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Settle In with Andrew Ross Sorkin
Wall Street titans, politicians and a stock market astrologer star in financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book, "1929." In this episode of Settle In, Sorkin talks with Amna Nawaz about what led to the crash, what we can learn from the after...
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- [00:01]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Hey, everybody, it's Jeff and Amna. We've been working on a brand new podcast that we're really excited to share with you.
- [00:06]
Amna Nawaz
It's called Settle In, A series of deep, thoughtful conversations with people we think you should know on the topics shaping our world.
- [00:14]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So settle in with us each week as we dig into the issues on our minds. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or on our website.
- [00:21]
Amna Nawaz
Hi, everyone, it's Amna Nawaz. Welcome to our new PBS podcast called Settle In. This is where we want you to hear longer, more thoughtful conversations with people we think you should know. And our very first episode is with an author. It's with a journalist. It's really with one of the preeminent financial reporters of our time, Andrew Ross Sorkin. He's written a bunch of books, he's won a bunch of awards, and he also hosts the Big Deal Book Summit at the New York Times. Every year he has a new book out now. It's called 1929. It documents what happened leading up to the 1929 crash. It tells all the stories about the men behind those decisions. It also tells a story about one zany astrologer who played a bigger role than. Than you probably think she did. And he also talks about the economy today, parallels to what we're seeing. And we had a great conversation. We also talked about how he speaks about money in his own family, which was fascinating to me. And also what he thinks the going rate should be for the tooth fairy, which was a subject of much debate. But take a listen, settle in, and enjoy my conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin.
- [01:32]
Andrew Ross Sorkin, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [01:36]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Thank you for having me.
- [01:37]
Amna Nawaz
So we're gonna talk a lot about your book, of course. Brand new book, fascinating book. Really, really quick read, which surprises me to say because it is quite involved.
- [01:48]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
That was the hope. That was the hope.
- [01:49]
Amna Nawaz
No. And for someone who's not deeply involved in it, I really, really loved reading it. Cause you tell stories so well throughout the whole thing. But let me just ask you this. Cause you have even said there. So there's been a lot written about the 1929 crash. Right? You're not the first person to tackle this. There's a classic book out there by John Kenneth Galbraith. So what was it about events like 100 years ago that said to you, I want to revisit this and I want to do it in this way?
- [02:14]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Well, so the truth is, to be totally honest with you, I wrote this book Too Big to fail in 2008, about the financial crisis. And after that, people used to ask me about how it compares to 1929 all the time, as if I was some kind of expert. And of course, I didn't really have an answer for them. And then I went on vacation with my wife and it was maybe like a nerdy vacation, at least for me, which is I downloaded a whole bunch of books and brought a bunch with me about 1929, including, by the way, the Galbraith book, which is a great book.
- [02:43]
Amna Nawaz
You're reading this on vacation, by the way.
- [02:45]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
On vacation.
- [02:45]
Amna Nawaz
You are. Must be. You must be really fun to travel with.
- [02:48]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So fun. And that book, by the way, he's an economist. And so most of the books that were written about this period, for the most part, were written either by economists or told in this sort of way about systems and economics and things like that. And the books that I had always loved, and he tried to replicate to some degree in Too Big to Fail, were these character driven narratives where you really got to understand the people and what they were saying and what was motivating them and what they're incentivized by. Because I always thought ultimately the economics and the systems, it's not really about. It's about the people who make the decisions that build those systems, that build those policies, that build all of that. And I read a whole bunch of books and I thought to myself, so, so weird. There's not really that book that takes you inside the room, that sort of tick tock, moment by moment book. And who are these people really? And I happened to go to Harvard University to give a speech one day. I got there early. I never get anywhere early. And I had time to kill. And I was at the Baker Library and I went over to the archivist there, and there was the archives for a guy named Thomas Lamont who ran JP Morgan during that period of time. And I said, could I look through these boxes? Could you get me from like 29 to 33 was sort of, I think, or 32 was what my request was. And I just started paging through these boxes, opening up these boxes, and his secretary happened to keep transcripts of his phone calls between himself and President Hoover and President Roosevelt.
- [04:21]
Amna Nawaz
Oh, wow.
- [04:22]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
And so you could actually see them. You know, he would say this, and then the President would say this, and he. And I thought, oh my goodness, maybe you really could recreate 1929 in that way.
- [04:33]
Amna Nawaz
I mean, the level of detail in the book, it really does. That's what I'm saying it doesn't feel like you're reading an economic history book. It feels like you're watching episodes of the Gilded Age. Quite frankly, it's just like stories about these guys and the lives that they lived and the decisions that they made that had such enormous impact. Tell me more about these men, right? These titans of the.
- [04:57]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
And mostly men. We should say mostly men. Angelina Adams is an astrologer who plays a big role in this book. I shouldn't say a big role, but plays a. There's a couple of cameos that she plays where actually a lot of these guys used to go visit with her to find out what to do in the market, including JP Morgan, the man, which is crazy.
