Is Another 1929 Crash Coming? with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin

(soft piano music) Lemonade. - Thanks for listening to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know. Listen to and follow Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know add free on Amazon Music or just ask Alexa. Alexa, play the podcast Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. Also, with Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts and audio books, all in the Amazon Music app. Listen to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. - By the way, I'm not allowed to own individual stocks or equities or anything like that. - Most financial journalists do not own individual equities of any sort. - If you wanna do that, you have to get elected to Congress. - Back in 2022, I went on Squawk Box, and for some reason I've never been asked back. - We always talk about human rights violations until the price is unletted hits $5. Then it's time to go sword dancing with the Saudis on my right, Joe. - One of the panelists that day was Andrew Ross Sorkin, who was not only a CNBC host, but he's also a New York Times journalist and host their annual deal book summit, which I love to watch, not only for the billionaire crash outs. - Jonathan, like the only reason I'm here is because you were a friend. - Exactly, I'm Andrew. - But also because I'm trying to figure out when will all of these psycho billionaires just blow up the economy? When is the next stock market crash? Give me the info. So I sat down with my good friend Jonathan because his latest book, 1929, is on exactly this topic. We talked about similarities between 1929 and today. What parallels are you seeing between the moment that we're living through right now in 2026 and the stock market crash of 1929? - Oh my goodness, so many. - AI's impact on the job market in the near future. - There is no question, no question, that it's gonna impact jobs. And we talked about how this might be the year that the world finally turns away from America for good. We've spent the last 50, 75 years trying to build relationships and alliances with all these countries around the world. And now these countries are like, you know what, people are crazy, we can't work with you. And yeah, that sucks 'cause I live here. But also, how is the rest of the world just realizing that now? ♪ I'll be right away ♪ ♪ No, they may stop me ♪ ♪ Make your daddy go ♪ ♪ And ask what's your plan ♪ - I usually kick this off with the question, but today I wanna kick it off with an apology. - Ooh, four. - In 2022 I came on your show. - Yes. - I appeared on Squawk Box. I was wearing a black turtle neck. I was satirizing many of the people that appear on the Forbes 30 under 30. I was on the show because I bought a bunch of BTC and SPACs during the pandemic because I was bored and I lost a bunch of money. - Do you invest yourself? - Oh, I've lost a lot of money watching this show. - Oh, yeah. - And my therapist told me that I have to tell you in person that the reason why I lost a lot of money isn't because of CNBC and Squawk Box. It's because I'm an adult. I made my own decisions. And there's no crying at the casino. - That's a very evolved view. So thank you. - I just wanted to own that. - I wanted to appreciate that. - Thank you. I do not, I thought we were, that's great. Thank you. - Yes. - And that's very nice of you to say. - I have to own that and I have to carry the consequences that came my way and my Wells Fargo account. - Did you get killed? - I got destroyed. - Really? Like, what are we talking about here? - I don't want to put it into a road mic, but I did lose quite a bit of money. - I'm sorry. - And I shouldn't have used CNBC and Squawk Box as a tool to build wealth. I should put my money into more reliable things, like polymarket embedding on UFC in the NFL. - Are you doing that now? - Occasionally. - That's maybe not a good idea either. - Well. - We can talk about that. - I don't know how I feel about prediction markets. I am assuming that the conundrum in the prediction market space is just how much insider trading is really going on. That's to me the thing. - Less so maybe in the politics? Like I think actually you could probably get a gauge of something from that. But if you're betting on what bad bunnies for a song is gonna be at Super Bowl, I'm assuming the cameraman and the cheerleaders and everybody who's in the stadium for three hours before halftime. - So I have a theory that the state of the American economy is determined by our Super Bowl ads. - Okay. - The 2026 Super Bowl was pretty much brought to you by three things. AI, crypto and weight loss drugs. Am I seeing this right that the American economy is pretty much propped up by Gryfter's addiction and low self-esteem? - I think you got it pretty, pretty right. That should be a new index. We've called the Super Bowl ad index. But by the way, that's true because if you go back and think two or three years ago, though it's the beginning of all the crypto ads. - Sure. - The FTX moment. The FTX moment, all of that. - Yeah, you can always look at the Super Bowl is not a bad place to look. - Do you ever see it as an indication of who is flush with cash and who's trying to message or total basically paying a picture of what is to come? - In every instance. In fact, now that you're saying it, I wish that I was, you say you