Pride takeover of the business section. Great to have you here. Great to be here. We are going to get into that in a moment. Let us talk about the pride issue. Here we are almost 50 years after stonewall. We thought this was the moment to market that moment with this cover and package of stories. Jason how do you choose the stories . What we wanted to look at was a consumer element but also how companies and also elements of the workplace and courts are impacting a lot of this. It is a little bit of a smorgasbord and that was the intent because there is so much we could possibly say on this topic. Carol as the reporting shows, there is still a lot of legal pushback when it comes to the Lgbtq Community. Joel there is still some Supreme Court cases that will be heard that could fundamentally change the nature of gay rights in america. Still. Jason joel weber, stick with us because you will be back with us to talk to us about where we are in harvard. Carol staying with this weeks special pride week section, walmart has long been an outside face of change. Jason and a shift towards healthier food, the company is launching a new line with lesbian talk show host, Ellen Degeneres. With that story, here is Business Editor jim ellis. This is a big change. She came out in 1997. The cover story on time. All of a sudden, her show on tv a year later canceled. She could not get work for three years. She did not get work from a big sponsor until amex in 2004. America had a long struggle with this notion of incorporating lgbt into the mainstream. And walmart as well had a long struggle with this. This is not target. Walmart went through and had a deal with the national gay and Lesbian Chamber of commerce in 2005 and so many of its employees and conservative groups gripe about it that they then dumped that and said we are no longer going to get involved in things that are controversial. They did not support the large corporations that pushed the court to get gay marriage approved. Now, america has changed and walmart followed. Jason part of the reason they were able to do that was ellen and you go through the numbers, she is insanely popular. Insanely. She is on tv every day and one day, twice. She has also sewn herself to be a good person for a brand. She is one of those things that now transcends her individual background. She is a brand in and of herself. She is the oprah of today. She is as familyfriendly as you can get. Carol youre talking about the cycle for ellen. Popular, not popular, and popular again as americans became more comfortable with homosexuality and the Lgbtq Community. Here we are at another juncture where we are questioning legally that community is under pressure again. The Supreme Court now has three cases pending for next session that deals with the idea of Employment Rights or employment protections for lgbtq employees. You can now be fired for being lgbt in a little more than half the states. There are no legal protections. I think a lot of people think that because so much has happened in the last 20 years with the court upholding the right for gay sex and Marriage Equality going through but instead, in the employment arena, you can discriminate legally in a lot of places and a lot of places do. The court will have to decide that and we dont know how that will work out and play because the court is more conservative now than it was. The argument before the court is whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act covers people because of sexual orientation. It was not written that way. It has been interpreted in that way by some courts but not others. So now, the justices get to decide. Carol you can find that and more in this weeks special pride business section. Including a special riveting interview and a haven for the Lgbtq Community in an unlikely place, china. Jason a new cryptocurrency. It has got a bit of a trust problem. Carol and our special trip to the Harvard Business school. We sit down with a harvard alum. The current commenting partner of bain capital. This is Bloomberg Businessweek. Carol welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek, im carol massar. Jason and im jason kelly. Catch up on our daily show and listen and subscribe to our podcast. Carol and you can find us online at businessweek. Com and our mobile app. We are here at Harvard Business school in boston. Jason first, facebook this week unveiled plans for a new cryptocurrency. The latest developments are undoubtedly being watched by regulators wary of the social networks dominance. We spoke with Sheryl Sandberg in canneslyons International Festival in france. We know we have a lot of people to work with. This is a heavily regulated space. We need to talk to people and that is what we are doing. We are then going to launch. Carol we got more from joel wiesenthal who keeps a measured watch on the cryptocurrency world. Joel it is incredibly ambitious. If it were to gain traction, it could be a potential game changer. The closest analogy i think of a is not only existing money but the android operating system and google essentially becoming a de facto platform for so much of the world. I think libra wants to do that for money. If you think of the Different Networks that exist, Payment Networks around the world, they dont talk to each other, they are not interoperable. They want to build the open source monetary platform. The flipside is it is going to be incredibly hard. Even if they could get the execution right and the partners right and the product is easy, dealing with financial regulations, the most tightly regulated aspect of any industry in any country around the world, and somehow navigate all of those