Andrew Ross Sorkin on 1929

This is Poured Over, a show about stories presented by the booksellers of Barnes and Noble. I'm Iwa Messer, I'm the producer and host of Poured Over. And Andrew Ross Sorkin, of course, is a household name at this point. He is the founder of the Dealbook vertical on the New York Times. You've seen him on CNBC and other places. But also, Too Big to Fail was a huge, huge bestseller. Also the basis for the HBO series of the same name. And by the way, did you know he was the co creator of Billions on Show Time? Yeah. Mm, that guy. But more importantly, he's back with a new book called 1929 and it is exactly what you think it is. It is unput downable history. And I have to say, as I was rereading it before we sat down to tape this interview, there are a little too many parallels to 2025, Andrew.

No, I know.

Way too many parallels.

That was not, I didn't know going into this that that's what was going to happen.

Eight years though, eight years of research. You managed to get a hold of minutes from the Federal Reserve of New York, the Bank of New York that no one had gotten their hands on. So you're digging around. It's a little different from your day job because you're not necessarily able to talk to the folks who are, shall we say, the bold face names in this book. So I just want to talk about where this started for you, if it was hot on the heels of Too Big to Fail or if it came out of other reporting that you were doing.

You know, it began actually because I had written Too Big to Fail and I was fascinated by financial crises. But the truth is, I think like most people, I knew that something very bad happened in 1929, but I didn't know exactly what.

Right.

And I had actually gone on vacation with my wife and bought a whole bunch of books, downloaded a couple as well. And I started reading about 1929 and I was fascinated by it. But I was also fascinated that I that there wasn't a book that really put you in the room in the sort of way that Too Big to Fail did, in the way that one of my favorite books, Barbarians at the Gate, did, in the way that sometimes a great Erik Larson book would put you in the room. And I thought to myself, huh, maybe there's an opportunity here to do something like that. And beyond just it being an interesting opportunity, maybe, you know, maybe there's a way to figure out maybe, maybe there's a bigger story here. I think maybe that's the way I thought about it, which is maybe there's a bigger story here. And I happened to be, a couple months later, up at Harvard University speaking, and I got there early. I never get there early. And I walked into Baker Library and I knew that they had an archive of a guy named Thomas Lamont who was running JP Morgan at the time. He was not really the CEO, but he was basically the de facto CEO. And I asked if they would pull a couple of boxes for me. And I sat down and just started paging through the box. And I saw that he had, you know, his secretary was keeping transcripts of his phone calls with the President in the White House. And I thought, this is unbelievable. And then I went and talked to the archivist and I explained what I wanted to do. And she told me, you can't do that, that I. She had read too big to fail. She said that that kind of granular detail just didn't exist. There wasn't one or two or three archives where all this material just was sitting right. And I just didn't want to believe her. I just didn't want to believe her. And she was right. It isn't sitting in two or three places that you can just sort of go on an excavations, you know, trip, if you will. And ultimately I ended up traveling around the country, going to Europe, sending researchers and students to all sorts of crazy places on my behalf during. During the pandemic, by the way, at one point. Yep. And that's how this whole book came together, really, sort of through almost picking through fragments of archives and. And being able to try to really put you in the room so you are there. And so when you read a quote, it is real. And when you see one person talking to their wife, that was the conversation and that was the thing that I had not seen done before. Yeah.

You and I have both read John Kenneth Galbraith's book on Crash. And respectfully, I mean, masterful, very, very smart man. But also he wrote that in, what.

55 wrote that in 1950s, early 50s, I think. But it had a different. It's just a different tone.

Absolutely.

And most of the people who were writing about that period did that in the 30s and 40s, a different approach. They didn't use quotes back then. They didn't really try to tell a narrative story. And so you didn't really know who the people were and what they were doing. And I've always approached almost all the writing I do and all the work I Do is never about the systems, if you will, or these institutions or math. To me, it's always a story about people who ultimately make decisions on behalf of institutions and systems and when you can understand the way they think and why they think what they think, Even if you disagree with them or think they're completely wrong, and it totally changes your perspective.

I got very attached to folks that I was not expecting to get attached to because.

