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hey daniel snyder here joining me today is mary childs co-host of npr's planet money podcast and author of the book the bond king the true story of legendary bill gross the man who invented bond trading built an empire within pimko on the west coast made billions and then as the cover states right here lost it all mary thanks for joining me today it's so great to have you here thank you so much for having me so i mean you've been in this industry for a long time you've been tracking and writing about the bond market for quite you know you've been a barons you've been to financial times you've been at bloomberg but i gotta ask you how did the idea for this book about bill gross come about for you so i was covering corporate credit markets at bloomberg in oh gosh from like 10 to 14 and i got like a little bit of a chip on my shoulder which i now realize is kind of inherited just from like the arrogance of bond people but i was like people don't understand the bond market and they need to like everyone pays attention to the stock market and that's like so dumb and you know that like kind of nested in my heart in some way and i just felt like there was indeed this like wildly influential market that people didn't understand and talk about in the same way and central to that market is of course pimco and i ran into them a lot in my corporate coverage days but then i started covering them full time in april 2014 at which time they were in the midst of this like enormous management change and um about to lowkey implode the details of what you can read in the book um but it seemed to me like you know when you start a new beat or at least when i started newbie i'm like okay i want to read everything that's out there and i was looking around for like you know i was also covering blackrock and janus and double line and guggenheim and i was just like what you know you can read michael lewis's book about the origins of like the mortgage-backed securities market but to a large extent i felt like there was a hole in in the world of like literature and books to to talk about the bond market and its import in a sort of accessible non-textbook way and so i decided to do it i don't know which is phenomenal right i think the timing right now is really peculiar as well because i think a lot of investors are talking nowadays about how the bond market in the stock market and where there used to be correlation and flight to safety in the bond market there's not because of inflation there's so many factors right so the bond market is in such big conversation right now um but to go back to because you break it down so extremely well within that and the start of pimco and how it got started and how it was a risky chance i mean you must have done tons of research research and you had tons of interviews and and went through tons of sources and videos and everything else throughout the writing of this book so i want to ask you what was the most shocking or surprising thing for you that you learned while you were writing this book oh wow um you know i wish i had like a pat answer for you because um there are a number of ways i can go with this one of the things that surprised me the most was like i could not for the life of me like you know it was i was doing a lot of the research in 2017 while all of these marches and protests were happening you know women me too all this stuff and i was like there are like no women in this book they're functionally there too and you know in the kind of like drama and the narrative of pimco's rise and uh the 2014 events and i was kind of frustrated by that at the time and the the thing i like tried to like wedge it in sort of like ham-fisted like i was like okay and then by the way women and like it didn't make any sense and so it was it was i learned a lot about like the settlements and the the various like allegations over the decades um and then i published almost none of it just because it made no sense in the narrative because these you know these stories end up so far from the center of power by design um you know and end up being kind of just like fringe and unimportant in that way in like the corporate story and as a person who cares about that stuff it was really painful um but to not be able to incorporate that but because this is such a bummer of an answer i'm going to give you a little anecdote so this is not like scandalous by any stretch but it made me laugh um one of the the people in the book she um she was telling me the story about how when she used to do interviews back in the very early days at pimco um she had a bit of a like litmus test where she had a cuckoo clock in her office and if she was doing an interview for a potential pimco employee and the cuckoo clock went off and the little bird jumps out and says goku if the interviewee jumped she would be like you know what it's not gonna work out this isn't to fit i'm sorry cause their temperament was clearly so ill-suited for the work environment at pimco so that was one of my favorite little and that somehow didn't make it into the book um i think i just forgot to find it at home but yeah but i mean you just brought up the workplace right you do dive into the work culture of pimco and um you know i remember reading about how you were talking about their silence on the floor while you're there and like the the trying to build a community but also i mean you're talking about a man bill gross who was just so unique and was so often right and was so almost controlling to a large degree and it's like yeah how do you balance the narrative within this book of being like we should talk about pimco versus this is why pimco is who pimco is because of bill so i was just kind of curious and workplace manner of what you're talking about yeah you talk about there's a lot of people that read the book and we're like wow you captured this workplace environment very well um was that something that was an initial strive for you to be like i really want to communicate this or was that something that just kind of added on over time it was definitely part of what i wanted there were a couple things that i was like i need to communicate like the intensity of the firm for sure like that's so definitional and foundational to what pimco is and how they think of themselves and how everyone else thinks of them that if i got that wrong i think the whole book would have collapsed like i think the no one would have been able to read it and take it seriously so that was very important to me to get right obviously the bond market stuff was very important to get right you know um i was so elated like i worked so hard to get it right but even so you know there's gonna be some word that's like wrong on page 97 just because like you know this thing has gone through a thousand different edits but to to get like a wall street journal review that says that i like am fluent in bonds from jim grant i was like okay like i didn't i didn't have that word wrong on page 97.
