When investors head for the exit, run to the fire

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MELLODY HOBSON: Women’s sports are the small caps of sports. We’re sitting here right now, front row seat, where we are seeing this inflection point that is going to financially manifest itself into real value for teams and emerging leagues and junior sport. And when I start to study the data and see this, literally, I just said, “Wow.”

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments, board member at JP Morgan and former chair of Starbucks and Dreamworks. With investment markets on a rollercoaster amid conflict in the Middle East and widening economic uncertainty, I wanted to ask Mellody about how she stays steady as an investor with so much influx. As she explains, Mellody doesn’t just tolerate the volatility, she welcomes it. She shares a string of financial and life lessons, including a counterintuitive admonition against making decisions based on money. She also talks about why she’s making a big bet on women’s sports, what bravery looks like for business leaders in 2026 and more. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments, accomplished board leader, and a longtime friend. Mellody, always great to be able to chat with you.

HOBSON: Great to see you. Yes, we’ve known each other forever.

Copy LinkWhy long-term investors should welcome volatility

SAFIAN: We are talking now amid some pretty intense uncertainty in 2026, war in the Middle East, energy prices up, tariff battles, AI anxiety, inflation. Ariel’s always positioned itself as a long-term investor. Your symbol is the tortoise, slow and steady wins the race. But chaotic moments like this can be so unsettling. Does anything about right now make you uneasy?

HOBSON: I know it’s going to be crazy. I tell people it feels uncomfortably familiar. And what I mean by that is it never feels great when you’re in these moments of unrest or chaos, but there’s a familiarity to it that we go back to that calms us in these moments. So there’s nothing particularly worrying me. It’s always something new and different, but I always stay focused over the long-term. The U.S. economy works itself out. These things work themselves out and you see an upward trajectory in the stock market over time. That’s what I stay focused on.

SAFIAN: Yeah. I mean, volatility is like, it’s part of investing. It’s also increasingly sort of everywhere in our society. Are there things about the way you deal with volatility in investing that you apply to your life or that folks here, whether they’re looking at the investment markets, but really their lives or their businesses, is volatility something you defend against, something you lean into? How do you think of that?

HOBSON: We lean into, we say volatility is our friend. If we are not selling, we are getting the opportunity to buy value and add more of a bargain price. And so we will look at the fundamentals of the company and we’ll say, did anything really change besides the chaos around it? That chaos took the shares down. Let’s buy more.  Because when they recover, we will be rewarded. 

I wrote a letter last year to our clients and I said, “We’ve become firefighters.” Most of the time a firefighter is sitting around the firehouse training. And then when the alarm goes, they run into the burning building. That’s what we do. Most of the time we’re just looking for opportunity. We’re training, we’re getting ready. The alarm goes like Liberation Day or the alarm goes like the Iran War, all terrible events. So please, there’s no joy in that, but it takes down good businesses, and we run into the burning building to get them. I think about that a lot in life. I think in those moments of great stress and anxiety, I always ask myself some very basic questions, “What am I supposed to be learning from this?” So I lean into it from the perspective of, “Can I get the learning out of it?” even though I will be the first to admit there are those times when it feels terrible.

SAFIAN: The risks of things like people talk about bubbles, whatever, AI bubbles or things like that, you don’t particularly worry about that either as long as there’s discipline about when you’re buying and when you’re selling.

HOBSON: I don’t want to be in that bubble. So we avoid them. That would be the way that I would think about it. Allbirds, the shoe company that was just the hottest rage, it was the thing. And then the company just crashed, I mean, literally fell off of a cliff in terms of sales, started closing stores, et cetera. And now they’ve reinvented themselves as somehow AI-related, and the stock is up 300%. That is classic bubble territory. We would never be in that story in terms of actual real money being invested. We would avoid that like the plague.

SAFIAN: Investing is such a counterintuitive in some ways because when prices are down, mostly that’s when you want to buy things. But in the investment markets, people get nervous when prices are down. And if you’re going to be a net buyer over time, you actually want prices to be down, right?

HOBSON: Everyone calls investing in the stock market or many people a rollercoaster. And I said, okay, let’s now be literal about a rollercoaster and how it makes you feel. We all feel better on a rollercoaster when it’s down towards the bottom. And we feel scared and terrible when it’s at the top and it’s about to drop. But for whatever reason in the stock market, it’s just the opposite.

SAFIAN: Yes.