Oh, goodness, who.

Who are you? Mitchell. I needed to know what was gonna happen with Charles Mitchell. I was like, what's going on with you? Lamont was definitely one of them. Jesse Livermore, the short seller. I was like, this doesn't. I don't think this ends well for you. My guy and his wife Mousey and his wife Mousey. Mousey.

Dorothy, otherwise known as Mousey, but Mousie.

I mean, what a 1920s nickname. Also, William D. And Raskob, I'd sort of known a little. I mean, the guy built the Empire State Building, so I sort of knew who he was.

John Raskob, though I will tell you, I think of as almost like a modern day. Almost Elon Musk.

Really. Okay.

Besides the fact that John Raskob has 13 children and so does Elon, you know, if you really think about John, John practically created General Motors.

Right.

He creates Tesla.

Yep.

Back then, the equivalent of building a spaceship is the immersed Empire State Building.

Absolutely.

The piece that most people don't know about John Rascob is he gets involved in politics. He gets involved in politics in a major, major way. Unlike Elon, he doesn't pick the winner. He picks the loser in Al Smith, who goes up against Hoover. But then, in a very kind of Elon, Vine, Twitterish kind of way, Raskov decides to use a good portion of his fortune, if you will, to undermine the reputation of Hoover, which, by the way, I think has actually lasted till this very day.

Listen, I had met a very different Herbert Hoover until your book. My entire understanding of this dude was not.

But part of that was because John Rascob was effectively using his money to seed the media with these very unflattering stories. In the same way that some people would describe what Twitter does to parts of the world today. And the reason I compare them is he was also a philosopher king, if you will. Everybody listened to every last word he had to say. And in some ways, he is responsible, or at least to some degree, put it into the culture. Even the idea of the five day work week. I don't know if you caught that.

Oh, yes, I Did.

Oh, I mean, people don't even know. I didn't even know that. We basically had a six day work week back then. And he had this idea that if we had a five day work week, not just because he wanted to have a weekend and work less, it's because he thought it would be good for the economy, because he thought more people would have to buy cars, they'd have places to go, they'd go places on the weekends, there'd be more consumerism. I mean, it was really quite interesting just to see the sort of parallels between so many of these individuals.

The optics too are really. I mean, if we're talking about america in the 1920s and the 1930s, you know, shame is kind of. People worry about that. The optics. All of these men are constantly thinking about how they're going to be perceived and their behavior is really sort of dictated by not necessarily their own certitude, but also what are the neighbors going to think or what are my colleagues going to think or what is someone going, is someone going to think? And there's so many parallels. I mean, I love reading history. I do it for fun. I've always done it for fun. I was a history major. I think it's fascinating because ultimately, who gets to tell the story, right? I mean, one of the things that you do in 1929 is we meet a lot of women that I'm sure the historical record would have been, not necessarily chomping, running to find and put in the forefront. And yes, they were married to very powerful men, but we gotta talk about the women for a second. We've gotta talk about the wives.

Well, as you know, Charlie Mitchell's wife plays a huge role in this whole story. And by the way, I mean, you know, it's probably sexist to say that there's, you know, every great man is, you know, there's a great woman behind every great man. I think that's actually very true in this story, which is that so many of these wives played these sort of super powerful roles and were super influential in terms of their own husband's success, if you will. But you know, I don't know if we want to, I don't want to give too much away about what happens with Charlie Mitchell and Charlie Mitchell's wife because it gets crazy and let's just say police get involved and it's, you know, I think that almost final scene of the book, most people have no idea that things are going to twist like that, right? So, you know, and now people go Google and try to find out what happens. But that's actually one of the things. There's not a lot out there on this, right?

But the psychology driving all of it. And this is where I have to give Herbert Hoover more credit than I previously had, where he understood that a lot of what was happening around the crash itself and the, I don't know, do we want to call it irrational exuberance leading up to the crash? I think we do. You know, that he understood that. The psychology of all of this, and you and I have seen this also in our lives, that you get a run somewhere and suddenly, you know, you watch that turn in the market and it comes and you kind of go, uh huh, okay, okay. And it is, it's human beings, it's human beings being humans and it's messy and it's wild and you manage to hunt down all of these different bits of information. But I think we leave that out of the conversation in so many ways. I mean, it appears in journalism certainly more now, I mean, given what you guys have been doing. But I do want to talk about sort of why we never really talked about the psychology behind 1929.

