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

Transcript

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

Speaker 12 A true story.

Speaker 11 Last Halloween, I went dressed as a chicken and I met a girl dressed as an egg, which answered the age-old question:

Speaker 11 the chicken.

Speaker 13 Listen to me. Markets are bigger than us.
What you have here is a structural change in the wealth distribution.

Speaker 9 Cash is trash.

Speaker 13 Stocks look pretty attractive. Something's going to break.
Forget about it.

Speaker 11 I actually think Halloween and Valentine's Day are very similar. They both involve candy, and I pretend to be something I'm not.

Speaker 11 Pretend to be thoughtful, caring.

Speaker 12 Two bangers in a row.

Speaker 11 Two bangers. Let's talk about Halloween.
What are you doing?

Speaker 12 I'm going to a party. I'm going to dress up as Inspector Clouse, and my girlfriend's going to be the Pink Panther.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 11 We want to get dressed up.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 11 Yeah, if that's the most embarrassing thing that's happened to your girlfriend being your,

Speaker 11 having her, you as her boyfriend, she's got a world of surprise coming her way.

Speaker 12 She's going to deal with some more. Ed, ask me what I'm doing.

Speaker 11 That's what I'm doing. What am I doing? What are you up to, Scott? What's going on with you? What are you up to, Scott?

Speaker 12 What kind of parties are you going to?

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 12 Ah, why are you going to Toronto?

Speaker 11 I am accepting an award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Spirit of Hope dinner

Speaker 11 for our advocacy and protection, I think, of the Jewish people.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But anyways, going to Canada to get an award.

Speaker 11 This is a very serious topic, Ed. Don't laugh.

Speaker 14 Don't laugh. What's so funny? Let me guess.

Speaker 11 You just got back from voting for Mom Donnie.

Speaker 12 Let me guess. No, I just love the, I love, I love how, I love the setup.

Speaker 12 I don't know if we're going to have this in the edit, but the prompting.

Speaker 14 It's a true story.

Speaker 12 I know it's a true story.

Speaker 11 I'm going to Toronto tomorrow morning. I know.

Speaker 12 I'm very excited for you. You're going to be back in New York and

Speaker 12 we're going to have, I think, a few meetings, right?

Speaker 12 They go over how the business is doing.

Speaker 11 Can I just say so far, I think this is our most cringy opening and that is not easy.

Speaker 11 I brought in Judaism, Toronto, Halloween.

Speaker 11 This is a fruit salad of weird. Yeah, we're doing our team meeting.

Speaker 11 I like to encourage everyone to work harder.

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 12 that was good. This show needs some work.

Speaker 11 Yeah, this show needs some work. No, the business is going really well.
Right place, right time. Who would have thought podcasting?

Speaker 12 We're going to get the first full picture of what it's like doing this show five days a week because people forget we only started doing this very recently.

Speaker 12 So this is our first full quarter where we're going to review the financial performance of doing this show every weekday.

Speaker 12 I personally am very excited to see how much money we're making off of this thing.

Speaker 11 You're my, I'm going to give another reference that only Drew, our technical director, he's the only person over the age of 40 on this call,

Speaker 11 that only he will write. You're my Fernando Valenzuela.
Do you know who Fernando Valenzuela is?

Speaker 14 I don't. He looks scared that I'm going to say it's some sort of like

Speaker 11 Norwegian porn star or something. Anyways, it's Fernando Valenzuela.

Speaker 11 You've told me what Fernando is arguably one of the greatest pitchers of all time.

Speaker 11 He played for the Dodgers in the 80s, and Tommy Lasorda had a fairly weak team, or I don't know, someone will come in the comments. No, they were a good team.
Anyway,

Speaker 11 he was this amazing pitcher, couldn't speak a word of English. And

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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 Fernando Valenzuela.
We went from once a week.

Speaker 11 We get a few positive comments. I'm like, let's go to twice a week.
We got it twice a week. The thing does well.
And Claire is very ambitious.

Speaker 11 She's got a wedding to pay for at some point, hint hint.