HOBSON: We all feel great at the top and we feel terrible when it’s at the bottom, but unlike an actual rollercoaster, it’s the reverse feeling. That’s actually what you should use as your investment strategy. The bottom is where you should feel more comfortable. The top is where you should feel more afraid.

Copy LinkHow financial literacy improves decisions

SAFIAN: It’s so hard for us to understand and apply all these things. I mean, you have long been a champion of financial literacy. You wrote a bestselling children’s book, Priceless Facts about Money, but Americans at every income level say they’re anxious about money. And it’s been that way even before the sort of latest external shifts. Is that just part of the human condition?

HOBSON: It’s education. We don’t learn about money in school. And as a result of that, that lack of knowledge leads to a great deal of anxiety. And I see that across all income levels. We learn about a lot of things in school, but the DAO, the NASDAQ, the S&P, your 401(k) plan, planning for retirement, the compound interest, which Warren Buffet calls the eighth wonder of the world, these are things that are not really taught. And the older you get, the more embarrassed you are about, “Well, I can’t ask anyone this.”

Part of the reason I wrote a children’s book was one, I wanted to write a children’s book. It’s a 10,000 word children’s book about money. This is not three words on a page. It really is a in-depth discussion of money and a fun and creative way, I think. But it’s also, I wanted to use the book as a gateway to get to parents. I thought if parents would sit down and read this book with children, they’d be learning alongside of them all the things that they’ve been too embarrassed to ask.

SAFIAN: I mean, I’ve had conversations with my kids even as they’ve grown up and become adults where they’ll ask me questions like, “Well, dad, I don’t really understand how does a credit card really work? What’s happening when I’m using my ATM?”

HOBSON: If you think about something as basic as an ATM, for a small child, it does not make sense.

SAFIAN: Yes.

HOBSON: An ATM is this magical machine that just spits out money. And so it creates a great deal of mysticism around money, and it makes it much less concrete.

SAFIAN: And now your money is this, right?

HOBSON: Correct.

SAFIAN: I mean, it’s not even cash. It’s not even an ATM.

HOBSON: That’s correct. A phone. So you have to explain all of this. I tell people it’s like teaching a language. It’s easier to learn a language the younger you are. If you live in an African village or Chicago, money is a part of your life. It’s like oxygen. There may be degrees of difference, but it is fundamental to living. And so as a result of that, getting that fundamental understood early, the earlier, the better. And the apprehension and the anxiety that most people have with money is fundamentally tied to the fact that they just weren’t taught.

Copy LinkUsing math over emotion when markets get noisy

SAFIAN: You often say math has no opinion. And I’m wondering whether that is a particularly helpful mantra in times of volatility like right now, sort of a way to filter out the noise and make decisions.

HOBSON: My math has no opinion line, which is one of my favorite lines. It is not original to me. I borrowed it from Fabrizio Freda, who was the CEO of Estée Lauder when I was on the board. I was on the board there for 15 years and he always said in math has no opinion. I love that line so much because there’s no massaging numbers in terms of just fundamentally what happened.

So if the Dow Jones goes down 500 points, there’s no editorializing around it. It happened. And then you ask yourself, what do you do about it? Your bank account is your bank account. Unlike some of the other things where people can create stories and myths or whatever it is, it is what it is. If the stock price did drop and nothing changed, then we’ll say the math is just inviting us in. I think it really does help anchor us in a reality that helps us not to rationalize.

SAFIAN: You were talking about how important money is, but for someone who’s in the financial services business, you’ve also said, “Don’t make important decisions based on money.” And so can you square that for us? Where does that come in?

HOBSON: It is so counterintuitive. I learned this one from John Rogers who started my firm, Ariel Investments when I was very young. He said to me, “Mellody, don’t make big decisions based upon money.” And I looked at him like, “You’re an investor and you’re telling me not to make decisions based upon money.” And he said, “I’ve seen this time and time again. You’ll have a young person. They’ve got a job. They love the job. They love their boss. They leave and go to another company for an extra $5,000 where they don’t love the person, the job, or the company.” And so they’re miserable for $5,000. He’s like, “That’s a bad decision.” And so they’re making a financial decision, which is a decision about their life. You want to start with what are you trying to accomplish and how does the math, which have no opinion, how does that shape your decision?
And if math has no opinion and the number is the number on a job decision, there are probably some other factors that you should consider as an example and put some value around them.

