Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - William Cohan: Turning Setbacks into Success with the Power of Persistence

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

William Cohan pulled out all the stops to get the Wall Street Journal to hire him, including getting an MBA, but they just wouldn’t. So he turned to corporate America. After nearly two decades as an investment banker, he got kicked out of Wall Street, forcing him to pivot again. In today’s episode, William shares the incredible story of how he went from broke, award-winning journalist to investment banker to bestselling author. William Cohan is a prolific author and founding partner of Puck, a daily digital news and opinion publication focused on business. His first book, The Last Tycoons, won the 2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. In this episode, Ilana and William will discuss: - His journey from broke journalist to investment banker - The parallels between journalism and finance - His expulsion from Wall Street  - How he reinvented himself as an award-winning writer - Lessons from the downfall of General Electric - The value of transferable skills across different industries  - How being open to new possibilities can lead to unexpected career paths - Persistence in the face of resistance  - The need for CEOs to be open to dissenting views - And other topics…   William D. Cohan is the bestselling author of The Last Tycoons, which won the 2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He has also written several other books on the financial sector, including his latest, Power Failure. He is a former Wall Street M&A investment banker with 17 years of experience at prestigious firms like Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch, and JPMorgan Chase. William is also a former special correspondent at Vanity Fair and a founding partner of Puck, a daily digital news and opinion publication focused on business. His writing has appeared in The Financial Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and The Atlantic, among others. Connect with William: William’s Website: https://williamcohan.com/   William’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamdcohan/  Resources Mentioned: William’s Book, Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Failure-Rise-Fall-American/dp/0593084160/

here's a story from wall street m&a investment banker maryland jp morgan etc etc and he turned to a new york times best-selling, not just for one book, three books. And he actually has like seven. So how has that even happened? Bill, thank you for joining me in the show. Thank you for having me. So how does it get started? You go to college.

I'm sure you had no clue that this is where your career will lead you. Tell us a little more. Well, I had always been tangentially interested in journalism. In high school, we had a newspaper that was independent of the school, and I was the business manager of the newspaper. I had to raise all the money through ads and subscriptions. And for some reason, we were wildly profitable. And that was a lot of fun. And we sort of split the profits or some of the profits at the end. That was sort of fun. But I'd never done any writing. And then in college, I was a history major and did a fair amount of writing and then became editor of a magazine there.

And that's when I started doing real writing, journalistic writing. And then after college, I decided I wanted to be a journalist. That was crazy. Went to upstate New York for a year, worked on a paper, then went to Columbia Journalism School for a year, and then got my graduate degree after a year, and then went back to Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was the education reporter on the Raleigh Times, the afternoon paper in Raleigh, and covered Wake County public schools for two years. So I guess that's a long way of saying I had been a journalist, you know, successful journalist. I won back-to-back investigative reporting awards in North Carolina when I was there in the early 80s.

I was not making very much money. They didn't pay journalists well then. They pay a little bit better now, but not much better. So your first reporting job was very minimal, right? What was it paying roughly? Well, if you want to talk about my first reporting job, which was in upstate New York, I was getting paid $9,000 a year. And then in Raleigh, I was getting a big raise up to $13,000 a year. But you know, I was a single guy. I didn't have any family. I only had to support myself. Right. And is that the reason why you decided to go with investment banking? Or what was the

pull there? Well, it was a combination of two forces at work. One is that my father kept telling me I was crazy to be a journalist. They literally were paying me nothing. And here I was creating all this content for them and they were getting rich and I was staying poor. He kept thinking I should go get my MBA. I really didn't want to get my MBA, but I kept trying to get a job at the Wall Street Journal. I really wanted to get a job at the Wall Street Journal and write stories about M&A deals on Wall Street.

I thought that was really interesting. And I kept trying to get a job like a number of my colleagues had from Columbia Journalism School, and they would never hire me. I don't know why. Maybe I didn't have it, what they thought I needed to have. So I thought, well, if I went and got my MBA, the combination of the journalism degree, the MBA, the awards, the experience, how could the journal not hire me? So my father wanted me to go. I didn't want to go, but I thought, well, if I did do that, and I wanted to be in New York and I could get my way to the journal in New York. So I went back to Columbia, worked to get my MBA, kind of like a mediocre student. You know, I was a history major and a journalist as opposed to an econ major. So eventually I figured it out, graduated, kept trying to get a job at the journal. They still would not hire me. Finally,

I was in one editor's office. I'd managed to worm my way into his office down at the World Financial Center. And he wanted to know what I was doing there. You know, he was late to our meeting. And then he came in, he said, like, you know, what are you doing here? I said, I want a job here. And he said, nah, forget it. We're never going to hire you. We have a hiring freeze on. And if we didn't have a hiring freeze, we have our eye on that guy from Fortune and this guy from Forbes. I said, well, either I'm going to go to the Wall Street Journal or to Wall Street.