The psychology of. I mean, look, a couple of things that are very critical happened in the 1920s that I think are often forgotten. First of all, the idea of borrowing money for individuals was almost a moral sin. Besides a mortgage. You did not borrow money before 1920, ever. Ever. The, actually the advent, basically General Motors and their ability to try to lend people money to buy cars is what led to that. And then Sears, Roebuck started doing it, and then Wall street started doing it, and then everybody started buying stocks effectively with loans. I mean, that's the big piece of this. And in the same way that there are Starbucks on the corner of every corner of New York, there were brokerages on the corner like Starbucks. I mean, it was everywhere. And so there was this sort of, you know, this was a moment where people thought they could get rich, right? They really thought they could get rich. And they were. I mean, people also forget between 1928 and 1929, the stock market went up 62%. So there really was the sense that if you had not gotten on that train, you were gonna miss the train. And so everybody's rushing to try to get in on this gold rush. At the same time, you also had a media that was being almost invented in front of us. Time Magazine, Forbes, all of this was happening in the last 15 years before 1929. And so business executives for the first time are now on the covers of these magazines. This is not just Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh and actors and actresses. These guys are sort of now the new celebrity and everybody wants to be them. And that, I think, is a very powerful force, and it's a force we see today.

Honestly, when I was reading 1929, there were a couple of moments where I thought, oh, yeah, remember that summer of NFT Keys? And I mean, I'm going to gently remind you too, there was a. A meme coin that got named after you.

Yes.

How did that even happen?

Well, and by the way, this meme coin, it's actually interesting you bring it up because it's very related to the book, obviously, while I was writing the book. And I couldn't even believe it because. So, a couple things.

Yep.

In 1929, one of the things that was happening was there's something called stock pool pools. And in a stock pool, it was basically a manipulation effort. There was no regulation back then. And what would happen is some of the wealthiest people would get together, they'd say, we're going to go pump a stock. They would then actually manipulate the stock by hiring people on the floor of the exchange to bid. One guy goes up for 20, the next guy says 30, 40, and then they. So the stock keeps going up and then they pull the rug up. Right. When everybody else is getting in and effectively buying them out.

Right.

So an almost identical thing happened to me, weirdly enough, this January. I was actually close to finishing the book at that point. And I was on television with Larry Fink, who runs BlackRock, and he makes a joke about how there should be something called a Sorkin coin. I think we were talking about bitcoin at the time. Two hours later, there's a Sorkin coin. Somebody has created the Sorkin coin. And this thing is on a tear, going up by millions of dollars. And interestingly, somebody invited me onto one of these signal telegram chats that they were having, and it was exactly like what was happening in 1929, just digitally. All these people are in this chat group saying, I'm going to buy a million dollars. Then you're going to buy a million dollars. And you're going to buy. And you're watching it go up and up and up and up, and then they pull the rug. And it's unbelievable. I mean, some of these guys were actually, I don't know, they found some of my kids online. I have two sons and a daughter, but they found two of my boys. And we're saying, we'll give you $50,000 of Sorkin coin, if you can get your dad to talk about it. I mean, it was. I had to calm. I was calling my children, saying, please don't talk to these people. I beg you not to respond. We're going to end up in jail. We'll be in court for the rest of our lives. But back then, that's what was happening, and it was legal. They wouldn't have ended up in jail. Right.

Part of what you're talking about, too, in the book is, well, shall we say, the start of the Federal Reserve, all of the legislation that keeps things moving and afloat. I mean, it really was the Wild West. It's hard to imagine that it wasn't really that long ago. I mean, it's less than 100 years ago that we're talking about. Some people could still have grandparents who were on the planet at the time, maybe as tiny people, but this is not that long ago.

