November 3, 2022 • 38 mins
It’s impossible to make good business decisions with bad information. That’s where truth-seeking reporters like Stephanie Ruhle come in. Host of the 11th Hour on MSNBC and Senior Business Analyst for NBC News, Stephanie has brought truth and accountability to power by breaking momentous stories like the London Whale loss. Bob talks to Stephanie about how she navigated a major career pivot, the surprising role New York City restaurants played in her career advancements, and how companies can get media coverage (spoiler alert: it’s easier than you think!).
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production. I heart
radio when I got into banking, and I realized, these
guys every day are kind of going through the New
York Post or they're reading Time Out or Zagas, and
they need to take their clients hot restaurants. My girlfriends
at the time worked in PR. I obviously knew people,
(00:21):
you know, in the nightclub and restaurant industry because it's
what young people do in New York. And I would
just book a table, and I convinced the guys that
I worked with, oh, in order for you to get
that table, I'm gonna have to go, You're gonna have
to have a girl at the table. And I hustled
my way in and it ended up being a huge
win for me because there I was three four nights
a week, out to dinner for two and three hours
(00:43):
with all the people on my desk, all of their
big clients. And that's how I built relationships and trust
and really how I built my career. I'm Bob Pittman,
and welcome to Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers
and Marketing. As we explore the stories from marketing and
busin this one of the most important components to Greek
business decisions, is good information garbagegen garbage owl. The term
(01:07):
coined by early computer programmers and still a basic tenantive
computer science applies to our business decisions as well. Hard
to make a good decision with bad information. Today, we
have someone who lives in this world of information and news.
She's Stephanie Rule, hosted The Eleventh Hour on MSNBC and
also senior business analysts for NBC. Neeters a Christmas Eve
(01:33):
baby who fits most of the Capricorn characteristics. Stephanie was
a child of the seventies, eighties and early nineties. She
lived and studied abroad during much of her college, started
out in a career in finance, and even though she
was a big success on a fast track, she jumped
to media at Bloomberg Television in two thousand and eleven.
She's been a part of NBC News since two thousand
(01:54):
sixteen and has never looked back. She's smart, she's caring,
and she's always in sight. Well, Stephanie, welcome. I am
so grateful to be here and grateful to talk to you.
Before we dive in everything, I want to warm up
with you in sixty seconds. Are you ready? Yeah, do
you prefer salty or sweet? Salty? Early bird or night owl?
(02:15):
Night o? Trading floor of the TV studio is the
same room because nobody realizes in New York or New Jersey.
My heart is in New Jersey, but my soul is
in New York. Introvert or extrovert extrovert, Slow and steady
or pedal to the metal, Pedal to the metal, But man,
I wish I was slow and steady. Comedy or drama?
(02:37):
A little bit of both? Cats or dogs. There's no
question dogs all day. Life work balance or life work integration,
Life work integration absolutely, First concert, Meat, childhood Hero, My Grandmother,
and Miss Pig. Favorite news anchor from Before your Time,
Tom Broke, claw by a mile, Favorite newspaper in New
(03:00):
York Time, favorite podcast, First Computer Commodore takes before This
is the best one. Guilty pleasure, Guilty pleasure, guilty pleasure.
Eating in bed while watching TV sounds good. Okay, we're
warmed up. Let's jump in. I'm gonna start with a
big topic news. There are two schools of thought today.
(03:24):
Collect all the relevant information about important stories and then
give the viewers, listeners or readers all the information without
bias or twisting to any one point of view. When
Walter Isaacson was on, he talked about in his days
at Time and CNN, he wouldn't even vote because he
was worried just by deciding who to select, he would
(03:45):
have a bias and it would influence his coverage. The
other school of thought, of course, is to serve a
particular group and reflect their views and the news tailoring
it for them for their point of view or beliefs,
not necessarily biased, but covering it from that angle. Clearly,
the ladder today gets a bigger audience and out supported
media lives on the sale of advertising, so that's important.
(04:06):
Where do you come down on this and how do
you see the current state of news in the US.
I think it's sort of in the middle. I think
sort of this merely providing information is limited and it's
not necessarily what people need from news organizations because you
can get basic information from a lot of places. I
(04:27):
wish it was clearer who's providing said basic information. But
I think there's something more than just straight news that
doesn't take you all the way to bias, and that
to me is insightful perspective. Right, you mentioned Walter Isaacson.
If Walter Isaacson were to come on television in conjunction
with a news story or a presidential historian, let's say
(04:50):
a Michael Beschloss, they're not coming on and giving a
deep bias. They don't have deep ideology that they're going
to solve for at the end of any story. But
with they can do is give insightful, educated perspective. And
I want that with my news. I want to watch
television where I understand, here's the information out there, here's
(05:11):
the story that's happening on the other side of the world.
And then the second feet is here's why it matters
to you. Here's what this means historically. Let's put it
in perspective, and to say we cater to our audience,
that's different. That's not news. Right. So when I think
back to my grandparents, my grandparents were religious listeners of
(05:31):
someone who I know you knew very well, Rush Limbaugh.
They loved Rush Limbach because Rush Limbaugh was a radio
personality who shared some of their political ideology. But they
didn't turn to Rush Limbaugh to get their news. They
turned to Walter Cronkite. Those are two different things. I
think those are two valuable things that exist in news
(05:52):
and entertainment and opinion, but they should be marked what
they are and audiences should understand what they are. I
don't have have a deep ideology, and my hope is
I want the world to get better and smarter. I
want to create content that helps people do that. I
want the world that I had my kids to be
better than the world I received. How does social fit
(06:14):
into all this. I've been struck by a staff that
about fifteen percent of America is far left or far right,
but eighty percent of the messages over social come from
the per cent. How does that fit into a human
in the United States getting the news and understanding it.
You know, when I really started thinking about the impact
(06:35):
of social during COVID, before I was working from home,
when I was sitting in a newsroom, I felt like
social was so tied to sort of the zeitgeist of America,
how people felt, what they thought, what they were doing.
And then COVID hit and I was living in a
keeny tiny island in New Jersey, and I was around
(06:55):
my neighbors and small business owners, and I realized how
keeny tiny a portion of us are actually on social
tweeting following things, and it got me thinking more and
more how twisted social media is and how it does
impact what we say and how we think. And the
truth is, we don't even know who's behind half the
(07:16):
people that are tweeting. Let me ask you a question, Stephanie,
you just talked a little bit about the difference between
opinion and news when you're talking about Russian Walter Cronkite
in social do you think we have an issue of
understanding what is opinion and what is news and what
is paid for and what's not paid for. It's totally
(07:38):
unclear what's sponsored what's not sponsored. I might send something
out because I just think it's funny or goofy, and
what if it's wrong And what if I sent that
tweet at two o'clock in the morning on a Friday
and I didn't do my research. Well, there's me, Stephanie Rule,
who's viewed hopefully as a responsible journalist sending out nonsense.
(07:59):
Before so social media existed, I had a really carry
myself to a standard as somebody is part of a
news organization. And if I was saying or doing irresponsible things,
NBC could say to me, Hey, Steph, you do that,
you're off the air. Now You've got news quote unquote
personalities that consider themselves bigger than their news organizations, and
(08:20):
so they're saying and doing wild, irresponsible things, and their
news organizations can't control them. And so I think it's
very messy. I don't have an answer for it, but
I know it's not helpful. Well, let me ask you
another question on this. Bill Pailey, founder and legendary head
of CBS a lot of news as sort of nonprofit contribution.
(08:41):
The cynics might say he did it to keep Washington
out of his business. Others would say he did it
because he felt it was his duty. Our news organizations
better if they're part of big organization, so it's not
the whole business, but has a little more leeway in
terms of economics. Or does it not matter? Sure in theory,
should news organizations operate almost like a nonprofit, like a
(09:03):
public service. They should, But at the end of the day,
we're controlled by money, and the most talented people, the
most valuable resources are drawn to profit centers, not nonprofit
centers in a totally pure world. Bill Paley's right, we
just don't live in a pure world. Anymore. Do you
(09:23):
think the public's view of news organizations has changed? And
how do you think they see what you do? Of
course it has changed over time. But I would also
argue that because there are so many news outlets, because
the barriers of entry are so much lower today, I
actually think in many ways, the American public is better
(09:44):
than they've been before. Right, we keep thinking that, like, oh,
back in the day, when there was only a certain
amount of news organizations, you know, whether it was TV
news or radio news or newspapers, weren't we all the better?
