Andrew Ross Sorkin (on stock market crashes)

21:44I need to go talk to a lawyer. But by the way, this is what's happened. You look at people in Congress or senators, anybody who is in possession of or likely to have, quote unquote, inside information, it gets super complicated with all the people around them. And as a result, my little family lives in sort of a nunnery as a result of that in terms of the stock market. It's tricky. I don't know. then it's like no one around you at all can do anything. What about your friends? Well, let's just say minimally, it's fucking crazy that someone that works at a newspaper is not allowed to own individual stocks, but that someone who's way ahead of some decisions that are going to be made that'll affect companies dramatically is not forbidden, is a little nuts.

22:20A little nuts. I think everyone could agree. A little bonkers. Can the president own individual stocks? Everyone can. They all can. My view is they should either have to have blind trusts or maybe there's some kind of disclosure program or maybe they can buy stuff, but then they have to hold it for a certain amount of time. I would be cool if you said, you're buying X stock tomorrow and there's some letter that says, I am going to sell it 30 days from now. But you actually say today that I'm selling in 30 days. So you have no control over why or when you're doing it. I think there's things you could put into the system.

22:53To help it. All I want people to do is trust the system. Yeah. And right now, we all do not trust the system. And we don't trust the system because the system doesn't deserve to be trusted. That's right. Earmark at the very end. I wonder if AI is going to neutralize everything. It's like everyone has an agent that's doing all the trading and the AIs are all equally brilliant, have equal access to all the information. Does it just become a stalemate? I don't know. That's a really interesting question. By the way, that's a whole other question, not just about the stock market and trading. It's about everything.

23:23White collar work is just going to go away. It's going to vanish. Yeah. By the way, I just had an experience. My dad was a lawyer. Lawyers. So I was sent a contract two or three weeks ago, a little thing that I just had to look at. And I saw two or three things I didn't like. I thought, oh, I'll just forward it to my lawyer, who probably would have charged me 500 bucks, maybe a thousand bucks to look at it. I'm on an airplane and it had Wi-Fi. So I put it into chat GPT and I say, tell me everything that's good and bad in this. And it points out the three things that I noticed and pointed out maybe two or three other things.

23:53It then said, would you like me to redline the contract? I said, sure. Prepare a counter it could do. So it does that. And then it says, would you like me to write a cover letter back to the people? It writes the most lovely letter. You could imagine it says, thank you so much for all the thought you put into this agreement. I've noticed a couple of provisions in here, which seem somewhat asymmetric. Using big vocab. Big vocab. I made a couple of changes to it. Never sent this thing to the lawyer. So I now saved myself the 500 ,000 bucks. 45 minutes later, this AI generated letter. These guys said, sure, that makes sense.

24:26So white collar is going to go first. But by the way, I'm a writer. I worry about writing. Okay, the other day, me and my friends heard a song at a restaurant. And then we were singing it. And then the next day, I was like, what was that song again? And I texted my friend. She was like, fuck, I don't remember. We were trying to remember. We couldn't. It was a whole thing. And I was like, oh, I kind of remember the basic tune. So I opened up chat and I hummed it. And I said, what is this song? And I think one of the lyrics is this. And it said, oh, it's Blah by Trish Shearer. And I was like, okay.

24:55And then I Googled it. I was like, that's not a song. Right, because it makes up stuff. It fully made that up. And I said, I don't think that's a song. And it said, it's a song. It's just a deep cut. And I was like, no, it's not. And then it said, oh, I'm sorry. And I was like, you liar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like humans. But it's good when you call them out because they lied to me one time and I called them out. Are you on paid chat GPT? I'm on paid. Okay, so the one thing, tell chat GPT, I've now done this, little news you can use. say only bring me back verifiable facts with links. Oh. Always never lie to me.

25:32And then say, remember that. I have found in the past couple of weeks that it's actually started to do that for the most part. It's straightened up a little bit. I'm sure it can also get a little tricky. Yeah, you just can't blindly rely on it. No, no, no, no. Okay, so I want to blast through some highlights, which would include becoming a staff writer in the financial section of the New York Times for years, becoming a co-anchor of Squawk Box, starting Dealbook, and then writing, of course, Too Big to Fail, which then became an HBO show. These are enormous accomplishments that are coming very quickly.

26:07I don't know how one has the time. I still don't feel successful. Right? Yeah, yeah. I was obsessed with Too Big to Fail, the movie. Oh, God bless you. I don't know what happened. It was one of those things that became like a nightly. Contagion. Yeah. I needed it to regulate my mental state or something. I watched it every night in college a lot. And all my roommates made fun of me. They're like, oh, my God, why is she watching this? They said she's too small to stop. Oh, yeah. Well, credit goes, by the way, to the great Peter Gould, who, by the way, back then was a staff writer on a little show that was just going into production called Breaking Bad.

26:44Oh, wow. And, of course, Peter then helped Vince Vaughn, and they co-created Better Call Saul together. And then you came on Breaking Bad at the end. At the very end. To talk about a merger. It was probably the highlight of my whole career. This actually is the highlight of my whole career. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I was a Breaking Bad fanatic. In the penultimate episode, they built a scene. I'm not actually physically in it. I just mentioned Charlie Rose, who I'd watched my whole life and had been on his show and all the things. I love Charlie Rose. They created a fake scene where Charlie Rose was interviewing the couple that had created gray matter, if you remember gray matter.

27:24And Charlie Rose sits there and intones something like, in an article in the New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was an amazing moment just to hear your name out of their mouths. The whole thing was wild. I knew they were going to do this, but I didn't know the parameters of it. Peter had just sent me a note saying this is going to happen. I might've had to actually sign my rights away for my name or something like that. Yeah, totally. Anyway, then I wrote an article to almost match what happened. And it became sort of like a viral sensation.

27:51Yes, yes. It was completely made up, but it was fun. Yeah. Okay, so how long ago was Too Big to Fail? Book came out in 2009. The film came out in 11. Okay. Directed by the great Curtis Hanson. LA Confidential, Detroit. He's no longer with us, but he was a very, very sweet man. Okay, so I guess you get the idea for 1929. How long ago? I know you worked on it for about eight years. So what happened, honestly, was I wrote this book about the crisis in 08. And invariably, people would say to me, can you compare for me what happened in 08 to this thing that happened in 29? And I'd kind of look at them with a blank stare and say, I really can't.

28:33Yeah. Because you only knew the broad strokes, as most of us know. Most of us, we know something very bad happened in 29. We know there was a Great Depression. And that was about the sum total of my knowledge. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by Alexa Plus. All right, let me tell you about something I'm genuinely excited to talk about, the all-new Alexa Plus. Look, we're all juggling a million things these days, and this thing is designed to actually make your life easier. It's like having a conversation with someone who really gets what you need. Picture this.

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30:12with me about 29. I was like, I should just get smart on this whole thing. Look, there's a whole bunch of interesting books and interesting characters, but the books I always loved were these character-driven narratives where you get in the room and you get to like see what they're saying to each other. Yeah, yeah. And what's motivating them, what's incentivizing them and who are they sleeping with? The movie version. I wanted to read the movie version. Yeah, yeah. And there were elements of the movie version. There are scenes in some books where they really do beautiful jobs of capturing certain things, but it wasn't like a book that did the whole thing.

30:43Right. And I was like, oh, maybe I could do that. And then I got just lucky. It was strange. A couple months later, I happened to be at Harvard University giving a speech and I got there early and I never get anywhere early and I had time to burn. I walk into this library and I asked this archivist, there was some papers that had been donated from a family, from a guy named Thomas Lamont, who's actually in the book, who ran JP Morgan. And I said, could I look at the boxes? And I start looking through the boxes. his secretary had kept transcripts of his meetings with Roosevelt, where they're literally talking to each other back and forth.

31:16And phone calls. With Hoover. And then there's letters, and you can see the letters back and forth and back and forth. And oh my goodness, this could be something. Yeah. And then the truth is, I was sort of marveling at how wonderful this was. And I went back to the archivist and I said, can I tell you my idea? This is what I want to do. Could you help me? Do you think this is doable? I explained the whole thing. She said, I've read Too Big to Fail. You can't do this. Oh. Because this is not going to work out for you. Why? Because she said, and she was not totally wrong about this, but I think I took it again.

31:46It's sort of like a personal challenge. Yeah. She said, there's not one or two or three archives where you're just going to be able to go there and just excavate the material. It was not clear that all the material that you wanted existed. And it was true that it was not all in one place. It was like in dozens of places. It was a little bit of like a mystery, putting these puzzle pieces together and you're trying to figure out, well, this guy doesn't have any archives. The main character in this book named Charlie Mitchell, nobody seemed to save his notes or letters or anything. I went to the bank he worked at to try to get all, they had nothing, there's no library.

32:19But you have to say to yourself, okay, I know he's at this meeting and I know that these other eight people were at the meeting or he would have had to talk to these people after the meeting. Can I go find their stuff? And then you just sort of pray to God that you'd find some other material. And then I found some depositions and other transcripts and other crazy things. He ends up getting arrested and doing some super shenanigans with his wife and found some fascinating transcripts. He would get asked, so when did you tell your wife you were going to do this? You'd say, well, I did this. I was in the room.