Speaker 11 And then I, and we go, let's go to five days a week. So you guys are my Fernando Valenzuela.
I'm literally throwing your arm out.

Speaker 12 I love it. I'm young.
I've got a lot more throws left in me.

Speaker 14 I agree.

Speaker 11 I agree, young man. All right.
With that, should we get to the headlines?

Speaker 14 Let's do it.

Speaker 12 We are speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin, editor-at-large of Deal Book at the New York Times and co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box.

Speaker 12 And he 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.

Speaker 11 Scott, ready to go? 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?

Speaker 14 No, you can say whatever you like. Throw the ball as hard as you want, my friend.
That's what the Canadians would say. They would say, do what you like to do.
But I'll tell you this.

Speaker 14 I want you to know, we got a copy of your new book, Scott, just arrived yesterday. And

Speaker 14 my wife and I looked at it and we said, instant bestseller.

Speaker 14 And you could just feel it. By the way, the cover is beautiful.
The approach to the whole thing is beautiful. I didn't get a chance to fully read it.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 12 It's just unfair.

Speaker 11 He's so fucking likable, isn't he?

Speaker 12 See, this is how Andrew is so successful. It's how he avoids roasts.

Speaker 11 How do you not like this guy?

Speaker 14 I'm not trying to pander to you 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 scott enjoy enjoy roasting him now read him in read this wonderful read this wonderful intelligent man in

Speaker 12 this is our conversation with andrew ross taukin Andrew, good to have you on the show.

Speaker 14 It's great to be here. I'm ready for the roast.
I'm ready for the roast.

Speaker 12 I can't wait to, but I'm going to start off because we want to get into your book here, 1929, which I'm actually holding right here.

Speaker 14 You can go buy it now.

Speaker 12 Currently number two on the bestseller list. It is outlining what happened in 1929, the stock market crash, which led to the Great Depression.

Speaker 12 Let's just start with the basics here, Andrew. What did happen in 1929?

Speaker 14 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 20s and this sort of remarkable period.

Speaker 14 It was probably one of the most transformational generations of our time from a technological perspective, automobiles, telecommunications, radio.

Speaker 14 And the other magic ingredient was credit, the opportunity for people to get loans to go buy stuff.

Speaker 14 And originally it started with buying cars and appliances from, you know, all sorts of different stores and things like that.

Speaker 14 And then Wall Street caught on and started offering people loans so you could go buy stock.

Speaker 14 And that was really what changed everything in terms of how stock trading in America became almost like a national pastime.

Speaker 14 So you had a market that just sort of roared in the craziest way from 19, beginning in 1928 to September 1929. It was up 90%.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It's that everybody was so levered that they were literally selling their homes, mortgaging their houses.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And it wasn't preordained. There was a lot of things that happened in Washington.

Speaker 14 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 and everything else, you can really see how those dominoes fell.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I'd read a lot about the period, but I'd never gotten inside the story, the characters, who they were.

Speaker 14 I loved books like Barbarians at the Gate and Den of Thieves and, you know, books that Eric Larson had written where you felt like you were in the room with these people.

Speaker 14 And I thought, could I go do that?

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Talk to us about your favorite one or two characters that you researched and if there's sort of a modern-day analogue.

Speaker 14 Oh, goodness.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 They called him Sunshine Charlie. And Charles Mitchell ran a bank called National City, becomes Citigroup.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 He believed in this idea of democratizing finance. That was a big theme for him in terms of what he thought would power America,

Speaker 14 getting

Speaker 14 the masses, the ordinary investor involved in the capitalistic system. Charlie Mitchell in his time was like the Jamie Diamond of his time.
I mean, he was on the cover of magazines.

Speaker 14 This was really the first time CEOs of big banks were showing up on the cover of magazines. I mean, before this was Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh and, you know, actors and actresses.