I don't know that that's the case, back when there
were such difficult called barriers of entry. I wonder did
the whole truth ever get out back in the day.
(10:05):
Think about cylinders of power, Right, you had media, you
had government, you had business, you had the church. How
could anyone break through those cylinders of power? They couldn't.
They were impenetrable. Now, look at the state of Pennsylvania.
What was it fifteen years ago? Through tiny social media campaigns,
victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church found one another.
(10:29):
And what did that end up doing? Having a real
impact on the archdiotis of the state of Pennsylvania. That's huge.
Back in the day, what could someone do if something
corrupt was happening in their small town Write a letter
to their congress person. Good luck with that. Now one
person's tiny voice can have a huge impact because of
(10:50):
those social media channels, because the barriers of entry are
so much lower. That's extraordinary. Now is that dangerous in
terms of standards and legal and best practice is in
terms of news? Absolutely, and we've got to figure that out. Okay,
let's go back in time. Now. You grew up in
New Jersey, born in the mid seventies. Can you paint
the picture of those times that location in your family life.
(11:15):
I grew up in northern New Jersey. My dad was
a mechanical engineer and my mother was a state at
home mom, and she ran the p t A in
my hometown and the board of Education where I lived.
My mom devoted her whole life to my sister in
my my life, my success and something I can remember
from a very very young age, how I didn't respect
(11:38):
and I have so much regret over it now what
my mom did for a living, which was the most
important job, being a full time parent, and devoting herself
to my school system and improving my school system. I
viewed everything as the person who makes the money in
your house is the boss of your house. And I
(11:59):
can remember a little girl driving with my mom in
the car to drop my dad at the train station,
and my mom being in her pajamas and my dad
in a passenger seat and me sitting in the backseat.
And I can remember my dad getting on the train
every day and thinking to myself, I don't know where
he's going or what he's doing, but one day I'm
going to be the person on the train and I'm
(12:20):
not going to be the person in the car and
my pajamas. I mean, my mom pushed me very hard
from a young age to always have a job, to
be focused on my career, to be focused on success.
But it really wasn't until I myself became a mom
and really struggle with all of the difficulties of life
and marriage and parenthood and career that I truly understand
(12:43):
and I appreciate the importance of parenthood, and as a
working mom myself now how to appreciate those other mothers
and fathers out there who dedicate themselves to be full
time parents to improving school systems because I'm the beneficiary
of that. I read somewhere that you were a serious
kid that you would rather make money babysitting on a
Saturday night than going out to parties. That an accurate
(13:05):
story a hundred. I mean, I think if somebody met
me out on any Saturday night now in a wig
and a costume, and who knows what. I'm a pretty
extroverted person. I do love to party, but I've always
always been focused on making money because it's Freedom's not greed,
having your own money. And I knew that from when
I was nine ten years old. It gives you options.
(13:29):
Money certainly doesn't give you happiness, but it gives you options. Bob,
think about the industries where you see the most abuse
and the most harassment. It's in industries where women are
backed against the wall trying to make rent. And when
I was in the eighth grade, I met a family
that I could babysit for every Saturday night and I
could get paid fifty bucks a week. I did the
(13:51):
math as an eighth grader and thought, is there a
high school party I could go to that's more fun
than fifty bucks? And the answer was no, And I
pretty much to have never been to a high school
party on a Saturday night because I always wanted to
make the fifty bucks in that time period. What were
the big issues that you remember? I mean, what was
consuming your view of the world? Then, gosh, when I
(14:13):
was in high school, what was consuming my view of
the world, My social life, my my popularity? Nonsense, right,
And now when I look at teenagers, I think it's
that times a hundred. To be totally honest, Bob, it
was the one thing that gave me reservations about having children.
I can remember how painful it is to be in
(14:34):
junior high or to be in high school, and I
remember thinking, if it's that hard to live that pain yourself,
it's going to be ten times harder to be the
parent watching a child grow up. It's amazing to me
that from a young age, the way our society, the
way our culture works, the way our media works, it's
about being exclusionary. It's about being popular, it's about having
(14:56):
a best friend, it's about being a captain of that
team and everything. How do I elbow somebody else out
to get on top? And that's such a lonely, terrible
place to live. Wouldn't it be better to teach our
kids and live our lives, to be part of a
community and make the world around us better. I wish
that's how I thought when I was younger. It's certainly
(15:17):
how I think now. Let me jump in here. Do
you think that that is more reflection of the eighties
of your time? I grew up in the fifties and sixties,
and in the fifties and sixties there was a it
seems like much more of a social conscience, more worried
about the world. For me, being a white suburban girl
in New Jersey. I grew up in the eighties. You
(15:39):
had just delivered me MTV, So I lived in a
time of a lot of pop culture and privilege. To
be totally honest, do you think that was the first
time that pop culture really began to influence society and
that that somehow hurt our kids being detached from the
world and not looking at these bigger issue us or
(16:00):
do you think this stuff just comes in cycles. I
think this stuff comes from cycles, And I actually think,
you know, the advent of something like MTV did a
lot for us in the fact that music connects us
and connects culture, and MTV I mean, you know this
better than I do. Also brought things to the forefront
and conversations, whether down the road it was about wrap
(16:21):
the boat or really talking to people about AIDS, or
seeing people on our TV every night that sounded different
or looked different. MTV era really brought this idea that
being alternative wasn't being fringe. It was just part of
the zeitgeist, part of culture. That's what we want, right.
We don't want our kids to feel like fringe is
(16:44):
weird or on the edges or something that isn't part
of the mainstream. The mainstream should include everyone, and that's
actually where we're getting now, to a more inclusive society
where we should just accept people for who they are
and where they are and where they come from. More
a Math and Magic right after this quick break. Welcome
(17:07):
back to Math and Magic. Let's hear more from my
conversation with Stephanie Roll. So you go off to college.
You survived your your high school years, you went not
too far from home in Pennsylvania. You graduated with a
degree in international business. How did you get there and
what did you think that was going to do for
your life and business? I accidentally ended up there Bob.
(17:31):
I went to college. I really thought I was going
to study engineering. Not long after being there, I realized
that wasn't what I wanted to do. As I said,
my guy is a really brilliant engineer. He worked for
an engineering company and he eventually took it over. But
when I was a little girl, I can remember being
in a car with him and realizing he was a
(17:51):
lousy businessman. One of their clients needed a part. They
made very very specific positioning devices, and I had to
drive into New York City and to over this tiny
part in a Manilla envelope with my dad. The person
stayed in a hotel for a week waiting for my
dad's company to manufacture this piece. I remember dropping the
Manilla envelope off with my dad and we get back
(18:11):
in the car. We're on the ride home and I
said to my dad, so what did you charge them?
He said, what are you talking about? And he said,
what do you mean what I charge him? I said,
that person came here as an emergency. They needed that thing.
How much more did you charge them for it? And
he said, we didn't charge them anything more. For them
they needed a piece. We gave it to them and Bob.
I can remember being a little girl thinking this guy
(18:33):
is not very good at business. That guy flew all
the way here to pick up this piece that they
desperately needed. Why didn't he charge them double? Triple, quadruple?
And I remember in high school thinking, my dad's this
really brilliant engineer, but I don't think you know that
to build a business. And I think I'm a great salesman.
I'm gonna go work for him one day. So I
said I'm gonna study engineering. My dad said, you're gonna
hate engineering. You will not be a good engineering student.
(18:56):
Do not do this. So I go to Lehigh to
study engineering. I get there and I quickly realized, oh yeah,
I'm not going to study engineering. I'm gonna fail with it.
So I had an older sister who was graduating from
architecture school, and I said, what am I gonna do?
I mean the middle of Pennsylvania at this frat boys school,
which and she said, go abroad. The most important thing
is life experience. Go abroad for as long as you
(19:19):
possibly can. So I did. I met the dean of
the International Business School, which I didn't even know what
it was, and he helped me kind of craft a
new major, and I went and I studied in Guatemala, Kenya,
and Italy. And when I was in Italy, I wanted
to stay living in Europe, but I had no money.