32:48This is what I said to her. And then they interview her. And then I thought, okay, I could put that together. So it was a lot of that kind of thing over and over again. It sounds very hard to organize. Yeah. Once you have all your snippets. The biggie was getting the New York Federal Reserve, the minutes of their board meetings had never been made public. So here we are, 100 years later, no one's ever really seen this stuff. Are they somehow exempt from Freedom of Information Act? They don't have to do it. I don't know. And I went and I begged and pleaded. And for a while, I didn't get anything.

33:21For like two years, I just got nothing. Then they finally agreed. They sent me the minutes, but redacted. They would literally have redactions over these lines. I'm like, what's going on here? And then they finally... Anyway, that really helped sort of ground the whole story. You need their account of how they were managing that whole scenario, I'd imagine. Each of these characters, to me, was so fascinating just to see what they were doing and why they were doing and what was incentivizing them. Yeah, they're bigger than life and brand new on the scene phenomena in America, which is like the wealthy celebrity.

33:52This is the period of time where we get, for the first time ever, celebrities that are just celebrities because they're rich. Prior to the 1920s, it was Babe Ruth, movie stars, maybe Charles Lindbergh. Singers. But a Wall Street CEO is now on the cover of magazines. And that was a totally new phenomenon. Today, you wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk or if Jamie Dimon or some hedge fund managers on the cover of a magazine, that would seem completely normal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this was completely not normal. So I think maybe this whole story starts, at least from what I gathered, maybe kind of 1990 with General Motors, oddly enough.

34:28This whole story starts at least structurally with that. It does. Or do you want to go further back? No, I'm so glad that you hit that because I think that is actually the eureka moment. But the eureka moment, I think, was prior to 1919, at least in America, for the most part, people didn't take on debt. Nobody really wanted to borrow money. It was almost a moral sin to borrow money, to get a mortgage. That was like a grubby thing to do. I think this would shock people. We've all grown up in a world where debt is. how the whole thing works is on debt. And people didn't have loans, which is crazy.

35:01They did not have loans. And so the thing that sort of made loans acceptable to the public was the idea, General Motors is like, we need to sell more cars. Most people do not have enough money to buy a car. We are going to loan you money to buy a car and people flock to it. And then you had other companies like Sears Roebuck sort of clock what's going on and go, oh, okay, well, we can loan you money so you can buy appliances. And then this guy, Charlie Mitchell, who's running what turns out to be Citigroup later on. Which at the time is the biggest bank? Biggest bank in the country. He says, we can loan people money so they can buy stock.

35:37Okay, so here we go. Yeah. Terrible idea. You said that these brokerage houses just pop up like Starbucks all around the city. And someone can walk in with a dollar and put a dollar down and they get$10 in stock. Totally. By the way, this is happening today with crypto. People are borrowing. You can get 20 to 50 times your money in the crypto markets right now. You're kidding. Somewhere between maybe 5%, maybe even 10 % of the crypto market, I would argue to you, is super leveraged right now. The problem is we don't know. Then the collateral is the actual coin that they've bought? Is that the collateral?

36:09What collateral are they putting up? Well, in some cases, the collateral is the coins. Is just the coins. Is just the coins. So it's all self-generating. It's all quite circular. It's all quite circular. This is interesting. It makes me wonder because my family from India is like you buy your cars straight out. You do everything you can to not owe any money. And I wonder if that's just because they grew up in a different system. No, by the way, in my family, always pay the credit card off. You want no debt. And there's other people who live the complete opposite way. They think debt is fine. Right.

36:41They think debt is great. They use debt to lower their tax bill. It's a very powerful tool in our economy, debt. It's a super powerful tool. But by the way, the other thing that happened after the crash in 29 was it scarred a whole generation of people to not want to do any of these things. My grandfather lived to 91 years old. He had actually been a messenger boy with his older brother down there in October of 29. And he watched somebody jump out of a window. He used to tell us this story all the time. And as a result of that, he never bought one share of stock. His whole existence. He would buy bonds.

37:15He would tell you to put your money under the mat. So you're weirdly like third generation. This whole thing with you not being able to buy is almost like a family tradition, really. Okay, so because people can borrow, it just floods the stock market for 10 years or nine years. Nine years. And the market's going up like crazy. Yeah, you say between 1928 and 1929, it goes up 90%. Where's your memory? How is this possible? This is a remarkable situation. This is a remarkable situation. He's got no notes. I have them, but my goal is always to not look at them. I interview people for a living, too.

37:48I look down at the notes. You've turned the pages over, by the way, so you can't even see the notes. It's a personal failure for me if I pick them up, but they are there in case I need them. So interesting. Okay, so it goes up by 90%. Yeah. Which is crazy. My question, though, what was the growth between 1920 and 1929? Well, there had been a little bit of a hiccup, actually, more than a hiccup. The market actually tanked in 21, but most of America had not yet really participated in this because that 1919 date, it didn't really take, it wasn't until, call it 25, 26. Or culturally, everyone's cool.

38:22Or culturally. Yeah. And as the market's going up, then people are saying, oh my goodness, they're seeing their neighbor do it. Yeah. And they're like, the train's leaving the station, folks. I got to get on the train. And that's how it always happens. It's like it becomes loss bias. I'm losing money, not participating. This is crypto. This is what everyone's doing now. I mean, that's the parallel to some degree. Now, I'm always scared because people say, oh, Sorkin, you're writing this book. The whole market's going to tank tomorrow. That's not what I was ever trying to do. It was more I wanted to write about this period because I thought it was sort of just fascinating.

38:53And then as I was doing it, the weird part was I would go, oh, that's a little bit like this. That's a little bit like this. But there's also differences. So I don't want to overstate the case. Crypto is a good comp because it's unregulated in the same manner that in 1929 it was hardly regulated. But you have this enormous growth. Everyone's getting in on it. Crazy timing, right? Winston Churchill happens to be visiting. Is that the most wild thing? Yes. He's visiting the New York Stock Exchange on the day it's plummeting, what, October 28th? Literally, Winston Churchill shows up in New York, actually shows up in the U.S.

39:24and goes on this sort of crazy trip around the country, basically trying to make money, becomes a stock trader himself. He becomes obsessed. He's watching all this happen. He's literally calling his broker, taking out big loans. Oh, my God. The whole thing is completely insane. And this is before he's obviously running England. This is on a serious down. He's in the U.S. basically on a lecture series to try to make back some of the money that he didn't have. And then he tries to make even more money because he wants to get in on the stock market. And he loves to be around rich people and rich people love to be around him.

39:58Yeah. So it was sort of this fascinating thing that was happening. Anyway, he happens to be down in New York. He literally goes to the exchange. He's watching all this happen. And there's this wild dinner, this party that was set up, which for me as a storyteller was unbelievable because you're always trying to get all your characters in one room. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You desperately want that. And when you're trying to write a true story, it has to be true. Right. And they're always looking like, how am I going to get all of these characters to get in one place? And then there's a dinner in his honor where all the main characters, as the market's crashing.

40:32Hosted by Mitchell, our protagonist. Mitchell is at this dinner. He was not the host. But he does raise a glass the night of the crash to all my former millionaires. That was literally the toast. He stood up and he said, to all my former millionaires. And the truth is, as he was giving that toast, he was doing that in part to almost mask the truth, which was that his whole bank was on the verge of falling apart. And he was trying to figure out what to do about it. And he went to that dinner scared out of his mind that if he missed the dinner, that people would know that something was wrong. Oh, my God.

41:11This is like that dinner on the Titanic. Yeah. Oh, right, right. Or like as it's sinking, they're just eating their dinner. And playing the music. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's some key players in it. There's tons of great characters, but there's also kind of just sectors that are involved in this really complex meltdown. You've got the banks, of which many of them are still in existence. It's crazy they weathered these storms, JPMorgan and Chase, and some didn't, some didn't. They're all there. You have the stockbrokers. Yes. They're a big part of it. They're manipulating everything. And that's the other thing that I didn't realize.

41:45It hopefully doesn't happen the same way today, or at least I pray it doesn't. I do think it happens in crypto. One of the things that was happening back then was you had these things called stock pools, where basically some of these wealthy guys would get together and basically pump and dump the stock. And it was sort of known and it was legal. There was no rules against it. So they would call each other up and say, OK, for the next two weeks, we're going to try to get this stock to go higher. And it was almost like actors on the floor of the exchange saying, I'm up for 120. Then you go to 180.

42:14Then I go to 220. Then you go to more. And then we're going to pull the rug. And weirdly, the public sort of understood what was going on. They almost talked about these things somewhat openly. And so people would try to jump in again with this train analogy. They'd say, if I can get on and off the train before the rug gets pulled, I too can play in this craziness. This is like the modern day GameStop a little bit. The modern day GameStop. That's exactly right. And by the way, that's happening also in crypto right now. I mean, all the time. You go on to Reddit, even these private Telegram accounts that people have set up.

