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1929 vs 2025: Andrew Ross Sorkin on Crashes, Bubbles & Lessons Learned Podcast Episode Description
(0:00) Chamath and Friedberg welcome Andrew Ross Sorkin to discuss his new book, “1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation”
(0:38) Why he chose this time period
(3:22) The setup: what led to the 1929 crash
(19:24) The characters: major players in the 1929 crash; what kind of bubble are we experiencing in 2025?
(26:21) Role of journalist vs market participant; characters of the 2025 market
(30:10) AI’s potential 1929-like impact on unemployment
(35:16) Why socialism is flaring up now more than it did post-1929
(40:34) Does the US need a 2025 “New Deal” on cutting spending, tariff balancing act
(46:51) Film rights strategy
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Referenced in the show:
https://archive.org/details/sim_ladies-home-journal_1929-08_46_8/page/n9/mode/2up
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1929 vs 2025: Andrew Ross Sorkin on Crashes, Bubbles & Lessons Learned Podcast Episode Summary
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1929 vs 2025: Andrew Ross Sorkin on Crashes, Bubbles & Lessons Learned Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
Hey, Sorkin. I just went through the comments. The one question keeps coming up over again. Why the are you writing this book? Jesus Ai. What a party pooper.
Speaker: 1
00:09
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What a party pooper. I don’t know, man. I don’t think I think it’s supposed to be the the book’s supposed to be ai a beach read.
Speaker: 0
00:15
A beach read?
Speaker: 1
00:15
Yes.
Speaker: 2
00:16
Come on. Did you read it?
Speaker: 0
00:17
My god. No. I saw the title. I was like, skip. Skip the whole year. Ai, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. Ai could hear and talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions a minute. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion.
Speaker: 2
00:34
What’d you guys say? That was fun. I’m doing all this.
Speaker: 1
00:38
Shemot, you’re you’re gonna love these characters. I kid you not. I kid you not. The people who do who are involved in this at that time, like, the the main character
Speaker: 0
00:48
totally agree with you. I I am a huge to be honest, I’ve studied this period for a ai, actually. I think it’s great that you wrote this book. I think it’s incredibly fascinating.
Speaker: 2
00:56
We’re here with, with Andrew Ross Sorkin, Chamath and I with another all in interview, Riveting. Today, we’re gonna talk about Andrew’s new book, 1929, and specifically cover why Andrew got into it, what the history teaches us, and are we looking at another 1929 or something different this day and age as a lot of people may speak?
Speaker: 2
01:18
But, Andrew, thanks for joining Chamath and I to talk about this.
Speaker: 1
01:21
Thank you for having meh. And I love your, your background there.
Speaker: 2
01:26
A Thank you.
Speaker: 1
01:27
A true image of what was actually happening in October 1929, crazily enough.
Speaker: 2
01:33
That’s right. And it was colorized by some AI or something, I think. But, yeah. Great. How and why did you get into this era of 1929, the great stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine? Like, you’re a busy guy. You’re on TV every day. We see you all over. You’re at conferences. I saw you at a conference in Southern California this speak, then you’re at another conference, then you’re back in New York.
Speaker: 2
01:54
You’re very busy. At what point did you say, hey, I sana sit down and write a book about this era?
Speaker: 1
01:59
Okay. So here’s what happened to me. So Ai written that book Too Big to Fail about the two thousand eight financial crisis.
Speaker: 2
02:05
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:05
And people used to always say to me after that, they’d get into these ai very in-depth conversations about 1929 or they’d sana know more about 1929. And most people know that something terrible happened in 1929. They know there was a crash in 1929. They oftentimes think it like is the Great Depression or leads to the Great Depression.
Speaker: 1
02:24
But if you were to ever ask most people now, Chamath and you are maybe in a different category and say, well, who are the people who actually were engaged in this? What were they saying to each other? Who was sleeping with who? Who was trying to over who? What was actually happening here?
Speaker: 1
02:38
And what were the incentives and what were the motivations that led to what clearly were some poor decisions? I couldn’t find that. So I went on a vacation like ten years ago with my wife, very nerdy, and I like downloaded all these books to my Kindle. And there’s some great books, by the way, about this period. Don’t get me wrong. But they didn’t have the sort of character driven story.
Speaker: 1
03:02
Like I loved Meh of Thieves. I loved Barbarians at the Gate. I loved stories about people.
Speaker: 0
03:07
Fabulous books. Fabulous books.
Speaker: 2
03:08
What did your wife think when you ignored her the entire vacation you guys were on and were just reading books on your Kindle?
Speaker: 1
03:14
I mean, I think she thought I was out of my mind. But, no. So I I I read these books, and I was like, okay. Where’s the story? Where’s the where are the people?
Speaker: 0
03:21
Before you get to the people, can you can you give people a concise tick like, I was gonna ask you for a TikTok of the the overarching economic issues before we get to the sort of the characters. Totally. Because I think yeah. Because I think what to your point, which is an important one, people think it was ai a okay. Stocks went down. Right.
Speaker: 0
03:44
But the other things, like the overproduction of the economy, tightening interest rates, the war ai, like, all of this stuff was just commingled and nobody fully understands that. Can you maybe give folks a precise representation of the setup the setup
Speaker: 1
04:00
of the crashing? So let’s just go back. Even let’s go back to 1919 because, actually, I think that’s a critical year. So prior to 1919 in America, people did not really borrow money. It was ai a moral sin to to to get credit. Like, people didn’t do it. In 1919, General Motors says, you know what? We’re gonna start lending people money so that you can buy a car.
Speaker: 1
04:23
And that was actually ai a major inflection point in Meh. Because then Sears Roebuck clocks what’s going on and says, okay. We’re gonna do this too for appliances. And then a guy named Charlie Mitchell who ran a bank called National City, which becomes Citigroup, says, you know what? We can do this for stocks.
Speaker: 1
04:41
So we, you know and and all of a sudden, brokerage houses are opening up, you know, on the corners of streets the way we see Starbucks today. It’s, like, literally like that. And you could go into one of these places, and you could put a buck down, and they would literally loan you $10 off of your dollar.
Speaker: 1
04:59
I mean, that’s how insane things were. And at the time There
Speaker: 0
05:02
was no risk underwriting of any kind. Zero risk underwriting. Nobody nobody understood what they were By the
Speaker: 1
05:07
way, there’s no Sai. There’s no regulations. Somebody who who who read this book early said, oh, in your research, did you get a chance to read any of the prospectuses for the companies? I was ai, prospectuses? Like, if there was like a leaflet that they handed out on the street, you’d be lucky. So there’s not there’s nothing.
