The Compound and Friends - It's not 1929, but it might be - Andrew Ross Sorkin

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

On episode 224 of The Compound and Friends, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Downtown Josh Brown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ are joined by Andrew Ross Sorkin to discuss: 1929 vs today, looking back at the SPAC mania, the art of the interview, Andrew's dream guest, and much more! This episode is sponsored by VanEck. Learn more about the VanEck Semiconductor ETF: https://vaneck.com/SMHCompound Grab a copy of Andrew's new book, 1929. Sign up for The Compound Newsletter and never miss out: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thecompoundnews.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠twitter.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tiktok.com/@thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay. Well, you were thinking short sleeves? I was thinking to go, I can go full squawk on you, just take the coat off. I could do whatever you, I could, I could go down to, go down to my t-shirt. So, Andrew, I was with my, my sister and brother-in-law for Hanukkah. Okay, we're going. And he said, like, if you want to go, go. So he said, like, anybody special comment up on the show that I might know, I said,

yeah, actually, he's a big, he's a big, he's a big, new time, and said, yeah, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, what's working is going on. He goes, we go to the same couple. What did you say? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. How about that?

Wait, might not? Let me hear you. Andrew goes to the same temple as my sister. Same temple. Same temple. They share a synagogue. That's funny. Small world.

But not the synagogue. So I grew up going to Westchester Reform Temple, not, not Westchester. What town of Westchester did you go out? You are a Westchester guy. Scarsdown, New York. Josh and I are Merrick. Right. We're Long Island.

It's the Westchester of the South. Oh, but you know, but you don't probably. know this. My father grew up in Merrick. I did not know that. Horthorn. Add that to the list. Horthorn.

North. Is that North Merck? Yeah, right near the high school. No shit. On the back side of the high school. Calhoun. If you know where that is. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. We grew up there. I mean, I lived there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is Josh. We live in Merrick. Yeah. So my grandmother

lived, she was 1002 years old. We used to literally go, Especially the last five, ten years. We used to go out every weekend to see her. So we have to add that to the list. Andrew Sorkins, not you, but your family. Yeah. Do you know who else?

So Paul Krugman. Krugman. So I just moved houses, but the house that I lived in previously, he grew up in the house across the street, America. I'll do you one better. Not in the same era. No, he's a little bit older than I am. Mario Puzzo wrote the godfather in Merrick.

I'll give you one other. Can I give you another? My grandmother, who was a schoolteacher, taught the Ben of Ben and Jerry's. At Calhoun. Yeah. We've got some people. You've got a lot of good people.

We have Debbie Gibson. Oh, right. You do have Debbie Gibson. We have Lindsey Lohan. Amy Fisher. And her driving instructor mother. We have Amy Fisher. Wow.

Doug Ellen, creator of entourage. Of course. Kenny Dichter. I mean, this town, Josh Brown. There's a lot going on in the house town. There's something in the water. There's something going on, but we have like a big celebrity town. I mean, you're like basically one of us, sort of, kind of.

I mean, your dad. My dad, but by way, also my dad's brother, my uncle, actually famous teacher in America. How famous? Pretty famous in that he... Infamous? No, no. He actually still teaches. Oh, Mr. Sorkin, I had him for gym.

You did not. You did not. Steve Sorkin teaches Atlanta in Washington, D.C., or out. Outside of Washington, you see. And I can't tell you, in our family, more people come back to me on the street randomly and say, they haven't. Your uncle taught me and changed my life. And for us, like, that's, like, the whole game.

You related to Aaron Sorkin or no? Totally unrelated. But do people ask you? Do they ask me? I mean, I went on, years ago, I went on the John Stewart Show. And at the end, he says, Aaron Ross Sorkin, everybody. Very confident. Thank you.

But by the way, I worked for Aaron. Probably now a decade ago, I was the consultant on the third season of the newsroom. Were you really? And I don't know if you remember this. I like the newsroom. There was a, the, what had happened was Aaron wanted to create a merger, sort of a plot line around the merger of ACN,

which was the cable network. The fake news network, yeah. And I don't know if you remember, there were these different family members, and so I went out to L.A. And spent a lot of time. It was a lot of cool. Oh, do you know that I served as the technical advisor?

I do. Of course I know. What do you think I live under a rock? Did you do that for the first year for them? No. I helped create the show. No, I know. But did you like ever help with the technical?

Of course. Yeah. Andrew, they should have merged with Waystar Royco, just like a crossover. Yeah. Like multiple universes. Oh, you're saying between billions and succession. Sure. All right.

Guys, it's an important man. Are we, are we camera ready? Not that important. No, no. By the way, this is always, I always think the best part of a pod is before the pod actually starts. Well, we agree with that. That's a big part of our pod. And I love, I love the sound effects.

I just, I want to say, who is managing that you? That's, that's, that's, that's, no, you're going right off the laptop. I'm like, a player coach, producer. But this is a little bit like, you got, like, it's almost like Kramer with the, with the different buttons. We have different sounds. Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop the clock. Here's a word from our sponsor. Today's episode is sponsored by Vanek.

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positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to an all-new edition of the best investing podcast in the world. We're very modest here, Andrew. Guys, we are in the presence of literal financial media greatness. I have been looking forward to this one for a really long time. Thank God you wrote a book. I don't know how else we would have gotten you here.

Are you kidding me? Can I just tell you the energy in this room is outrageous? I don't know what's happened. I think maybe you put the headphones on. Yeah. You get the music rolling. That's right. That's right.

You get the applause kicking. That's right. And everybody just sort of gets into it. You're not wearing the headphones over there. So can you feel this right now? Honestly, there's like, there's an energy going on right this minute. It's palpable. She's going to hear it on Spotify.

All right. Andrew Ross Sorkin is an award-winning financial journalist, co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box and a longtime columnist for the New York Times where he founded the influential deal book newsletter that then basically became the business section. Yeah? No. Close enough?

No, no. We've got a lot of things going on at the time. He is the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail and most recently, 1929, inside the greatest crash in Wall Street history and how it shattered a nation. Sorkin also co-created the hit Showtime series Billions and has won major journalism awards, including an Emmy for his interviewing work. Finally, Sorkin's family hails from Merrick. Bing.

There you go. There you go. All right. It's a real kind of thing. Clap that out. All right. Let's do this. Is it 1929?

It is not 1929. Why? What are the differences that are overwhelming the similarities? Look, a lot of people are talking 1929 all over again right now. Thanks to you. Thanks to you. I think the truth is maybe it's 1999.

We can discuss that. Okay. But the distinction between 1929 and now. is so different in the following way. Back in 929, there was no SEC. There was no insider trading rules. Manipulation, it was legal, normalized. It was completely cool.

Yeah. There was no FDIC insurance for banks. So you had runs on banks. 9,000 banks go out of business. You had no capital requirements. Right. You had nothing. You literally, it was, people talk about the Wild West.

