How To Stop an Anxiety Spiral, The Best Protections Against Financial Ruin, and a Workaholic's Guide to Productivity (and Self-Care) | Andrew Ross Sorkin

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:18Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today, we've got an unusual guest, given the nature of this podcast. I'm talking to my friend, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who's one of the best known and most well-respected financial journalists in the world. I wanted to have Andrew on because he He recently wrote a book about the stock market crash of 1929. The book says a lot about human nature when it comes to one of the most reliable sources of suffering for myself and many other people, and that is money. So in this conversation, you're going to hear us talk about how to manage your anxiety when it comes to money, how not to make emotional money decisions, how not to lose your head and fall prey to fads and FOMO, etc.

1:00We also take a deep dive into Andrew's own productivity hacks, given that he is genuinely one of the busiest people in all of media. And just so you know, one of those hacks is meditation. So we'll hear about his meditation practice. A little bit more about Andrew Ross Sorgan before we jump in here. He writes for The New York Times, where he's the founder and editor at large of Dealbook, an online daily financial report. He's also the co-anchor of Squawk Box on CNBC. and he's written two bestsellers, Too Big to Fail and his latest, which is called 1929, Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation.

1:40Quick reminder to sign up for my new app. It's called 10 % with Dan Harris. You can get it if you go to danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try it before you buy it. We've got a lot of stuff going on there. We do weekly live video meditation and Q &A sessions. We also have a growing library of meditations from some of the greatest teachers on earth. Sign up, danharris.com. Join the party. We'll get started with Andrew Ross Sorkin right after this. Andrew Ross Sorkin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you. It's nice to see you, and I appreciate you making time to do this.

2:16Of course. There are a lot of questions that your new book raises that I think will be of interest to the audience. But before I ask you those questions, can you just describe 1929, what you were aiming for, why you got interested in this project and what you were aiming to do? So the history of this book is I wrote a book called Too Big to Fail after the crisis in 2008. And people used to ask me all the time, you know, how that related to this thing that happened in 1929, because I think we all know that something terrible happened in 1929. But the truth is, I didn't really have any good answers for most people because I didn't know that much about it.

2:52And I became sort of obsessed with trying to understand that whole period of time and what that crash was like. But more importantly, I was, I don't know, I became obsessed with the people during that period. And for some reason, there have been a whole lot of great books that were written about that period, but they weren't those sort of character driven narratives that I always loved. you know, the sort of Den of Thieves style, you know, barbarians at the gate in the room, tick tock, you know, Bob Woodward were back in 1929. What would have what would have you seen inside the Oval Office? What would you see inside the banker's office?

3:29Like, what were they saying to each other? And so that's the journey I've been on for the last, call it eight years, to try to uncover all sorts of memos and notes and diaries and letters and all sorts of things so that you could actually feel it. So you could feel what these people felt as all this was happening. And I think that when you get underneath the whole story, it sort of changes, at least changed my sense of what was happening during that period, which was obviously this euphoric, almost FOMO-driven period where everybody in the country desperately wanted to buy stocks. They all were obsessed with it.

4:07People were loaning extraordinary amounts of money. That was sort of the background of all this. And there was also new fangled technology was automobiles or radio. And people wanted to buy into that future. And that sort of was super exciting. But then, you know, got to be, as you can imagine, a little bit too much. So one of the points you make in the book is that, you know, your your insights are very much ultimately about human nature. And so I'm going to just read something you wrote and maybe on the back end of that you can free associate. Sure. Ultimately, the story of 1929 is not about rates or regulation, nor about the cleverness of short sellers or the failures of bankers.

4:52It's about something far more enduring, human nature. No matter how many warnings are issued or how many laws are written, people will find new ways to believe that the good times can last forever. They will dress up hope as certainty. And in that collective fever, humanity will again and again lose its head. The enduring lesson is not that booms can be prevented or that busts can be fully averted. It is that we need to remember how easily we forget. The antidote to irrational exuberance is not regulation by itself, nor skepticism, but humility. The humility to know that no system is foolproof, no market fully rational and no generation exempt.