Speaker 14 All of a sudden, these bankers are on the cover of magazines as like cover stars. And so maybe he was like Jamie.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And he was really, frankly, he was a racist Elizabeth Moran. And

Speaker 14 he

Speaker 14 was screaming from the rooftops about this thing called Mitchellism and how he believed that Charlie Mitchell and Wall Street were going to upend America because of this sort of rampant speculation that needed to be tamped down.

Speaker 14 And I think once I understood that there was this fight, this battle between these two powerful individuals, I thought, okay,

Speaker 14 from a character story perspective, that can really be the driving spine of how this goes.

Speaker 11 I mean, some of the things that people may not know that I didn't know until I read your book was

Speaker 11 the 1929 or the Great Depression or the crash, it wasn't as much 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But it was kind of a slow-moving train wreck, right?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Sometimes people talk about Black Tuesday. Well, guess what? There was a Black, that was a Black Thursday.
There was a Black Monday. That was a Black Tuesday.
Interestingly, at the end, so

Speaker 14 from October to November 13th of 1929, stock market was down about 49%.

Speaker 14 But by the end of 1929, the stock market was only down 17%.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So it had this psychologically scarring effect on some Americans who had basically been just taken out because they had borrowed so much money.

Speaker 14 And by the way, couldn't benefit when the stocks recovered at all because they were basically on margin to begin with.

Speaker 14 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 Holly tariffs, 1930, that created a problem for the country.

Speaker 14 The Fed, as we mentioned, didn't really do much of anything for the most part.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 You lose money, great.

Speaker 14 Didn't care. And so they almost were like not really looking at the problem.

Speaker 14 Hoover used to talk about it 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%.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 11 After researching this crash,

Speaker 11 Are you more or less confident that we're on the precipice? So we know the the correction is coming, but we don't know if there'll be a soft correction or when it's coming.

Speaker 11 Are you more or less confident that there will be something resembling, if not a crash, a significant destruction in value in the markets?

Speaker 14 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And so that if we do have another crash, if you will, that it is not as deep and not as sustained.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 You 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.

Speaker 14 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, it's back then RCA was the NVIDIA of its day.
Now it's NVIDIA.

Speaker 14 How much of that whole boom is being powered by leverage.

Speaker 14 So not to say that you look at, you know, 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.

Speaker 14 And we're not just talking about the data centers themselves. We're talking about, you know, the energy companies that are providing electricity and the construction and real estate.

Speaker 14 There's all sorts of other component parts of this ecosystem that are being powered by leverage.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 That's one of the things we've been talking about on the podcast.

Speaker 14 Well, you guys have been talking about all these circular deals, right? These sort of round-trip transactions.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And by the way, they're probably right directionally about where our whole world is headed, kind of like the internet,

Speaker 14 but some of the spending is indiscriminate.

Speaker 12 Right. It feels as though we're going to enter the leverage phase where we're on the precipice of that phase.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 You also talk about the tariffs, the fact that tariffs were an important issue that were being debated.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 People beginning to talk about that. What is so striking about the book and that I think is so resonant for so many people is the extent to which it is a mirror of today.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 I just want to sort of say up front, that wasn't, it wasn't the goal.

Speaker 14 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, much to my family's delight, frankly, because they were.

Speaker 12 Eight years, right?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 You know, you're talking 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.

Speaker 14 He is the Elon Musk of his era. He was sort of a philosopher king.

Speaker 14 One of the would have been,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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,

Speaker 14 in large part prior to that, to even take on a loan of any sort. And he sort of made that available to the masses, then tried to create a mutual fund that would have been levered effectively.

Speaker 14 So he used to say everyone ought to be rich.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And,

Speaker 14 you know, if he owned Twitter, oh my goodness, you know, really trying to undermine the reputation of Hoover secretly for years.

Speaker 14 In fact, I would argue Hoover's reputation, even to this day, was damaged by this guy, John Raskob. And then John Raskob.

Speaker 14 very cleverly came up with an idea that actually I would argue changed America in a large way, which is today we work only five days a week. Back then we worked six days a week.

Speaker 14 The stock stock market was open on Saturdays.