- [05:16]
Amna Nawaz
Like, how was that ever part of the conversation?
- [05:19]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
The fact that she had this office in Carnegie hall and people would literally go visit her and they would listen to what she said, they were paying her extraordinary amounts of money and these were all like big time business leaders trying to. It was astonishing and extraordinary. And in fact, I wish I could have done even more with her in the book. But for the most part, the two big characters I think of in this book, and it's what actually really drove me to finally write it, was a guy named Charlie Mitchell who ran a bank called National Citi, which becomes Citigroup. And he was really responsible for the first time in America to try to loan people money so you could buy stock. They called him Sunshine Charlie. And he always had a smile on his face and he always wanted to sell you something, but he was the person who made buying stock on margin, if you will, accessible. And because of him, brokerages emerged all over the country, mostly in cities, but I mean, they were on the corners of streets the way there's Starbucks on the corners of streets. And you could walk in and you could, if you had a dollar, they would loan you $10. Literally $10. And it was also a time of great technological change. People were very excited about RCA and radio and all these new technologies the way we are probably about AI today. He was in some ways, in terms of. Just to put it in context, he was like the Jamie Dimon of his time in terms of fame. He would be on the COVID of magazines the way Babe Ruth was on the COVID of magazines. This was really a function, a first time function of the 1920s. And on the other side of the story is a guy named Carter Glass, who you may know because there's a bill that was called Glass. Steagall broke up the banks in 1933. Carter Glass was a senator from Virginia, and he was like the Elizabeth Warren of his time. And he would rail about this thing called Mitchellism and Charlie Mitchell and how he believed that Wall street and Charlie Mitchell were going to ruin America and upend the economy because they were loaning out too much money and creating this sort of speculative hype that was going to all come undone. And of course, he was right. And the idea of pitching these two people effectively against each other, when I realized that there was this sort of fascinating almost pitched battle, I thought, okay, there's a story.
- [07:36]
Amna Nawaz
I mean, I want to underscore here what you lay out so well through stories in the book, which was this idea that at the time, that big change of being able to buy stock on credit, that was a huge shift, right? How dramatic was that shift when people were suddenly able to do that?
- [07:52]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
That was a huge shift. And by the way, even a broader shift in America. I mean, up until 1919, taking a loan was considered like a moral sin. It was something that only, you know, the grubby of the grubs would do. It would be like going to a pawn shop. It was really something that was looked.
- [08:12]
Amna Nawaz
Down upon, like, culturally.
- [08:14]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Right, Culturally. Culturally. Just as a. You did not want to be somebody who took on credit. And what happened in 1919 was General Motors decided they needed to sell more cars. And how are they going to sell more cars? They were going to start to loan people money. And somehow people decided that that was acceptable because it was a big purchase. And so if you were going to buy a car and you needed to take the loan from gm, well, then Sears Roebuck clocked what was going on and said, oh, goodness, people are willing to do this. That's interesting. We are now going to actually sell appliances and we will loan you money so that you can buy those appliances again. Some of those are expensive products. And then folks like Charlie Mitchell on Wall street see what's going on and say, ah, we can do this too. And now we are going to democratize finance. That was really the phrase during that period. We're going to take finance away just from the elites and now make it available to everybody by loaning people money so that they can also play in the markets.
- [09:15]
Amna Nawaz
I mean, this idea that it becomes a concerted effort by these titans of Wall street, these leaders like Charlie Mitchell. You write in the book that he said he believes stocks and bonds should be sold, quote, over the counter, just the same way a clerk sells a necktie. I mean, how do they do that? How do they lure so many people to do this, to invest in this way. And why is it attractive to people at the time?
- [09:40]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Well, I think this also was a period of time where it was a real industrialization period. You had a lot of people coming from middle of the country to big cities, and all of a sudden there's an opportunity to play in the market. They're seeing this lottery ticket almost put in front of them. And not just the lottery tickets in front of you, but there are these banks and brokerage houses that are effectively going to lend you money so that you can buy the lottery ticket. And it's really, I think, part of the human condition, which is that people wanted more. Everybody always wants more. And I think people were also watching how successful certain people had become, this sort of elite class had become. And this also speaks to the inequality in the country, that people thought that this was the new American dream. I also think that that was actually psychologically a big shift. I think prior to that period, the American dream was almost think of it more as the Horatio Alger kind of story. I think in the 1920s, it became a get rich fantasy that you too could participate in.
- [10:47]
Amna Nawaz
And this fact that guys like Charlie Mitchell and Lamont were on the covers of magazines, they were really treated like celebrities of their time. Right. Did that help to kind of fuel that culture of you too can be like this?
