Are We Reliving 1929? Parallels to Today’s Market Mania — ft. Andrew Ross Sorkin

Summary

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Prof G Markets: Are We Reliving 1929? Parallels to Today’s Market Mania — ft. Andrew Ross Sorkin

Podcast: Prof G Markets — Vox Media Podcast Network
Date: October 31, 2025
Guests: Scott Galloway (Host), Ed Zitron (Host), Andrew Ross Sorkin (Guest)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book, 1929, which explores the causes, characters, and consequences of the infamous 1929 stock market crash. Hosts Scott Galloway and Ed Zitron explore historical parallels between 1929 and current market trends—especially the AI boom and the increasing presence of leverage and speculation. The conversation ranges from stories of Wall Street’s past, lessons for the present, and candid reflections on financial journalism, politics, and personal ambition.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Crash of 1929: What Really Happened

[08:36–13:41]

• Sorkin sets the scene: “The 1920s… was probably one of the most transformational generations of our time from a technological perspective. Automobiles, telecommunications, radio. The other magic ingredient was credit.” (Andrew Ross Sorkin)
• The innovation wasn’t just tech—it was access: mass credit allowed ordinary people to purchase not only goods but also stocks, kicking off speculative mania.
• From 1928 to September 1929, the market soared by 90% before the crash.
• The crash unfolded slowly. “It wasn’t as much of a crash as it was a slow bleed… By the time we were in, I think, ‘32, the market had lost 90% of its value.” (Scott Galloway, 13:12)
• Deep leverage and policy errors (e.g., Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, lack of Fed action) amplified the crisis, culminating in 25% unemployment and 9,000 bank failures.

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2. Why Tell the Story of 1929 Now?

[10:09–10:57]

• Sorkin was inspired by repeated questions comparing 1929 and 2008 and wanted to tell the story “in the room,” through its people, not just economic events.
• The book focuses on vivid personalities and dynamics rather than just data.

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3. Key Historical Figures & Modern Analogs

[10:57–13:12]

• Charles Mitchell (“Sunshine Charlie”) democratized access to stocks, “like the Jamie Dimon—and in some ways Michael Milken—of his time.”
• Carter Glass, “the Elizabeth Warren of his time,” championed Glass-Steagall and opposed rampant speculation.
• John Raskob, likened to Elon Musk, popularized mass credit for car purchases and was a visionary behind the Empire State Building. “He was the Elon Musk of his era… He used to say, ‘everyone ought to be rich.’” (Andrew Ross Sorkin, 20:05)

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4. Parallels to the Present: Are We Reliving 1929?

[15:34–19:23]

• Leverage remains central: Sorkin suspects today’s risks resemble 1999 (dot-com bubble) more than 1929, but points out harder-to-trace leverage flows in today’s private credit markets and AI boom.
• The euphoria surrounding artificial intelligence, fueled by debt and circular deals among tech giants, echoes the unchecked optimism preceding both 1929 and 1999.
• Sorkin: “Back then RCA was the Nvidia of its day. Now it’s Nvidia.” (15:57)
• Warning signs are here: Sorkin notes “round trip transactions” and “indiscriminate” spending, especially in AI.

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5. Learning (or Failing to Learn) from History

[22:08–23:01]

• Sorkin cites Einstein’s epigraph: “The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others… Each must learn its lesson anew.”
• “We have to learn our lessons ourselves,” he observes about markets’ recurrent cycles. (Ed Zitron, 22:08)

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6. Speculation: Double-Edged Sword

[23:01–24:31]

• Sorkin challenges the idea that speculation is always bad: “Speculation in some way built America.”
• The challenge today: maintain healthy speculation to fuel innovation, but prevent it from running amok.

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7. What Should Policymakers Do?

[24:31–26:22]

• Preventative measures: raising interest rates, recognizing imbalances (e.g., AI-driven GDP growth).
• Crisis playbook: Historically, flooding markets with liquidity (bailouts) is politically and fiscally harder now due to debt.
• Sorkin points to today’s massive U.S. debt as a complicating factor compared to 1929’s balanced budget. “Bondholders in U.S. treasuries are going to raise their hand and say… you have to pay us more for that risk.” (Andrew Ross Sorkin, 26:12)

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8. Present-Day Market Rooms: Recreating the Drama

[29:52–31:48]

• Sorkin imagines a modern “in the room” moment: Sam Altman arranging deals with Lisa Su (AMD) to secure AI chips through complex financial engineering.
• These “circular deals” echo historic pooling and manipulation practices: “I would want to see that conversation… trying to understand how much anxiety all of these individuals really have or don’t have.” (Andrew Ross Sorkin, 31:48)

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9. Corruption, Influence, and the State of American Capitalism

[31:48–34:14]

• Galloway posits our era is defined by “an orgy of corruption and flat out grift.” (Scott Galloway, 31:48)
• Sorkin recounts being targeted by cryptocurrency scammers manipulating “Sorkin coin”—modern echoes of 1920s Wall Street pools.

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10. Politics, Populism & the New York Mayoral Race

[34:17–41:49]

• Discussion shifts to the Cuomo vs. Mamdani NYC mayoral contest, using it as a microcosm for the American debate over capitalism, socialism, and governance.
• Sorkin: “The idea of a city that's built on capitalism being run by somebody who demonstrably… wants to fundamentally change it is a fascinating development.” (Andrew Ross Sorkin, 34:55)
• Wall Street is less worried about actual socialist reforms, more concerned with policing, safety, and managerial competence.
• The growing generational disillusionment with capitalism: “Support for socialism [is] at an all time high in America.” (Ed Zitron, 40:30)
• The business community acknowledges concern but is not yet taking radical political change seriously. “I think they're concerned. I don't think they're taking it seriously, though.” (Sorkin, 41:49)

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11. Writing & Researching ‘1929’ – Sorkin’s Process

[43:27–52:08]

• Sorkin on his “black market” research during COVID lockdowns: paid students to access and photograph archival materials when libraries were closed.
• Relentless research process: “Trying to find all the material and also to think through these different characters to figure out what were their motivations… what was the chip on the shoulder?” (44:35)
• On ambition and filling ‘a hole’: “I have a hole that I’m trying to fill.” (Sorkin, 46:51)
• Storytelling advice: Ground complex financial systems in personal stories and motives; it makes cycles relatable and understandable. “I'm fascinated by people… I ultimately believe people make decisions, good and bad, that ultimately impact and create those economic cycles and systems.” (Sorkin, 49:03)

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12. Understanding Today’s Economic Titans—What Drives Sam Altman?

[52:08–53:55]

• Sorkin analyzes Altman: “I think that he believes in his heart that there’s an inevitability to this technology… [so] he is convinced of… these other issues oddly, do sort of fall to the wayside.”

