carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." jason: we are here at bloomberg global headquarters. carol: we zero in on conversations from bloomberg's year ahead summit. jason: some of the world's most respected figures spoke at this event. carol: we heard from iac and karen weaver. jason: and we have a story on presidential leadership in the

years past. carol: and we have a talk about the year ahead when it comes to investors. jason: tgp group's co-ceo made a dynamic run through, something he previously represented to his own investors. >> we have been talking about big data for a while. this is extraordinary. it is hard to figure out. let me give you the tagline we are using to solidify our thinking. we have seen this for a couple years being used more broadly. i am thinking about the impact of data and where we are in the cycle. oil and data has been around forever.

the first well was built in 347 a.d. what makes it a new era is our ability to gather it and refinement. what you get is early consolidation. in the early days of oil, we had massive consolidation. you see getty and rockefeller in the titans of today. you had interesting things happen. the exxon valdez changed regulations for oil. we are seeing changing regulations for data around the world. all of that has been surrounded by testimony and scandal. i flash back to ron chernow's book. rockefeller was in front of the courts in 1907. the senate did not lay a glove

on rockefeller, just like they didn't on mark zuckerberg. four years later, they broke up standard oil. we have a scandal in the data world. these scandals will have effects on history. germany invaded russia when they shouldn't have because they needed the oil. we are watching data shape the politics of the world. it is all about the products. the oil industry is not about the products -- is not about the industry itself. it's about the products. google monetizes data.

facebook is a data company. the idea of data products are going to dominate the years ahead. in health care today, you can take your data and get reductions on your health-care premiums. you can take your fitbit for a walk when walking your dog. there are copy shops where if students give their info, they get free coffee. this info is sold to recruiters. around the world, you are paying for things with data. these are not three's -- free services. what is the value of the data? how much are you paying for

those services? around our portfolio, there is data everywhere. you can figure out your ancestry. we run the metering system here. the point is a note of caution. the society always catches up with a new technology. we don't have 50 years now and we will see society catching up quickly. jason: john gray is the president and the coo of blackstone.

he has spent years building and running his real estate group. what are they going to be buying and selling in the year ahead? >> we have had a great run in asset prices for a long time. the fed has begun to raise rates. we've had some issues in emerging markets. oil prices have come down sharply. i think it is natural that you have this kind of volatility at some point during the cycle. i don't think that is necessarily bad. for our business this is generally good. asset prices could keep grinding higher. if you have a business model like we do, we have discretion, where things drop in price and

we could move quickly, and because you are not short-term finance or forced to sell. for us we say, wow, there are lots around the world that have been repriced. this could be more of an interesting investment environment going forward. jason: they have been repriced already? what was the catalyst? >> the u.s. stock market is down 10% from where it was. credit spreads have gone out. in certain asset classes, there has been more displacement. when you look at this decline in prices, multiples of actually come out. jason: i want to go deeper into your line of business. help us understand the investing environment versus economics. they are interrelated, but not necessarily correlated, it feels like. >> people are nervous, given

this volatility. the numbers are still pretty good. small business confidence is at an all-time high. unemployment is very low.

what we are seeing with our companies is generally pretty good. i think the issue back to my earlier comments is, the fed is going to move toward raising rates. that will put pressure on multiples. that is the shift we are facing right now. you can see where economics continues to be pretty good. but because wages go up, that impacts the bottom line of companies. multiples come under pressure. valuations don't grow at the same rate. you have a strong economy and less growth and valuation. jason: coming up, ceos discuss what is in store for consumer brands. carol: and we have a transformation of a company continuing. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek."

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carol: welcome back. jason: join us every day on the radio. carol: you can find us online at businessweek.com. consumers and food brands are continuing a wave of consolidation. no one knows that better than our next companies. jason: the president and ceo of ahold and ceo of mandalay's international tell us where they see growth in the year ahead. >> if you look at our sectors, not everything is the same in food. in north america, this is probably not a good place to be in a. you're in a much better place

outside north america. if you have growth segments, you will do well. i am not sure that consolidation is the way to go. >> what is going to happen are companies that are probably having more difficulty getting growth. bigger companies still have the same problem of not growing. there will be a shift coming, that's growth in food is going to be recognized.