This was like truly the Wild West. Yeah. And so I like to. to believe. It was almost like an unlicensed casino. Completely. Yeah. And there was just, and there was just no norms. And forget even about questions about morality or immorality or amorality. It just, it was a whole, in a business of trying to, one side trying to out with the other side, this was the sort of the ultimate manifestation of that. Also, the technology sucked, to be honest with you. I mean, I think one of the reasons that the crash was as violent as it was in

1929 was because literally the stock prices on the wall were like four, five, seven hours out of sync with what was actually happening. And if you had any pride at all, you just sold indiscriminately. And that's what it just sucked the confidence down the system. And then the last piece is, to me, every major systemic crisis that this country and anywhere has ever had has been a function of debt, credit, too much leverage in the system. you could go to a brokerage back then and literally give them a buck and they would give you $10. Yeah.

So, I mean, people are playing 10 to 1. And so all of a sudden the margin calls are coming when the down draft happens. Today, we have rules. We have regulations. We can discuss a lot of guardrails are coming off. There's new products and all sorts of new crazy things happening. There's also debt building up in places we don't know about. But I don't think there's a sort of 10 to 1 situation.

I do think the technology is pretty good. I mean, you can either middle a second on Robin Hood or whatever you want to, you know, figure out exactly where things are. So for all of those reasons, I don't think we're in 1920. All right. So I want to take that a step further. I'm glad to hear that that's your take. And one last thing?

Please. I think there's a misconception, which was actually one of the reasons I want to write the book, which is that 1929 somehow that there's some kind of terrible collapse, and then all of a sudden there's a great depression. And there's like 25% unemployment in the country, 9,000 banks out of business. Left out, smooth haulie, left out rates being raised. A lot of steps in between. There's like a hundred.

It's like 1929 was the first domino of a series of dominoes that go, including terrible policy choices, political choices and other things. It wasn't preordained that you had to land in the morass you did. It's so good that you didn't say it was 1929. From one Merrick Boy to another, we were ready to light you up. No. Well, wow. You were going for it. I'm of the mind that we are in for a series of crises.

None that reached the levels of 1929 ever again. I don't think it's possible. I just think we're going to have these like market scares and we'll have recessions. And that's perfectly normal. 1929 is probably impossible. And I have like a lot of reasons why I believe we could not repeat that. again, we could have worse, you could have a nuclear war. But 1929 specifically can't be repeated for a lot of reasons.

I'll throw about one reason it could. There's only really one way it gets there. Micro strategy. If you believe that debt is the match that lights the fire of every real crash. Yes. One of the lessons that we learned actually in the aftermath of 1929 that we actually enacted in 2008 and again, actually during the pandemic, is when you have a crisis, you're supposed to throw money at the problem.

That's actually what Ben Bernanke learned. By the way, doing his thesis at Princeton on the Great Depression, and that was everything they didn't do. So now we have this playbook, which is, okay, looks like there's a crisis. Fix it. Fix it.

Spend the money. It doesn't matter. Back in 1929, there was a budget surplus in America. We're not in that position. And so what I just don't know is whether there is some kind, I've always thought there would be like some invisible line in the debt in America. So we have $38 trillion dollars of debt right now.

Is there a day where we actually do have some kind of massive pullback in the market or something terrible happens? The Fed says, and the politicians say, we're going to bail out everybody. We're going to spend $5, $10 trillion because that's what we have to do. The playbook says to do that because if we don't do that, we're going to be in this other mess. But in the process of doing that, all of a sudden the bond market says, no, mas. This is not going to work for us anymore. And we're going to have to pay extraordinary interest rates. and then all of a sudden you get into some kind of terrible austerity spiral, and then you actually do land in 1932.

Yeah. So that's, that is the path. So I'm not suggesting that happens, but that's the thing I worry about. I agree. You absolutely need the bond market to not do that. But I think it's very difficult for the bond market to do that because we are ourselves the money by and large. People stand-up comics like to do late-night TV and talk about how we're like in Hock to China. China's been selling treasuries for 10 years.

We own the, we own the treasuries, for the most part, is one very important piece of the equation. Josh is loaded up on treasuries personally. We owe the money to ourselves. I think it's important. But the second part of this is society was not built around the stock market 100 years ago, the weight of it is today. Right. I was talking to a 1929 truther the other day. What is that?

And he was not counteracting the importance and how vital your book is for everyone to read. but his comment was, I'm trying to think of who it was, his comment was less than 3% of the U.S. population owned stocks in 1929. What's a 1929? And number two, nobody jumped out the window. That's a fabrication. Like there were like one or two suicides. It was not waves of men like loosening their ties,

stepping onto a roof and splattering on the ground. By the way, interesting stat on that. Yeah. Which is, so there were people who were jumping out of windows, by the way. But not like by the whole. But not like by the hundreds in the popular imagination. And even even crazier about it, if you go and look at suicide rates, 2028 compared to 1929, it was actually marginally less. And the builders were not very tall.

Let's be honest. Back in the day. But I'll give you a story which you will appreciate at both Merrick boys. My grandfather, Sidney Sorkin no longer alive but used to live in Merrick. Rest in peace. He was down there with his brother as a messenger boy. Oh, wow. And he did watch somebody jump out of a window.

Yeah. And he used to tell us that story over and over again, not just tell us a story. He was so psychologically scarred by that whole scenario and situation. He never bought one stock in his life. How did you talk about that? It's crazy. The whole time. There's a lot of people whose formative experience is a financial crisis.

And then that's the information they pass on to their next generation, that it's all risk. It's all speculation. It's dangerous. And we have some characters, by the way, in the book that you shoot themselves in the head, at least two. The characters in the book were amazing. But, Andrew, you got very lucky with the timing of this book. Because when did you start to write this? Or when did you think about it?

Like seven years ago? I started working on this at the end in 2016 long time ago. So needless to say, you could not have foreseen where we are today, obviously. No. So very fortuitous that we're even having this conversation. Why did you write this? Like, where did the idea come? What makes you set out for?

Because there are great crash books that have been written. Why did you do this? Two things happened. One was people used to ask me after I wrote Too Big to Fail, how does 2008 compared to 1929, I didn't know the answer. Like I really didn't know. And so I went on my own journey, read other books, profiles, biographies, and you're right.

There's some great books about this period, the Galbraith book being the most famous. The Livermore book. There's so many books. The Brian Burroughs book about Livermore, not reminiscences, but the biography. And there's some. There's some other great books as well. There's a lot of good ones. For me, for whatever reason, the book I kept looking for was that sort of inside the room

TikTok book that actually puts you like right there where you could feel the characters. You wrote the movie. And I couldn't find that book. There were a lot of great books, but I couldn't find that book. And that was the book that I wanted to read. And that was the book that ultimately I wanted to write. And I wasn't sure you could even do it. I think one of the reasons it took me this long was I, to get to the sort of granular details

where you could put somebody in the room and say, you know, this table that we're sitting at here is made out of wood and it's dark brown and this is what they said to each other and, you know, drinking a glass of walk. Like all those little details you had to find from old transcripts and depositions and letters and memos and diaries and all sorts of crazy things. And that's what was, that became the sort of wild journey I went on. You got your hands on some materials that no one's ever seen before during the research that you were doing for the book. Tell us about that.