42:47This is what they're doing, meme stocks. The other guy was a guy named Jesse Livermore, who was sort of the Cassandra in the room. He's the only guy who really won huge, right? He won huge because he was a short seller. He bet against the market. And for most of the late 20s, he was almost out of business because the market kept going up and up and up. And he had nothing and it wasn't working for him. And then makes$100 million. He's that guy in the big short. Yes, except an emotional wreck of a guy because he makes the money. He then goes on to lose all the money. He makes a little bit of money back.

43:16And by 1940, without giving away the whole book, he walks into the cloakroom of the Sherry Netherland on Fifth Avenue and kills himself. God, there's so many suicides in this book. Is there a known death total? Strangely enough, despite all of the headlines about suicides, technically, there were less suicides in 1929 than there were in 1928. Oh, weird. So even though the popular perception is that people are jumping out of windows, and people were, I think what happened was anytime there was a suicide after the crash, there was always a headline about it. And they were either attached to the financial industry or they were somebody who had mortgaged their home or lost their this.

43:53And so in terms of the popular perception, and by the way, even the story my grandfather would tell, I think these things did happen. But it's outsized. But I think in our imagination, on a relative basis, it might be outsized. Okay, so then some other players, of course, are you have the politicians and then you have the Fed. And the Fed's kind of new, right? The Fed should be doing stuff that today it would be doing, but at the time... Does nothing. Yeah, explain what they should have or could have done and what they chose to do and why. Interestingly, the Fed, which had just started in 1913, is totally basically a new institution.

44:24Even though they were supposed to be an independent institution, they were worried about politics. They were scared of the politics. And for the most part, they sat on their hands. They were debating the whole time, sort of the way the Fed debates now about whether they should raise interest rates to cut this whole thing down to size, whether they should lower interest rates. And if they did that, would that cause more speculation? The debate was happening, but they were almost too worried to do anything super substantive about it because they thought not only did they get hauled up in front of Congress, but that ultimately the Fed could just lose funding and it would be over.

44:53Now everyone talks about the independence of the Fed. There was a lot of sort of political pressure on them, or at least they felt that political pressure because they thought that they could really screw themselves. And that was pre-crash. After the crash, the thing you would have wanted them to do, which frankly Ben Bernanke did in 2008, is you want to flood the system with money and effectively bail everybody out. But you remember how politically unpopular bailing people out is? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So back then, they weren't really game to do that either because that would have been a politically unpopular thing.

45:24I think the sort of psychological pressure of that was real. Ben Bernanke, by the way, had done his thesis, interestingly, at Princeton on the Great Depression. Whoa. and had watched all this play out. Yeah. And then I think that actually was a big impetus for him to do what he did. But look, for many, many years, we lived with the political ramifications of that because people were so frustrated, the bailouts, so upset about the bailouts. I know people who think, and I think this may be true not to go too political, but you look at what happened in 2008, I think that might have even led, frankly, to Trump's presidency in 2016.

45:58Occupy Wall Street to QAnon to all of it. Yeah. So it's interesting that it might have been the right economic thing to do, but not necessarily the right political thing to do. And I don't know if there was an in-between. But the weird part to compare, the one thing I think politically about this all the time is in 29, there wasn't this sort of Occupy Wall Street movement immediately. In fact, a lot of people blame themselves. Marx in your book. Groucho Marx was living in Long Island at the time. He was not a super famous actor yet. And he caught the bug like everybody else. He would spend all day at this brokerage house.

46:33He was convinced by this broker that he should buy into RCA, which was like the NVIDIA of its time. It was like the hot stock. Radio was the ticker. It was the next big technology. He was sort of questioning the economics of it because they didn't have a dividend. He thought, well, if they're making money, they should be giving us the money. And the broker's like, dude, you got to do this. This is the future. The world's changing. It's different this time. He does it, of course, and then gets a call in October. You got to come down here. And he has to mortgage his house. And so, so many of these people, they did ultimately blame themselves.

47:06And he asked them, well, how did this happen? He said, well, I made a mistake. And then Groucho Marx said, no, I made a mistake for believing you. For listening to you. That was that kind of personal responsibility that we don't have as much to that degree. Now we just blame everybody else all the time. Even questions about capitalism and socialism. That didn't really come up till mid to late 30s at the earliest. That's interesting to me because I'm always thinking about now we have these big debates in this country about what's the right thing. Now, Hoover knew what to do, but chose not to, but encouraged Roosevelt to do it, yeah?

47:38So Hoover knew what to do, sort of. I mean, I would just say Hoover made a whole bunch of mistakes. I mean, a whole bunch of dominoes went the wrong way. He wanted to raise taxes at a time where you shouldn't be raising taxes because the whole economy was faltering. He had made a pledge as he was campaigning in 28 to the farmers in America. He was trying to get them to vote for him, that he would implement tariffs. if you're seeing the parallels, folks. And so he says that he needs to go and do that. 1930, he puts tariffs in place, despite, by the way, just like now, economists were writing these open letters, CEOs going down to Washington to say, please don't do this.

48:14He says, well, I told everybody I was going to do it. I got to do it. So he does it. A year later, global trade is down 60%. And he had this idea in his mind that the market and the economy were different, that they were somehow separated from each other. and that this was almost like a psychological problem that you could sort of like jawbone your way out of it. If you could just tell people to feel better, they would feel better. By the way, we just had that experience. We've had that experience a whole bunch of times. It's happening right now. It happened in the last administration. People know what they know about how things are really happening.

48:47They go to the grocery store and they get a bill and that's that. But interestingly, as things got progressively worse, one of the things that Hoover wanted to do, but he was also basically losing at this point. meaning he was not going to be the next president. He wanted to effectively have what's called a bank holiday. He thought he needed to shut down the banks before there was like a run on all the banks. Full collapse. And he's scared out of his mind that this is going to happen. But because he had basically told everybody that this was a psychological problem, he really wanted Roosevelt to endorse the idea that they would do this.

49:23Since Roosevelt had won. And Roosevelt, of course, doesn't want to take this on. He wants to start with a clean slate. He doesn't want to endorse anything that Hoover's going to do. And Hoover doesn't want to really capitulate to the idea that this was really his thing. The egos, my God. Yeah, egos standing in the way of like... So Hoover secretly sends a letter to Roosevelt begging him to do this with him. Roosevelt says, no way I'm not doing it. They're going back and forth, back and forth for weeks. The night before the inauguration, literally it's 1130 at night. Hoover calls him one last time, says, please, let's just do it tomorrow.

49:55Otherwise, the banks are going to go out of business. He says, no, we're not going to do it. Of course, a couple of days after he gets inaugurated, what does Roosevelt do? Shudders the banks. And it does help save the system and begins the beginning of this sort of upward trend. So he did politically get what he wanted out of all this. It's possible, had they done this earlier, they could have stemmed the tide a little bit better. Okay, let's talk about all of the downriver outcomes of this collapse, because I bet there's a bunch we don't know about. I think most we would know, and in the book you say, I think in 1934, maybe that was the nadir where we were at 25 % unemployment.

50:37There's like tented camps everywhere. They're called them Hoovervilles. 25%. 25 % unemployment in America. And you point out the peak of our unemployment after 2008 was 11%. For a hot minute. By the way, the lowest unemployment we've ever had ever was I think about 2.5%. That was like true Alice in Wonderland time, 1950s. So yeah, one in four adults who would want a job can't get a job. Can't get a job. That's pretty bleak. And that really impacted people who had nothing to do with this trading stock. This was so much of the whole country was now being impacted. So what kind of things came out of this societally?

51:10Well, all of a sudden, you're having a situation where people like Charlie Mitchell, who had sort of gotten away with it all. I don't want to say gotten away with it all because it was unclear what he'd gotten away with. But all of a sudden, the bankers start to get blamed. really for the first time. They had been blamed in the papers, but not in any political kind of way. You know, we're always debating, you know, should people go to jail? Well, what happens? Roosevelt literally tells the Justice Department to go arrest him. So he gets arrested for tax evasion, not for an actual crime related to the banking crisis at all, which seems almost apropos of the way we seem to do it in this country.

51:46Al Capone. I was going to say, that's how we got Al Capone. We love to do that. That's how we got Al Capone before that. So he had saved his bank, interestingly, with his own money. Remember, I told you about that dinner with Winston Churchill. He had saved the bank with his own money. But as a result, he had a huge paper loss because he had invested all this money in his own stock to try to keep it from falling apart, which was sort of noble in its own way. And then decides, because he had made some money in cash that year, that the way he was going to try to avoid paying taxes that year was he was going to sell all of his losing shares to his wife.

52:16It was like a stock swap. It's illegal now. But back then, it was unclear how legal or illegal it really was. And so he gets arrested and he goes to trial. And interestingly, just like maybe after 08 or other things, he doesn't ultimately go to jail. He gets acquitted by the jury. And the jury decides that almost anybody would have done this in his position. And by the way, others were doing this. Everybody was doing it back then. And then we actually put a law in place to make this completely illegal. Okay, so that's what happened. And now how is it a bit of a warning? What are the parallels to today?