Choice is yours. And he said, goodbye. So by that point, it was May of 1987. Pretty much all you had to do to get a job on Wall Street in May of 1987 was breathe. So I went to Wall Street. That's incredible. So I did that for close to 20 years. And you've been in some of the biggest firms possible. Tell us a little bit about what are some of the challenges? That's a very competitive, at least now, it's a very competitive environment. A lot of really hard work. And it was then, too.

I didn't feel like I was working any harder. I worked pretty hard as a journalist. So I was working very hard as a journalist getting paid $13,000 a year. And here I am, a banker on Wall Street, getting 10 times that amount, working the same amount. Some of the skills are quite similar. When you're a journalist, you have to be able to sift fact from fiction. You have to get people to trust you with their most sensitive information. You have to be able to keep that confidence. You have to be able to communicate well and write well. And all those things are important on Wall Street too, especially I was a M&A banker, M&A advisor. And the only difference is when you're a banker, at least at the beginning, you have to be able to do spreadsheets and know what accounting and balance sheets are and finance. And, you know, I did have

my MBA, even though I was no superstar at that, I eventually figured out how to do those things and managed to keep working hard, keep doing as good a job as I could and survived it for 17 years. Incredible. And what I love about what you just said now is all these transferable skills that we actually have between different roles, but sometimes we're just not seeing it. So I love how you already translated it. But then you're taking this,

and if I'm right, you have some really hard moments somewhere around the transition between the two, the investment and writing a book. So if you can tell us a little bit about that, I would love that, Bill. It was pretty simple, actually. I had a great career for a long time on Wall Street. At this point, I was at J.P. Morgan Chase after the two, J.P. Morgan and Chase had combined, but before they reached the potential that they have now. And I was head of the telecom and media M&A group. So I had a pretty big job at a big firm. And then September 11th happened. I had actually just moved offices from Wall Street to Midtown Manhattan. But that really

changed for a long time, dynamic on Wall Street, you know, investment banking business dried up, sort of the promise of the JP Morgan and Chase merger faded pretty rapidly. And the managers at the bank began cutting people left and right. And I basically managed to survive three or four rounds of cuts over two plus years. But then finally, in January of 2004, they managed to find me and fire me for no reason other than it was time for me to go. Apparently, they needed more bodies because the firm was kind of bleeding. It was before Jamie Dimon got there and turned things around dramatically. So at that point, you know, I'm about to be 44 years old. I have two young sons.

My wife worked. They also not only did they fire me, they also took an extra step of meanness and blackballed me from the industry so I couldn't get another job. They decided that that would be something I wanted to do as well. some of my books to the people who were responsible for my leaving Wall Street to thank them for what they did for me by forcing me to choose another career. And so here I am in January of 2004, no income, no job prospects, doing what I had been doing for close to 20 years. And I decided, well, what I can do is write. I still know how to write. I hadn't written anything except for stupid PowerPoint presentations in close to 20 years. But it's like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, you learn. So I thought I had this crazy

idea that, okay, I'll try to write a book and I'll write a book about Lazard, where I had worked earlier in my career on Wall Street. It was such an interesting place and it was a private firm, private partnership, and there were all these incredible people there. And there really had been only one other book written about the firm, and that was many years earlier. So I decided I would do that. I wrote a book proposal, I got a book agent. And next thing I know, crazy, there was a lot of interest from book publishers for this book, which surprised me because, you know, it's a fairly private, little known firm. I mean, it's an important firm on Wall Street, but it wasn't known like Merrill Lynch was

known because it didn't have a big brokerage side. So I got signed up. I got a contract. Now I was free of any bosses. No one could fire me. I had my equity in the book, which I shared with my publisher. And that was, you know, I could not have imagined a better outcome to the end of my Wall Street career and what my colleagues had done to me, completely undeserved. But they had the power. They were in the room making the decisions and I wasn't. So a word to

the wise, when the cuts start coming and you're not in the room where they're making those decisions, you're quite vulnerable because if you're not in the room, you're going to end up probably on the cutting room floor. But tell me, Bill, to leave everything and just write books, I think a lot of people will also not get an agency to say yes. And especially these days, they'll just go on Amazon and try to hustle through the book. What made you successful or how many attempts did you try? How long did it take you to actually decide that this is what you want to do? I had two young kids. I didn't have a job. I had been blackballed from the industry that I had been working in. So I had to figure something else out. I figured I could write. I knew I had an interesting story.