5:33The greater the heights of our certainty, the longer and harder we fall. So that is underneath the story of 1929, the story maybe of our life, which is, you know, I think a lot of people think about booms and busts and what we're all doing. and they think, oh, could we have more regulation? Would that do it? Or is this about economic systems or cycles? Is it about Washington policy? What is it? And I think when I finished the book, I thought to myself, it's not any of those things. It's us. It's how we behave as people. It is that FOMO that drives us. And sometimes, by the way, drives us forward.

6:16You know, I think oftentimes we think FOMO bad or speculation bad. I think there's an element which maybe there's an aspect or an element that's actually important to drive us forward. You just don't want it to get too out of hand. But I do think underneath it is this idea that we all get a little too confident. We all get a little too cocky. We don't question ourselves the way we should. We're always very quick to question everybody else, but oftentimes not ourselves. and that the only way to protect yourself ultimately from an economic perspective i think is is having that sense of humility and also to some degree being able to have the discipline in your own life to say okay i don't know if this is good i don't know if this is bad i don't you know to be asking to be constantly curious and i think by the way those who are constantly curious do end up usually on the winning side of all of this, or at least the better side of all of this.

7:19Do you have any thoughts about how we can, just to step back for a second, one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on is that money can be one of the most ruthlessly efficient sources of human suffering. I think it can also be a source of happiness too. but what your work reveals about how neurotic and unreasonable and self-deceiving and greedy and all the other human frailties and foibles that can emerge around money. It's really important what you're pointing to here. And you're pointing to humility as one corrective. Do you have any thoughts? I mean, you're covering the ups and downs of the markets every day.

8:05How can we generate that humility in the face of these huge sloshy waves of irrational exuberance that roll over our culture in the face of new technologies? So I've always been struck by Warren Buffett because he's obviously had a remarkable career. He's been an amazing investor and he's never really gotten wrapped up in the thing of the moment. somehow he's managed to have this sort of detachment from the very idea of FOMO you know he likes to say he lives in Omaha in his in the home that he bought was it 50 plus years ago as a way of of almost forcing that detachment and you know I think Money is, you said it, money is a hard topic for a lot of people.

9:05It's hard to topic for people to even talk about. I know a lot of families don't talk about money. But I think one of the things so interesting about a Warren Buffett-like character is he doesn't get down about missing something. He says to himself, I don't know a lot about technology, so I'm not buying NVIDIA. I'm not buying. He didn't buy a lot of the tech companies in the dot-com boom. Now, he will tell you he missed stuff. He probably should have bought Amazon, probably should have bought this stuff, but he didn't. He didn't buy into Bitcoin when everybody was telling him he had to do it. He sort of had specific principles with which he approached all of this and said, this is the stuff I understand.

9:46This is the stuff I don't understand. You know, the market is, you know, historically up 10 percent. Oh, I'll sell then. If the market's down 10 percent, his view was like, I'll buy then. It wasn't an emotional decision for him. If stocks go down, he often gets, talk about emotion, he often would get excited. Even if his own stocks are falling, he'd get excited because you know what he'd say? It's now on sale. I can buy it for cheaper if I actually like it. If I like it because I think it's going to be a thing for the long term. So I just think there's, and by the way, I think it's very hard to have that emotional detachment.

10:26I know personally for myself, I'm not allowed to buy individual stocks or things like that. Mutual funds is sort of where the Sorkin family lives because of the conflict rules that I live under as a journalist. But I can tell you, and I never bought Bitcoin or anything like that because of these rules. But I have the FOMO all the time. And I think to myself, I, by the way, have been protected in some ways by these rules. because I think to myself, oh, goodness, I remember meeting people when Bitcoin was under$1 ,000 a coin. And I remember thinking, oh, I should have could have bought some. And I should have.

11:06And I think about that all the time, like everybody else does, I think. And the question is, can you hold yourself back? And I don't know what kind of discipline that requires, but I do think it probably requires sort of overtly thinking about it like that one of the pieces of advice i received early in my life as a grown-up and i'd be curious to see what you think of this because this is kind of straight ahead conventional wisdom but i've lived by it wisely or unwisely i don't know you'll tell me i don't buy individual stocks i don't even follow the market that closely a little bit but not that closely i just put my money i you know having a financial advisor and put my money in some mutual funds, try to consistently save and not think about it much.