So I wrote letters to Lehigh University alumni who worked
in banking, because I knew they had banks all around
(19:40):
the world and a real deer whomever, can you get
me a job? Blah blah blah blah, And Mary Lynch
offered me a job in Switzerland, and before the summer started,
the group blew up and they said, you can go
work from Mary Lynch in New York. So I came
back to New York. I worked for Mary Lynch for
a summer. I didn't even know what they did. I
had some terrible back office documentation job. And one day
(20:04):
early in the summer, I had to make a delivery
under the Kicks and Country floor and I just love energy,
and I said, I don't know what these people here
do for a living, but this is what I want
to do. And I met these two guys who were
interest rate derivatives traders, and I said, can you teach
me what you do? And I would come in before
my work day started, and I would go see them
when my work day ended, and these guys taught me
(20:25):
about interest rate derivatives. So I applied to go work
at all these banks for their sales and trading programs.
And because I kind of had a wacky resume having
studied all over, I got in a bunch of interviews
the night before. It's a Sunday night in New York City.
So I go to the dinner with these two guys
and these four other guys that worked with them, like
just get friends of theirs in the industry. And so
(20:47):
they're all like twenty seven years old. I'm twenty. So
they all worked at banks. They interviewed lots of undergrads,
and they start talking about the math problems. They would
ask all the candidates all these word problems, you know,
like there's two trains going down opposing train tracks. One's
going sixty miles an hour, one's going ninety miles an hour.
Wehn can the first one get to talaf? You know,
one of those which Bob, There's no way in God's
(21:11):
green Earth I could ever answer any of these questions
ever in my life. But I'm sitting at dinner half listening.
They're basically talking through all the word problems that they
do in the interviews. I walk into my interviews that
week Jacome Morgan, Smith, Barney, Credit, Sueez, and I literally
get asked every single question that I had heard Sunday night,
(21:34):
and I can't do any of the map on the
you know, you know, if you're soppos to show your work,
And I'm like, uh forty two you know, Los Angeles, Seattle,
and they're like, yes, yes, yeah. So I absolutely ate
the test. And the truth is I accidentally cheated on
it because I would never have been able to solve
any of the answers. But the truth ends up being
(21:56):
it's kind of how I ran my career in banking anyway.
I all, so I heard this story which sort of
goes along the same characteristics the same person that when
you were working in banking in the late nineties, you
were able to get reservations at the hot restaurants and
clubs for the senior folks, and the only caveat was
they had to bring you along so you could again
(22:17):
learn from them, meet their big clients. Really get I
guess it's the new world apprenticeship. Is that a true story?
And how did you manage to figure that out. It's
absolutely true. When I got into banking, I had all
these thoughts like, oh, maybe I want to work in equities,
Maybe I want to do this, maybe I want to
do that. And someone said to me, go where they
(22:39):
need you. And one of the first rotations I had
was on a corporate bond desk I knew nothing about,
and they had had a bunch of turnover, and so
I thought, I'm gonna stick here. They're short on staff,
So I end up on this desk and I realized
these guys every day are kind of going through the
New York Post or they're reading Time Out or zagas,
and they need to take their clients the hot restaurants,
(23:00):
and so I figured it out. My girlfriends at the
time worked in PR. I obviously knew people, you know,
in the nightclub and restaurant industry because it's what young
people do in New York. And I would just book
table and I convinced the guys that I worked with, oh,
in order for you to get that table, I'm gonna
have to go You're gonna have to have a girl
at the table. And I hustled my way in and
it ended up being a huge win for me because
(23:21):
there I was three four nights a week out to
dinner for two and three hours with all the people
on my desk, all of their big clients. And in
any business, I think news is the same. Every business,
Bob is about trust and relationship building, and that's how
I built relationships and trust and really how I built
my career. So let's jump. You had a really good
(23:42):
career in finance, and you looked like you were making
great headway and achieving your goals. You're a credit suee
SA dout your bank, and then you jump to journalism.
So it's time for you to give us that origin
story of how you got into journalism and news. You know,
I always wanted to work in journalism from when I
(24:02):
had a Fisher Price cassette player as a four year
old making commercials with my sister. It's what I always
wanted to do. But I think people don't really pursue
their dreams when they had a day job, and I
was lucky enough to have a day job in a
very lucrative industry in banking. Two years into banking, I
almost left to go to journalism school though, and a
(24:22):
mentor of mindset, don't leave. Do this for ten years,
make your own money, and then figure out what you
want to do. And that really was very good advice
at the time, because it's a privilege to pursue dreams
when you've got your rent paid for. And I worked
really hard for a long time, and I saved my
own money, and I worked really hard, and I thought,
(24:43):
I'm gonna do this for ten years and then I'm
gonna change careers, or then I'm gonna start a family.
And ten years in I did start a family, but
I wasn't ready to change careers. But I thought about
it a lot, and I thought about TV. One day,
I was giving a speech for a nonprofit called the
White House Project, and a woman who ran it in
Tiffany Defoo. He was talking to the board after and
she said, women and minorities always get lumped together, but
(25:05):
if you take the fifty most powerful black men in
the United States, they help one another more than the
fifty most powerful women. All of you are senior in
your industries. You each need to say what you want
to do next, and somebody else in the room has
to say I'm gonna get you there. And it was
my time and I said, you know, I've always wanted
to work in the media. And there was a woman
(25:26):
at the cable who ran human resources for Bloomberg, and
she said, I'm going to be the one to get
you there. And a few days later I met a
guy named Andy Lack who ran Bloomberg Media, and he said,
in the new world of media, there's no more teleprompter readers.
You have to know the information, you have to love
the content, and the audience has to want to have
a relationship with you. And I said, well, Andy, I've
(25:48):
got one and two better than anybody you have in
this room. And number three that would be a risk.
Very good friend of mine is a guy named Todd
Bowley and said, you go back to them. You tell
them you will do this job for the lowest amount
of money of any person who works as the whole company.
They can give you no contracts, so they can fire
you at any time, but they need to give you
(26:10):
a TV show to anchor, and they need to hire
somebody to teach you how to be on TV. That way,
you're sharing a little bit of risk and they're taking
very little brisk And Bloomberg miraculously said, yes, it was
definitely a leap. I took a nine pay cut, and
I was scared. You know, there was a good chance
I was going to humiliate myself, Bob, like, I wasn't
just changing careers. I was changing careers publicly, right out
(26:34):
there in the open. By the time I made that
career switch, I had saved a lot of money, and
so I was taking a huge pay cut, but it
wasn't that big of a risk. And I was making
a move not to cover pop culture but to actually
cover Wall Street exactly where I came from. Or all
of the guests that Bloomberg would want to have on
TV were people that I knew for years and years.
(26:55):
So it's about reducing the risk when you make a
leap like that. By the way, at Bloomberg, I will
point out you had one of your early successes. You
were one of the folks who broke the story about
the London whale. For those who don't remember, that was
the JP Morgan trader who lost about six billion dollars.
It was a trader who basically got off sides in
the market, who got so so big and so irresponsible
(27:16):
he blew up a huge portion of the market, breaking
the London Whale crushed my husband. When I was in banking,
he ran credit to ri As, a credit Swiss. I
sold credit to ri it As at Deutsche Bank. I
was at Bloomberg for about six months when a source
of mine was an old relationship of mine, calls me
and said, you need to look into this trader. You
(27:37):
need to look into somebody who's gotten so big so
offside that like this guy can't get out of his trade.
I come home from work that day and I said
to my husband, do you know somebody named Bruno. It's Phil.
They call him the London Whale. And he looked at
me and he said, I can't talk about it with you.
I need I need to call my office. And he
put his sneakers on and he went running. And it's
(28:00):
gonna be said that. I was like, I guess we're
onto something. It turns out my husband running at a
riveter's desk was a huge counterpart of the London whale.
So when the London Whale blew up, it was crushing
two banks all across the street, and it was crushing
to my own husband's business. And when the story broke,
people like really came after me, like Oh my god,
(28:20):
that you cook the goose for us. I can't believe
you did this, Like you're one of us. Why would
you do this? And I have to give credit to
my husband who was like, this is a story that
should be told. This is totally wrong, what's happening in
the market. You know this industry better than anybody else
covering at sepany. It would be a huge mistake if
you didn't, and you went on the NBC Great career.