Speaker: 1
05:24
And it’s just like a complete go go era. Forget about 1929. In 1928, the stock market went up 48%. So people are just there’s just sort of like this it’s a little bit of the Chuck Prince when the music’s playing, you’re dancing, and everybody’s dancing, and nobody’s even thinking about the music stopping, kind of like ever.
Speaker: 1
05:44
Now ai, there’s also these technological changes. I mean, huge generational technological changes in the same way I think we’re probably talking about like AI today, radio. So RCA was ai the NVIDIA of its time. Everybody wanted into RCA. The speak ticker was radio because it was ai the it was, like, gonna change the world.
Speaker: 1
06:07
And and the other big piece of this was also similar to today, this idea of democratizing finance. It was like, okay. The elites have had their way. They’ve made all the money. We’re now gonna let everybody in on the action.
Speaker: 1
06:22
Now the difference between then and now, though, was there was also, like, crazy amounts of manipulation, insider trading. As I said, there were no ai, like, literally no rules. Nobody’s going to jail for this stuff because it didn’t there wasn’t a rule against it.
Speaker: 0
06:36
By the way, it wasn’t just individuals that was investing and overextended with margin, but the banks would take depositors’ money, and they were going along the stock market.
Speaker: 1
06:44
The the the banks the banks were doing it. By the way, the bank no. The banks regular old corporations.
Speaker: 0
06:49
I mean, could you imagine could you imagine if it turned out that, like, JPMorgan and Goldman was going long Nvidia with depositor funds? That’s sai that’s the effective equivalent of what was happening back then too.
Speaker: 1
07:00
You had p you had corporations taking their balance sheet
Speaker: 0
07:03
Right.
Speaker: 1
07:03
And effectively then loaning it out so that people could go buy stocks. That was the other thing that was happening. So Right. There’s sai sort of, like, just the the push towards investing and and overproduction and and all sorts of other things created this sort of frothy arya.
Speaker: 1
07:20
And you had a Fed. You mentioned the Fed, which is an interesting part of this. There was a Fed. It was new, started in 1913. They knew this was a mess. Like, they kept saying to themselves, you read all the diaries and notes that I was in for the last eight years.
Speaker: 1
07:33
They knew there was a problem. But they were scared out of their mind about doing what they probably should have done, which is raise interest rates, but they couldn’t pull off, like, a Volcker kind of thing. Can you
Speaker: 0
07:45
sorry. But can you double click into what you said about the fact that there was a social contagion around wealth creation that people felt like the elites had had their way and now it was everybody else’s turn. Just describe that. Like, what had caused that and what amplified that social continuum?
Speaker: 2
08:01
And who and who was everyone else? Were these factory workers? Because we’re kind of on the heels of a big industrial build out. So, like, was it the fact folks were had savings for the first time? Like, where is this coming from?
Speaker: 1
08:13
Well, so what’s really happening is you have a lot of folks who are coming from the from farms, frankly, and moving to the big cities for the first time. That’s a huge part part of what’s happening. So most of the trading, I should say, is happening in the big cities. It’s not happening, you know, out out in small towns. It’s happening in big cities for the most part.
Speaker: 1
08:32
But but that whole sort of scenario, once they’re in the big city and they’re seeing that there’s sort of this wealthy group of people, talk about inequality, this wealthy group of people, and they want in on the action. And also, by the way, the people at the top, meaning the bankers and investors and entrepreneurs are like, we think there’s this big opportunity to open this up for the little guy or the ordinary investor.
Speaker: 1
08:56
We think this is like a huge opportunity. There’s a guy named John Raskob who’s sort of like the Elon Musk of his era. He actually ran General Motors, created the credit program there, then becomes hugely wealthy, then gets into politics, by the way, ends up building the Empire State Building.
Speaker: 1
09:11
But he was trying to create almost ai the first mutual fund Mhmm. Because he thought that people should be able to get in on the action the way he did. That was, like, his whole conceit, and he talked about it pretty openly. There was a famous article called Everyone Ought to be Rich. That was his ai.
Speaker: 1
09:30
Everyone ought to be rich. And it also was a time where sort of the American dream shifted a little bit, I think, from sort of a Horatio Alger story a little bit to, like, a lottery. Can we get rich? Like, can like, the whole idea of capitalism is gonna give us this great opportunity. And Ai you know, obviously, we’re we’re stopping that today.
Speaker: 0
09:49
Do you think that radio played a role in that because it amplified these stories and made them go faster and people would just, like, start to tell these tales and folks started to forget the Horatio Alger part. Like, I’m just still trying to understand, like
Speaker: 1
10:03
I You have
Speaker: 0
10:04
you have folks on the farms. Right? They’re getting educated. The industrial revolution is happening, so they’re moving to the city. And the radio then is maybe what Instagram is like now. You’re seeing people with wealth. You’re seeing this wealth that you don’t have. You aspire to that. Yes.
Speaker: 0
10:19
And then something comes in and fills the void. Is that is that kind of the mechanic?
Speaker: 1
10:23
I think something fills the void and all of a sudden you now have the opportunity because this the bank or the brokerage houses are gonna lend you all this money. And it’s not just radio being the communication ai. It’s really the media. So the other thing that was happening during this period so Time ai starts in 1923, Forbes ai.
Speaker: 1
10:41
All of a sudden, Charlie Mitchell, the CEOs, are now on the cover of magazines the way Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh had been on the cover. So sort of the the shift in how people even thought about business, none of these guys were, you know, famous before the nineteen twenties, but they became famous and everybody sana everybody wanted to be them.
Speaker: 2
11:05
This was what America was about, was this industrialization. Right? And this was kind of ai, hey, we’re pioneering an entirely new world, and these are the leaders doing it, and these are the rock stars that are transfer transforming this country. I mean, was that kind of a big part of what was going on at the time?
Speaker: 1
11:20
Totally. And everybody wanted to be everybody wanted to be a rock star. By the way Yeah. It’s the same way everybody wants to be you, David. Everybody wants to be Chamath, or they all wanna be Elon. Like, I think there was a huge thing, like, ai. And here’s this opportunity, and they were being sold the opportunity and given the opportunity not just to invest.
Speaker: 1
11:36
But, again, I think that the margin piece of it was such a crucial crucial element.
Speaker: 0
11:41
Do you think it’s a coincidence, Andrew, that now you’re you’re publishing this book in 2025, but, like, how does it feel ai eerily similar to you? Like, way too similar ai you can almost map one to one those boundary conditions then in some version of that today? Like, is that how is that ai
Speaker: 1
11:59
you feel? Little bit, but not I would say that wasn’t my intent. Like, when I got involved in this, I just wanted to retell the story and figure out who these guys were. I I ended up after that crazy vacation with my wife, I ended up going to a Baker Library. I happened to be giving a speech at Harvard and I walk in there and I had some time and I asked the librarian.
