Why are there millions and millions of unused Dollar coins which no one really wants to spend? What are the rules of a drug economy? And why is pre-school so important? Adam Davidson and his team of seven at NPR is dealing with these and similar questions in their bi-weekly podcast “Planet Money”. This week they have the chance to celebrate the 300th episode. Enough reasons for an interview with Adam Davidson (Twitter).
Q: Your 300th episode is coming up. Congratulations on that! You started with your podcast when the housing bubble in the US collapsed and just last week the Dow Jones Index dropped some hundred points. So, obviously there seems to be no end in sight…
Adam Davidson (c) NPR
Adam Davidson: I think we will have to believe that things will return to normal someday, but that day seems far away. Certainly it will take years and not weeks or month. It is very shocking; if you told me on the first podcast that on the 300th we would still be in the midst of this deep crisis I would not have believed it.
Please let us know: How bad is the situation really?
I like to think in terms of time spans. I do think we in the rich world, in Germany or the USA, we are very lucky to be born in countries that have seen sustained economic growth for decades and in some cases many centuries. Over the course of our lifetime we will have every reason to believe that that will happen again. But this now is not just a short blip, this is going to dramatically effect entire generations. Here in the US we still have to cope with the problems of foreclosure. There are still 30-40 percent of our houses for sale — that is a huge number of houses. Europe has in many ways even harder problems. The Europeans have to somehow figure out who and what they are and who is in the club and who is not in the club. I hate to make economic forecasts because it is just a guarantee to be wrong but we definitely have years and years to come with a fairly uncertain future.
Everything started in 2008 with the award-winning NPR radio special called “A Giant Pool of Money”. How did you get the idea to start the bi-weekly “Planet Money” podcast?
I was not someone who grew up fascinated by economics. My father is an actor and my mother is in dance and I was brought up to think that finance and business is a very boring thing. I learned to be really interested in it but I was always frustrated that business and finance coverage is for insiders. If you don’t understand the secret language then it is really sort of useless for you. So, for a long time I’ve wanted to find a way to do business and economics coverage for a broad audience, for non-experts. “Giant Pool of Money” was a fantastic “proof of concept”. It proved to me, to my bosses, to Alex Blumberg and “This American Life” that it is possible to do this, to make finance and even the most obscure parts of finance interesting and maybe even fun and enjoyable. ‘Giant Pool of Money’ was really a huge event in mine and Alex’s life. There were many people saying: Thank you for making things clear that I never understood. So, it became a very natural outgrowth at that point perusing this dream.
Broadcasting executives here in Europe would hardly agree to spend money on something you cannot broadcast in your normal program but which is “internet only”. How did your bosses react?
I think there is a general recognition that the days of what we call terrestrial radio are limited. We don’t know if it’s two years or five years or twenty years but we do know that we live in a world where you need to reach people digitally. For my bosses at NPR “Planet Money” it is a great experiment in what audio can sound like and what the experience can be like for on-demand audio. By definition, broadcast reaches a large audience, which means that it has to be attractive to a large number of people. Whereas in A podcast, since everyone of your listeners has chosen to listen to you – they’ve taken action –I think you can be a little more niche, a little more narrow, you can show you personality more maybe and you can be a little ‘geekier’. NPR is very generous in supporting it even though our primary output is not on our main radio programs.
You said the “Planet Money” podcast is kind of a ‘niche’ program. Does it mean that you get more feedback or that you have fans have a stronger connection to your podcast?
To me it is amazing: When I am on the big shows like ‘Morning Edition’ – those shows get up to 25 million listeners a week. And I might get a few emails a year. For the podcast it is 150,000 to 200,000 listeners — for a podcast it’s a good number. But we get dozens and dozens of emails every day. Very smart emails, very interesting questions. It is a totally different relationship, much closer, for me much more exciting with our podcast listeners.
…even with professionals from the financial world? What do they think about “Planet Money”?
That has been a surprise to me! I thought our audience would be non-experts. But we discovered that there are a lot of professionals who really like us a lot. And I think that’s because finance is so specialized. If you are a bond trader you maybe only trade US bonds or emerging market bonds or corporate bonds. It’s the same for a stock trader. So, nobody knows everything about finance, so it is helpful if someone explains the overall vision of how it all comes together.
Of course you talk a lot about the US and the world’s economy, the financial markets, the debt problems and so on. But you had other topics a well, for instance you described why pre-school is important to the economy, how Bitcoin works or about Shopping Center Economics. Where do your ideas come from?
One of the things we wanted to build into planet money from the beginning is that every story we do we do because somebody on the team is really interested. Like every reporter, for a long time I had to cover things that I didn’t care about because they had to be covered and that was my job. With “Planet Money” we wanted to make it so that we are always interested, we only cover things that are exciting to us. You cannot make a podcast that is exciting and engaging on a subject you yourself don’t think is interesting. That was the beginning. We then put together a team of I think the very best people in public radio and radio in America, just amazing curious people who really want to understand the world. And we let them follow their curiosity. For example Alex Blumberg has a new baby, so Alex became really fascinated by this preschool study and just decided to understand it better and better. And most of them have that feel. Even right now we are planning so Europe coverage, we want to send some of our reporters to Germany and probably to France. But even there we do not want just to cover the news, we say: ‘Find something going on that you find puzzling or upsetting or exciting or interesting in some way. Get yourself excited and then get us excited’ – that is the rule.
Please tell us about Toxie, the toxic asset.
This was the brilliant idea of David Kestenbaum and Chana Joffe-Walt. They just kept hearing this phrase ‘toxic asset’. It was on the news all the time. And they were just wondering what is a toxic asset, why would anyone own a toxic asset, what are they like and they came up with the idea: ‘Let’s just buy one!’ That would be the best way to figure out, what’s going on with them and why they are causing so much trouble. It turned out to be very complicated to buy a toxic asset, but they managed to buy one. And sure enough it was the perfect tool to understand the financial crisis, how people ended up with these horrible assets and what’s happening with them now. We asked our audience to name our toxic asset and Toxie was the name that won. Unfortunately our last of a long list of reports on Toxie was the day she died (for some reason we started calling her ‘she’). Now she is very missed.
There are a lot of business and financial journalists, but only a handful have the ability to really explain what’s going on in a way that everybody can understand it. Is the world of finance too complex – or is it a problem of journalism?
Finance is very complex, it is very confounding, it confuses you. I do not want to make it sound like it is simple but I do think that a lot of it can be explained much better than it is to a broader audience. There are a few reasons why it is not: First of all, for most of modern history there was no reason for the average person to know a lot about finance. It was like electricity – it just works. Finance was appropriately covered as a technical thing.
It is very uninteresting until the whole thing breaks. And then it becomes suddenly very very important and it becomes crucial. You have to understand it to understand anything that is happening in the world. There are a lot of journalists who know a lot about finance but do not have the training or in many cases the interest in translating it for normal people. And then we have journalists who are interested in translating it but do not have any of the technical training. It is an understandable mismatch, but it is a mismatch which needs to be addressed now. It is now clear that every major media outlet needs to invest in reporters who can deeply understand the complexity of modern finance
You yourself seem to have a real passion for finance. Is it still the same even after 300 episodes?
I wouldn’t say I have a passion for finance. I find it interesting and learning about it makes me feel like I am learning a secret language that helps me to understand how the world works much better. But I don’t think that I have an inherent fascination with bonds or stocks or interest rates. I spent time in Haiti and with very poor Americans and I now find those stories much more interesting, much more powerful because the stakes are really really high. Much higher, of course, than they are for the rich.
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Read this interview in German.
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