I knew Lazard was an interesting place. And I guessed correctly that my former colleagues would grant interviews to me and I would tell the story of the firm. I mean, I knew I was a decent reporter because I had done that. I had learned how to do that. I hadn't written anything longer than a newspaper article. And that was 20 years earlier. And I hadn't done anything other than, as I said, these stupid PowerPoints, presentations and selling memorandums on companies that I was selling.

So I had no idea whether I could actually, I mean, it's not like I went back to journalism for a newspaper or a magazine. I just like went right into the deep end and thought, I'm going to write this book. And, you know, I wrote a proposal, a book proposal that was 100 pages. So I think publishers could get a sense of what was going on here. And they went for it. Amazing. So this is when The Last Tycoon was born, if I'm right. But between that and actually becoming, sorry, a bestseller, especially in New York, that bestseller, it's a light years away.

So how did you make it? What do you think made it such a success from the beginning? Well, that first book, The Last Tycoons, was a bestseller. And then it was selected by the Financial Times in 2007. It was named the best business book in the world that year by the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs. So I was a finalist for this award. Then I went to London. Lloyd Blankfein, who was then the CEO of Goldman Sachs, they called my name. I was in the audience, you know, like at the Academy Awards when all the actors are in the room and the ones who are expected to win are right up front.

And then the ones who pretty much have no chance are there, but they're way in the back. And then suddenly they get called and they win. And it takes them like 10 minutes to weave their way and get up to the front. That's what happened with me. No one expected me to win. My wife and I were way in the back, and they called my name, and it took me 10 minutes to weave my way up to the front. There's Lloyd Blankfein handing me the award and a 30,000-pound check. From there, of course, then I got a call from Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. Did I want to write for Vanity Fair? Did I want to write op-eds for the New York Times?

Did I want to do this? Did I want to do the next thing? You know, I was off to the races. And then my second book, that book comes out in April of 2007 or whenever it was. And then in March of 2008, Bear Stearns collapsed and went down the tubes and the financial crisis was upon us. So then I had my next topic handed to me, you know, a book about Bear Stearns. And that was a huge bestseller. So, I don't know, I got lucky and might be small amount of aptitude.

Small, small, small amount. You created your own luck, you mean, Bill. It's possible. I like that. Because most people will just duck at this moment and you decided to lean in and write about it. And then, you know, if I do a fast forward, suddenly you start writing and talking to, I don't know, the executives of Goldman Sachs and GE.

And now you're starting to like talk to all these executives and write multiple books. And we'll talk about your new book in a little bit. But now you're just starting to ride this incredible wave and you're a correspondent and you're, you know, in Vanity Fair and you have your own, which we'll talk about. But then on the other hand, you know, some people will like, oh my God, this is an overnight success. Well, it took Bill multiple years for this overnight success. Talk to us a little bit.

I mean, the people that are listening, right, they're like, maybe I want to be Bill, but I don't even know how to start. There were like two strands of the DNA. And they both became very important to what I've been able to do and the good fortune that I've had to do what I do. Part of it was early on going the journalism route. And then, of course, part of it was the Wall Street route. And I've written books more than just about Wall Street, but, you know, I'm probably best known for writing about Wall Street. And so I don't think I could write about Wall Street with the insight or the confidence that I have to do it had I not worked there for 20 years. And, you know, it wasn't like a fly-by-night thing.

I actually started at the bottom and worked my way up to near the top. And I understood how the sausage was made, and I saw it works and all. I was at times heavily recruited and at times fired. So I sort of had a round trip on Wall Street. I saw the good, I saw the bad. I knew what worked, what didn't. Plus, I advised corporate executives on some of their most important transactions.