regulatory bodies, it will be so difficult. I wonder if itll even get off the ground. Jason let us go back one step. Help us understand how this would look. What does it look like to me as a Facebook User if i wanted to pay carol for a pez dispenser . Joel there will be a new currency called the libra. It will be a courtesy and headed to a basket of stable currencies around the world, i imagine heavily weighted towards the euro, the dollar, the yen and the pound. Probably the worlds most stable currencies. In theory, if you wanted to start using it is currency, you could go to an exchange and there would be regulated exchanges that comply with local regulations. You could put in 100 and get back x number of libra. You could do it in theory from a contactless payment from your phone. They do not anticipate normal daytoday use in countries because most Payment Systems work fine. If the two of you were in different countries, it is not so easy to send someone money. There are all kinds of tricky aspects. If you wanted to do something more complicated like send someone remittances from a developed economy to an emerging market, it gets more complicated. If you wanted to set up remittances on a regular basis or something that automatically takes out part of your paycheck, it gets even more complicated. I think they wanted to build a platform so others would build the apps to make it easier. Carol it has to have a consistent value so it would be considered worthy for people to use it. Joel the volatility of existing cryptocurrency renders them unusable for these types of purposes which is why we mostly see them for speculative purposes. Black markets. The grey market. Things youre not supposed to do under the law. And you accept the volatility risk. They argue that the system in which the libra is backed up by currency held in a bank will make it unvolatile and both the sender and receiver can be roughly certain of the value. Carol several stories out of Silicon Valley including how facebook and google are among companies. Jason do not call me a birdbrain. Here is our editor on bird brains in Silicon Valley and more. Animals have been studied by neuroscientists but this science has been on the edge of the academic mainstream has become popular. Tech companies all over the world but especially Silicon Valley are interested in understanding how brains work and applying that to ai and other futuristic things. Carol and Voice Recognition software. Max if you are trying to make siri work better, this gets into complicated stuff but ai basically tries to figure out how the human brain works and then mimic that in software. To the extent that we are able to understand how humans form connections, in theory, that could help software make connections and allow siri to understand what you are saying when you mumble. Jason we thought this would end up in a script of Silicon Valley. You are a great chronicler of the valley, how does this fit in . There is an element of this that is like, oh boy, here we go. Max the whole idea of ai has been hot for a long time. I would say one of the easier pieces to parody of this is the human brain interface. Scientists and doctors have worked on this because if you were to create a brain interface, you could help people with amputations. Jason from neuroscientists to rock n roll, a hard pivot but this is a firstperson story. Fascinating story, a firstperson story. A cool element online. Tell us about the tale. Max vernon silver is the foremost led zeppelin copyright artist. It is written a couple of memorable stories about a andute between led zeppelin spirit over stairway to heaven. He stumbled on a quirk of u. S. Copyright law which is full of these weird quirks which is that before 1978, a piece of music to have a copyright had to have the sheet music filed with the u. S. Copyright office. And if it did not, in theory, according to some legal interpretations, that would mean that a lot of guitar solos which were improvised where the record label did not file a deposit copy with the government are basically open season. Vernon went to the Copyright Office and started pulling all of these wellknown, iconic pieces of music including from bruce springsteen, Leonard Skynyrd and started putting together this frankensong as a demonstration of the absurdity of u. S. Copyright law. And we have this amazing will on Bloomberg Businessweeks website which will allow you the reader to assemble your own frankensong with Public Domain riffs. Jason some of the bestknown parts of the bestknown songs are free game. Max exactly. This may get worked out in the courts. This led zeppelin song is in the works. If a judge were to say that there is a piece of recorded music that could get a copyright. Right now, as we understand it, just having the recorded music is not enough. Carol coming up, trade talks. Jason and more from our visit to the Harvard Business school. We sit down for an exclusive and rare interview with alum jonathan nelson. Jason welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. Carol you can listen to us on the radio on sirius xm channel 119. In washington, d. C. Jason in the bay area, and london and through the Bloomberg Business app. Turning to a topic we cannot stay away from, trade. President trump and chinese president xi are scheduled to sit down. Carol they will have an extended meeting at the g20 summit next week. We have a preview of the meeting. Shawn this is a big deal. The leaders of the worlds two largest economies to hash out their differences. We do not know how this will go. There is a possibility, a best Case Scenario that they agree to a bit of a truce and more talks. No one thinks we