Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - September 11th, 2026

23:45And I noticed that he was getting more and more prosperous as he got older and accumulating more and more properties and assets. So I started with him, and then I got a call from Leon basically saying, don't you want to talk to me too? And of course, the answer is, yes, Leon, of course I want to talk to you. I was just going to get around to reaching out to you. And then, you know, same thing with Josh. You know, I reached out to him. And, you know, I think, you know, I'm so glad that they gave me willingly of their time and on the record, right, without any kind of filtering going on. They did have their PR people there.

24:26But instead of hindering me, which some PR people can do, you know, maybe that's their strategy. They were facilitators, and I'm thankful for that.

24:35Carol Massar:All questions were on the table. I asked them everything and anything. Were you surprised by anything that you got in particular? Of course I was surprised by things that I heard them say. Absolutely. I was also surprised that they were very open and cooperative. You don't always get that, and when you do, it's really nice. I've been blessed, knock wood, to get that most of the time. Some people can be obstreperous and uncooperative. And I've had people who were not cooperative after the book came out say they regretted not being cooperative. You haven't gotten any of that? No. I haven't. I mean, here, they were cooperative.

25:20I haven't yet heard anybody. I haven't heard any complaints yet. Maybe it's too early in the week before the complaints come. You know, it's not a book you read overnight.

25:32Carol Massar:No, we actually have been talking about it in the newsroom because you go dig deep, really, into Apollo the Firm. The importance of the executive life insurance, credit DNA deals. Those backstories, they really help paint the picture of Apollo's DNA. Why was it so important, though, to kind of get to the heart, like sharing that within the book? I mean, I'm just a believer in taking a blank sheet of paper at the beginning of the story and just going through it. I mean, maybe that's why the books get so long, but, I mean, you can't tell the story of Apollo without telling the story of Drexel and Mike Milken and the collapse of those two things and how out of those ashes came this group of people.

26:10And, you know, it was not obvious that this group of ex-Drexel bankers who, you know, right after the collapse of Drexel, you know, Jewish guys basically from New York, were getting a big equity investment from Credit Lyonnais, the State Bank of France. You know, so Drexel collapsed. And then, you know, it was just, you know, very surprising that that whole series of events came about. And one of my favorite stories is that this guy from Credit Leonae was calling Leon like six times before Leon deigned to return the call. And here he was trying to, you know, essentially, you know, cut a deal with these guys.

26:52Carol Massar:One of the things we wanted to ask you, and we were, again, talking about this before you were coming on our team. What was so unique about Drexel? It's like if you think about who came out of it, you know, it made me think of like the PayPal mafia after reading it. Right. You have like the Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk. I mean, the names that were coming up from the Mike Milken world. David Solomon, Rich Handler. It's unbelievable. Yes, it is. Leon and his crew. Leon's brother-in-law, Tony Ressler, started Ares. I mean, it really goes on and on. And then you sort of see it like in the group that Josh put together to buy the commanders, a lot of Drexel people.

27:34You know, it's akin to, as you said, the Peter Thiel coaching tree. I like to compare it to the Coach K coaching tree as a Duke guy. So it's an amazing group of alumni and what they've accomplished because the place was – I also told the story in the book about sort of the origins of Drexel, which was completely modest and mediocre, to be honest. And then it went into the stratosphere because of Milken. which also makes sense considering how extraordinary an innovator he was. He obviously took it too far and got himself pleading guilty to criminal behavior and spending time in prison. But other than that, Mrs.

28:19Lincoln, he was fabulous.

28:22Carol Massar:I do want to get to more Leon and more Apollo, but I'm kind of stuck on the milking and the innovation part of this because that's something that struck me in the book. Like, you know, there's this often touted thing that, like, the only financial innovation or Wall Street innovation has been the ATM. Right. You really throw water on in the book, and you talk about the innovation that Mike Milken did. And some others, too, around the same time. So what did they figure out that others before them hadn't? Well, it turns out that Mike Milken was brilliant and, like, a brilliant – not only brilliant generally, but a brilliant student of finance.

29:02And it was actually a very simple idea that he took and made, you know, a whole new industry out of. Not unlike Mike Bloomberg here, to be honest. And so what he realized is that most companies at that time in the 60s and 70s had trouble getting access to capital. And unless you were like investment grade, you know, like a railroad or a bank or a steel company, you know, you know, had trouble getting access to capital. And so what he realized, you could actually lend money to these companies. They would pay higher interest rates. So investors would want it because they could get paid a higher rate of interest for buying these loans.