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13. Advice on Media, Life & Work

[53:55–56:49]

• On launching a media company: Blend podcast, video, and product, noting younger audiences’ expectations and tolerance for blurred interests.
• On balancing family and career: Sorkin lauds “doing everything you possibly can do” before kids, then finding purpose in showing children hard work and passion.
• Marriage advice: “Find somebody who you could talk to forever… We never get sick of each other.” (Andrew Ross Sorkin, 56:49)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the slow-motion nature of 1929:
  "It was kind of a slow moving train wreck." — Scott Galloway (13:12)

• On why speculation need not always be vilified:
  “Speculation in some way built America… so much of the generational change technologically and otherwise came from speculators.” — Andrew Ross Sorkin (23:01)

• On current market leverage:
  "...after 2008, so much of the loan market moved to private credit. We don't really know all the disclosures about that..." — Andrew Ross Sorkin (15:57)

• On character-driven history:
  “I’m fascinated by people because I ultimately believe people make decisions, good and bad, that ultimately impact and create those economic cycles and systems.” — Andrew Ross Sorkin (49:03)

• On what drives ambition:
  “I have a hole that I’m trying to fill.” — Andrew Ross Sorkin (46:51)

• On today’s ‘grift’:
  “It strikes me that… what will mark this age economically is this orgy of corruption and flat out grift. Your thoughts, Andrew?” — Scott Galloway (31:48)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [08:36] – The 1929 Market Crash: Build-up and aftermath explained
• [10:57] – Key historical characters and present-day analogs
• [15:57] – Parallels & differences between 1929 and today’s markets
• [17:45] – The AI boom as today’s speculative mania
• [22:08] – The Einstein quote: lessons never learned
• [23:01] – Speculation as an American engine
• [24:31] – Lessons for policy: prevention and response
• [29:52] – Sorkin’s “in the room” vision for today’s market deals
• [31:48] – Corruption: then and now
• [34:55] – Politics: capitalism vs socialism in NYC
• [43:27] – Sorkin’s research process and personal drive
• [49:03] – Advice on storytelling
• [52:08] – Psychological profile: What’s driving Sam Altman?
• [53:55] – Building a modern media company
• [55:05] – Life and relationship advice

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Episode Tone & Style

• The banter is sharp, irreverent, and peppered with personal anecdotes, comedic jabs, and moments of earnest introspection.
• Sorkin shines both as historian and storyteller, bridging economic concepts with vivid character sketches and practical lessons for the present.
• The hosts combine skepticism of market euphoria with hope that, over time, optimism pays.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a rich exploration of 1929’s lessons for today’s investors, policymakers, and citizens. Through wit, candor, and historical detail, Sorkin, Galloway, and Zitron draw connections between eras, dissect the risks of boomtimes, and reflect on the nature of speculation, ambition, and leadership—in both markets and life.

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Transcript

[Scott Galloway]

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[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

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[Scott Galloway]

Today's number 11. That's the percentage increase in Halloween candy prices this year compared to 2024.

[Ed Zitron]

True story.

[Scott Galloway]

Last Halloween I went dressed as a chicken and I met a girl dressed as an egg. Which answered the age old question, the chicken.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Listen to me.

[Scott Galloway]

Markets are bigger than us.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

What you have here is a structural change in the wealth distribution.

[Scott Galloway]

Cash is look pretty attractive. Something's going to break.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Forget about it.

[Scott Galloway]

I actually think Halloween and Valentine's Day are very similar. They both involve candy and I pretend to be something I'm not. Pretend to be thoughtful, caring.

[Ed Zitron]

Two bangers in a row.

[Scott Galloway]

Two bangers. Let's talk about Halloween. What are you doing?

[Ed Zitron]

I'm going to a party. I'm going to dress up as Inspector Clouseau and my girlfriend's going to be the Pink Panther. I do have another Halloween story actually. And that is I went to a party last week that for some reason I thought was a costume party. It was my friend's birthday dinner and I convinced my girlfriend that it was a costume party, and she was just assumed that I was right. I was like, yeah, it's definitely. We want to get dressed up. We show up as cowboy and cowgirl with cowboy hats. And it is a regular dinner party. Everyone is dressed completely normally. So it was quite a shocking experience for us.

[Scott Galloway]

Yeah. If that's the most embarrassing thing that's happened to your girlfriend, being your having you as her boyfriend, she's got a world of surprise coming her way.

[Ed Zitron]

She's gonna deal with some more.

[Scott Galloway]

Ed, ask me what I'm doing. Ask me what I'm asking, what I'm doing. What am I doing? What are you up to, Scott? What's going on with you?

[Ed Zitron]

What are you up to, Scott? What kind of parties are you going to?

[Scott Galloway]

Well, Ed, I don't like to talk about this kind of thing, but I am going to Toronto tomorrow. Now you say, why are you going to Toronto?

[Ed Zitron]

Ah. Why are you going to Toronto?

[Scott Galloway]

I am accepting an award from the Simon Wiesenthal center and the Spirit of Hope Dinner for our advocacy and protection. I think of the Jewish people, and it's me and Van Jones, which is one, a very big award, and two, shows you how deep into the barrel you have to go because so few Jews are actually speaking out. But anyways, going to Canada to get an award. This is a very serious topic, Ed. Don't laugh. Don't laugh.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

What's so funny?

[Scott Galloway]

Let me guess. You just got back from voting for Mom. Donnie. Let me guess.

[Ed Zitron]

No, I just love the. I love the setup. Just. I don't know if we're gonna have this in the edit, but the prompting.

[Scott Galloway]

It's a true story.

[Ed Zitron]

I know it's a true story.

[Scott Galloway]

I'm going to Toronto tomorrow morning. I know.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm very excited for you. You're gonna be back in New York and we're gonna have, I think, a few meetings, right? They go over how the business is doing.

[Scott Galloway]

Can I just say, so far, I think this is our most cringy opening, and that is not easy. I brought in Judaism. Toronto, Halloween. This is a fruit salad of weird. Yeah, we're doing our team meeting. I like to encourage everyone to work harder. And we're going to go over the business. Business is rocking, by the way. I mean, markets is a drag on the business, but that was good.

[Ed Zitron]

This show needs some work.

[Scott Galloway]

Yeah, this show needs to work. No, the business is going really well. Right place, right time.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Who would have thought?

[Scott Galloway]

Podcasting?

[Ed Zitron]

We're gonna get the first full picture of what it's like doing this show five days a week because people, People forget. We only started doing this very recently. So this is our first full quarter where we're gonna review the financial performance of doing this show every weekday. I personally am very excited to see how much money we're making off of this thing.

[Scott Galloway]

You're my. I'm gonna give another reference that only drew our technical director. He's the only person over the age of 40 on this call that only he will write. You're my Fernando Valenzuela. Do you know who Fernando Valenzuela is?

[Ed Zitron]

I don't.

[Scott Galloway]

He looks scared that I'm going to say it's some sort of like, Norwegian porn star or something. Anyways, it's Fernando Valenzuela.

[Ed Zitron]

You've called me worse.

[Scott Galloway]

Fernando is arguably one of the greatest pitchers of all time. He played for the dodgers in the 80s and Tommy Lasorda had a fairly weak team. Or, I don't know, someone will come into the comments. No, they were a good team. Anyway, um, he was this amazing pitcher. Couldn't speak a word of English, and he was amazing. And you're not supposed to, I guess, use a pitcher more than once, maybe twice a week as you throw out the arm. And Tommy was pitching him three times a week and basically turned his arm into, like a rubber band. Just totally overplayed him. Anyways, you're my. You're my Fernando Valenzuela. We went from once a week. We get a few positive comments. I'm like, let's go to twice a week. We go to twice a week. The thing does well. And Claire is very ambitious. She's got a wedding to pay for at some point. Hint, hint. And then we go. Let's go to five days a week. So you guys are my Fernando Valenzuela. I'm literally throwing your arm out.

[Ed Zitron]

I love it. I'm young. I've got a lot more throws left in me.

[Scott Galloway]

I agree. I agree, young man. All right, with that, should we get to the headlines?

