This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholds on Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, Liz Hoffman comes in to tell us about writing Crash Landing, which I found to be a fascinating book about telling the story of the pandemic that we all just live through, the economic dislocation,
the health risks, just the mayhem that took place. But from the perspective of a number of corporate CEOs, Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital, the hedge fund that had a couple of amazing trades based on this, the CEO of Delta, of Hilton, of Ford, of Goldman Sachs of Morgan Stanley of Airbnb. Really a fascinating discussion from a perspective that I think you probably are unfamiliar with. You know, it feels like we all went through more or less
the same thing. That turns out not necessarily to be true. Some of these people were dealing with inordinate stress, tremendous risk, concerned that their businesses and their companies, some of which have been around the United States for a century or more, we're going to go out of business. And it really is a fascinating tale told from a really interesting perspective. I really enjoyed it, and I think you will find it to be delightful summer reading with no further ado.
My conversation with Semaphor's Liz Hoffmann discussing Crash Landing.
Thanks, Arry, it's great to be here.
I have to tell you I don't always say this. I really enjoyed the book. I found it to be a fascinating look into an experience we all had and thought we shared together, but it turned out a lot of people had very, very different experiences. We'll get into that in a minute. Let's just start with your background. You have a master's degree from the Northwestern School of Journalism. Was the plan ways to cover finance? What led you into this area?
No, not at all. I started out as a sports reporter in college, really Division three athletics. If that's your if that's your thing.
What the time, That's what My college was, Division three football, not exactly a hotbed of not a powerhouse.
No, but but thought I wanted to cover sports. Actually I played sports growing up, and I really liked that kind of reporting, which is sort of really beat reporting at its at its most basic, right, and then you know at some point, well I went to grad school because I graduated college in two thousand and eight and was, shockingly enough, yeah, having trouble getting a newsroom job. And uh, and I said, I'll go get a master's and things will be better in two thousand and nine because these
are one year programs, right. So obviously, I, you know, economically minded from the jump, but no, I really wanted to be a sports reporter. And then at some point it ocourred to me that even if you do that and you get to the pinnacle of that career, your your reward is to live in Bristol, Connecticut, right orn't for ESPN, And you know, it was really, frankly, just like beggars couldn't be choosers. I graduated in o nine.
The first job I had was at a family owned media company outside of in the West suburbs of.
The Wall Street Journal is part of the family army.
I fought my way back.
So where did you what was the first place?
It was called Wednesday Journal, and they ran a bunch of weekly newspapers and a monthly parenting magazine called Chicago Parent. That was my truly my first job was running their web editor. I mean it was grim times and nine.
How did you get to the Journal?
I moved to New York in twenty ten working for a legal trade pub, a competitor of Bloomberg Law Law three sixty, where I was hired. You know, your career is just a series of lucky breaks. I was hired to cover I think securities litigation or insurance regulation some of you like truly, and then my recollection. Anyway, this is the myth that I'm going to create. Was that my first day they said, actually, we're thinking about launching a corporate law vertical. Do you want to cover M
and A? And I said, I don't know what that is, but yes, that sounds better.
I'm familiar with them, but A is exactly right.
No idea. But you know, working at a trade pub is such a great training ground, right because you've got to get really smart fast, and you have to know what you don't know and find out you know because your the rears are incredibly sophisticated. So anyway, I covered M and A for them for about two years and then I don't know what God smiled on me, but I got hired by the Wall Street Journal in twenty thirteen.
So you start in twenty thirteen, and then you proceed to get some major news stories that you either covered intimately or broke. Burger King buys Tim Horton's Bakery using Halliburton, merge Delany's EMC. What stands out from that era and what was your lucky break that you were very often amongst the first reporters breaking this news.
Well, the journal is an incredible seat from which to do that. There's a lot of institutional privilege that you bring to the job every day there. You know, when I got hired in twenty thirteen, Emina was dead. Part of the reason, actually, I think that I got hired was that I was covering kind of messy, wonky legally
complicated em andated had gone sideways. You know, it ended up in court, and that was at the time with the journal thought was a blind spot for them, which they were very good at breaking deals, but didn't totally understand them or lost sight of them after they came out. And then you know, as it turns out, a switch flipped in the market. In twenty fourteen was a record,
twenty fifteen was a record. None of them still stand right, They've been eclipsed by sixteen seventeen and then you know again in twenty one, but you know, it was there were big deals falling out of the sky, and I don't know. I always say it's better to be lucky than good, though, if you can be both, that's that's helpful. But yeah, some of those were fun. Burger king Tim Horton's I remember very clearly, because it was in the middle of those waves of kind of tax dodgy, those inversion deals.
But these are two big, legitimate, you know.
Totally, but they were reincorporating in Canada and there was a lot of sensitivity around that, and I remember that one came together pretty quick, if I remember, which is pretty unusual, but like Friday or Thursday to a Sunday scoop.
So what about the COVID beat? How did you find your way to that space? Were you regularly covering epidemics or clearly there's a corporate story there. How did you tumble your way into that?
You know, go back to early twenty twenty, I mean every beat was a COVID beat pretty quickly too. Right at that point, I'd been covering, as you mentioned, investment banking Goldman Sachs for a couple of years and again, I'm probably pretty lucky. I had the sense at the time that maybe that story was at least that chapter of it was a bit played out. You know, that
February March market started to go. I mean it started as a financial story, I guess is the how I got involved, which is that markets woke up to it very quickly, and things got hairy very fast, and basically every reporter at the Wall Street Journal at the time was became a COVID reporter.
That's interesting. So when did you get a sense that, hey, this COVID thing isn't just another flu. There's something an order of magnitude more significant than what's usually your background story. Forty thousand people die from the flu every year in the US. Anyway, when what was it clear to you as a reporter this wasn't the usual flu.
I won't say that it was ever clear to me from the health perspective. I'm not a health expert, but you know, you.
Would see these heads even from a business perspective, right, So.
I think really what happened was and I tried We'll talk about the book in a bit, but I tried to kind of recreate that that slowly and then all at once feeling right if you remember, you know a esque. Yeah, but you know, markets peaked, you know, would turn out to be a peak on I think February eighteenth or nineteenth. Right, things are, you're starting to see it a little bit in the repo market, You're starting to see commercial paper credit get a little rickety, spreads are widening, stocks are
still kind of hanging on. And then it was really, you know, the last couple of days of February and the first week of March where I mean, things just went crazy. And I remember, you know, to give you a sense of you know, the fact that I'm trying not to Monday morning quarterback this stuff. I was coming back from a family vacation on March eighth in the in the Gulf and sitting there not a mask in site.
I remember my sister in law had stolen some extra wet naps from Chick fil A, like wiping down the airline seat, feeling a little foolish doing it. And so came back to the office on a Monday Wednesday. We were told, you know what, we're gonna try and work from home on Thursday. This is Thursday, March twelfth. Uh huh, never went back.
Wow, that's unbelievable.
So I mean, that's how quickly this happened.
