All

right, i'm here with jason weg from the wall street journal. And a he's one of the most requested guests that i get for the knowledge project. So i'm happy to have o here. Jason, great

to be with you, shane. So

i guess one question i have is, what does your day look like? What's your typical day? My

typical day is kind of a mess. Im, you know, i've been doing this for a long time. My my column has run for seven years in the wall street journal every every saturday, except when i'm on vacation or in the hospital, which hasn't happened. And it's not always so easy to feed the beast. You know, i can't take a week off because i don't think i have anything useful to say. I have to find something. And as i think you'll remember, i once defined my job as saying the exact same thing between 50 and a hundred times a year in such a way that neither my editors nor my readers will know iam repeating myself. And it's a lot harder than it sounds. It's more challenging than it sounds. It's usually more fun than it sounds. So, you know, a typical day for me is, i, when i can, i like to start very early. I like to get to the office before seven. I maybe read for a few minutes, then go to the gim which clears my head. I and i, i, you know, probably spend too much time on line and on twitter. But mainly i'm trying to figure out how to triangulate between what's going on in the financial markets and the news flow, and my readers lives and the questions that are on their minds, and try to find new and interesting ways to say the same old things. So i'll spend a fair amount of time reading a journals in evolutionary biology or cognitive psychology. I maybe a reading blog posts by people who ostensibly don't have anything to do with investing or the financial markets, trying to get a spark of a creative idea that will give me a different kind of entry point into what's going on.

Did you get started writing?

Well, i always wanted to be a writer. I was a very bookish kid. My parents, my mam is still alive, my dad and my mam both were very literate people. They had varied careers. My dad was a farmer and a military officer and a a political science professor and aew or publisher. And then later in their lives, my parents became ardent antique dealers. And our house was full of books, including first editions of mark twain and nathaniel hawthorned and canes, actually, among among many, many other great authors. And so i was always bookish. From the time i was 13. I wanted to write, but i wasn't interested in journalism until after i got out of college, and my great american novel was not selling, nor was it even writing itself. And out of despair, i i did take a very junior level entry level jobing in journalism that had nothing to do with business, and found that it satisfying and that there were surprisingly few other people who could write reasonably well. So i got better at it, and i worked hard at it. And then i got into business journalism, at forbes's magazine. And was

that a conscious choice, you moved to business or no,

it was all serandipity. Like almost everything in my career, if you take the lock, there's no plan. And in fact, if you take the luck away, there's probably nothing left. I think luck is luck is just a massively powerful force in the lives of individuals and societies and markets. And im i benefited hugely from it. I've been fortunate that i've had good luck, not a lot of bad luck, although i'm sure that time will come too. But in any case, i i my first job in journalism was working in an africa magazine. And i, i did that for a couple of years, even though i knew nothing about africa when i started. And when i finished, i bumped into a friend of mine on the street who said, time magazine is looking for some very junior people. And i said, well, they don't come any more junior than me. And time magazine ended up hiring me to be a fact checker in the business section. And then i got laid off from that after a year and a half. And forbes magazine hired me, and after about six weeks, i realized i liked it. And that's how i became a business journalist. That's

amazing.