So the biggest sort of unlock in a way. which you don't hopefully feel odd enough in the book itself was convincing the New York Fed to give me the board minutes during that period. For some reason, 100 years later, they had never disclosed the board minutes. By the way, the current board minutes, they distribute them online. Who were they protecting? It's not a schedule. 100 years ago, you couldn't get them.

So I went through multi-year process effectively to try to convince them to give me these board minutes. In fact, the first time they gave me the minutes, they'd had a lawyer spent. and months prior, redacting parts of the minutes. Everybody's dead. It's okay. To give to me. So what do you think, what do you think they were worried about? You know, I've never gotten a full answer on that.

I think that back then, the truth is that the expectation of those executives and the people on that board was that this was like everything in the vault. Also, a lot of, all of them, interesting, a lot of the information that they were redacting was actually, bank information, not actually about the biggest banks, but about a lot of small banks from around the country that have been seeking money from the Fed, you know, trying to get bigger loans, effectively. So I don't know, but that, in a weird way, once I had that, because then I knew when the meetings were, where they were, what they were talking about at any given moment, a number of the major characters in the book were on the board of the Fed. Yeah. And so, well, I said, you don't hopefully feel the minutes in the,

the book. It gave me sort of a treasure map because then I knew Charlie Mitchell, who is a main character, I knew that if the meeting ended at three, I would say, I would say, I said, okay, well, who would have you talked to after the meeting? And then I'd go try to find the diaries and notes of like the five people he might have gone and talked to that after you. And then you'd hope you'd pray, basically. You know, I think I was talking to you about this.

He's, he's doing this while he is a full-time job. It's insane. While he is a full-time job. It's crazy. I was, one of the reasons it took so long was there were, there were long stretches. It's still an incredible feet. So I've been listened to a lot of audiobooks. I listen to yours.

And one of the things that's so interesting about the primary sources is that they even existed for your period of time, for earlier presidents, they had diaries. Unbelievable. It was all right there for you.

So I'm sure there was many periods of time where you're like, what you want to show it to somebody? You're like, this is insane. Oh, I couldn't believe it. But the truth and the sort of problem or challenge of writing the book was actually a lot of them didn't.

So it's all based on primary material, but for example, like Charlie Mitchell, there is no diary. The guy hardly wrote anything. He was like Hank Paulson. He basically didn't want to put anything on paper, ever. So what you had to rely on was say to yourself, okay, who did he work with who did keep diaries? You know, you had to find the aid, you know,

I got a lot. The butler. Honestly, some of the best stuff in the book about Hoover, or rather actually about Hoover and about Roosevelt, came from some of their aides who kept diaries. Yeah. And so it was a lot of trying to find these sort of secondary and tertiary characters and getting their information. And sometimes they'd recount in whatever it was that afternoon, talk to Charlie, he did this, I did this, da-da-da-da-da-da.

Or you'd find some deposition where they, because there was all these lawsuits afterwards, where the lawyers would actually say, hey, Charlie, so you were here? What did you say? You talked to your wife? What did you say? And then they were able to read for that? What did you say? You were able to read through all of the depositions? Yeah, yeah.

And then they interviewed the wife. And then the wife would say, yeah, I was in the kitchen. And this is what I said back to Charlie. And then all of a sudden you go, ah, I have a scene here. On the Hoover thing, I thought it was particularly hilarious that he called it. He gave it the word depression because he didn't want it to be called a panic. Thought a panic was a bad word. Brilliant.

Thought he was trying to end the panic. Interestingly, he was one of those guys, by the way, kind of like Trump, kind of like Biden, thought that you could sort of jawbone the economy, get people to believe something that wasn't actually something they couldn't feel. It's about confidence. It was just like if you smiled and felt good that things would get better. And I think we've seen that play. We saw that play in 29.

We've seen it now. Did you come away from all of that research with sort of like an informal list of the people, not the policies, but the people themselves who you think are the most culpable for what ended up happening? Or is it too big to pin it on any one or two people? I think it's probably too big to pin it on any one person. For me, it was more... Was it more politicians or more Wall Street people? Like, who made the bigger mistakes?

My expectation is never to suggest... I think Wall Street does what Wall Street is going to do. Like, that's just what it is. And so then the question is, how do you put the guardrails around that? Can you jump in front of the train to stop the train? Okay. Kind of thing. And that, I think, is probably both a political,

issue and potentially a Federal Reserve issue. And by the way, both of them, and I think you see it in the book, are grappling that spring of 1929 with the question in their head. Things are getting out of control. What do we do about this? Interest rates were like a main character. Right. And look, the same debate we're having now, you know, should they cut interest rates? Should they increase? Like, that's what they were doing. That was like, and they thought should we increase rates so much to try to tamp down the speculation. But if we do that, we tip over the entire economy. And by the way, politically will we get killed? And interestingly, back then, it wasn't that they were worried that, you know, Hoover was

going to kill in the way I think some of the Fed might worry about Trump today, but more about the idea that the Fed was so new. It'd been born in 1913. It hadn't survived an actual crisis yet. Some people had called it an experiment. They were still calling an experiment. And they'd gotten killed in 1920, 1921. There had been a sort of mini crash.

And they had been blamed for it. And so they think they were worried, are they just going to, you know, forgetting about getting called in front of Congress? So they're just going to, would Congress just get rid of them? Presidents and Congress have gotten rid of banks of the United States before. Like famously, the first two or three bank of the United States entities were a president would come in, Jackson, and say, we don't need this shit. Get rid of it. So it was a legitimate concern.

I wonder if you have a strong view on the role that gold and exchange rates and the dollar, like what was the, what do you think was the fulcrum there? Look, I think the biggest fulcrum there. was we were still on the gold standard. And that meant that what we're doing today, the lesson that we learned was we need to print money and just flood the system with cash. Back then, as long as you were living on the gold standard, you could not do such a thing.

You would have to recall gold from elsewhere to sit in the bank and reserve. Yep. And so the big debate that was happening was if you got off the gold standard would like, would the world like fall off as its axis? What are all these dollars even worth? Right.

I mean, that was the question. So there really even was a question. question happening as this is all unfolding about just like what is money right and that was sort of another story i probably didn't even get as deep into that in the story as i as i'd love to but that was sort of another component part of this as as you were writing the book like i loved it by the way it was amazing god bless you think what you did that was so special it read like a movie it read like a script it was a character narrative of all of these different players i'm sure you've thought about this becoming a tv show or a movie or whatever but like taking that a step for

further. Did you have actors in your head? No, no, never. In fact, people have said to me, like, who should play what? I've, even I mean, I've thought of it since then, but there was never a moment. And I never even thought about it as a movie necessarily. It's like, it's a, like an HBO

series, I feel like. But I never even thought, but I'm saying, as I was writing the book, it wasn't smiled, are you in talks? Yeah. You went. You win. He went. No, no, no. By the way, there was like a glit, there was like a a tweed in your eye when I said HBO. I'll go even straight in that. No, we've, we've talked to all sorts folks about it and hopefully one day something will happen but and maybe it will maybe won't but i think i

was thinking more no no i think i was writing the book more like did you ever read barbarians at the gate of course or den of thieves like those are the books that i classic loving yeah and i don't think that jim stuart necessarily was when he was writing that book the den of thieves was thinking this could be a movie or or or brian borrars was thinking that i just wanted to write it in a way where you and my mother and everybody could read it and just sort of like read it on a beach. You could read either on a beach or you could read it because you're like a serious academic. There are some very obviously cinematic set pieces in the book in 1929 that as you're reading it, you could just picture, oh man, I'd love to watch.