Speaker 14 And he had this idea that she wrote about in November of 1929 that, you know what, we should have a five-day work week 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 He said, 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.

Speaker 12 Being both a father and a teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. Each must learn its lesson anew.

Speaker 12 And I think that is kind of the crucial point here, which is you're describing a situation that looks very similar to what is happening today. We know what happened in the aftermath.

Speaker 12 We know that there was a stock market crash that led to a period of depression. But you also opened the book

Speaker 12 by saying, you know, we have to learn our lessons ourselves.

Speaker 14 We do. And by the way, let me just say, here we are being very depressed.

Speaker 14 It's very depressing to think, oh, everything's going to go off a cliff. The truth is that,

Speaker 14 you know, over time, the market goes up. You know, a lot of people, by the way, since this book came out, they said, oh, Andrew, you know, you're calling for a crash.
It's all going to end terribly.

Speaker 14 What are you saying?

Speaker 14 And the truth is that you could have all the Cassandras in the room,

Speaker 14 you know, saying the sky is going to fall, but over time, things have gone up.

Speaker 14 And I do think that's worth noting because being a professional optimist has been a better business than being a professional skeptic.

Speaker 14 Again, over time. That's not to say, you know, if you need the money in the moment of crisis or a panic, you have a problem.
But

Speaker 14 if you don't, things will get better.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 You know, 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.

Speaker 14 And so much of the sort of generational change technologically and otherwise came from speculators.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And that's, that is the million trillion dollar question. How do you do that?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 if you're the Federal Reserve, even in the face of some of these other issues around employment and the like.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I don't know if you guys read Jason Fuhrman at Harvard just wrote this paper.

Speaker 14 If you literally 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.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 that's a very complicated scenario. How do you cut off what seems like a speculative sort of fury?

Speaker 14 And you want that innovation, but But you also, now especially because of the concentration, you don't want to sort of tip over the rest of it.

Speaker 14 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?

Speaker 14 Which is, and the answer typically is you flood the system with money as politically unpopular as that is.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 12 We'll be right back after the break. If you liked what you heard, hit follow and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more.

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Speaker 12 We're back with Profit Markets.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 There's a couple meetings or scenarios in both books where you feel like you're literally in the room. And

Speaker 11 what I would ask you to do is put us, if

Speaker 11 someone said, put me in the room

Speaker 11 in October of 2025, like you see the markets every day. You're literally someone who's taking the blood pressure and the,

Speaker 11 you know, taking the, in the pulse of the markets every day. You see it, and you've been doing this a while.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 14 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 Wong, but actually maybe with Lisa Sue, who runs AMD.

Speaker 14 Because you would see both of them either on a phone call or probably on a Zoom, maybe in a room together.

Speaker 14 I don't know the specifics of how it all happened, but I think you'd get to see the conversation. You'd get to understand the motivations that Sam desperately wants.

Speaker 14 this build out, feels like he really needs, you know, to buy all of this compute. You have Lisa Seward AMD desperate to get into this sort of chip game, which she's losing to NVIDIA.

Speaker 14 And so her motivations are, I need to get into this.

Speaker 14 How are they going to make a deal? And in this case, they create this sort of odd circular transaction where

Speaker 14 OpenAI gets warrants in AMD knowing that if they announce this deal likely, I'd love to see that conversation.

Speaker 14 We think that the warrants are going to be worth a lot more because of this connection between the two.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I would want to see that conversation. And then I would want to see some conversation after it where

Speaker 14 Sam is briefing President Trump and Scott Besson on it. And then maybe the breakfast that Scott Besson has

Speaker 14 with Powell, once a week they have lunch together together or breakfast together.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 how much anxiety all of these individuals really have or don't have in these moments.

Speaker 11 Those circular deals, that would be an interesting room. I'm curious, and obviously my political leanings are going to come out here.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 It strikes me that this age, and

Speaker 11 I'm putting forward a thesis, that what will mark this age economically is this orgy of corruption and flat-out grift.

Speaker 14 Your thoughts, Andrew? Look, I think that there, unfortunately, is a lot of grift in this moment.