- [10:59]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Totally. And it's like it is today in that people look at Elon Musk or Sam Altman from OpenAI, or Jamie Dimon who runs JP Morgan, and they look at these people and they are genuine celebrities. They are celebrities the way Babe Ruth was a celebrity, or Charles Lindbergh was a celebrity, or Groucho Marx was a celebrity. These business executives really became.
- [11:24]
Something of great import.
- [11:27]
Amna Nawaz
So there's a democratization of the financial word world going on. But of course, the little guy is always at a bit of a disadvantage. And you outline some of these really shady practices that were engaged in by the bankers. They would form sort of an investment pool, right? Then they would drive up the stock price. They would bring in ordinary investors, and then what?
- [11:48]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So unfortunately, there was no SEC at this time. There were no insider trading laws. There was no disclosures, There was nothing. Just to put some context to this, I mean, somebody asked me the other day when you were doing the research, did you ever get to read like a prospectus for a company? I said, a prospectus? You'd be lucky if there was a leaflet that they'd be handing out on the street to Sell you the stock about.
- [12:10]
Amna Nawaz
And there's literally no transparency in the system, right?
- [12:13]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
No transparency. Zero. Zero. And so one of the things that happened in terms of just the way some of the elite were trying to manipulate the system was they created what was called investment pools. And a couple of very rich, wealthy, typically men, got together sometimes by the way, in their wives names for tax purposes, were effectively putting together a group that was going to run what might be described as a pump and dump scheme, where they would say, you know, you're going to buy at 100, then the next person's going to buy in at 200, then 300, then 400. And at some point we all know the day that we're pulling the rug, meaning we're all going to sell at the same time. But we're hoping that all of the little guys and everybody else who's not part of the scheme, they will buy up on top of us so that we will be the winners and effectively they'll be the losers. Now, what was so interesting about oh, by the way. And they'd pay off journalists in certain cases in the process, trying to get them to write articles saying, this stock's about to go up tomorrow to get people really interested in what was going on. And the other thing that was happening as all of this was going on is some investors knew that there was this investment pool. So it wasn't totally in secret. They would say to themselves, okay, I know that the stock is probably going to go flying for the next two weeks, but you'd have to know when to get in and out before the other guys. So there was sort of like a contest going on, meaning you too could get rich in if you understood that the pool was in operation. So sometimes you'd even read in the papers, there's an investment pool around this stock. And then bup, bup, bup, bup, bup. And in some cases it was almost like actors on a trading floor with their own instructions about what they're supposed to do at any given point. It was shocking.
- [13:56]
Amna Nawaz
I mean, it's so shocking. It's so manipulative, it's so predatory. Just to underscore here, there were no guardrails. I mean, was there ever accountability for these kinds of practices and actions?
- [14:10]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Not really.
- [14:12]
Not really. I mean, the creation of the SEC was one in 1933 or 1934, rather. We broke up the banks in 1933. We can talk about that. There was a bank in the court.
- [14:22]
Amna Nawaz
Well, and Charlie Mitchell was prosecuted years later. Right.
- [14:25]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So years Later. Yeah. So interestingly, years later, Charlie Mitchell was prosecuted. And I don't want to give away the end, but some wild things happen. And let's just say he doesn't go to jail. And most of the people that were involved in things like this did not go to jail at all. The truth is that the thing, and this is, I think, still true of Wall street today, people thought about what they were doing, that the job itself almost was about outwitting the other person. If you really think very sort of deeply about what Wall street and trading is, it's one person has to think they're smarter than the other person because they're buying the stock and somebody's selling the stock. And the person selling the stock has to think that it's going down, and the person buying the stock has to think it's going up. And so there's this contest of wits. That's what it is. And back then, forgetting about the rules, part of it was this view that they could out. It was just a contest of wits who could outwit each other however possible.
- [15:26]
Amna Nawaz
And then ordinary investors, everyday Americans, are just caught in the middle of all this.
- [15:31]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Well, ultimately, that's what happened. And the worst part about it is it wasn't just that the stock market crashed in October. And by the way, I think our perception that the market dropped on one day is clearly wrong. It actually happened over a series of days. And then a whole bunch of other things happened that genuinely led to the Great Depression. But as the stock market was dropping, it wasn't just that you were losing money insofar as the stock went from a Stock went from $50 to $30 or $40, and therefore you lost $10 or $20. The problem was because you had borrowed all that money, you were on the hook. So famously Groucho Marx, who apparently, according to his son, was somebody who actually was very conservative about his money, or at least thought he was, had been spending all of his time at this brokerage in Long island, you know, trading constantly and being told, of course, by the broker, everything's going to be fine. This is all, you know, this is the future. You have to invest in this stuff. Otherwise you're going to be on the losing end of things. Gets a call in late October and says, you got to come down here, you got to pay up your margin loan. And he doesn't have the money. And so what happens? He ends up having to mortgage his home. And so I think there was a generational almost scarring that took place during this period, and, you know, it becomes very dramatic. You know, a whole bunch of people, some of the characters in the book, ultimately kill themselves. There are people who jump out of windows. I don't tell the story in the book, but my grandfather was 11 years old during this period, and his older brother was actually a messenger boy down on Wall Street. And he had taken my grandfather down there in October. He'd actually missed a day of school. And my grandfather watched somebody jump out the window. This is after the crash. And he would always tell us this story because he would always tell us that he would never buy stock. He lived until he was 91 years old and never bought a share of any stock. No stock he kept because of what.