11:53What do you say to that? I think you're doing it right. Warren Buffett would tell you you're doing it right. That is the mantra. He tells his family, buy the S &P index, close your eyes, keep putting money in, and hopefully you'll wake up in 30 or 40 years from now and you'll have a nice nest egg. That that is a much more both economically successful approach and i'd imagine a successful emotional approach because the you know the ups and downs of it look i cover people and deal with people who are living this moment to moment they're buying stocks they're selling stocks they're shorting stocks they're doing it is a very hard emotional business and that it almost is an emotional that's what the business is i know people who can't sleep at night you know it's because they're waking up trying to figure out what's going to happen oh my goodness and the responsibility that they feel for all of that speaking of not sleeping at night there is one thing about your work specifically in 1929 that makes me anxious that i would like to hear your thoughts on yeah i'll start with this question and i'll maybe get to the sharp end of the the pointy end of the stick in a second but you just spent eight years marinating in the most famous stock market crash.

13:13Do you think we're in a bubble now headed toward another crash? So I do think we're in another bubble now, and I think we will invariably at some point have another crash. But I don't think that the crash has to be as deep or severe as what happened in the Great Depression. I think that one of the great misunderstandings of that period, in fact, is that somehow there was a crash in October of 1929, and all of a sudden we had a Great Depression. And that's not really true. What really happened was we had a crash, and that was sort of the first domino. But there were a series of dominoes after that domino that were really policy choices, mostly in Washington by the president, by Congress, by the Federal Reserve, that ultimately led to the Great Depression.

14:01It wasn't preordained just because we had a crash that this had to happen. And I do like to believe that we've learned a lot of lessons from that period, including, and I think we saw it in terms of how policymakers can react to a crash in 2008, during the pandemic and other times, so that the severity of a crash or a crisis, you know, is not exacerbated, is not made worse. So yes, I think at some point this will happen, but it doesn't have to end in 25 % unemployment, which is what happened in 1932. And I don't think, and now I'm talking against my own book because here we are talking about crashes.

14:42The truth is that most people who invest in the stock market, assuming that they can hold on or hold their investment and that they haven't used borrowed money to do it, You know, 10, 20, 30 years later, they will do better. Even with the crises and the crashes, you know, mapped into all of that. It actually has paid much better to be an optimist than to be a skeptic. And here I am as a journalist. I'm, you know, I'm the professional Cassandra in the room. But the winners have been the ones not that have sat it out because they've been worried something bad is going to happen tomorrow. The winners have been people who have been optimists, actually.

15:28okay so this is the the follow-up that i was kind of teeing you up for when i see you in my social media feed or when i'm reading the times right talking about the fact that we're likely in a bubble and bubbles tend to burst that produces for me a lot of anticipatory anxiety and you know i i my phantasmagoric mental movie making capacity that we all have you know flashes forward to we're gonna we're gonna have a crash customers won't be able to afford my meditation app anymore and then i'll be in a situation where i have fewer customers and a smaller savings to fall back on blah blah blah ends up with me living under a bridge you know just right type of that this is it runs in my veins that kind of penchant for fear i got the same fear by the way yeah well i mean i'm like now i'm digressing your grandfather yeah witnessed a suicide after the crash yeah and then never bought a stock again and around that same time my great-grandfather became a crook lost the family fortune put his head in the oven in the kitchen and killed himself and my grandmother found him and so i think for both of us that That conditioning is still in our nervous system.

16:53Okay, so having said that, I'm just curious what you recommend about living our lives knowing the bubble could burst at any moment. Look, I think the real thing that I've learned working on this book and reporting on this world as long as I have now is that the danger is in debt. which is to say if you are borrowing money to invest, borrowing money, I hate to say it, just sometimes you have to borrow money to start a company. It's the borrowed money that is the challenge for the most part. And so if you can try to avoid having debt or a lot of debt, I think you can oftentimes sort of get through to the other side.