I'd love to watch this scene. Who do you want to cast in this movie? I would like to be a young J. Pierpont Morgan and I will do the most. I'll grow the most. I think Bouchemi's got to be in there. No, who should be in? Who should be in it? Who are like the three most important characters that we have to cast?

I think we got to cast Charlie Mitchell. Okay, fair. We got to cast Carter Glass. Okay. Because he's sort of like. What's the age range for Carter Glass? By the way, this is some older, older men. Right.

Older men. Harrison Ford. I do think we want Evangeline Adams in this movie. Evangeline is basically an astrologer that every banker in the city was going to visit. to basically tell them what to do, which was insane. It's amazing. She had a newsletter, by the way, back then that was bigger than deal book. She had 100,000 people subscribed to her newsletter.

She was the Tom DeMarc of the 1920s. Oh, let's get Willie Macee. We could do that. For just anything? For just anything? Yeah, absolutely. Make it happen. I will say Charlie Mitchell, handsome man could be like a George Clooney type.

Like, it just, you know, and we got to have Livermore in there. Yeah. You need it. To me, that's the most... Jesse Clemens. Interesting. For Livermore?

Like, make him a little bit older. Let me ask you this. So, so you didn't have the actors in your head, but surely, because when I'm reading... I'm thinking Leo Dio. Yeah.

When I'm reading a great book, I like it. When I'm reading a great non-fiction book, I Google the characters. I want to see what they look like, right? Assuming these are not people that I know what they look like.

Did you do the same to have some sort of picture in your head? Oh, I had lots. By the way, I mean, thousands of photographs. Because a lot of the times when I was trying to write a scene, if you will, I'd be trying to find either. So the way I'd be doing is I'd try to find dialogue, meaning some kind of note or letter or diary or transcript or something that's where they're talking to each other.

I would then try to find either a picture of like the room that they would have been in or some architecture plan or some description of what that looked like. I might try to find the newspapers from that day to figure out like what was happening that morning or afternoon or. what the weather was. I mean, so I was like looking for all these kind of little, little things. So yes, lots and lots of pictures. When do you think 1929 ended? Like the era. Was it the beginning of World War II?

Like, when do you peg that? Like, all right, we're done with this. The end of the Depression? Yeah. Well, you know, a lot of people try to give this whole new deal and Roosevelt lots of credit for somehow ending things. Not true. Because if you really go back and look at a stock chart, I don't think that's 37.

Right. Does he say 37? Oh, he's not. No, he says it's all. We're on the verge of 1930s. I've been saying that for a decade. Right, which is to say that you could actually go the other way again. Yeah, we crashed in 37, 50% crash.

So, I don't know, I must say, what you say, 1940, we got a chart? No charts. So, like, I feel like World War II produces the economic activity and the inflation that you need to pull out of, like, a deflationary or disinflationary tailspin. and it puts people back to work. And it just, it feels like that's when most people would say. Yeah, because money wasn't moving. In other words, there was not, there was not a financial response. Right.

That ended the crisis. It was literally an exogenous event. But I also add one other element to it because I also think of, I look at 1950, frankly, 1950 to 1980 and think to myself that that was almost an historical aberration because the other component part of this is the rest of the world is now basically out of business. the U.S. is like a monopoly power with monopoly rents. You have unionization happening, and we can afford to actually do that in part

because we're not competing against anybody, really. Everyone else has to rebuild. And you don't really see wages stagnated in the U.S. in total about 1980. And I think that that also coincides a bit with the rest of the world coming back online and competing against us again. And that starts to sort of compete away some of the margin.

There's also the boomers coming into their peak earnings years, like into the 80s, which kind of like gives you another leg to the bull market. Once you pull out of the 70s, which were horrible for stocks, horrible for inflation, then you got like a new tailwind that has nothing to do with anything. Reagan and Michael Jackson, so what are you going to do? And Rocky, did you ever read, did you ever read The Great Depression of Diary by Benjamin Roth? Yes, great book. And that, what was so great about that book was obviously captured a whole other sort of set

about the rest of the country. What it was actually like for the people. Exactly. So I think using that as a segue, in terms of Josh's earlier point, why that sort of dynamic can't play out. Forget about the economic ramifications of the dead. And of course,

it's all valid. But like the actual experience of the average American living through that 15-whatever-year period is unthinkable. No work anywhere, just for years on end. Like grapes of wrath for 70% of the population. It just seems, it seems we can't repeat it.

Unemployment of literally 25% manufacturing, cut in a half, banks all over the place going out of business. Like, that's just, that's not going to happen. I can only hope. I can only hope. You tell me what happens with AI, by the way. I think there's, right, best case scenario for AI could also undo some of the other things, too. So I wanted to just go back to very few Americans actually own stocks.

Yes. Most retirement plan for a middle-aged person living in the 20s was, die, basically, right? Yes. Okay. Half the country was working in agriculture, working on farms. Everyone was a farmer. Ranches.

Okay. The other half working in factories, people weren't living to 90. But that's why you don't have people relying on the stock markets the extent they do today. And that's why I think we have to race to the rescue with money anytime the stock market. Because we just have a much heavier emphasis in society on this is how you retire. you buy stocks you're in 401k. It's trillions of dollars, everybody's in. But this is the ultimate put.

But we didn't have that back then is a really... Well, we also didn't have home ownership as sort of a, you know, a beacon of what the American dream was supposed to be. And you could argue that that onto itself also sort of threw a wrench in things in 2008. Some of the policies to get us there. Yeah, I just look at the degree to which we have based retirement on the stock market itself and the amount of people who are relying on it directly or indirectly.

It's about 60% now, I think. Yeah, I just don't think we could ever... And the politicians, like, that's the scoreboard. Yeah. I just don't think we could ever allow for 90% decline in stocks. It almost like would be an impossible thing. 90. Yeah, no.

Yeah, no. We could have a very bad recession. We have them, you know, the first 10 years of my career, I live through two of them. So I understand that. I just feel like you see a lot of people doing financial media, financial commentary.

And when they want to get attention, they'll either say 1987 or 1929. And I think, 87, I could picture it happening tomorrow. 29, I just don't think it's possible. I feel like Andrew retired in 1987. Like, you don't hear that anymore. You killed it.

Thanks to 1929. Well, but I was, one thing to consider, though, and maybe I'm talking against my book now, and you guys know this, given what you guys do more than anything else, it's actually never really paid to be a Cassandra, or at least very rarely does it pay to be the Cassandra.