Speaker 14 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 possible.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 an operation, a pool operation, where they effectively were almost like actors where one person would say, I'm up for, I'm buying a 120 and then 140, but they all knew exactly, they were all in it together.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Back in January, somebody created something called a sorkin coin. I happened to be on TV with Larry Fink, and he mentioned that he joked that there should be a sorkin coin.

Speaker 14 Somebody actually created one. All of a sudden, millions of dollars of trading.

Speaker 14 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 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 in fact one of them reached out to one of my sons online on social media found him and was was offering him i think fifty or a hundred thousand dollars worth of sorkin coin to try to get him uh to somehow, I don't know, do something.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 12 That's what I heard. Trump probably said too.

Speaker 11 I think of you as being like, if I was asked to have five people to sort of embody New York to me and different angles of it, different complexions of it, you would be one of those people.

Speaker 11 I just think of you as the consummate New Yorker.

Speaker 11 Talk to me about Cuomo versus versus Mom Dami.

Speaker 11 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 Dami, but also you talk, you speak to every day to some people, some market players who are very, seem vehemently opposed to him.

Speaker 11 What do you think this says about the moment? It says about the moment in New York.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 that's why this is

Speaker 14 to the degree that people are questioning, how did this happen? Obviously, Mondami felt like came out of nowhere. Cuomo is a

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And I think it's very complicated for a lot of other people to support Mondami, in part because

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Like he says that out loud. He has said that.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I think the bigger questions, though, that are animating the likes of

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 Commissioner Tisch in charge, but 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.

Speaker 14 The pandemic really exacerbated it. We also had a lot of laws change that made

Speaker 14 common thievery, you know,

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 that. I think there's this question about anti-Semitism, to be honest with you, is a real question.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And then I think, you know, I know people talk about taxes and people think he's not going to be able to raise.

Speaker 14 The tax thing, thing, I think, is almost a red herring to sort of just a larger question about can he manage the city.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 what he represents and speaks to in terms of the big ideas around affordability and the like.

Speaker 14 But when it comes to actually the practical day-to-day of actually managing a city, when it's pretty clear that he's never done anything like that.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 11 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,

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And I think it's just as it's going to be hard for him to raise taxes because the logistics of the

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And I think, I do think there's been some Islamophobia. I think that's probably true.
As the Cuomo campaign gets desperate, you know, they running ads and or affiliated parties running ads of the

Speaker 11 plane slamming into the Twin Towers. I just think

Speaker 14 that shit's ugly.

Speaker 11 You know, I mean this sincerely, Andrew, I'd love to see you run for office, but

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 14 Well, that's the saddest part. Nobody wants to take these jobs.

Speaker 14 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 City mayoral problem. That's a problem around the country.
Nobody wants,

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 run for something.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But no, I think a guy your age, I'm hoping Ed someday decides to get involved in public service.

Speaker 14 Ed, you want to 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.

Speaker 12 I want to make the money first.

Speaker 11 But you're right. Your point is,

Speaker 11 unless we start

Speaker 11 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 is going to,

Speaker 11 who with any options and has a nice life and isn't a total megalomaniac is going to want to do this shit.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 So, yes, it's strange, but it's actually increasingly not strange.

Speaker 12 The extent to which socialism is being embraced by people and people are losing faith in the capitalist system, which to me is going to be kind of the great referendum of our time.

Speaker 12 Do we like capitalism? Do we like the system that we've inherited or do we not?

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 14 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.
I mean, what they would be doing.

Speaker 14 And what's so unique, by the way, in this city in particular, I recognize the poll suggests otherwise in terms of just the view about socialism. If you ask most,

Speaker 14 at least the experience that I've had of, and this is anecdotal, people who are voting for Mamdami, they say, well, he's not really a socialist. They'll say, actually, no, he's not a socialist.

Speaker 14 He's a democratic socialist. That's a very different thing.

