Megan what it has not escaped is an economic slowdown or perceived economic slowdown which is really affecting Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister who could do no wrong. His support has slumped a little bit and he is facing an angst among his people not too dissimilar from the populism we in terms of people saying canada needs to return to its roots. I want to feel like it is supporting us out in the heartland and the western parts of the country in particular. Julia they have knockout growth. He has had challenges. The Paradise Papers have been an issue. Politically there has been noises surrounding him that have not been very helpful. Megan he has had a few domestic scandals with both his chief fundraiser and finance minister under scrutiny. But the core concern is that, this 4. 5 ve had growth. But as oil prices have declined in projections for growth are hovering around 2 he is facing pressure. People are facing the same amount of concerns about their wages, lack of wage growth, how they will afford things Going Forward with oil prices being what they are as well. There is a conservative movement in canada. Justin trudeau is well known globally for embracing diversity and embracing syrian republic refugees andsyrian being a supporter of diversified fema candidates. He is one of the most diversified political leaders in the world. At some time the rubber will , meet the road if youre fulfilling your promises. Another big thing is nafta and President Trump and renegotiating that. Canada is incredibly reliant on the u. S. As a trade partner. Nafta has benefited canada and mexico to an extraordinary extent. The longer this goes on with donald trump hanging this sword over their head about what will anden leads to concern these two rivals trying to unseat him. Carol he is responding to some extent. Megan he has cut taxes, really looked at how i can deliver a more middleclass package, taking taxes down for those making less than 75,000. Similar to the republican proposal. And hiking rates on those over 157,000 a year. Those are popular. People like to see a redistribution of income. But whether or not he will be able to put in place the measures that jumpstart growth in falling oil, get the investment he needs, particularly with snap Multilateral Companies are , looking and saying, is this where i want to invest and put workers right now . Julia the next elections are in 2019. He has got a bit of time. You started this by saying he was vibrant, young, a globalized vision in was so exciting for the rest of the world. But if you look at some of the rivals, as you have mentioned, there are some similarities there. Megan absolutely. One of his is a person on the left, even implement a harder against the rich platform, and a conservative supporter of brexit. These are Interesting Times for him. What is interesting is he is incredibly popular around the world. He is popular in canada. We should not say he is not. He attracts a lot in a aggregate polling of a multiparty system. That is not something to sneeze at. But look, the shine has come off a little bit and whether people will start paring down if he can deliver on his promises, whether he has control over his own house in terms of scandals, and whether or not if you look at the economic times, is this the Prime Minister with the kind of intellectual heft to deliver. Julia a few concerns about support for Justin TrudeauGoing Forward. Certainly not worrying about any kind of armageddon scenario. Carol that leads us to the cover story. We love this story. Megan this is one of my favorite stories, the real emergence of survivalist foods. It is a juggernaut now in terms of business at this movement of people basically preparing for we should not pull punches people are preparing for armageddon and where that is spread out. What is so great about this story is it shows everyday struggles people and families are facing. Everyday struggles families are facing. Every day struggles of hurricane victims. Kids stuck in dorm rooms because of severe weather. Survivalist foods wants to provide foods that provide 300 calories, 7,000 for a years supply. They are now everyday potential lifelines for struggling families, struggling parts in the country. Of course, it is tongueincheek. There are many humorous elements. But it is also a real story of what going on in the country. Carol we have more on this story from amanda little. Amanda hes a 42yearold entrepreneur. His company is producing survival food. It is freezedried, long storage food you can keep in your pantry for about 25 years, probably longer. He is selling about 75 million of this product a year. He is part of an exploding market in survival food. Carol we have a couple of packets. Here is the beef chili packet. You can hear it. It is freezedried. You just add water. It is interesting. This is a growing business and is not just about selling it to those folks who had to deal with disasters, which we have seen a lot of because of recent hurricanes. But he is trying to get this stuff into suburbia. Amanda i really see it as a suburbanization survival story. I came into this with a lot of skepticism. I have some family members who were beginning to develop their own sort of basement stores of this kind of product. That got me interested in it. Aaron had an interesting take. He is not what you would expect to be the kind of prepper guy. As i described, he is kind of a clark kent figure. He drives a bmw. He golfs. He worked at tyson foods, post foods. Hes a corporate guy and saw this opportunity to take the product that was this extreme, Zombie Apocalypse product and get it into the mainstream. I was curious as to whether this was successful and what it says about us as a culture. How the response to this product which he has now got in walmart, target, home depot, bed bath beyond, home shoppers network, how this trend in sales reflects an area of the culture reflects who we are as a culture and our broader anxieties as a culture. Julia i love