29:44And that the rate of default wasn't necessarily much higher. So that the chance to make more money from that investment, if you will, was actually exponentially higher. So he realized that these companies should be financed. And, of course, there were tons of companies that needed financing, long-distance telephone companies, cable companies, cellular companies, movie companies, Hollywood. I mean, he ended up, you know, the lodging industry, he ended up financing thousands of companies and he wanted 100 % market share. He innovated this at a time when people had no idea what he was up to. So Drexel was way off to the races, had huge market share.

30:25And then finally, other banks on Wall Street figured out what Milken was doing, competed with him, began to take market share, but still Drexel had the majority of the market share. And then, of course, he took it, you know, success sometimes leads to excess, and he took it too far and, you know, criminal behavior and pled guilty to things and spent time in prison. And then that pretty much led to the firm getting in trouble financially and legally and blowing up in February of 1990.

30:55Carol Massar:But junk, high yield is such a part of normal market structure, right? Well, it's now taken for granted now. It's a huge innovation. Could you draw a line from that? Sorry. It's a private credit. That's what I was going to say. Private equity, private credit. Well, absolutely. You can draw a line, at least in terms intellectually, because Mark Rowan worked at Apollo. I mean, it worked at Drexel. worked with Milken quite often and saw firsthand what he was up to and how the credit markets worked. And then when they started Apollo, they started off by buying all sorts of credit securities and hoping that they would, often at a distressed level, and hoping they would go up in price.

31:37Then they bought the executive life bond portfolio for$0.50 on the dollar, paying$3 billion or something worth$6 billion and made a fortune from that. And then he worked with Jessica Bibliowicz, Sandy Wiles' daughter, to create National Financial Partners and learned the insurance brokerage business. So all of that was hugely important, understanding credit, understanding insurance, understanding long-term capital. And then when the opportunity in 2008 came along to create a theme with Jim Bellardi, who used to work at Sun Life, he pounced on it.

32:12Carol Massar:It's all about relationships, isn't it? Well, and not only relationships, because if you're like Jim Bellarty with an idea and you're looking for money and you're going around to a bunch of firms, you want to be one of those firms. But he did go to a bunch of firms. But it's Mark Rowan having the insight, the spark, to realize that this was a huge opportunity and had the potential to be as important to the credit markets as Mike Milken's innovation with high-yield financing was back in the 80s. One of the things that we found, and our producer, Talia, like we all have been kind of digging into.

32:48Carol Massar:Hey, how'd you get the hardcover? The book. I just, you know, what can I tell you? We can get you one. Okay. The relationship between Leon, Mark, and Josh, the repeated mentions of succession plans, and who is considered a real co-founder. Yeah. Does that dynamic still loom over their relationships and over Apollo? Yeah. What is that about? Rich people behaving poorly. You know, a lot of money sloshing around. Yeah. Success has many fathers, right? And so, I mean, look, I think to be fair, it was Leon's firm. And he started with a bunch of people who were like his peers at Drexel. uh uh john hannah and tony wrestler others craig kogut really interesting great people right and then then there were like the associates you know need people to do the work josh harris mark rowan okay uh in fact it was mark rowan who called josh harris to come to apollo mark josh harris had been at blackstone after harvard business school and he was like after three months he left blackstone to go to Apollo.

33:57I don't think anybody has left Blackstone after three months. Okay. So, so that was really, it was Leon's firm. He had sort of people who were his peers, uh, who started with him and then the associates, Josh and Mark and Michael Gross. Uh, and then, you know, so fast forward, you know, to around 2008 when Leon decides like Blackstone went public that maybe Apollo should go public too. By then, like the peer group, the initial peer group, the John Hannons, the wrestlers, the co-guys, they had left. Okay. And there some still hanging around, but basically it was Leon and then this other group of people, including Mark and Josh.

34:32And he said, look, if we're going to go public, we have to let investors know that there's a succession plan in place. We don't have to say what it is now, but let's just say it's going to be these two guys. And he gave them, you know, he controlled all the shares, most of the shares. And he had 93 million shares at the time they went public. He gave them each 58 million shares, which is now gave them, which is$10 billion of value. I mean, they made them instant billionaires. And he's also said, if you want to call yourself co-founders, be my guest. It's a marketing thing. You want to put it on your business card, do it.