I've been involved in some of the biggest, most high-profile deals over the years. It was very hard to snow me, if you will. A lot of journalists who cover Wall Street don't even know what these guys are talking about. Don't understand what a balance sheet is versus an income statement. Don't understand finance. Don't understand underwriting. I understand all of that. And it's very hard for these guys. I call it like I see it. I know what I'm talking about. No offense to anybody. So I think for whatever reason, people have decided, well, all things considered, if I'm going to write about it,

they'd better participate and take my calls. It's better for them to take my calls than to ignore me. Although some have tried to ignore me, like Goldman Sachs executives tried for more than a year to ignore me and shun me and pretend I wasn't writing a book about them. But then they came to their senses and they gave me all the interviews I wanted. That's incredible, Bill. Sometimes we don't realize that everything we go through is actually the muscle that we need to build in order to create what you just created for yourself. And it's incredible because nothing is wasted. It's just part of that muscle. But these are the moments that define you, right? These are the moments that become the bill that can write

because he walked the walk, not just talks theory, which is where I really believe that we're myself and my team is people walk the walk, not just talk theory. And I really, really believe in what you just said. But I think there's something about the fact that now you're able to walk in and talk to Jack Walsh and people like this, and you're just having these conversations, but something made you not quit. And I continuously write about Goldman Sachs, continuously try to talk to these executives. What makes you not quit, Bill? First of all, I have a contract, right, with a publisher. So I have to deliver the book.

And of course, I'm determined to make it the best it can be. And I don't have subpoena power. Sometimes I wish I had subpoena power, like once a year I could use it and say, okay, Lloyd Blankfein, you're not going to talk to me. Well, now you have to talk to me because I'm going to subpoena you. But I don't have that power.

And I think I just keep asking. But after a while, if they keep saying no, I just move on. And then they don't want to participate. There's nothing really I can do. But I find that most people eventually come to their senses because they start hearing I'm talking to all of these people around them. And they can only imagine what those people around them are saying. And so they decide, I think, in the end that it's better to participate and to get ahead of this.

And I think once you have a body of work that people can look at and they see that you try very hard to be fair, you're very complete and thorough and disciplined and take it seriously and are professional, then they figure all things considered, the best thing to do is to talk and participate and make sure that your side of the story is included. But if it's not, I'll triangulate around you. I'm like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. I'm not going to stop until I'm done and the book is done and I've turned it in to the publisher and it gets published. So as I like to say, I'm getting in a car in New York and I'm driving to LA. You can come along for the ride.

You can sit in the passenger seat. You can sit in the back seat. You can even take your hand at the wheel if you want to. But I'm going. I'm going from New York to LA and I'm driving this car. You can either get in or not. You can participate or not. It's up to you. But in the end, the book's going to be written. Your certainty and conviction is so inspiring, I think. So here we are. You just published. To me, it's one of the more interesting rise and fall. Like I love the name,

The Power of Failure. And you're taking a company that clearly was iconic, what they created, I don't know, 600 billion market cap or whatever that was GE. And now they're a small subset of it. So tell me a little bit, why did it rise and fall? What happened there? Well, it's all in the book. It's called Power Failure and Rise and Fall of an American Icon, published in November of 22 now. And it was about GE, which was one of America's great corporations, a great conglomerate, much admired, even before Jack Welch took over in 1981 and ran it was always a technological leader. The people who started it, a combination of Thomas Edison and Charles Coughlin. I was formed from the merger of two companies, Thomas Edison's company, which he basically wasn't part of much anymore, and Charles Coughlin's company, which he had taken over. But they were basically in the business, this brand new to transport it and distribute it. And it was actually dangerous. Like some of the first people who took up the product of electricity instead of oil lamps or

candles or whale oil or these other forms of lighting and heat would wood fires. There were fires. It was dangerous. People's businesses burned down because the technology was too volatile. So I always was fascinated by the company. My first job at a Columbia business school was working at GE Capital in New York, financing leveraged buyouts of all things. So I went from being a newspaper reporter covering public schools in Wake County, North Carolina, to financing leveraged buyouts on Wall Street. And it turned out that one of the people I shared an office with during my two years at GE Capital was a guy who went on to become the CEO of GE. So a guy named John Flannery, who was the CEO after Jeff Immelt, who followed Jack Welch. So I was personally invested in the story.