It's not that you shouldn't listen to the Cassandra and pay attention to the yellow and red flags they're waving, but for the last hundred years, you'll do so much better. You'll be so much wealthier, not listening. Well, that's the premise of what we do. So we don't think we know better than the people who are issuing all these dire warnings.

We just know that most of the time they don't come true. And even if they do, they're all survivable. if you're not taking the wrong kind of risk. There's a reason. It's because we are a capitalist society as individuals. We are all self-motivated to go to work, to make more money, to better ourselves for our family, to grow personally and professionally. And all of that.

That's what our generation thinks. I think there's some others who. But that's the stock market. It all shows up in earnings. I want to ask you if you struggled during the last- I'm struggling every day. The last couple of years finishing the book. Yeah.

And I know the lead time from like when you submit a draft to when the publisher. Because I know that takes forever. But like you're in the morning, you're on TV. You're looking at things like OpenAI and SoftBank and the funding rounds and the valuations. It has to be impossible for you to not see the patterns repeating. Oh, there's no question. That must have been very difficult to compartmentalize. The first time I started thinking about it was actually during GameStop.

Right. Right. the whole GameStop AMC, memeification of, I mean, that felt very 1920. Yeah, they were trading tons of GameStop back then. It was modern day bucket shops. Similar story with some of the crypto stuff that was going on. So I feel like there were actually a couple of periods of time where even my publisher would have wished that I had like finished the book.

Now. Now. Because they would have been like, yeah, now it's happening. That was way more reminiscent that 2021 period than today is. Yeah. I won't disagree with you there. I think you're totally right. So one of the things that I find really interesting is the pattern matching, because we

I'm a market commentator. I do it all the time. Everybody does this. We're always looking for patterns because it's nice to be the person that spots danger coming. But also, second our DNA, in one of the most ancient parts of our brain,

pattern recognition was literally life. Like, I wanted to share this with you. I thought it was interesting. Like, the human being cannot help but see danger everywhere and repetition of things. Is an economist, Gary Smith and a data scientist, Jay Cortus, and they wrote a book, and it's about the human

need to pattern match. This is a quote, the survival and reproductive payoffs from pattern recognition gave humans an evolutionary advantage over other animals. Indeed, it has been argued that the cognitive superiority of humans over all other animals is due mostly to our evolutionary development of superior pattern processing. The authors list various ways pattern recognition aided in the survival. rival early humans. Zebra stampedes were a signal of predators. Dark clouds were a signal of rain. Some foods are edible. Some are poisonous. What do they look like? The reason why we are all here is

because our ancestors spotted the danger, usually as a pattern, and were able to pass on their genes. The people whose ancestors did not do that are not with us today. When you're looking at the roaring 2020s and you just finished reading Andrew Ross Sorkin's unbelievable 1929, I personally, I found it impossible not to compare the patterns of what was happening then to now. Oh, with the cash. Like it's unbelievable how easy it is for us as people, as humans. Oh, for sure. This looks like that.

No, the whole time I'm seeing, you know, this phrase democratization of finance. Yeah. It used, you know, almost religiously in the 1920s. That's amazing. And then, of course, it's used religiously today as we're introducing all these. sort of new, interesting, and maybe esoteric products and things like that, crypto and da-da-da-da-da. Tariffs all of a sudden happen. Right.

Right. And I'm like, oh, my goodness, I've seen this movie before. Let me tell you how that movie ends. Now, but that's the complicated part because the movie, well, we'll see how it ends, but it's not exactly the same. It was very easy to get bearish about tariffs now, and God forbid you knew anything about the 30s. It would have been a five-alarm fire. to look at the numbers that they were talking about for tariffs,

last year the stock market ended up 18%. Like it was the total wrong thing to pay attention to. But how do you know, especially if you're looking for patterns without even realizing it? Well, I think part of it is we look for patterns broadly, but then we oftentimes miss the detail. So, for example, on tariffs, I think there's a view,

how did everybody get it so wrong? Everyone had their hair on fire, and it hasn't been as bad as people expected. you know, back in 1930, you know, trade falls by 60%. Why was that? Because it was an across-the-board tariff, very similar to the kind of things that Trump announced on Liberation Day

with the kind of super aggressive numbers and then reversed. And then reversed. The second here, but the reversal was not sort of part of the pattern match. Right. And so that's where things... The reversal...

Oh, that's such a good point. The reversal invalidated the pattern. Exactly. Because they didn't reverse themselves in the 30s. they plowed ahead. Right. And you never knew, I think, for at least a couple weeks, even when it felt like there was reversal, you weren't sure, is this a full reversal, what's happening?

And so people... Well, Trump could have reversed the reversal and, in fact, tried to several times. And that's what makes... I guess Michael and I debate this a lot. Not really debate, but we talk about this a lot. We have so much respect for some of the older people who have decades more experience than we do in the investing world. And we read all their stuff.

and we revere them, but we also have to remind ourselves, these people are experts on a previous version of the world, and they're always talking in analogies to other things they've been through, but these things are never the same. The inflation of 2021 is not the same as the inflation of 1975.

Whenever anybody says I've seen this movie before, no, you haven't. You haven't. Right, right. But it's a little bit like, this time is never, this time is different. It's not totally right.

And this time is never different. It's not, we say always different. Right. You think it's always different. Right. You think it's always different. We say this time is different, which is the thing that people say sardonically. Right.

So all this time is different. Yes. Every time is different. Like, and how is it different? But see, I think it's like this time is never really that different, but there's always like a twist. But it depends what you're talking about. So for, things need context. For example, in 2015-ish, every investment writer was obsessed with the Cape ratio.

In 2013, Henry Blodgett wrote about it, right? I'm stopping me. I'm not reinvesting my dividends, whatever. It was like years of it. Well, there was a husband infection. The husband was right. That was traveling through Wall Street. So had you only looked at the CAPE ratio without any context of the CAPE ratio in 1870 versus

today the differences in the economics and the industries and the sectors and the margins of these businesses, you would have missed everything. So, yes, things, there is nuance. Now, when it's not difference, our behavior, that is always the, the same, right? When you see manias, that always ends a certain way. But when you're talking about the facts of the markets today and the economies and the companies, always different. Okay, so where are we today? You know, I was with Paul Tudor Jones a couple, maybe a couple weeks ago now. Sell. Okay. And Paul says, we're live trading the show. So Paul says he, it's 1999.

Oh, I was going to say 1994. He says 1999. Okay. But he will also remind you that the market still went up 40%. Yeah, I think the NASDAQ tripled in 1999. Right. So you tell me, I mean, by the way, 1928, people like Charles Merrill, you'd appreciate, co-founder of Merrill Lynch. Sure, sure. He told people get out of the market.

Yeah. Except from the beginning of 1928 to September 1929, the market was up 90%. So here's where I think we are right now. Babson, too. Roger Babson of Babson College. The Babson break. Did like a four-year tour, same doom and gloom speed. one day it actually was right.