Speaker: 1
12:18
I said, Can I see these boxes? This guy Thomas Lamont who ran JPMorgan at the time. And I said, can I look inside these boxes? And inside the boxes, his secretary is keeping transcripts of his phone calls with Hoover and Roosevelt. Ai, by the way, same way, like, everybody’s probably talking to Trump or Trump today. And I’m like, oh meh God, I haven’t seen it. And you’re seeing the conversation.
Speaker: 1
12:40
And I thought, okay, if you could use those transcripts in an actual story and then you could figure out, I didn’t know if other transcripts existed for all the other characters. Yeah. Wow. You could recreate this whole crazy situation.
Speaker: 2
12:52
Right.
Speaker: 1
12:53
But I didn’t go into it thinking, okay, this is all one to one. And I don’t think it is one to one. I think there’s a lot of leverage in the system today, but it’s a different kind of leverage. I like to believe that there’s now an Sai. There’s other regulations.
Speaker: 0
13:07
Well, you can believe it. There is one. Paul’s doing a good job. He’s there.
Speaker: 1
13:10
So I’m not here to tell you that, like, we’re going off a cliff tomorrow. I think there’s probably some things that are happening in our economy today that do mirror that period. Ai I hope there’s some lessons in here.
Speaker: 2
13:21
But do you think do you think the regulations that have been in put in place over the past hundred years, and there have been several cycles, one of which happened after o eight, of trying to create new protective provisions around how we operate in our financial arya, have they actually changed things enough, or does the human element always find its way? It always finds its way to frothiness, to frenzies, to these kind of moments of exuberance, easy easy money, and this this, like, will there’ll always be a path, you know, whether some people might argue crypto tokens.
Speaker: 2
13:53
There was an NFT moment a few years ago. Wherever the regulation kind of path of least resistance is, that’s where everyone goes.
Speaker: 1
14:00
Totally.
Speaker: 2
14:00
That’s always gonna be the case.
Speaker: 1
14:02
That’s the human condition. We all want more. You know, there’s that great line in, it’s it’s it’s Wall Street two, where I think, Michael Douglas sai to Shia LaBeouf, I thought the second Wall Street was not as good as the first one, by the way. 100%. Sai sana something ai, what’s your number? And he looks at him and he goes, more.
Speaker: 2
14:19
Right.
Speaker: 1
14:19
And and that’s
Speaker: 2
14:20
That’s humans. That’s humans.
Speaker: 1
14:22
And that’s humans. And more means we’re all trying to figure out how we’re gonna get to more. And Mhmm. I think that that was what was going on then. To some degree, it’s what’s
Speaker: 2
14:32
going on now. I think what’s always going on. It never changes. It’s not like there’s some unique moment today. Maybe there’s technology that’s kind of unlocked this kind of news sai. But
Speaker: 1
14:43
Look. The other piece of this is actually a lesson for me that I still grapple with today. I think people think the word speculation is like a dirty word. And the truth is, having now written this book and Too Big to Fail and just spending, you know, all this time reporting on all this, you need speculation.
Speaker: 1
14:59
Speculation is the twin of innovation. Real estate.
Speaker: 0
15:03
It’s putting
Speaker: 2
15:04
your capital at risk.
Speaker: 1
15:05
There is no it’s it’s
Speaker: 0
15:06
ai discovery. It’s risk discovery. It is the hard underbelly of innovation. I completely agree with that.
Speaker: 1
15:12
There is no innovation without some speculation. Elon Musk would not have created Tesla sana said somebody speculated on him early when it all seemed totally insane.
Speaker: 0
15:21
And, also, he’s probably speculated himself in 50 different ideas that never saw the light of day. That’s what it means. It’s ai you’re investing risk capital. That capital is not always money. It’s a lot of ai. It’s time and reputation as well. It’s convincing other people to come work on something, and you’re doing it speculatively. That’s what Silicon Valley does. No betting on the come.
Speaker: 1
15:42
And so then the question becomes, how do you create an environment where you can have speculation? Not just have it, but encourage it, but not let it get out of control. Right? Like, that is the sort of fundamental question.
Speaker: 2
15:57
What ends up happening, Andrew, is, like, no one gives a shah when a big fund manager or a big bank or some kind of dark pool of capital loses loses money. But when it hits the consumer, when it hits the individual, then there’s this rush to protection. It’s ai, we need to protect the system.
Speaker: 2
16:15
We need to ai of protect the consumer because they’re always the ones that get taken advantage of. Is that kind of fair? And if as you look at what happened coming out of A 100%. Out of o eight.
Speaker: 1
16:25
Yeah. Look. You can look at both of those things. You could look at by the way, I think an interesting one because we’re now dealing with it now is the accredited investor rule. So Right. You know, by the way, that really goes back to ai late nineteen thirties, ai. You know, the idea was we only wanted the wealthy to be able to have opportunities to invest in private companies because they were the only ones that we thought should be, prepared to lose the money, and we didn’t want the little guy to lose the money.
Speaker: 1
16:51
Here we are now in, you know, 2025, and there’s a lot of folks saying, you know, I want I want the access. I want the opportunity. And, you know, sometimes, like, I remember Chamath, you and I probably talked about this years ago. I remember I’d either talk about, like, GameStop or some of these other companies and tell people, you know, oh, you gotta be careful, guys. This this could go wrong.
Speaker: 1
17:15
I said that a little bit some about the speak stuff and some other things. And people are like, Sorkin, stop it. You’re not protecting me. You’re protecting the man. You’re protecting the man.
Speaker: 1
17:25
And it was sort of
Speaker: 2
17:26
Regulatory capture. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
17:27
It’s a very interesting concept. Ai, anyway, I haven’t come up with a, you know, a neat answer about that, but I do think about it a lot.
Speaker: 0
17:35
Well, to your point, but I think the the forties act, 1940 act, I think it was it’s been a very complicated piece of legislation because if you fast forward to today, we’re still trying to unwind and fit a square peg into a round hole, if you will. The entire crypto economy contorts itself around the Forte Act. Right. All these BDCs contort vatsal. Private credit contorts itself. And why?
Speaker: 0
17:59
And, well, right now, we don’t have the regulatory will to just go and have a wholesale rip and replace of what is really old legislation. I think Scott
Speaker: 2
18:08
has talk about the for Chimaat, do you wanna just describe the Forte’s Act, like, what’s in
Speaker: 0
18:12
it? Well, it it was basically written as a way to sort of try to delineate what is a security, what is allowed to be traded, what kind of businesses can be public. And at the time, with the understanding that they had of the economy, it all made sense. There was a pretty bright line of here’s a commodity, here’s a security, and here’s what is allowed.