I have a vivid recollection of my sister lives in the city. I live in the Burbs, and she was out visiting late February and we had gone to Target. Hey, as long as you're out here, let's swing by Target. And I never really go to Target post pandemic. It's all delivered. But at the time we were walking through Target, there's no toilet paper, there's no bleach, there's no this is February, this isn't March. And that was my first, Hey,
something's going on. But it turns out in the book lots of companies had a much earlier sort of lead on something bad, something wicked. This way comes and it's not the usual. Tell us a little bit about that, you know.
I start the book kind of an earnest at Davos twenty twenty, which will to me just go down as like the most absurd gathering of human beings right in history. And you know, it's this private dinner that's actually being hosted by my ven employer at Wall Street Journal, though I was not invited. They don't let the reporters into the fun stuff. But it's a bunch of CEOs with Steven Manuchin, the Treasury Secretary, and they're all yacking about this.
The big theme that year, as it often has been since then, was environment esg and they're all talking about the kind of corporate babble that you hear at these things. And Steven Manuchin, the Treasury Secretary, stands up and says, you, guys, like you're looking at the wrong thing. There is a city of eleven million people in China that's on lockdown.
This is the end of January of twenty twenty. And I start there because you know, in my reporting, these are people who should have had they the best line citing the world. They run global businesses, they've got regulators and government officials on speed dial. They sometimes are regulators and government officials, and they were totally blindsided. And you know, there's two ways to look at that. One as like celebrities, they're just like us, right, like these guys bumped along
in the dark, just like the rest of us. The other is, I don't know, I found it a little unsettling. These are people who really should be able to see around corners. They're paid a lot of money to see around corners, and most of them didn't.
Most of them didn't, but a few did. And I'm fascinated in the book, and we'll get into the details how some companies in different sectors they were able to see a little bit around corners. Starting with the airlines, they were getting cancelations long before everybody shut down. They had a sense, hey, something is a little different here. You talk about hotels, Airbnb, and then the banks were having people draw down their line of credit weeks and
weeks before things really got got bit. So that's the question, who had the earliest read, who was hip as to what was going on? And what was their response.
In my reporting, Actually, someone you didn't mention I think had the earliest beedn That was Bill Ackman.
That literally next question of Persian Square Capital. Yeah, who got very nervous very early. Yeah.
So Bill a bit of a germophobe, but he you know, in mid February, he has been reading. He's a voracious consumer of everything's kind of funnel to him and internalizes it in these investment vcs, and he is starting to
get very spooked. In late January, mid February, he goes to London School of Economics in mid February, gives this talk and is asked about the coronavirus, and as he's sort of getting ready to answer, this kid in the front row just like very innocently coughs or something and Bill kind of like leaves, yeah, jumps and it's one of those like dumb little things that we would all kind of you know, later you would look back and
be like, oh, that's what did it for me? And he comes back and says, Okay, I think we are dramatically underestimating this. And so the key components of any investment are like fesis, expression and timing right, and so he says, I think the market is not aware of
the risks here. Okay, how do I express it? And most people think of Bill his bread and butter business, as activist concentrated stock investing, but he's a bit of a background in macro two back from seven oh eight, and he actually decides to do this in the credit markets, where spreads are incredibly tight, investors are assigning basically no risk premiums to corporates at were governments or junk over
investment grade. And he said, all right, we when things get bad, that's where it's going to blow out, and he shorts the entire credit market. And it only takes about two and a half weeks for people to realize that he is right and he's holding an incredibly valuable piece of paper. Ends up turning about twenty seven million dollars of SWAT premiums into two billion plus and profit.
I really like the way you tell this tale from multiple perspectives, multiple storyline, lots of different leading characters. What led to that approach?
I mean, at heart, I'm a narrative journalist. I like to tell stories and collect facts and present them in ways that people can understand and grab onto. But really the origin story of the book was I had done a story for the Wall Street Journal that published the first Saturday in April, and it was a TikTok day by day of the month of March, and it feeds from you know, lots of colleagues around the newsroom, and it was day by day from the seat of it
was the month that the economy shut down. We've never seen it before. We thought that was an important story to tell, and it's you know, two dozen CEOs, investors, policymakers from like all across the economy, and it was just incredibly clear coming out of that that that we just barely scratched the surface, right, that this was fundamentally just like the kind of yarn that reporters dream of, which is it's narrative, it's tense, there's a lot of drama,
there's high stakes. Things really mattered, and so that's I think where the germ sort of I've got planted. I spent a couple of weeks, you know, talking to you know, publishers and agents as one does, and try to write a proposal and see if anyone would buy it. And then they did. And next thing I knew it was you know, summer fall of twenty twenty and I was at a book deal.
Huh. Really really interesting. So so you choose a number of specific industries or did you choose them? Did they self selected? It's kind of apparent some of these industries are going to be the first to really succumb to an economy shutting down. How did you decide who were the key players to focus on, what sectors to really delve into.
Yeah, this is you know, most reporters who write a book, they have a beat and a huge thing happens on their beat and they crush it, and then they write a book about it, right, think about.
Whatever your bad blood is bad blood.
Perfect example, John carry Rout at the Journal crushes the there are no story and says, of course I should write a book. This was a little different, right, This is nobody's beat at the Journal. Elsewhere is every company on the planet, in the entire economy. So and in part, I think the reas that I thought I was maybe in a good position to do it was I thought it would be more of a financial story. If you
remember early on, right, the markets are going crazy. There's you know, people are always kind of solving the next crisis by looking at the last one, and there's this concern that it's going to be two thousand and eight all over again. And I thought the banks would be aniger piece of it, honestly. Then they it turned out really to be a story about a crisis in the real economy. So then you know that summer you're looking around, you're thinking, okay, like some combination of what is important.
So some obvious ones there. Airlines obviously important, right, travel obviously important, finance important. It was just a little unclear then how that would all shake out. I know I wanted a big sort of multinational industrial manufacturer, manufacturers, yahure, and I wanted people ask me, why is Airbnb in the book if you have Hilton, and did you want a tech company? And the truth is, at that point I really didn't think, and I think it ultimately was
the right call. I'm not sure that tech had a uniquely interesting pandemic. No, despite the reason that we kind of all got through it. I'm not sure Apple had like an incredibly compelling story.
Right, if anything of any sector that was able to sort of all right, everybody go work from home. You all have laptops and high speed connections. Do you have to do? They seem to almost take it in stride.
Tech was the scaffolding on which the pandemic story hung, I think, but not to me anyway at the time, an important part of it. But I did want a company that was in addition to kind of making sure that you're checking boxes on sectors and really getting a picture.
At the end of the day, books are character driven these kind anyway, and so you're gonna end up sort of essentializing these CEOs into archetypes that are carrying a narrative that's sort of you know, buzzing underneath feed the story that they're telling.
And I will have a lot of great characters as CEOs and great storylines. David Solomon at Goldman you have the CEO of Hilton Delta American Airlines, like work your n Airbnb, Brian Tranchesky.
If I wanted a CEO who was younger, I wanted a company that was in a different place in their life cycle, and Rbnb was on the verge of going public, which is just such a naturally high stakes thing. And you know, we can talk about the Airbnb story, but I fully thought they were left for dead, which is why I'm a journalist and not an investor.
So when you're selecting these storylines, when you're choosing these characters, how obvious are some of these because these are all big personalities, big egos. There's no shrinking violets amongst any of the people you're writing about. Was that part of the reason you selected them? Tell us a little bit about the thought process.