Right. Then they call it the Babson break. But for years, nobody listened to the guy. So, Andrew, obviously, there is massive optimism around this new technology.

And it is factually driving everything. 75% of the spending, the markets, it's gains, whatever, like all that good stuff. But what I'm seeing is not a lack of enthusiasm

because it's not hard to find euphoria, right, like in different areas. But if you use Microsoft as one of the proxies for the AI public security that you can invest in. I think the market is rejecting

a lot of the optimism. Microsoft has not even outperformed since chat EBT or over the last year, like barely outperform the market. Invidia is getting sold off. Like, yes, the semiconductors are going vertical. But I, like the the forward P of the Mac 7, it's unchanged. So is there optimism? Is there

uncertainty? Is there debt? Is there high expectations? Yes, but this is not a maniacic. So by the way, I've always been uniquely focused on Microsoft because I always thought that Microsoft was a backdoor way to buy access and shares effectively of Open AI. Correct. In the private market. In the public market.

I think a lot of people think private shares. SoftBank is the other sort of backdoor vehicle for that. And again, I think you're right. But then you say to yourself, if that's true, how do you think about the private market valuations for some of these assets? That's where 1929 is perhaps. Like Open AI and their, what is it, 500, whatever it is right now. 500 billion. It would be very interesting.

I am very curious to see how the market reacts if we have the opportunity to trade those shares publicly. Like Oracle was just in a 45% drawdown. If Open AI was public, I think it would be worse. What to if Tudor is saying it's 1999, though, the implication. I think he might even said September 1990. Okay. So the NASDAQ, the NASDAQ fell 85%. People don't understand this.

Not the S&P. The NASDAQ fell 85% from the peak, which makes, Maybe it was March of 2000 for, I know that was for the S&P. I'm not sure if that was the NASDAQ's peak. But it was an 85% drawdown. So when you invoke 1999, like, you sort of better be sure or wink when you're saying it. I feel like it's not the kind of thing to say lightly. A 99% decline in the NASDAQ today would be akin to the crash of 1929 for the overall stock market.

These are the biggest stocks in the world. in 1999, forget about earnings valuations. These companies are pre-revenue. I think, like, not Cisco. Those are the big guys. The question is, but there's a whole- AI is not pre-revenue. It might be overvalued.

But there's a whole ecosystem of much smaller companies that we're not really focused on that I think if you add them up to collect. But they don't matter. That's the thing. Nobody has exposure to them. They don't even trading. This is a hilarious headline from the information the other day.

AI evaluative. valuation startup, L.M. Arena, valued at $1.7 billion. Now, that's, that's no money. Who cares? But it's a startup

that operates a widely cited ranking of AI models. Like, that's where we are. That sounds like that's worth $1.7 billion. Yeah. So, listen, whatever. I don't know anything about the company. So, yes,

there is obviously optimists around these particular names that we don't have access to. But just anecdotally, you are on TV every day talking about the stock market, as are you? How many people are asking you

about stocks right now? Because I'm not getting anything. I get asked about stocks every day. I mean, I'm sure you do. InVVVVI. I go to the airport. They say to me, what do you think of it in video?

What do you think of... Maybe you're a bad example. You are literally on CNBCM. You don't think 2021 was more of that than yesterday? Oh, so much. Okay. So much. That I agree with.

But then the question is, do you think that there's going to be a re-rating on any of the AIs? Well, who knows? Or do you think the re-rating's already happened? Look at CoreWeave. It's cut in half. Like, it's happening. So you think it's happened.

It's already happened. I said this, and it was very profound. I said this on TV the other day. It was almost brilliant. I said the sign of a healthy bull market is it takes out its own trash. And I think I was probably referring to the Bitcoin Treasury stocks at the time. But it applies to not that the company is trash, Corweave, but the trashy behavior that we look back and we're embarrassed by, a healthy bull market doesn't require for there to be a market-wide sell-off in order for those corrections to happen. They just sort of happened and people stopped talking about it.

Do you remember the Circle IPO? Of course. That was wild. That was last year. Look at a chart of that stock. We took out the trash. I'm sure it's a fine company. It went straight up and straight down.

Went straight up, straight down. The band played on. Like, we're doing the show today with the Russell 2000 having rallied the small cap 600. Stocks all over the world. So maybe we're- Are we 1996? I just think. we're better at processing.

But I think this is Josh's point. My point is, you can't say it's a speculative mania. And then I show you 50 of the hottest stocks of last year in 30 to 70% drawdowns. Only two of the match seven. Only two outperformed last year. So I think Josh's point is right. Is it in 1996. This is the point.

Like, we're looking desperately. For some parallel. For some power. We're looking for the pattern. But what if 2021 was 1999? And this is 2004. Like, I guess I'm trying to say we had a speculative mania. People are glossing over this.

We had a thousand IPOs on the NASDAQ, a thousand on the New York Stock Exchange between 2020 and the end of 21. It's never happened before outside of 1999. I think ARC had six different ETFs that were up 100%. That had it only happened since 1999. That was the bubble. And we're done. It's over.

So it's not to say, listen, if the market were to fall 40% from here, I don't think that necessarily proves anything. I think if you look at the valuation, the fundamentals, the growth, like, that is the truth. And the market, listen, if the market falls 80% from here, yes, it was a bubble. In 2000, the market falls 40% all the time. In 2020, Envidia was cut in half. Maybe worse. Dude, in 2025, Nvidia fell 35%. It just happened. Meta was in a 70% drawdown in 2022. That's not good enough as a 2001 analog. Like, that's not enough pain. It's not enough And then Nvidia lost three-fourths of their market cap.

Yeah. Amazon was cut in half. Like, we sort of had, it's not akin to 2000, 2001, but it's like bad enough in the tech stocks where the excess was. We cleared it out. And what do these companies do? They did some layoffs. And then went into a brand new cap-X cycle.

And so I feel like it's early to say, here we are. It's 1999. I just, I'm not seeing it. I don't know. Listen, there is more optimism, obviously, than as there should be. We've been in a long bull market, but it is not excessive. Now, Josh and I talk about this a lot. We had multiple contraction in 2025.

People don't even know that. You could say, well, what about X, XYC? What about I read and Aklo in those names? By the way, the trash had been taken out. They got cut in half. Like, there are, especially in 2025 or 2006, because of Roberthood and the advent of the realtor, which is a real thing, 20% of the volume, there are always pockets of nonsense. And especially in a bold market, they will.

never, never not be pockets. It's always going to be. They will never, that will never not exist. But I think the pockets to the extent that they exist today may be more, actually, frankly, in the private markets. I totally agree with you. We agree. And the thing is, who cares? Like, who gets hurt? Well, who get, uh, the people that are in those markets can all afford it. They're big boys. What's on my, Mark Andreessen?