Speaker: 0
18:33
The problem is, as we’ve seen, is that businesses today in 2025 are way too ai, and they don’t map to the brittle definitions of eighty years ago. The problem is that when you try to go and rewrite those rules, there isn’t the legislative will because what Andrew says comes up over and over again, which is the fear of what could go wrong stops people from doing what I think could go right.
Speaker: 0
18:59
And that has pretty profound consequences, I think. I think in part, when you look at what happened in GFC, you can pull the string back to to the nineteen forties and the 40 act and people’s reaction to to regulations. The savings and loan crisis, that’s another one that was absolutely unnecessary, but happened because we tried to contort ourselves to expand the economy in ways that were brittle.
Speaker: 0
19:23
Andrew, I wanna ask you a question, which is if we go back to the ai, so we Yeah. We have a good sense of the the setup. Yeah. Can you explain the big characters and Right. Who they were and the roles that they were playing?
Speaker: 1
19:37
Okay. So there’s there’s there’s two there’s a whole bunch of characters, but I’d say there’s two main characters in this book that really drive the story line. One is Charlie Mitchell, this fellow who runs National City. He is the Jamie Dimon of his time in terms of fame. He might actually be more like Michael Milken because he he really does develop sort of credit for the public.
Speaker: 1
19:58
Michael, of course, did it,
Speaker: 0
19:59
for
Speaker: 1
20:00
businesses later.
Speaker: 0
20:00
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
20:01
But, he they used to call him Ai Charlie, and he was on the board of the New York Fed. He was constantly calling for lower interest rates, interestingly, during all of this. And he was the guy who was not just loaning to, speculators and stockholders. He was also, loaning money to different brokerage houses across the country.
Speaker: 1
20:22
On the other side of the story in Washington is a guy who you probably heard of or know named Carter Glass. Yeah. Carter Glass was the Elizabeth Warren of his time ram maybe even like AOC.
Speaker: 0
20:35
AOC. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
20:36
And he would by the way, he was like a a racist Elizabeth Warren interestingly, given the weird things going on down there at the time. Anyway, he would rail for years about this thing that he described as Mitchellism. He believed that Charlie Mitchell and what Charlie Mitchell was doing was gonna upend the economy effectively.
Speaker: 1
20:57
And as the story plays out, they are sort of pitted against each other. One of the things that Charlie does is he defies or at least appears at one point to defy the Federal Reserve, which is trying to clamp down on speculation. They don’t try to raise interest rates. What they weirdly do is they send a letter to all the banks saying, Please stop lending to speculators.
Speaker: 1
21:17
And the banks don’t know what that even means, so they stop lending basically to everybody. And Charlie says, We’re not going to have that, so we’re going to start lending ourselves. And that sort of creates this whole other dynamic which leads him to end up being in front of Congress.
Speaker: 1
21:30
And I don’t wanna give away the story, but he does get arrested on the steps of his own home for doing some crazy things later in the story. But those two sort of play a big role, and then you get to see how Glass Steagall came about, which, by the way, is shocking because it is not what you would think at all.
Speaker: 1
21:49
It almost has nothing to do I don’t wanna say it has nothing to do with breaking the banks apart for, like, political reasons, but it actually has to do with, business reasons. Meaning, there was, like, some major bank money and lobbying going on behind the scenes to f over JPMorgan by the guys who arya running Chase and the Rockefellers.
Speaker: 1
22:08
So it’s it’s wild. The story is wild.
Speaker: 0
22:10
I mean, there’s okay. So just the summary. But the Glass Steagall, I think, as I understand it, but tell me, basically separates commercial banks and investment banks.
Speaker: 1
22:19
Separate separates commercial banks and investment banks.
Speaker: 0
22:21
And then sets up the FDIC, basically.
Speaker: 1
22:23
Up the FDIC. Right. Again, when you see how that all came together, the FDIC piece of it, it the the the backstory of, like, these laws
Speaker: 0
22:33
It’s not it’s not coming from consumer protection as much as you’re saying lobbying to try to basically, like, marginalize the eight 100 pound gorilla.
Speaker: 1
22:42
Exactly. Exactly. And and you’ll see it. You will be in the room with these people literally going in there, sitting in the White House, begging Roosevelt to do this. And and ai the way, Carter Glass is actually unhappy about it. I found letters where Carter Glass is ai, this bill is getting taken away from me and is basically being taken over by the bankers, which is almost hilarious because Elizabeth Warren loves to cite this bill as sort of some panacea.
Speaker: 2
23:09
Andrew, as you look at markets today, just to come back to the modern era, I don’t wanna ask you the the simple, like, draw the parallels. But are are we in and and I’ve heard you ask this question a lot lately. Ai, are we in a monetary bubble? Are we in an inflationary bubble?
Speaker: 2
23:27
Are we in a speculative bubble? Are we in no bubble?
Speaker: 1
23:32
So I’m assuming we’re in some bubble, and we just don’t know when it’s gonna pop of some sort. And ai the way, we don’t know how big it’s gonna pop either. You know, it doesn’t have to be 1929. It could be 1999. It could be 02/2008. It could be smaller than that. I I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
23:47
Do I think that there’s lever I mean, you guys talk about this AI investment phenomenon that’s taking place right now. And for the most part, the big corporations are spending real cash, so it’s not that’s not levered. But you look at a lot of the real estate plays, the energy plays that sort of on the periphery of this, there’s a lot of leverage there.
Speaker: 1
24:07
I think the credit the private credit world, we don’t really know where all the leverage lies right now. Now I don’t think that any of that is as leveraged as what we we were talking about, this, like, 10 to one situation in 1929 or maybe or even, like, the subprime situation in in 02/2008.
Speaker: 1
24:23
But I don’t know. At some point, you start to look at some of these, you know, like the Ai OpenAI deal or the AMD deal, And there is a little bit of a circular kind of thing going on there, for now. And I just don’t know where but that could be we could still be years we could still be years away from this.
Speaker: 1
24:40
And by the way, it could it could work out on the other end.
Speaker: 2
24:43
But what about, like, government monetary fiscal issues? So vatsal bank monetary policy Meh. Interest rates, and then the fiscal issue, the government spending right now. Ultimately, if you have a devaluation of the dollar, we’re seeing gold at $4,000 an ounce. We’re seeing the dollar basket trade down.
Speaker: 2
25:00
I think one of the worst years we’ve ever seen this year. Does that ultimately translate into a higher index on the stock market because the dollar is worth less? I mean, should you know, could this be more of a monetary or fiscal kind of problem
Speaker: 1
25:13
It should.
Speaker: 2
25:14
Than it is a speculative kind of problem.