don't know, I think you know. That was a hot take. I just want to let everyone in the same thing. - No, no, but I wish I had looked at it exactly like that. I think we often do look at the Super Bowl ads. Look, I've been, I'm always obsessed with the ads almost oftentimes more than the game. And it usually is these companies that are kind of on the cusp that either have a lot of money or frankly, that don't even have enough money who are almost desperate to take a stand, make a stand, show themselves, right? And this is the year that AI is here. By the way, I think, I want to say open AI did a big ad last year as well. And then you had the crypto guys, I think they started in this role a couple of years ago. But yeah, you can totally sort of see the narrative arc. - I felt that these commercials are a story about optimism. And over the past five years, the stock market has boomed. - Right. What is the optimistic story that the markets are believing? - The optimistic story that the markets believe, and by the way, as we're filming this right now, they're not that optimistic. I don't know how much of a believer they are. They're believing AI is the future. It's going to create shocking amounts of productivity and efficiency, which by the way to me raises all sorts of questions about jobs and job losses long-term, and therefore what that ultimately means. But we can get there. They are betting to some degree right now on sort of this deregulatory environment where all the regs come off. Crypto becomes a thing you can do. If you want to do prediction markets or better gambler trade, all that's available to you, you want to merge, all that's available to all of the things that some folks in the market thought were not there a couple of years ago, they look and go, it could happen. - I have been struggling navigating the AI discourse, specifically in my industry, Hollywood. AI discourse is either this vague optimism or vague humorism. Every conversation that I'm a part of. AI will replace your job. Okay, which job? I don't know yet. Or all here, trust me, AI is gonna create so many jobs. And I'm like, what job? And they're like, I don't know yet. Are you seeing any specific numbers that are showing that one side is winning over the other? - Oh. - Because that's what I'm looking for. I think in the short term, there is no question, no question that once it starts to get to sort of escape velocity, that it's going to impact jobs. There's just, I can't even see some other answer. So when people say, so what I hear is, are we an AI bubble and we should be worried about that? And I say, yeah, but you should also worry about, what happens in success? Maybe there's an AI bubble. And that probably is some kind of short term, duration mismatch between the amount of money that's being put into this right now and how much money people are actually gonna make off of it at least immediately. I think longer term, I don't see how we could have immediately more jobs. I think specifically we'll start by having less jobs. - It would start with a pay traction. - Yeah. - And then hopefully, fingers crossed. - I think there's a lot of yolo here. I think there's a lot of like, let's just see what happens and hope. And there's sort of a faith. And I don't know, I don't think I have this faith, but I think there's a faith that we've always somehow figured it out on the other side. We had horse and buggies, we went to cars, we figured it out, TV didn't kill radio, cable didn't kill the movies, all that. - Sure. - Though maybe it is killing the movies. - It is killing movies for sure, yeah. What would the past five years of stock market returns look like if Nvidia just was excluded? - No goodness, not good. I mean, look, if you take out the top basically six or seven tech companies out of the S&P 500, you're looking at something that looks like it's flat to basically down. That's what it looks like, that's terrifying. Yeah, but that's why this whole sort of tech revolution is people are buying into this dream. That's what's going on. I would say flat, you'd have to, there's a whole bunch of math you can do on it, but it would not look nearly as positive. - I think one of your great skills is creating parallels with the past. So let's talk about the book. - Okay. - I wanna put up one of the pull quotes from your latest book, "1929." I'd love for you to read it. - Lengthy, uninterrupted, booms like the one in the 1920s produce a collective delusion. Optimism becomes a drug or a religion or some combination of both. People lose their ability to calculate risk and distinguish between good ideas and bad ones. - What parallels are you seeing between the moment that we're living through right now in 2026 and the stock market crash of 1929? And look, when I wrote this book, I didn't think that I was trying to write some kind of warning about the world today. Like that was not actually the point of it. But as I was writing it, I would go, "Oh my, I'd see some headline, I'd clock it and go, "Yeah, that just happened, yeah, that just happened, "and so many of the things are the same." - What was the inspo? I mean, because for me, heterosexual men hit 40 and they either go world war two documentary, but for you, do you just pick financial crises? - No, what happened was, after writing to be to fail, people used to ask me all the time about 1929. They'd asked me about the