[Ed Zitron]

Let's do it. We are speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin, editor at large of Dealbook at the New York Times and co anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box, and is just out with his new book, 1929, which we cannot wait to get into. Let's bring him in. Good to see you, Andrew. Scott, ready to go.

[Scott Galloway]

Hey, Andrew, just quick, before we get started, is it okay if I mock your interview with Leslie Stahl, or is that going to upset you?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

No, you can say whatever you like. Throw the ball as hard as you want, my friend. That's. That's what the Canadians would say. They would say, do what. Do what you like to do. But I'll tell you this, I want you to know we got a copy of your new book, Scott, just arrived yesterday. And my wife and I looked at it and we said instant bestseller. And you could just feel it. By the way, the COVID is beautiful. The approach to the whole thing is beautiful. I didn't get a chance to fully read it. I mean, we were just sort of going through it quickly, but you could just feel what you're trying to do in those pages. And hats off to you. And I just can't wait for it.

[Scott Galloway]

It's just unfair. He's so fucking likable, isn't he?

[Ed Zitron]

See, this is how Andre's so successful. It's how he avoids roasts.

[Scott Galloway]

How do you not like this guy?

[Ed Zitron]

I'm not trying to pander to you.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I'm not. I'm just telling you, the thing shows up. The thing showed up at our house yesterday and we have a whole conversation about this cover, whoever made that cover. It's gorgeous.

[Ed Zitron]

Scott, enjoy roasting him. Now read him in.

[Scott Galloway]

Read this wonderful. Read this wonderful, intelligent man in.

[Ed Zitron]

This is our conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Andrew, good to have you on the show.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

It's great to be here. I'm ready for the roast. I'm ready for the roast.

[Ed Zitron]

I can't wait, too. But I'm going to start off because we want to get into your book here, 1929, which I'm actually holding right here. Go Buy it now, currently number two on the bestseller list. It is outlining what happened in 1929, the stock market crash, which led to the Great Depression. Let's just start with the basics here, Andrew. What did happen in 1929?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, I mean, you probably have to go back even before 1929 to get fully there. But, you know, the 1920s, people talk about the go go twenties and this sort of remarkable period. It was probably one of the most transformational generations of our time from a technological perspective. Automobiles, telecommunications, radio. And the other magic ingredient was credit. The opportunity for people to get loans to go buy stuff. And originally it started with buying cars and appliances from, you know, all sorts of different stores and things like that. And then Wall street caught on and started offering people loans so you could go buy stock. And that was really what changed everything in terms of how stock trading in America became almost like a national pastime. So you had a market that just Sort of roared in the craziest way. From 19, beginning of 1928 to September 1929, it was up 90%. And this was like free money for most people. And then of course, the crash happens. And it wasn't just that the market crashed. It's that everybody was so levered that they were literally selling their homes, mortgaging their houses. And that's what really took the confidence, almost generationally scarring a whole group of people and was the first domino in a series of dominoes that then led to the Great Depression. And it wasn't preordained. There was a lot of things that happened in Washington. And I think when you get into the story of who these people were and what they were doing and their motives and their incentives, everything else, you can really see how those dominoes fell.

[Ed Zitron]

There have been a lot of stock market crashes throughout history, throughout American history. Why did you choose this one? Why was this one? Why was 1929 in particular so significant?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

So many people would come up to me after I wrote Too Big to Fail and say, well, how does 2008 financial crisis compare to 1929? The truth is, I didn't know. I'd read a lot about the period, but I'd never gotten inside the story, the characters, who they were. And I loved books like Barbarians at the Gate and Den of Thieves and, you know, books that Erik Larson had written where you felt like you were in the room with these people. And I thought, could I go do that?

[Scott Galloway]

Well, one of the things I really appreciate about the book is that you bring some of the characters that we don't hear about or aren't on the tip of our tongues to life. Talk to us about your favorite one or two characters that you researched. And if there's sort of a modern day analog.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Oh, goodness. So my two favorite characters, the reason I think I wrote this book and the reason, I think the moment I knew I could even write the book was when I really got to understand a guy named Charles Mitchell. They called him Sunshine Charlie. And Charles Mitchell ran a bank called National City becomes Citigroup, by the way, lives, if you know, New York City lives in what is now the French Consulate on Fifth Avenue between 74th and 75th Street. That was his home. And he was the guy who really created this idea of lending people money to buy stock. He used to say that stock should be sold the way neckties are sold, that there shouldn't be mystery around stock. He believed in this idea of democratizing finance. That was a big theme for him, in terms of what he thought would power America, getting the masses, the ordinary investor involved in the capitalistic system. Charlie Mitchell in his time was like the Jamie Dimon of his time. He was on the COVID of magazines. This was really the first time CEOs of big banks were showing up on the COVID of magazines. I mean, before this was Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh and, you know, actors and actresses. All of a sudden these bankers are on the COVID of magazines as, like, cover stars. And so maybe he was like Jamie. I think in some ways he might have been a little bit like Michael Milken, actually, in terms of what he ultimately did, in terms of the credit piece of it. And then on the other end of the story is a guy named Carter Glass, who I think a lot more people know because they know about Glass, Steagall. This is the bill that broke up the banks in 1933. Carter Glass was like Elizabeth Warren. He was the Elizabeth Warren of his time. He was actually from the South. He was a senator in Virginia. And he was really, frankly, he was a racist Elizabeth Warren. And he was screaming from the rooftops about this thing called Mitchellism. And. And how we believe that Charlie Mitchell and Wall street were gonna upend America because of this sort of rampant speculation. And that needed to be tamped down. And I think once I understood that there was this fight, this battle between these two powerful individuals, I thought, okay, from a character story perspective, that can really be the driving spine of how this goes.

[Scott Galloway]

I mean, some of the things that people may not know that I didn't know until I read your book was the 1929 or the, you know, the Great Depression or the crash. It wasn't as much as a. Of a crash as it was a slow bleed. Right. It kind of played out over three years. It wasn't like Black Friday or one day. At one point, they thought it was done and over, but it just kept hemorrhaging. And by the time we were In, I think, 32, the market had lost 90% of its value. But it was like. It was kind of a slow moving train wreck, right?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

It was such a slow moving train wreck. I mean, I think a lot of people have this impression that there was like one great crash. People talk about, like, Black Thursday. Sometimes people talk about Black Tuesday. Well, guess what? There was a Black. There was a Black Thursday. There was a Black Monday. There was a Black Tuesday, interestingly, at the end. So From October to November 13th of 1929, stock market was down about 49%. But by the end of 1929, the stock market was only down 17%. In fact, the New York Times used to keep a list of the most important stories of the year that they published at the end of the year. The crash was not on it. So it had this psychologically scarring effect on some Americans who had basically been just taken out because they had borrowed so much money and, by the way, couldn't benefit when the stocks recovered at all because they were basically on margin to begin with. And then as 1930, 31, 32 go by, there's just a number, as I said, of sort of policy errors. The tariffs, by the way, smoot, Hawley Tariffs, 1930, that created a problem for the country. The Fed, as we mentioned, didn't really do much of anything for the most part. And by the way, you also had Andrew Mellon, who was the treasury secretary at the time working for Hoover, saying that he was a true capitalist. His view was, you make money great, you lose money great, didn't care. And so they almost were not really looking at the problem. They almost, Hoover used to talk about as a psychological problem and that the stock market was divorced from the real economy. But by the time you get to 1932, as you said, the market was down 90%. You had unemployment in this country of 25%. Think about that, 25% of unemployed people. And then all of a sudden, you had about 9,000 banks effectively fail.