- [17:29]
Amna Nawaz
He lived through and what he was.
- [17:31]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Because what he witnessed. He would say, andrew, the stock market is not for us. It's for these other people. And so he bought bonds. I think he probably kept some cash under his mattress. But I think there was a whole generation of people that were psychologically scarred by this, by this period. No, no doubt.
- [17:49]
Amna Nawaz
I mean, some of the parallels that you've already made between what you document so compellingly in the book and what we're seeing today and what you cover every day as. As a journalist, they're just too clear to ignore that practice of pumping and dumping, for example. I mean, that makes me think of meme coins. Right? And what we've seen over and over again. Is that a fair parallel to draw?
- [18:10]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
I think it's a very fair parallel. I think crypto meme coins in particular are this unique. I don't even know if you call them an asset. I don't know what they are. It's some kind of class of something. And I actually experienced this myself. I don't know if you know this story, because it was a wild thing for me personally.
- [18:28]
Amna Nawaz
I've heard this. But tell me the story.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
So I'm writing this book, and in January, I think I was getting closer to the end of it. And I had gone on tv at one point, Larry Fink, who runs a firm called BlackRock, had made a joke that there should be a Sorkin coin. He says this aloud on television, and two hours later, there's a. Someone created a Sorkin coin. Like a real Sorkin coin that's all of a sudden trading, and all of a sudden it's becoming worth millions of dollars. But the craziest part about the situation was I start getting these text messages and DMs on, you know, X and all of these different sort of Messaging platforms. And this was sort of like the pools of 1929, because I'm getting invited into these groups where they're literally talking about, okay, you're going to put the stock. You're going to buy the meme coin at this. You'll buy sorking coin for this, Then you'll buy Sorking coin for this. And I'm watching this in real time.
- [19:24]
Amna Nawaz
It's like collusion.
- [19:25]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Collusion, yeah. That's exactly what it is. They're manipulating in this. In this thing. At one point, by the way, I have. Now they're 15 years old, but I have two boys. I guess they were 14 at the time. And these. Whoever these people were, they actually found them on social media and said, you know, they were offering them 50,000, $100,000 worth of sorkin coin so that they then could claim that, you know, that the Sorkins were behind the coin. Of course, I had to.
- [19:51]
Amna Nawaz
Your children.
- [19:51]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
To my children, I had to go. Of course. I called one of my sons, Henry, and I said, henry, you cannot talk to these people. Please don't respond to these people. I am begging you, stay away from. I said, we're gonna be in court for the rest of our lives. We're all gonna go to jail. Do not. Do not correspond with these people. And of course, he says, dad, you know, I'm leaving a lot of money on the table.
- [20:16]
Amna Nawaz
And just, like, the tiniest part of you is so proud, but then you're like, no, you can't do this.
- [20:20]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
You cannot do this. You cannot go near this thing today. By the way, I think it's worth, like, nothing. I think it's, like, 20 something.
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Amna Nawaz
It's still out there. Like, it still exists.
- [20:30]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
It still exists. In fact, my son was telling me the other day that it might be coming back marginally, but I don't know what that.
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Amna Nawaz
I like that your sons are tracking it for you. They're like, don't worry, dad. We got this. But in terms of the lessons that we learn from history, right, because there's such a clear parallel here with crypto and meme coins to some of the things we've lived through in the past. The language that you use to. That they were using back then about democratizing access to the markets, we're using that again now, right? There's a lot of talk around how to get more people invested in more private market assets, how to even open up 401ks, like, traditionally very conservative and safe portfolios. How to do more of that. Why haven't we learned the lessons of.
