Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Crash That Shook Wall Street — And The Lessons We Keep Ignoring - Andrew Ross Sorkin

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Andrew Ross Sorkin is an award-winning journalist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of Squawk Box, CNBC’s signature morning program. He is also the founder and editor at large of DealBook, an o...nline daily financial report published by The New York Times that he started in 2001. Sorkin is the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail and the co-producer of the 2011 film adaptation, which was nominated for eleven Emmy Awards. Sorkin is also the co-creator of the drama series Billions on Showtime. Get his absolutely brilliant book 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation here: https://amzn.to/47o3wgK Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He is the host of the podcast Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island. 📚 Get a copy of my books: Solana Rising: Investing in the Fast Lane of Crypto ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/43F5Nld⁠⁠From Wall Street to the White House and Back ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/47fJDbv⁠⁠The Little Book of Bitcoin ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/47pWRmh⁠⁠The Little Book of Hedge Funds ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/43LbM83⁠⁠Hopping over the Rabbit Hole ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/3LaykJb⁠⁠Goodbye Gordon Gekko ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/47xrLYs⁠⁠ 🎥 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗮 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗼 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗻𝘆! ⁠⁠https://www.cameo.com/themooch⁠⁠ 🎙️ Check out my other podcasts: The Rest is Politics US - ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@RestPoliticsUS⁠⁠ Lost Boys - ⁠⁠https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYFf6KS9ro1p18Z0ajmXz5qNPGy9qmE8j&feature=shared⁠⁠ SALT - ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/SALTTube/featured⁠⁠ 📱 Follow Anthony on Social Media Instagram - ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/scaramucci/⁠⁠ X - ⁠⁠https://x.com/Scaramucci⁠⁠ LinkedIn - ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/anscaramucci/⁠⁠ TikTok - ⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@ascaramucci?lang=en⁠⁠ YouTube - ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@therealanthonyscaramucci Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:38 Take us through the base ingredients and tell us if anything is different today. What should we be worrying about? The match that lights the fire every time. And I would argue effectively that in 1929 it was his margin loans. Now you said could it happen again? And where are we today? Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci.
Starting point is 00:01:59 Joining us now is the world famous and very talented Andrew Rorschon. The title of the book is 1929, The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History. Andrew, welcome to the show. I love our relationship, and you are very famous for many reasons, but you're also the best-selling author of Too Big to Fail. But what drew you back nearly a century to write the day? 1929 crash? I mean, the truth was that I didn't know enough about 1929 crash. I had written about 2008 in the financial crisis and people would always ask me to compare
Starting point is 00:02:38 the two and I didn't always have a great answer. And I think most people that I know sort of have only a vague conception that something pretty terrible happened back then that led to the Great Depression. And I always love books, I think like you love books about people, about, you know, those great books that put you in the room with those people, Barbarians of the Gate, Den of Thieves, all those kind of, you know, inside the room kind of books, fly on the wall kind of things. And I thought, wow, could I try to do that to this? Listen, I was enthralled by the different characters in the story. I had read Lords of Finance
Starting point is 00:03:17 by Leiaquod Ahmed. Fabulous book. 15 years ago, you referenced it a little bit in year. I read Galbra's crash, but that was like when I was in college, so I didn't really have a lot, a lot of memory of that. But let's set the scene, though, because, you know, when I closed your book, I took some notes, and I said, okay, what did I learn from Andrew's book? Greed always overcomes wisdom. I think that's one of the number one things. You had tremendous excesses going on in the late 20s, okay, as it related to margin and the use of margin. And then you had an insider grab bag, which was legal at the time.
Starting point is 00:03:57 Right. But the insiders were sort of moving things around in a way that the outsiders could never have been able to have taken advantage of, right? So guys like Joe Kennedy got out of their barely unscathed, right? Pretty much you got it right. With one extra feature, I think, which is set against a backdrop of just wild euphoria. So I think it's the piece, it's the debt piece, meaning just the amount of credit and leverage in the system. That to me is the match that lights the fire.