52:49We earmarked some, but what's currently happening? I think people, even if they don't really follow the market, they would be aware of the fact that we're in quite a boom right now. So I think there's a couple of things going on. And I don't want everyone to run out and go, oh, my God, the whole thing is on fire. But we put a lot of laws in place. The SEC emerged in 1934. There was the Bank Act, which split up the banks. Carter Glass did that in 1933. We had a Bank Act in 1940. There were a lot of things that we've done to try to make the system safer. And one of the things that's happening now is we are taking some of those guardrails off in the guise of sort of democratizing finance, which was sort of the concept, by the way, in the 20s.

53:27Everybody wants more access to the lottery tickets because we all want more. Ideally, we'd like not to work for that. Ideally, if we could avoid it. In the best case scenario. And so Washington just approved a bill called the Genius Act. Genius Act allows people to trade in crypto in ways they couldn't before, trade in private equity, venture capital, private credit. Now we'll be available to put in your retirement funds and 401k plans and all sorts of stuff like that. So that worries me a little bit in terms of what is going on. I think you can do it, but you have to figure out a way to do it transparently with a lot of eyes and safety mechanisms on there.

54:04And I think right now we're taking a lot of the safety mechanisms off. Private equity and venture capital, all that stuff is really a private market. You don't have to disclose stuff in that world. And so here it's going to be available to the public without the sort of same disclosures the public stocks require, for example. By the way, President Trump recently announced, I think this is pretty interesting. He says public companies shouldn't have to disclose their earnings quarterly. Historically, companies would come out with earnings reports four times a year. You could see what was going on.

54:32That was the whole point. It's pretty important. He says now you should only do that twice a year. Now, his argument is that these companies are wasting too much time focused on short-term earnings and are not thinking long-term enough. It takes too much energy and time away. But there's a whole other argument, which is more transparency, the better. That's not an invalid argument. No, no, it's not an invalid argument. I have time for the argument. I just don't know what the true implication of it is. So I think it's like a red flag. It's a question. We should sort through the question. Yeah. I mean, it kind of parallels what I think is a general issue in politics, which is 80 % of their life is out fundraising, right?

55:08That's all they do. That's the trap of the job. They can't really govern because all they got to do is endlessly raise money. By the way, that's a trap that CEOs and business leaders would say. Every quarter, they have to take a week, four times a year. So a month out of their year is being used to build decks and talk to the analysts and talk to the journalists. Worse, probably make some short-term decisions that are not good for the company you have invested in. So there is some argument. There's like a fiduciary responsibility aspect to it. And that's why I get it. I'm just saying I think it's all part and parcel of this larger guardrail thing.

55:41Yes, yes. And it's funny because the one thing I do think about a lot is that speculation, we all talk about speculation is like a dirty word and you don't want people speculating. The other side of it is you need a little bit of speculation for our economy to make these great innovations. I mean, speculation is like the twin of innovation in a way. Think about whoever invested in Tesla in the beginning when it was an absurd investment was speculating. All the AI stuff right now is speculating. There's no profitable AI product. It was speculation. And so when you think about the great innovations that have come out of this country in a very weird way, I know it's heretical to say.

56:16It was built on speculation in some ways. It's like a needle to thread. How do you have enough speculation without having too much speculation? Yes. Yes. You're trying to control this force that is very powerful. Which is the question. All of our industries, virtually, have been in one way or another funded by this stock market. Yeah. And so everything we have that is now an asset of ours is somehow you can pretty much trace it back to this system. Hate it or love it. It is how we have done what we've done. And this will come up in the book review I read. The question that I also think about is just how much we've decided that gambling is a part of our...

56:56So speculation is a form of gambling. But now we're also gambling just on any and everything, which is a different kind of speculation. That's my complaint about crypto. Well, there's crypto. There's no there there. You can now bet on the news. You can bet on a presidential election. You can bet on Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey, where they're going to get married. Yeah. I mean, you can bet on all of this stuff. And obviously, you can go on a fan duel and bet on the game. But I just don't know what that does to the culture. Yeah. I mean, everything's gamified. It's also as a result of our social media and our attention and needing to move quickly.

57:31I'll say it's terrible. Yeah. I mean, that aspect's terrible. There's been a lot of Michael Lewis parallels between you guys as we've been sitting here. Even the going to London part and getting into finance in London. There's a lot of stuff they're writing. He's like a hero of mine. Oh, yeah. As he should be. He's so awesome. Oh, my God. He is like a historic figure. He is so charismatic and brilliant and casual about it all. I'm totally enamored. I'll tell you what, I'm enamored. I have this vision in my head of him playing the keyboard, meaning the typewriter, like a piano. And just with a smile on his face, writing these books, almost cackling as he's writing.

58:05Whereas I'm sitting there and I'm like hunting and pecking and I'm in pain and all of the things. Yeah, he's really good at the thing you said, which is making a big story, making the characters so real. So real. And you're so invested as if it's a movie. But he's so fucking playful along the way. It's like our favorite kind of performers, the ones that make it look effortless. The best. Yes. But all of his recent work on his podcast about this insane gambling addiction that a very significant portion of the young men in the country have, it's fucking terrible. But capital needs to be raised for innovation and this is our instrument to do so.

58:39So I'm also very in defense of the stock market. Okay. No. Oh, now we're about to get serious. We are. Because I absolutely adore you. Okay. I adore you. I've had nothing but when I met you, I'm like, I love that guy. I hope I'm on his show. I hope he's on our show. Just love him. You guys have the illusion of journalistic integrity, but it's become so politicized. The New York Times is very, very clearly left, and Fox is clearly, clearly right. And that's the problem. It has the illusion of journalistic integrity, but it's interesting that it falls so perfectly that they've become so political.

59:15Do you think that's a valid point at all? And I'm going to bring up your book review. So I read the book review of 1929 in the New York Times, a place where you work forever and help build. And it's not a great review. And it's not a great review because the person doesn't like the stock market. It's not a review of your book. It would be like someone who hates gas-powered cars reviewing the Honda Accord. Don't review the Honda Accord. You've already established you only like electric vehicles. The notion that the New York Times had the audacity to review Joe Rogan's stand-up routine, I thought was preposterous.

59:49You've got to recuse yourself from that. You've already declared. So I don't think that review of your book was fair at all. And I think it reeks of the thing that I am suggesting is happening. Wow. I have a couple thoughts. One is, so I grew up with the Times. Started when I was 18. I love the Times, let me say. No, you don't have to say that. No, I do. I'm just saying it's hard for me. There are things I agree with, and there's things I don't agree with, like anything in life. And so the only thing I feel like I can be responsible for is me. Yes. I think what happens is, and maybe this goes to then the audience.

1:00:19I think that I am channeling the audience. I think as a journalist, my job is to sort of channel the public. What does the public think? And you may say to yourself, well, who is the public? Who are your listeners versus who's listening or watching MSNBC or reading the New York Times or who's watching Fox? I like to think of myself, this is selfish to say, as a completely independent actor. You're thinking on your own. Whether it's the Times or CNBC or any other part of my life, there's no model. There's nobody saying to me, hey, Sorkin, you got to do it this way. This is what you have to do. I'm asking you to do it or I'm instructing you to do it.

1:00:54You're smart enough to predict the criticism you'll get. You got me on the couch. I am cognizant of that. Maybe that's not good. Maybe it's great. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I don't either. I wanted to talk about it. I'm not unhappy that you did. It's a little uncomfortable. I won't tell you it's not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't figure out what the public actually wants. This is the thing I grapple with in the following way. I think that part of the public wants questions that are super newsy, super accountable. There's part of that audience that wants that. And increasingly, there seems to be an audience that doesn't want that at all.

1:01:30And maybe we're sort of just moving in these different directions. I don't know what the right answer is. By the way, I think about this all the time. So I don't want you to think that this is like, this is like clearly, unfortunately, on my mind in a way that you've sort of got in there. Yeah, I think all sides are claiming they're doing it, but then there's these very big and public and known failings of it, right? So even on the daily, these two Princeton professors on talking about, You know, there's a huge failure of the media during COVID. Distancing didn't work. It was already known by the WHO six months before, and it was shut down.

1:02:05So it's a bummer, and that's not what the fourth estate's supposed to be. So it's like just if we acknowledge that there's some failures, why are these failures? My hunch is that because all of these things have become really dedicated to one side or the other, and that to me is what's scary. I think there is, again, get out your salt shaker, because this is what I've been doing for my career. I think there's a value in journalism, capital J. Me too. Me too. No, no. But so here's the complicated part, because now we're going to get into like the economics of the media business and where the soul goes and all the things.