Well, so there's so many different interesting pieces to this that you're reflecting on. You mentioned the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve was not created till 1913. And so at the time, in 1929, you know, we see these debates now. Should you raise interest rates? Should you lower interest rates? Should the Fed be independent? What should be happening here? Who should be running the Fed? All of these things. Should the President have too much influence back then? And it's one of the reasons that the crisis even happened. The Fed did not think it could get ahead of this thing. They didn't think that they could raise interest rates to crazy numbers to try to stamp it out early because they thought it was politically unpalatable and they, as an institution, would be in jeopardy. They didn't feel they had the credibility with the United States public and with Congress. They thought Congress could pull their charter, frankly.

Right.

And so it was a very sort of different feeling back then about sort of right now. We think the Fed is the Fed. Right? Right. It was not the Fed then. And so. And then you didn't have many rules. And that was one of the reasons this happened.

But also, we're at the tail end of the Jazz Age. We're at the tail end of a giant run. I mean, there, in some ways, I can see why the exuberance was there. Right. That people thought this was never going to end. We had come out of a really significant war. There was. People were investing in cities in a new way. I mean, things were happening on a scale that we had not previously seen. And this whole idea of the American dream right like as you were saying, everyone thought they could get rich. And is it Groucho Marx that you quote saying, oh, no, when the shoeshine boy is telling you it's time to buy, it's time to get out, or something like that? There's a Groucho Marx story in here.

There is a Groucho Marx story. It's a different story now. Groucho is in there. Groucho was somebody who. Was somebody who back then was not famous yet, but he was very frugal, a very frugal guy. But he was somebody who got seriously caught up in the mania. He was somebody who used to spend his afternoons in Long island at a brokerage house, reading the tape, buying stocks. That's what he did. And he became totally enamored with the whole situation. And then, of course, October 1929 hits and he gets the phone call and he ends up effectively having to, you know, mortgage his house all over again. I mean, that was, that was one of those great examples of a guy. And that happened over and over and over again. He's famous, of course, but that was just a sort of a. And one tiny example of what had happened across the country.

And Winston Churchill. Sorry, can't resist bringing in Winston Churchill because honestly, I was not fully expecting to see Winston in your book. But okay. Also very famous, totally caught up.

Who knew, who knew that Winston Churchill would show up in New York in October of 1929 and get totally, you know, you bite the, you know, get, get. Who knew he would show up and, and, and totally get bitten by the market. And he was there in the middle of all of this and play. And his perspective on it's just so interesting because of course, he's from England, where the get rich quick scheme had not really hit yet. You know, American capitalism had yet to be exported. But he was enamored by all of it. And there's just so many fabulous scenes with him because he's, he's. He loved power and he loved to be around the money.

It also, some of it sounded like it was verging on insider trading, but I think the definition of insider trading was a little different.

It wasn't. Insider trading didn't exist.

It really didn't exist. But if you think of sort of, I mean, remember BCCI and all, like all of these moments, right, in financial history where you're just kind of like, how did that even happen? And it really. All of it comes back, you know, all of these things come back to this moment in history where you can See America trying to become more of a thing, Right. Like, again, there we're dealing with the German debt left over from World War I. That's a whole.

Well, but the important part about that story is actually that effectively, at that point in the reparations negotiation in Europe, which is just so interesting, is the United States. The President doesn't send politicians to go negotiate that. They send bankers, they send CEOs. And so it's another example of how just the entire business world had eclipsed, effectively, traditional politics. It eclipsed everything.

History. I mean, listen, you've been a journalist for how long? You've been doing this since the late 90s, right?

Yes, technically. Okay, 1995, I was 18 years old is when I first walked into the New York Times.

So we're talking a good 30 years. And yes, there have been rises, 87. There's all sorts of moments. But when you're reporting on financial markets and you're reporting on. I mean, you've reported on some big mergers as well, watching how the landscape has changed has been pretty trippy. But do you know when you're sitting in a moment that history is being made around you? Like, I wonder how many of these guys actually knew that history was happening.