[Scott Galloway]

After researching this crash, are you more or less confident that we're on the precipice? So we know the correction is coming, but we don't know if it'll be a soft correction or when it's coming. Are you more or less confident that there will be something resembling, if not a crash, a significant destruction in value in the markets?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

So I'm more convinced that there'll be a destruction of value in the markets, but probably more akin to something like 1999 than 1929. Because the other thing to remember is back in 1929, there was no SEC, there were no bank capital requirements. There was no bank act, There was nothing. Insider trading, the ability to truly manipulate things was what happened every single day. I like to believe that we've learned from that moment and so that if we do have another crash, if you will, that it is not as deep and not as sustained. What I think I don't know about today is I think it's harder to fully understand where all the leverage is today than we used to know. After 2008, so much of the loan market in this country moved to private credit. We don't really know all the disclosures about that. Some of that's connected into the insurance industry now. So there's a lot of sort of questions that I have. And I also think this AI boom, which is sort of the euphoria, I mean, back then RCA was the Nvidia of its day. Now it's Nvidia. How much of that whole boom is being powered by leverage. So not to say that you look at Meta and Google and all the big tech companies are obviously throwing a lot of their own cash at this problem, but also they're taking on some debt, but they're also now partnering with all sorts of private credit funds and doing all sorts of other things. And we're not just talking about the data centers themselves, we're talking about the energy companies that are providing electricity and the construction and real estate. There's all sorts of other component parts of this ecosystem that are being powered by leverage.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And if OpenAI is going to spend a trillion dollars over the next five years and they need 900 billion to come up with, they can only borrow. That's one of the things we've been talking about on the podcast.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, you guys have been talking about all these circular deals, right? These sort of round trip transactions. That's just another sign to me of a sort of euphoric moment where there's not really an roi, there's sort of a religion about where this is all headed directionally. And by the way, they're probably right directionally about where our whole world is headed. Kind of like the Internet. But some of the spending is indiscriminate.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. It feels as though we're going to enter the leverage phase where we're on the precipice of that phase. Just when you look through the circumstances of the time 1929, and you really paint this picture in the book, you know, this is coming off of an incredibly prosperous time. Post industrial Gilded Age. All of these wealthy billionaires who, as you say, are not just rich people, but influencers, they're now on the covers of magazines, they're on Forbes and Time. You also talk about the tariffs, the fact that tariffs were an important issue that were being debated. There's this tension between the relationship with Wall street and also Washington and the amount of influence that could be bought by people on Wall street in Washington. People beginning to talk about that. What is so striking about the book, and I think is so resonant for so many people, is the extent to which it is a Mirror of Today. I mean, all of the characters, all of the conversations, you can pretty much draw a direct link to what is happening in America right now. I'd love for you to just say a little bit more about that, how it was such a similar time and all of the connections that you feel you made when writing this book.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I try not to be prescriptive in the book because when I started this book, I thought I was really just trying to write a story about a particular moment in time. And as I was writing it, and obviously all of these things are happening in the news that we're reporting on every day and we're reading about in the pages of the papers and talking about on TV and on your podcast and everything else. It started, you know, there were these, like, alarm bells going off. Oh, my goodness. This is parallel to this, and this is parallel to that. So I just want to sort of say up front that wasn't. It wasn't the goal. The fact that the book is coming out now is. It's only a function of the fact that I finally finished the book, much to my. Most of my family's delight, frankly, because.

[Ed Zitron]

They were eight years. Right.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I went into it thinking I could pull it off in maybe two or three years. And of course, then it dragged on. But it was a labor of love. You know, you talk about different characters being so similar. There's a guy named John Rascob who I actually think may be the most interesting person in the book. He is the Elon Musk of his era. He was sort of a philosopher king. One of the. Would have been if there was. If there was a Forbes list back then, he would have been on it. He ran General Motors, was the one who actually decided to start lending people money to buy cars. That's actually what, by the way, changed the way people even thought about credit for the first time. So it was a moral sin in this country, in large part prior to that, to even take on a loan of any sort. And. And he sort of made that available to the masses, then tried to create a mutual fund that would have been levered effectively. So he used to say, everyone ought to be rich. He built what was then the SpaceX of its time in the Empire State Building. He was the single individual behind that. At one point. He, by the way, gets into politics. He actually had been a Republican, switches to be a Democrat, in this case to try to take on Hoover. Working with Al Smith. Loses, by the way, then spends a lot of his money paying off journalists and, you know, if he owned Twitter, oh, my goodness. You know, really trying to undermine the reputation of Hoover secretly for years. In fact, I would argue Hoover's reputation even to this day was damaged by this guy, John Raskob. And then John Rascob very cleverly came up with an idea that actually, I would argue, changed America in the large way, which is today we work only five days a week. Back then, we worked six days a week. The stock market was open on Saturdays. And he had this idea that she wrote about in November of 1929, that, you know what? We should have a five day workweek because. Not because he wanted to be nice to people, because he thought that if you actually had an extra day during the weekend, it would create a bigger consumer economy. More people would have to buy cars, they'd have places to go, they'd buy gardening equipment and everything else. So again, you sort of see these people in this sort of parallel, like, universe.

[Ed Zitron]

And yet the opening quote or the epigraph in the book, which I think is so good, is this quote from Albert Einstein. He said this in 1929, three days before black Tuesday. He said, quote, the ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and a teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. Each must learn its lesson anew. And I think that is kind of the crucial point here, which is you are describing a situation that looks very similar to what is happening today. We know what happened in the aftermath. We know that there was a stock market crash that led to a period of depression. But you also open the book by saying, you know, we have to learn our lessons ourselves.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

We do. And by the way, let me just say here we are being very depressed. It's very depressing to think, oh, everything's going to go off a cliff. The truth is that over time, the market goes up. A lot of people, by the way, since this book came out, they said, oh, Andrew, you're calling for a crash. It's all going to end terribly. What are you saying? And the truth is that you could have all the Cassandras in the room, you know, saying, the sky's gonna fall, but over time, things have gone up. And I do think that's worth noting because being a professional optimist has been a better business than being a professional skeptic. Again, over time, that's not to say, you know, if you need the money in the moment of crisis or panic, you have A problem. But if you can, if you. If you don't, things will get better. And one other piece that I've grappled with a lot actually writing this book, I've actually come to the conclusion that actually speculation in some way built America. We all think that speculation is this dirty word. But whoever did bet on Elon Musk when he was doing Tesla, and it seemed like an absurd idea that was a speculation unto itself. And so much of the generational change, technologically and otherwise, came from speculators. Now, the problem with speculation is you're trying to thread some kind of crazy needle, which is you want some semblance of speculation in the system, but you don't want it to go overboard. And that is the million trillion dollar question. How do you do that?