1:02:33Yeah, yeah, yeah. If journalism, capital J, dies, or if it can't do what it's supposed to do, which is actually to provide news and information that you can learn from, we can't have a conversation using facts. And we need the facts. Yeah. Somehow. And by the way, sometimes in these interviews that I'm doing, and by the way, sometimes times in the interviews that you're doing, you are collecting facts. You are in the business of collecting facts that then get put into the public bloodstream and are hopefully picked up and used in the right way. Yeah. Sometimes, obviously, they can get spun and all sorts of things, but we need the facts.

1:03:09Yeah, I agree. And so I always wish I could do it better every single time. Even something that I've done that's great. I never think anything I've done is great, to be honest with you. I always sort of go, oh, it could be better. The book could be better. Everything can be better. Always. You're pretty fucking good, though. The bar is pretty goddamn high. You know what I'm saying? For me, that's what's going on constantly. I'll write an email, send the email, and think I could have sent a better email. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, that's like the prison of my own brain. Yeah. I have the same fear you have.

1:03:36How are we trusting anything? Right. And I want to get to the bottom of that. And I really want us to figure it out. I'm not sure people are really suggesting the real problem and then the real solution. Can I throw up one other thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all trying to be trusted. I think everybody wants to be trusted. We talked about people want more money. And actually, I would argue too, they want trust. And so the question is, what does that mean? How do you react? How are you trusted, right? And sometimes a brand can be trusted. Sometimes a person can be trusted. And I think what's happening that's so interesting right now is, especially in the media landscape, it seems like individuals are trusted more than brands are trusted.

1:04:18except then you until they yeah I'm just saying I don't know I wish I had a better answer for you well I love the book you're a phenomenal writer you take too long between books takes a while because we're going on like eight years oh no much longer yeah too big to fail is a while I wonder if they'll make a movie 16 years maybe it'll be 16 years yeah this is definitely gonna get made into a show and you know it maybe we can hope I'm watching it it's gonna be a great show The characters are phenomenal. They're also interesting. It's from such a different era too. Like the way people were living is just so fascinating.

1:04:54It's the birth of all the stuff that we're still kind of seeing now, like on steroids. Now they're going to space instead of building the Empire State Building. Yeah, yeah. Well, Andrew, I adore you. I really, really, really, really am grateful for what you do as a journalist and the different things I've read that you've exposed in the loopholes and you do hold power accountable and I'm very grateful for it. And I just think you're a wonderful dude. And I hope you'll come back. I appreciate it. Thank you, guys. This was fun and a little scary.

1:05:24Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:05:34We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. You know, sometimes you're just grumpy. Yeah. Yeah. I've felt this agitated in a long time. Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. It's okay. I'm going to get over it. Okay. This is a change of venue. It's a new starting fresh. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff in my house.

1:06:05There's a lot of stuff in my house that I think gets used one time and then just sticks around forever. Yeah. And like I couldn't close cabinet doors in my gym because there's just stuff overflowing that's never ever been used. It's never going to get used. Yeah, sure. Threw something out. You got to cut that out. No, I want to keep it. I kind of, no. What was it? This ridiculous fucking back thing. The tag is still on this motherfucker. You can't close the cabinet. I'm fucking throwing this motherfucker. No one's ever going to notice. Oh, wow. I did. I pitched it. Did you feel good? No, I felt conflicted.

1:06:46I was preparing for if I get caught. What is my defensiveness? Okay, okay. And what did you mount? We're keeping this. We have to. We cannot. I'll be busted. No, we have to because we have to teach people. She doesn't listen. That's true. And neither does Anna. She has friends that listen. No, they don't listen. Nicole does. Hi, Nicole. Hi, Nicole. Thanks for listening. I don't know if she listens to the fact. Nicole, please don't tell. Please don't tell. It's a contraption. Yeah, so I was like, what am I going to – first of all, I wouldn't have done it if I wasn't like 99 % sure. It's never going to get brought up.

1:07:19Yeah. And then I think, well, what if it does get brought up? Is it a scratcher? A back scratcher? I think or some – yeah. Okay. It's huge and heavy and – Okay. It feels hard to do. It has a tag on it. So it can't be getting used because you can't really use it with the – Okay. I snapped. I know. I can feel it. Well, if you're going to snap. But I'm not trying to hide it. I'm trying to own it. Yeah, but also if you're going to snap, I suppose that's the best way. That's me snapping. Yeah. It's not like I'll throw something away secretly. Well, no, you could snap by yelling. So it's better that you did this.

1:07:59Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wouldn't ever yell at anyone. Okay. Unless they were yelling at me. Sometimes you get angry. Everyone gets angry and sometimes things get pushed over. Instead of yelling, you could throw stuff out. This is a good lesson. Well, I don't know if anyone should copy this. I bet it's already being copied. Let's get honest. You weren't the first one to do this. You know, there's a lot of like, there's things get worked out in interesting ways and everyone, you know, there's a certain amount of life that's between the lines. Oh, sure. Right? Yeah. And everyone knows, wink, wink. Nicole.

1:08:34It's part of the, you know, the silent lubricant that makes everything work. Yeah, of course. I don't even know what I'm saying, but once in a while I snap and I pitch something. Okay. I've never been busted, which makes me think I have a really good barometer of what, like, no one's ever going to notice. Okay, so you threw it in the big trash can. Outside, and I picked a trash can that was, like, very—no one's—the person who owns this item is never going to be in that trash can. There are several that they would use before they got to this deep one. Right. Now, what, okay, so if. Okay, so if.

1:09:07Yeah. If you're confronted. I would go, I snapped. I couldn't shut the door. I was already really frustrated. I tried nine times to shut the door and put it in different things. And finally, I just said, it has a tag on it. It's never been used. I've been wrestling with that forever. And I'm going to pitch it. And if someone wants it, I'll replace it. Great answer. You're liking this? Yeah, that's honest. But then that person might say, as if this is so hard to figure out, that person might say, you can't just decide which of my items you're going to throw away. I understand that point of view, too.

1:09:37It's very valid. It's more valid than my point of view, which is like being an adult, come talk to me about it. But I knew I was not in a headspace to have a gentle, civilized talk about it. The right thing would probably just be walk away because I bet tomorrow wouldn't bother me nearly as much as it did in that moment. Look, I think you saying you didn't have the capacity in the moment to walk away. Yeah. And you didn't have the capacity to have a conversation because you knew it wasn't going to go well. It wouldn't have gone well, yeah. Then, and you felt this was the only option. This was the next best option.

1:10:12It was the least worst option. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if you say that, I know this person. And I think this person is going to, this unnamed person is going to be like, you know what? I get that. And I know him and I'm glad he chose that option instead of the other ones. Yeah, I hope so. But what I have to do in these situations where I've done something and I feel very validated in my decision or very confident. Yeah. You feel happy about it. What I do that helps me is I transplant this person. I transplant Delta onto this person. And then when I imagine throwing anything of Delta's away, I feel terrible.

1:11:01Because Delta also has a lot of things. And they all have a very special meaning. So then that was step two. So I'd already kind of snapped and I threw something away. And then I went upstairs in my bedroom to rush. And then we have another basket in our room. There's so many baskets in the world. They've all found their way to my house. Containers and baskets. Yeah. And I look in this new basket that's virtually in the center of our room. I'm like, what is in this basket? Sure. It's half-fulled with stuffies. They're not obviously mine. They're not Kristen's. Not obvious, but. There's also an errant sweatshirt in there.

1:11:35It's not mine. Okay. And then I go, well, this basket's going in their room. Oh. No, no, no, no. Oh, my God. Okay. But that was me being insolent, too. It's like, I'm taking this basket and I'm putting it in their room because it's full of stuffies. Right. And then I had to stop because then I felt like I was just going to be a whirling dervish and just clearing out. I think I want to live in a big empty box sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah. Of course. But then you don't. And I was telling myself as I was ramping up and starting to boil, I was like, this is the price to have a house full of life and love.

1:12:08Exactly. And that always works until it doesn't sometimes. Sure. And then it's time to take a secret trip to the trash. One day you're going to miss that basket of stuff you so fucking much. But you're going to pine for the basket of stuffies. Bobby Brown. Bobby Brown. Bobby Brown. Not the rapper. Not the rapper. Not the Stranger Things. There's a Bobby Brown. Millie Bobby Brown. Millie Bobby Brown. Oh, sure. MBB. Yeah. Well, that could get us on another tangent that I don't, I mean, I want to talk to you about, but I'm afraid to talk about on here. I see that there's a feud. I can't believe you don't know this.

1:12:42I can't believe I'm breaking scooch. Yeah. This is cute. This shows how not clued in you are. Yeah. Rob, you know what I'm talking about, yeah? I had to ask a friend a couple days ago what was going on. Wow. Lily Allen, right? Yes. Lily Allen, his wife. David's. David Harbour's wife, Lily Allen, put out a album. Okay. They're not together anymore. Okay. She put out an album, and it's wild. It's derogatory towards— The whole thing is about him. Okay. And very explicit. Oh. about him. And what kind of stuff does it? Well, there's a song called Pussy Palace. What's that mean? He had a pussy palace.

