ADAM DAVIDSON: I think when you're a creative
person and you're starting something new and
you want to do great work it can be a little
terrifying.
You have yourself, maybe a small team.
What are we supposed to do to be great?
What are we supposed to do to be fully ourselves?
It was looking back at Planet Money that I
created with a small group of friends where
I saw so many lessons in what you can do early
on that sets you up for success.
Creating Planet Money came out like a lot
of things out of frustration that I felt,
I wasn't born interested in business.
I grew up in a home of artists who could care
less about business.
In fact, I grew up in a world of artists where
everything was open for discussion – sex
and drugs and art and everything except money.
Money was this lame, horrible thing that no
one wanted to talk about.
So I, of course, became fascinated by the
lame, horrible thing no one wanted to talk
about.
But I didn't particularly care what the stock
market was doing on any given day or what
the Fed policy was.
I had to learn to find that interesting.
And when I did find it interesting and I found
that business is directly tied to every aspect
of our lives.
It determines how much comfort we have and
in many ways it determines who we marry, how
many kids we have, where we live, how we live.
And business itself represents dramas that
the characters in business and in economic
policy have their personalities and their
emotional states and all of the things that
make a good drama.
The drama is there.
It just requires translation.
And as I began to feel, that and then I would
think about most business coverage and it
was so lifeless.
Just the stock market did blah, blah, blah.
The Federal Reserve blah, blah, blah announced
this policy.
And it just made me frustrated.
It made me really, really frustrated.
And surveying the landscape I felt not in
every case but in a lot of, in many cases
there was either serious but really boring
and hard to understand business coverage or
there was fun, lively business coverage that
was sort of silly and thin.
And so we, I guess it was an experiment but
we felt like it would pay off.
What if we just started the most of both.
We wanna be very substantive, very serious,
very grounded in smart, thoughtful stuff,
but also fun and exciting and filled with
drama and characters and all of that.
And what if we just refused to accept that
there's a tradeoff and just insist on the
most of both.
And it's not that we always succeeded or every
episode succeeds but setting that as a bar
allowed us, frankly, to just not give up early
in the process.
And I've often said there's not a Planet Money
way of telling a story.
There's a lot of little tricks and gimmicks
and approaches we came up with but it really
is just a group of people who agree we're
going to hold ourselves to this really high
standard and we're just going to keep trying
until we succeed.
And that's true for every individual episode
and then it's true for the show as a whole.
And that's by the way what I've noticed, you
know I've worked at This American Life, at
The New Yorker.
I've worked at places that, the New York Times
magazine, that do really consistently incredible
work.
And that's what I keep noticing.
Yes, I mean in all those places people are,
there are very smart people.
They're very capable people.
But it really is just there's a tone set like
we're gonna just go for this thing that we
all agree is important and we all kind of
know we could give up a little early but we're
just going to push each other to get past
the finish line.
And that to me, as simple as that is, is the
secret to a culture of excellence.
It's not about oh, I'm excellent, therefore
anything I do is excellent.
And it's not oh, here's the excellence rule
book and I'm just going to follow it.
It's having a tone and an agreement that we're
going to push each other until we succeed.
Another thing I'm proud of with the show is
that from the very beginning we decided, we
thought a lot about the tone of the show and
the show was born at the time of the financial
crisis when, to us it felt like what we saw
as the traditional business journalism voice:
""The Federal Reserve did this today.""
It's sort of a man usually in a suit telling
you what happened with utter authority.
We're like that voice is absurd.
It's absurd.
They completely missed the biggest financial
story of multiple lifetimes.
They don't know anything and you can't have
a voice of authority when you're covering
the complete collapse of authority.
And luckily we also didn't feel like we knew
everything.
So we really developed this voice that we
called 'holy crap, I just learned this fascinating
thing.
Let me tell you about it.'
So the authority we have is not we know and
you don't.
The authority we have is we happen to be lucky
and have this job that allows us to really
look into this stuff and allows me to tell
you what's so interesting about it.
And that was really important.
Another thing is the host of the show, the
voice of the show was a shared sensibility,
not one person.
Which sometimes was frustrating because I
felt like in the beginning it was my baby
and I wanted everyone to know that.
And they didn't always.
But it's allowed for real longevity because
different voices have come in, added.
Other voices like mine have left, but there's
a central sensibility that remains and I'm
very proud of that.