Well, it's interesting you say that, because I don't think that they did. And one of the great revelations for me about 1929, which I think you'll see in the book, is it's actually a slow burn. And that's actually almost a little bit of a surprise for people. It's not that there's some one terrible day. You've heard about the one terrible day. There is a terrible day, but it's so much more than that. And unlike 2008, for example, I think that people who were engaged, involved in what was happening in 2008 knew that the day that Lehman Brothers went down, that history was being made. I think it was clear history was being made then. And that's why I wrote that book, Too Big to Fail. I don't think in the moment that they knew what was happening in October of 1929, and even by the end of the year, I don't think they knew it because of the sort of strange slow burn. It wasn't really apparent to people just how damaging this moment would later become, frankly, for two or three years.

Right. But also, technology is different, journalism is different. Information doesn't travel as quickly as it does now. I mean, ticker tapes were literally. I forget which one of our guys had 18 ticker tapes in Each of his houses or whatever it was.

Jesse Livermore. Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you. The short seller, Jess Livermore. But information can only pass so quickly. You physically need a newspaper to be printed. It's not like something you get an alert on your phone the way we can now. And don't you think that's part of it? I mean, don't you think that social convention actually has more sway? I mean, there are a couple of different points where you say, well, these short sellers were actually seen as vultures. They were seen as very, very tacky and morally wrong and all of these kinds of things. And I don't think that's necessarily how they're perceived now.

Well, that's interesting. I don't know. I think that short sellers have been described as un American for as long as they've been in business for many years. Elon Musk would tell you that the people who were shorting Tesla were un American, that it was unpatriotic, that it was immoral to be shorting a stock. Short sellers would tell you that by betting against a stock, they were almost like the investigators. They were the. They were the check on the market. They were almost their own regulatory apparatus. But back then, as of now, and now, I think people have a relatively dim view of people who bet against other people.

I find it entertaining at times. I mean, it's not.

You know what? To be a short seller, by default, you're almost a colorful character. You have to be, because your whole life is about challenging the conventional wisdom. And it's very hard to be a sort of standard fare person, if you will, who is constantly challenging the conventional wisdom. And so I think one of the reasons you think it's fun, which I think it's fun and is true of Jesse Livermore and true of others, is that they are as over the top as they could possibly be.

But it makes for a good story, and.

Yes, it does.

Trying to figure out, I mean, good guys, bad guys. This is not a black and white story. I mean, this is the historical record. Sure, but it's not black and white. And we meet. Well, I mean, Senator Glass.

Well, it's very interesting. So, okay, so I'm curious. So Carter Glass, who plays a huge role in this book, who really was the Cassandra in the room in many ways, is a complicated dude. Yeah, he is super complicated. And depending on how you come to this book and maybe how you leave this book, I think people are gonna have very different views about him. I'm curious what your view about him is.

He Was definitely entertaining to read about. I'm a fan of legislation. I do think that not everyone comes to the table with the same amount of information or the same amount of understanding. I think that we should be looking out for folks who are maybe less fortunate than the rest of us. But then again, I'm a Bostonian and Bostonian by birth, so it's kind of tattooed onto the DNA that we're supposed to do these things.

So I don't want to give it away, but as you know. Well, let's not. The thing about Carter Glass is he's obviously very famous before having created a bibble. Except I think when you really get underneath how that bill was created, it might change your whole view of everything. I mean, by the way, that, to me, was the fun of putting this book together in that I didn't know these things.

Yeah, I like the idea that you can still be surprised. I mean, again, you've been doing this for 30. You've got to pick up bits and pieces. And yet, at the same time, a lot of these guys were just not spoken of for a long time. Yeah, of course, people know more. You know, JP Morgan, things like that. William Randolph Hearst pops up. There are sort of people who float in the background. But I have to say I didn't recognize most of these names, but I really enjoyed reading about them. I was kind of like, who are you?

Well, by the way, that was the fun part for me because I worried. I thought to myself, okay, you know, that people have written, I imagined, about 1929. Had they really captured who the people were? And did anybody know who they were? And yes, for me, so much of it was. Was a genuine surprise. And to find these colorful characters and to realize that they had made these super important decisions, oftentimes for reasons that were completely at odds with what the public even then thought. To me, that was the great revelation. And there were pieces of the story. You know, I don't. Because it's a narrative, I don't say it, but there are pieces of the story that I think, you know, even scholars will read and go, oh, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. And I've had that now happen a bunch of times where people have read the book and they've called me up and said, I thought I knew everything about this.