Like, if he invests in 10 startups and six of them go to zero or get cut in half, he's fine. He'll continue to do that. This is his investors. It's Harvard. Like, they can take a head. But watch this space, because to me, the next sort of piece of this, and this is not this year, probably not even next year of the year after,

there's a big move of what you know about it, to take a lot of the private equity, venture capital, tokenize it, create these semi-liquid instruments similar to some of the reits, like B-Reed kind of products that look like a stock. You can buy any day, but if you want to sell, you may not be able to sell tomorrow. We are watching that space.

Like that. You know what, and you know what happens? The minute those vehicles meet price discovery, instant 20 to 30% haircut. Healthiest thing in the world. We just saw that happen with a private equity company where they attempted to merge a private vehicle and a publicly traded vehicle.

And the market said, oh, yeah? Here's what we think it's worth. Yeah, great news. You have liquidity. Oh, shit. It's worth 70 cents on the dollar. Healthiest thing in the world. If we have excesses in the private markets

and you have a situation where they want to have temporary liquidity, quote-unquote, or offer like you can pull out 5% of your money every quarter, whatever it is. That is how you get true price. It's probably lower, frankly, for a lot of things, not for everything. And I think that's what you want to see if you want to be constructive. How do you explain something I think about a lot of what was the SPAC phenomenon? Because that was sort of a new product. Everybody got super excited about it.

Not so new. It wasn't that new, but it became. I used to sell that shit in the late 90s. Right? Not so no. And then, but most of them failed. And the truth was, I'd go on TV or be writing about it and be sort of cautionary warning. People saying, look, this may not work out.

Be careful. And the truth was most people were like, Sorkin, stop trying to protect me. By the way, you're not really protecting me. You're protecting the man. Like, like, stop being so protection. internalistic about this stuff. This stuff is... Here's the great irony.

I want my lottery ticket. Give me the lottery ticket. The great irony of the SPAC bubble is that actually the SPACs were the best part of it. Meaning, while it was still a SPAC, your downside was guaranteed at $10 a share. Oh, yeah, totally. It's the safest thing in the world. Spacks were like bank accounts. So great.

It wasn't until they converted to a company away from being a SPAC that you had risk. And then of course, almost every one of them had a massive drawdown on that conversion. We had SPACs in the mid-2000s. That's how half the Chinese companies got public here in the U.S. And I was doing the IPOs for these SPACs. And I would tell clients, honestly, most of these are going to suck. Some of them will probably work. But it doesn't really matter that much because we have a $10 downside.

They announced the deal. We'll have six months to decide if we want to stick around for the conversion. course you never did. Right. And you collected your interest and you just moved on. This was a great investment banking product in that day. What we saw four years ago was different. Celebrity spaks were new.

This is what you had to report on. You had very prominent, successful business people who had made a lot of money, get really attracted to the structure. Very lucrative. Ahmed. People that. A shack. Like that part of it was not different.

We, everyone. Rod was doing one. Everyone knew. Everyone knew that this is going to end badly. Once you see that, you know you're closer to the end in the beginning. So, can we talk about your day job? Yeah. Like, you are absolutely killing it with CNBC Squawk.

But, like, in particular, the guests that you have on the show, what's the story? How do we do this? We're in awe of your ability to book people from politics, economics, technology, stock market traders, hedge funds, pro athletes, movie stars. I've seen you interview with Kim Kardashian and like Ray Dalio back to back. It's not just the booking, it's the versatility of being able to jump from one conversation to the next. I don't think there's a lot of people in the world who can do that. Do you give yourself enough credit for having that ability?

Oh, this is like an under, you're throwing the ball underhand. I really mean it. Do you recognize how extraordinary you do? is to do something like the Deal Book Summit, for example, which I've been to. I feel very lucky. And it's not like a humble brag. I feel lucky. You have the talent.

You're lucky that you have the talent. No, I'm lucky that I'm curious. That's honestly, I think what it is. Lucky that is curious. I'm lucky that I'm curious. Because when I was a kid, all I wanted to do was typically talk to the adults.

I would go to like my parents are like a cocktail party. I wanted to talk. Did you hold up like a corn, like a corn on the cob as a microphone? I didn't have a bar at the bar at the bar queue. I used to do magic tricks. I was, uh, I love magic. But I was always like curious asking people questions.

And I didn't care. I love business. Always loved business. But if you were a poet, I could sit with you for an hour. I'm curious about that. If you were a scientist, if you were, it didn't matter to me. You have a wide-ranging curiosity that touches on a lot of things. I meet somebody on the street.

I want to know about their stories. It's just like how I'm sort of wired. Yeah. So I feel lucky that that's, like, that I'm wired like that. because it's, for me, it's like a natural act to want to know. I don't have to, like, try. Well, we think we think it's amazing. It is amazing.

By the way, I do have to try. I don't want to say, I don't try. I have to, like, figure out how I'm going to do the interview, and I probably over-prey and make myself crazy. But, like, the actual, like, that's what I really love. And the fact that I get to do that all day. Unbelievable. I was on an airplane recently watching you with Tom Frustin.

I had never heard of him. Really? And I said, this guy looks super interesting. And I listened to his book, which he read also. Great book. And it just sent me down a rabbit hole of the Redstones and Hollywood. And, like, it started with him and started with your interview. Like, that sort of, I was like, this is a dude.

I want to learn more about this guy. Tom Frest is a fascinating dude. I mean, the history of MTV. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Everything that he was involved with. But yeah, so I just, I love hearing people's story, understanding their story, understanding them and understanding, like, what drives them and why they're doing what they're doing and,

yeah. I mean, I think that's my whole. And by the way, I feel like part of it's like you're always trying to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. I feel like I'm doing that in the context of the interview. I feel like I'm doing the context of people that I was writing about in the 1920s. That's sort of like the way I'm, as I said, sort of wired. What do you think is an example of one of the best interviews that you've done and why?

Well, so the interview that I probably got the most attention that I ever did, and may very well be the best interview I did, was this interview I did with Elon Musk a couple years ago. Okay. I remember it. And it wasn't, you know, early on in the interview, he made some, you know, big incendiary comments about advertisers and told them to go to themselves. He told him to go to the advertisers. But the thing for me, sort of like the art of the interview craft of the interview thing was when you see somebody like somebody going to some kind of place like that, for me it was. for me it was like okay

how do you sort of like meet them where they are in that moment and try to pull it back because it could have gone that that interview could have just gone well he could have done this thrown his earpiece down and walked off could have walked off but also it could have just gone down a dark road it could have stopped you know sometimes people shut down

so to me I'm always trying to figure out like okay in this moment how are we gonna how are we gonna bring and so I actually think that's if I love that interview actually X that that moment, sort of right after that moment, because there was sort of a turn that I took, partially because of the preparation, I had like, I had sort of planned a couple different ways I could do things in sort of any given moment. And I sort of went to a thing and sort of settled him and brought it to a different place. And then we were off to the race. Do you have those, almost like a comic has a bit?

Do you have those little pieces of an interview ready, almost like, all right, if I need to get him, win him back, here's what I'll ask, or if I need to change. No, a little bit. Like, I always think I'm not a pilot, but I think I'm taking off from JFK, and I ultimately need to get to LAX, and I'm probably going to stop at O'Hare and Atlanta, and I might have to, you know, drop in Dallas or wherever. And so I have a sort of plan, but then I also know the weather's going to change. You had turbulence in that one.