35:09And now, of course, they're all co-founders. Everybody's a co-founder.

35:13Carol Massar:We're speaking with Bill Cohen. He's a journalist and author. He's got the brand new book out, Money to Burn, The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the rise of a new Wall Street, I think we've got to talk about Jeffrey Epstein. I want to go there because it's interesting how you... Everybody wants to go there. Well, we talked about a lot before we got to Jeffrey Epstein. In fairness. You have a couple of chapters that kind of get into it. Oh, yeah. I think somebody said it was not until page 430 or something that I get there. But I get there. You talk about the business relationship.

35:44Carol Massar:Then you get into when Jeffrey was arrested. You talk about the third chapter, the Leon Revelations, things that came out after his 2019 New York arrest. So you spent some time on it. What do you think is the smart thing or the conversation we should be having around this? Or I don't know. Did he talk about it? Did Leon talk about it with you? Oh, endlessly. Yeah. Yeah, endlessly. And, you know, it's all in there, chapter and verse. I've, like, been looking for a way to shorthand it. And it's a very hard thing to shorthand because there's more nuance to it than people are ready to deal with. You know, like most people think it's an innuendo-laced relationship.

36:24Like how could you possibly pay$158 million to this guy for, you know, tax and estate advice you could probably get for, you know,$5 million from Paul Weiss.

36:32Carol Massar:How could you, Leon? For Paul Weiss. Well, there you go. And, you know, he has a long answer. It's a, you know, I would have loved to have been able to refute his answers. I would have loved to have been able to find a smoking gun and be like the guy that found that, you know, Leon and Jeffrey Epstein had this, you know, horrible criminal-based relationship. And I know there are other reporters out there, like, trying to do the same thing. The New York Times seems to be quite focused on this topic. You know, good luck. I hope if there's something there, find it. I talked to the man directly. You know, don't forget, the other side of this equation, Jeffrey Epstein, is no longer with us, so we can't really talk to him about it.

37:19But I've seen the documents that Epstein gave the idea to how they should be revised so that Leon could avoid paying$2 billion in estate taxes. And I talked to the attorneys that drafted those. And, you know, it hasn't really been, you know, there's a lot of political hay around it. Like Senator Wyden is trying to make political hay, but it hasn't been challenged by the IRS.

37:45Carol Massar:Was he comfortable when you were talking with him? Yes. I mean, I think he knew if he was going to do this, he knew I was going to ask these questions. How would you characterize his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? It seems like Leon was, like many people, intrigued by him and his relationships, right? Like as he told me, no one else was introducing me to Bill Gates. Jeffrey brought Bill Gates to my office for two hours. If you're Leon Black, do you really need an intermediary to introduce you to Bill Gates? Well, his point was that nobody else did it, and he wasn't doing it himself. I mean, I think there are some people even more on the hierarchy of important people than even Leon Black.

38:37So to get to Bill Gates is probably not that easy, right? So somehow Epstein was able to do it, but it was more than just Bill Gates. It was all those other crazy, important people who Epstein had in his flock. So that was one thing. And then, obviously, Leon had extramarital affairs, and I don't know what role Epstein played in all that. The one that I talk about most in the book is this Guzel Gagneva. That did not come through Epstein. That came through Donnie Engel, who Leon knew from Drexel days, who was the one putting together the Predator's Ball. So, so.

39:20Carol Massar:It's like Wall Street history. Wall Street history. It really is. And it's great stuff. Yeah. And then there was this issue of his tax and estate problem, which I found hard to believe that there was a problem, but okay, there was a problem and he needed someone to fix it. And Epstein was the one who came up with the spark or the germ of an idea to fix it that was then vetted and implemented. One thing I want to end on, because we've just got about three minutes or so. So last chapter entitled, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? You talked to an Apollo competitor, calls Apollo a bank. Last sentence of that chapter of the book, here it is.

39:55Carol Massar:You're writing, he shuddered visibly, probably because if we've learned anything over the years, it's that Wall Street banking can turn rapidly into a very dangerous business indeed, especially just when you think things couldn't be any better. It feels rather ominous. Well. How do you think about what's next to come? I have my concerns. What specifically, Bill? I'm worried that the seeds of the next financial crisis have been planted in the private credit extravaganza, shall we say. See, and I thought you were going to say AI and all the spending, but private credit. AI spending is a potential problem, but that's an equity problem.