You know, you never know why some I mean this is true at a daily journalism job or a book you never really know why anyone is talking to you, and you know again, because of the way this book came together, I had to kind of go out and say, here's what I'm trying to do. I think you have a good story to tell. By the way that you shouldn't assume that any of the people in the book spoke to me. Their stories are the ones that I tell.
But it's a little bit of a kind of layer, all right, like one of the important stories where can I get people to talk to me? And then you kind of throw things overboard where like one or both of those isn't quite working.
So I have to interrupt you here. I assumed you spoke to all of these people. It looks like you have amazing access people. There's a lot of details that are very very specific that someone would say, and it keeps coming up to food. Oh, they're out in mon talk and they have a lobster role. Or he's stuck in a hotel and he's eating the same sort of food that comes in every day because it's him and a bunch of Saudi's stuck in a DC hotel, those
sort of things. It looks like these are very specific recollections from individuals who appear to have spoken to you.
Yeah. Look, I mean I think readers can draw their own conclusions. I think what I had said when I approach people was, you know, here's how I want to tell this story, which is very voice of God, very fly on the wall. I think, just from a reader, that's really what you want. You want to be jumping back and forth between live quotes and old things, and you're trying to tell a story. And I think that gives people the safest space to speak.
But you did speak to most of these people.
I certainly everyone in the book had ample opportunity to talk to me, and many of them took it.
Oh that makes a lot, makes a lot of sense. Were there any narratives that you want to cover but didn't like, Any companies or sectors or space that you thought, oh, this could be a great thread and for whatever reason, it never came together.
Yeah, there's two buckets of those. I would say, like you will notice and like, I think it's better to just address it straight on. There's not a cruise company in the book. There's not a meat packing there's not like a what we would consider to be like bad or at least slightly dubious actors. You at a shock, and like, look, I never covered those industries, and a challenge of a project like this is you just you can't source up at twenty places in six months. It's
not how journalism works. Took me years to get the relationships that I have now. And so yeah, there is a little bit of self selection there, which is like total fair criticism of the project if you're making one. And then there were some that I pursued that ultimately just I didn't think we're additive. So Macy's is a good example, kind of thought they would have a more
interesting pandemic than they did. I got to the end and we sort of my editor and I kind of looked at the storylines, like what are we doing here? And we threw one or two overboard.
Retail just is nothing. Hey, there's no retail order online.
You know what it was? Honestly, it was yes, And I think that story is going to take a couple of years to play out, and I don't I couldn't say at the time. And that's a hard thing about writing a book, particularly when you come from the world of journalism, particularly if you come from a place like the Wall Street Journal, which is that you're supposed to have a point of view on this stuff, and you're supposed to be able to say something definitive. And it
felt too early to me at the time. Yeah, it felt too squishy.
Huh. Really interesting. So let's talk a little bit about Bill Ackman. He not only was early in seeing the crisis, but that bet he made ended up netting Pershing square two billion dollars. That's a hell of a trade. I don't know why we haven't heard more about that.
Look, say what you want about Bill. I mean he's a controversial figure and he doesn't always get it right, and that is one of the best trades of all time. Yeah, that's great, and you know it's it's a pure trade. He saw something that people didn't. He was right on the thesis. He found a place to express it efficiently, right, I mean absolutely nailed the time. I mean you're talking about I don't like you could do the math. It's
got ten thousand percent return in like three weeks. I mean it's I mean.
Really crazy well number. So I love that he reaches out to different people like Warren Buffin and Bill Gates. Anybody ever get back to him, I don't think so.
I mean that's The other thing about Bill, which is, you know, I can say straight face, like, very impressive piece of financial footwork there, but also is a little is flailing a little bit, is a little vulnerable is you know? The thing about Bill Lackman, and I write about this in the book, is he has this tendency to take what our investment thesis and turn them into
holy wars. You'll remember years ago he had a proxy fight it Target and I think it was invoking JFK and his speech to shareholders.
It's really target at least the battle with Carl Icon over what he describes as a pyramid scheme. You could say that's.
A whole but also even that, you know, tears in his eyes talking about taking the battle to the ends of the earth like it and you know what, they are genuinely felt. These are peces that become He wraps himself in the flag of them, and he totally did it here, right. He takes to Twitter for the first time in you know, year or two and says, mister President, like we can solve this right in jets himself right in the middle of this thing. Ends up parlaying that into a CNBC interview where he.
Rarely excortiated for even though he had already covered his short and moved to.
The long side exactly right now. In fairness, live television is not a place that is super comfortable with a lot of nuance, right. But what he did was he went on television and said hell is coming, and and the stock market went down. And I think Mike Novagrats was like, get him off the air, right, I mean it was, but you're right, he I think ultimately, and I spent a lot of time on this because I didn't want to carry anyone's water. He didn't do anything wrong.
Yeah, No, he really was fascinating.
He was bullish at that point.
Yeah, he had pocketed the two billion and said we're going to go the other way because I think eventually the Fed and the White House will do the right thing here.
Yes, And that's the way he thinks, right. The answer to him was so obvious that someone was going to do it and rborway the trade that he saw, you know, so.
He covers the short, goes long, and yet there's a ton of criticism that he's talking down the market because he's short. He was no longer short.
Yeah, he just wasn't that's just not true.
So in the book and my recollection of the period is the criticism seemed to be not just unfair but very personal. How did he respond to the sort of public flaying that he got on Twitter?
Actually responded pretty responsibly, put out I think two shareholder letters about a week apart in late March, and actually like did what no portfolio manager usually love doing, which is he deconstructed the trade. Right, he said, here's what we bought, here's what we bought, here's what we paid. Here was my positioning more or less. When I went on the air, I thought handled it the right weight. Got a little loss in all the noise, and sure, you know.
I mean, at that point, the world is going to hell, and who cares about a letter from a hedge fund manager explaining why he wasn't joy boning the market down? But still a great trade that he never really got full credit for, other than the two and twenty, which is not a terrible thing.
And and you know most of the money is his though, yeah he's any anymore.
Right, right? That happens with a lot of hedge funds. And so even better than the twenty is the two billion. It's not a bad, bad week's work or bad months work. Right.
The other thing about Bill, I don't know if you want to get to this.
Leep, yeah, no, I love tell more, tell.
Me you know. He called this thing coming and going right. We talked about the coming on the way out back before inflation was was really a thing. He does what any sort of freshman economic student could do, says, I don't know, man, like a lot of pen up demand here, a lot of money most people buy and large and this is true at kind of every income level. Came out of the pandemic wellfare, then they went into it and just a total show on the supply side. We're
going to have massive inflation here. And he put on a train. He was a little earlier on that one. His actual IRR is not quite as good, but heils like another two billion dollarge.
There really weren't a lot of people who were who were correct about that. Jeremy Siegel was one for the same reasons, and and Ackman was one.
So kudos called it coming and going I will note that when he went back to doing what he is ostensibly paid to do, which is to take deeply researched positions in single name stocks. He lost a ton of money on Netflix, so.
Which is which is kind of funny because did he lose it on the way up and did he lose it on the way down?