17:37And if you get to the other side, the world's a lot better. The people who get caught in these downdrafts are people who have decided to take on typically remarkable risk. I don't think, Dan, you've taken on a remarkable risk in this podcast, and I don't think you'll end up under a bridge. But I get it. I get the feeling. And I think that the trick, I don't know if it's a trick, but back in 1929, people were going to brokerage houses, and they'd put down a dollar. The broker would lend you$10. The good news is, by the way, that hardly even happens today. It almost can't happen today, really. so that's another sort of good thing to some degree though there are people who are involved in crypto and other things where people are leveraging themselves up and doing all sorts of wildness so i think you have just have to be careful and you just have to say to yourself if i'm you know if for some reason i would be out of work for six months or 12 months can i survive and if i can't you might decide i want to save some and don't want to you know risk whatever i have either in the stock market or crypto or doing all sorts of other things that people do and by the way the truth is most americans don't even i mean the sad reality is here we're talking about investing and the like you know 60 of americans are invested one way or the other in the stock market that means 40 really are not because they can't afford to be Well, I want to ask about the 40 % and even some of the remaining 60%.

19:09When you say, you know, look, one way to protect yourself is not to take on too much debt. I think there are a lot of people listening to this podcast who have mortgages, who have student loans, who maybe, you know, have to run up their credit card bills because things are dicey in their lives. So what about those folks? And I would include, I have a mortgage myself. So I have a mortgage too. I think what I'm trying to say is, look, there are going to be times where you're going to invariably have to take on some debt, in some cases, depending on your own circumstances, to live. And so I'm not suggesting you can't have any debt.

19:46I think the question is, is it, quote, serviceable? and so if you said to yourself meaning can you pay the monthly payments and if for some reason something bad happens if the stock market were going to go down for example you know do you do you need that money is that cash that you need it are there are people who are invested in the stock market and then they sell every month and they use that money to to live that to me is a little scary. But by the way, like if you're a retiree, for example, and you're saying yourself, you know what, I may need this money in five or 10 years. Well, then you should have a portion of it to the side.

20:27You shouldn't be necessarily fully invested. So I think it's a little bit just thinking about the math of your life. I mean, I'm by the way, I don't know if you do this. I budget things. I'm very much I sit around, I look at all my credit card bills and say to myself, okay, how much can I spend next year? How much can I spend per month? And there's certain things we're not going to do this month or that month or whatever it is. We have a running joke in our family. Sometimes I will announce that things have gone overboard, meaning there's been too much spending. And I sort of suggest to everybody we have to have a month of austerity.

21:05And of Of course, everyone sort of gives me a hard time about that. But I also, look, I grew up in a family that values frugality. Yeah, I will say that. And I don't want to say cheapness because there were certain things that, you know, I think my family, we like would splurge on a vacation. That was something that was important to us. But we would never, like a car, a car would just get you from one place to the other. Like never a fancy car, ever, ever, ever. And so but there are families, obviously, who I think may not have the means to buy or to lease a certain car or whatever it is. And they decide that that's what they want.

21:46And so they go do that. I think you have to think about some of that stuff. Just to say, well, you know, my family, we do detailed budgeting to my wife and I. And then also with my business, my CEO and I do and and our head of operations. We do a lot of detailed budgeting. I find it oddly soothing to have a real sense of how much money we have coming in and going out and then make decisions based on reality as opposed to like a niasmatic fog of unknowing and dread. Well, so it's so interesting. So I'm exactly like you are. But then I do know people. I actually have a friend who I'm thinking about.

22:21I will not out them on your broadcast who really just does not want to know. Like doesn't want to know how much things cost. doesn't want to know they have taken on a little bit of debt to me it's like i think they're living on with blinders on they think that it's sort of a much more relaxing way to live they also sort of have a view that everything sort of comes out of the wash and everything's going to be okay i'm a little bit more neurotic than that bro yes me too on the frugality thing we have another we have a mutual friend who i'm not going to name because he hasn't given me permission to say this, but he has a little email that goes out regularly that you may be on too.

23:03And he used the term, this friend, recreational frugality, where he makes it a game to see, you know, can he avoid overspending? And I found that really interesting. I think I know exactly the person you're talking about. And I think I've read that same newsletter. I like that. But look, I always, for whatever reason, it's like a value in our family, maybe for my parents, maybe for my grandparents, that frugality was, there was something very noble about saving money if you could avoid the loan, if you could avoid credit. So, but I also recognize, A, that I feel super lucky that I didn't have to take on, I mean, of a mortgage and things like that, but that I wasn't taking on extraordinary debt.