Speaker: 1
25:16
Well, so you would think it would be, but then explain and sai, meh, I think like the traditional, the classic economist would say this, you know, these things should not be happening at the same ai, meaning look at the price of equities, look at the price of gold, look at the price of, you know, US treasuries right now. It doesn’t at least classically, it shouldn’t shouldn’t line up the way it’s lining up right now. So I I just don’t know.
Speaker: 1
25:37
I would have thought that the investor class would have wanted to charge us a higher premium for our bonds these days for a whole bunch of reasons, but they don’t. Maybe that’s just like life is relative and other countries are, you know, not doing as well. And so we’re still the the the prettiest girl of the dance.
Speaker: 0
25:56
I think that’s exactly totally right.
Speaker: 2
25:58
But we’ve never seen so much capital so so much, printing happening as we see today. I mean, the 7% debt to GDP in ai with an expanding economy, Never seen that before.
Speaker: 1
26:09
Totally. But then if that’s the case, you’d think that we’d all have our money in Bitcoin and or gold, but but we don’t. Why is that? I don’t know.
Speaker: 2
26:21
How do you invest? Anyone ever ask you that?
Speaker: 1
26:24
Most people don’t ask me that. And the truth is Ai not allowed to invest in individual stocks. It’s actually but given what I do for a living, that’s part of the Right. Part of the Part of the deal. Part of the the nunnery that I have to live in.
Speaker: 0
26:37
You’re long the index.
Speaker: 1
26:38
I’m long the index. I am long Bitcoin
Speaker: 2
26:41
Bitcoin Gold?
Speaker: 1
26:42
Ai I’m long the indexes and, no. I I I by the way, I wish I could. I thought for many, many years it’s probably shifted now. But for years upon years, I was always I think Chamath and I talked about this. I was always worried about buying Bitcoin because I didn’t know, I I didn’t wanna be on TV or in the papers.
Speaker: 1
27:00
Well, I
Speaker: 0
27:00
I would do it. I came on CNBC I know. To tell
Speaker: 1
27:03
Sorkin to buy it. And I would I would sit there.
Speaker: 0
27:05
A coin to a ai. Sorkin would show me a clip of Charlie Munger telling me that it was rat poison. And he would say, Tom, what do you think? And I said, I have tremendous respect for Charlie and Warren, but they’re wrong.
Speaker: 1
27:16
I remember those moments, fondly and sadly because, I should’ve I should’ve listened. I should’ve listened.
Speaker: 0
27:24
But sai okay. So you have a very balanced kind of portfolio, pretty vanilla down the middle.
Speaker: 1
27:28
Super vanilla. Ai I’m not gonna get index funds. I’m not gonna get rich, unfortunately. Offer my investment.
Speaker: 2
27:34
Journalist that restricts you from access to arya? I mean, you’ve you’ve seem to have a good pulse on what’s going on, but really what matters in arya is having a pulse on what the actors in the markets are doing. Right. And you’re not able to to act on it.
Speaker: 1
27:48
I have misgivings about it. How about that? You like you
Speaker: 2
27:51
you’re you’re you’re the character in your show
Speaker: 1
27:53
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
27:54
Acts where you have all the inside info, but you can’t do anything about it.
Speaker: 1
27:57
Can’t do anything about
Speaker: 2
27:57
it.
Speaker: 1
27:58
Yeah. Exactly. But that’s the point. I get it. I I knew that’s what I was signing up for. So I’m I’m I’m I’m cool with it.
Speaker: 0
28:03
I Ai
Speaker: 2
28:03
mean, do you like do you like being a journalist? I mean, do you like sitting as a speculator or an observer versus being an actor? I mean, have you ever thought, like, man, I really understand markets. I really understand the parallels to history. I’ve got a good sense of this.
Speaker: 2
28:15
I I feel like I should play a role. I wanna play a role. I could make money. I think about that.
Speaker: 1
28:20
I’ve I’ve thought about that for years
Speaker: 0
28:22
Uh-huh.
Speaker: 1
28:22
Totally, about, you know, could I could I be an actor? Could I play a role? And I often go back to the idea meh and look, maybe this is not the right way to think about it. But I feel like I’ve managed to have, hopefully, some semblance of credibility with some people by doing it this sai.
Speaker: 1
28:40
And I’m and I’ve been able to be, hopefully, a a good part of a conversation and be engaged in a lot of things. Maybe I could do that as as as a sort of a direct actor too. I don’t know. I also think, by the way, journalism seems to be changing. MSM, legacy media I mean, by the way, there’s a lot of people
Speaker: 2
28:56
now start a podcast sana you could just do whatever you wanna do.
Speaker: 1
28:59
So I don’t know.
Speaker: 0
29:00
I don’t
Speaker: 1
29:00
know what the right answer is.
Speaker: 0
29:02
Tell us who are the characters in the play today. Who are who are the actors? Who are the main actors that you see in
Speaker: 2
29:07
the movie? Question. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
29:10
Whew. The main actors. Well, I think you’d probably think about them in a couple different ways. You sort of think about them in the financial side and probably the tech side and where they sort of come together. So I think, obviously and then the government piece. Sai, obviously, the president, Scott, Howard, on on the sort of business end of things inside the inside the government.
Speaker: 1
29:30
And then Ai think in the banking or classic banking world, you’d say that probably Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink are probably the most sort of powerful players in the sort of traditional legacy piece, but then you probably give a nod to Brian Armstrong at Coinbase as sort of being one of those sort of OGs in sort of wherever you think crypto goes.
Speaker: 1
29:52
By the way, vatsal off to, to Vlad Tenev, who I think has been sort of very outspoken, sort of talk about democratizing finance. Right? Like, he sort of represents that. But then you tell ai. I mean, I think Sam Altman and Elon and wherever you think AI is headed next and and the Google guys
Speaker: 2
30:09
But it’s interesting because you’re playing you’re saying the technology, particularly AI, is playing a key role in Yes. Fundamentally.
Speaker: 1
30:17
It seems like it is. You think you you think that’s true?
Speaker: 2
30:20
Well, I’m asking because you you also I mean, the the capital that’s moving through banks, the there’s a there’s a whole another set of industries that generate trillions of dollars of revenue that seem to be largely ignored in the conversation about where the economy, where the global economy is, where it’s headed, where markets are headed. It’s all about AI. Right?
Speaker: 2
30:36
I mean and I I think that’s like But
Speaker: 1
30:38
that’s because if you kind of
Speaker: 2
30:40
and and I guess the question is, like, is that a media thing, or is that, like, a real economy thing?
Speaker: 1
30:44
I think it’s a real economy thing because I think if you if you x out the Meh seven Meh. All of a bryden, the economy does not look nearly the same. Right? It I mean, I don’t wanna say we’re levitating, but, you know, we’re either Sai
Speaker: 2
30:59
Ai I saw a data point yesterday that said the GDP quarterly GDP was, like, flat excluding data center spending. Does that sound right to you? Did you see that?