You know, I'd have to go back and look. My recollection is that he came out publicly not an activist position. So we think this is a great company and literally did it right at like peak streaming, Like the next quarter Netflix announce it's like first subscriber either slowing growth or loss, I don't remember, uh, and sort of kicked off this now two year kind of slow bleed of peak.
Streaming happens, Hey happens. You can't You can't bat a thousand in this business, right, You make two billion dollars on the pandemic, you make two billion dollars on the inflation call at.
A cost of about two hundred million if I remember right, right.
And so then you lose a couple of bucks on Netflix. You know this too shall pass? Yes, So wh let's talk a little bit about Yolo. You only live once. That means go out and buy the crappiest meme based companies there are discuss.
I mean no, it's it's such an important part of the pandemic story because I think, I mean, it's just so fueled by it, right, like all of the very normal human behaviors came to an end, and there's that a a lot of money. As we've discussed, these these Stimmius stimulus checks and just this like you can't go to sports game bat.
On sports, no betting, no casino.
Stock market becomes a casino like most you know, stock markets are largely momentum driven, which is weird if you think about it, right, Like a stock goes up, it's presumably a little more overvalued than it was before it did. You should sell it, right, say, if it goes down, and instead you end up having these waves that fuel themselves and you know, your professional wealth manager, you chuck to investors, they will say that underpinning it is some
basic fundamentals of you know, corporate analysis and management. Not really and actually the meme stock stuff just didn't even pretend, right, it was so nakedly goofy. And as you know, Spencer wrote this great book. Certainly some people made some money, but like ultimately a giant cell phone by that entire community, right.
Right, no doubt about it. And it all started with game Stop and read it and Wall Street bets and that became like a self fulfilling prophecy of a small company with a huge excess short position in it, which meant it was primed for a squeeze. And then these people discovered Gamma trades. Hey, we can buy out of the money call options and force these people to cover their shorts and you know, to take a let's be honest, it's a junk company, right. Wait, you're selling video games
in retail shops in malls. Who cares to take that from single digits to multi triple digits. That's a hell of an orchestrated short squeeze.
And it was interesting too because you know, retail had just been getting less and less relevant as a market force. Go pass it totally, like you have a remember IPOs back in the day, And that's some things used to win them by saying we've got retail right, give us that allocation doesn't matter at all anymore, and you know,
trying to see sort of retail reassert themselves. And I think it also I don't know whether they were both just riding the same wave or one fuel the other, but had that the same sort of populous political establishment, right, right, sort of putting your thumb in the eye of the political establishment. Same thing in the financial establishment, and.
Ironically ironically right, it's like, wait, you're gonna all this Robinhood is a public company. They're The way they make money with their free trades is they sell it. Payment for order flow is what it's called. So if you don't like the big hedge funds like Citadel or Millennial, you're putting money in their pocket.
Yeah, what's funny about And I'm not an expert on payment for or flow, but you know, there's the way that I think people commonly look at it is like your trades are being sold and people are trading ahead of you. That's not really why people buy order flow. They do it because it's random and actually uninformed. The sense is that retail doesn't know anything that Citadel doesn't, so they want that flow to kind of balance stuff out, and just well it's val.
Right, it's volume. If you're getting a cent a share on billions of shares, that adds up totally.
I mean just to say that the deck isn't in many ways stacked against retail, But I don't think it's some kind of like all it's nonsuming conspiracy. Ken Griffin is direct from Miami Beach or whatever.
Right, if you discovered that the deck is stacked against the individual investor in twenty twenty, you're a century late to the part.
But in some ways, actually, it's never been friendlier really, So you're talking about, you know, if you want to have a basic if you want access to basic investment products, it's never been friendly or cheaper, easier.
Free to trade. You could buy the S and P five hundred for four basis points totally. And so the best way to beat people at their game is don't play their game. Play a different game.
And they made up this insane game and then somehow won it and then lost at it. Everyone seemed to lose yours. But no, but I think it was I mean, it wasn't strictly a pandemic story, except that, you know, if you were sitting in March of twenty twenty and you're watching the Dow go from thirty to twenty two right in the course of a couple of weeks, the idea that it would be hitting fresh highs again like
by the end of the year seemed insane. And it was just such a good reminder that like there was no ability to forecast this.
I thought this was totally a pandemic story. People are stuck at home, they don't have the usual outlets, a lot of pent up energy, a lot of pent up cash, and suddenly this comes along. I loved Investor TikTok because there was not a bigger collection of people that you you could see the train crash coming, like get out of the way, and they didn't want to hear. People literally said to them, you guys don't understand what you're
doing and you're going to get hurt. And your old school was the pushback, and then all of those people, with very few exceptions got demolished.
Well, I think it's a pandemic story in two ways. Right to your point, people are bored. They are they have a lot of cash sitting around, but they could have bought the fortune fifty with it.
They did not.
For yeah, well, but even more than that, they were angry, and there was a lot of angst and they wanted they were they were fed up with authority. I mean, a huge story coming out of the pandemic is, you know, I think fueled by it is this declining trust in institutions like why by the S and P fifty when you can resurrect you know, some dead retail store from your youth. I mean, there was a real political edge to it.
I think that traces back decades or certainly at least to the financial crisis, and institutions have been seeing a decline and in fact, you know, we'll talk a little bit about the Trump administration later, but they very much captivated on the hell with the man. I'm anti establishment, Vote for me, no doubt about it. But let's talk about something else that was very related the Great Resignation.
I have a pet theory. People stuck at home with cash cares act cash in industries they weren't happy about took the opportunity to upskill, to look for new jobs, to start their own businesses. New business formation in twenty twenty and twenty one were huge. What happened during the Great Resignation?
I think it's two things. Like, to your point, yes, people we had all as cash. They also, like frankly, because they were spending more time with family, in part because a lot of people died. You start to kind of reassess what you care about in life and if you can afford it. Given the stimulus payments, then you might do that, But that's not the whole story because like those stimulus payments, a lot of estimates out there, it seems like probably two to two and a half
trillion dollars of excess savings during the pandemic. Half of that maybe two thirds has been spent down. So like, if that's the whole story, then we'll see people go back to work very soon, you know, which ultimately wouldn't be the worst thing for the economy given where the labor work it is. But I think it's actually just like a little more complicated than that, which is and
this is an economic book. I'm not a psychologist, but the pandemic was so weird and it was just such a reset for a lot of people.
That's a great word. I've used that phrase. It was a great reset where people they rethought their jobs, they rethought their relationship between their work life balance, they rethought they're commute. Let's talk about hybrid working and the return to office.
I think that's the most lasting change to come out of this. I mean people have talked about, you know, the digitization of the economy. Actually a lot of that to me is overblown. Like if you look at for example, years years old totally and I think the pandemic pulled forward stuff more than anything else. If you look at like exactly retail, e commerce is a percent of retail, like it's soreed during the pandemic, but now is basically back on the trend line that it would which.
Was which is dramatically since the late nineties. But you know, but the idea that.
That was like a total stratosphere change, I think is not true. The thing that I think is really lasting is the relationship between between capital and labor, right between management and their employees. You know, I do tell this story in the book. You referenced it early on. And you've got the CEO Goldman Saxe, who's out in the Hampton's on a Friday. Uh, I don't think he was using that trip, but I don't have access to the schedule. But you know, is waiting in the line at I
think it's at the Montac Lobster Club. Jury.