>> to what can brand producers like yourselves get married? >> we don't know a lot about retail. i don't see us immediately getting into anything. i don't know about france. >> we have those private labels. we try to make the debt -- differentiation. the markets are very competitive. >> we also try to think about consumer trust in the future. how they would like to shop. how they can have a more efficient journey in the store. there is a whole transparency in the supply chain. we try to be more conscious about food safety, where it is coming from. we are a trusted brand for food safety. those customs, they have the

trust and -- of consumers. jason: ceos continue to adapt to their changing marketplaces. we turn to the ceo of weight watchers, managing massive changes of their own. carol: mindy grossman is steering the 55-year-old company through the transition. >> we have a health solution business. we have spent a lot of time launching our consumer business. we will be launching that business in the first quarter of 2019 to really provide the same ecosystem of support, but with a gas board that can measure efficacy of health care costs.

this is with satisfaction. when we lay down our goals through the end of 2020, here is what is going to happen in 2018. we have also been doing a lot of work around emerging markets. we think this is an opportunity. the first priority was to relaunch the brand the markets were in it. the last two components were to expand our products. our wellness, travel, and hospitality. >> a big launch for the company. you have a marketing campaign, i understand. >> this is our most comprehensive global brand campaign we have ever done in the history of the company. >> you can announce it. >> they really represent health and wellness in the u k and in the united states. we want to be a partner in transforming people's lives. carol: it is hard to be a brand ambassador, for oprah. >> we look at every market as a pyramid of ambassadors we look at micro influencers. that could be chefs in a particular category. it could be body positivity bloggers.

that is what we call celebrity. just like our partner, we ask, do they want to inspire people to lead healthier lives through their action? it is not just people who need to lose weight. it is people who represent, i want to be healthier and this is how i live my life. we asked tens of thousands of people about their perspective on health and wellness. if you asked that amount, would you like to lead a healthier life? they will pretty much all say yes. we know that we are not going to give up our science of this program. we know that people want inspiration, not just information. that is what we are trying to

give them. carol: mini came -- mindy came to the company in 2017. this 2018 year has really been about getting into a transformation of the company. it is going to be a big year. jason: she even renamed the company. carol: still ahead, the pac that

led a record number of women to office in 2018. ja andson: the energy industry

that -- is grappling with the

threat of climate change. one ceo speaks frankly about the strategy of her company. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek."

carol: you can also listen to us on the radio on sirius xm and in new york, boston, washington dc -- >> in the bay area and in london on dab digital and on the bloomberg business app. our focus this week's on looking around the corner with insights from the annual bloomberg year ahead summit. >> duke energy's lynn good spoke with joel weber. the conversation very quickly turned to climate change. lynn: the issue really starts with the united nations report a few weeks ago. we have been focused on carbon reduction for over a decade. climate change is an issue that is going to be important to our customers and communities and investors. the important thing to recognize -- we are building on a solid foundation.

our carbon emissions are down 30% at duke. we are on track to meet our commitments around standards and we will continue. we have been able to use natural gas and renewables. this is front and center. i think the focus of our industry remains very high. joel: let's talk about what that portfolio that you have looks like. this is what you are trying to

build toward when you look out to the future. talk about the progress that you have made and where you are now? lynn: duke would have been primarily coal and nuclear in 2005 - 2008. we are increasing our renewables, about 10%. we are one of the largest nuclear operators. if you were sitting in the carolinas, 50% of the power is coming from carbon-free nuclear. this is an important part of our strategy, to continue to keep carbon emissions low. joel: nuclear does not get a lot of love. why do you think this is so overlooked? lynn: it's interesting. our industry has been a

behind-the-scenes industry. it works. what is making it work what are the resources that really make it possible. carbon energy is an incredibly viable resource. it operates 24 hours a day. natural gas is also an important resource. and then you bring a new solar and wind and battery technology and energy efficiency. you should be painting a picture of a portfolio. we have never been dependent on one form of energy. jason: david rubenstein interviews doris kearns goodwin. carol: record numbers of women were inspired to run for office in 2018.

this is only the beginning. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪ ♪ there's no place like home ♪

argh! i'm trying... ♪ yippiekiyay. ♪ mom. ♪

jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." carol: still to come -- >> two individuals solving problems, including the mayor of flint, michigan, and the person working on new york subways. carol: first, we have to talk about politics.