comparisons between 1929 and 2008. - Yeah, and the truth was, I never had a good answer 'cause I didn't know. - Oh, so they would just turn to you to be like break down the sub-prime mortgage crisis or break down what happened in the roaring 20s that led to this? - Yeah, they would just, you're like, I haven't. - I would always walk out of whatever that conversation was with whomever it was and say, I really gotta learn about this. I really gotta understand this period. So then I was like, okay, I'm gonna try to figure out how to do it. - Were there particular characters where you were like, oh, I love the T here. This was very interesting and titillating. And these particular people had huge impacts on the world and shaping the global markets. So I'd say there's two guys, two guys, one woman who, to me, were just it. One guy's name, John Raskop, he really was like the Elon Musk of his era. He was running General Motors 1919. Up until then, by the way, we're talking about credit and debt and all this stuff, people taking all this debt. You didn't do that in America. That was like a moral sin. - Right. - Proper people did not take on mortgages, nothing. - You wrote that credit was a new invention in 1929. It was. And in 1919, John Raskop had this idea, how am I gonna send more cars to run General Motors? How is it gonna send more cars? I'm gonna lend people money so they can buy more cars. And that somehow flipped a switch in the American public about their willingness to take on debt and what that relationship was even like. And then you had Sears Robock do that. And then you had a guy named Charles Mitchell who was a banker who ran a bank called National City, which becomes City Group. He clocks all this. He says, I can do this too. I can do it in steroids. And I'm gonna let people buy stock, democratize finance. And I'm gonna loan them the money to do it. - And that was the original kind of retail investor. - That was the first retail investor. So Raskop did that. Then you had Mitchell jump on top of it. And my other favorite character is a woman named Evangeline Adams. Evangeline is an astrologer in New York City. - Okay. - And you laugh, but every Wall Street banker and trader went to visit Evangeline. She had an office up a Carnegie Hall. She charged $50 an hour. - Wow. - She had a newsletter, 100,000 subscribers. And she would tell you if the stocks were gonna go up or down. And they would listen to her. Just the way they'd probably listen to whomever right now. - Sure. - Gwyneth Paltrow, Deepak Chopra. Some form of kind of astrological bonds. - And that was what was going on in the 1920s. - Everybody that I talked to, when they described their grandparents, they describe how Pennywise grandma and grandpa were. - Totally. - How did these people convince grandpa to say, fuck it, I'm gonna put it on credit? I mean, that is a huge consumer shift to happen. What did they do that kind of pressed those buttons that allowed our grandparents who are famously risk averse to get, I'm all in. - Well, I think that there's, the phrase FOMO didn't exist in 1920s, but it should have. - Yeah. I think what happened was you had this sort of revolution taking place, people all of a sudden buying cars, getting their appliances from seers. And people seeing, you know, this whole idea, like keeping up with the Joneses or whatever. And so I think people saw people getting rich, getting wealthy. They're coming also, by the way, from the country, if you will, to these cities, like New York, and they're seeing what wealth is and they want in. I think that's what this was about in the 1920s. And just some degree, I also think it was a shift in what the American dream was. And not just what the American dream was, but the very sort of conceit of how to get rich, which is not slowly, which is fast. The American dream became about the lottery, to get became about sort of quick riches. - The Pogo stick, how do I level up? How do I level up quickly? - And maybe that's the only way to level up. Meaning, if I do my day gig, my day job, I'm never gonna get there. So I gotta be doing all this other stuff. - Well, to have a call back to my opening apology to you, what got me into the SPACs and Bitcoin thing and made me kind of internet addicted on Reddit, was this feeling inside of me of like, am I missing out on something? Am I, am I stupid? Because I've been chugging away this particular way my entire life, but there's gotta be something else. I keep hearing about this, not everything. So this idea that there's this other level you have to unlock, and these are the tools to do that. Was that something that was also happening in the 20s? I'm like, don't be a schmuck. I mean, this everybody else is doing this. If you talk to my guy, there's another way to get this done. This is why informersials exist. This is why Tony Robbins has to exist, 'cause everybody wants to find the path for, they want to figure out how to do it. And by the way, you're not alone, like with Bitcoin, by the way, I'm not allowed to own individual stocks or equities or anything like that. - Is that it's like a CNBC thing? 