Yeah, remember this, it's always food and cracked me up. I noticed that on regular basis.
I to check that instinct to myself. But and he was waiting for a table and a young woman comes up to him and says, mister Solomon, I work for you, an analystic goldman and me and like six of my colleagues points over to some table. We all took the day off and came to the beach.
And some of that is mark smart thing to say to the CEO of he was infuriated.
I tell that story because I think it like sets the table for this fight that we are somehow now two years later, still having I am. I would say the risk of being called like a capitalist show, I'm somewhat sympathetic to CEOs here who for a lot of the pandemic, especially in places like New York, are walking around the city on the weekends and seeing the bars packed and then seeing their office is empty on Monday.
So like the it's not safe for us to come in, you are making us risk our lives, like was certainly true in the beginning, and you'll remember an outbreak on the I think equity trading floor, Morgan, Yeah, where genuinely like there were places that were not safe, and I talk in the book a lot about the New York Stock Exchange for that reason, But at some point that
just wasn't true anymore. And you know, you talked about flexibility and reassessing your priorities, and that's totally fine to a point, but there's clearly some professional self indulgence that was baked in.
Here's my pushback to that. Right, the US return to office is sixty percent, except in big metropolitan areas where it's fifty percent. In Europe it's almost ninety five percent. Why is that Their mass transit is much better, their cost of housing is much lower. You could live much closer to your work. My big takeaway from the pandemic is that commuting in America sucks, and sucks in a way that, oh my god, I'm not going to do this anymore unless I have to. And a lot of
people decided. You know, it's amazing how we get used to something and you just don't question it. Lots of people have a two hour community to the office because they can afford a place in Rockland, or in Suffolk County or in mid New Jersey. Coming into New York as an example, and suddenly recapturing three four five hours a day, Hey, I don't care if I have to make twenty percent less, I'm not doing that.
I think that I totally agree, though I'm not sure that that's a trade most people are willing to make right more than Stanley. You imagine, like lot of people maybe I'll have to be here, but we're going to pay you for where you live, and people like lost their minds about it. You know, there was a study
a couple of months ago. I'd have to go pull it, but that I think I found that Americans has got like ninety three minutes back or something from work from home a day a day, and it you know, spent it. I think it was a little bit of a gender split, but like spent it, you know, a third to third to third on like work, personal life and caregiving and some other things. Right, And I don't remember the numbers.
You could check me in Europe, but they were lower, and then in Asia they were like one hundred and twenty minutes. So there's some I'd be curious to see what happens if you overlay that. But I think there's
this frog boiling thing, which is you're commute. As your life gets more complicated, to get older, you get wealthier, kind of just expands and it doesn't occur to you that that's weird to spend three hours every day because everybody does it, and then you don't do it anymore, and you realize this is great thing.
That the thing that I found so amusing in the first on a couple of quarters of the pandemic, the productivity numbers go through the roof. People are working longer hours, and they just seem to be doing a better job at first.
Yes, but then they start to And I think it was Jamie Diamond last year who said, you know, as you can imagine, we keep quite close tabs in our employees and we noticed that productivity on Fridays is really love right, which like maybe we should have a four day work week. That's a totally note, so far over and totally not far off. There's actually a lot of pilots, mostly in Europe that are really interesting about this.
I love the stories about the people who didn't take Fridays off. They took two jobs, and we're doing two full jobs, time jobs at once, and nobody knew a company figured out.
Yeah yeah no. But I think to your point, journalism is an apprentice business, right. I learned how to do it by sitting next to people who are really good at it.
The job is like that, right, but it's like very fair issue.
A lot of businesses like that, right, Like you I would hear senior reporters on the phone, like learning how to talk to a source, you follow someone to a meeting, you know, you learn how to deal with a client. That stuff is soft and is really hard to do remotely. And I think, you know, I think what young people actually want is I think they're mostly okay going in, but they want real value. They don't Taco Tuesday. They want to say, if I'm here, I need to go to that meeting, right.
Like collaboration, mentorship, training, trail.
Places that you're seeing the most turnover with still some data on this. The other day are the why am I here? Jobs? Right, which is the ones where people never left or have to go in. They work an assembly line, they got to physically be there.
They get that.
And then the ones where people understand that they can be remote. I'm I'm often remote because I'm out meeting sources or traveling or working at home or whatever. It's the ones in the middle where they're like, why am I here? This is a job that I could very much do from home and I'm not getting any additional support or mentorship or encouragement, those the people who are quitting.
My favorite story of that era was in the Washington Post about companies making people come into the office to do.
Zoom calls well and right, because there's this sort of equity belief right that there's some and by the way, I think a lot of this where we're said, after the first promotion cycle, when people realize that there's a
huge advantage and it's actually unfortunate. I think if you track these cohorts, because the people for whom flexibility is deemed to be the most valuable are frankly like women with kids, you know, minorities who have like much further commutes and tougher personal situations that they need more time
to deal with. But I actually think it's going to work against them, which is that the people who can afford, you know, for a bunch of reasons to come in every day and see the boss and slap some backs, you're going to get going to get over promoted. And we're starting to see it now. We'll see how it
shakes out in the commercial real estate market. But companies are upgrading their space but needing less of it, so trying to figure out how to actually right size your footprint and have an office to people want to be in.
Yeah, that's absolutely true. It's fascinating. So I'm in the office yesterday and we have this new division that we launched, and we have people in from around the country, and it's like, wow, I forgot what was like to have twenty thirty people in an office that normally holds twenty people, but the past year has been eight, ten, twelve people. It's like everything's popping. We bring in lunch, it's this and that. Wow, this is kind of fun. I forgot how much fun it can be when you've an office
full of people. We're more startup than established entity, so not everybody has that ability. I'm not sure how much i'd buy into the you must be here for culture. I've been hearing a lot of that lately. But the FaceTime, the collaboration, the mentorship, just the learning how companies operate, that's got to be a huge, huge aspect of this whole thing.
I completely agree. And I mean, look, it's every generation kind of shakes their fists the next one. So these kids have no respect, they don't know how anything works. But I do think like losing two years of that if you were in your twenties starting out, like, yeah, there's a lot of just sort of like passive osmosis that happens.
That you miss out on when you're remote. And you know, whenever we see like a zoom call with twenty thirty forty people on it, it's usually one person, maybe two people speaking, and it's wait, I have to give you my full attention for an hour. That seems like a lot for very little in return in terms of what you're learning the like that could be a if it's a half a page memo instead of fifty people spending an hour, isn't it more efficient to say important read this as opposed to.
That's the old joke, right, this meeting could have been an email. This email could have been a slack. The slack could have not existed, Like whenever there's some inflation that happens, and I think it's good that some of that got dispensed with. But and look, maybe I'll be wrong about that, but like ar VR, it doesn't seem like a replacement to me, Like the replacement seem bad. Like if you don't want to have a meeting, don't have a meeting. We don't have a fake meeting, right.
I'm with you on it. By the way, what you said. My colleague Mike Batnik had a hilarious tweet which was, most books should be magazine articles, most magazine articles should be tweets, and most tweets should be deleted, which I find to be I hope not this one. I hope this one justified. So just so you know, what I found so interesting about the book is it reads so we all went through this pandemic together. We all more or less experienced maybe eighty percent of the same stuff.