- [21:14]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
The past well, so there's two pieces to this and I want to be fair about it. So the genius act, which was something the Trump administration put together earlier this year, actually allows for venture capital investments and private equity and crypto and other things literally into your 401k. So this is going to open up and genuinely democratize access. So there's two sides to this coin. One side of the coin is that in truth, those people, and typically they were the elites who have had access to the top performing. But I would just say the top performing private equity firms and venture capital firms and those funds have vastly outperformed over the last 20, 30 years. Other people who were just playing, buying the S and P index or other things, and so they have gotten rich. If you had access to shares of Uber when they were private or shares of Facebook when they were private, you made a lot of money. If you bought them in the public markets. Well, actually, by the way, now you would have made a lot of money too, but in a different way. And so there is an argument to be made. I get the argument that the public thinks that they should have the same access that everybody else has. We have this rule in the United States that was actually put in place in 1940 called the accredited Investor rule, which is we only wanted, frankly, wealthy people to be able to take the risk on these very risky investments because the view was you don't want anybody risking their nest egg that they can't afford to lose. So I get the argument, which is that people want. The question is when you get the access, what kind of transparency comes with that? How can you prevent manipulation? How can you make sure that everybody has the same opportunity to get out at the same time? That's going to be a big issue in terms of how some of these new financial instruments have been structured. So I think there's some real questions about how this is all coming about at the same time that we're almost taking some of the guardrails off of the system.
- [23:09]
Amna Nawaz
Yeah, well, tell me more about that because I think 100 years ago was a different world, right. Different regulatory environment. Non existent. Right. Not really any guardrails in place. A number of laws and regulations passed in the wake of 1929. You mentioned the SEC, obviously, the FDIC, the Glass Steagall, which was separating the commercial side from investment banking. Are there enough guardrails in place today, in your view, from what you see every day, to prevent similar kind of crash from taking place, to prevent people from being caught in the crossfire.
- [23:47]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So I'm hopeful that we can't necessarily have a straight up 1929 style crash that leads to a demonstrable Great Depression. I like to believe that having the sec, having insider trading laws, having the Banking act, having some of those other rules in place will keep us from going completely and utterly off a cliff. And that took us, you know, a decade to get back from and created this, as we described, generational scarring.
- [24:14]
Amna Nawaz
Okay.
- [24:15]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Do I think that we could be doing things that could put us into a place that looks a lot like 1999 where we had a dot com bubble that absolutely burst and for years, not a decade, but for a couple of years really did hurt people? I think that's very, very possible. Do I think that these new products that are being sold need more disclosure, need more third party auditing, need more attention on them 100%. And I think that that's always the thing. Anytime there's a new product that's being launched, especially these financial products that people don't always understand and almost are purposely built so that you don't understand them. There are always charlatans, there's always frauds that emerge in these things. That's what happens every single time. And that's what we need to avoid. And, and that's why I think you really need not just the regulations themselves, you also need, in my mind at least, a vigilance, almost a disposition that you want a regulatory agency and just a country that cares about this, that's not all about taking everything away, but about keeping the focus on these things. And I think right now, at least in this version of Washington that we're living in, there's a view we should be making things less transparent.
- [25:29]
Amna Nawaz
What worries you about that approach as a journalist, as someone who covers this?
- [25:34]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
When you're in the journalism business, you are all about transparency. I mean, I think we believe generally that transparency.
- [25:45]
Is more helpful than it is negative to the system. And I just, I'm concerned that when you don't get those, that kind of transparency, the frauds do emerge and the charlatans show up and weird things happen when you don't really know what's happening all the time. And by the way, this is on top of the fact that so much of what's happening in the marketplace today has actually moved out of the public markets, where we have even some transparency, and into these private markets. So so much of what's happening is actually in what's called the shadow banking system. It's behind the scenes already we can't even see what's going on. It's so hard today to figure out where the debt and leverage even is because even since the financial crisis of 2008, it used to be that most loans in America came from banks and the banks were regulated and you could see where they were loaning the money and whether the loans were good or bad. Now, by the way, people did not even though they could see all of this, we still had this crisis, the subprime crisis and everybody could see all of that. And they almost looked away or wore blinders. Now forget about the blinders, you can't even see because so much of the loan portfolio in America is now at private equity firms and it's called private credit and we have no idea what's going on. So those are the things that I am anxious about.
- [27:01]
Amna Nawaz
There's also, there's the transparency issue, which I take your point on. There is also in this moment of where we are in Washington, as you put it, in this administration's view, in this president's view, so sort of a push to deregulate in all other spaces, oh, 100%.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
That's where you ran out of Financial.
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Amna Nawaz
Protection Bureau has gone. I mean, it's not just a matter of the SEC existing, it's also a matter of what the SEC is choosing to prioritize and choosing to enforce. Right. The laws and regulations are only as good as the ones that are actually enforced. Is there something different about this moment in time that, to use your word, makes you more anxious? Not necessarily that we're going to have a 1929 style crash, but that there are other forces at play that could lead to something new and different right now?
- [27:48]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Well, I think without the transparency, it's very hard to know. And that unto itself should worry people. The thing that's been so interesting to me is, you know, here I am a journalist, you could argue professionally I'm a skeptic. I think we all are. But for most people who've been in the stock market over the last hundred years, despite what happened in 1929, despite the dot com bust in 2008, people have made money over that period of time. It's actually been better to be a professional optimist than a professional skeptic.
- [28:22]
For the most part, as long as you didn't need the money in the middle of the crash, for example.