'Cause you're a job? - 'Cause my job. - Totally. - You can move the market. - Okay. - Right? I oftentimes know news. - Is that through the times with the CNV? How does it work? - Oh, wow, and cross the board. Most financial journalists do not own individual equities of any sort. The mutual funds, sure, maybe some own ETFs, I don't know, but the idea that you could be talking about a stock or something that you own, talking it up, you'd be like, if I was talking of Bitcoin, there'd be a huge company on Bitcoin, right? - Yeah. - And if you want to do that, you have to get elected to Congress. I mean, that's the way to trade individual stock. But I will tell you, there's so many times where I'm like looking at all of that and going, man, I missed out, like I knew, of course I knew. - The same way you were saying, you're like, how do you get, yes, that is a natural human reaction to all of this. - Well, that's the theme of the first part of this convo, which is this idea of optimism, phomo, missing out, something big is about to happen. I want to talk about another theme, which is risk. And when I read your 2008 book, Too Big To Fail, what I took away from it is fundamentally that crash was caused by a risk laundering grift. - Am I thinking about that right? And how did that work? What were the risks that they were hiding that caused the financial markets and the housing market to collapse? - So there's a whole bunch of different grifts going on. I don't know which one you want to go to first. There were, you lead us, Andrew. - Well look, so I have a very complicated view of 2008, okay? And the reason I say I have a complicated view is because I think that the, on one end, you have Wall Street and the banking system effectively, we're saying play hide the ball, but sort of because you had rating agencies that were completely conflicted and you had these CDOs and sort of structures that people are creating basically just like mountains of debt, pile on top of each other and sliced in all of these sort of unusual ways. And then on the other side, you had people trying to buy homes that they should not have been buying. And I say that because we don't often talk about it like that. Interestingly, by the way, in 1929, after the crash happened, back then, people didn't blame the bankers initially. In fact, if you read the diaries, they all blame themselves. They say, I shouldn't have done this. I shouldn't have done this. I shouldn't have gotten sucked in. I shouldn't have, the FOMO got away from me. 2008, it was like finger pointing, everybody, everybody was at fault except for yourself. Like nobody was saying it was their own fault. Everybody was like participating and I don't think any of these certain parties had more power than others in the story. Totally. And by the way, look, there's no question. I would say that the banks in the end have more responsibility than an individual should. But I do look at the whole thing and say, the whole thing was a little crazy. And by the way, you had also shareholders. In fact, the investor class that was basically rewarding all of this and not saying, [BLANK_AUDIO] is too risky. Are there any risks that are currently being baked into the economy right now that we're not seeing? The same way you saw that with those bad mortgages. Yeah. Okay. So the big risk today is actually a function of something that happened after the financial crisis. So after the financial crisis, we said we got to regulate these banks. We cannot have these banks lending money like this anymore. As a result, we made it harder for banks to lend money and we created or incentivized a whole other industry called private credit. Basically banks don't, banks hardly lend the money anymore. Now it's basically private equity firms that are creating these funds and lending that money out. Right now, we have no transparency, no real look into what is going on inside these firms. And some of these guys are already running into trouble, some of them have lent extraordinary amount of money to software companies, some of these AI companies, some of them are partnering with some of the big hyper scalers in AI, so meta and others. And I do think that we are going to have some kind of reckoning in what's called the private credit space. Now, what I don't know is when that happens, if it happens, how much of it ultimately impacts the true real economy or hits the banks and then becomes an even bigger problem. If and when that were to happen, who do you think would get hurt the most there? Would it be similar to 2008 where it hits Main Street very hard or would it just be these guys and Westchester and Greenwich? It would be some Westchester and Greenwich, but a lot of folks now are a lot of 401k 8 plans and other things are now increasingly invested in private credit. So and you have endowments invested in private credit. So I think it would be broader. I don't think it's just a one and done. And also the second you get into a credit contraction, so if this whole industry is lending all the money that's going into the system and they stop and there's a problem, that means they're also your stop lending, which means if you're a corporation that relies on companies to lend so that you can go build your next thing, you're not building your next thing, which means you're not hiring all the people you were going to hire to build your next thing. And so that has a sort of broader economic downstream effect, you know, just so I understand it, when I walk through Manhattan, right? And I see many of these tall buildings, and they say JP Morgan, they say Chase, they are these big banks. What you're referring to is not those