SAFIAN: And even investment decisions shouldn’t be based always solely on money.

HOBSON: The reason that I say no, which is going to be shocking, it shouldn’t just be based on money. Sometimes it’s much easier to save yourself from yourself, and that’s why I like dollar cost averaging. So with dollar cost averaging, you’ve decided, “I’m going to invest $100 a month in this mutual fund or ETF or my 401(k) plan.” So sometimes the market is high, sometimes it’s low, and over time I’m going to average a better price. And so that is a good way of not making an investment decision based upon money because you’re trying to time something that you probably can’t get right, especially both sides of it. That’s why I’m very much against market timing. People say, “Well, I got out of the market right before it fell.” And then they don’t go back in. You don’t know we’re going to wake up to a war in Iran. Someone who tells me that they did, they got lucky. And I’m sure Kalshi or someone of these predictive markets will say they predicted, but that’s extremely hard.

SAFIAN: When you’re trying to optimize always for money, decisions around greed, decisions around risk, all those things get muddled in the middle of it and sometimes your wisdom about it drops away.

HOBSON: This is Behavioral Finance 101. Human emotion takes over, which is why I tell people, for example, “Do not make big money decisions in times of great emotional stress.” If you’re on some kind of medication and they say, “Don’t drive heavy machinery,” it’s exactly the same concept. You don’t want to be making big decisions because emotionally, your mind can’t do it.

Copy LinkWhy Mellody Hobson is investing in women’s sports

SAFIAN: I want to ask you a bit about an investment area that you’ve leaned into lately — how much it’s about money, how much it’s about other stuff — and that’s sports. You were part of the group that bought the NFL’s Denver Broncos in 2022, and then last year you announced Project Level, an investment fund focused on women’s sports. It’s not too late to get into women’s sports. Valuations are up sharply. Your emotions and getting the better of you.

HOBSON: Women’s sports are the small caps of sports. We are at an inflection point in sports, once in a generation. We are sitting here right now, front row seat that is going to financially manifest itself into real value for teams and emerging leagues and junior sports. And when I started to study the data and see this, literally, I just said, “Wow, today versus five years ago, how much more are you aware of women’s sports?” From the hockey team that won the gold, men and women’s, right, to the CBA negotiation that just happened for the W with new salaries for the team, to the draft that just happened for the W. Women’s sports is much more a part of our lexicon than it was before, and we will see that actually translate into media rights, sponsorship, higher revenues, which will be value that will be created for sports assets.

We’ve already seen it happen in men’s sports. Women’s sports are going to go on that same trajectory. The most valuable men’s sporting team in the world is Real Madrid worth $16.5 billion, supposedly, according to Forbes and Sportico. The most valuable team in America, Dallas Cowboys at 12 and a half billion. The most valuable women’s team, New York Liberty, supposedly 500 to $550 million. The likelihood of a women’s sporting asset doubling or tripling in value is higher than the likelihood of the Real Madrid doubling or tripling from here.

The WNBA receives right now about 3% of the media rights of the NBA’s contract because they’re owned by the NBA partially. That contract that the NBA has is 7.7 billion a year, the WNBA gets $220 million of it, 3% but they have 15% of the viewers. This is arbitrage. Eventually, those media right numbers will go up.

SAFIAN: Project Level has announced three investments so far, not in the WNBA—

HOBSON: Not yet.

SAFIAN: … as you’ve been talking about, but NWSL team in Denver, the Denver Summit, League One Volleyball, which I guess they call LOVB, right, the women’s professional volleyball league, and then most recently, the sort of NFL-backed flag football league, which is nascent and is not just women-focused, although is women-focused, I guess, for you.

HOBSON: Co-ed league. Flag, 20 million people play flag in the world, 4.1 million of them are youth. Women are a big and fast part of the growth in flag for the obvious reasons. You’re 12, your mom probably doesn’t want you playing tackle football, but you might love football. Flag is really popular in America, and this is what we call a league expansion. The NFL is the anchor and they’re expanding. The owners own the league as well. Volleyball, 490,000 girls in high school today played volleyball, more than boys play soccer or baseball. And then when you get to the Denver Summit, we just had our first home game in Denver. 63,000 people came to our first 12 game. We shattered every record of attendance at a women’s soccer game in America. The previous record was 49,000, so the fandom is there. I’m telling you, we’re just watching it come alive in real time.