And when I was working there, Jack Welch was the CEO and the company was the most admired, the most valuable. It was a technological leader. It was a leader in finance. It owned NBC. I mean, it kind of all fell apart. And I was trying to, you know, I wanted to know what had happened and why. So one thing I like to do is if I see a dead body on the ground, I'd like to know how it got there. And so that's what I did in this case. And as a result, I got to meet, obviously knew who Jack Welch was when I was working there and who didn't know who he was. I mean, everybody knew who he was. But in the years before he died in 2020, March of 2020, just as the pandemic was starting, I spent a lot of time with him, many interviews. And that was miraculous. You know, it was great.

And pretty much everybody else at the company I wanted to talk to spoke to me, too. Not the current CEO. He refused my many requests to be interviewed, but all the others did. There's always one who holds out, who thinks they'll be better off by not participating. And the book is out. What would you say to our listeners? To me, this sounds, this whole dynamic of what happens to companies and how do you have to continuously reinvent and adapt a company as well to technology and this era of change. There's a lot of similarities also

to how individuals need to reinvent themselves and adapt. It all kind of goes together. Why would you say our audience has to go to Amazon or go to your website? We'll have all the links. Why do they have to read this? I would never say anybody had to read anything I've written. I try to tell stories in a way that are very character-driven. So there's a lot of interesting characters, a lot of interesting people who worked at this company and made it great.

And a lot of mistakes were made towards the end that I think are valuable lessons. But basically, it's the story of America in the 20th century. It was our greatest company. You know, if Apple fell apart at this point and went from like a $3 trillion company to one that was much smaller and much less relevant, wouldn't we want to know what happened?

Why that happened and why that happened, and how that could have possibly happened? I mean, at the moment, Apple feels invincible. Microsoft feels invincible. Google feels invincible. But GE once felt invincible too. Even when I worked there, it felt invincible. So what the hell happened? And telling that story and figuring that out, it's a story I find fascinating. I mean, just like what happened to Bear Stearns? Why did that go down the tubes? What happened? How did Goldman Sachs not go down the tubes? What made Lazard so special? What happened in the Duke lacrosse scandal? I don't know. I get these things in my head that I want to get the answers to. And the only way I can figure out how to do it is to write a book about it. How much is what you're writing, what you're learning from these mistakes can be applied now to help CEOs like Amazon, Microsoft, et cetera, avoid these mistakes? How much similarities do you see between the different companies

and how they're making decisions or how they're adapting or how they're innovating? What do you feel are some of the similarities and what can be applied to companies today for senior leaders to say, man, we need to learn from these so that we don't run into the same wall? There's always a risk in these companies of failure. WeWork seemed invincible. All these companies, they seem invincible, right?

But if you don't have the right CEO and he doesn't or she doesn't make the right decisions, then even companies as great as GE or others can go down the tubes. Joseph Schumpeter, the great Austrian economist, talked about creative destruction in companies. And the seeds of their destruction are planted early in their life cycles. And the question is whether or not they can avoid succumbing to that. And are you dexterous enough and nimble enough and clever enough? And can you see around corners sufficiently? Can you make the right decisions? Do you pick the right leader? Do you surround yourself with the right subordinates? Is there a feeling of openness where people can speak their minds without being penalized and risking losing their

jobs? All of that is hugely important, subtle, ill-defined. You can't really forecast how someone will handle those situations, but it becomes everything. Who would have thought that Tim Cook would take over from Steve Jobs and increase the market cap of Apple 10 times? I mean, most people thought after Steve Jobs died that Apple was a goner. So how did Tim Cook do that? That's sort of an interesting question if you'd ever participate in helping someone write a book about that. I like stories that are very character

driven. There's great narrative. There's a great history. How can you beat a company that was sort of started by Thomas Edison and JP Morgan, the the man is a backer and became the most admired, respected, valuable company on earth. And then suddenly wasn't anymore. How did that happen? I totally agree. I still remember a conversation of someone basically saying, you know, on Wall Street, and this Amazon thing is ridiculous. Like Sears is definitely controlling the world and that's the future. Who is Amazon and why do they think they're valued? So one wiped and one is alive, right? And kicking. So I totally hear you. And by the way, I think it was an incredible point about having this open environment for people to bring ideas to the plate and to try things and fail at things. And I think it's