Starting point is 00:04:29 There's always some semblance of euphoria because by default you have to get sort of a speculative frenzy going. And then when you sort of don't have enough transparency in the system, when you have people manipulating and doing all sorts of shenanigans, charlatans and frauds and everything, it gets complicated quick. All right. The other thing I got out of the book is that these were like Patricia. These were waspy people living in the 5th Avenue salons. They were living in Tuxedo Park. They were summering in Newport and hanging out in Greenwich. I mean, this was not, you know, these were not like old school. Like when you think of like the mob and Al Capone back in the 30s, this was a different style of crime, right? This was a totally different style of crime. And the truth was it really wasn't crime. I mean, because it was because there was no. rules. I mean, I think about this all the time. You know, sometimes I wonder what I would have done back then or you would have done back then or any of us would have done back then and not to excuse the behavior because I think as you read it, especially in the context of today, you'd say, oh, my goodness, this is criminal. This is wrong. At a minimum, this is immoral. But I always have found that one of
Starting point is 00:05:43 things that's so interesting about the markets is it's a business of people who think they're trying to outwit somebody else, right? Whoever's buying a stock thinks they're smarter than the guy they're selling it to. And whoever's selling the stock thinks that they're smarter than the guy who's buying it from them. So draw an analogy to today. Okay, so you obviously, you were influenced by your research on Too Big to Fail. You know, what's interesting, I finished this book about two weeks ago and I read Too Big
Starting point is 00:06:11 to Fail about, I don't know, 12 or 13 years ago. So I went back and reread that book as well. Oh, God bless you. And it was interesting because you definitely took the elements of that book, the motif, the individual stories. You're in the boardroom. You're talking to the people's spouses. You're talking to the people's friends. And you got a lot of interesting characters in this book, Winston Churchill, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:06:39 But I guess the thing that took me back about this book is that it wasn't really just a single day event. It was like a slow motion crash leading up to the event. So tell us a little bit about that. Tell us about some of the things that went haywire while the fuse was burning in the late 1920s. Well, that's the thing that I think is oftentimes misunderstood about 1929 and frankly the Great Depression. And I'll say it was my own misunderstanding too. One that, you know, it wasn't just there was one, you know, horrific crash. It really was this sort of slow motion situation. In truth, You know, sometimes people talk about Black Thursday, Black Tuesday, Black Monday. There were a lot of Black days.
Starting point is 00:07:23 I mean, like a lot of Black days. In fact, the stock market effectively fell, when you really think about the fall, close to 50%, but really between the months of October and middle of November of 1929. So it wasn't just one moment. But then, oddly enough, by the end of 1929, the stock market was actually only down 17%. which I think I know surprised me, didn't even make the lists of some of the most important stories of the year. And that's because I think there was a misunderstanding in that moment
Starting point is 00:07:55 of actually how many families were just completely wiped out because of the leverage and debt that they had taken on. So it wasn't just that the stock market had gone to 50% and they could hold their stocks that, you know, and the equity value had gone down. It's that they were all getting margin called and having to sell their homes and mortgage their houses and, you know, had lost everything.
Starting point is 00:08:13 And then it wasn't even just that the cram, It was somehow going to impact the economy by itself, which it was, but not, didn't have to be the Great Depression. It was really the first domino of then a series of policy choices. And I try to put you in the room with Hoover as well. And with, you know, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury Secretary and inside the Fed and then Roosevelt. And you see just the mistake after mistake after mistake that they made that made the whole situation that much worse. everything from raising taxes to implement any tariffs to the Fed, obviously, you know, trying to hold on to the gold standard. I mean, well, the president was trying to hold on the gold standard.
Starting point is 00:08:52 The Fed, you know, wasn't flushing the system with money the way, frankly, Ben Bernanke did in 2008, which I think was, by the way, one of the lessons that he learned when he did his PhD at Princeton about the Great Depression. So I think you're sort of looking at a story that's not really just about 1929, the story, and I intended actually when I first became the project, I thought, Oh, the book's going to start on February or, you know, January 1st, 1999 will end at the end of the year. And I realized really to tell the story, you really had to, the full breath of it. In fact, goes at least through 1933 and at least the way I've tried to tell it actually all the way through 1940. The two big players to me, and you mentioned Benjamin Strong, of course, who passes away.