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, as someone who studied that time, what lessons can we learn such that when or if. But I think we probably all agree when the stock market corrects, it's not as painful and as destructive as it was back then.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, the first piece is what do you do on the front end to try to avoid a crash? And that might be, by the way, raising interest rates if you're the Federal Reserve, even in the face of some of these other issues around employment and the like. When you look at an AI boom that's taking place in our country today, I mean, right now the problem is we, or the challenge I would argue is we have such an imbalance in our economy. I don't know if you guys read. Jason Furman at Harvard just wrote this paper. If you literally take out all of the money that's been funneled into sort of the data center build out in America, you would have basically flat GDP in our country, you know, maybe up 0.1% or something like that. I think he concluded. So that's a very complicated scenario. How do you cut off what seems like a speculative sort of fury, and you want that innovation, but you also, now, especially because of the concentration, you don't want to sort of tip over the rest of it. So I think part of it is what do you do on the front end and then on the back end, what do you do which is. And the answer typically is you flood the system with money. As politically unpopular as that is, that's going to become increasingly more complicated because of our fiscal imbalances, which is to say back in 1929, for better or worse, we had a budget surplus. This country hardly had any debt. The more you start to flood the system with money now, you create all sorts of other new problems for yourself because at some point, bondholders in U.S. treasuries are going to raise their hand and say, you know what? We don't really like this that much. We're happy to lend you money, but you're going to have to pay us a lot more for that risk.

[Ed Zitron]

We'll be right back after the break. If you liked what you heard, hit follow and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

If it seems like AI is touching just about every part of your life these days, you aren't imagining things. It's all up in your streaming services. It's all up in your job search, and now it's even in your doctor's office. It can perform exceptionally well, kind of almost in a superhuman way on these specific, very challenging, complex clinical cases. This this week on Explain it to Me When AI meets medicine. And I think it can be potentially revolutionary and transformative people if they use it in the right way and when it doesn't compute. One in five around 20% of Americans said that they had turned to a chatbot for advice that later turned out to be incorrect. New Episodes Sundays. Wherever you get your podcasts, Scott we're hitting the road, bringing Pivot live to the people. Seven cities. Toronto, Boston, New York, D.C. chicago, San Francisco and LA.

[Scott Galloway]

Of course, you went to Oasis, you went to Beyonce, you saw the remake of wizard of Oz and the Sphere. All those suck compared to the Pivot Tour. This is, this is the biggest tour. Same people that are organizing our tour, that organized Taylor Swift's tour, they are much more excited about our tour.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

All right, that's enough, grandpa. It's going to be so good. And we're bringing our brand of whatever we do to the people. And we're excited to meet our fans. We love our fans. For Tickets, head to pivot tour.com See you there.

[Marina Larude]

This week on Net Worth and Chill, we're joined by Marina Larude, the powerhouse founder and CCO of LaRude, the luxury footwear brand that's redefining accessible luxury. From conceiving the idea during an RV road trip with her husband to winning the FNAA 2024 Brand of the Year award. Marina's journey from Teen Vogue fashion director to building her own empire is nothing short of inspiring. Marina gets candid about the money mindset shift from executive to entrepreneur, how she's scaling internationally while maintaining her values, and what it really takes to compete with footwear giants. When you're bootstrapping your way to the top, get ready for an unfiltered conversation about wealth building, taking calculated risks risks and turning your corporate expertise into entrepreneurial gold. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF.

[Ed Zitron]

We'Re back with Profgy Markets.

[Scott Galloway]

The way this reminded me a little bit of your book Too Big to Fail is you're very good at putting people in the room. There's a couple meetings or scenarios in both books where you feel like you're literally in the room. And what I would ask you to do is put us. If someone said put me in the room in October of 2025, you see the markets every day. You're literally someone who's taken the blood pressure and taking in the pulse of the markets every day. You see it and you've been doing this a while. If you tried to remove yourself from this age and objectively look at what's going on and you wanted to put someone in the room, the markets today, how would you describe it?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Okay, so if I could write about today, what I would want to do is try to recreate the scenes where Sam Altman is putting together the transaction. Not with Jensen Huang, but actually maybe with Lisa Su, who runs amd, because you would see both of them either on a phone call or probably on a zoom, maybe in a room together. I don't know the specifics of how it all happen, but I think you get to see the conversation. You get to understand the motivations that Sam desperately wants this build out, feels like he really needs to buy all this compute. You have Lisa Su at AMD desperate to get into this sort of chip game, which she's losing to Nvidia. And so her motivations are, I need to get into this. How are they going to make a deal? In this case, they create this sort of odd circular transaction where OpenAI gets warrants in AMD knowing that if they announce this deal, likely I'd love to see that conversation. We think that the warrants are going to be worth a lot more because of this connection between the two. And then that's going to create value which OpenAI can use effectively as cash at some point to pay for the chips that it otherwise couldn't afford to buy. I would want to see that conversation and then I would want to see some conversation after it where, you know, Sam is briefing, you know, President Trump and Scott Bessant on it, and then maybe the breakfast that Scott Bessant has with, you know, Powell, you know, once a week they have lunch together or breakfast together. So, yeah, I would be Trying to tell those stories as a way of sort of bringing you inside of today's economy and trying to understand how much anxiety all of these individuals really have or don't have in these moments.

[Scott Galloway]

Those circular deals. That would be an interesting room. I'm curious, and obviously my political leanings are going to come out here. I'd love to be in the room where he's basically saying to Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman or give me 100 million bucks and I will pass AI legislation that lets you molest every piece of IP out there. It strikes me that this age, and I'm putting forward a thesis that what will mark this age economically is this orgy of corruption and flat out grift. Your thoughts, Andrew?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Look, I think that there unfortunately is a lot of grift in this moment. And by the way, maybe that grift will ultimately look like the kind of grift that we had in 1929, but just in a different form. Right. I think that's, that's possible.

[Scott Galloway]

Was it on this scale or was it worse? And I asked that sincerely, was it on the same level as this or worse, better?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, so in the stock market itself back then, you literally had all sorts of like demonstrable insider trading and manipulation going on, where literally the specialist on the floor was oftentimes organizing what was called an operation, a pool operation, where they effectively, almost like actors were. You know, one person would say, I'm up for, you know, I'm buying a 120 and then 140. But they all knew exactly. They were all in it together. That is happening today in crypto, that's happening in the meme stock arena. I told a story on 60 Minutes about this, and it was such a wild situation for me personally. Back in January, somebody created something called a Sorkin coin. I happen to be on TV with Larry Fink, and he mentioned that he joked there should be a Sorkin coin. Somebody actually created one all of a sudden, millions of dollars of trading. And I kept getting invited into these telegram accounts, sort of chat rooms and signal chat rooms, and they're all talking about how they're actually going to manipulate the coin and press it up. And they all were trying to. They wanted me to be involved in it because they were trying to. They thought if I endorsed it, it would go, go up. In fact, one of them reached out to one of my sons online on social media, found him and was offering him, I think, 50 or $100,000 worth of sorkin coin to Try to get him to somehow, I don't know, do something. And I had to call my son and say, look, you cannot talk to these people. I beg you. We're all going to go to jail and be arrested. You cannot. Please do not reply. And of course, my son said to me, dad, I'm leaving a lot of money on the table.

[Ed Zitron]

That's what Eric Trump probably said, too.