Speaker 14 So I don't think they actually think that their way of life is going to fundamentally change in part because they think they don't think he can actually change it given

Speaker 14 the roles, responsibilities, and powers that a mayor has.

Speaker 14 But I do think there is this larger question about capitalism versus socialism in the same way that I think there's this question, and I think this actually came out of 2008 and a financial crisis, a complete and utter

Speaker 14 rethinking about experts, expertise, institutions. All of that sort of

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I think those questions were raised again, by the way, in the context of the pandemic. And so, you know, it's one thing to scream from the rooftop and say, guys, look at history.

Speaker 14 Capitalism is the thing that actually works. Socialism is the thing that actually doesn't work.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 12 We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, sign up for our newsletter at profgymarkets.com/slash subscribe.

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Speaker 12 We're back with Prof G Markets. This has been fascinating, but I want to hear more about the book, specifically your process.

Speaker 12 One of the things I admire about you is the fact that you do everything. It's kind of insane.
I mean, you're on, you're the anchor on CNBC.

Speaker 12 You started Deal Book at the New York Times. You're writing for Deal Book.
You're doing all of these different things.

Speaker 12 And you're writing books, by the way, not to mention the shows, the fact that you wrote and produced billions.

Speaker 12 How did you, what was your process? Like, I know that you went to the libraries and you were, you know, filing through all these documents.

Speaker 12 Like, tell us about what it took to actually write this book while juggling an extremely demanding career.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 i would do this on weekends i would do it on nights i do it in between things

Speaker 14 you know for the first couple years i was researching like crazy uh 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, I thought the pandemic might go on for a very long time.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I would call up,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And I would pay those students, I'd find them and pay them to go through boxes for me.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Now, in 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.

Speaker 14 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, what was the chip on the shoulder, what was the hole that these people were trying to fill.

Speaker 14 Because I always think, and you guys actually talk about this, I think what drives a lot of people, especially at the top, is some semblance of insecurity, actually.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And all of a sudden, it makes it at least relatable or understandable so you can appreciate why these things are happening.

Speaker 12 Why are you so industrious? It's kind of a broad question.

Speaker 14 Why are you so ambitious?

Speaker 12 Yeah, no, seriously.

Speaker 14 Because I have a hole that I'm trying to fill.

Speaker 14 Fair enough.

Speaker 12 But can you? I would like to hear, like, just go inside the mind of Andrew Ross Sorkin. You are this superstar and you're reaching out to, I mean, imagine being a college student.

Speaker 12 You get a DM from Andrew Ross Sorkin asking for a photo. I mean, what drives you?

Speaker 14 I was driven to write write this book because of my own curiosity about the topic. But,

Speaker 14 you know, I think part of it was,

Speaker 14 could I do it?

Speaker 14 Like, I honestly think part of this, I think actually a lot of the things that I do is

Speaker 14 like trying to prove to myself that I'm capable.

Speaker 14 Like, could I pull it off? You know, when I wrote Too Big to Fail in 2008 and 9, It was like lightning in a bottle.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And I don't know, maybe I got the timing right and the this and the that. And

Speaker 14 so I think,

Speaker 14 you know, to some degree, I think for me, I'm always trying to push myself to see, well, could I do it again?

Speaker 14 Was it luck? Was it not luck?

Speaker 14 You know, I think I probably have the same insecurities, frankly, that a lot of,

Speaker 14 that I think most people have to some degree. And I think, I hate to say it, but I think that that probably drives me more than it should.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 I said it should be a movie because it's kind of insane how much it feels like you're watching a movie. I mean, the same could be said about like Harry Potter, as an example.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 I just would love to hear, you know, we want to tell great stories on this show.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 14 Thank you. I don't know if I'm a great storyteller.
I think I love the story of people. more than anything else.

Speaker 14 I mean, it's interesting because people have written about 1929 and have done very well writing about 1929, but they typically write in the context of economics and cycles and systems.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And so I'm always looking to tell the story through those people.