Speaker: 0
31:06
It’s definitely a 100 to 200 basis points of GDP.
Speaker: 1
31:09
Yeah. So sure. So let’s so let’s say if you if you x out it if you x out the AI boom, where, you know, where do you really stand? I think that’s a real real ai question. I think the reason why no one’s focused on the rest of the economy first of all, the AI story, I think, is the more exciting part.
Speaker: 1
31:25
But it is what I think is I don’t wanna say propping up the economy, but it’s keeping the economy
Speaker: 0
31:31
Well, I would I would flip it on its sai. I don’t I think that those comparisons are kind of dumb because at every point in the economy, there are these dynamic reallocation of resources and assets. Things are important at different times. I think the thing with the AI thing is, like, what is every company doing to figure out what they look like in a world of AI?
Speaker: 0
31:51
And if they’re not gonna spend that amount of time, their productivity is probably going to, on the margin, shrink to a net new company that just does what they do just efficiently and better. That’s just the cycle of creative destruction we’ve seen at every point of every meaningful technology.
Speaker: 1
32:06
So you think we need to be talking about this much more outside of the sort of, like, tech and data centers and that ai?
Speaker: 0
32:12
Yeah. I made this comment. All the private equity wives got their husbands to come in and rail at me in the comments. And I said, you know, the the the least success I’ve had at the software company I started has been selling into private equity. It’s like Sai have Fortune 500 and Fortune 1,000 customers lining out the door. I couldn’t sell to one single private equity company.
Speaker: 0
32:33
What is effectively a platform that uses AI to rewrite all your software. And I’m like, but this is the first company that should be in line. And what it goes to is that their heads are firmly in the sand. And I think that’s not a a decision on technology. It’s a psychological decision.
Speaker: 0
32:51
So I think the weird thing with AI is that it pushes people to a place of psychological insecurity. And I think that they think, I don’t want this to be my problem. I need to just wait this out and somebody else will deal with it in the future. That’s very different than other technology arya.
Speaker: 0
33:07
Like, you know, in the .com bubble, that’s not what we live through. In the social bubble or the mobile bubble, It was always like, okay. This seems interesting. Let’s figure out how to embrace it. Take advantage of it. This is the one where many people are like, nope. I’m just kidding.
Speaker: 0
33:22
Just
Speaker: 1
33:23
no. Alright. But here’s the question. So, you know, 1932 comes around, and we had unemployment in this country at 25%.
Speaker: 0
33:31
25%. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
33:32
K. It was pretty crazy.
Speaker: 0
33:33
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
33:34
If the AI boom is as successful as I think we’re all excited it could be, and it affects every industry in every way and all the things we’re we’re discussing here, there need to be massive productivity gains. Like, massive, like crazy. And invariably, productivity gains are sort of a euphemism for cutting costs in some other way.
Speaker: 1
33:53
And that ultimately probably is gonna have an impact on unemployment in this country. And do ai things. Or do more things. And the question is, which one is it? Or, by the way, is it a combination of both? I would I would probably Yeah.
Speaker: 0
34:06
It’s a combo. You high grade people so that they spend less time doing drudgery, and you allow them to work on more important things. Like, I’ll give you an example. My wife runs a life sciences business. And what’s funny is when she looks at AI, she’s like, all of this stuff is trying to sell me speak. And she’s like, I don’t want speed.
Speaker: 0
34:25
I want quality. She’s like, I’m not trying to make 500 molecules tomorrow. I’m trying to make the right molecule for the right disease, and I’m happy to take five or six years to do it. And right now, I think we’re still in the novelty slopware phase of AI where most of it is about speak, and, you know, you’re spending a lot of money to try to get crappy outcomes out faster.
Speaker: 0
34:50
Eventually, we’ll replace that with quality outcomes, and they’ll take a lot more time. And I think that that’s when you’ll have the real productivity improvements. Back to life sai, like, these guys wanna get drugs for every person. Right? That’s not a tomorrow thing.
Speaker: 0
35:05
That’s not, like, type it in in English and all of a sudden pops out the other end. And so I think we’re gonna have to take a lot more time. That’s when this stuff becomes really real, and that’s gonna be very exciting.
Speaker: 2
35:16
Andrew, did we see coming out of the crash of nineteen twenty nine, a big move towards socialism in this country saying, hey, capitalism has failed us. And, you know, how do you kind of speak to the rise of socialism today and the argument that capitalism’s failed most Americans?
Speaker: 0
35:31
Well, so yes. Sorry. And to add on to that, do you think the New Deal would have looked the sai, or would there have even been a New Deal if there hadn’t been a crash in ’29?
Speaker: 1
35:42
Okay. So two quick answers. Meh, that conversation happened, but not nearly as quickly as it happened, for example, after GFC of two thousand eight. So I remember being down at, like, Zuccotti Park. Wall Occupy Wall Street, all of this conversation we’re having now about socialism versus capitalism, like, that happened immediately.
Speaker: 1
36:02
In 1929, that conversation did not happen immediately. Part of the reason it didn’t happen, is because there was sort of ai a slow roll on the economy and even the market. So there was sort of a disconnect between the economy and the market. People forget, at the ’29, the stock market actually was down only 17% by the end. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
36:24
And so people thought it was actually gonna come back. There were times when it actually seemed to be coming back, and and Hoover had this idea that he could it was almost like a psychological problem and that the market and the economy were detached from each other. He then starts making all of these sort of, frankly, mistakes. Obviously, the Fed doesn’t, flood the system. Hoover decides he wants to raise taxes.
Speaker: 1
36:46
He does Smoot Hawley with tariffs. That’s something he had pledged to do to try to get farmers to actually vote for him, and he thought that was like a pledge that he had to keep. And so there’s a whole sort of set of policies that came into play. And the Hoovervilles don’t show up, meaning these sort of like tented camps sort of think Zuccotti Park. That doesn’t happen really till 1932.
Speaker: 0
37:07
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
37:07
And when you go back and look at why Roosevelt won, it wasn’t actually on the economy. If you go and look at the polls, it was over Prohibition crazily enough. And so it didn’t have that sort of social effect. Having said that, you know, famously, Roosevelt, you know, on his inauguration day, goes after the bankers in the inaugural address.
Speaker: 1
37:29
And then, of course, the New Deal shuts down the banks, has what was equivalent to a national holiday. 9,000 banks go out of business.
Speaker: 2
37:36
Right.
Speaker: 1
37:36
And and then that’s sort of when the conversation about capitalism and socialism starts to rear its head.