that. I never even heard of the term preppers. We build air raid shelters in the u. K. Do we dont have same kind of mentality. You make a good it is just a point. Tiny portion of the American Population buying into this, around 2 . Yet if you look at the number of americans who have first aid kits, that gives you a sense of the opportunity here. Amanda 2 is a small percent, although that is a lot more than was buying this product five years ago. Right . So, his sales have more than doubled in four years. I spoke to folks at Emergency Essentials and some of his competitors and they are also seeing this trend. I mean, the whole category is growing. They are describing it as a response to the increase in natural disasters on one hand and this fear there are diminishing government safety nets. Basically, that people have to take their own safety and security in their own hands, which is an interesting reflection on both our environmental moment and our political moment. 2 is still a fringe category but it is growing really fast. Carol turning survival foods into a cover image was a job of our artistic director. Alexander, the cover story is about survival foods. I did not realize this was an industry. You had to make a cover image out of it. What went into the thinking . We worked on a number of this of how to visualize which included trying to create a bunker scenario, or trying to imagine what kind of context you eat this in. We thought it might be interesting to figure out what it does not look like which is appetizing. Something like one of the holiday meals. Carol it looks like a lot of dry stuff. That is the real food before it gets water added to it and becomes a complete meal for you to eat. Carol interesting cover. Very stark and it really does contrast with everything before the holiday. Thank you very much. Julia ground zero of fake news, silicon valley, and what needs to be done about it. Carol plus, how fake news artists have figured out how to beat google. Julia this is Bloomberg Businessweek. Carol welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. Julia you can catch us online at businessweek. Com, and on the mobile app. Opening the magazine this week in remarks, paul barrett writes about what google, facebook, and twitter need to do to fight their common enemy, fake news. Paul for the first time, there is at least the beginnings of a rift between washington and silicon valley, which up until now has really been immune to a serious regulation. Now there is at least, in there he, the threat of greater regulation of the big internet platforms. Carol it is hard to believe some of the numbers put out by the social Media Companies when they talk about russian meddling. What number, what was it, 126 million facebook users may have seen the kind of content, divisive content created by the russians. Paul you can add 20 million more if you counted instagram which is owned by facebook. The numbers are bigger than we previously understood, than the companies previously disclosed. I think for that reason, we have to post an answer the question, how do we move forward here . Do we have to draft some kind of regulation that causes government control of content on the internet . I dont think that is a promising path given the First Amendment and our freespeech values. In the absence of that kind of sweeping regulation, the companies have to step up and do more. Carol lets talk about their responsibility. These are companies that are all about data and data collection, and they use it effectively to make billions of dollars. Should they not have had some awareness sooner rather than later about what was going on . Paul i think the obvious answer is yes, they should have been aware that would be vulnerable to being used by malign forces, whether it was the russians in the 2016 election or the longerterm issue of use of the internet for terrorist incitement. I mean, while the hearings were going on in washington, up here in new york we had the latest terrorist incident involving a guy who mowed down people on a bike path, killing eight people. The authorities very quickly determined he had been radicalized online, looking at isis videos and other material. Carol what has been the oversight by a facebook or a google, youtube and twitter in , terms of this kind of content so far . Paul they definitely have some issues. They have some mechanisms in place that allow them to take down objectionable content. They have both algorithms that search for the content. They also have human oversight of their sites and they look for , it that way. But they are clearly not at a point where they are catching a lot of stuff. Much of it gets through. Inol speaking of fake news, the technology section, why google is not trying to stop take nudist on youtube. Julia the socalled evil unicorns. Mark facebook has faced the broader criticism, but google has a problem as well. We have seen that after two tragic shootings, las vegas, there was a misidentified suspect. Trumps created these posts about him online with blatantly false information. Came up at the top of Google Search results. I was talking with you know, a former engineer, who said they have dealt with this problem in the past with spam and came up with a term, evil unicorns. If there are unicorns, they are not evil. But it is a term developed to say someone has built this website or url page that would blatantly print false information, pernicious information, but it would only turn up for obscure queries. The example might be childhood vaccinations where theres a lot of evidence on the benefits, but a lot more people are willing to create content about the evils of childhood vaccinations. Because the way Google Search is structured, they tend to crawl back and service it high for search results. Carol how do they fix that . They know their technology, their algorithms can redirect searches. What are they doing about it . Right. The problem is particularly stark with breaking news. What happened with las vegas and the