I am a little surprised. It was shorter than I expected. I was kind of like, wait, what?

Which was what sort of the book?

Yeah, 1929. I was sort of expecting it to hit, like, sort of More like in the 500. And trust me, I enjoy the way it's written. Please don't misunderstand me. But I did have a moment of like, well, aren't we supposed to have seriously weighty things? And then I read somewhere that Walter Lord and Erik Larson were two of the people you sort of looked to in terms of structuring so that, in fact, we could participate in the way you told this story and could be in the room. And I just, I have not thought about Walter Lord's Titanic book in a really long time. And I know it's still assigned reading for a lot of folks, so I just thought, can we spend some time looking at.

Well, look, that was a book that really put you in the room. You really felt that. You really felt like you understood who the characters were, what happened to them, what they were thinking at any given moment. And he did such a brilliant job in that case. And that was really my goal for this and to make it readable. So the problem with, I want to say the problem, but the problem with a lot of history books is it's almost too serious. It's long and there's a lot of detail. There's a lot of detail in this book. I don't want to tell you that there's not a lot of detail in this book. It does run, I think, with the endnotes close to 600 pages. So it's not short. But it was very important to me that whether you are a historian or you're interested in business, or you're interested in politics, or you're just interested in a great story, that it would be accessible. You know, I think a lot of times people think a story about markets or business or politics is sort of limited. They can't, you know, it's limited to a certain audience. I want. To me, this is like a great drama. This could be a novel if it wasn't true.

Right. Right now, for me, it's definitely all about the psychology of the people. I am watching people make their decisions, watching people interact. I mean, the idea that radio is a brand new technology, I mean, or that the automobile is just starting to become the thing that watching people respond to that and watching people respond to OSEI tariffs, it's kind of fascinating. Or I think I didn't know that Calvin Coolidge declined to run a second time. And that's how we got.

That's how you got Hoover.

And I was like, huh? And former governor of Massachusetts. So like, vague, vague understanding of his story.

But that's What I'm hoping somebody. I'm so glad you're saying these things, because inside this story are these little nuggets.

Yeah, absolutely.

Just like nugget after nugget after nugget where you go, huh? And that's how that happened. And that's how that happened. And so much of it is how our world exists today. I mean, we could talk about the parallels between today and then, but a lot of just even how we live today is oddly a function of then.

Yeah, actually, I think it's the function part that I think not everyone is going to connect. Let's spend a little time there. Because for me, as I was reading, I was like, oh, hi. Is this Tuesday or 1932? It's. I mean, that's one of the pleasures I get from reading history is being able to see the context for the present moment. And I think we see a lot of folks who get nostalgic for things, and nostalgia takes all sorts of shapes and sizes and intensities and all of that kind of thing. It's always the psychology that gets me. I'm like, people are messy. They may not know they're messy, but, wow, people are messy. And I would just love folks to be able to pick this up and go, right, okay, this looks a little familiar. This looks a little familiar. And this is all just based on reporting and structuring there. I mean, it's. Oh. So talking about the Smoot Hawley legislation, right? And suddenly, folks, you know, rural America is like, yay, we want.

We.

We got a thing. We got a thing that we need. And then suddenly, tariffs send imported goods up 60%.

Right. No, no. I mean, what's fascinating. And if. Now, if you really want to draw.

The parallels, collapses, right?

If you want to draw the parallels, the parallels are real. So here we are, we have tariffs today, the hot political topic, right, over tariffs. Then, interestingly, Hoover ran on tariffs to try to get farmers to vote for him. Same kind of idea as what happened last time.

Right.

And what happens after they put the tariffs in place? You know, global Trade falls by 60%. It's a remarkable situation, by the way, even more remarkable to understand where we are today in 19. So back then, not just the president had to approve it, but Congress had to approve it.

Right.