um that's a random page don't go looking i have no idea what's on page but it is um so those were kind of really important but i think the most most important thing to get right for me was bill gross like this is not a biography and i didn't ever want it to be like he grew up in the beautiful babbling creek about but i wanted to communicate clearly and in it as fulsome a manner as i could who bill is and what makes him tick and like there's this weird like misunderstanding of him or or kind of a dissonance between what he thinks he puts forward and what he actually is and i think he still struggles with that i think everyone who worked around him struggles with that so capturing that's almost impossible because it's truly the parable of the blind men and the elephant you know they're all feeling a different part in describing what they're feeling and it's like not adding up to what an elephant looks like so i had to interview so many people just to get kind of this this sketch of bill and of course bill was like you know the most important person to talk to in that um and he was very generous with his time and and his thoughts but it was it was a there are so many contradictory things about him and you know he changed over the decades and so i had to kind of wrap uh wrangle all of those disparate views and portraits to to kind of build this picture and i think i did it i think i threaded the needle where i think it did come out like he's a person he's not a god he's not a you know a caricature he's a real person and i think you do come away at the end of the book feeling like you sort of get him yeah i mean what you just kind of talked about i mean i think you did an excellent job first off is like you really did tell the compelling story of him as an individual within these scenarios and you know how he started by you know going to the casino in las vegas versus then going into the bond market and having the worldwide casino but also the fact that people change over time right and and how do you balance this guy that was just so right all the time um but also smart enough because i was pulling this quote out of your book when he was talking about the disease of size and success right and he recognized that himself that he was just like we are growing so big this could be the downfall of us and then obviously we have what happened in his life and i mean you still have a lot of power players in this book that are still relevant in today's market is that still surprising to you it's awkward is what it is like i think you know i think one of the things that that makes this book kind of electric is that everyone is still alive and and you know still playing in their markets and very big and and to be fair like i always aim to make sure that the whatever i whatever you know journalistic endeavor i do that the people involved like don't feel wronged but it's almost never the case that they're like yeah you did a great job because i don't do pr so that balance and you know this is familiar to you um that balance is always kind of a delicate emotional one but um but i do think like the that's why another reason why it's so important is that this is a living market this is you know the people who created this market are with us the people who run this market are running it like we haven't changed substantially the structure of this market in ages and i think it's worth examining and i think it's worth at least understanding you know we can't make better choices if we don't understand it yeah i also just love i mean you did an entire chapter on the great financial crisis yeah right and the influence that pimco had during that time um i wanted to ask you i mean was that surprising for you because it was kind of surprising for me being somebody that you know we still look back on the the great financial crisis and we're referencing it a lot right now with recession fears and everything else it's kind of like is pimco in the background again right now is i think a question that pops in my head i think i mean yes this is again a you know a fundamentally like bond market like it's not necessarily driven by the market that they sit in quite as much as it was last time but you know like like they aren't such a large player in like driving inflation arguably you know so i think that the positioning is certainly different this time um but they are the experts you know and they are very central and foundational still to the bond market and its workings and you know every decision that about like bond market structure or a derivative structure like there are committees and and pimco sits on these committees so i do think that it is still absolutely the power player that it was in 2008 2009 i think the you know that really established their reputation that the financial crisis really was a way for them to make a lot of money for clients but also to kind of to me that that was more or less their most influential most publicly influential moment and i think that you know they're still out there doing like thought leadership about you know the transition to a higher interest rate paradigm and all this stuff that that's very useful um i'm curious how their power manifests in this one because it isn't quite as you know the trade in 2009 was to do what the government's about to do but do it first to buy what the government's about to buy and then sell it to them and it's less clear here it's a lot less clear here how to maybe pull that one off so yes but it's a you know i i i'm trying to avoid saying this time it's different but yeah totally i mean but so to wrap this up a little bit i've got one more loaded question for you if that's all right uh what book is coming next you know a lot of people have been asking um and i'm flattered i'm honored by the question i will say this one really took it out of me so i'm not going to be doing a ken griffin book anytime soon um that's been the number one suggestion i'm playing i'm not walking into that trap um i don't know good suggestions are welcome yeah i know there's some people out there i mean it's not exactly bomb but powell powers in conversation a lot of complicated but anyways um so before we wrap up where can people follow you if they want to interact with you more yeah i'm on twitter at mdc i'm on it far too much so you can definitely find me there um i'm i have a sub stack that i update annually at offtherun.substance.com and i'm on npr's planet money on average like once or twice a month so amazing thank you so much mary thanks for spending time with me today guys i can't recommend this book enough then i literally binge read it like you get into this the way that mary wrote this and and really broke down bill gross as a man um and and the guy that revolutionized capital markets for the better in all honesty um go check it out give it a read interact with mary mary i wish you all the success from this you deserve it thank you so much i really appreciate that
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