(28:41):
Now you've got one of the great jobs and news
anchor at the eleven o'clock news on MSNBC. I want
to sort of use some of that perspective now and
I want to share some with the folks listening today.
When you look at business leaders today, how do you
think they use information and what do they need? If
(29:02):
you ask the business leader today two, what are some
of the most important characteristics? They would say, being an
empathetic leader, understanding your people. You'd be hard pressed to
find a business leader today who's got sort of the
Gordon get go rule with an iron fist, my way
or the highway. It's so much more collaborative. And I
(29:25):
just think sort of the evolution of our business leaders
it's fantastic as far as information goes, it's all completely
warped right now. Bob years ago, Coke and pepsi right,
they would battle, their marketers, would battle their advertisements like
their campaign. Now you could come out with a campaign
(29:45):
and immediately an underground group of sort of social media
guerrillas could go after that new product and crush it
moments after it launches. And what kind of business leaders
do best in this world? The biggest problem our business
leaders have today is that we live in a world
of short termism. You could have the most productive, thoughtful,
(30:07):
long term vision for your company, but in the world
that we're living in, with activist investors banging down your
door every other day, nobody can make long term decisions.
For business leaders, everything is about your next quarter earnings call.
Let's move from business to the world we live in.
We talked a little about how technology social in particular,
(30:30):
is changing it. We talked some about what's good and
bad about it. Any other technology here that's on the
horizon that you think is going to have the kind
of impact that the iPhone did fifteen years ago. I
don't think it's necessarily a specific technology, but I do
think the impact COVID had on us working from home, telehealth,
(30:52):
remote education, skills based training is going to change things.
When we look at the jobs of the future, they
are not necessarily tied to four year degree liberal arts education,
and they're much more skills based. During COVID, you saw
a lot more companies like Google, like sales Cource, like
IBM create more skills programs so they can recruit workers
(31:16):
that don't have four year degrees, that are coming out
of high school that can get higher paid, higher skilled jobs.
That is something I'm excited about about where we're going,
rather than the scores of young people taking six years
to get out of community college with communications degrees that
don't align with the jobs of tomorrow. So let's talking
(31:36):
about jobs of tomorrow. Globalization is not a quaint outdated notion.
Now what's happening globalization is important. But three years ago,
if I brought up supply chain issues to you, Bob,
you'd be like, what, I'm not thinking about the supply chain,
And neither was I. And because of COVID, you're now
seeing enormous companies like Walmart not just say we're going
(31:59):
to buy them American because it's the right thing to do.
More and more companies are saying we're trying to source
from American manufacturers because it's the more economical thing to do.
We're never going to produce things cheaper than they do
in China and places in Asia, but we're starting to
realize we need to bring more and more manufacturing back
to the United States, and that's a good thing. Advice
(32:21):
time here. If you could go back in time, give
your twenty one year old self some advice. What would
that advice be? Mind your own business. That's simple, Yeah,
not mind your own business in a petty way. Mind
your own business, meaning focus on yourself, work hard on yourself,
don't be hard on yourself. We keep looking at what
(32:42):
other people do and what other people have and minding
their success and using that as a marker for our own.
I remember there was once when I worked in banking,
somebody who got a huge opportunity that I thought I
should get, and I would dying over it, like I
was in a bathroom, saw losing my mind, crying like
(33:04):
you gotta be kidding me. And I went to go
see somebody who's sort of a mentor of mind and
like this is bullshit, Like I'm gonna bury this person
like I can't believe this happened. And he said to me,
somebody else's success could probably be explained in three ways.
Either they are a super super talent that you don't
realize and maybe you're not as good as you think.
(33:25):
That's category one, so you won't help you trying to
bury them. Category too, they're hooked up. The CEO of
the company loves them, They get a customer who worships
them like they are just in the hook up alley,
and you're not in it. That category two or category three,
there are frauds, just like you say. They bullshitted their
way up. It's never gonna work out, and they're gonna
blow themselves up in a year. So why be the
(33:46):
person they try to bury them along the way? Be
the good person that was minding your own business and
focus on your own success. Seems like the slow to blame,
quick to forgive philosophy of the world has got lost
a little bit. So I'm not gonna end this without,
of course, doing something very practical here. I'm going to
use your experience in news. If someone has a great
(34:09):
new product or service, they have some new development in
their business. How's the best way for them to get
news coverage? Start telling their story themselves. Do it on TikTok,
do it on Instagram. Start showing it. Don't do it
with a PR firm. Don't do it with the pitch.
Start showing it and I think it will get picked up.
(34:31):
Someone's going, great stuff. I'm in Iowa. How can I
do that? You know how you can do it? DM me.
We're journalists. We're all looking for ideas, and I'm not
looking for one from a PR firm. You know, we
live in an age of Shark Tank, where the Mark
Cubans of the world discover all sorts of businesses. Tell
your story. You can do it. We end each episode
(34:53):
of Math and Magic the same way. We do a
shout out to the greats in the world of analytics,
and the crea is the math people for the analytics,
the magicians, if you will, for the wildly creative parts.
And it takes both of those to have great business,
great ideas, great products. Who is your choice for the
best in math? Someone who blows my mind, who I
(35:14):
think is sort of the ultimate, would be Mike Bloomberg.
Mike Bloomberg figured out there is a product that Wall
Street means and I'm going to perfect is one single product.
I'm not going to go outside my lane. I'm not
gonna go too broad, I'm not gonna go too big.
I'm gonna fill this hole for Wall Street how they
can communicate and price assets. And once I perfect this product,
(35:40):
I'm going to charge an enormous amount of money for it,
so I have no competition, and I'm choosing the highest
end market where they can afford it, and I'm going
to charge them an enormous amount of money and never
ever ever give them a break. And that's what he did.
He is a brilliant risk manager. And who in math
you don't laugh at this one. It's Harry Styles. I
(36:03):
didn't even know that much about Harry Styles. And a
few months ago Harry Styles performed on The Today Show
and I brought my daughter to go see him. I
went in like, oh, he came from a boy band.
He has Mick Jagger charisma and rock star status. Everything
about this artist is absolute magic. The morning I saw
(36:24):
Harry Styles performed, that night, I went to a dinner
the Mark Benning off of Salesforce hosted, and Matt Damon
was sitting next to me, Matt Damon, right born identity.
And I turned him and I said that I know
I should be sitting here so excited to sit next
to you and blown away, and I am. And I said,
if I have to tell you, I saw Harry Styles
performed this morning, and I've never seen a star like
(36:45):
this in my life. And are you ready for what
Matt Damon said to me, Bob, he said, stay no more,
he said, I'm Matt Damon. He said, my wife has
gotten to meet celebrities do incredible things. You know, he
rattled off. He's like, you know, I know George Clooney
and Brad Pitt. We've got all these love of buy
any good And in all my years with her, the
one thing my wife has ever asked me for in
(37:06):
the world of celebrity and entertainment its tickets to see
Harry Styles with my daughters tomorrow. When his album dropped.
He said, you are not alone. So when I tell
you I think pure magic is Harry Styles, I'm not alone.
Matt dame Won agrees with me. There you go, Mathew Magic,
Mike Bloomberg and Harry Styles. Probably the only time those
two are on the stage together Stephanie, You've got an
(37:28):
amazing story, You've got wonderful insights. Thanks for sharing it today.
Thanks for having me, Bob, I love you. Here are
a few lessons I've picked up in my conversation with Stephanie.
One new should offer insightful perspective, a middle ground between
objectivity and bias. As Stephanie said, the best journalism tells
(37:50):
the story and why it matters. Too has proceed at
the table, whether it's writing letters to bankers in college
or insisting on going to business dinners with their bosses.
Stephanie got where she is today because she advocated for herself. Three.
Mind your own business. As Stephanie says, don't compare yourself
to others. Just work hard and follow your passion. I'm
(38:13):
Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode.