Starting point is 00:09:34 He's the first Fed chair. Right. He passes away prior to the crash. And Ahmed in his book and you and your book suggest that he probably would have have been a little less tight on the Federal Reserve range and probably would have created more laxity and more liquidity had he not asked. So, right? So there's a little bit of a single man theory here. But let's go to Hoover because, I mean, Hoover basically the way you describe, I'm always thinking, geez, I mean, you could have had a monkey flipping coins and at least
Starting point is 00:10:03 would have gotten half of the decisions right in a coin toss, but he was going nine out of ten for getting decisions wrong. So talk about him, some of the mistakes he was making and about the way, he was a great guy and a very classy guy and he made a lot of money and he was a charitable guy. You know, he did all those things, the food programs for veterans and stuff, but he really got this wrong. He had a terrible blind spot as a presidential leader. What was that? Well, the biggest blind spot was that he really believed that the stock market was somehow disconnected from the real economy. I mean, that was probably his number one mistake. He also thought somehow that it was, you know, that he had the ability, which he did not, to jawbone his way out of it,
Starting point is 00:10:46 which was, you know, this idea that he could sort of tell the public what, something that actually wasn't really happening and tell him basically go put a smile on your face and that they would have a smile on their face. By the way, this is sort of akin to what was going on. You know, when President Biden was telling people that, you know, there was no inflation in the country and, like, they didn't understand what was happening. people felt it and they felt it in 1930, 1930, 1931, 1932. You know, Hoover implements these tariffs, which every economist in America is telling
Starting point is 00:11:18 him it was a terrible idea in large part because back in 1920s when he was trying to win the election, he went around telling farmers, you know, I'm going to try to protect you. I'll put tariffs in place if you elect me. So he felt that he needed to make good on his pledge. Again, sort of another terrible mistake. He was also being advised by a guy that frankly he didn't really like that much. Andrew Mellon, but Andrew Mellon was a true capitalist in the sense that his view was, if you made a lot of money great, if you lost a lot of money, great.
Starting point is 00:11:46 So I think there's a whole bunch of things going on along the way that just really unraveled things. Going online with that Express VPN is like forgetting to mute yourself on a Zoom meeting. Do you really want your coworkers to hear you trash talking them? Because all your traffic flows through their servers, internet service providers, including mobile network providers, know every single website you visit. It's terrible. And in the U.S. ISPs are legally allowed to sell that information to advertisers.
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Starting point is 00:13:41 So Roosevelt comes in and more or less does the opposite of Hoover, right? So take us through some of the steps. Well, so that's actually, I mean, by the way, I'm so curious how you think about it, given how much you know about transition, you know, presidential transitions and the like, you know, one of the things that could have prevented some of the bank failures. And by the way, we ultimately had something like 9,000 bank failures in America was that Hoover really did understand by 1932. Now, 32, 33, he was late to the party that he needed to try to bail out the banks. He needed to try to declare a bank holiday or do something relatively drastic to try to save the banking system.
Starting point is 00:14:19 But he was so, what's the word? He almost refused to do it. He was doctrinaire. He was a very doctrinaire guy. He had, you know, he was the opposite of George W. Bush, because in too big to fail, you have this great scene where Bush is talking to Paulson and Bush is like, well, I'm a conservative. I don't want to do that. And Paulson's like, okay, where the whole system's going to blow up. Right. So then Bush says, okay, then we're going to do that. That's a left-leaning strategy to dump a trillion dollars into the banks. But I felt like Hoover was, you know, he missed the beat there with that. Right. I think he was both doctrinaire, but also embarrassed, to be honest with you, because to some degree, because he had told people for so long that there was no problem, I think it was hard to go back on that. I think that's one of the reasons.
Starting point is 00:15:06 So he was so desperate. At this point, he's now lost the election, knows they need to do something about the banking system, and he goes to Roosevelt secretly and begs him and says, look, I want, I'm going to go do this. I want to do something, but I want you to approve of it. I need you to endorse it. Otherwise, the public is not going to buy into it.
Starting point is 00:15:25 And of course, Roosevelt basically has lies to his face. says, well, I'm not doing that and I'm never going to do that, basically. And of course, Roosevelt's saying that to Hoover because the truth is that he does want to do all those things, but he needs a clean slate. He doesn't want to be attached to this, you know, Hoover doing it first. But as a result, they lost actually some serious time and frankly, hundreds of banks probably as a result of it. Yeah, which caused a further contraction, right? And the other thing, you know, you were great on the concepts of deflation in this book. I mean, the deflation in the economy, you know, we always talk about inflation, Andrew,
Starting point is 00:16:04 but deflation destroys debt-laden economies because you just can't pay back the debt and you watch these people get back their farm equipment or turn back the keys to their capital equipment, their houses. I mean, it was just absolutely devastating. But, you know, you mentioned presidential transitions, you know, they're very similar. You know, egomaniacs are fighting with each other and they don't want each other to get any credit for anything. And it was exemplified there. I guess the story between Wall Street and Washington. You know, like when I read your two books side to side, I'm like, wow, I mean, that clash has been
Starting point is 00:16:44 going on for a hundred years. And it's the same story. It's the same story. Wall Streeters feel like the Washington people know nothing. The Washington people feel like the Wall Street people are just greedy pigs feeding at the trow, both feel slighted by each other, right? Take us into some of that intrigue. Well, look, I knew that I could write this story or thought I had an opportunity to write this story when I began to fully form and appreciate the story between two, I think, very unique individuals in the context of Charlie Mitchell, who was the CEO of National City, which goes on to become Citigroup, he was running what was the biggest bank in the country.