Speaker 14 And I feel like that's the most relatable way. And frankly, for me, the way I even understand the world,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I actually don't understand what they're talking about when they talk about certain things.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And so I find myself writing that way.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 How did you

Speaker 12 get to know all of the characters in 1929, considering the fact that you don't know them?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 You know, some of the material I found wasn't just in the moment. It might have been from 10, 20, 30 years, even later.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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 try to do that in this context.

Speaker 14 But everything you read, if you see a quote or an emotion, or it came from somewhere, there's hundreds of pages of endnotes in this book to really, 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 was I think I was purposely looking for some of those things as I was going through the material 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.

Speaker 12 I'd like to throw out a few characters, see what you think is going on in their head.

Speaker 12 Sam Altman.

Speaker 12 He says we're going to spend a trillion dollars. He's cooking up these deals with Lisa Sue.
He's going to Larry Ellison.

Speaker 12 Everyone's saying it's a bubble.

Speaker 12 Many people are calling him Scam Altman.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 Do you think he ignores it and believes that we just have to build AI no matter the cost? What do you think is going on in his head?

Speaker 14 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've done over these past years.

Speaker 14 I think that he believes in his heart

Speaker 14 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,

Speaker 14 that's the end state.

Speaker 14 And so as a result, I think he's thinking, I want to be the one who gets there first.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 while I do believe he's concerned to some degree about the implications of these things, in terms of safety and the like and their implications on our society, I think because of that sort of sense of inevitability that he is convinced of,

Speaker 14 if you believe that too,

Speaker 14 these other issues oddly do sort of fall to the wayside.

Speaker 11 If you were going to start a media company from scratch right now, what would it look like?

Speaker 14 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 TBPN guys are doing.

Speaker 14 I mean, I think it would be, you'd be sort of a combination of sort of podcast meets video,

Speaker 14 probably meets product and selling certain types of products.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 But I think once you crack that, then I think the whole thing opens up into doing all sorts of interesting things.

Speaker 11 I was asking this when you're on, and

Speaker 11 I think people,

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 12 Be straight with me.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 the complication of trying to do both well. And it's hard.

Speaker 14 And I tell myself all the time, Scott, that, you know, 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.

Speaker 14 I worry that, you know, they're going to,

Speaker 14 they could have a, you know, there could be a backlash. Interestingly, I'll tell you about my own father.
My father was a lawyer and he worked so hard.

Speaker 14 I mean, he worked, he acted like a first-year associate till he retired.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 yet here I am. And what I realized, I do think is true.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I mean, I love them more and I hope they know that, but that they will

Speaker 14 hopefully be able to find a passion or understand that you could find something that you could love to do that much.

Speaker 14 Again, these are all things I tell myself. And whether

Speaker 14 we'll, we'll know in 20 or 30 years when I get, you know, the bill from the psychiatrist for for the kids. So you tell me.

Speaker 12 We're going to be billing you. Any marriage advice?

Speaker 14 Find somebody who

Speaker 14 you could talk to forever.

Speaker 14 That's the thing. For me with my wife, I could talk to her forever.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 I felt like I'd known her so long. It was like a weird connection thing.
I was like, this feels weird to me.

Speaker 14 So, yeah, if you can find that, that's a pretty special thing.

Speaker 12 Andrew Ross Sorkin is a financial economist for the New York Times and the editor-at-large of Dealbook. He is also the co-anchor of Squawk Box, the NBC's signature morning program.

Speaker 12 His latest book, 1929, Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation, is available now. Andrew, this was fantastic, as always.

Speaker 14 This was a lot of fun. Thank you, gentlemen.
Really appreciate it. You guys do such a great job.

Speaker 11 Thanks, brother.

Speaker 11 Ed, what'd you think of the Canadian spot? You know that, right? You know he works for the Canadian Intelligence Service.

Speaker 11 Anyone that nice,

Speaker 11 he's definitely funneling back trade secrets to Canada.

Speaker 12 There's something wrong. He's too successful, too humble, too kind.

Speaker 12 Yeah,

Speaker 12 there's something off with him. There's got to be, right?

Speaker 11 What'd you think? 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.