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Matchic, a
production of I Heart Radio. The show is hosted by
Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Susan Ward for booking and
wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small fees. Marissa
Brown for pulling research. Our editors Derek Clements, Mary Dow
and Ryan Murdoch. Our producer Morgan Levoy, our executive producer
(38:36):
Nikki Eator and of course Gayle Broul, Eric Angel, Noel
and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears.
Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production. I heart
radio when I got into banking, and I realized, these
guys every day are kind of going through the New
York Post or they're reading Time Out or Zagas, and
they need to take their clients hot restaurants. My girlfriends
at the time worked in PR. I obviously knew people,
(00:21):
you know, in the nightclub and restaurant industry because it's
what young people do in New York. And I would
just book a table, and I convinced the guys that
I worked with, oh, in order for you to get
that table, I'm gonna have to go, You're gonna have
to have a girl at the table. And I hustled
my way in and it ended up being a huge
win for me because there I was three four nights
a week, out to dinner for two and three hours
(00:43):
with all the people on my desk, all of their
big clients. And that's how I built relationships and trust
and really how I built my career. I'm Bob Pittman,
and welcome to Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers
and Marketing. As we explore the stories from marketing and
busin this one of the most important components to Greek
business decisions, is good information garbagegen garbage owl. The term
(01:07):
coined by early computer programmers and still a basic tenantive
computer science applies to our business decisions as well. Hard
to make a good decision with bad information. Today, we
have someone who lives in this world of information and news.
She's Stephanie Rule, hosted The Eleventh Hour on MSNBC and
also senior business analysts for NBC. Neeters a Christmas Eve
(01:33):
baby who fits most of the Capricorn characteristics. Stephanie was
a child of the seventies, eighties and early nineties. She
lived and studied abroad during much of her college, started
out in a career in finance, and even though she
was a big success on a fast track, she jumped
to media at Bloomberg Television in two thousand and eleven.
She's been a part of NBC News since two thousand
(01:54):
sixteen and has never looked back. She's smart, she's caring,
and she's always in sight. Well, Stephanie, welcome. I am
so grateful to be here and grateful to talk to you.
Before we dive in everything, I want to warm up
with you in sixty seconds. Are you ready? Yeah, do
you prefer salty or sweet? Salty? Early bird or night owl?
(02:15):
Night o? Trading floor of the TV studio is the
same room because nobody realizes in New York or New Jersey.
My heart is in New Jersey, but my soul is
in New York. Introvert or extrovert extrovert, Slow and steady
or pedal to the metal, Pedal to the metal, But man,
I wish I was slow and steady. Comedy or drama?
(02:37):
A little bit of both? Cats or dogs. There's no
question dogs all day. Life work balance or life work integration,
Life work integration absolutely, First concert, Meat, childhood Hero, My Grandmother,
and Miss Pig. Favorite news anchor from Before your Time,
Tom Broke, claw by a mile, Favorite newspaper in New
(03:00):
York Time, favorite podcast, First Computer Commodore takes before This
is the best one. Guilty pleasure, Guilty pleasure, guilty pleasure.
Eating in bed while watching TV sounds good. Okay, we're
warmed up. Let's jump in. I'm gonna start with a
big topic news. There are two schools of thought today.
(03:24):
Collect all the relevant information about important stories and then
give the viewers, listeners or readers all the information without
bias or twisting to any one point of view. When
Walter Isaacson was on, he talked about in his days
at Time and CNN, he wouldn't even vote because he
was worried just by deciding who to select, he would
(03:45):
have a bias and it would influence his coverage. The
other school of thought, of course, is to serve a
particular group and reflect their views and the news tailoring
it for them for their point of view or beliefs,
not necessarily biased, but covering it from that angle. Clearly,
the ladder today gets a bigger audience and out supported
media lives on the sale of advertising, so that's important.
(04:06):
Where do you come down on this and how do
you see the current state of news in the US.
I think it's sort of in the middle. I think
sort of this merely providing information is limited and it's
not necessarily what people need from news organizations because you
can get basic information from a lot of places. I
(04:27):
wish it was clearer who's providing said basic information. But
I think there's something more than just straight news that
doesn't take you all the way to bias, and that
to me is insightful perspective. Right, you mentioned Walter Isaacson.
If Walter Isaacson were to come on television in conjunction
with a news story or a presidential historian, let's say
(04:50):
a Michael Beschloss, they're not coming on and giving a
deep bias. They don't have deep ideology that they're going
to solve for at the end of any story. But
with they can do is give insightful, educated perspective. And
I want that with my news. I want to watch
television where I understand, here's the information out there, here's
(05:11):
the story that's happening on the other side of the world.
And then the second feet is here's why it matters
to you. Here's what this means historically. Let's put it
in perspective, and to say we cater to our audience,
that's different. That's not news. Right. So when I think
back to my grandparents, my grandparents were religious listeners of
(05:31):
someone who I know you knew very well, Rush Limbaugh.
They loved Rush Limbach because Rush Limbaugh was a radio
personality who shared some of their political ideology. But they
didn't turn to Rush Limbaugh to get their news. They
turned to Walter Cronkite. Those are two different things. I
think those are two valuable things that exist in news
(05:52):
and entertainment and opinion, but they should be marked what
they are and audiences should understand what they are. I
don't have have a deep ideology, and my hope is
I want the world to get better and smarter. I
want to create content that helps people do that. I
want the world that I had my kids to be
better than the world I received. How does social fit
(06:14):
into all this. I've been struck by a staff that
about fifteen percent of America is far left or far right,
but eighty percent of the messages over social come from
the per cent. How does that fit into a human
in the United States getting the news and understanding it.
You know, when I really started thinking about the impact
(06:35):
of social during COVID, before I was working from home,
when I was sitting in a newsroom, I felt like
social was so tied to sort of the zeitgeist of America,
how people felt, what they thought, what they were doing.
And then COVID hit and I was living in a
keeny tiny island in New Jersey, and I was around
(06:55):
my neighbors and small business owners, and I realized how
keeny tiny a portion of us are actually on social
tweeting following things, and it got me thinking more and
more how twisted social media is and how it does
impact what we say and how we think. And the
truth is, we don't even know who's behind half the
(07:16):
people that are tweeting. Let me ask you a question, Stephanie,
you just talked a little bit about the difference between
opinion and news when you're talking about Russian Walter Cronkite
in social do you think we have an issue of
understanding what is opinion and what is news and what
is paid for and what's not paid for. It's totally
(07:38):
unclear what's sponsored what's not sponsored. I might send something
out because I just think it's funny or goofy, and
what if it's wrong And what if I sent that
tweet at two o'clock in the morning on a Friday
and I didn't do my research. Well, there's me, Stephanie Rule,
who's viewed hopefully as a responsible journalist sending out nonsense.
(07:59):
Before so social media existed, I had a really carry
myself to a standard as somebody is part of a
news organization. And if I was saying or doing irresponsible things,
NBC could say to me, Hey, Steph, you do that,
you're off the air. Now You've got news quote unquote
personalities that consider themselves bigger than their news organizations, and
(08:20):
so they're saying and doing wild, irresponsible things, and their
news organizations can't control them. And so I think it's
very messy. I don't have an answer for it, but
I know it's not helpful. Well, let me ask you
another question on this. Bill Pailey, founder and legendary head
of CBS a lot of news as sort of nonprofit contribution.
(08:41):
The cynics might say he did it to keep Washington
out of his business. Others would say he did it
because he felt it was his duty. Our news organizations
better if they're part of big organization, so it's not
the whole business, but has a little more leeway in
terms of economics. Or does it not matter? Sure in theory,
should news organizations operate almost like a nonprofit, like a
(09:03):
public service. They should, But at the end of the day,
we're controlled by money, and the most talented people, the
most valuable resources are drawn to profit centers, not nonprofit
centers in a totally pure world. Bill Paley's right, we
just don't live in a pure world. Anymore. Do you
(09:23):
think the public's view of news organizations has changed? And
how do you think they see what you do? Of
course it has changed over time. But I would also
argue that because there are so many news outlets, because
the barriers of entry are so much lower today, I
actually think in many ways, the American public is better
(09:44):
than they've been before. Right, we keep thinking that, like, oh,
back in the day, when there was only a certain
amount of news organizations, you know, whether it was TV
news or radio news or newspapers, weren't we all the better?