[Scott Galloway]

I think of you as being like, if I was asked to have five people to sort of embody New York to me in different angles of it, different complexions of it, you would be one of those people. I just think of you as the consummate New Yorker. Talk to me about Cuomo versus Mamdani. I'd love to just give. Looking at it through the lens of the markets, I know you talk to and are. You're. You're both young enough to, I think, understand the appeal of Mom Dhame. But also you talk, you speak to every day to some people, some market players who are very. Seem vehemently opposed to him. What do you think this says about the moment and says about the moment in New York?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Oh, goodness. Look, I think what it really says about the moment is that the Democratic Party has struggled to find the best possible candidates to actually put up on the board. I mean, I think that's, that's why this is. To the degree that people are questioning, how did this happen? Obviously, Mandami felt like came out of nowhere. Cuomo is a. It's complicated for people to support him for lots of reasons. And I think, you know, a lot of those reasons, I don't even have to spell them out. And I think it's very complicated for a lot of other people to support Mondami in part because he, he is, he's not a democratic socialist. He actually is a socialist. If you go and listen to what he talks about. I mean, he is, he does demonstrably talk about seizing the means of production. Like, he says that out loud. He has said that. And so I think that those sort of the idea of a city that's built on capitalism being run by somebody who demonstrably does not believe in it, and not just doesn't believe in it, but wants to fundamentally change it is a fascinating development in our city. I think the bigger questions, though, that are animating the likes of some of the hedge fund managers and some of the most outspoken Wall Streeters that you hear actually have nothing to do, oddly enough, with free buses and free groceries. I don't think that's what this is about. I think that this is actually about something very different. I think this is about policing and safety in the city and whether he is going to not just keep, you know, Commissioner Tisch in charge, but, you know, how he's going to reallocate resources around policing in this city. And I think we have lived in this city and had lots of problems over the last five years. The pandemic really exacerbated it. We also had a lot of laws change that made, you know, common thievery, you know, something that doesn't even get prosecuted in large part. So I think there's a big question about that. I think it starts with. With that. I think there's this. This question about anti Semitism, to be honest with you, is a real question. I think that's like a real legit question that people. I'm Jewish. That people have in this city, about what does he actually believe, and how is that going to manifest itself over the next couple of years in the city? And then, I think. I know people talk about taxes, and people think he's not going to be able to raise the tax thing, I think is almost a red herring to sort of just a larger question about can he manage the city? I think that's actually another big piece of this, which is to say he's a young man, he's 33. A lot of people are super excited about him as a politician and what he's. What he represents and speaks to in terms of the big ideas around affordability and the like. But when it comes to actually the. The practical day. To day of actually, like, managing a city when it's pretty clear that he's never done anything like that, and to the extent that he's managed things in this role as an assemblyman, that he wasn't even, like, doing the job half the time, I think a lot of people look at that, that are in the business of Wall Street. I'm here at the Nasdaq today. I think those are the issues they're thinking about.

[Scott Galloway]

The mayoral race is an executive or operational position, and it's about making sure the MTA works and that there's policing. So to a certain extent, his views on Israel are. I don't want to say they're not important, but I feel like we have bigger fish to fry in terms of where we expend our political capital. And I think it's just as. It's going to be hard for him to raise taxes because the logistics of the. Of having to get the governor and the State legislature on board, you know, his views on Israel or on Jews. I see why it's meaningful, but I don't think it's profound here. And I think. I do think there's been some Islamophobia, by the way.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I think that's probably true because the.

[Scott Galloway]

Cuomo campaign gets desperate. You know, they running ads and. Or affiliated parties running ads of the, you know, the plane slamming into the Twin Towers. I just think that's. That shit's ugly, you know? I mean this sincerely, Andrew. I'd love to see you run for office, but it feels very. It feels like more of a statement on our politics that you kind of think, wait, this is the best we can do?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Well, that's the saddest part. Nobody wants to take these jobs. I mean, that's the thing. And I don't know how we change that. By the way, that's not just a New York. New York City mayoral problem. That's a problem around the country. Nobody wants. With very few exceptions. I don't want to say nobody wants these jobs, but I don't know what would it take for us to get you, Scott, to run for something?

[Scott Galloway]

If I was your age, I would do it, Andrew. It's just that I'm barreling towards death and I want to go to Ibiza and hang out with my friends. And I would absolutely do it because I'm a narcissist and I'm wealthy, which are the two primary qualifications to run for office. But, no, I think a guy your age. I'm hoping Ed. Someday decides to get involved in public service.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Ed, you want to run? You want to get dragged through the mud? Ed, you don't want to get dragged through the mud every day and have people on TikTok saying this crazy stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

I want to make the money first.

[Scott Galloway]

But you're right. Your point is, unless we start. Stop these on the left purity tests, and unless on the right, they stop being, in my opinion, just so fucking crazy and coarse and cruel, who the hell's going. Who with any options and has a nice life and isn't a total megalomaniac is going to want to do this shit?

[Ed Zitron]

Andrew, you speak a lot with the business world. You have kind of like a direct line of communication with all of the top executives, the people on Wall street, the business community at large. And it's interesting to hear that there are concerns in New York, specifically with Mamdani, about the policing in general, but socialism at large. You know, you mentioned the strangeness of the capital of capitalism being run by a socialist. However, at the same time, this is spreading across the nation. Actually, you've got 46% of Americans saying they don't support capitalism or they have a problem with capitalism. You've got support for socialism at an all time high in America. So, yes, it's strange, but it's actually increasingly not strange the extent to which socialism is being embraced by people and people are losing faith in the capitalist system, which to me is gonna be kind of the great referendum of our time. Do we like capitalism? Do we like the system that we've inherited, or do we not? I would love to get your sense of what the business community thinks about this question. And also, if they are concerned and also taking it seriously, do they think that this is a real problem?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

So I think they're concerned. I don't think they're taking it seriously, though. I'm not sure what it would take to take it seriously, meaning what they would be doing and what's so unique, by the way, in this city in particular, I recognize the polls suggest otherwise in terms of just the view about socialism. If you ask most, at least the experience that I've had of, and this is anecdotal, people who are voting for Mamdani, they say, well, he's not really a socialist. They'll say, actually, no, he's not a socialist, he's a democratic socialist. That's a very different thing. So I don't think they actually think that their way of life is going to fundamentally change in part because they don't think he can actually change it, given the roles, responsibilities and powers that a mayor has. But I do think there is this larger question about capitalism versus socialism in the same way that I think there's this question, I think this actually came out of 2008 and the financial crisis, a complete and utter rethinking of about experts, expertise, institutions. All of that sort of was put up in the air as a question. And by the way, I think that's almost a straight line to President Trump winning in 2016. I think those questions were raised again, by the way, in the context of the pandemic. And so it's one thing to scream from the rooftop and say, guys, look at history. Capitalism is the thing that actually works. Socialism is the thing that actually doesn't work because they look at you and they say, I don't believe you, or I don't care, because I'm trying to find, you know, I believe in my own truth.

[Ed Zitron]

We'll be right back. And for even More Markets content. Sign up for our [e-mail] subscribe we're back with Prof. G Markets. This has been fascinating, but I want to hear more about the book, specifically your process. One of the things I admire about you is the fact that you do everything. It's kind of insane. I mean, you're the anchor on CNBC. You started DealBook at the New York Times, you're writing for DealBook, you're doing all of these different things. You're writing books, by the way, not to mention the shows. The fact that you wrote and produced billions. What was your process? I know that you went to the libraries and you were filing through all these documents. Tell us about what it took to actually write this book while juggling an extremely demanding career.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

So the truth is, I did think I was going to be able to do this in two or three years. Obviously, I couldn't do that. And part of it was I did have, you know, these other responsibilities that I needed to make sure that I was attending to every single day. I would do this on weekends, I would do it on nights. I would do it in between things. You know, for the first couple years, I was researching like crazy, just trying to find lots of different material that actually, there were some stumbling blocks along the way. Then, by the way, the pandemic happened. And actually, at one point, I thought the pandemic might go on for a very long time. I didn't even know what I was going to do. You couldn't even get inside some of these libraries around the country. I actually almost created, like, a black market. I would call up our we I, along with a researcher that I was working with at the time, we would call up archivists, ask them what students were allowed in libraries. Because certain students who had, like, a dissertation due or a thesis due were allowed in. And I would pay those students. I'd find them and pay them to go through boxes for me. So I'd say, box 152. I need you to actually, with your iPhone, take a picture of every single page and send it to me. Now, in the end, I went back to actually most of those libraries afterwards because I did feel the sort of tactileness of seeing it, but it was really like a mystery. It was like putting a puzzle together in a way of trying to find all the material and also to think through these different characters to figure out what were their motivations and what was the chip on the shoulder. What was the hole that these people were trying to fill? Because I always think. And you guys actually talk about this. I think what drives a lot of people, especially at the top up, is some semblance of insecurity, actually. And so trying to understand what that insecurity even is, so that when you actually see them making decisions, even when you think the decisions are completely irrational or make no sense or the wrong decisions or immoral, you say to yourself, ah, but I remember reading earlier in the book about what was happening with this guy as a kid or as a this or that, and all of a sudden, it makes it at least relatable or understandable so you can appreciate why these things are happening.