The concern about what's going to happen with my job, what's gonna happen with the economy? Am I going to get sick? I'll never forget walking the dog around the block and watching a guy spray a package that was delivered with light sool? How long did we idiotically wash down our groceries like? There was a lot of confusion as to what was going on, So most of us
had a very similar experience. What I really found entrancing about the book is, oh, there were a lot of people that had an incredibly more stressful, more at risk, higher level real economic catastrophe experience. Than I had, and you use their storylines and the characters of the CEO of Delta and American Airline and Airbnb and Ford and Hilton then on and on and Goldman Sachs to tell
a story. I feel like I got to look behind the curtain of stuff that we all kind of suspected was going on during the pandemic, but most of us had no idea. And that's what made the book so interesting to me. It's like, oh, there was some serious ish going down as it's all unfolded.
I mean, first all, thank you.
Is that a fair description of the book?
I hope.
So.
I mean, at some point you get so close to these projects you kind of can't see them. So it's always nice to hear it from readers. But you know, I think, well, just a high level one thing that I kind of wasn't aware of at the time was like, just how close it came to being really worse, right, really really bad? And in some respects, I just think the economic toll would have been worse if the pandemic itself was not quite as bad. Right, There is a
sort of a thought experiment that you can do. We're like, okay, we've a pandemic that's half as bad, right, I'm not sure it generates the same reaction reaction same. You don't get six trillion dollars, you don't, you know, you get real divergence and outcomes, which ultimately I'll tell you a funny story that at some point the sub head of the subtitle of the book I think was fortune and Failure and Fortune and the pandemic Economy or something like that.
At some point, I don't know, late it's twenty twenty one. Talking to my publisher, I was like, you know, Paul, like, not a lot of failure at the end of the day, right. I think corporate bankruptcies were like an all time low in twenty twenty.
You had a handful of retailers, and a lot of it was mostly local, local restaurants and dry cleaners and things like that. But it wasn't the big company, no, right.
And I think had the pandemic been just not as bad, you wouldn't have seen that incredible geyser of financial support.
I have a vivid recollection of early twenty twenty of a Congress that was so divided that a bill was introduced to rename a library and they couldn't move it forward. And then the pandemic hits, and the biggest fiscal stimulus in history Cares. Act One passes. It's ten percent of GDP, It's over two trillion dollars. How did this massive fiscal stimulus come together in such a short period of time.
On the economic side, I think the government did quite well. I actually think I'm sort of an undersung here on all this. To Steven Minichen, I think really deserves a lot of credit. And frankly, you know, before the pandemic, when he became Treasury secretary, he had obviously worked on Waltreet to come out of Goldman sacks. He ask people that there was like super high confidence that he was going to make his mark, and you know, a lot
of jobs and Treasury remained unfilled. I mean, the administration was very chaotic.
Very slow to fill across the whole board. Every every department was totally.
And so this was like an understaffed financial regulatory apparatus run by someone pretty unknown that I'm not sure the Street specifically had a ton of confidence in, and I think really nailed it. So there's two pieces of this, right, There's the fiscal stimulus side, Congress, and look, nothing brings people together like a crisis. They are you know this. That's the other thing too, is that I tried to kind of get back in the book. You gotta remember
early pandemic. It became this terrible, toxic, sludged Groundhog's Day forever. But it didn't start that way. It started out as as kind of a unifying, weirdly earnest moment of.
Like genuine threat gineet.
It was obviously important at the moment, and it felt that way, which is unusual, and I kind of wanted to try to bring people back to that moment that now sort of seems sort of sacharine and stupid that we banged pots out of windows, and you know.
At the time it didn't see.
Congress like on the steps. I mean, the whole thing was goofy.
So you you have a little bit of criticis you both compliment and criticize the Trump administration, And we're talking about the key players. On the one hand, you have the Treasury Department, which really seems to be doing its best to hold things together. On the other hand, there's the White House and the CDC. How did both those groups do?
Look, I don't think this is a partisan a political statement. But the White House did not cover themselves in glory here, and neither did the CDC, which, by you know, it's not an overly political organization. Right. Just the science was bad, and I don't think it was certainly not a conspiracy.
The communication was bad. Also, it was very confused, right, yeah, exactly. I always like to tell people if you don't think you should wear a mask whenever you have surgery, tell everybody in the operating room don't bother with the masks. They don't do anything, right.
Yeah, yeah, Look, I mean there were plenty of great books written about the Trump White House, and to Washington Post reporters wrote a great book about the health response itself. Schulie read looking at sort of the world that I know. The economic side, I think did a really good job with a couple of important caveats, the first one of which is the spicket was open too wide for too long.
That last round of stimulus AID in was it April of twenty one pretty clearly unnecessary both from like a household wealth perspective and actually, just the other day I did a story looking back at the airline AID and very clearly that last round of aid totally unnecessary. The first one very clearly necessary and well done. You could argue about the second one, which is at the end of twenty twenty.
So let me ask you. That leads to an obvious question. The airlines as an industry got this giant package. Most other industries did not see the same. So the hotel industry didn't get that. The restaurant industry didn't get that.
There were a lot, real detail, there were a lot of industries that the pandemic really tore a swath through that did not seem to have the same sort of luck in getting Congress to How do you explain that you're right good lobbyists or right parts right time, partly good lobbying, but fundamentally airlines and actually banks too, which is why those tend to be the industries that we have to bail out every so often.
Are national resources in private hands. Planes are national resources. We need to have them, and we decided that we'd rather have the private sector manage them than the government for I don't know, customer serves reasons, I don't.
Know, but like, but those big things bad no matter who.
Doesn't it you know it is a and actually I think the first time we meet in an airline ceo in the book, it's it's Ed Bastion from Delta and he's at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas in January of twenty twenty giving a keynote, which is a weird place for an airline CEO to be. This is a gadget show, right, and he's talking about, you know, the seepback entertainment should be a streaming platform, right. They're they're gonna have this bionic software that shows you your
itinerary when you look at a screen. I mean, really like next level stuff. And I tell that story as a reminder that, like, airlines are an incredibly capital intensive business that involve flying really expensive hunks of metal around and every like ten to fifteen years something bad happens, and they had forgotten that. I think that industry had really thought they had escaped that boom and bus cycle.
So plenty of arrogance coming into this. Plenty of people have rightly pointed out that they spent something like ninety six percent of their free cash flow on stock buybacks totally, but like, had they spent eighty percent, that wouldn't have saved them either.
Right, unless they didn't know stock buybacks.
Well, you can have a company that is one hundred percent cash, but like that CEO won't have a job for very long because some investors are going to come in saying, what are you doing? Right, there's an optimal capital structure, but there's not an optimal capital structure for a pandemic. And so look, and especially if the government is saying it's not just the market telling you we don't want to fly, it's a government in a lot
of cases saying you cannot fly. Right, we're shutting down your business, which is a wild thing to do in a capitalist society. And so look, ultimately, like I didn't accounting of this recently for someophore And the bill comes to something like sixty two billion dollars out the door, of which less than a third is designed to be repaid.