I don't know that that's the case, back when there
were such difficult called barriers of entry. I wonder did
the whole truth ever get out back in the day.
(10:05):
Think about cylinders of power, Right, you had media, you
had government, you had business, you had the church. How
could anyone break through those cylinders of power? They couldn't.
They were impenetrable. Now, look at the state of Pennsylvania.
What was it fifteen years ago? Through tiny social media campaigns,
victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church found one another.
(10:29):
And what did that end up doing? Having a real
impact on the archdiotis of the state of Pennsylvania. That's huge.
Back in the day, what could someone do if something
corrupt was happening in their small town Write a letter
to their congress person. Good luck with that. Now one
person's tiny voice can have a huge impact because of
(10:50):
those social media channels, because the barriers of entry are
so much lower. That's extraordinary. Now is that dangerous in
terms of standards and legal and best practice is in
terms of news? Absolutely, and we've got to figure that out. Okay,
let's go back in time. Now. You grew up in
New Jersey, born in the mid seventies. Can you paint
the picture of those times that location in your family life.
(11:15):
I grew up in northern New Jersey. My dad was
a mechanical engineer and my mother was a state at
home mom, and she ran the p t A in
my hometown and the board of Education where I lived.
My mom devoted her whole life to my sister in
my my life, my success and something I can remember
from a very very young age, how I didn't respect
(11:38):
and I have so much regret over it now what
my mom did for a living, which was the most
important job, being a full time parent, and devoting herself
to my school system and improving my school system. I
viewed everything as the person who makes the money in
your house is the boss of your house. And I
(11:59):
can remember a little girl driving with my mom in
the car to drop my dad at the train station,
and my mom being in her pajamas and my dad
in a passenger seat and me sitting in the backseat.
And I can remember my dad getting on the train
every day and thinking to myself, I don't know where
he's going or what he's doing, but one day I'm
going to be the person on the train and I'm
(12:20):
not going to be the person in the car and
my pajamas. I mean, my mom pushed me very hard
from a young age to always have a job, to
be focused on my career, to be focused on success.
But it really wasn't until I myself became a mom
and really struggle with all of the difficulties of life
and marriage and parenthood and career that I truly understand
(12:43):
and I appreciate the importance of parenthood, and as a
working mom myself now how to appreciate those other mothers
and fathers out there who dedicate themselves to be full
time parents to improving school systems because I'm the beneficiary
of that. I read somewhere that you were a serious
kid that you would rather make money babysitting on a
Saturday night than going out to parties. That an accurate
(13:05):
story a hundred. I mean, I think if somebody met
me out on any Saturday night now in a wig
and a costume, and who knows what. I'm a pretty
extroverted person. I do love to party, but I've always
always been focused on making money because it's Freedom's not greed,
having your own money. And I knew that from when
I was nine ten years old. It gives you options.
(13:29):
Money certainly doesn't give you happiness, but it gives you options. Bob,
think about the industries where you see the most abuse
and the most harassment. It's in industries where women are
backed against the wall trying to make rent. And when
I was in the eighth grade, I met a family
that I could babysit for every Saturday night and I
could get paid fifty bucks a week. I did the
(13:51):
math as an eighth grader and thought, is there a
high school party I could go to that's more fun
than fifty bucks? And the answer was no, And I
pretty much to have never been to a high school
party on a Saturday night because I always wanted to
make the fifty bucks in that time period. What were
the big issues that you remember? I mean, what was
consuming your view of the world? Then, gosh, when I
(14:13):
was in high school, what was consuming my view of
the world, My social life, my my popularity? Nonsense, right,
And now when I look at teenagers, I think it's
that times a hundred. To be totally honest, Bob, it
was the one thing that gave me reservations about having children.
I can remember how painful it is to be in
(14:34):
junior high or to be in high school, and I
remember thinking, if it's that hard to live that pain yourself,
it's going to be ten times harder to be the
parent watching a child grow up. It's amazing to me
that from a young age, the way our society, the
way our culture works, the way our media works, it's
about being exclusionary. It's about being popular, it's about having
(14:56):
a best friend, it's about being a captain of that
team and everything. How do I elbow somebody else out
to get on top? And that's such a lonely, terrible
place to live. Wouldn't it be better to teach our
kids and live our lives, to be part of a
community and make the world around us better. I wish
that's how I thought when I was younger. It's certainly
(15:17):
how I think now. Let me jump in here. Do
you think that that is more reflection of the eighties
of your time? I grew up in the fifties and sixties,
and in the fifties and sixties there was a it
seems like much more of a social conscience, more worried
about the world. For me, being a white suburban girl
in New Jersey. I grew up in the eighties. You
(15:39):
had just delivered me MTV, So I lived in a
time of a lot of pop culture and privilege. To
be totally honest, do you think that was the first
time that pop culture really began to influence society and
that that somehow hurt our kids being detached from the
world and not looking at these bigger issue us or
(16:00):
do you think this stuff just comes in cycles. I
think this stuff comes from cycles, And I actually think,
you know, the advent of something like MTV did a
lot for us in the fact that music connects us
and connects culture, and MTV I mean, you know this
better than I do. Also brought things to the forefront
and conversations, whether down the road it was about wrap
(16:21):
the boat or really talking to people about AIDS, or
seeing people on our TV every night that sounded different
or looked different. MTV era really brought this idea that
being alternative wasn't being fringe. It was just part of
the zeitgeist, part of culture. That's what we want, right.
We don't want our kids to feel like fringe is
(16:44):
weird or on the edges or something that isn't part
of the mainstream. The mainstream should include everyone, and that's
actually where we're getting now, to a more inclusive society
where we should just accept people for who they are
and where they are and where they come from. More
a Math and Magic right after this quick break. Welcome
(17:07):
back to Math and Magic. Let's hear more from my
conversation with Stephanie Roll. So you go off to college.
You survived your your high school years, you went not
too far from home in Pennsylvania. You graduated with a
degree in international business. How did you get there and
what did you think that was going to do for
your life and business? I accidentally ended up there Bob.
(17:31):
I went to college. I really thought I was going
to study engineering. Not long after being there, I realized
that wasn't what I wanted to do. As I said,
my guy is a really brilliant engineer. He worked for
an engineering company and he eventually took it over. But
when I was a little girl, I can remember being
in a car with him and realizing he was a
(17:51):
lousy businessman. One of their clients needed a part. They
made very very specific positioning devices, and I had to
drive into New York City and to over this tiny
part in a Manilla envelope with my dad. The person
stayed in a hotel for a week waiting for my
dad's company to manufacture this piece. I remember dropping the
Manilla envelope off with my dad and we get back
(18:11):
in the car. We're on the ride home and I
said to my dad, so what did you charge them?
He said, what are you talking about? And he said,
what do you mean what I charge him? I said,
that person came here as an emergency. They needed that thing.
How much more did you charge them for it? And
he said, we didn't charge them anything more. For them
they needed a piece. We gave it to them and Bob.
I can remember being a little girl thinking this guy
(18:33):
is not very good at business. That guy flew all
the way here to pick up this piece that they
desperately needed. Why didn't he charge them double? Triple, quadruple?
And I remember in high school thinking, my dad's this
really brilliant engineer, but I don't think you know that
to build a business. And I think I'm a great salesman.
I'm gonna go work for him one day. So I
said I'm gonna study engineering. My dad said, you're gonna
hate engineering. You will not be a good engineering student.
(18:56):
Do not do this. So I go to Lehigh to
study engineering. I get there and I quickly realized, oh yeah,
I'm not going to study engineering. I'm gonna fail with it.
So I had an older sister who was graduating from
architecture school, and I said, what am I gonna do?
I mean the middle of Pennsylvania at this frat boys school,
which and she said, go abroad. The most important thing
is life experience. Go abroad for as long as you
(19:19):
possibly can. So I did. I met the dean of
the International Business School, which I didn't even know what
it was, and he helped me kind of craft a
new major, and I went and I studied in Guatemala, Kenya,
and Italy. And when I was in Italy, I wanted
to stay living in Europe, but I had no money.