shooting in texas, a lot of people are interested in something very newsworthy and searching for it and there is not much information online. What happens is people can go out and create false information that can spread and become very viral and surface high in search and it spreads on twitter and facebook. It is a vicious cycle. I think google one solution is to give more weight to authoritative sources. If something is a news outlet, it should appear higher in the search. When they first launched google news, their search term for any newsrelated terms, it was just vetted sources. Three years ago they opened that wider the blogs. Google sees a tradeoff between relying heavily on mainstream established outlets and what they see as the wider, long tail of the internet. They also want to provide searches for someone not just looking for information on a mainstream outlet. That is the tradeoff google sees. I dont think they have come up with a solution to the problem. Julia next the pitfalls of , combining health care and tax reform. Carol and Angela Merkel plots her survival. Julia this is Bloomberg Businessweek. Julia welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. Carol you can listen to us on radio on sirius xm general 119, and on a. M. 1130 in new york, 99. 1 fm in washington, d. C. , and in the bay area. Julia and in london and asia on the Bloomberg Radio plus app. The economics editor attempts to answer one of the Big Questions in the senate tax bill. Carol specifically what happens , when an individual Health Care Mandate is inserted in negotiations. Peter the senate bill, which the senate will be taking up after the holiday, has in it a repeal of the individual mandate. They are not trying to repeal all of obamacare. But they want to take out a leg of a threelegged stool and some people think that itself good spell the end of obamacare. The concept being that the reason for the individual mandate is to make sure everybody including people that are relatively healthy participate in the risk pool and that helps hold down premiums for everybody else. If you take that away, it becomes much less affordable to provide subsidies to keep everybody insured. Julia they basically want to save money on subsidies and use this as a financing tool to offset some of the other things , tax cuts in the taxcut package. Peter the byrd rule carol senator byrd. I hate to use that term. Carol senator byrd. Peter they cannot pass a tax cut beyond the 10year window for deficits they are looking at. If they cant repeal the individual mandate, the bill will not cross that threshold and cannot pass without getting democratic votes which wont happen so it will doom it. This is an important discussion. Crowe talk about the discussion not only among republicans but also democrats. But it is not very popular, this mandate. It is tricky for both parties. Peter for republicans the trick , is they love the idea of the Congressional Budget Office everybody they can save more than 300 billion, but the reason that would happen is fewer people will be covered according to the cbo. They want to take the savings without acknowledging the expected decline in coverage. Carol and increased Health Care Costs down the road. Julia republicans decided if they do this to get tax reform passed, it will force us to come back to health care in some repeal and replace of obamacare early on in the new year. They acknowledge it is not sustainable if we pull back on the repeal of the individual mandate. Given the difficulties we saw passing any form of repeal of obamacare, the senators said were not going to do this, how can they swing this . Peter that has been an issue for the republicans for a long time. Now that they control the white house and both houses of congress, they cant be in a defiant posture of just saying vote no, vote no. If obamacare fails and there is no sustainable replacement, it is on them. I think there are a lot of republicans saying we should be a little careful about pulling out one of the legs of this threelegged stool. Carol also in the politics section, Angela Merkel is planning her next move after failing to form a majority coalition. Julia here is news editor matthew phillips. Matthew for years now germany has been the center of stability, politically, economically through the european debt crisis, the refugee crisis. That is starting to crack now. We saw the early fissures in september with a german election in which chancellor Angela Merkels party lost a significant number of seats in the lower house. She tried to form a government over the weekend. Those talks failed. It is unclear what will come next in germany, whether she will be able to form a government. What is clear is this age of merkel as the Unifying Force in europe seems to be in the Rearview Mirror now. Carol what is interesting in reading some of the coverage, she has been in power for 12 years. This is her fourth term. Some have said she has gathered a lot of political baggage along the way. Matthew this is somebody who has over 12 years formed three or four governments now. She has done very well to build coalitions and form compromises. She is seen as a nonideological politician. As she has been able to form the governments inside germany, that has allowed her to look outward energy ona lot of her foreign policy. Meanwhile, inside germany, she has made a lot of enemies, carries a lot of political baggage. Parties have formed government with her and felt burned by those. The free democrats for example are putting the screws to her a bit right now and not coming to the table in a way that is allowing her to form a government. Right now, it is very unclear whether she is going to stick around. She has said she would rather have new elections rather than be part of a minority coalition. Carol depending on how this plays out, it will have implications for germany and obviously for Angela Merkel. What does it mean for broader europe . She has been a crucial figure coming off the crisis and in terms