jason: david rubenstein hosts his show on bloomberg television. he sat down with doris kearns goodwin to talk about her book on leadership. carol: this contains lessons for business leaders as well. doris: leadership is about human nature and the way a businessman or a politician builds a team. and how they can bring that team together at critical moments. this is what abraham lincoln and franklin delano roosevelt did. eleanor roosevelt was always willing to question his presumptions and speak truth to power. any team needs that, in business or not. whenever she wanted something done, she would bring a person

he didn't want to speak to to the dinner table because he brought in an alternative point of view. fdr loved to have people who were down in the bureaucracy come into his office so he could question them against department heads. he put people against one another and would give the same assignment to two different people. they all had ways of getting new opinions into their heads. carol: a great conversation. you can get more in an upcoming episode of the david rubenstein show. jason: more than 100 women will be sworn into the u.s. congress in 2019. carol: you had organizations that were incubators of sorts, and splitting up to support women in congress. one nonprofit is devoted to

helping women pursue public office. since the loss of hillary clinton in 2016, it has set the stage in 2018. erin i've been working in politics for a number of years, and women are proving their viability to institutional players. i look at all the money that goes into politics. i look at the hours spent. more often than not, we are going backwards in representation. the research shows that the

number one reason why women don't run is because they are not recruited and encouraged at the same rate as men. you have men represented and elected in office. this is harder for women to break into that. in 2011, we wanted to figure out a way to provide men and women alike an opportunity to tell us about running for office -- office. carol: how many did you start with? erin: we learned a lot of someone to tell you they think they should run for office.

we are just over 21,000 women who have been asked to run for office through our work. 14,000 of them are preparing to run for office. [applause] carol: significant. carol: if hillary clinton had won, would we be having the same conversation? erin: we would not. we looked at the landscape and looked at where we could add work to a logical place for women to start. people could get a feel of what it was like to run for office. we launched that program before the 2016 election.

we were assuming that hillary clinton was going to be elected president and our work was going to be much harder. we had plans for how difficult it was going to be to get into the program. election day came and went. i was thinking of rewriting everything we were doing, and then the floodgates opened and we got thousands of women in the program pretty immediately. carol: when we thought of what women might running -- be running for president in 2020, some of the usual suspects came out, warren, harris. jason: another prominent woman in politics over the past year was sally yates. she was fired by president trump for refusing to defend that travel ban in 2017 when she was the acting attorney general.

carol: that was within a few days of the trump administration. she spoke with our bloomberg editor-in-chief. sally: you can debate whether you agree with a particular decision by a judge, but trying to undermine the very legitimacy of that judge for our judicial system is something that is not only knew but really dangerous. we cannot expect at the end of this presidency that we are enough to where the public confidence bounces back to these institutions. for a lot of the reasons we were talking about a few minutes ago, these institutions really only function properly if the public

has confidence in them. they can only function of the citizens of this country believe decisions are being made based on the facts and the law. >> are the questions being asked about this similar to watergate, or other eras of public life? sally: i am not suggesting decisions at the department of justice aren't being made for political reasons, but it sure is not for lack of trying on the president's part. carol: next -- jason: the president of the new york city transit authority. can he get the subways in shape

in 2019? carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

>> you can also find us online at bloomberg businessweek.com and on our mobile app. jason: when you look at big global issues, some of them can best be understood by looking at some local examples. >> this is also a problem we see around the world. this is not always the case. >> karen reaver is leading the way. karen: what happened in flint

was criminal. you had to the poisoning of a whole community. children are going to be impacted. one of the things they are looking at now is the numbers of deaths attributed to an ammonia, they were wondering what was going on there. i was talking to someone earlier and i was saying it is really easy to put a cost on infrastructure, and what we need that way. when you look at the human factor, we don't know what that

is going to be. carol: is it a reminder our society values people differently? >> there for other cities in the state of michigan. it put cost over the public health and welfare of the people. carol: who should be gone after? karen: we've said that for every level of government. we want everyone from top to bottom to be accountable. carol: are all the pieces in place? karen: i hope people are paying attention to what happened in flint. this should never have happened. carol: where are we today?