interesting because our society or our kids are not taught this way. You have two sons. I have a son and a daughter. That's not how they're taught. What they brought up is basically there's a test and you need to get an A on the test and you need to get it right. And you need to crisscross applesauce and raise your hand politely. And there is no trial. You need to learn and you need to do well on the test. And then you're suddenly wanting them to become this wide environment that is innovative and open to ideas and testing different things. And it's interesting to see how

do you actually create this new environment that hasn't been taught anywhere and not for the leaders and not for the participants. So it's basically new for everyone, I guess. It can be risky and dangerous, especially in this environment, to speak up and speak your mind. You can get canceled. You can get fired. Oftentimes, CEOs don't want to hear dissenting views. They make a decision and they want everybody to get on board

and row in the right same direction. And that's important to some extent. But it's also very important to hear dissenting views, to hear alternative views, to hear other ways of thinking, and to encourage that. And that can make all the difference. I mean, Jack Welch had that ability. He was very tough and very determined and very strong-headed,

very strong-willed, but also he encouraged people to dissent. He would listen to dissent. Even if he had made up his mind on a certain decision or deal or direction or whatever, he would listen to other people's views and be willing to change his mind. I think his successor, Jeff Immelt, was less willing to do that, more headstrong, more determined that when he decided something that it was right and he didn't want to hear any dissent. And as a result, he made a bunch of poor decisions that were existential in the history of the company. Now, in parallel, I think you're also a correspondent, you wrote for Vanity Fair for a long while, as well as been writing for different companies, and then you

created your own. Tell us a little bit more about Pug and other things that you're involved with. Since I had been a journalist on a daily paper and then packed that whole thing in and then came back to it from the writing the book side and wasn't working for any magazine or newspaper. And then Graydon Carter asked me to write for Vanity Fair. I was, of course, thrilled to do that. But I've been basically a freelancer, which is both very liberating and very difficult, especially at this time of year, because when you are on staff somewhere and you are a W-2 employee, your taxes are taken out every paycheck. When you're a 1099 employee like I am, come April 15th, the pain really registers. That's sort of a joke, but it's true.

But I'm freelance, so I write books. I'm a founding partner at Puck, which is a new digital media company. I'm the Wall Street correspondent. It's a great organization. It's an important organization, too. I mean, we have collected a group of first-rate journalists who, and this is an important point I'd like to make. I think I alluded to this a little bit back when I was in Raleigh working for the News and Observer Publishing Company and was getting paid $13,000 a year. I didn't have any equity in what I was doing. I wrote all these stories and people presumably bought the paper in part because of my stories. The people who owned the paper, the Daniels family, who

were lovely people. I respected them. They got fabulously wealthy when they sold the paper to McClatchy for, I think, around $350 million before the industry imploded. So they got fabulously wealthy. And basically, ever since then, I have been on a campaign to make sure that journalists got properly compensated for what they created. Because honestly, you can have all the classified ads and the digital ads and the glossy ads you want, but there's nothing to read. Nobody's going to pick it up.

I don't mean clickbait. I mean serious investigative journalism, responsible, thorough, well-reported, well-documented, interesting narrative journalism. I think that's what we do at Puck, and we all have equity. We're backed by venture capitalists. We've had two rounds of venture capital, and all the journalists have equity. And I've been fighting that battle for 40 years. And finally, Puck came along, and we started it together. One of the main principles was that we would all have equity in what we're doing. As much as I love Vanity Fair, I didn't have any equity in that. That was owned by the Newhouse family. I don't have any equity in the New York Times or the FT or anything, but I do have equity in PUP. I have equity in my books

that I share with my publisher. I have equity in PUP. And that's the way it should be. That has to be the new paradigm for journalists and content creators, content providers. And if I've accomplished anything in all of this in my career, as it winds down or keeps going however long it does, it's that journalists and content creators deserve and should have equity in what they write. Totally agree. And, you know, I think it also creates a different depth of what we're used to. There's a little bit of fast, fast, fast era, but there's also a need for going deep into really interesting analysis that you guys do in pack.news. So we'll have the links and everything, but I love the passion and where this is coming from, because this is coming to solve something that you felt for yourself, which is always the best way. What would you say, you know, is one thing that maybe people don't necessarily know that you feel has built you to