Starting point is 00:17:25 he was as famous as Jamie Diamond but probably less conservative than Jamie Diamond in terms of how he thinks about the market. He called him Sunshine Charlie. He used to always say
Starting point is 00:17:36 he thought we should sell stocks the way we sell neckties. So he wanted to sort of demystify finance. And he was largely responsible for really almost creating the credit market so that people could buy stock on margin. And people were doing this,
Starting point is 00:17:51 you know, 10 to 1. You'd put a buck, they'd give you 10, they'd loan you $10. because of Sunshine Charlie. And on the other side of the story, and this is where I really thought, okay, this could be the spine of the story,
Starting point is 00:18:01 this is the clash of the egos, is a guy named Carter Glass, Senator Virginia. I think a lot of your audience will know him better because his name is attached to the bill that ultimately breaks up to banks in 1933. But Carter Glass was the Elizabeth Warren of his time, and he was railing for years
Starting point is 00:18:20 about this thing called Mitchellism. I mean, he used to call it Mitchellism, how he believed Charlie Mitchell and Wall Street were going to just ruin the economy that speculation got out of control. He was trying to come up with every, you know, possible way to, you know, damp down some of the speculation. At one point, he was proposing ideas to, you know, put taxes on, you know, stock trading to end speculation, for example. And interestingly, he did have a sense, he was a smart guy. He understood the economy and finance pretty well. He was largely responsible, actually,
Starting point is 00:18:52 for the creation of the Federal Reserve and the bill that actually put that in place back in 1913. And so you could sort of see the Washington Wall Street fight through the prism of those two individuals. So, Andrew, I love that story about Mitchell, by the way. I followed it right to the end and, you know, his eventual exoneration at trial, but also just the things that he went through and the reputation damaging. And the way you wrote about Lamont and J.P. Morgan's son. It was classic, right? The one guy's working. The other guy's like a dilatat doesn't want to get his hands dirty, right? I mean, it's just everything that you and I have experienced in life.
Starting point is 00:19:29 But I want to talk in a Dr. Frankenstein sort of a way, okay, in terms of like how you create life, you know, Mary Shelley, Dr. Frankenstein, but I want Andrew Sork in the channel how you create a crash. Speculation. Hoover ever missteps in economic policy. banking, wild west in the banking. Fractional banking system with the Wild West and the people don't even understand if they put their money in the bank, they could lose it if the bank has credit missteps. Take us through the base ingredients and tell us if anything is different today and if it isn't different, what would be, what should we be worried about?
Starting point is 00:20:17 Okay, so look, the match that lights the fire every time you saw it in, you read too big to fail or you reread too big to fail, the match that fire was too much leverage in the system in the context of subprime loans. Leveraging confidence, right? Because you had these supplied modes that were AAA rated. Yep. People are like, well, I'm going to get the money back. I mean, doesn't keep leveraging them, right? The CDO market, you know. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:20:41 And I would argue effectively that in 1928, in 1929, it was. It was margin loans. It largely was margin loans. Now, you said, could it happen again? And where are we today? The good news in my mind is, look, there was no SEC back then. You know, even if you think the SEC is not doing a lot right now, still exists. There are people who are hopefully monitoring some of this. So some of the shenanigans I like to think aren't as significant as they were then. By the way, there was no bank capital requirements back then.
Starting point is 00:21:20 There was no rules. There was no insider trading rules. There was no nothing. So I like to believe that, yeah, we can have corrections. We can even have crashes, but they don't have to turn into depressions. So could you have a crash like 1999? Sure. Could you have a crash even like 2008?
Starting point is 00:21:41 Sure. But in both instances, you know, we did. come back a lot quicker than obviously what took place in 1929 than ultimately 30, 31, 32. And I think part of the answer is we've also learned that in those moments, you do flood the system with money. Now, one difference that is very different today than even 10 or 15 years ago or in 1999 or before, which I haven't really, I don't know the full extent of just what the implication would be, which is U.S. debt is so large. that it might make it more and more complicated to throw money at the problem.