And that's sort of the math. There's some interest ration warrants getting out there that are somehow still underwater three years later should tell you something about the markets.
But like, even though good luck booking a flight, everything.
Is can you imagine that? So the travel hell that we went through in twenty twenty one, twenty two. Can you imagine how much worse that would have been if you'd had hundreds of thousands of people kicked off of payrolls. They lose their training, right, This is an incredibly regulated industry. At the same time that a lot of airlines were modernizing their their fleets, so having to retrain pilots on new planes, I mean, they just would have been a disaster.
And by the way, like fire them. The government page for them anyway on unemployment, which is less efficient.
So let's talk about Ford. You know, we haven't really brought them up. The CEO of Ford has a big role in here. Like they did during World War Two, where they built bombers and tanks and things like that, they start making respiratory devices, they start making masks, respirators. Ford really stepped up to the plate. Tell us a little bit about the CEO of Ford.
C Ford is a guy named Jim Hackett, and he was hired just a couple of years before the pandemic. It's kind of an odd choice, and actually it's a little bit of an odd duck, Like really came was running one of the biggest office furniture companies in the world before that. Really cerebrobally thoughtful, kind of wonky, a little hard to follow for the kind of like go left, go right crew that are you know, the engineers that work in a place like Ford. And so Ford had
had a tough couple of years. They'd come into the pandemic incredibly leveraged, huge amounts of debt. They lose their investment grade credit rating pretty early on. I got to cut their dividend. I mean, is a company that is in mortal trouble because every piece of its supply chain and its business doesn't work right. You can't have people making cars. No one's gonna buy. No one's gonna buy
a car. And even if they wanted to, the idea that they would go into a dealership and sit in a car that someone else had just tested her and got yeah, you got to remember like it wasn't gonna work. And then this whole huge finance business that is just massively at the mercy of credit markets and rates that was, you know, really high wire act. And so you know, I think the story of Ford that I tell is sort of in two pieces. One is that which is
they almost failed. Of all the companies that I looked at, I think became the closest and ultimately were saved by a pretty interesting bit of diplomacy, which is that you remember in the spring of twenty twenty, and we talked a little bit earlier about the government's response, which is that they did in about six weeks when it took them six or nine months to do in O eight just stand up a lot of these backstop facilities, figure out where the pain is, what they should buy, what
they should put a floor under, and they start to buy corporate bonds, which is a pretty dramatic step to take. I mean, that's really government's picking winners and losers, which is very un American. And but do you have to be an investment grade to have your bonds be eligible for this facility that the Fed and the Treasury is standing up and Ford had lost it. And Jim Hackett, who spent a lot of time in Washington, I think he was on the board of Fifth Third for a while.
So like, no, it's pretty well connected in finance, calls Larry Fink Blackrock and says who's who's doing the bond buying for the government, says, listen, I don't want to put you in a weird spot. I'm not trying to be inappropriate, but like Ford is the kind of we're acting the way that you guys want companies to act, Like, we're not laying we got a union contract, we're trying to be responsible, we're trying to be thoughtful. But when we come out on the back of this, like do
you want a thriving industrial heartland sector or not? And very quietly there's a change made to that program, which is that if you had been investment grade I think back in the pre pandemic, your bonds are eligible. And on the back of that, Ford launches the largest JUNGK fond offering in history, massively over subscribed, ends up at I think eight and a half billion, I don't remember, which really saves it. So you take away from that anecdote what you want.
But it helps to know people.
It helps to know people. Also, I think I think it was the right move. Like Ford obviously a strong, important company and was waylaid by this. But the other story that that you're talking about is it's a company and again, like I understand now that it will people will roll their eyes, but at the time there was a real it's a big deal. It was a big deal, and it was. There was a real earnestness when you.
See surgeons come out wearing garbage bags because they don't have gowns, they don't have gloves, they don't have masks. Hey, something's gone terribly wrong.
Totally, and the fact that it ended up on the private sector to solve it is insane. But that's where it was. And Ford is a company that that bleeds American right. They made bombers during World War Two, they made iron lungs for polio patients, and and and it's a little bit of I think this sort of faded corporate titan trying to reinsert itself in the national narrative. It was a little bit of that, but but.
It was also the right thing.
But it was the right thing to do, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for it. I mean, ultimately, the not a ton of respirator turns out that they're very complicated to made. But they made these. If you remember, one of the real concerns was that healthcare workers themselves were getting.
Sick, didn't have masks, didn't have masks.
And so they made these kind of like hoods like respirators that actually just cleaned, yeah, exactly, and so and they I think they used it was the fan belt from like a Ford F one fifty because it was a They called it Project Apollo because you remember that scene in Apollo third right that they dump everything they have on the table and say, what can we build with this? And so they used I think the rest the fan blower from the truck. They used to walt power tool.
Batteries, right, that's on the assembly line.
Because again, there's so much like grimness baked into these decisions, because the concern was that we were going to be standing up field hospitals, right, and you don't have electricity, so you have to find things that run on battery packs or pneumatic power. I mean, just really dark stop, really really interesting Tingency planning here was brutal.
So you talk about Treasury did great, the White House not so much. What about the Federal Reserve? Did they have much of a role here? I mean rates were cheap anyway, what's the difference between one percent and zero percent at that point?
I mean there's two places where you can be fairly critical of the FED. One was before all of this, which is they had a really hard time turning off the tap in the twenty tens.
Getting through could not they could not.
Get interest rates up, which meant that they didn't have a lot of wiggle room. To your point, you know, crisis hits, the first thing you do, obviously is large registrates, and they did, and that's fine, but it would have been a lot better if they were starting, say where we are today at four or five and going to one or two.
And the second thing.
The second thing is they were massed. They were way behind the curve.
On inflation on the way out, no doubt about it.
You really thought it would be temporary, and it wasn't. And then by the way they.
Well it transitory just is taking longer than expected. If you go back and look at CPI in March twenty twenty one, that crossed through abruptly their two percent target, and they sit on their hands for a full year after it goes through two percent and continues to go higher. I can't explain that. I don't understand that other than the fact that historically they're always late to the party.
I think that's right. But I think you saw like a diverging playbook, which is anything on the fiscal side. They overdid it right, and on the monetary side they underdid.
It, and until they panicked and overreacted and raise rates so fast they began to break things.
One hundred percent. And I would say probably the reason that Congress overdid it is that they are lectible. Right, people like getting checked right.
Nobody doesn't get reelected because the fiscal stimulus was too big.
No, and like maybe someone at the Fed doesn't get reappointed. But that's such like an arcane, just like a different discussion. There's lesson at stake there. Clearly they were late. I would say probably by two meetings, maybe three to six months, depending on how you do it. They should have started in the fall of twenty.
I would say summer of twenty one. But we're just nitpicking at this point. All right, So we talk about White House, the CDC, the FED, Treasury, let's talk about a couple of states. Because you don't really get into this very deeply in the book, but you briefly touch upon it. Hold aside his other woes, but there seemed to be a void coming out of the White House, and into that vacuum steps Governor Andrew Cuomo with a daily briefing that felt like, oh, someone's talking to us honestly,
like we're adults. It was a breath of fresh air.