tall buildings that we see here on Wall Street or you see in Manhattan, you're talking about like essentially family offices, small private equity firms. No. So there's from Blackstone. They're in this business. Yeah. But they're huge. BlackRock, huge. BlackRock, Apollo, Carlyle, all of them, something called Blue Owl, there's something called Aries Management, all of them now are effectively in the lending business that used to be the banking business. Let's talk about the third theme in the 1929 book. The fourth theme is corruption. Yes. Lots of it. Every banker in the book is running pump and dumps. Every politician is getting kickbacks. Now today, corruption in America, obviously booming, Griffith is a growth industry. Yes. How does corruption of today compare to the corruption that you write about in your book in 1929? Wow. Well, it's different, it was probably, it's a different kind of corruption. It was probably a broader kind of corruption, frankly, and in these pump and dumps were like a regular feature of the market. It would be like if a couple of us got together every couple weeks and we were the elites and we said, hey, see that stock over there, we're going to run that stock for the next two weeks. We're going to pay off some journalists, write some nice articles about what's going to happen to it. We're going to send in some traders, almost like actors on the floor of the New York Sack Exchange. I'm in for 120. I'm in for 140. Everybody's on the payroll. Got it. The whole thing. They all know what the deal is. And what's so interesting about it is, and then of course, two weeks later, they know we're going to pull the rug and we're all selling on that date. The interesting part was that part of the public understood this. They knew this was going on. And they went in the 20s. They were in the 20s. Some were aware because they talk about it as a pool operation. And so members of the public would be like, I'm going to get in on this. And if I can get in and out before they pull the rug, I can make a fortune on the back of these other guys. So you had all these people sort of laddering up in this sort of very crazy way. Of course, most of them would lose by the end of it. It really was a little bit like, do you remember GameStop? Of course. It was a little bit like that. Everyone's saying, diamond hand, diamond hands, everybody knew that at some point the rug was going to get. Right. But that was a game of timing. The whole game was, you know, can you get in and out? Can you get in and out? But that was happening every two weeks with different stocks. Because they thought that there was like some group of people who were going to do this little game. And they were going to. Everyone was going to try to play the game on top of each other. So you're saying, since the 20s, people were trying to play financial double Dutch. Of like, if I just jump in and if I don't want to jump out, I'll be like that. Financial. I'm using that. Can I use that? You should go take it. I mean, now everybody knows that I just took it from you. But yeah. Okay. Financial double Dutch. It's yours. It's yours. That's exactly what. By the way. And they're doing it now with meme coins. Right. They're going like telegrams, signal. There's people who have these message groups and they're all playing the same game. It's just digital. Now. By the way, you go and read it. They're doing it. You're going X. They're doing it. And they're talking about them to ladder up on this and ladder down on this. I think the corruption you're talking about is what's going on in the White House. But that's like at a different level. I mean, the scale of that. How is this possible, Andrew, that Donald Trump made apparently $3 billion last year as president of the United States? I mean, I remember the good old days when if you became president of the United States, you would just get a $65 million book deal really just simple means as you exit public office. I can't explain it. I can't explain it. I can't explain. I mean, you and I probably have the outrage, but I can't explain where the outrage is. Why is there not more outrage? It's so obvious and blatant in front of us that you would think that people would be. headlines every single day. Do you think it's because that number is so scrooge, McDuck, DuckTales big? It's like when you hear the word trillion, I mean, for me, I'm like, you might as well say a bajillion. When you get to trillion, it's just a number that I can't. People have been. So $3 billion is a U.S. president. I think part of it is. It's just crazy. I think part of it is that we. I hate to say been desensitized to all of this. And part of it is politically when you have one party that basically runs the country, White House, Senate, House, there are no investigations. There are no hearings. There are no. They're very, very rarely. Do you have sort of a true system of checks and balances? And so I think that plays a huge part in where we are right now. Well, that's what regulations are for, right? And you've written about government regulations and you talk about the government regulations that came down after the 1929 crash ship, but a lot of those regulations were repealed in the 1990s. And then the economy blew up in 2008, which you then wrote about. Was anything fixed after 2008 that would make another 2008 or 1929 moment less likely? Yeah. And I think