And Congress did. And by the way, back then, thousands of economists wrote letters saying, please don't approve this. And what happened this time? Thousands of economists wrote letters saying, please don't approve this. The difference is, in 1934, Congress having done this, and of Course, the economy sinking as a result says, you know what, we're going to let the President go make unilateral deals or bilateral deals, country by country, as opposed to sort of a widespread. We're going to let you go off and do this. And it's that shift, that change in the law, that has led actually Trump to go make all of these tariff deals.

Right. But also, I mean, the technical definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results. And I'm reading this page going, okay, okay, we tried this before. It didn't seem to work terribly well the first time.

Look, my hope is, and really the reason for writing this, once I start to understand the full breadth of it all, is not to say that this is 1929 and we're here.

No, I'm not saying that either.

No. But it's more to say, you know what, we are on our way. We are on our way. And if we don't learn the lessons of that period and we don't understand what happened and why it happened, we will not just be on our way, but we'll get there. And to me, so in a way, it is a warning. I mean, I do want the book to be a warning to people, not just the general public, but policymakers and other people, to understand how connected things really are. And while I tried not to, nowhere in the book do I say this is related to this today. But I hope that as you're reading it, you're having the experience that you did where you clearly said yourself, I know it says 1929 here, but it could be 2025.

But also, I have.08 in the back of my brain, too. I mean, it's not entirely parallel, but subprime mortgages were snapped up the way stocks were snapped up and people were taking on mortgages at rates that were. It's just, you can't help but notice patterns because people, people make patterns.

And by the way, it's all happening. It's happening again right now in a different way. So, for example, you know, the laws were just changed so that private equity and venture capital and what's called private credit and crypto and all of these things are be allowed to be in your 401k plans. And people are going to be able to buy shares effectively and in private companies that they never were before with no disclosure. I mean, we are. There are things happening even today in terms of new inventions. Right. People are talking about tokenizing shares in private companies. I don't know if you're following some of this stuff with OpenAI and SpaceX. People want to get. People want the riches. It's the same thing. They're seeing people get rich and they want to get rich, too.

I think history can be a really useful tool. I think history can be a really useful tool. I mean, we're here now, we're here, we're here. And the question is, how do we move forward?

Well, by the way, the hardest thing, and I think it's also the lesson of 29. It's the lesson of too big to fail. 2008 is when the train is moving, you can have all sorts of people screaming from the rooftops telling you the train is going to go off the track. And most people still want to stay on the train.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's.

And that is the hardest part. So, you know, Carter Glass was one of the great Cassandras of his time. Roger Babson, who's a character in the book, who by the way, created Babson College, was a Cassandra. And people listened. They heard what they were saying, but they didn't want to hear what they were saying. We had the same thing happen in 2008. You can go back and read stories 2003-2004-2005-2006, where the front covers of magazines and newspapers would say, we're in a real estate bubble. And what would happen is every year you'd say, oh, maybe I'm not going to buy the home this year. Year I'm going to wait for it to fall and then a year later it wouldn't have fallen, it would have actually gone up. And a year later the same thing happens. And at some point you say to yourself, this train has left the station and if I don't get on, I'm going to be left behind. And of course, everybody gets on right when it's about to go off the track.

It is a little trippy too, to go back. And I reread Too Big to Fail and it's the first time I'd reread it since, you know, when did 09 it pubbed 09 09. And it's really kind of wild to read like a historical record kind of. I mean, the narrative flow, it's. If you haven't read it, just go back, pick it up. It's fantastic. But it's kind of trippy to sort of have one foot in remembering what the news coverage looks like and the Times coverage especially, but. And then having a foot in. I'm reading this book and it is. I mean, it's 20 years ago almost, and it's just very. And how much the world has changed in less than two decades.

So I think of the book 1929 as a prequel almost to 2008, and with the hope that we can avoid having to write the sequel. Right. I mean, that's the goal. How much did you think? I'm curious. We talked about some of Erik Larson's work and the great book about the Titanic. I think actually this book is modeled as much after that as it is actually after Too Big to Fail almost in the structure of it.

So there was a moment too, where business book like James Stewart, Den of Thieves. Do you remember Den of Thieves?