[Ed Zitron]

Why are you so industrious? This is kind of a broad question.

[Scott Galloway]

Why are you so ambitious?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. No, seriously, because I have a hole.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

That I'm trying to fill.

[Ed Zitron]

Fair enough. But can you. I would like to hear, like, just going inside the mind of Andrew Russorkin. You are this superstar, and you're reaching out to. I mean, imagine being a college student, you get a DM from Andrew Ross Sorkin asking for a photo. I mean, what drives you?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I was driven to write this book because of my own curiosity about the topic. But, you know, I think part of it was, could I do it? Like, I honestly think part of this. I think actually a lot of the things that I do is like, trying to prove to myself that I'm capable. Like, could I pull it off? When I wrote Too Big to fail in 2008 and 9, it was like lightning in a bottle. And I think if you know me well enough, you know that I sort of have thought for a long time like, that maybe that was just, like a lucky thing. And, I don't know, maybe I got the timing right and the this and the that. And so I think to some degree, I think for me, I'm always trying to push myself to see, well, could I do it again? Was it luck? Was it not luck? I think I probably have the same insecurities, frankly, that a lot of I think most people have to some degree. And so I think. I hate to say it, but I think that that probably drives me more than it should.

[Ed Zitron]

I think what we've learned about you as well is that you are an incredibly good storyteller. I mean, for those who read the book, it's kind of. I said it should be a movie because it's kind of insane how much it feels like you are watching a movie. I mean, the same could be said about, like, Harry Potter as an example. You read the page and it's like, you can see everything that's happening in front of you. And so what. That is really the remarkable thing about this book. I just would love to hear. You know, we want to tell great stories on this show. It's an incredible skill. We think it's one of the most important skills in the age of AI. What is your advice for how to tell a great story, and how did you get so good at storytelling?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Thank you. I don't know if I'm a great storyteller. I think I love the story of people more than anything else. I mean, it's interesting because people have written about 1929 and have done very well writing about 1929, but they typically write it in the context of economics and cycles and systems. And I'm fascinated by people because I ultimately believe people make decisions, good and bad, that ultimately impact and create those economic cycles and systems. And so I'm always looking to tell the story through those people. And I feel like that's the most relatable way. And frankly, for me, the way I even understand the world. You know, I'm not trying to be humble or something by saying, I'm not that smart. I'm not that smart. Sometimes I hear people talking about things in these sort of very. To me, it's very confusing. I actually don't understand what they're talking about when they talk about certain things. But when you tell me the story through a person and the way they were feeling and then why they were doing what they're doing, and then connect it to the economic cycles and systems and all those things, then for some reason, I get it. And so I find myself writing that way.

[Ed Zitron]

I think that's the way we try to talk about markets on this show, too, which I think there's a void in the market, which is like, it's all people running society. So if you understand the people, then you'll start to understand why things are happening and the reason that things unfolded the way they did. What is very interesting and a little bit crazy to me about this book is you're describing people who are not alive, who you've never met before. And I assume you had to kind of fill in the blanks. How did you. You get to know all of the characters in 1929, considering the fact that you don't know them.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I mean, this was literally reading the diaries, reading the letters, reading the transcripts, reading the memos, reading all sorts of materials, reading what their friends were saying about them in those moments. Some of the material I found wasn't just in the moment. It might have been from 10, 20, 30 years, even later. You know, I found materials that some of their kids had written about some of the characters. And so, again, I think I was just trying to figure out who they were. And I think I try to put myself in their shoes. I mean, I think I try to do this today with people who are alive. I try to think to myself, well, if I was so and so, even when I disagree with them, you know, why do they think what they think? And so I think I tried to do that in this context. But everything you read, if you see a quote or an emotion or a. It came from somewhere. There's hundreds of pages of endnotes in this book. So you can actually see where the material came from. It's not that I had to really craft it in my head, though I will say, having covered the crisis of 2008, I think that actually helped me a lot understand sort of the emotional state of humans in those moments and sort of, like, what they do and who they call and what happens in those moments. So I think I was purposely looking for some of those things as I was going through the material.

[Ed Zitron]

Just on that point of getting to know people. I think you're good at it, at figuring out what's going on in their head. I'd like to throw out a few characters, see what you think is going on in their head. Sam Altman, he says, we're gonna spend a trillion dollars. He's cooking up these deals with Lisa Su. He's going to Larry Ellison. Everyone's saying it's a bubble. Everyone. Many people are calling him Scam Altman. What do you think is going through his head right now when he comes out with these deals that a lot of people believe are dangerous, that he's playing with fire. Do you think he recognizes that? Do you think he ignores it and believes that we just have to build AI no matter the cost? What do you think's going on in his head?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I don't want to speak for Sam. I've known Sam for a while, I think, and I've covered a lot of what they done over these past years. I think that he believes in his heart that there's an inevitability to this technology, its emergence, and ultimately to AGI, that he believes that there is a straight line to that and that whether he does it or somebody else does it, that's the end state. And so, as a result, I think he's thinking, I want to be the one who gets There first. And while I do believe he's concerned to some degree about the implications of these things in terms of safety and the like and implications on our society, I think because of that sort of sense of inevitability that he is convinced of, if you believe that too, these other issues oddly, do sort of fall to the, to the wayside.

[Scott Galloway]

If you were going to start a media company from scratch right now, what would it look like?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Maybe some. It would be a combination of what you're doing mixed with what Alex Cooper's doing. No joke. And by the way, I admire what the TVPN guys are doing. I mean, I think it would be, you'd be sort of a combination of sort of podcast meets video, probably meets product and selling certain types of products I think you can do. I mean, what's so interesting to me, this is a much longer conversation, is just how the audience has shifted in terms of what you think the sort of traditional rules should be in the context of most people who are involved in sort of this new podcast realm, you know, are venture capitalists or this or that. And they have all sorts of stakes in different things. And for whatever reason the audience I think, doesn't care. So maybe the world has changed, I don't know. But I think those are some real questions. But I think once you crack that, then I think the whole thing opens up into doing all sorts of interesting things.

[Scott Galloway]

I always ask you this when you're on and I think people, anyone who knows you knows you're a pretty soulful guy. Any thoughts for a guy like Ed who doesn't have kids or a wife yet on your learnings as a dad and a husband?