it's harder to create the kind of financial crisis we had in 2008 today. But I do want to say one thing about Gryfft and sort of money and politics and all of this. One of the big laws that was written in 1933 was Glass-Steagall, which was this bill that broke up the banks, the idea that basically you were going to separate the investment bank, the casino from the deposit or money, right? And then by the way, that bill was effectively overturned in the 90s. And sometimes people look at that and go, "Well, that bill was still in effect. Maybe this wouldn't happen." It was Clinton, right? Clinton. Yeah. If you go back and this is in the book and look at how that bill was written, it was as corrupt as anything you've ever seen. In fact, part of that bill in 1933 was not written by Carter Glass. It was actually written by a banker, physically, by a banker, who was trying to screw over another bank, in this case, JP Morgan. And the banker worked for Chase and he wanted to break up JP Morgan. That's what this was like the whole play. That was the play. And the play worked. But Morgan Stanley is the investment bank that was separated from JP Morgan. Today, Morgan Stanley exists because JP Morgan was broken up into two. And that's what Morgan Stanley is. But the idea that the bill was written by a banker, and by the way, at the behest of Roosevelt who was supposed to be this guy who hated the bankers, he actually told Carter Glass you have to put it on the screen. this part of the bill in the bill was Roosevelt and they were friends like what I'm trying to understand Roosevelt was in on this whole thing. It was wild. So everyone always thought Hoover was the bad guy. Right. Roosevelt was doing all sorts of wildly. By the way, Hoover and Roosevelt ran their Oval Office the way Trump does. More CEOs were hanging out on the couches of the Oval Office in the late 20s and early 30s that you could possibly imagine. So are we dummies for pearl clutching right now about dollar sign Trump meme coin when this has been happening for a damn hundred years? Look, the distinction is I don't believe that Hoover or Roosevelt were collecting money. I think I don't think that's what was happening. I think they were influenced by people with money and I can't speak to how much money some of these folks were donating to their different campaigns or whatnot. But there's no evidence that I don't want to suggest otherwise that somehow Roosevelt had his own meme coin or the equivalent of. I don't think that's what was happening. But I only mentioned this because at least in my sort of very naive impression of Roosevelt before I started writing this book was that he hated bankers. He was like going after Wall Street. He was a really sort of maybe he was the pearl culture of sorts. And he was in with these guys as much as anybody basically rewriting these bills. Something that's very interesting that we're having in this conversation right now is you're talking about the power of very charismatic, influential, famous people and their ability to shape not only public sentiment, but also shape policy. Right. You write about it and the book let's take a look about the way people would slobber all over the rich. Oh, here we go. In an era that equated fortunes with brilliance, the titans of Wall Street and industry became household names, magazines like Time, which started in 1923 and Forbes, which began in 1917 turned financiers into cover stars. The richest men in America were cast as visionary symbols of success in a nation enthralled by it. Why does it sound like you're describing the New Times deal book summit that you host? This sounds like that. Oh goodness. I have to take exception at that in a in a in a strong way. Okay. Tell me. Look, I think that if you go back and read these articles, these articles were puffery. Oh, there's no pushback about these people. You talked about sort of optimism in the country. And I spent more time than I would want in the stacks of libraries reading old copies of business week, which by the way started in 1929, interestingly enough. And when you read these kind of stories, you could understand why the public just did whatever these people said. There was no pushback. There was no people questioning what was happening. There was almost felt like the media had bought into this whole thing. Yeah. I take the position and you've seen those interviews at deal book. And I think you've seen my other work that my job is to ask the questions oftentimes uncomfortably. Yes. And so while there's no question, I'm trying to interview people of power and influence the whole goal of the exercise is try to is so that the public can actually see the way they think, why they think what they think, even if we completely disagree with the way they think. And you know, you can really sort of get underneath who these people are and how effectively they are shaping our society and our world. All jokes aside, one of the things that I've noticed. And the reason why I watch the deal book summit on the big screen is because you're going to see the oligarch crash out with Andrew Ross Orkin. I mean, the mean material from what you do that entire day is pretty epic. How do you get these people to crash out on a live stream the way you do? There was all of the criticism. There was advertisers leaving. We talked to Bob. I hope they stop. You hope don't advertise. You