1:13:26Meaning he had lots of girls. Yeah. He had another apartment that she thought was a dojo. A karate dojo or a Mikasa-su dojo epic Ken style? I'm not so sure. The whole album, it reads like a diary. Like it's like one, And it's like a novel. And it's intense. It is? It's intense. Do you know some of the lyrics by heart? I can pull some up for you. I didn't know it was your pussy palace. Pussy palace. Pussy palace. I always thought it was a dojo. Dojo. Dojo. So I'm looking at a sex addict. Sex addict. Sex addict. Sex addict. Talk about a low blow. Oh, no. Oh, no. There's also a really tough one. I found a shoebox full of handwritten letters from brokenhearted women wishing you could have been better.

1:14:15Sheets pulled off the bed, droon on the floor, long black hair probably from the night before. Dwayne Reed bag with the handles tied. Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside. Hundreds of Trojans. You're so fucking broken. How'd I get caught up in your double life? So they were in an open relationship. This is part of it. I also have, I find this very complicated. Okay. Extremely complicated. First of all, congratulations and thank you. You've popped me out of my mood. I'm going to go take that out of the trash.

1:14:48All it takes is a pussy pal. So you hear from the very beginning the story of this, basically, how he asked her for an open relationship. Can I pause for half a second? They don't sell butt plugs at Dwayne Reed, do they? Maybe that was that back scratcher you threw out. That might have been a really That's a huge butt plug I mean maybe that's just how he was Carrying him all his shit around Okay He just grabbed a plastic bag And put all his sex shit in there I guess But you like You don't have a bag He doesn't have a backpack or a bag Okay okay I'm getting bogged down in the details Yeah And maybe they do sell Maybe there's like behind you I hope Because butt plug Every Like there's no shame In anything I've heard so far No no Blue toys Butt plugs There's shame if Okay Okay, so she starts the album by talking about how she got cast in this play in London.

1:15:46She goes to London, and then he kind of turns on her a little bit. He calls her, and he asks for an open relationship, and she says yes. Okay. So she plays her side of the conversation on the phone, But really it's like her recreating it. Okay. I assume. I assume she didn't record that. Okay. Okay. So then what follows this whole album is they had rules, as you should. Sure. Boundaries. Boundaries. And it seems that he really crossed all these boundaries. It seems like they were supposed to only have sex with sex workers. Wow. That's an interesting parameter. I know, but that's their— Not judgmental, just saying interesting.

1:16:33I agree. but I think it's because the separation. The fear of the attachment. Exactly. So sex workers, yeah, no love, no sex, I think in the house or bed or shared, shared the marital bed. Exactly, shared locations. Yeah. Anyway, it seems that that didn't happen. He fell in love with this person. Her name is Madeline. She says that there's a song called Madeline. Oh, boy. Yeah, it's like, and then she was Madeline for Halloween. Like she's really leaning in. Lily Allen went as Madeline. Yeah. Okay. So there's just a lot of drama. Okay. When you go at Halloween, is this her as the person? She just put up that.

1:17:17She looks like Tori Spelling. No, she went. She's gone as Tori Spelling. Stop. Listen to me. She, this is Madeline the character. You know, the like, the illustration. No. You know Madeline the French. Oh, I can kind of see it's a cartoon cover. Yeah, by Bemelman, Ludwig Bemelman. I do, I do. This is Lily Allen. That's Lily Allen. As Madeline, the character for Halloween. But that's a play off of, in her album, the person that gets called out is this woman, Madeline. So she's just like, she's being cheeky. Okay, she's playing, she's being playful. She's being playful, cheeky, but I find it a little like, eee!

1:17:59I'm a little concerned about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I, this goes, but we had this exact conversation about Taylor and the Charlie XCX and this type of thing where I was like, I just think, I mean, Taylor's different, but, and the whole thing is different. But I do feel like, of course it's your right. You're an artist. So like you can do whatever you want. Take your pain and make art out of it. Yeah. But I think it is so irresponsible to drag someone, even if they like, look, I get it. Like you're so mad and you just want to throw them in the garbage like you threw that back scratcher in the garbage.

1:18:47But like, what about so many people are affected more than him? I mean, not more than other than him. She has kids who are, you know. When I try to imagine what she's feeling like to make the decision to go to Halloween is that it's in. It feels like it could be either. I'm hurting so much. I want to hurt and embarrass you. Yeah. That Halloween or the album? Both. OK. But Halloween to me is where we really. Well, that's like extra. The whole thing is the album and everyone is talking about and everyone's like, oh, my God. And everyone's like, David Harbour. Right. So I think the desire is I'm hurting a lot.

1:19:33You've hurt me. Yes. I want to hurt you back. Yeah. And that I understand. But then I would just do the same thing. Time out. Yeah, Tia. I don't think you're hurting him. I don't think that's working. I don't think he's hurt by this. I think he feels probably confirmed that it was right to not be with her. so for starters i don't think it had the it would have the desired outcome right so i think there's either that that would be one thing i could understand and then another thing i could understand is i'm deeply humiliated now this is kind of what i would do right i'm humiliated by this and embarrassed and the way i take ownership of it back is to go as this other woman to Halloween in the same way I make fun of myself before you can.

1:20:24Like there's a, there's a judo move to go like, I'm not affected by this. Look, I'm playing with this. This is, I'm fucking with this. And it's like, and I think it could be an attempt to salvage your own. Does that make sense to you what I'm saying? It does, but she's not embarrassed. She's, this is like a huge album now. Like she's happy. I think the reason she's leaning in and going as Madeline for Halloween is like a promotional. Yeah. But I'm asking more about the actual art itself. Like it is. Is that OK? And I guess like OK is gray. Like, oh, yes, it should be allowed. Yes. Is it ethical?

1:21:09Is it ethical to. do what she just did? Like, I find this hard, hard to answer. I think it's fine. So that's my answer. It's totally fine. And the result of her actions are, in my opinion, he doesn't look bad. She looks nuts. And she has now limited, I think, her future with anyone that isn't rational. So yes, I think it's totally fine if she does it. And then I think she'll pay whatever price comes with that, which I think will be a real one. I'm not even evaluating what he did. I'm saying when someone does deal with their very long-term intimate relationship in a very knee-jerk public way, forget the details, I go, ooh, that's a way to deal with it.

1:22:01Yeah, me too. That's my whole point. So I'm saying that's not a good look for her. Forget the details. Just the notion that if that if Kristen and I got divorced and my first stop was us weekly to give a play by play breakdown of everything she did wrong. That says more about me than her. I, yeah, that's what my point is. Yeah. It feels very Amber heard Johnny. Yeah. It feels, it feels to me that they probably were meant for each other. It's probably a very tumultuous, high, high intensity relationship. Yes. I agree. I think some people will be thinking, well what if he hit her could she not she should go to the police yes exactly so i think if any time that's something you can't go to the police over which you should yeah be a thousand percent clear yeah yes in any relationship anyone gets physical you should go to the police yeah so anything short of the person breaking the law sorry that's just shitty girlfriend shitty boyfriend fucking run-of-the-mill stuff.

1:23:07And that's life. It is. And I guess that, again, that's the thing. But you're allowed to write about your life in a memoir. You're allowed to write it. Like, you're allowed. It's just like, at what point does the line cross? And I guess it's person to person. Yeah, it just. It's individual. You're allowed. It goes, it's legal. A, it's legal. Yeah, exactly. It's totally, I'm not saying anyone shouldn't. I will just file that person into a category in my mind. And that's the price you'll pay. So when you're deciding whether you want to do it, you just go like, well, what will be the fallout? What will most people think?

1:23:42Yeah. But I think if you're young and you have recently been cheated on and feel heartbroken and you hear this, you're going to be a moth to a flame. You're going to feel very comforted by it. I think a lot of people feel seen. Yeah. And I get that. I mean, this is my definitive statement on it. I totally support it because it's art. And there's art that I like that people find grotesque and overshare, whatever they think. Yeah. But that's art. And so I support it, you know, at the end of the day. And it's not for me. Right, right, right. But a lot of art's not for me. Right. Yeah. Okay, I want to say an opposite thing.

1:24:21Oh, okay. I saw Sentimental Value, the movie Sentimental Value. Okay. And talk about a piece of art that I support. Oh, okay. and and it's so good it's so beautiful what got you to the theater because i'm not even aware of the movie so how did it come across your desk so i love the movie the worst person in the world it's one of my favorites and it is the same director and the same actress in the movie i heard that this was coming out like earlier this year and i've been waiting and waiting and And I'm like, November? That's way too long. It'll almost be in 2026 by then. Exactly. But it came, and I went to the theater first weekend, and I saw it, and it is a just gorgeous movie.

1:25:15I can't wait to see it. And it's really, it speaks so beautifully to family dynamics, complicated and simple ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's gorgeous. I really highly recommend it. Can't wait. And I think after what happened today with your back scratcher, you'll see it. I'll feel foolish. You'll just feel like. I can already tell I'm going to feel foolish. No, you don't have to feel foolish. I'm already feeling foolish just because I've calmed down. I might have to remove it from the trash can. Okay. Great. Well, then I got to clean it because it was in the trash can. It'll never get used. I don't really need to clean it.