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 11 always enjoy really speaking to him.

Speaker 14 Also, his books, if you write books,

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Nice family man.

Speaker 11 Good friend. Yeah, just kind of one of those guys that kind of has it all.
I would love to see Andrew

Speaker 11 run for office. I think he's very pragmatic, very likable.
I think he'd be a great mayor of New York.

Speaker 14 I think he'd win.

Speaker 11 And he's got a blend of the kind of empathy and humanity that you want in someone in public service.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 12 I'm struck by the book. I'm struck by his ability to tell a story.

Speaker 12 I'm struck by his work ethic, as exemplified by the amount of work that he does and 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.

Speaker 12 I mean, if you read the book and you read sort of like the prologue about how he did it,

Speaker 12 it's kind of unbelievable. The thing that I am most

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 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, you know, I reached out to him to

Speaker 12 get coffee and chat.

Speaker 11 And get a job? Is that what you're telling me?

Speaker 14 Wait, hold on.

Speaker 11 Just by accident, you decided to have coffee with another financial media personnel. Yeah, I did.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Yeah. Just, you just wanted, you wanted him to, you wanted him to mentor you.

Speaker 14 Yeah,

Speaker 11 that's right. That's right.
Memo to self.

Speaker 14 Interviewing with competitors. Okay.

Speaker 14 Great.

Speaker 11 Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 12 Well, it doesn't matter what I thought. The most important thing,

Speaker 12 he doesn't need to meet with me. I'm like a pip squeak compared to him.
He doesn't really get much out of it, but he was so willing,

Speaker 12 so interested, so kind,

Speaker 12 you know, 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.

Speaker 12 A level of humility coming from a person who is so successful is just always striking. I mean, the way he kind of

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 But I think my learning from it is

Speaker 12 I think kindness.

Speaker 12 and generosity is not only a good thing in and of itself, but it also gets you you very far. And when you talk to anyone about Andrew Ross Sorkin, when you ask anyone about, you know, what he's like,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 It's why

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 for your career

Speaker 12 and the way it can actually be quite powerful in terms of your career ambitions.

Speaker 11 I think there is a lesson there, and we've said this a couple of 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.

Speaker 11 And I think, unfortunately, that's a common theme among the far left.

Speaker 11 And I think where the right has gotten it right is they celebrate success, whereas whereas I think sometimes on the far left, we're suspicious of it.

Speaker 11 And what I have found is that exceptionally successful people,

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And the way you get there is through kindness and doing things for people where there doesn't appear to be any expectation of reciprocal benefit.

Speaker 11 And you just kind of memo to self, I'd really like to do this person a solid someday.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think there are different ways to do it. I mean, I think you can find examples of very successful assholes, one of which would be Trump, another of which would be Elon Musk.

Speaker 12 But I think to your point,

Speaker 12 there are several different ways to be successful.

Speaker 12 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've got to be an asshole to people, you've got to steamroll over people.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 They did people favors. And it all comes back to them in the form of career karma, let's say.

Speaker 11 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

Speaker 11 who sleeps with 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.

Speaker 11 I would not describe that as a success. And Donald Trump's wife wants nothing to do with him.
The East Wing

Speaker 11 used to be the First Lady's residence, and they quickly figured out she doesn't need it. Have you ever, I mean, literally, has anyone heard from the First Lady?

Speaker 11 She wants nothing to do with her husband, nothing to do

Speaker 11 with him. And he's raising a bunch of Nepo kids who, anyways,

Speaker 11 different, different, you're more successful than either of those people, Ed. All right, let's move on.

Speaker 14 Clip it, clip it, clip it.

Speaker 12 This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research team is Dajlan, Isabella Kinsel, Christian O'Donoghue, and Mia Silverio.

Speaker 12 Drew Burrows is our technical director, and Catherine Dylan is our executive producer.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 You have it

Speaker 12 in kind

Speaker 12 reunion

Speaker 12 as the world turns

Speaker 12 and the world flies

Speaker 12 in love.

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