don't want them to advertise? No. What do you mean? If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. But go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob, share in the what it is. I think that most of the people that I have had the opportunity to talk to on that stage, and you may disagree with this because you so we're coming to the premise that they crash out. So I'm looking at it comedically. But these moments are, but I think that a lot of them want to be understood. I actually think it's a big part of it. I think a lot of, I think, by the way, I think as a human condition, everybody in some way feels misunderstood. We all film this understood in some way. I literally get on stage and tell jokes for a living. We all film this understood. I think when you lead an organization and your pictures on the cover of magazines and newspapers and on TV and whatnot, the public often projects all kinds of things on you and who you are and the way you think and why you think what you think. I believe that one of the reasons that people will sit with me is because they know that over a course of 45 minutes or an hour, people actually do get to see who they are. Now, depends who's sitting on the other side about what they think of that experience. Some people look at that and go, by the way, interestingly, I know a lot of people who watch that Elon Musk interview who said he killed it. That was amazing of him. Sure. And then I know other people who were like, oh my god, that was like, well, it's it's an crazy town. It's an economy, Rochak test, right? Where you are, you know, kind of position, because to me, the Elon and the World War Two bomber jacket saying, GFY, go fuck yourself. I mean, this is 2 p.m. in Columbus Circle, right? We're in the middle of the afternoon. It's broad daylight. I mean, this isn't like a late night comedy set. He's letting it fly like that and just being like, where's Bob at? I mean, he's doing crowd work at that point. So I could see that if you're Linda at Twitter. Yes. You're terrified. Terrified. But if you're at Babylon B, clap emoji. Totally. And so that I think is that's, but that's what it is. And I think that there's a group of people who watch these things on one side and group people watch them on another. And that is the worst check test. I'll tell you why I watch. I told you this off camera. I'll say it on camera on Mike. I watch the entire deal book summit because I think what you're hosting is actually this day long summit that is the story of American business. Yeah. That's what it is. With America's biggest titans and the parallels I see between you hosting that and the book and current discourse that exists is there is this myth that continues to persist that the richest people are also the smartest or the clearest people and their thinking and their thoughts and in their worldview. Why does that myth persist? I mean, you've gotten to sit with a lot of these people. It's because we as a society, it's because we as a society project on to people success and not just we equate success with brilliance. And we equate money with brilliance. And we equate the idea that if you've had success and you've had this money, not only are you brilliant at this one thing that you just did, but that somehow, you know, you may be brilliant at something else. And historically, that's what's always so fascinating. You get these people who have, you know, they do it once and then they think, all right, now I got to do it again. And I got to do it again in this, but in all sorts of other realms that maybe they're multi-domain expertise. Maybe they're not really prepared to do that. Andrew, you got to tell them, everybody isn't Dion Sanders. We all can't go from football to baseball like that. We all can't. Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson. I mean, but it's rare. It's really rare. Michael Jordan learned the hard way. Being multi-domain, a multi-domain goat is very tough. But for some reason, you're right. No, I think that's what's happened in this country, which is we do have such a reverence for, unfortunately, we have such a reverence for money that we immediately look at the wallet, the pocketbook, you look at the Forbes list or whatever it is. And you go, that person knows something. Elizabeth Holmes. She gets it. And by the way, sometimes they do get it. And sometimes they get lucky. And sometimes they did something crazy to get there. Right. You were recently in Davos for those of us who don't go to Davos. What is it? Oh, that's just a good question. I feel like there's such a miss. Maybe talk about being misunderstood, a misunderstanding of what that even is. Yeah, what is it? Think of it as like a massive trade show. Okay. That's a collection of world leaders, both world leaders like the political class on one end, and business class on the other. And by the way, I'm not going to suggest there's corruption in this, but what's so interesting is you have, like governors will show up, right? Gavin Newsome shows up, Governor Whitmer will be there. Right. There's a whole bunch of governors there this year. And I mentioned this because what are they doing there? They are there trying to attract business back to their state. So they're having meetings all day long with CEOs trying to say, hey, California's awesome. Let me tell you what California's awesome, Michigan's awesome. And