1:25:55What if you take it out and then there's a maggot on it? and then you get maggots in the house and then it's like jokes on you. Faris. Ooh. Gross. All right, let's do fact. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:26:21In the spirit of honesty, I'm not done with this episode. Great. Okay. Yeah. So there might be facts left on the table. I'm so sorry. It's okay. I'm sorry. Everyone will live. Everyone will live. I think you will live. I think you will get through it. But I do have a few because I did get - Few's better than none. Few's better than none. That's what they say. Benefits of creatine, okay? Okay. Creatine is a natural source of energy that helps your skeletal muscles flex, contract. It helps create a steady supply of energy in your muscles so they can keep working, especially while you're exercising.

1:26:57If you have diabetes, though, you probably shouldn't take it. Oh, really? Yeah. It says studies show that it's safe for many people to take creatine supplements. However, there isn't enough evidence. Oh, there isn't enough evidence to show if it's safe if you are pregnant or breastfeeding. Oh, I got you. They just haven't tested on all these different people. Have diabetes. Diabetes. Kidney disease. Have liver disease. And if you have bipolar disorder, it says creatine may also increase your risk of mania. Oh, we don't want that. This is from the Cleveland Clinic. Studies suggest that creatine supplements may help brain function in people 60 and older.

1:27:34This includes short-term memory, reasoning, neuroprotection, keeping groups of nerve cells safe from injury or damage. Researchers are studying whether creatine supplements may help people with cognitive conditions, including dementia. I mean, obviously, there's like a lot of stuff with muscles. Sure. That is beneficial. Helps recovery. You know, I had a third grade education before I started taking creatine. Wow. And then you graduated from UCLA. That's right. The America's hardest school to get into. I want to take it. Mary Claire Haver, who we had on, the perimenopause expert, recommends it for women.

1:28:18So I'm going to start taking it, I think. You should. I could have also gotten into UCLA. I just didn't apply. But I think that— You figured out, though, from your GPA that that would have been quite a challenge. Okay, no. No. I did great in school. Yeah? And I would have gotten— Yeah, better than you. And I would have gotten in because I also have Indian diversity and Southern diversity. We already discussed this. Southern. This is the new square footage of your house debate, I think.

1:28:54Okay, I looked up percentage of people with colaboma. I might have to find my diploma and hang it behind my head. No. I don't know where it is, but I think it might be worth finding it. And then I'll also print out that page that said it's the hardest. So when people see it, like, oh, did you go to UCLA? What's that other thing? Oh, wow, it's the hardest school in the world to get into. Okay, not the world. Didn't you have a third grade education where you started taking creatine? Not the world. I don't have a thing of a jar of creatine next to that. So it'll be the diploma, the bona fides, and then the reason.

1:29:28Now, coloboma. I love it. I looked up the percentage of people with coloboma and percentage of people with heterochromia. Yeah. I know someone with that, too. He has both. He has both? Yeah. Oh, I get so distracted by the colonoma. No, I don't think so. It just it takes over enough of his eye that it looks like he has a different color eyes. but I don't think he has both. Oh, are you sure? I'm pretty sure. Oh, dang. Find a nice close-up of his eyes. Yeah, you're right. He would be, that'd be a double jackpot winner. That's why I thought it was extra cool. Yeah, no. Cola Boma affects approximately one in 10 ,000 people or about 0.01%.

1:30:09That's rare. That's cool. Yeah, that's very limited-ish. Extremely limited-ish. I bet he's insecure about it, but I genuinely love it. It makes it so much more interesting to talk to him. And I hope he feels that way. And it does make it look like he has heterochromia. Yeah, which I love. Which is also affects less than 1 % of the human population worldwide. And I have a friend whose daughter has it. And I used to hold her as a baby. And I've been around her a ton. And it wasn't until this summer I was looking at her. And I went, oh, my God, you have heterochromia. You noticed it only now? Yes.

1:30:43Now she's just old enough to, like, lock in and talk to you as an adult. Right. And I was like, whoa. What colors are they? Blue and brown. Really? Yeah. Wow. There's a Blue Jays pitcher that has the heterochromia. Oh, wow. Ooh. Some of those players were very cute. I wasn't rooting for them. That was so fun. We didn't even talk about that. The Dodgers won. I know. It was the craziest series. It was so fun. There cannot have ever been a more hotly contested series. Like, has there ever been one, Rob, where they went 15 innings, they went 11 innings? Because that's got to be the closest. Yeah, I think that was the most innings played in a World Series.

1:31:22Wow. There you go. That's so cool. We had so much fun watching it, watching the Game 7. Where were you? Charlie's. Charlie and Erica's. He hosted. You were out of town. Yeah. I was hosting a birthday party. And I was doing that thing I did at the Globes, which is I was watching it at my seat. and I was afraid I was going to miss my cue to go introduce a new. I would imagine a lot of people at that party were. They made an announcement about phones. You couldn't have your phone on. So I was really breaking the rules. Oh, no. But I had to check in with the scores. I know. Most of the people in the room weren't from Los Angeles.

1:31:59They can be forgiven. Right. And, of course, no one's from Toronto. Just kidding, Toronto. I love you. I didn't feel as great about the victory that I would normally. Did you? Yes. I thought it was the absolute best way to win. Yeah, just they fought so hard, and they haven't won in a long time. I don't care. And it was a big deal that they get. This is why you're a champ. This is why you're a champ. If I were competing against them, I'd start throwing it. Like, I'm going to throw this guy a fucking heater. I'm going to give him a home run. That is. These boys deserve it. They're from Canada. Deserve?

1:32:35Yeah, they're from Canada, Monica. No, stop this. Oh. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Rob just put up a picture of the blue. Oh, my God. And he's showing us his Adam's apple. He has a big Adam's apple. He's got a big girthy Adam's apple. And he has heterochromia. It's Max Scherzer. He's cute. Yeah. He's very cute. If he wants to move to L.A. And if he's single. He's rich, athletic. He's got a wife. Get rid of her. Come to L.A. They all have wives. It's so irritating. Anyway. You didn't feel bad for them at all? I felt like they put up a good fight and that's life. That's games. When we were playing the Yankees last year in the playoffs and we won, I'm like, yeah, fucking we beat the Yankees.

1:33:17Like they're the, you know, they're the underdogs. Monica, we like underdogs. I'm not interested. No. Like it's who is the best. I know. I know. The best is the best. You don't get upset. Listen, some victories feel better than others. Can we agree on that? Yeah, but I thought this victory felt so good. I know, but we were Goliath. Like when we beat the Yankees, they're Goliath, and that feels awesome. Listen. Okay. As someone who has won two state championships, one being a David and one being a Goliath. Yeah, you've been on both ends. I've been on both ends, and— That first one was better. It was better to win.

1:33:57Yeah. Like, for me. Yeah, and probably for the audience. But I don't like that. Like, I like that we, if we had lost because people were booing, don't make that sense. Because people were booing because we were somehow Goliath. Yeah. I'm like, fuck you. We're the best. There you go. Then great. And we get to be the best because guess what? We are. Right. Right. This is the heart and mind of a champion and I respect it. I loved it. The fact that we were like down. We weren't going to win for a lot of that game. And then we came back. These are the victories that really pack a punch. And, you know, I was with Charlie and Erica and Ryan and Amy and Laura and Matt.

1:34:44Matt is a Blue Jays. Of course. He's from Toronto. He's from Toronto. Yeah. And I was there and Jess and Ana. It was so fun. And, you know, at one point, Ryan was like, he wanted to leave. Sure. He was like, we lost. Oh, okay. He gave up. Yeah. He gets so emotional during games. I watched him play football games with him once, and I said, it's too much for me, Ryan. I can't. Like, his emotions— He's devoted. Yeah, and his emotions are just—they're really plugged in. Yeah, but he wasn't screaming or anything. He wasn't—did he throw anything? No, he just—he was defeated, and he told Amy, like, we should go.

1:35:17Yeah, I want to go sad. And I was like, no! I said, there's a lot of game left. Yeah. Don't give up. Right. And I was right. Yes, yes, you were. It was really fun. You had a fourth fact you didn't even remember you had, which is LA won the World Series. That's right. And I really loved that part. And this is not very me. But I did love the part in the movie. No, when the pitcher, you know, the Canada guy. Oh, my goodness.

1:35:53You had a little bit to drink, I think. you know the canada guy you know the canada guy I don't know what just happened you know the canada guy it's because canada guy I was you can see someone on a bar stool trying to say Canadian guy and just hung up on Canada but I was also starting trying to say catcher or pitcher like I got confused there was a lot going on in my head the pitcher the Dodgers pitcher was throwing and the Canadian at bat was trying to get hit. Oh, interesting. Okay. And then that's why the pitcher got so pissed and then he did hit him. Beamed him. And he said, fuck you, motherfucker.

