This Is How The Paparazzi Business Really Works

Tracy Alloway (0:08)

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:13)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:14)

Joe, you know what my favorite Odd Lots podcasts are?

Joe Weisenthal (0:17)

Definitely all the ones we've done about poker and gambling, right?

Tracy Alloway (0:21)

Yeah, poker and chess episodes, those are my absolute favorites. No, my favorite episodes are actually when we talk to people, our fellow colleagues at Bloomberg.

Joe Weisenthal (0:32)

I agree, I love those episodes.

And not to speak about how great things are at Bloomberg and how great it is here and how great our colleagues are, but it is really remarkable, the wide range of backgrounds that people have, whether we're talking to our colleague who is a cattle farmer or former traders or whatever it is, or the guy who is the father of the beige book. It's always interesting.

Tracy Alloway (0:57)

Yeah, it's a large organization. There's a wide range of experiences, and it seems like a lot of people have very interesting backstories, and we've had some of them on, as you just mentioned, but I think I've found the Bloomberg reporter with the most interesting background ever.

Joe Weisenthal (1:14)

This is gonna have to be pretty impressive to beat the cow farmer, but I guess cows are a commodity, so I guess maybe it does fit in with the Bloomberg bread and butter coverage. Okay, so what is the background of the person we are talking to today?

Tracy Alloway (1:29)

Okay, so our guest for today is Eddie van der Walt. He is a Metals reporter for us in London, but before he was covering all things metal, he was actually a paparazzi, or I guess I should say paparazzo, singular.

Joe Weisenthal (1:45)

I am very excited about this. First of all, I'm a big fan of Eddie's Metals coverage. I love when he talks about gold because all the crazies are in that market. But I feel like, A, the paparazzi is one of these things that's ubiquitous in modern life. And we basically know nothing about how the business works. And I imagine there's a lot of interesting lessons we'll learn about risk taking and risk management and all this.

And maybe even also digital rights management and intellectual property. So I am excited about this episode.

Tracy Alloway (2:16)

Okay, well, we have a lot to cover in 20 or 30 minutes then. I mean, the great thing about Eddie is that he also looks at the paparazzi business model from an economics perspective. I've spoken to him a little bit about it before. So I think you're really going to enjoy this discussion.

Bloomberg's Eddie van der Walt, thanks so much for joining us.

Eddie van der Walt (2:40)

Tracy, hi, thank you.

Tracy Alloway (2:41)

I guess the obvious question to begin with is how you got into the business of being a paparazzo in the first place.

Eddie van der Walt (2:50)

Yeah, I mean, I started off, I was a student photographer. The dream was to go photograph elephants in the Serengeti, and nobody told me that people don't pay for pictures of wildlife. And so when I came over to the UK, I kind of, I wanted to work in news, and I had a few interviews in the industry. And to be honest, I turned, the first time I interviewed at the company that I worked for, which was called Big Pictures, which was one of the biggest agencies at the time. They've gone under since, but I interviewed there, and I had no idea what these guys did. So I walked into the office, and everywhere is just pictures of, you know, I don't know, people in compromising positions, and you just got the image immediately that this was their business, their business was paparazzi. And so I was a student when Diana died, and I remember saying to myself, the one job that I will never do in my life is work as a paparazzi photographer. But I got interviewed by a South African guy, and he offered me the job.

And the first time I turned it down, and then a few other things that I tried didn't come off. So he came back to me about a month later and said, look, the guy that we hired that time didn't work out, but are you up for it?

And then the second time around, I took it. And it just kind of sucks you in. The world sucks you in, because the better you get at it, the more you know the characters that work in it and the backstories and so on, the more you get to know it, it has in any industry, the more you become worth. And so it was much easier to get into it than it was to get out of it, to be honest.