- [28:28]
And so what I don't know is one of the reasons I like to think that we haven't gone off the rails over the last hundred years, completely and utterly off the rails is because there were guardrails. The SEC was focused on these issues. We implemented capital requirement rules after 2008. The Fed wasn't a political animal. I mean, we haven't even talked about that. You know, the Federal Reserve plays a super important role in stabilizing our nation's economy. And one of the things that's very interesting about 1929 is the federal Reserve actually was being impacted by politics at that time. Yeah, it was a new institution. It was born in 1913. And I think these folks were very worried that if they made the wrong decision, it wasn't that they were just going to get hauled in front of Congress. It was that the Federal Reserve could be eliminated entirely because it was so new. Nobody knew it wasn't. You know, it hadn't been around for 100 years.
- [29:24]
Amna Nawaz
And the President at the time didn't believe in government intervention.
- [29:27]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Right. President Hoover, Hoover did not believe in intervention at all. Andrew Mellon, his Treasury Secretary, was a true capitalist who really believed that everybody, you know, should take their own, you know, take their own medicine and, you know, if you had pain, you know, you should just suffer. And that was literally his position. But I say all that because, you know, one of the things that did happen in 2008 was Ben Bernanke was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and he had done his thesis, PhD thesis at Princeton on the Great Depression. And one of the great lessons of that period was you have to flood the system with money in a crisis. They did not do that in 1929 or 30 or 31, because. Partially because of the political pressure. And so you have to be willing to do things that are politically, oftentimes unpalatable, things that are very unpopular. And when you have a Federal Reserve that could be influenced by politics, it becomes very hard to make the politically unpopular decision. And so, you know, to me, it's the confluence of a whole bunch of things happening in Washington right now that concern me, whether it's the transparency, whether it's the sort of spate of new financial products that are emerging in the market without necessarily all the right guardrails. It's, you know, the questions about the independence of the Fed. I think all of those things create a stew of things that we need to focus on. That's not to say we are going off a cliff to 1929 tomorrow. It's just to say that this train is veering in a way that we should be concerned about, and I think we can keep it on the track. But we have to do that through vigilance.
- [31:05]
Amna Nawaz
Vigilance how? I mean, this is the main question people will have when they hear this conversation, right? Which is they watch the headlines as well as you and I do. They've seen a president who's more willing to interfere with some of these bodies, who wants to exert more control over the Fed, for example. They see the deregulation. They're going to read this book, which is a big red flag, sort of like, pay attention to history, everyone. And they're wondering, are we in our own roaring twenties now? Are we just, like, hurtling towards the inevitable?
- [31:34]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
I think we are.
- [31:34]
Amna Nawaz
Should I be hiding money under my mattress?
- [31:38]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
I know that's the hardest part to answer. There's part of me that says, sure, we are probably in some form of the 1920s. I was just, by the way, talking to Paul Tudor Jones, who's a famous trader who's made an enormous amount of money. It's been remarkably successful. And he said to me, we are likely in October of 1999. So not 1929, but October of 1999, okay? The bubble bursts, effectively. The dot com bubble burst.
- [32:09]
12 to 18 months later, however. So you'd say, should you put your money under the mattress? Here's where it becomes complicated. The stock market went up about 40% after October 1999 before it actually burst. And so there's this very interesting question. This goes to trading. This goes to your own psychology, your idea of safety, of risk. Do you want to be able to. You have to get on and off the train and understand when to do that. And that's a very hard thing to do. But if you just sock all your money under the mattress, you also potentially may not participate in some of the gains. And as I said, over the last hundred years, you would have been a benefactor and on the right side of doing that. So there's no good answer.
- [33:03]
Amna Nawaz
To be clear, I do not have money under my mattress. I don't want anyone thinking there's anything on there. So here's the deal. You talk about this. We've talked about this a little before, too. About. Money's kind of like an emotional thing, right? It's deeply embedded in who we are, how we talk about it, how we look at it. Generational to a lot of degrees. You shared your grandfather's own story and how he influenced your views today. This is something. I mean, you are. People have said this about you before. You are one of the leading financial journalists of our time. No one understands These things better than you. So how do you personally, how do you view money? How do you look at it in your world and in your family? How do you talk about it?
- [33:48]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Not well, to be honest with you.
- [33:50]
Amna Nawaz
So I don't know why that makes me feel better.
- [33:54]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
No, it's true. Look, you know, my sister and I talk oftentimes about, you know, should we talk to our parents about, you know, what their circumstances are? I really don't know my own parents circumstances as well as I probably should because it's always been an uncomfortable conversation for the most part. Right.
- [34:13]
I think interestingly, my children talk about money and this is interestingly cultural. I wonder whether it's a demographic. They're more. And maybe it's because they actually see me talking about this stuff on TV or reading the articles.