So I wrote letters to Lehigh University alumni who worked
in banking, because I knew they had banks all around
(19:40):
the world and a real deer whomever, can you get
me a job? Blah blah blah blah, And Mary Lynch
offered me a job in Switzerland, and before the summer started,
the group blew up and they said, you can go
work from Mary Lynch in New York. So I came
back to New York. I worked for Mary Lynch for
a summer. I didn't even know what they did. I
had some terrible back office documentation job. And one day
(20:04):
early in the summer, I had to make a delivery
under the Kicks and Country floor and I just love energy,
and I said, I don't know what these people here
do for a living, but this is what I want
to do. And I met these two guys who were
interest rate derivatives traders, and I said, can you teach
me what you do? And I would come in before
my work day started, and I would go see them
when my work day ended, and these guys taught me
(20:25):
about interest rate derivatives. So I applied to go work
at all these banks for their sales and trading programs.
And because I kind of had a wacky resume having
studied all over, I got in a bunch of interviews
the night before. It's a Sunday night in New York City.
So I go to the dinner with these two guys
and these four other guys that worked with them, like
just get friends of theirs in the industry. And so
(20:47):
they're all like twenty seven years old. I'm twenty. So
they all worked at banks. They interviewed lots of undergrads,
and they start talking about the math problems. They would
ask all the candidates all these word problems, you know,
like there's two trains going down opposing train tracks. One's
going sixty miles an hour, one's going ninety miles an hour.
Wehn can the first one get to talaf? You know,
one of those which Bob, There's no way in God's
(21:11):
green Earth I could ever answer any of these questions
ever in my life. But I'm sitting at dinner half listening.
They're basically talking through all the word problems that they
do in the interviews. I walk into my interviews that
week Jacome Morgan, Smith, Barney, Credit, Sueez, and I literally
get asked every single question that I had heard Sunday night,
(21:34):
and I can't do any of the map on the
you know, you know, if you're soppos to show your work,
And I'm like, uh forty two you know, Los Angeles, Seattle,
and they're like, yes, yes, yeah. So I absolutely ate
the test. And the truth is I accidentally cheated on
it because I would never have been able to solve
any of the answers. But the truth ends up being
(21:56):
it's kind of how I ran my career in banking anyway.
I all, so I heard this story which sort of
goes along the same characteristics the same person that when
you were working in banking in the late nineties, you
were able to get reservations at the hot restaurants and
clubs for the senior folks, and the only caveat was
they had to bring you along so you could again
(22:17):
learn from them, meet their big clients. Really get I
guess it's the new world apprenticeship. Is that a true story?
And how did you manage to figure that out. It's
absolutely true. When I got into banking, I had all
these thoughts like, oh, maybe I want to work in equities,
Maybe I want to do this, maybe I want to
do that. And someone said to me, go where they
(22:39):
need you. And one of the first rotations I had
was on a corporate bond desk I knew nothing about,
and they had had a bunch of turnover, and so
I thought, I'm gonna stick here. They're short on staff,
So I end up on this desk and I realized
these guys every day are kind of going through the
New York Post or they're reading Time Out or zagas,
and they need to take their clients the hot restaurants,
(23:00):
and so I figured it out. My girlfriends at the
time worked in PR. I obviously knew people, you know,
in the nightclub and restaurant industry because it's what young
people do in New York. And I would just book
table and I convinced the guys that I worked with, oh,
in order for you to get that table, I'm gonna
have to go You're gonna have to have a girl
at the table. And I hustled my way in and
it ended up being a huge win for me because
(23:21):
there I was three four nights a week out to
dinner for two and three hours with all the people
on my desk, all of their big clients. And in
any business, I think news is the same. Every business,
Bob is about trust and relationship building, and that's how
I built relationships and trust and really how I built
my career. So let's jump. You had a really good
(23:42):
career in finance, and you looked like you were making
great headway and achieving your goals. You're a credit suee
SA dout your bank, and then you jump to journalism.
So it's time for you to give us that origin
story of how you got into journalism and news. You know,
I always wanted to work in journalism from when I
(24:02):
had a Fisher Price cassette player as a four year
old making commercials with my sister. It's what I always
wanted to do. But I think people don't really pursue
their dreams when they had a day job, and I
was lucky enough to have a day job in a
very lucrative industry in banking. Two years into banking, I
almost left to go to journalism school though, and a
(24:22):
mentor of mindset, don't leave. Do this for ten years,
make your own money, and then figure out what you
want to do. And that really was very good advice
at the time, because it's a privilege to pursue dreams
when you've got your rent paid for. And I worked
really hard for a long time, and I saved my
own money, and I worked really hard, and I thought,
(24:43):
I'm gonna do this for ten years and then I'm
gonna change careers, or then I'm gonna start a family.
And ten years in I did start a family, but
I wasn't ready to change careers. But I thought about
it a lot, and I thought about TV. One day,
I was giving a speech for a nonprofit called the
White House Project, and a woman who ran it in
Tiffany Defoo. He was talking to the board after and
she said, women and minorities always get lumped together, but
(25:05):
if you take the fifty most powerful black men in
the United States, they help one another more than the
fifty most powerful women. All of you are senior in
your industries. You each need to say what you want
to do next, and somebody else in the room has
to say I'm gonna get you there. And it was
my time and I said, you know, I've always wanted
to work in the media. And there was a woman
(25:26):
at the cable who ran human resources for Bloomberg, and
she said, I'm going to be the one to get
you there. And a few days later I met a
guy named Andy Lack who ran Bloomberg Media, and he said,
in the new world of media, there's no more teleprompter readers.
You have to know the information, you have to love
the content, and the audience has to want to have
a relationship with you. And I said, well, Andy, I've
(25:48):
got one and two better than anybody you have in
this room. And number three that would be a risk.
Very good friend of mine is a guy named Todd
Bowley and said, you go back to them. You tell
them you will do this job for the lowest amount
of money of any person who works as the whole company.
They can give you no contracts, so they can fire
you at any time, but they need to give you
(26:10):
a TV show to anchor, and they need to hire
somebody to teach you how to be on TV. That way,
you're sharing a little bit of risk and they're taking
very little brisk And Bloomberg miraculously said, yes, it was
definitely a leap. I took a nine pay cut, and
I was scared. You know, there was a good chance
I was going to humiliate myself, Bob, like, I wasn't
just changing careers. I was changing careers publicly, right out
(26:34):
there in the open. By the time I made that
career switch, I had saved a lot of money, and
so I was taking a huge pay cut, but it
wasn't that big of a risk. And I was making
a move not to cover pop culture but to actually
cover Wall Street exactly where I came from. Or all
of the guests that Bloomberg would want to have on
TV were people that I knew for years and years.
(26:55):
So it's about reducing the risk when you make a
leap like that. By the way, at Bloomberg, I will
point out you had one of your early successes. You
were one of the folks who broke the story about
the London whale. For those who don't remember, that was
the JP Morgan trader who lost about six billion dollars.
It was a trader who basically got off sides in
the market, who got so so big and so irresponsible
(27:16):
he blew up a huge portion of the market, breaking
the London Whale crushed my husband. When I was in banking,
he ran credit to ri As, a credit Swiss. I
sold credit to ri it As at Deutsche Bank. I
was at Bloomberg for about six months when a source
of mine was an old relationship of mine, calls me
and said, you need to look into this trader. You
(27:37):
need to look into somebody who's gotten so big so
offside that like this guy can't get out of his trade.
I come home from work that day and I said
to my husband, do you know somebody named Bruno. It's Phil.
They call him the London Whale. And he looked at
me and he said, I can't talk about it with you.
I need I need to call my office. And he
put his sneakers on and he went running. And it's
(28:00):
gonna be said that. I was like, I guess we're
onto something. It turns out my husband running at a
riveter's desk was a huge counterpart of the London whale.
So when the London Whale blew up, it was crushing
two banks all across the street, and it was crushing
to my own husband's business. And when the story broke,
people like really came after me, like Oh my god,
(28:20):
that you cook the goose for us. I can't believe
you did this, Like you're one of us. Why would
you do this? And I have to give credit to
my husband who was like, this is a story that
should be told. This is totally wrong, what's happening in
the market. You know this industry better than anybody else
covering at sepany. It would be a huge mistake if
you didn't, and you went on the NBC Great career.