who you are today and the person that can create Buck and write all these books and become like, what do you think is something that built you this way? Well, I mean, I was blessed with wonderful parents who cared about me and my brothers and cared about our education and got us the best education. And then I felt the responsibility to do something with that education. And I've always been a hard worker, a self-starter, ambitious, driven. I think I try to do things with a sense of humor, but also a relentlessness. I'm not going to stop. As I've said, you can participate in my articles and my books or not. There's nothing I can do about it. I can't force you to do it, but I will not be deterred. Not in a mean way or anything. I'm on

a mission and I'm going to accomplish my mission. That's all there is to it. When I was growing up, I was not much of an athlete, and I'm still not much of an athlete, but I was determined to do something about that. I went on Outward Bound twice. I went on NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership, once. That really changed my life when I was 18. Gave me a lot of inner strength to overcome difficulty and miserable situations. I've, you know, run five marathons. I've hiked to Mount Everest. So, you know, I'm a determined guy. And there's not really much difference between hiking to Mount Everest and writing a book. As I think the Chinese proverb says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

And so I'm on these journeys of a thousand miles. I mean, what could be longer and more tedious and more detail oriented and frankly harder than writing, you know, a 600, 700 page detailed narrative nonfiction book? I don't know, there might be things that are harder, but not many. But, you know, I've done it, I'm going to continue to do it. You know, I'm getting a little older now. It's getting a little harder. But, you know, once I sign that contract, I'm doing it. You're doing it. And that's incredible. And also, I think you don't let anybody or anything derail you from that, right?

And that's the relentlessness that we talked about. But also, I think you have a quote that I like, and I forget which book, but if you're looking for a friend, get a dog, right? I mean, it's like, not everybody's going to love you. There's a saying, if you want to be loved, sell ice cream, and even then you're going to be criticized. Judge me by my enemies. That's where I've come out. No, everybody's not going to like me. A lot of people don't like me. A lot of people are really out to get me, but I don't care. They're just blaming the messenger for their own foibles, their own mistakes, the only things that they hope would never see the light of day. But my responsibility is to try to get to the truth or as much of the truth

as I can get to without subpoena power, without a trial, without a courtroom. And even then, you can't really get to anything as much as you think you can, as I showed in the book about the Duke Lacrosse scandal. So no, I'm not going to be deterred. I don't care if I make enemies. Incredible. That's amazing because I think some of us need a little bit of a thicker skin, but I think it's also part of your mission. You're so grounded by your mission and it just helps you move forward. And maybe I'll ask you one thing, Bill, we do have a little bit of a tradition. If you would catch yourself 20 years ago or 40 years ago, whenever, just kind of go back in time with me for a little bit, what would be an advice that you would give yourself, your younger self,

about now that you see where you are? It all turned out for the best. But after my investment banking friends at JPMorgan Chase decided they had to fire me, that was a pretty dark period. And it didn't really go away. You know, it took a long time for that to end. And part of the reason I made myself vulnerable, I think, to getting fired was because I had moved around a little bit. I guess it's a long way of saying, had I just stayed at Lazard, where I could have just stayed instead of leaving after six years to go to Merrill Lynch, because I was recruited away and it seemed like a better opportunity just because something seems like a better opportunity. If I had stayed at Lazard, I'd probably still be Lazard now and I would never have been a writer and I just have

been a banker and probably would have made a lot more money. So I don't have any regrets, but if I just stayed, working in a firm like that has a lot of ups and downs. Working on Wall Street has a lot of ups and downs, even if you're not going to be fired. But I'm much better off as my own boss without people telling me what to do. I can do what I want to do. I can write what I want to write most of the time. Being freelance complicates that because you have to sort of get green lights from editors to write stories. But basically, you know, if I want to write a book, I can generally figure out a way to do that. And no boss, nobody telling me what to do, nobody forcing me to do the kind of hours that I don't

want to do that I had to do when I was working on Wall Street, because that's what somebody said I had to do. All of that was horrible. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Maybe I'd wish it on my worst enemy, but I'm not sorry that that's all over now. And I have much more control over my life. I love that, Bill. And you inspire a lot more people, that's for sure, than you would have, you know, if you would have stayed. So again, it's kind of all goes back to it's all for a reason, right? Bill, I really, really enjoyed the conversation. I think there's so much to learn and we'll have the links.

I want people to go to your website to get the books. For me, these are fascinating learnings of what's possible and what can happen to companies. So thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. I really enjoyed this very much.

Appreciate your time and your excellent questions and your enthusiasm for what I had to say. That's always nice. I appreciate it, Bill. I hope you guys enjoyed it.