Starting point is 00:22:19 So here we are. Back in 1929, there was a budget surplus, by the way back then. We hardly had any debt. But I think the biggest thing is leverage and the biggest thing is where's the leverage and knowing about it and having transparency around it. And I do have some worries today about those issues. So we have the euphoria and the AI bubble that's clearly taking place. There's indiscriminate spending. I think everyone would agree with that. Then the question is where's the leverage and is there too much leverage in the system? And I think partially because of the private credit today, which is to say that so much of it is in the shadows, I don't think we know right this moment. I don't know. What do you think?
Starting point is 00:22:57 Well, yeah, I mean, I'm worried about it. I mean, one of the analogies that you brought up that had me worried was what the Federal Reserve was doing in 29. They were tightening credit after the bubble that had already formed. Jerome Powell is sort of, you know, he's taking balance sheet back. He's shrinking the balance he did at a time where you've got an explosion in corporate debt. I mean, it's a record corporate debt. And it's direct corporate debt. So it may not hurt the banking industry, but it will collapse the credit markets, which will seize the economy, right?
Starting point is 00:23:29 I mean, so I'm worried about that. And also the thing you also brought up, which I want to reference is the inequality. So I think the numbers you used in 1929, it was like 25% of the, what the 1% controlled 25% of the countries, wealth, but today, Andrew, doing the calculation is a little bit over 30%. And so I'm wondering if that extreme inequality, okay, is hurting the country. Like, you know, for sure, as an economist, the extreme inequality actually hurts innovation. Because what happens is the rich just sit on everything. Right. And then they pay the government not to break them up. Right. So, you know, they sit, They sit there.
Starting point is 00:24:10 They lobby the government. Don't break up my Mag 7 company. And even though the irony is breaking up AT&T enabled us to create the Mag 7, they don't want to get any breakup, right? So when you get wealth concentration, you weirdly get a lack of innovation. So I think not only are you right about that, there's one other feature of it, which is that once you get into a serious inequality situation,
Starting point is 00:24:36 people start to be desperate and start to, ordinary individuals who are suffering from the inequality part of this take risks that they otherwise would not, right? You know, a lot of what was happening was people really wanted access to the lottery ticket. They wanted to buy the lottery ticket. And, you know, the truth is that when most people buy a lottery ticket, most people lose. And I think that's actually, you know, a big feature of why people were making some of the bets that they were making in the late 20s. They saw people making money. They wanted in on it.
Starting point is 00:25:09 You know, I'm curious where you land on this. I think there's a lot of people who've actually, and they've, by the way, they've benefited from this. They've looked at Bitcoin and crypto as a lottery ticket for themselves. And actually, so far, you know, on the whole, if they did it early, it's paid off in a very, very big way. But there's also a lot of leverage in some of those trades. You know, look at some of the interesting option markets around Bitcoin and Ethereum and some of these others with it. You can do it for 20 times, 50 times. I mean, I don't know how much of a big piece of the market that is in crypto, but obviously,
Starting point is 00:25:44 crypto was something that didn't exist in 1929. Well, listen, this is me interviewing you, but I will interject here a little bit and tell you that that was the first thing I thought of. When I closed the book, where is the Wild West right now? The Wild West was the stock market in 1929. The Wild West right now is the unregulated crypto market and the unregulated global crypto market. Now, the good news is it's only about $4 trillion. So if the whole thing implodes, it'll be painful, but it won't destroy the whole system. But I'm going to say something in praise
Starting point is 00:26:20 of Gary Gensler. Okay, you're ready? Okay. Buckle up. Oh, my goodness. Right. In praise of Gary Gensler. Okay. Get your seatbelt on. So weirdly by being politically motivated and blocking the cash or the spot Bitcoin ETF. Like if you, like when I took administrative law, and I've come on your show, the futures ETF is approved in November of 21, you would look at administrative law statute and say, okay, though the cash one will be approved within six months because it's the goal is not to be arbitrary or capricious. But Gensler shuts it down.
Starting point is 00:26:59 He's very politically motivated. He loses the court case, is evidence of how politically motivated it is. weirdly he sets in motion the car crash of Three Arrows, Sam Bankman Freed, those blockchain lending companies all imploded. And he took so much leverage out of the system that when it was time to get the ETF approved, like when BlackRock got its ETF approved, he had strained all the excess out of the system. Now, that excess is building again.
Starting point is 00:27:31 So I'm worried about it. you're worried about it. I think smart people should be. But weirdly, you know, we could still be living in a world of Sam Bankman-Freed because maybe that floating of the ETF would have masked over some of the nefarious things that he was doing, right? That's interesting. That's interesting. Look, my colleagues in the industry probably get pissed at me for making that comment, But I think he weirdly helped the industry survive because there was a lot of nefarious things. A lot of 1929 things going on in the industry due to the lack of regulation.