Speaker: 2
37:43
I think it’s because at that point in American history, we had not yet made the promise to the average American that they have the right or the opportunity to buy a home, to get a a college education, to have progressive income every year. As you point out, most folks were transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial economy. And so the big transition in life had been, wow, I can get an apartment.
Speaker: 2
38:05
I don’t have to work twelve hours a day, grueling physical labor in the fields. I can actually live and walk to a grocery store and get amazing food and meet people and socialize and live in this amazing city. And it was before we had made all of these promises that I think led to these expectations that folks then end up feeling disappointed ai, and they blame it all on the failure of capitalism.
Speaker: 2
38:25
My personal opinion, as you know, is that it’s fundamentally a function of overspending by the government and overpromising rather than allowing natural market forces to bring everyone up, which, meh, I think created and creates a lot of the the the distrust and the the issues we face today.
Speaker: 1
38:41
But can I stand on top of that? Because, you know, you’re describing what I always think of as sort of the leave it to beaver American dream that people sort of have in their mind, which is really more of ai a nineteen fifties style dream and actually was a function, I think, of a post World War situation where where the where the country was, we were monopoly power.
Speaker: 1
39:01
Everybody else sai out of business. This is also the ai, like, the reason why unions even worked, I would argue, for in large part, was because there was this period of time where we were the only players in town. So we could we could charge monopoly rents for a lot of things, and people could buy a house with a white fence and have two kids and and have an edge.
Speaker: 1
39:21
All of those things that we, now say are the dream. I’m I’m I’m look, there’s some people who think that was an aberration in history. Ai hope it wasn’t, but I’m saying there were a lot of forces at play that created that ram, but I don’t think that was the dream in 1929.
Speaker: 2
39:36
Yeah. Do you buy into Ray Ray Dalio’s points of view that we’re at the end of an empire, end of a cycle?
Speaker: 1
39:42
I hope we’re not. I hope we’re not. You you look, I think I think you look at a lot of the things going on right now just with how much debt we have. I I sort of look at the Neil Ferguson view of the world, which maybe lines up pretty directly with, with Galio, which is that when you get, you know, GDP and when you start to look at, like, defense spending as a percentage of GDP, there is this point at which, at least historically, you have, like, a real problem, and that sort of has set created the end of the empire.
Speaker: 1
40:14
I think that happens in his view of the world in, like, ’19 into 02/1940. So maybe there’s still time to turn it around. I don’t know what you what about you?
Speaker: 0
40:21
It’s a very exact forecast, 02/1940.
Speaker: 2
40:24
You ever read that, what’s that series, the Asimov series on, where they’ve got this, like, social forecasting capability? Sorry. Totally forgot.
Speaker: 0
40:34
Arya, do you think that if you look at GDP going through the crash Yep. Basically, like, cratered and then I mean, what whatever we think of the New Deal, I think the the reality is that it it just created an enormous amount of investment that then just turned GDP around. Is there a version of the New Deal that America needs to do today? Is there a new compact we need to have with our citizenry today?
Speaker: 1
41:00
Well, but so there’s two things that happened though. There’s the New Deal and then World War two. I meh, sai, yeah, I think you have to sort of lump them in a way together in terms of the spending profile and why we were spending and and
Speaker: 0
41:11
Well, even I think even in the mid thirties though, like, really before we were engulfed in it, we were
Speaker: 1
41:16
we were
Speaker: 0
41:16
cranking, like, eight, nine, 10% GDP. My my my point is just more just that idea of a new social compact, a new set of, like, agreements. I I Ai don’t know. Like, is it is it we vatsal point?
Speaker: 1
41:30
Maybe maybe we do. But what does that look like? And and where are we gonna get the money to to spend it? That’s the real question. And how can we I think Freeberg would say
Speaker: 0
41:38
well, I’m not gonna put words in Freeberg’s mouth, is that the agreement is actually not about spending more, but actually less and getting folks to understand that these trade offs need to happen.
Speaker: 1
41:49
So I I agree with you and I agree with David on that. Like, I think we have to cut spending in a big way, but this goes back to the more issue, which is everybody everybody wants more.
Speaker: 2
41:59
The ai, Sorkin, and I I’ve shared this point of view many, many ai. But I think when we made the promise, when the federal government and, people who got elected to represent the population in the federal government got elected, they said, we’re gonna give you an education, and then we’re gonna use federal spending to do that.
Speaker: 2
42:15
We’re gonna give you access to a home. We’re gonna create this federal home loan program. And in all these cases, when there was a promise made on giving you the more, it was all about increasing government spending. We’re gonna give you access to health care. And then Medicare became kind of this ballooning spending ai.
Speaker: 2
42:31
Because in every case, because it’s not actually a free market, the government doing the spending gets taken advantage of, and all the costs underlying that spending line get inflated. Because there’s no natural market force of buy and sell. There’s only a market force of buy. And that’s why education costs have ballooned. That’s why housing has ballooned.
Speaker: 2
42:49
That’s why medical Totally. Expenses, pharmaceutical drugs have all ballooned. Because as soon as the government provides that as a service, it completely distorts the arya, and you can never get out of that free fall. So the fundamental challenge is you have to have the the more difficult conversation to your point of it’s not more, it’s less, and we’re all gonna have to kinda deal with that.
Speaker: 2
43:08
Or you’re gonna do the same thing that everyone’s done historically, which is wealth taxes and, you know, growth saloni. All the stuff that kind of we’ve seen many times before.
Speaker: 1
43:16
Sai but this is now you’re talking about, like, a political it’s almost a paradox or a challenge, which is how do you get the public to buy into the idea of less. Right. Right? That is the fundamental question. We all know that we have to spend less. I Sai agree with that.
Speaker: 1
43:31
I’m and I and by the way, I feel blessed so that I could probably afford afford it, but to take less. But the question is, you know, if you don’t have it, taking
Speaker: 0
43:41
less is Yeah.
Speaker: 2
43:41
They’ll they’ll say, ai. Rich ass like you guys can say that. Good for you. Bull ai, that’s not fair to me. And I think that’s the big issue is the people who would proclaim that would be immediately attacked. Like, you live with less. Tax the rich. And that becomes where Dalio and others have argued historically, you see these notions of civil unrest, of civic splits that that that happened.
Speaker: 2
44:02
By the way, the book is foundation the foundation series. I don’t know why it didn’t come to my mind. The the the idea is called psychohistory where the guy can actually predict all of these social trends because they’re all predictable and they all happen in in cycles.
Speaker: 1
44:13
Okay. Can I just throw one other thing in this? Because I’m so curious about it. And I spent a lot of time thinking about Smoot Hawley in terms of tariffs. So there’s an art there’s a there’s a, I think, a fair argument that tariffs were now attack ai to national security, resilience today, and, like, we may decide philosophically you sana have an automobile industry in The United States because if you let BYD sell cars in this country, we would not sell cars in this country.