23:53And you're right. There's a lot of people who've had to, whether it's student loans or mortgages or even just credit card debt just to feed the family. So it's complicated. I wish I had a better answer. Yeah, it's complicated. And you and I have both been very lucky. And I do believe that there are many things we're talking about here that can be helpful no matter what your economic circumstances are, including what I'm about to ask you. Coming up, Andrew Ross Sorkin talks about some practical tools to stop mental spiraling, the mantra that he likes, which I happen to like a lot as well. Would it help?

24:29His meditation practice, productivity hacks and life routines, calendar blocking versus to-do lists and much more.

24:41So there's basic personal finance hygiene that we've been talking about. But then there's also kind of how do you manage your mind in the face of all of this? I was asking you before, how do we not fall into, you know, paralytic, anticipatory anxiety? And there is a phrase that you like that I also like. And in preparing for this podcast, I was really excited to see that you also quote, as I do very frequently, this under heralded, little watched, I think, Tom Hanks movie that came out many years ago. ago called Bridge of Spies. Yes. In which Tom Hanks plays a neurotic attorney and has a very interesting but calm client.

25:27Do you want to pick up the story from there? Oh, goodness. This is a quote that I I can't believe you found this. I think about this multiple times a day. So in this movie, the spy in Bridge of Spies, you'd think should be more anxious, more nervous. And Tom Hanks can't understand why he is not. And he looks at him and effectively asks him, why aren't you more worried? Why are you more anxious about all this? And the spy looks back at him and says, would it help? It's almost like a mantra for me, which is that anytime I get into one of these moments where, I don't want to say that I'm spiraling, but where I'm really sort of like going through all the permutations and maybe overdoing it and I'm anxious about something that's happened or I'm trying to think through this or that and it's sort of overtaking me.

26:25I try in the moment to step back and I literally look at I can like see the frame on the movie and I say to myself would it help and by the way sometimes it actually would help sometimes actually sort of thinking through the various permutations or whatever you're you know trying trying to wrestle with can be helpful. But then oftentimes, at least for me, I realize I could turn this over in my head 100 times and it's not going to change the outcome at all. And so asking myself that question in this moment, would it help to keep going on this mental journey? I know you're a big meditator. I don't know if it's a form of meditation, but it's something that, as I said, I do ask myself it several times a day.

27:13I have it. My desk at home has a little sign that says, would it help? I love that so much. And I love that moment from the movie. And I, too, think about it all the time. To answer your question, it is at least a cousin of meditation because it's a mindfulness bell. It wakes you up and pulls you out of ancient neuroses and storylines, habitual thought patterns, spirals or something shallower than a spiral reconnects you to your wiser parts. And yeah, I have found it incredibly helpful that there can be an objective problem. You're having to run up credit card debt because you simply need it to feed the family and you recognize that it could have really dangerous consequences down the road for your financial health, through credit rating, all that stuff.

28:11There could be an objective problem like that. But will being frantic, while understandable, will it actually help? It's a very clarifying question. I'm so glad you brought it up. You're the second person who's ever brought this up with me. I was just thinking many years ago, I'd seen it in the movie and then thought a lot about it. And I literally had this thing made for my desk. And then I was on a hike, as it happens, with a friend of my wife's who's a psychiatrist. And I was explaining that sometimes I have this neurosis, you know, sort of I can spiral. And she said to me, have you ever seen the movie Bridge of Spies?

28:50So it sounds like there's a nice little group of people who seem to be aware of this moment in the movie. You mentioned meditation. meditation when my first book came out many years ago you were super supportive you brought me on cnbc not the most hospitable place to meditation i would imagine and helped me promote the book i remember one of your co-anchors on squawk box was very very skeptical borderline hostile i can't remember that gentleman's name anyway it's very kind thing for you to do and you did it in part not only because we were friendly but also because you have an interest in meditation and so i'm just curious, like, where are you with that now?

29:30So when I saw you then, I was pretty deep on a TM meditation schedule. And I was pretty consistent, I would say, 20 minutes twice a day. And I did. And this went on for many, many years. And then I sort of found myself slowing down a little bit, maybe doing it once a day, you know, for 20 minutes. I find myself now sort of going in cycles with it. And I'm probably right now off the cycle. I used to tell, I think actually you and I used to have this conversation. If you could meditate or you could sleep or you could go to the gym, which would be more valuable? I'm in the morning TV business. So sleep is sort of high on my list.