- [34:29]
They're more in tune with what's going on with money in the country. But again, not personally at all, most of the conversation. I remember when we did have serious inflation on the tooth fairy. I will say that in our family.
- [34:45]
Amna Nawaz
Listen, that struggle is real.
- [34:47]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
I thought a dollar a tooth was a good deal.
- [34:51]
Amna Nawaz
That feels right.
- [34:53]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Okay, I've been told that I am way behind the times. I'm told it's like $5 a tooth for a tooth. I was told that it's $5 a tooth now. And I know. And look, I live in New York City, so maybe I'm in the wrong demographic, but I have even been.
- [35:09]
Amna Nawaz
Maybe it's a New York City thing.
- [35:11]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
I have been told about $10 a tooth recently.
- [35:13]
Amna Nawaz
Absolutely not. Absolutely not for a single child's tooth.
- [35:18]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Andrew, this is my. I'm with you, I'm with you. But I don't know, I don't know who's running in which circle.
- [35:26]
Amna Nawaz
You know, this is where the collusion is actually helpful. You need to get together with the other parents and you all need to have an agreed upon price cap and then no one can break it. That's the only way.
- [35:37]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So these are the conversations we have in our family. I will also say, interestingly, my sons, I think, and I think this is true of a lot of kids now, they are more aware of money and they're more entrepreneurial and you know, they're all looking different ways. They can sell things on TikTok and on Instagram. And so I do think that people are hopefully marginally more financially literate. I mean, I do think there's a financial literacy conundrum in this country. I wish we could teach this at a greater level. You know, when kids are young, so it can become more of the conversation. But I do think there's even like this cultural thing we have to get over, which is that we should just have a much more open dialogue about it.
- [36:18]
Amna Nawaz
Well, aside from conversations you have with your children and aside from Sorkin Coin, there's also, I mean, people want to talk to you. They want to talk to Andrew Ross Sorkin. I was telling you, I was talking to a couple of people who work in the financial industry and I mentioned to them I was talking to you and their eyes lit up like they were so excited to hear what you have to say, to read your book. And people trust you. The guys, the titans of today, Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon and Bob Iger, they show up and they want to talk to you. And I wonder how you look at that, like how you view that responsibility. And also why? Why do you think? Because they could choose not to engage as well. Right. But they do. They show up and they answer questions. Why?
- [37:06]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
It's a great question. I think about that a lot. I don't have a brilliant answer for you. I like to believe.
- [37:15]
I like to believe that it's because of two things. One is I genuinely have a passion for the topic and this world. I care about it deeply. I've spent an enormous amount of time, I spent my entire career covering this world, trying to get to know this world, sort of steeping myself in it in so many different ways. And I hope that that is respected. They don't always agree with what I say about things, but I hope that there's a semblance of respect about it. But I also think it's because I do come to the table with a sense of empathy for whomever is in the seat. Meaning, I don't think. I look at people and this is, I think maybe why I've written these books the way I've written them over the years. You know, it doesn't matter to me what title you have on your business card or how much money you have in the bank. I think one of the greatest lessons for me is actually everybody's seriously human. Like, we are just human. And the title and the money is not emotional armor. It just is not. In fact, it might even be anti armor. And so I think to some degree, I try to.
- [38:30]
Meet people where they are. Not always where I want them to be. Maybe not where the public wants them to be, but to where they are so that I can try to have these conversations to try to understand what's going on inside their brain. Because I do believe that if we can illuminate what's going on inside their head, even when we don't agree with what's happening, even when we really disagree with what they're doing, there can be a better understanding of the entire situation. Things that seem irrational, it's not that they don't. They could still be irrational, but it becomes somewhat rational to understand why they are the way they are or why someone's made the decision that they've made. And it's a little bit like this book, which is, I think, a lot of.
- [39:12]
Histories of things often feel very black and white, and we decide there's a good guy and a bad guy and. But if you can get inside the room and you can actually see what they're saying to each other and what they're thinking in that moment, nothing is black and white. It is always gray. It just is. And I think that that hopefully can bring us in some ways together, frankly.
- [39:35]
Amna Nawaz
If you weren't doing this work, what do you think you'd be doing with your life?
- [39:40]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Somebody told me that I would be a psychologist. I don't know if that's true.
- [39:47]
Someone told me that I would be a venture capitalist.
- [39:51]
And I thought that was actually an interesting thing, because one of the things I think I do love about this work is I do love finding and almost feeling like I'm discovering some early company that's done something at the very beginning a lot of the time. One of the reasons I think I know some of these people and have been able to sort of, like, understand them, is I met Elon Musk, you know, when basically Tesla was beginning. I met Sam Altman before OpenAI had ever started. You know, the guy who runs Airbnb. You know, I think in their first year of creation. So I think when you. Especially when you can try to sort of understand the genesis, the origin story, that's really interesting, and it's fun to try to sort of find those stories in the very beginning.
