology. I am emily chang. The name of the game at cisco the last few years has been transition from legacy hardware to software and services. The push has been led by the ceo chuck robbins. I caught up with him at the wsj conference in laguna beach and asked about ciscos role in building the cities of tomorrow. What we see happening around the world, whether its a company, a city, a country, technology is at the heart of every strategy. We get that. Cities are no different. Whether its meeting the objectives that cities have around Revenue Generation or solving some of the problems they have like parking or like lighting costs, etc. , all of those now can be solved or achieved through the use of technology. Just a quick example, 20 of the lighting costs in the world are 20 of the energy costs that come from lighting. Just by connecting these lights and controlling them more effectively, you can reduce that in the cities by 50 75 . There is a tremendous opportunity out there. The network is at the heart of making that happen. Emily how do you turn that into big business . When do we see this adding substantially to the bottom line . Chuck we are operating in 120 cities around the world right now. Driving projects. We