40:33I don't necessarily worry about equity markets falling. That's risk money that falls, and you've got to take the good with the debt. It's credit and debt. Credit and debt. I mean, what was 2008? It was credit and debt. And if that shuts down, if those markets shut down, then everybody is fighting for capital.

40:51Carol Massar:How does it play out? Everybody keeps thinking. You went to Milken a couple years ago, and first of all, everybody was in love with private credit, and then it's been not so much as of late. Yeah, there's been some leaks in the dam, cracks in the dam. And Mark will say, well, yes, there are some bad actors who do some bad things. We don't do that at Apollo. We're better underwriters. And that people are overreacting to this. or they didn't read the fine print in the BDCs and said that you can only take out 5 % of your money, but they want 10 % because, of course, they're freaking out. Well, the problem is that now they've introduced private credit to retail investors who shouldn't be anywhere near it.

41:25I think generally it's a mistake, and then there's going to be private equity with retail investors and 401ks. I think all that's a mistake. That's a reach too far.

41:35Carol Massar:So what's your next book? I've got an idea it hasn't been fully signed up yet with the publisher so I'm not going to speak about it but it's going to be different but similar different but similar did we approach the subject at all in this interview actually yes you did at the beginning alright oh what's the future of Leon Black real quickly I mean, he's worth$18 billion. He's got his own private office. He's got the best art collection in private hands in the world. He's going to develop on the Woolworth Mansion on the library side into an art museum. He's going to be okay? He's going to be fine.

42:18I mean, I think he'd like to be redeemed in social circles, but that's maybe going to be a bit of a tougher pull for him.

42:26Carol Massar:All right. So what do you need, about a year and a half for the next book? Two years? Yeah, something like that. Okay. Well, come back before that. I hope so. Put us on your calendar. Always happy to come back here. We loved it. We've been looking forward to this. Thank you. Bill Cohen, the new book, Money to Burn, The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street. Bill, thank you.

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43:30Carol Massar:This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem. Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at O-D-O-O dot com. That's Odoo dot com.

44:29Carol Massar:floors. When my kids go all in, I say go for it because I've got OxiClean to get the stains out. It's not clean unless it's OxiClean. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Daily podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app or watch us live on YouTube. Everybody of a certain age has their own 9-11 story. Absolutely. Yeah, where they were when they heard we were under attack. Mark Jacobson's 9-11 story is a bit different than many others. He was in the Pentagon that morning, just about 100 feet from where hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the building.

45:08Carol Massar:Yes, like so many, that day changed the course of Mark's life forever. He spent close to four years deployed to Afghanistan, both in a military and civilian capacity. He was at the command table in Kabul on May 2, 2011. That's when U.S. forces captured and killed Osama bin Laden. He has seen a lot, certainly since 9-11. Dr. Mark Jacobson is a retired U.S. Naval Intelligence Officer. He served in Afghanistan with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He's also a senior fellow at Salve Regina University's Pell Center. He's a historian of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., and he joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio.

45:44Carol Massar:I should note, too, full disclosure, he was my wife's professor at The Ohio State University. So that's how I first connected with you. And that was a long time ago, too. That was a lifetime ago, as well. It really was. Teaching a class on terrorism after 9-11. Yeah. Hey, we are really grateful to have you here. Take us back to that day, that Tuesday morning in 2001. You know, it's interesting. I was telling a colleague earlier, I can't remember if I was in the Pentagon on the 10th of September, on that Monday. It was Tuesday, September 11th. I had just returned from the West Coast where I was at a conference with my European colleagues.

46:20Carol Massar:And one of the issues on the table was terrorism. What's the threat to each side? Should we worry about it as much as missile defense issues or resurgent Russia, China, all that? One of my colleagues later reminded me, I'd forgotten about this, that I told our European colleagues rather sternly that for us, it wasn't a matter of if, but when, when it came to terrorism. And, you know, there were people whose job it was every single day to think about the what ifs and what should we worry about in terms of terrorism back then. I was not one of them. But to me, it struck me that this is something that had been boiling up.