Starting point is 00:28:11 So all right, well, we're down to the last five minutes. So what I do with my producers, Andrew, is I come up with five words. Okay. Five thoughts. We call them from your book. Okay. So it's almost like a raw shot test. I'm going to say the thing and then you respond.
Starting point is 00:28:26 Okay. You're ready? Here we go. All right. Right. I say the word crash. You say what? Pain. Okay. I say the words, two words, Wall Street. Complicated. Complicate. All right. Give me another, just give me one more sentence. Go ahead. Matching of wits. Matching of wits.
Starting point is 00:28:50 See, when I hear the word Wall Street, I think of good and bad. There's a good, is arterial. That's what I'm calling complicated. Right. Arterial structure, flow of capital. Creates innovation. But then there's a lot of riffraff in Wall Street, as we both know, right? And that's the thing about all of this, which is, you know, you read a book like this and work on a book like this for all this time. And you start to think, okay, you're going to become like a Cassandra.
Starting point is 00:29:18 But the truth is that it's been much more profitable to be a professional optimist than a professional skeptic over the last 100 years. No question. All right. All right. So we did Wall Street. Let's keep going. And number three, let's say the word Washington.
Starting point is 00:29:34 And I don't mean George. I mean D.C. Mistakes. Yeah. That's my word. Mistakes. See, I, you know, everyone calls Washington a swamp. I see it as a gold-plated hot tub.
Starting point is 00:29:47 I think these guys sit in the hot tub and they pass the Cabanos and the Cristal and hang out together. And if you're with them, you know, you sit and bubble up in the hot tub. If you're not with them, they throw you out of there. You know, it's just, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a little bit. It's a... I don't know. Maybe they've installed a hot tub in the White House.
Starting point is 00:30:03 I don't even think it's that fancy, though. It's an ugly place. Let's just put it that way, okay? I mean, I... You spent more time there than I have. I got my 11-day PhD on how bad it works. You know, it's ugly. All right.
Starting point is 00:30:14 I say 2008. You say what? You say 2008, and I say... I say sequel. As in sequel to 1929. Yeah, I say a rhyme. A rhyme. Right. History doesn't necessarily exactly repeat itself, but it was rhyming with 1929, right?
Starting point is 00:30:37 100%. Okay. So I hear the word of rhyme. If you're 1929, we'll end with that. I say the words 1929. And I'll give you the last word. What do you say? Hold on you say 1929. What do you think? Yeah, I say 1929. I want to hear what you think first. The greatest lesson. See, I'm going to tell you something that I really think about your book, okay? You wrote a book about the downfall of the economy and the downfall and the crash. But when I closed the book, I thought, okay, this was the day that America grew up. This is the day where America said, okay, we're going to get a leader in to put a welfare system in and to provide a safety net for the injigent. This is the day that America is going to start to institutionalize government,
Starting point is 00:31:26 which, believe it or not, led to the institutionalization. and mechanisms that allowed us to win the war, which set up 80 years of tremendous prosperity for the West. So it's a weird thing, but it was a very bad thing that happened, Andrew. But it was a great lesson. It set us up. It set us up. For what was what Andrews once said was the American century.
Starting point is 00:31:52 Anyway, I congratulate you on having a bestselling book. You know, my books are bestsellers, Andrew, but they're all stacked up here in my base. I mean, that's the problem with my books, but not yours, Andrew. This one got the bestseller list in the first week. Thank you. The title of the book is 1929 inside the greatest crash in Wall Street history. Now, it shattered the nation, but also possibly birthed the nation.
Starting point is 00:32:17 And so I like that. I like the optimism. Yeah, I think it did. I really do. I think it did. I agree. In fact, you know, I mean, I think Roosevelt looked around and said, you know, as Rahm Emanuel once said, and you quote him in 2000.
Starting point is 00:32:30 Let's not waste the crisis. Okay, the crisis would be a wasted opportunity. And Roosevelt looked at this and said, okay, we've got to protect the indigent. And even though some thought he was a traitor to his class, in many ways, he saved his class. He saved his class from a nationalist fervor, an America First movement in the late 30s. He saved us from all different types of things. And it started in 1929. There you go.
Starting point is 00:32:56 All right. Well, anyway, thank you for joining us, man. Thank you. Congratulations again, brother.

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