will get a bigger deal but there is also, and this is not a small possibility, that the leaders meet, they dont agree on anything, and we go into what is starting to look like an allout economic war between the worlds two leading economies. A pretty big deal. Carol i love this line in your story President Trump has the gun barrels pointed at china. Batch of the eu and japan, not to mention his public foaming about eurozone and chinese public monetary policy. Talk about setting the table here. We have seen a bunch of tweets this past week. He is aiming at so many different people going into this meeting. Shawn i tried to sit down and count how many of the g20 that donald trump was in a possible trade war with and i came up with seven or eight including india and mexico. The tariff threat is still there in terms of the immigration agreement with mexico. The president said after 45 days, if he does not see progress, he will go ahead there. India slapped retaliatory tariffs on the u. S. After trump decided to take them off a preferential trade list they have been on for a long, long time. The big deal besides china hanging over the horizon is the threat of auto tariffs. The president has already ruled that imported cars, for example your subarus and bmws, are a threat to National Security and the question is, what will he do about it . He really likes the idea of hitting the eu and japan with tariffs which no one in the Auto Industry can be said likes and no one outside of the u. S. Thinks would be a good idea for the global economy. We are already seeing a Global Growth slowing and these gun barrels he has aimed everywhere are only contributing to the uncertainty and helping to put a damper on growth. Jason i feel you were one of the first people who told us or described this as essentially weaponizing trade in many ways. It is happening against a backdrop we should point out of the president of the United States wanting to get another four years in the white house. He was also launching that this week in florida. This is a key political talking point which i have to think informs the way he is going to osaka. Shawn it is not just weaponizing trade anymore. If you look at his comments about the European Central bank and mario draghi, essentially that mario draghi is laying out the case for further stimulus to try to help boost the european economy which looks like it is slowing down you are talking about weaponizing monetary policy. Weaponizing the dollar. His main complaint is about the euro there. Donald trump has a conception that he has grabbed that National Security is about more simply than the weapons of war. That it is about economic security. Jason someone familiar with washington and geopolitics, that is fourstar general stanley mcchrystal. Carol about a Rolling Stone with him at the bloomberg breakaway summit about todays tumultuous times. And about about a Rolling Stone article that ended his career. It came out at 2 00 in the morning, titled the runaway general. Soon as you see that, you know you have a problem. There had been tension between the Defense Department and the white house. Not personal. I got along well with president obama. But there was this tension over the strategy. This thing explodes and i am in afghanistan and as soon as it came out, i knew there was a problem. Made some phone calls and i was asked to fly back to the United States that night to speak to the secretary of defense. And i absolutely know what is going. But still, as i get on the plane for the 17 hour flight, my 86yearold father in florida, i know he is seeing the news cycle every day. People who do not know what is going on are opining on the media about it. My son in college is seeing it and then my wife of 34 years is seeing it. As we are flying back, 17 hour flight, i get this email from three privates. Three privates do not normally write to fourstar generals. Carol how did they get your email . [laughter] i dont know. It is funny, because i have met them and gone on operation. We had a special relationship. They said, we heard about this article and if you let that reporter around those things were said we dont think that , was very smart. P i am reading this email going whoa. However, general, we know you and love you and no matter what happens, remember that. And you get that from three privates. You land in d. C. And you go to see the president of the United States. He asks whats going on, and i didnt know. I do not know the background. I just knew there was a conflagration. Carol had you read the article by this time . Yes. I did not think it was accurate. I did not think it had depicted it fairly. The president has a problem from my team and it is my responsibility. Not his. I prepared my resignation and i offered it to president obama. I said, if you want me to go back and keep command, i will do that. If you want to give me a dressing down, we can do that. If you want my resignation whatever is best for the nation. ,he took it, he was an incredible gentleman. Boom boom boom. We had a short conversation. Here is the point. I walked out of that room. I had been four years at west point. Been born in an army hospital. Everything in my life had been military. 34 years as an officer and in an instant it is done. Carol you can check out that full conversation. Coming up, more from our day at Harvard Business school. We zero in on new data on business schools. Jason plus we sit down with faculty and alumni including scott sperling, copresident at Thomas H Lee Partners. This is bloomberg. Jason welcome back to Bloomberg Businesswek. Carol still ahead, Harvard Business school. Jason we sit down with an alumni as well as jonath