1:36:39He did? Yeah. And you can just, it's silent, but it's so clear. It's hard for me to know whether this is in your head or this was on camera. Yeah, no, I think that happened. He said, fuck you, motherfucker. You think? You guys. This was game seven? We had a fuck you, motherfucker. those sweet and they all ran do you remember when the canada canada canada you guys didn't even watch apparently so yeah justin roblezki now that happened yeah the bench is cleared after well that was at the beginning of the game wasn't that the third inning it's just in the game bottom of the fourth bottom of the fourth okay great okay i missed that part you missed it yeah I didn't see that part.

1:37:22Oh, it was a big part of the game. Yeah. And it was hot. Yeah. You're mixed messages. I know. You hate aggression. I know. You hate violence. But I love winning. Right. So you have priorities. That makes sense. We all have, you know, we make concessions for bigger priorities. And I was like, I was like, fuck that guy. Yeah, yeah. Trying to get hit. Fucking Canadian. He's kind of like, guys. I looked up this guy after the hot one that screamed. He's much younger than me, and I think he also has a wife. And he's from Georgia. Actually, I don't know if he has a wife, but he's too young. That's such bullshit.

1:38:01It's not. You can't say that until you've met them. He's 25. You don't know. He could be so mature. Oh, he grew up in my hometown. Oh, my God. That's another strike. Hoffman Estate. No, that's cool because that's Georgia and Rob. Oh, he's bi-coastal. He said he had to apologize to his mom. Oh, you love it. I love that. Women, there he is. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's cute, right? You kind of like white trash look. It kind of surprises me sometimes because he looks like he went to Milford High School with me. He went to Georgia. He looks like a Georgia boy. I mean, he's got a fucking short long. He's got shaved sides and a big, big wolf in back.

1:38:41He's got a full man shoe. No, he's cute. I like it, but I am a little surprised you do. Because this dude's like, he's driving around a 79 Trans Am with a T-top soft drink and a glass bottle of Mountain Dew, cut off jean shorts, a VIA high tops with no laces, yelling, fuck you out the window with reckless abandon. Here's a better one. Oh yeah, dude, this guy's dirty. No. Oh, he's nasty. He's not. You should take him for a ride. You don't have to marry him, but take him for a ride. Yeah, we all agreed he was getting fucked that night. Yeah. Can you look up if he's married? Can you look up if he fucked that night?

1:39:18He definitely fucked that night. That's a fact. I can check, and I checked. He might have gotten too drunk to fuck that night. I don't think he is. Married. No, he's 25. He ain't married. People are married. If you want to fuck Monica, what's his name? No, I'm not. I'm cutting that. Oh. Wilson Rabelsky. You're asking right now out loud, hey, will you come over and treat me like it's the World Series Game 7? No, now I'm nervous. I got nervous because he's rejecting me. I can feel it. I just imagined the whole thing. Like, someone sends him this clip. Yeah. And he's like, ew. No, he's like, what's her address?

1:39:54No, he's like. God, you're so stupid sometimes. You are so stupid sometimes. I don't know. I mean, it makes sense. You didn't get to UCLA. You couldn't be more stupid. But that's okay. We'll move on. Oh, okay. It was Wall Street 2. Who said, what's your number? Jacob Moore asked the question, what's your number? He's speaking to Bretton James. Jacob Moore is the Shia LaBeouf character. Okay. So he's the one that says it. Bretton James is friend of the pod, Jess. I need to go home. I don't know what's going on. Let's get you home. Let's get you some. I think you need an IV for fluids. I am dehydrated.

1:40:34I had muscle spasms. Okay. Friend of the pod, Josh Brolin. How does Josh fit into all this? He's Brett and James. Oh, that was the character that said it. Yeah. No, that received it. Received it. And Shia LaBeouf asked it. Oh, interesting. Boy, this answers the craziest question. What? That's so weird. So I stumbled upon John Brenthal's episode of his show, Real Ones, with Shia LaBeouf. Okay. It's incredible. I mean, it has 12 million views. I'm not like I didn't discover something. But it's an incredible interview. You've got to watch it. It's fucking wild. What do you mean it's an interview?

1:41:17Well, John has a podcast. Wait, John Bernthal, who our friend of the pod. Yeah. He has a podcast. He had Shia LaBeouf on. On his podcast called Real Ones. Oh. And it's, remember how much he was talking about how Shia like got to the tank movie? And he's like, this guy's way too much. Yeah. And then by the middle, it was like, no, this guy is fucking walking the walk. Yes. So they have this connection. And Shia, I don't think, has come out and spoken publicly about all the gnarliness he's created. Yeah. And he does in this interview, and it's so captivating. Oh, good job. It's a level of honesty.

1:41:53I don't know if I've ever seen it in public. Yeah. Yeah, because Shia hit girls. He's a domestic abuser. And he talks about it. Yes, he owns it in this crazy, crazy way that I'm just shook by the level of ownership and introspection he has on it. And he's like, yeah, man, I'm going to be apologizing for the rest of my life and I need to. I have to and I should. Is he sober? Yeah. Good job, Jon Bernthal. It's a great interview. I'm going to listen immediately. I was going to recommend to Brolin. So weird you just said all this. Weird, yeah. Because I was texting with Brolin and I was like, oh, I'm going to recommend this thing to him.

1:42:40Why? Just because? Because of the level of inventory this man has done and is willing to say in public is like, it's fucking crazy. Yeah. And I know Brolin would enjoy a thing like that in the same way I enjoy it. But I have this thought. I don't know if he's worked with Shia. He might, like, if you've worked with him, and I would imagine during his chaos, maybe you hate his guts. Right. And there's no way you're going to be able to listen to this thing. And it just crossed my mind, like, oh, I want to recommend it to Josh, but I kind of want to figure out first, has he worked with them? And then now you're telling me three hours later.

1:43:16That's weird. That's him. That is weird. That is weird. Well, we love Josh Brolin. We love his episodes. He's a great guest. He is. This reminds me, though, it's so funny. So Beth's dead is out and a lot of people have consumed the whole thing because they've moved over to Patreon. So we're starting to get feedback on the end, which is very interesting because I'm no spoilers, but people have a lot of thoughts and opinions on the end. And it's so funny. We're all projecting our own stuff. As we do. Everything. At all times. But it is, it's been so interesting to hear. I know, like I posted the clip.

1:44:01The clip I chose to post of Reese was her talking about writing on a daughter's mind with a Sharpie and not a dry erase board. And there were a handful of people who were like, what about boys? You don't think that goes for boys? And it was like, yeah, talk about projection. Like, well, A, she's a girl. So she was a daughter. She can't speak about what the impact is on a boy because she's telling her story. Yes. For starters. Yes. Because she said that about girls does not mean she said that's not true for boys. But you filled in. Yes. It's not true for boys. And that's like the power of like your narrative is already no one gives a fuck about boys.

1:44:40And so I hear one thing about girls and like I knew, you know. Right. Yeah. It's crazy how like you can look at this clip that is like so benign. And beautiful. And beautiful and true to her. and get really triggered by it. I know. Well, that's why, but yeah, it's just funny to hear, yeah, people have such specific reactions to things, and it says so much about you. Your reaction says so much about you. Yeah. And I think I'm proud of that with Beth Stead, that it's caused that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like has the ability to cause people to feel a lot of things. Yeah, and disagree. That are about them.

1:45:18Yeah, it's been interesting. That's why we love serial. It begat debate. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, one thing, in fact, I got to check, and I'm embarrassed. I said I watched Too Big to Fail. I was obsessed with it. I was obsessed with it. But I said I watched it in college. Not possible. It's not possible. It's fucking me up a little bit because in my head, I have a memory of being in my college apartment doing this. But I wasn't. It's so confusing. Have you had a screener? Two years before. Because you were a comm major, marketing. I was. I was a PR major. And theater. I have two diplomas. Back to your diplomas thing.

1:46:02Well, they're easy to get there, so I'm not surprised you didn't get three. They're not easy at all. They say it takes five diplomas from UGA to equal one UCLA diploma. Okay, so. I want the world to know I don't think this about UCLA at all. I'm just doing it because I love that it agitates Monica. It's a funny bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it's, I mean, it's, I mean, objectively it's the hardest school in the world they're going to do, but I don't even care. Oh my God. Graduates of UCLA just twist everything. Now, I, I guess, I think what happened is when I was home for the holidays, I, unfortunately I didn't even, it's not even in the year I lived at home.

1:46:43Right. I lived here in Los Angeles. You're home for Christmas probably. and watched it, and then I couldn't stop watching it. And so I was around all those people from college. Yeah. But wow, did that really mess me up. Cut yourself some slack. Think how much this brain is holding. I mean, you've fucking been here for 38 years, and you have a lot of it. It's kind of crazy. But what can be trusted? None of it. Trust it all. Let God sort them out. I love you. Love you.

1:47:26follow armchair expert on the wondery app amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts you can listen to every episode of armchair expert early and ad free right now by joining wondery plus in the wondery app or on apple podcasts before you go tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.