[Ed Zitron]

Be straight with me.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

I'll be totally straight with you. First of all, and I think Scott said this, I think professionally, when you're young, before you have kids, do everything, do everything you possibly can do. Because I do think one of the great conundrums and challenges of being a dad and being a father and having a professional life is the complication of trying to do both well. And it's hard. And I tell myself all the time, Scott, that if I write this book and they see me working hard on it and they see me care about something, hopefully they're going to care about something. I worry that, that they're going to. There could be a backlash. Interestingly, I'll tell you about my own father. My father was a lawyer and he worked so hard. I mean, he acted like a first year associate till he retired. And I thought to myself, I'm never going to work that hard. This is crazy that he's working this hard. Why is he. He's working on the weekends all the time. What's he doing? This is insane. And yet here I am. And what I realized, I do think is true. I think if you love something, and I'm so blessed to have found something I love, I'm hoping, I'm praying that if they see me love something as much as I do and as much as I love them, not to say that I love them more, I mean, I love them more and I hope they know that. But that they will hopefully be able to find a passion or understand that you could find something that you could love to do that much again. These are all things I tell myself and whether we'll know in 20 or 30 years when I get the bill from the psychiatrist for the kids. So you tell me.

[Ed Zitron]

We're going to be billing you. Any marriage advice?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Find somebody who you could talk to forever. That's the thing for me with my wife. I could talk to her forever. We never get sick of each other. It's the craziest thing. When I first met her, I was actually scared to date her because I felt like I'd known her so long. It was like a weird connection thing. I was like, this feels weird to me. So, yeah, if you can find that, that's a pretty, pretty special thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Andrew Ross Sorkin is a financial columnist for the New York Times and the editor at large of Dealbook. He is also co anchor of Squawkbox, CNBC's signature morning program. His latest book, 1929 Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation. He's available now. Andrew, this was fantastic, as always.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

This was a lot of fun. Thank you, gentlemen. Really appreciate it. You guys do such a great job.

[Scott Galloway]

Thanks. Brother Ed, what'd you think of the Canadian spy? You know that, right? You know he works for the Canadian Intelligence Service? Anyone that nice? He's definitely. He's definitely funneling back trade secrets to Canada.

[Ed Zitron]

There's something wrong. He's too successful, too humble, too kind. Yeah, it's, there's, I. There's something off with him. There's gotta be, right? What'd you think?

[Scott Galloway]

I'm fond of Andrew. I don't know him well, but I know him and I like him and I want him to succeed. And I find that he's actually quite. I think because he has such a powerful seat at cnbc, he's actually. He gives it to you Pretty straight. He's not afraid to push back or. I always enjoy really speaking to him. Also, his books. If you write books, you see how hard they are, and within 10 or 12 pages, you can usually tell if, A, they wrote it and B, if they did the work and Andrew does the work. It doesn't surprise me. That book took him seven or eight years. Like, when he writes a book, he really takes it on. He does a lot of research. He really goes deep. And so his books, kind of, like I said, they put you in the room and they put you in the period, and they put you in that time. A very talented guy. Nice family man. Good friend.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Scott Galloway]

Just kind of one of those guys, kind of has it all. I would love to see Andrew run for office. I think he's very pragmatic, very likable. I think he'd be a great mayor of New York. I think he'd win. And he's got a blend of the kind of empathy and humanity that you want in someone in public service. But at the same time, I think in New York, you have to have someone who understands finance and markets, and he gets those things. Your thoughts?

[Ed Zitron]

I'm struck by the book. I'm struck by his ability to tell a story. I'm struck by his work ethic, as exemplified by the amount of work that he does in all of his different media outlets and the amount of work, the insane amount of work that he had to put in to produce this book. I mean, if you read the book and you read sort of like the prologue about how he did it, it's kind of unbelievable. The thing that I am most impressed by with Andrew, I think, is his humility and his kindness. And I know that sounds kind of mushy and whatever, but I really am. And, you know, when we had him on the show for the first time, I've been a fan of his for a long time, and I reached out to him to get coffee and chat.

[Scott Galloway]

And get a job. Is that what you're telling me?

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Wait, hold on.

[Scott Galloway]

Just by accident, you decided to have coffee with another financial media personnel?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I did.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Yeah.

[Scott Galloway]

You wanted him to mentor you. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Memo to self. Interviewing with competitors. Okay, great. Sorry, go ahead.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, it doesn't matter what I thought. The most important thing, he doesn't need to meet with me. I'm like a pipsqueak compared to him. He doesn't really get much out of it, but he was so willing, so interested, so kind. Met with me for a Long time was very honest about the struggles that he's had in his career, what he thinks he's good at, what he thinks he's not good at. A level of humility coming from a person who is so successful is just always striking. I mean, the way he kind of was telling me, you know, here's what I think I got wrong, by the way. I think this is what a lot of people appreciate about you. But I think my learning from it is I think kindness and generosity is not only a good thing in and of itself, but it also gets you very far. And when you talk to anyone about Andrew Ross Sorkin, when you ask anyone about, you know, what he's like, the kind of man he is, everyone's review, it's a glowing review of how kind he is as a person. And I do believe that it is not all of his success. I think it's a big piece of his success. It's why people want to work with him. People want to have him on their show, people want to represent him. I think he is a really good example of what kindness can do for your career and the way it can actually be quite powerful in terms of your career ambitions.

[Scott Galloway]

I think there is a lesson there, and we've said this a couple times on the show, that there's a cartoon of very successful people, that they're Monty Burns, that in order to be that successful, you have to crawl over people. And I think, unfortunately, that's a common theme among the far left. And I think where the right has gotten right is they celebrate success, whereas I think sometimes on the far left, we're suspicious of it. And what I have found is that exceptionally successful people, generally speaking, over index on kindness, they're generally good people, because one of the keys to success is being put in a room of opportunities when you're not physically in that room. And the way you get there is through kindness and doing things for people where there doesn't appear to be any, you know, expectation of reciprocal benefit. And you just kind of memo to self, I'd really like to do this person a solid someday.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I think. I think there are different ways to do it. I mean, I think you can. You can find examples of very successful assholes, one of which would be Trump, another of which would be Elon Musk. But I think to your point, there. There are several different ways to be successful. And I think there is an image that is being projected that if you want to be rich, if you want to be influential, you to be an asshole. To people. You got to steamroll over people. And that actually is not true. And there are many examples, as you say, of people who actually got to where they are because they formed connections and friendships, they were generous, they did people favors, and it all comes back to them in the form of career karma, let's say.

[Scott Galloway]

Yeah, I also just, I can't help be triggered by whenever you mention Donald Trump and Elon Musk. You also have to define what success is. You're talking about one person.

[Ed Zitron]

It's true, too. Those guys are not happy, sleeps with.

[Scott Galloway]

A loaded gun next to his bed, is radically addicted to ketamine and is in custody fights with two different women over custody of a child that he has not seen. I would not describe that as a success. And Donald Trump's wife wants nothing to do with him. The East Wing used to be where the first used to be the first lady's residence. And they quickly figured out she doesn't need it. Have you, I mean, literally, has anyone heard from the first Lady? She wants nothing to do with her husband, nothing to do with, with him. And he's raising a bunch of Nepo kids who anyways, different.

[Ed Zitron]

Different.

[Scott Galloway]

You're more successful than either of those people, Ed. All right, let's move on.

[Ed Zitron]

Clip it, clip it, clip it. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research team is Dashiell and Isabella K. Kinsel, Kristen o' Donoghue and Mia Silverio. Drew Burrows is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof. G Markets from Prof. G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday.

[Scott Galloway]

In kind.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Reunion. As the world turn.