Like, the weather is going to change, and I'm going to have to divert. Yeah. But I have to have a plan of how, of a couple different ways to divert based on what happened. So, yeah, I sort of try to have a plan. And I try to listen. I think, oh, you guys, I can tell. Like, because you're not looking at questions, reading. Like, the best interviews.

We're just ham and egg at it over here. Wait, actually, Andrew, I said to Josh, you. Dude, this is the only, this is only podcast we've ever done. We have, like, almost nothing in the dock. We normally have, like, 15 pages of charts and stuff. We are, we have nothing. Yeah, we got nothing.

Well, no, because I know what we want to ask you. Right. Right, but I think that the best interviews, at least that I've ever done, are the ones where I feel, A, super prepped and, like, read in, I feel like I feel them. Also, that you know where the speed bumps are for the other person. That's another thing I think I spend a lot of time thinking about, like, if I ask this question, if I ask it this way, do they lean in? Do they flinch?

Do they shut down? And then I sometimes rethink. How do I want to, what kind of reaction do you want, by the way? But, yeah, I think listening was the other thing. Many years ago, actually the first real interview ever does, 15 years old, I'd started the sports magazine. I went to interview David Stern, former commissioner, late commissioner of the NBA, one of the all-time great people on the planet. Wait, what you went and interviewed David Stern? How? So I was living in Scarsdale, New York. He lives in Scarsdale, and I wrote him a letter

and said, I was 15-year-old kid. I was doing this magazine. I wanted to come interview him, and I went to interview him. And I had a legal, I had a legal patch that my dad had given me. And I had written down all the questions. And I sort of bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, just asked the questions. He answered the questions. I went to the next question. I had a tape recorded.

Da-da-da. And it was the greatest lesson of my life because when I listened to the tape when I got home, I realized, oh shit, he said this, he said this, and I never followed up. I never even thought.

You just went through your list? I just had my list. But it was like then and there that I realized you have to listen to the other people. person and the best stuff comes out if you just listen. You could probably go for certain interviews. You could go into the interview with sort of three or four ideas, three or four questions

and never even think about anything else if you just listen to the answer. Right. And because it could lead you to a place where you didn't even think that you were going to get to go. Somebody opens themselves up and you're just worried about, well, what's the next thing I want to ask them? Totally. And then you missed the conversation.

Get the interview. you missed the conversation. Who's saying no to you still? I feel like you can get anybody. I got to get you guys on the air in the morning. You know, I've never been on Squawk. I've been on CNBC 15 years. I swear to God.

What time do you wake up, though? I don't know. I don't know why. What time do you wake up? Believe me, I'll be up. I mean, the show starts at 6 a. I'm 48 years old. I'm going to mail to our menopause.

I will be awake. Can we just say you're only three blocks away? I know. Yeah. Invite me anytime. Okay. I know a couple things. Like, who can't you get?

that you would love to get. Like, what's a... The Pope. You know. Why do you think that would be interesting to anyone? No. Interestingly, I went and interviewed the previous Pope. I went to Italy because all of these CEOs were going to visit him.

This is in 2019. They wanted to get his blessing for all. If you remember when ESG and DEI programs and climate issues were front center? That was how you raised money in 2018. Oil executives were going to visit the Pope back then. Unbelievable. For asking for permission or begging for forgiveness? Probably a combination of both.

Probably the photo op. Why do you think that would be an interesting? I can't imagine that being interesting. I don't know. You know. It's just the scale of it, like I'm going to the Vatican and I'm sitting with the Pope. I'll tell you somebody who I think is one of the, I actually, I want to interview because she's a great business woman and because she's a great interviewer, Oprah Winfrey. Oh, I feel like you could do that.

Yeah, I got to work. Get it for the summit. I got to work my work on it. All right. This is the last thing we're going to get to and then we're going to let we're going to let you go. And I just wanted to say thank you so much for spending this time with us. Oh my goodness. Thank you.

Really appreciate it. Could you rank the three people that you can't stand the most infinite? No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. I can do that. I think, this is where I wanted to ask you. Yeah. I think one of the things you do better than almost anyone I see on air is you stay cool.

And you are able to sort of like, hear people say things that the audience is kind of in on it with you. They know you don't agree. But you keep it business and you still remain curious. Even when it's obvious that you have an opposing view, you have this ability I find to just keep the conversation going. Nothing is worse than a conversation that ends with people mad at each other. Right.

It's like the defeats the whole purpose. I've never really seen that happen with you. You keep the conversation going and you're dealing with like political stuff. and like people have really passionate opinions. This is going to sound really weird. Even though I think our job is to be super judgmental, I'm like one of the least judgmental people you'll actually meet. So in the moment, I'm not judging.

I mean, I'm judging because part of my job is to judge who's telling the truth, who's not telling them what their motives and incentives and all. But I'm also, I sort of recognize people who they are. Yeah. You know? And in that moment, I'm just trying to figure it out. They're trying to make sense of them.

And I'm not trying to change them. Yeah. You're giving people a chance to tell their side of whatever the issue is. And the viewer, the public gets to see whatever the answer is. You may not like the answer, but by the way, that is the answer. Sometimes I'll get emails or texts or tweets from people and they'll say, you've got to go harder at that person. You got to, they didn't answer the question. You've got to ask it again.

Yeah. Why haven't you asked it five times? Yeah. And what they're really saying is, why have you not, like, taken out your revolver and shot this person on this? Because you're from Scarsdale. Merrick Boys are very judgy. Josh is very judgmental. I'm extremely judgment.

But the truth is the greatest thing about what I call live journalism is I can ask the question once, twice, maybe three times. And you can see the physical reaction of the other person. And that is the answer. You may find it completely unsatisfying, but that's what they're going to tell you. And that's great. And it's also, that's great television. That's, I mean, people, how many years would be on Squawk? Start in 2011 hosting and was probably maybe 2006 or seven, you know, just with CNBC as a contributor.

It's incredible. And you're getting up at like three in the morning every day, four in the morning? I live in the city, so I'm the closest to the studio. Okay. I wake up late in morning TV land. Well, I think it's safe to say it's one of the most influential shows in not just financial media, but I think just anyone who's an investor, it's like Ground Zero,

every CEO, every politician, myself, including everyone's watching, and you're amazing. Well, I'm listening to the Compa. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, guys. All right, so that concludes part one

of the Compent Friends with Andrew. I want to tell people where they should buy the book, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, airports. Audible. Audible. Independent book shops. They've been really good to me.

Guys, you are going to absolutely We love 1929, and when it does become an HBO show, which Andrew took us off about, that way you'll have that background. And I highly recommend reading it or, like Michael does, listen to it in our post-literate society. Is that there? We want cameos. We want cameos. All right. Guys, Andrew Russell, and these gentlemen, thank you so much for watching.

Thank you for listening. We'll talk to you soon. Good night. Thank you, everybody. You want to do it one more time?