47:01Carol Massar:We had watched it with the USS Cole a couple of years earlier. We had watched it even before that when it came to the strikes on the Al Qaeda training camps in Jalalabad, the strike in Sudan during the Clinton administration, Mogadishu 1993. 1993. So, but again, no one was thinking, yes, there's going to be an attack in two days in New York City and Washington, D.C. Now, I remember some strange things about that day. I remember I was listening to the Howard Stern show back when it was on regular FM radio. Right. And there was a report that a two-engine small propeller plane had crashed into the Trade Center.

47:38Carol Massar:And actually, I've been hearing, I didn't realize that that was broadcast all over the place, that lots of people had made that mistake. But I remember thinking, is this a rerun? I don't remember. Did a plane crash into the Trade Center? I think before I got into the Pentagon and, you know, my little drive from Arlington and then a long walk in from the parking lot, I think the second plane had hit by that point. because I remember coming into the building and thinking, I need to go tell my colleagues at the joint staff in the special operations division, the division that handled counterterrorism, I'm going to ask to come down and work with you.

48:14Carol Massar:This is going to be a busy day, week, whatever. And my thought was that this is absolutely bin Laden. And anyone who was working the issues knew of the attempts to blow up airliners over the Pacific, I knew of bin Laden's involvement in a lot of other operations. What many of us didn't know at the time was that the presidential daily brief back in August had had the headline, bin Laden determined to attack U.S., but we can talk about that later. I actually remember giving my sister, who was a reporter on the West Coast at the time, a heads up saying, you need to get into your station now. We're at war.

48:53Carol Massar:And she was like, what are you talking about? So we had a normal routine except for the fact that we're all watching on our big CRT TVs at the time. No flat screens. We're watching the replays of the plane sitting in the Trade Center. People are just wondering, what do we do? And we're a policy office. We're about memos and paper. Our focus was actually Latin America, the Andean Ridge counter-narcotics. Well, just as I was about to walk from my office, which was, for those who remember the pictures behind the helipad on the e-ring, I was about to walk to go pick up our morning intelligence briefings from our office, which would have required me to walk right by ground zero there, where American Airlines Flight 77 hit.

49:41Carol Massar:Just as I was about to get up, I got a call from a friend of mine, someone else in the counterterrorism world. and we were saying, how would you do it? Well, we do this all at once, right? We've got to probably figure about an hour before everybody gets their act together. So yeah, what do you think? Well, I'm hearing five planes. I'm hearing 10 planes. There's a lot of disinformation or misinformation out there at the time. And okay, I'll see you when I see you. Good luck. And I hung up the phone and at that point, the cubicles in the room started shaking. You felt the overpressure. you it's the sound of I remember saying it sounded like wood a pallet of wood dropping on concrete the whole building shook and then you start seeing the smoke start coming in you know you I reflecting back I think of as we were evacuating I mean just the first little bits of of humor I saw that my boss was in shock he was a retired army colonel fantastic leader but he's just looking at me and I realized I have to evacuate the room.

50:43Carol Massar:I have to help get everyone out. And so a young sergeant and I moved everybody, had them put away their classified material, grab their things and go. And the two sort of humorous things looking back on it, I remember for some reason, I kept thinking when you leave and when you evacuate an airplane, you're not supposed to bring anything, right? So I left my wallet. I left my passport happened to be with me that day. I left my bag, keys. I took off my suit jacket and I just left it on my desk as we walked out. The second thing I remember is we were in the E ring, so the outside ring of the Pentagon.

51:18Carol Massar:And I remember our office manager, another enlisted person from the Air Force, trying to lock the front door. And this is not the new Pentagon. These are the old World War II doors with the frosted glass. And he's having trouble locking it. Meanwhile, there's flames coming in. And it's like, hey, Mike, I think we're okay. I don't think we need to lock it. And then we evacuated. I mean, we were, again, about 120 feet from impact. But we were fortunate in that the plane had hit the new part of the Pentagon, which was structurally more sound. People behind us, near us were killed. Colleagues and friends in the chief of naval operations intelligence plot office, these are naval intelligence professionals, were killed.