You hit it. So one thing that I think is is true, and I might take in a different direction, which to this huge vacuum of public sector leadership coming out of Washington at a time that it was badly needed. My takeaway from that is, actually the CEO has kind of stepped in, and I think part of the reason that, you know, I think they kind of frankly wish they hadn't, because really put themselves squarely in what I would now kind of call the culture wars.
Right, Yeah, how dare you try and say, fellow Americans from dying, who do you think.
You how dare you try to do anything that doesn't have to do with running your business day to day, which is what a lot of the sort of pandemic leadership involved.
Before we let you go, we're going to get to our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests, starting with tell us what you're streaming these days? What are you watching listening to? What's what's keeping you entertained? What kept you entertained during the lockdown?
Well, I about a year ago quit my job at the wall Stree Journal and joined a startup. So I know this sounds terrible. I should don't have that. It's called Semaphore. I can sign up.
Actually get you daily Flagshriffic. Yes, I get Flagship and it's great.
I'll also sign you up for business before we leave. But uh, but so I actually tragically like have less time for television than I used to. But I'm obviously watching succession. I just watched The Diplomat on that FLI I love that.
We're in episode seven. It's great. It's very good, really well written, like almost believable in a strange way.
It's like if The Americans was a rom com. That's why I enjoyed it. But like, but one thing that I did like genuinely love about the pandemic, and obviously with all the caveats around that that belong there, one thing that I genuinely loved about some of the darkest days of the pandemic were just these the way these things become cultural phenomenons, like something we're just hit. So Tiger King, just like all An.
Was watchable, but I love people loved it.
Right. I'm not a reality television person at all, but got sucked into Love is Blind because it was so insane and everyone was talking about it. These things kind of.
Became Did you watch John Krakinski's weekly.
Video, How Delightful? And it's one of those things that now you look at it and you're like, god, it feels saccharin and sort of chanting, really corporate sponsored and was all. But at the time it was like, really was genuinely.
Fun and you know you loved him already. It's like, oh, no, wonder Emily Blunt married.
He's delightful, delightful. They were all delightful. No, there was something. There's some I'm not a culture reporter, and culture reporter I would say it better, but there was something like some weird earnest monoculture that was kind of simmering during a lot of the pandemic that I miss a little bit.
Actually, you know, when you go back to World War One and the popular entertainment of the day, it doesn't look sacherin and every now and then, even during World War Two, some of the Hollywood movies are a little jingoistic and a little We just saw some movie with Carrie Grant and I'm trying to remember who it was where she's married to a German who turns out to be an Austrian who turns out to be a Nazi, and he's trying to get her out of Europe and
it's like there's just a time and she gives her passport to the maid in Poland who's Jewish, Like it wasn't jingoistic. I can't remember the name of it, something Honeymoon, something like that.
But I'm actually surprised at how little pandemic media there was. Not a lot of movies have come out. There's one like Anne Hathaway and what's his name? That was kind of interesting, but I actually think we just haven't really grappled with it as a culture.
Bo Burnham is the closest terrific, that's the closest thing to a pandemic popular culture thing that that was really really quite fascinating. Yeah, sorry, Next question, tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.
You know, when I first joined the Wall Street Journal, I sat right behind Dana Simaluca, who was then the deputy M and A editor has now been the M and A editor for a long time, and he was the first person who really taught me about kind of the dark art of some kinds of journalism, and it was just really learned how to m and A is a funny beat because most stories are basically one fact, but that fact absolutely has to be right, and it's
sort of unique in that way. I think, and learned a lot from him about how to handle really sensitive stuff and you know, a little bit a little of black magic that goes on in certain beats, So I really I learned a lot from him. Then my boss after that was Marie Boudette, a totally different kind of editor. Never really was a beat reporter in the traditional sense, but had incredibly good instincts about stories and really great judgment and encourage me to be more authoritative and ambitious
in the stories that I was telling. And I've only been working for him for less than a year, but you know, I've learned a lot from from Ben Smith, who's our editor in chief, and I was really trying to trying to build a new kind of journalism and we're having a lot of fun doing it.
Really really interesting. Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorite and what have you been reading recently.
I am, perhaps disappointingly like I read a lot of non I read almost exclusively nonfiction. I read a lot of nonfiction. I'm like, I can escape my job.
In my very time. I got this is business nonfiction.
I wrote the kind of book that I like to read. Really, you know. I had COVID actually for the first time around Christmas of last.
Year, and I re read November for Yeah, it's.
Funny if you if you get the audio book which I recorded, I did it that week between Christmas and New Year's because it takes a couple of days and I have a full time job, and I had COVID, and so you can kind of hear it. But actually I re read like, uh, Barbarians at the Gate Den of Thieves, like those old those old really great yarns us a great and then there's a new generation to them. That I really loved that that friends and colleagues and
competitors of mine have written. Trip Michael had a great book come out last year about Apple. He was my colleague at the Wall book He's Gonna Kill Me. It's called After Steve, which I really love. Another former colleague, Eric Schwartzel, wrote this great book called Red Carpet about Hollywood and China and soft power and business and commerce. That's fantastic. And again he's going to think I'm just
buttering him up. But my boss Ben had a great book come out a couple of weeks ago, really fortuitously time, but about this era of viral digital media that has just now completely come crashing to an end. I thought that was a great called Traffic.
Traffic really really intriguing. Our final two questions, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in journalism.
People have been talking about the death of journalism for a long time, and it's extremely true in local journalism, which is where I really kind of wanted to go. I wanted to apply to newspapers in Boulder and Topeka, and it was right at the sort of the start of the end for them. This was two thousand and eight. You know, Facebook was and Craigslists were just killing their ad business and they hadn't totally been hollowed out yet,
but they were getting there. I feel like there will always be demand for smart people to make sense of an incredibly complicated world. Just sort of be agnostic about where that is.
You know.
Again, first, I've had four jobs basically in journalism. One was again at a parenting magazine in the Midwest, at a legal trade publication in New York, at the Wall Street Journal, and then a thing that didn't exist a year ago. So you know, you pick up skills at every one of them.
Really interesting and our final question, what do you know about the world of journalism and investigative reporting today you wish you knew ten fifteen years ago when you were first getting started.
It's better to be lucky than good. If you can be both, that's great, And I look, I think you put yourself in a position to get lucky, but I don't know. My one piece of advice I spiascit he is always take the meeting. Just you literally never know.
And always take the meeting.
There's this eighty twenty rule in journalism people talk about, which is that eighty percent of tips come from twenty percent of sources. These are like professional sources who know what the deal is. But I will tell you that long tail is really long and you get really interesting stuff if you're willing to spend some time on it.
Huh, really quite fascinating. Liz, thank you for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Liz Hoffman. She is now the Business and Finance editor at Semaphore and the author of crash Landing, the inside story of how the world's biggest companies survived the pandemic. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of our previous four hundred and ninety seven that we've
done over the past eight and a half years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Sign up from my daily reading list at ridolts dot com, Follow me on Twitter at Ridolt's, follow all of our fine family of Bloomberg podcasts at podcast I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Sarah Livesley. Paris Wald is my producer.
Sean Russo is my head of research at Teko of al bron is our project manager. I'm Barry Ridholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.