Do I know Den of Thieves? One of my favorites. One of my favorites.

And that was a ma. So this is sort of going back to the early 90s. That was massive. That book was massive. People who didn't necessarily read business narratives were reading that book.

Yes.

And Barbarians the Gate. The Brian Burroughs Barbarians at the Gate. That was late 80s, I think that came out.

That was 86.

Okay. So that came out before Den of Thieves. But there was this moment, and then, you know, Michael Lewis had done Liars poker, probably around 85, 86 too. And, you know, and you had Tom Wolf being Tom Wolfe. And so the way we talked about it was still possible to be shocked by people's behavior. And I. Did Burroughs also do the BCCI book? I think he did the BCCI Somebody. I should remember this, and I don't.

But there was a giant.

There was a giant book on bcci, and I think it might have been Burroughs. But the way we talked about these things and the way we talk about the intersection of money and power and politics and governance and all of these kinds of things. It's the amount of change.

By the way, the book you're thinking of, I think, is a book by Larry Gerwin and Peter Truewell.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

False Prophets. Right.

Yeah, False Prophets. And then BCCI is in the subtitle.

Yes.

Okay. But all of these interconnected.

I used to work with Peter Truell. Oh, did not know a good book.

Did not know that.

Forgot about that book.

Yeah. And it's funny, though, which books continue on. Right. And which. Which field. I mean, again, all respect to John Kenneth Galbraith, but we don't read him the way like our dads and our grandparents did. Right. And so watching how the evolution of storytelling tools have also changed. I mean, we use video in a way that no one else has. We have people react differently to Newspapers now, like when I was a kid, everyone had the newspaper delivered and, you know, you were, do I read the Times on my phone? I read the Times on my phone. Does it mean I cover everything? Not always. And so that sense of sort of serendipity and discovery has changed. And not just for. I've talked about how serendipity happens in newspapers and magazines for books, but you can talk about it in a larger scale. I mean, it's the way you interact with information about your community and your society and culture, but also money. Right. Like, I'm not necessarily reading something that's dedicated solely to finance, but, you know, drop something in the middle of the style section and sure, I will stumble across that.

So I don't think about this story so much as a market story or finance story. I think of it as much more of a human drama that could actually be in the stiles section, shorts, maybe a political story. I think it's a mix of all of those kinds of things. And I think unfortunately we don't get to step back enough from these moments. But also do it when I say granular. I think we now as readers want to feel a sense of intimacy with the actual characters. I think far too long. And this was maybe what you're referring to about some of these other books or the newspaper reports of that time. There was almost a two dimensional sense of who these people were. Right. They were like cardboard cutouts in a way, because people really didn't explore the depths of who they were and why they were making those decisions. And that was actually what made this project so, so interesting and also so challenging. Because part of what I was trying to do, especially because I couldn't speak to them, was try to really figure out what was motivating them. Why were they doing what they were doing, why did they want this power or why did they want the money, or why were they going along with something that they didn't think they should be going along with? And what you realize about all of these characters, and I think I learned this actually when I was working on Billions Years Ago. Yeah, yeah. And you're thinking about what is the motivation of a fictional character? But in a way that led me to think about, okay, well, what is the motivation of these individuals? And the more you sort of peeled back their own story and really got back, sometimes to the point when they were children or later, it was always about some. Some sense of insecurity, some sense that they were. They had something to prove, they were trying to prove something to somebody. Sometimes they were trying to prove something to their mother. Other times they were trying to prove something to their wife or their spouse or their colleagues or, you know, somebody who spurned them or they had a failure and they needed to show that they weren't a failure. And there really was as a, you, you hit the issue. It is psychology, this idea of, you know, people who wanted to be around power. Why did they want to be around power? Because proximity to power is power, you.

Know, Andrew, I realize you are doing 9,000 interviews, so I'm just going to say thank you so much. That was the perfect place to end.

Thank you so much. I am a huge fan, as you know, so I'm super grateful.

This was great. Thank you so much. Be well. Thank you for listening. Poured over is a Barnes and Noble production to help other readers find us. Please rate and review the show wherever you listen to podcasts.