52:00Carol Massar:We were fortunate. But I do remember stepping out in front of the helipad, out the emergency exits, and the first thing I see on the ground is silver metal with this zinc chromate color. And being an avid model airplane builder as a kid, I knew that zinc chromate color was rust-proofing for the inside of an airplane. And you saw the red, and it was pretty clear it was an American Airlines plane. But it was a long day. The only other thing that I sort of remember, and it's hard to get through this part, is no one can get through to me. And I remember telling my parents a couple of weeks earlier, oh, you want to know where I work?

52:40Carol Massar:I work right under the helipad. And what's the picture that's going out on international TV is all the flames coming out. My father was able to get through to me. And he got somewhat choked up. We were only on for a couple of seconds. But that was, yeah, the few things, I don't even remember some of the other calls people got through. But if you remember this, the cell phone networks were just down. And it was hard for people to get through. I will say it was the same for those of us. I was down at the New York Stock Exchange and the same thing. And my husband, we just couldn't, you know, everything was wiped out.

53:11Carol Massar:And there were just eight hours or so before we could somehow connect. And I want to ask you, are we immune from something like this happening again? No. Is the intelligence better? Yes. Even with the tensions between the White House and its traditional allies? Yes and no. So let me explain. I think if there's been consistency from Obama through, well, let's say even from George W. Bush through Obama, through Trump, Biden, and Trump Part II, I think the counterterrorism apparatus has largely survived. And in this, I'm talking about the intelligence community, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and others.

53:59Carol Massar:and I think that the strategy and operational machinery, I'm not talking about the political or the policymaking, I'm talking about at the operational level, I think that strengthens so much in the years after 9-11 for the better. I think it's hard to completely take that away regardless of political decisions about where the Fed is. To dismantle it, basically? Yeah, I don't think that's the problem. So I worry, I also don't worry about one of the main problems with 9-11 in terms of intelligence sharing, the FBI not speaking with the CIA. And then, of course, we have a whole new thing where after 9-11, law enforcement began to get greater capabilities.

54:42Carol Massar:And I mean, nowhere is that clearer than in New York City, right? NYPD has an incredible intelligence apparatus. But as the intelligence community, particularly the FBI, shifted to the prevention of terrorist attacks, and actually specifically the FBI, it's not the priority to investigate, but let's prevent. I think that machinery is there. The question is, can this administration keep that commitment to making counterterrorism a primary mission for the FBI and make sure they have the resources and personnel required to do that? What about starting at the beginning with this stuff? I mean, you're a former Army psychological operations specialist.

55:18Carol Massar:You advised Generals Petraeus and McChrystal on foreign affairs. You served in Bosnia in the 90s, Afghanistan in the 2000s, as Carol mentioned. You understand propaganda and espionage history. What about when it comes to sort of the soft power of the United States, the USAID, the Peace Corps, those sorts of things? Should we be doing more before it gets the level of people who want to destroy the United States? I just watched Moneyball the other day, and I keep thinking about undervalued. Yeah. USAID, the single most undervalued organization in the U.S. government, maybe not just from foreign foreign policy standpoint, but maybe overall.

56:00Carol Massar:What we, Carol, we were talking a little bit about lessons learned and what's works, what doesn't work. One of the areas I think we never understood well enough was the value that USAID has as a counterterrorism organization. their ability to understand violent extremism and combat it before these people start dropping bombs and blowing things up. Meaning what specifically? Helping countries to develop governance structures, to address grievances, helping to create civil society, and literally helping to prevent conflict or mitigate conflict. Our thanks to Dr. Mark Jacobson, retired U.S. Naval Intelligence Officer, now historian of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

56:46Carol Massar:And that wraps up our weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Thank you so much for joining us. Be sure to tune into Bloomberg Business Week daily Monday through Friday starting at 2 p.m. Wall Street time on Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg TV, and on SiriusXM Channel 121. You can also watch our daily broadcast on YouTube. Just search Bloomberg Podcasts. We're simulcast on Bloomberg Originals, available on Bloomberg.com slash originals, and streaming platforms, including Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung TV Plus, and more. Find our Bloomberg Businessweek podcast at Bloomberg.com, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

57:18Carol Massar:And the latest edition of the magazine is available on newsstands now at Bloomberg.com and always on the Bloomberg Terminal. I'm Tim Stenebeck. And I'm Carol Masser. Have a good and safe weekend, everyone. This is the Bloomberg Businessweek Daily Podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern on Bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.

57:59Carol Massar:This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's Odoo.com.

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