karen: we had three years in which to fix these pipes. we have until the end of next year. we are ahead of schedule. we have less than 150 to go. after they are fixed, we are still on bottled and filtered water. you still have a public health risk until we get those pipes removed and replaced. carol: what guarantee can you give your citizens this won't happen again?

quality standards for granted. we have been working on that in the state of michigan. i said, i am not signing off. i haven't told anyone to drink water from the tap and i will not tell them. if we're going to do it right, let's do it right. we then have to have the medical community to sign off.

carol: flint has had troubles for decades. some of these conditions have been in the works for years. jason: the new york city transit system is massive, old, and complicated. a u.k. native was hired to fix it. he has worked on will raise all around the world -- railways all around the world. this looks to be his biggest challenge. andy: the biggest problem is reliability of the service. that is the biggest challenge. we do move 8 million people a day. there has been a slow decline and in the reliability of the service. we can build a compelling case for what needs to be done.

jason: this job was done not that long ago. ten months? your first day you knew what you were getting into to some extent. this is not the oldest system you have worked on. what has been your biggest surprise? andy: the biggest has been the scale of the task. we worked on the third transit in north america. this itself had myriad problems. there was a bus depot. new york city transit has 50,000 employees. i think it is the scale of the job.

it is the scale of the challenge we are dealing with in some cases. nearly 100 years old, that is ridiculous. jason: so old that the manufacturer does not even make it anymore. are you kidding? andy: we must prevail in this conversation. if we want to rebuild this thing, and give the transit system they deserve, we need to have a plan. it is called the fast-forward plan. we don't need tinkering. we have to bottom, every aspect -- to modernize transit from top to bottom, every aspect. it can be done, but it comes with a cost.

jason: what is that? andy: billions of dollars, around $40 billion over 10 years. jason: coming up next, looking at 2019 in the digital world. this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." carol: you can listen to us in new york, boston, washington, dc -- >> and in the bay area and on the bloomberg business app. we are checking out to spaces

continuing to evolve quickly, digital media and luxury. carol: we need to talk about the digital space. >> what we think about data is the price to value exchange. this has the user's consent. consent can be a tricky thing. >> even people who are relatively tech savvy do not understand what they are giving up. >> you need to give control to consumers. cambridge analytic, this will some personality test thing that had no real value to consumers. it stayed in a lot of places

that consumers would never have imagined. in of those things were accidents. the operators of that business have to be doing a price to value exchange. they have to look at themselves in the mirror. they have to look at their colleagues and say, we charge a fair price for this thing. that price was user data. people have to understand it and it has to be fair. it is crystal clear. you pay $20 a month and you get access to this. >> let's say cambridge analytic is a rotting fish.

where does facebook sit on the spectrum? >> i don't think they were doing it with that intentions. >> there is a responsibility -- >> i think people were surprised by the power of that platform. and the extent to which misdeeds would or could be done. it's perhaps possible that facebook did not even understand the price they were charged. when this data can be used in this weaponize way, people are giving up much more than they understood. >> you have done a lot of business with facebook?

>> we have advertised and we have been partners. i don't envy what they are going through. i think they have been incredibly innovative as a company. this is going to slow them down. i think they will power through. it's an unpleasant time right now. carol: last, we have to talk about luxury. jason: ian trager is the perfect person to talk about it. he created the very concept of a boutique hotel. ian: what has happened in europe, which we usually follow, in london, you have the

aristocrats. you don't have much of a middle-class. you have a big segment of the population. luxury has to be responsive. we have the 1% and then you have another group. what i found in the hotel business, wealthy people want to get a good bargain. if you stay in the hotel room and you get the same kind of feeling and experience you get in a much more expensive hotel, people would like to get that bargain. if you can have the same access to entertainment and excitement, rather than paying more people to take it, not to millennials, anyone.

carol: bloomberg businessweek is available on newsstands. jason: and online and on our mobile app. carol: what can you take away from this conversation? jason: i loved getting that sneak peek of talking to john gray, talking about volatility. private equity guys love that because that is how they make their money. carol: i loved talking about data and digital image technology. you can watch the entire year ahead to summit on bloomberg live's youtube channel and on bloomberg.com. jason: check out our daily business week podcast. carol: we caught up with the mayor of columbus, ohio.

jason: more bloomberg television starts right now. ♪

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