- [40:44]
Amna Nawaz
So can I ask you about some of these people you've known for so long?
- [40:48]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Yeah, yeah.
- [40:49]
Amna Nawaz
The big actors that you cover now, back then, the way that you write about them in the book, they sort of lived a very cloistered, rarefied air, celebrity life like they were who they were, and we didn't have the same society today. These men are more connected in a lot of different ways. Right. They have a lot of different ways to get their messages out. They're more politically active or involved in some cases, or not, depending on who they are. How do you look at the role that these leaders play in today's society?
- [41:23]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Well, so I'm of the view that post the financial crisis of 2008, every major business leader in America became a politician. Really, they all started making these pilgrimages to Washington. This was long before President Trump was in office. This was when Obama was in office. You would see the big bank CEOs go visit with him. You'd see Warren Buffet would fly from Omaha to see him. And part of that was because there was big questions about what tax policy was going to be in America, whether the Consumer Protection Bureau was going to be put together, whether the Dodd Frank bill was going to be put together. And so all of a sudden, the lobbying, the jockeying for how an industry would ultimately get regulated became a huge part of the business. I think that's now true of the tech giants. So now you're seeing those tech leaders, whether it's Tim Cook or Zuckerberg or Musk or whomever, now spending an extraordinary time, amount of time in Washington to the point where I think Mark Zuckerberg recently bought a home in Washington, D.C. just because I think he's going to be going there as often. Interestingly, by the way, back in 1929, the president of the United States, Hoover and later Roosevelt, had the same kind of relationship with the business community, meaning all of the sort of top business leaders were constantly going to Washington, constantly spending time in the White House to try to influence the president one way or the other.
- [42:49]
Amna Nawaz
So I think it's fair to say most people who read your book are not millionaires or billionaires. Right. They're not following the markets on a molecular level. They're working Monday to Friday. They are taking care of their families. Trying to get the kids taught for practice. Exactly. They're trying to figure out, like, how am I going to get the money and the time to go see this doctor about this pain I've had in my side. Like, everyone's just doing what they need to do to get by, but they want to know how to fill in the gaps. When we talk about the uncertainty ahead and what we don't know. And your book, I think, goes a long way to doing that by looking at lessons from history. So when most people have a chance to look at this and to read your book, what is it that you want them to take away from it in the way of a sense of what's to come or what they should carry from history?
- [43:37]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Look, I think it goes again to the sort of human Condition of More I don't know if you saw the movie Wall Street 2 wasn't as good as the movie Wall Street 1.
- [43:47]
Amna Nawaz
I think I missed that one. Who was in Wall Street 2?
- [43:49]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Shia LaBeouf was. Was the. Was one of the actors with Michael Douglas. But there's a great line in that movie.
- [43:56]
Amna Nawaz
I just want to say I did not expect Shia LaBeouf's name to come up in this conversation.
- [44:00]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
And there's a great line. I think it's either Shia LaBeouf says it to Michael Douglas or Michael Douglas says it back to Shia LaBeouf and he says, what's your number? The question being what's your number? How much money do you need to make, to stop, to be done? And I think a lot of people, by the way, in their mind, think that they have a number, right? If you could just get to some number, we'd be okay.
- [44:23]
Amna Nawaz
What's enough?
- [44:24]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
What's enough? Yeah, and he turns around and he looks at him and he goes, more. And I think that, interestingly, is a little bit of the human condition, which is that everybody wants more. And what I would just suggest to people more than anything else is to try to take a look at all this in a very balanced way, to the extent that we can be balanced, and to say that we need to have a little bit of humility about these things. We need to recognize that there's some kind of risks that we can all take, and some kind of risks are healthy risks. We shouldn't go overboard. We need to hold back a little bit. Speculation, by the way, unto itself, is not a bad thing. You need a little bit of speculation in the economy, by the way, to have great innovation. That is a truth. It is a truth. Somebody had to speculate on Elon Musk and Tesla years ago when it seemed like a completely insane thing to be investing in. So you don't want to take all of that away. You want people to take a little bit of risk, but you don't want people to go overboard. And I think it's very hard for people when they see the train leaving the station and they think to themselves, you know, so and so's doing well over there and so and so is doing, I need more. I need more. And I'm willing to take more and more and more and more risk.
- [45:41]
Amna Nawaz
Andrew, it is a fascinating book. I really, truly, I enjoyed reading it. It's 1929 inside the greatest Crash in History and how it Shattered a and it has been a real pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much for making this.
- [45:56]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Has been a joy. Thank you so very much. Thank you for talking about an uncomfortable topic of money.
- [46:02]
Amna Nawaz
I feel like we're getting better at it as we go.
- [46:04]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
We are.
- [46:06]
Amna Nawaz
Thank you.
- [46:06]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Thank you.
- [46:15]
Amna Nawaz
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