Speaker: 1
44:39
We wouldn’t make cars in this country ever again. And you may think that that’s a bad idea and you want that to be here. Having said that, if we do this, which we are, we will probably spend more to buy less technologically capable cars ten years from now than the next time we all you know, if you go on vacation to Europe or Asia and get in the back of one of these other cars.
Speaker: 1
45:03
And how should we think about that? That to me is ai a real fundamental question ai capitalism and also about resilience and national security.
Speaker: 0
45:12
What I would offer to you is the way that we should think about this is how do Americans in American society preserve maximum optionality in the face of very difficult decisions in the future? So if geopolitically, we are induced into a war, All wars have tremendously bad consequences. How would we have the wherewithal to not have to be a part of it?
Speaker: 0
45:38
If you look at the last number of wars, these are all ultimately over resources. Right?
Speaker: 1
45:43
Right.
Speaker: 0
45:44
And if you think about resource independence, there are many, many things today where America is just fundamentally instable because we don’t have resource independence. But if we were to get that and then we have the building blocks, we wouldn’t actually have to fight a war.
Speaker: 0
46:01
Now there may be other reasons, and people may pull us into wars, and I I get all of that.
Speaker: 1
46:05
But Ai
Speaker: 0
46:05
think that that’s a really big question. Would I be okay with a less better car, but having a national transportation infrastructure that we control and cannot be turned off by somebody else? On the margins, I would say, yeah. I’d be okay with that.
Speaker: 1
46:19
And and the interesting part though is there’s gonna be a premium on that. Right? Like, we’re gonna pay more for that. And that may be that may just be the cost of doing business. Sure.
Speaker: 0
46:26
And that may and that vatsal meh be the cost of strategic flexibility and optionality. And I think if you just think about what the downstream consequences of not having that are
Speaker: 1
46:36
And maybe and by the way, maybe those costs are even ai, and and we and those costs don’t get added and they don’t get added to the model. Right?
Speaker: 0
46:43
You’re absolutely right. They’re they’re always higher because they’re measured in human lives. It’s always higher. It’s always more costly.
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46:50
Mhmm. Andrew, who do you sell the, movie rights to of your book, and when’s the movie coming out?
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46:57
Haven’t sold them yet. We’re talking to a couple people. Hopefully, we’ll have some news on that sometime soon.
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47:02
Because it sounds like it’s a very people driven story, so it should make for kind of great drama. Right?
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47:09
Oh, totally. I mean, I tried to write it I didn’t try to write it, for film per se, but I tried to write it in a cinematic a way as humanly possible given that I was also constrained ai, you know, I had to have archives and notes and diaries. You know, it looks like a long book, by the way, folks.
Speaker: 1
47:25
It’s a little bit shorter because there’s a 100 some odd pages of end notes at the end,
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47:30
for
Speaker: 1
47:30
those who sana, and ai the way, some of the end notes are ai fun.
Speaker: 0
47:33
Andrew, when you write these things, do you and then when you license it, for example, like when they started to make billions
Speaker: 1
47:39
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
47:40
Do you take a strong point of view in how the scripts in that case or the screenplay in this case will be bryden? Or do you kind of say, okay. Here’s my source material. You guys do the best you can and you kind of do you care who the actors are? Do you care about any of that stuff? Or do you think it’s ai, okay. They’re licensing it off off on your merry way. Do the best you can.
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48:00
You know, I think actually in this day and age, just
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48:02
terms probably in your mind. Right? You have a vision of what this whole thing looks like visually. You probably have faces.
Speaker: 1
48:08
Right.
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48:08
You probably you probably have all of this. So how do you do you ai go of that?
Speaker: 1
48:11
Or Well, I think first of all, I think you have to let go a little bit at some level because that’s just the nature of the business for better or worse. I think right now in this streaming environment, you know, there’s sort of two ways you can go sell projects like this. One is you go sell it to a streamer and they go off and they try to develop it. They go find the team that does it.
Speaker: 1
48:32
The other approach is, you know, find the actor, maybe a director, maybe the writer all at one ai, and then walk in with it. So in that context, you probably have more of a say in the future of it. You know, right now, just the way the business is, you know, the the Hollywood’s buying a lot less stuff ai I think is more interested in sort of the former version where you show up with the whole thing sort of prepackaged, preplanned.
Speaker: 1
48:56
But, you know, it almost changes, you know, by the month in terms of what they want.
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49:02
Mhmm. Mhmm. Are you, doing the audiobook yourself? Are you reading the
Speaker: 1
49:06
I read it. You guys are in the audio business yourselves, so you I will tell you, I went in it’s thirteen hours, the the book, in total. You do it on, you know, double ai, and you you’ll be done in, you know, six and a half hours. But, it probably took me, like, thirty hours.
Speaker: 1
49:23
It takes a ai. And they did do it. Ai did do it. Yeah. I did it. It was fun.
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49:27
It was ai your
Speaker: 2
49:28
first time was it your first time reading the audio book?
Speaker: 1
49:30
I’ve never read it before. When when Too Big to Fail came out, we had a British actor do it. And I enjoyed read I enjoyed listening to him. Sai he added some gravitas to the to the project because of that, you know, the Brits always sound smarter than
Speaker: 2
49:42
us. British?
Speaker: 1
49:43
Pretty much. Pretty much. Pretty much. Okay. Sounds smarter. Sound smarter. I was going for sound and smarter. Us. They do. They do.
Speaker: 2
49:53
Well, Andrew, thanks for joining us. This has been awesome. Congrats on the release of your book. Thanks for chatting. Good broad buying topics. I’m buying.
Speaker: 0
50:00
Thank you.
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50:01
Ai appreciate, guys. You know, I I enjoy this so meh, and I listen to you guys so religiously. So, this is a a You’re
Speaker: 0
50:07
the best, bro.
Speaker: 1
50:07
Thanks for
Speaker: 0
50:08
doing it. I mean, it’s a it’s an incredible period of of American history that, to your point, not enough people really understand. I’m glad you were.
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50:14
Sai interesting.
Speaker: 0
50:15
Yeah. So Ai find it so interesting. Yeah. That twenty year period, I would say twenty eight to forty eight.
Speaker: 1
50:22
Well, thank you.
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50:23
It’s got everything.
Speaker: 1
50:25
Thank you, guys. I appreciate it.
Speaker: 0
50:26
Alright.
Speaker: 2
50:26
We’ll talk soon. Thanks, man.
Speaker: 1
50:27
See you. Thanks.
Speaker: 2
50:27
Bye, man ai.