Part of our weekly series with The Nib
on inequity in the time of pandemic.

Sean, San Mateo, California
Interviewed April 13, 2020

Narration: Sean Stannard-Stockton is the president and chief investment officer of Ensemble Capital, a San Francisco Bay Area investment firm that manages about a billion dollars on behalf of some 200 clients. Sean: “I totally support the idea that when there is blood in the streets, as the Wall Street phrase goes, you should be buying stocks.”
Sean: “Or that when others are fearful, you should be greedy. That is the right way to think about investing. But that doesn't mean every time the market dips you say, 'Oh, this must be a buying opportunity.’”
Sean: “Investing is not just a profession of spreadsheets and number crunching. You get to learn about everything important going on in the world, because the economy is just the collective activities of humanity.”
“One thing we know about investing is that when people are feeling particularly fearful or pessimistic, they tend to make bad decisions.”
Sean “We try and help people manage the level of risk between a near-term decline versus a permanent impairment of their lifestyle – because you acting irrationally during the panic as opposed to the actual event itself being the thing that impairs your wealth.”
Sean: “To stimulate the economy, everyone is talking in trillions of dollars. And that number is truly, like, unfathomably large. How do you explain what a trillion dollars is?”
One million seconds was a week and a half ago. A trillion seconds is 32,000 years ago. It's a thousand generations before humans discovered agriculture. It is an enormous number. And yet it may not be enough.”
“I wouldn't say this is a fun time to be an investor – it's an exciting time. You know, scary times can be exciting as well.”

Interview by Mallory Newman, illustrated by Thi Bui, script by Sarah Mirk and Amanda Pike.

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Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the "boat people" wave of refugees fleeing Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017) has been selected for an American Book Award, a Common Book for UCLA and other colleges and universities, an all-city read by Seattle and San Francisco public libraries, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics. It made over thirty best of 2017 book lists, including Bill Gates' top five picks. She illustrated the picture book, A Different Pond, written by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017), for which she won a Caldecott Honor. With her son, Hien, she co-illustrated the children’s book, Chicken of the Sea (McSweeney’s, 2019), written by Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and his son, Ellison. Her short comics can be found online at Reveal News, The Nib, PEN America, and BOOM California. She is currently researching and drawing a work of graphic nonfiction about immigrant detention and deportation, to be published by One World, Random House.

Mallory Newman (she/her) is a former associate producer for Reveal. She has worked as a journalist and videographer since 2017. Her reporting on the San Francisco Police Department’s reform efforts helped to win a 2018 Society of Professional Journalists award for ongoing police coverage at Mission Local. Currently, she is working on an international feature-length documentary on food and national security. Newman is a Marine Corps veteran who deployed to Afghanistan. She is also a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and has a bachelor’s degree in international relations from San Francisco State University.

Sarah Mirk (she/her) was a digital engagement producer for Reveal. Since 2017, she has worked as an editor at The Nib, an online daily comics publication focused on political cartoons, graphic journalism, essays and memoirs about current affairs. She works with artists to create nonfiction comics on a variety of complex topics, from personal narratives about queer identities to examinations of overlooked history. Before that, Mirk was the online editor of national feminist media outlet Bitch, a podcast host and a local news reporter. She is also the author of several books, including “Year of Zines,” a collection of 100 handmade zines, and “Guantanamo Voices,” a collection of illustrated oral histories of the world’s most infamous prison.

Amanda Pike (she/her) is the director of the TV and documentary department and executive producer of films and series at Reveal. Under her leadership, The Center for Investigative Reporting garnered its first Academy Award nomination and four national Emmys, among other accolades. She was the executive producer of the inaugural year of the Glassbreaker Films initiative, supporting women in documentary filmmaking and investigative journalism. She has spent the past two decades reporting and producing documentaries for PBS, CBS, ABC, National Geographic, A&E, Lifetime and The Learning Channel, among others. Subjects have ranged from militia members in Utah to young entrepreneurs in Egypt and genocide perpetrators in Cambodia. Pike also has dabbled in fiction filmmaking, producing the short film “On the Assassination of the President,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. She is a graduate of Princeton University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She is based in Reveal's Emeryville, California, office.