SAFIAN: From financial volatility to investing in women’s sports, Mellody has a way of making it all sound straightforward and logical. So how is investing in sports different than TV and movies where her husband, George Lucas, made his name? And what does bravery look like for business leaders in 2026? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Ariel Investment’s co-CEO, Mellody Hobson, talked about building financial literacy as a life skill and why she sees women’s sports as the next great investment opportunity. Now she talks about Taylor Swift’s impact on the sports business, her frustration with the diversity dialogue in America, and what it takes to be a brave business leader in 2026, plus, why storytelling may be the most underrated skill in business. Let’s jump back in.

Sports is an entertainment business, right, which is an arena you have experience with. You’re on the board of Dreamworks—

HOBSON: It’s media.

SAFIAN: … for a long time. You and your husband, George Lucas, are active in the industry, but investing in sports, it’s got to be different though than TV and movies.

HOBSON: Sports has held up TV. So if you look at the top 100 TV shows, I mean, the NFL is a lot of the list. My husband always says to me, “We don’t want sports fresh frozen. We want it fresh.” And so because we don’t want to hear about the score, it kills the game for us, we actually watch sports when it happens. Then streaming realized we want sports too. That’s Apple, that’s Netflix, that’s Formula One going to Apple for that big five-year contract, $750 million. The NBA wants to go to Europe. They went to Africa. They’re also looking at women. 

And quite honestly, a great example of this with the NFL, Taylor Swift did actually affect women watching football. It was first about her dating this football star and girls watching, then girls and women really loving the game, and that’s been fantastic. It also sticks because girls are playing more youth sports. That builds the future fandom. And those families are used to paying for those girls to play sports. So then they’ll be used to paying for tickets to go and watch women play sports.

SAFIAN: One of the things about sports, it sort of reminds me of other things about entertainment and media overall, which has often been thought of as being protected in times of economic uncertainty. Is that part of the calculation? Is that make sports a particularly, I don’t know, appealing asset class right now?

HOBSON: So one of the things I would say to you is that one of the things we like about women’s sports is the tickets are less expensive and it gives more families more access to the games. We love that. I think our average ticket price for the Summit was somewhere in the neighborhood of $50. So that’s very different than trying to go to a major league men’s game these days. I think it’s worth it, so please don’t see that as a negative, but there’s this opportunity here that we think is really great.

SAFIAN: The name Project Level, it reminds me of a venture you launched several years back, Project Black with the aim of scaling minority owned businesses and narrowing the wealth gap. How much do you see Project Level as more than a financial investment, looking for cultural impact for women in that way?

HOBSON: In a big way. 95% of women in the C-suite today played sports, high school or college. Sports affects a girl’s leadership skills. We know it. And so to the extent that we are a part of developing those leadership skills and making that girl who’s 12 years old on the field, on the pitch, on the court, more confident, more secure in who she is, I have a 12-year-old girl, and so I can see it. And so this is not just about the investment and the financial return that I think and expect to be very compelling. Again, because math has no opinion, I’m just giving you the math. And the stats around the leadership development issues are just as compelling as the financial stats that I have seen.

Copy LinkA “painful moment” for inclusion

SAFIAN: I want to ask you about Project Black and how it’s going. I mean, there has been culturally kind of a pushback against diversity-based efforts, particularly since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Has that impacted Project Black?

HOBSON: Sure. The conversation around diversity has taken a turn that has been extremely surprising, and I will tell you, very disappointing. At the same time, I will say that our goal is to invest in great businesses, and that is what we will continue to prosecute as an investment thesis. But the enthusiasm for this idea of opening up opportunity has been affected by the political narrative because of fear. People are afraid of engaging in these conversations because they think that it will bring some form of negative attention or perhaps legal attention that they just don’t want, even if they, from a values perspective, completely agree. This has been, for me, a painful moment because it’s so much about who I am and what I believe and Project Level is another extension of that. So much of my life’s work has been about inclusion, and that inclusion, I think, leads to better outcomes of who’s sitting around the table, who’s making decision, what information you use to learn and to know and to grow, to how you think about the world so that you can be tolerant of others and therefore diminish acrimony.
All of that. 

I think, again, the data speaks to this being the right thing to do, but for whatever reason we’ve taken a step back that has affected the context of Project Black but has not affected the long-term investment outcomes that we will deliver.