(28:41):
Now you've got one of the great jobs and news
anchor at the eleven o'clock news on MSNBC. I want
to sort of use some of that perspective now and
I want to share some with the folks listening today.
When you look at business leaders today, how do you
think they use information and what do they need? If
(29:02):
you ask the business leader today two, what are some
of the most important characteristics? They would say, being an
empathetic leader, understanding your people. You'd be hard pressed to
find a business leader today who's got sort of the
Gordon get go rule with an iron fist, my way
or the highway. It's so much more collaborative. And I
(29:25):
just think sort of the evolution of our business leaders
it's fantastic as far as information goes, it's all completely
warped right now. Bob years ago, Coke and pepsi right,
they would battle, their marketers, would battle their advertisements like
their campaign. Now you could come out with a campaign
(29:45):
and immediately an underground group of sort of social media
guerrillas could go after that new product and crush it
moments after it launches. And what kind of business leaders
do best in this world? The biggest problem our business
leaders have today is that we live in a world
of short termism. You could have the most productive, thoughtful,
(30:07):
long term vision for your company, but in the world
that we're living in, with activist investors banging down your
door every other day, nobody can make long term decisions.
For business leaders, everything is about your next quarter earnings call.
Let's move from business to the world we live in.
We talked a little about how technology social in particular,
(30:30):
is changing it. We talked some about what's good and
bad about it. Any other technology here that's on the
horizon that you think is going to have the kind
of impact that the iPhone did fifteen years ago. I
don't think it's necessarily a specific technology, but I do
think the impact COVID had on us working from home, telehealth,
(30:52):
remote education, skills based training is going to change things.
When we look at the jobs of the future, they
are not necessarily tied to four year degree liberal arts education,
and they're much more skills based. During COVID, you saw
a lot more companies like Google, like sales Cource, like
IBM create more skills programs so they can recruit workers
(31:16):
that don't have four year degrees, that are coming out
of high school that can get higher paid, higher skilled jobs.
That is something I'm excited about about where we're going,
rather than the scores of young people taking six years
to get out of community college with communications degrees that
don't align with the jobs of tomorrow. So let's talking
(31:36):
about jobs of tomorrow. Globalization is not a quaint outdated notion.
Now what's happening globalization is important. But three years ago,
if I brought up supply chain issues to you, Bob,
you'd be like, what, I'm not thinking about the supply chain,
And neither was I. And because of COVID, you're now
seeing enormous companies like Walmart not just say we're going
(31:59):
to buy them American because it's the right thing to do.
More and more companies are saying we're trying to source
from American manufacturers because it's the more economical thing to do.
We're never going to produce things cheaper than they do
in China and places in Asia, but we're starting to
realize we need to bring more and more manufacturing back
to the United States, and that's a good thing. Advice
(32:21):
time here. If you could go back in time, give
your twenty one year old self some advice. What would
that advice be? Mind your own business. That's simple, Yeah,
not mind your own business in a petty way. Mind
your own business, meaning focus on yourself, work hard on yourself,
don't be hard on yourself. We keep looking at what
(32:42):
other people do and what other people have and minding
their success and using that as a marker for our own.
I remember there was once when I worked in banking,
somebody who got a huge opportunity that I thought I
should get, and I would dying over it, like I
was in a bathroom, saw losing my mind, crying like
(33:04):
you gotta be kidding me. And I went to go
see somebody who's sort of a mentor of mind and
like this is bullshit, Like I'm gonna bury this person
like I can't believe this happened. And he said to me,
somebody else's success could probably be explained in three ways.
Either they are a super super talent that you don't
realize and maybe you're not as good as you think.
(33:25):
That's category one, so you won't help you trying to
bury them. Category too, they're hooked up. The CEO of
the company loves them, They get a customer who worships
them like they are just in the hook up alley,
and you're not in it. That category two or category three,
there are frauds, just like you say. They bullshitted their
way up. It's never gonna work out, and they're gonna
blow themselves up in a year. So why be the
(33:46):
person they try to bury them along the way? Be
the good person that was minding your own business and
focus on your own success. Seems like the slow to blame,
quick to forgive philosophy of the world has got lost
a little bit. So I'm not gonna end this without,
of course, doing something very practical here. I'm going to
use your experience in news. If someone has a great
(34:09):
new product or service, they have some new development in
their business. How's the best way for them to get
news coverage? Start telling their story themselves. Do it on TikTok,
do it on Instagram. Start showing it. Don't do it
with a PR firm. Don't do it with the pitch.
Start showing it and I think it will get picked up.
(34:31):
Someone's going, great stuff. I'm in Iowa. How can I
do that? You know how you can do it? DM me.
We're journalists. We're all looking for ideas, and I'm not
looking for one from a PR firm. You know, we
live in an age of Shark Tank, where the Mark
Cubans of the world discover all sorts of businesses. Tell
your story. You can do it. We end each episode
(34:53):
of Math and Magic the same way. We do a
shout out to the greats in the world of analytics,
and the crea is the math people for the analytics,
the magicians, if you will, for the wildly creative parts.
And it takes both of those to have great business,
great ideas, great products. Who is your choice for the
best in math? Someone who blows my mind, who I
(35:14):
think is sort of the ultimate, would be Mike Bloomberg.
Mike Bloomberg figured out there is a product that Wall
Street means and I'm going to perfect is one single product.
I'm not going to go outside my lane. I'm not
gonna go too broad, I'm not gonna go too big.
I'm gonna fill this hole for Wall Street how they
can communicate and price assets. And once I perfect this product,
(35:40):
I'm going to charge an enormous amount of money for it,
so I have no competition, and I'm choosing the highest
end market where they can afford it, and I'm going
to charge them an enormous amount of money and never
ever ever give them a break. And that's what he did.
He is a brilliant risk manager. And who in math
you don't laugh at this one. It's Harry Styles. I
(36:03):
didn't even know that much about Harry Styles. And a
few months ago Harry Styles performed on The Today Show
and I brought my daughter to go see him. I
went in like, oh, he came from a boy band.
He has Mick Jagger charisma and rock star status. Everything
about this artist is absolute magic. The morning I saw
(36:24):
Harry Styles performed, that night, I went to a dinner
the Mark Benning off of Salesforce hosted, and Matt Damon
was sitting next to me, Matt Damon, right born identity.
And I turned him and I said that I know
I should be sitting here so excited to sit next
to you and blown away, and I am. And I said,
if I have to tell you, I saw Harry Styles
performed this morning, and I've never seen a star like
(36:45):
this in my life. And are you ready for what
Matt Damon said to me, Bob, he said, stay no more,
he said, I'm Matt Damon. He said, my wife has
gotten to meet celebrities do incredible things. You know, he
rattled off. He's like, you know, I know George Clooney
and Brad Pitt. We've got all these love of buy
any good And in all my years with her, the
one thing my wife has ever asked me for in
(37:06):
the world of celebrity and entertainment its tickets to see
Harry Styles with my daughters tomorrow. When his album dropped.
He said, you are not alone. So when I tell
you I think pure magic is Harry Styles, I'm not alone.
Matt dame Won agrees with me. There you go, Mathew Magic,
Mike Bloomberg and Harry Styles. Probably the only time those
two are on the stage together Stephanie, You've got an
(37:28):
amazing story, You've got wonderful insights. Thanks for sharing it today.
Thanks for having me, Bob, I love you. Here are
a few lessons I've picked up in my conversation with Stephanie.
One new should offer insightful perspective, a middle ground between
objectivity and bias. As Stephanie said, the best journalism tells
(37:50):
the story and why it matters. Too has proceed at
the table, whether it's writing letters to bankers in college
or insisting on going to business dinners with their bosses.
Stephanie got where she is today because she advocated for herself. Three.
Mind your own business. As Stephanie says, don't compare yourself
to others. Just work hard and follow your passion. I'm
(38:13):
Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode.
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Matchic, a
production of I Heart Radio. The show is hosted by
Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Susan Ward for booking and
wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small fees. Marissa
Brown for pulling research. Our editors Derek Clements, Mary Dow
and Ryan Murdoch. Our producer Morgan Levoy, our executive producer
(38:36):
Nikki Eator and of course Gayle Broul, Eric Angel, Noel
and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears.
Until next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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