Copy LinkWhat bravery looks like for leaders now

SAFIAN: I had a discussion off the record recently with a business leader about some of these topics, and she was saying to me, “Listen, as a woman of color who was born in another country, I can’t talk about this stuff right now.” She just felt like the environment was too punitive. You gave a really memorable commencement speech at USC in 2015 where you talked about bravery. I’m curious what you think bravery looks like in 2026 for business leaders.

HOBSON: I always tell people, courage is not the absence of fear. We know that. It’s just overcoming it. When I think of these moments, I have a visual image that I use to pull myself together, John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and I can see him in the raincoat with the backpack, and he is facing police officers and people holding batons, and they are going to hurt them. He put himself in harm’s way for me, for us. He knew he would be heard. And so the question is, we can all go through life with the easier, more comfortable outcome and not put ourselves in harm’s way, but there are times when we’re going to have to do that. And I don’t mean you have to throw yourself in front of a train, but I do think we have to stand up for our values, and this is when we have to be brave. So I won’t shy away from the conversation around diversity because I believe it. I don’t have to be combative. I can just be logical and authentic in my perspective. And if that makes you feel uncomfortable, that’s on you.

SAFIAN: I mean, in the time we’ve known each other, you’ve never been shy. You always have a high conviction about where you stand on things. Do you know when your conviction is sort of risk becoming stubbornness, that sort of balance between when conviction is wisdom and when the human part of us is sort of pushing us to go a little too far?

HOBSON: I try to have people around me that will tell me the truth, and I ask them, and sometimes people, they hit me really hard. So if you ask, you’ve got to be ready to receive, and it’s not always what you want to hear. The issue that I have is I live with rebels. George is a rebel. He’s not an overlord, he’s a rebel. His friends are rebels. John Rogers did something that had never been done before when he started Ariel. Howard Schultz and starting Starbucks, there are people that I’ve just… Jamie and how he shows up in the world, Jamie Dimon. I just am very comfortable in those environments. I must self-select them so clearly they embolden and empower me. I’m not trying to be a hammer, but I’m also not afraid, if that makes any sense.

SAFIAN: I do want to congratulate you on the upcoming opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, September 22nd in LA. I hope I have that right.

HOBSON: Yes. We’re in a sprint.

Copy LinkWhy storytelling is an underrated business advantage

SAFIAN: I wanted to ask you because narrative and storytelling, it’s often viewed as squishy for business. It’s not about math, it’s not about data. Are there business lessons in storytelling? Are there things that narrative does that numbers can’t do?

HOBSON: Yes. I think narrative is foundational to life. And so when you look at even great CEOs, they tell a story about their business backed up by facts and data, but it’s compelling. I remember Bill Gates, he sat on a panel with a doctor who talked about saving one baby, and he said everyone in the audience was in tears. And he said, “At the Gates Foundation, we’ve saved millions of children, and I can’t get anyone to cry.” The Gates Foundation has done amazing work. I’m just saying that the narrative can help advance an effort. Warren Buffett is an amazing storyteller, but he’s also the greatest investor of our modern day. He can do both.

SAFIAN: Is there a thought or a lesson about finances and financial literacy that you would encourage people here to take away with them?

HOBSON: I think my takeaway would be you can actually lean in a way that you can get the information you need to know. It’s just making sure you ask questions. Again, using a story, very simple. If you have a child, you go to a doctor and the doctor says, “Your child broke their tibula in three places.” It’s your child. You are concerned about their health. You don’t know what the doctor is talking about. You would say, “What does that mean?” And then the doctor would of course say, “Your child broke their leg.” I want people to go to that financial advisor and when they get the jargon or the acronyms or the language that they don’t understand, they think, “I need to understand this to the degree that I need to understand the health of my loved one. I need to make sure I do the exact same thing when it comes to my money, be it at the bank with interest rates or the mortgage documents or the investment portfolio.”

SAFIAN: Mellody, this was so great. Thank you so much for doing it.

HOBSON: Thanks for having me.

SAFIAN: Mellody and I first connected years back about the power of financial literacy and the power of narrative to drive change in business and in life. She has a gift for demystifying what can seem like complex topics. What this conversation reinforced for me is how her investing philosophy reflects a larger philosophy about focusing on long-term values and long-term outcomes. At a moment when many business leaders are shy about what they believe, Mellody is betting on women’s sports, standing behind Project Black, and reminding us that bravery isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the willingness to move through it anyway. Math may not have an opinion, but Mellody certainly does. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.