by the way, you have prime ministers of different countries who are there for similar reasons. Crazy. Did you see Mark Carney basically? Totally. Yeah. Let's take a look. We knew the story of the international rules base order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful. An American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. So this was super boring, but why was this so important to all my friends that read foreign affairs? I'll tell you why I wasn't boring, because this was the one speech that called out everybody else. It basically said, and I shouldn't say everybody else, it was effectively a call out of Trump. It was effective a call out of the United States. It was the first real speech you saw from an elected official of a major country say this whole thing doesn't work. And the role the United States has played is no longer the relationship we have of the U.S. is not what it used to be. We can't count on these people, and we're going to have to go our own way. That's what effectively he would say. You're saying we're going to have to go our own way. And by the way, that may mean creating new alliances among ourselves. The suggestion was that Canada might ultimately have to align itself in some way with China. So this really was a geopolitical red pill moment of like, let me tell you what the matrix is. For the longest time, the United States had this thing called the rules-based order. You have the IMF, you have the United Nations, you don't invade other countries, we use the U.S. dollar. But we knew it was bullshit. But now, in every four years, 10,000 idiots in Wisconsin can throw this whole thing off because of the electoral college. He said exactly the way, but pretty much, yeah. And what is he then alluding to? Is he basically, is this our WCW versus NWL moment? I don't know if you saw this during the 90s when Hulk Hogan defected and then basically started his own thing? He became the heel. Correct. Is that what Karni is doing right now where he's like, look, it's time to pull up and see what Xi Jinping wants? That was the message. That's what he seemed to be trying to say. And by the way, I believe that there was sort of a continuation of that speech and that sort of theme at this big security conference that takes place in Munich just a couple weeks later. But yeah, this was the one, you know, just being a Davos, this was the conversation. Everybody in the halls were like, okay, maybe the deal is over. Why is perhaps Canada and these other countries that were formerly aligned with the United States and what he was signaling? Why is Canada aligning with China bad? Hey, it's Julia Louis-Dreyfus from the Weissr The Meat Podcast, among other things. And I've got a little holiday wisdom for you. Hosting during the holidays means lots of cooking and that means your trash is going to be full of smelly, rotting food, yuck. So here's the wisdom. Get a meal food recycler. I did. We've had ours for years and it has totally transformed our kitchen. It's unbelievable how much cleaner everything is now, plus it's so easy to use. You toss in basically any food you don't eat. Peels, pits, meat, dairy bones. Last year we put in a whole turkey carcass, really. While you sleep, mill, automatically dries and grinds all your food waste down to about a fifth of its size. That means at night you can fill it after a big, elaborate dinner and by morning they'll be room for breakfast. Nothing rots, nothing stinks, no fruit flies. And my favorite part, no more of those gross, drippy, mid-dinner garbage runs. If you want a cleaner, calmer kitchen this holiday season, go to mill.com/wiseer for an exclusive offer. That's mill.com/wiseer. Happy hosting. Well, it depends if you believe that China is ultimately a long term adversary of the United States or not. But the concept that we've spent the last 50, 75 years trying to build relationships and alliances with all these countries around the world. And now these countries are like, you know what, people are crazy. We can't work with you. You keep changing your-- Too volatile. Yeah, you keep changing your tune all the time. We can't really depend on you. We don't know whether you're really our friend, our foe, our friend of me, you're pretending. We don't know what's going on. Brothers like dating in New York City. I don't know what's happening with this situation, but I need stability. So what's the long-term effect for the United States? So this was the first Davos I've been to where I really thought, okay, we could have a real sort of shift in geopolitical power. I remember being there when Trump was first elected, first term. And everybody there sort of treated it like a one-off joke. These silly people did this and it's not going to ever happen again. And so whatever happens happens and we'll go back to the old way in 2020. That was the conceit. I think this time a lot of these countries are now saying, this is what the people want. This was not some kind of, you know, aberrant. The fact that it's Trump 2.0 is a definitive flag, this is what the American public wants. This is what the American public wants. And if this is what the American public wants and this is not what we want, we got to figure out another plan. And I think that's what is going on here to some degree. Now what I don't know is whether you hit 2028, maybe Democrat, Wednesday, White House. I don't know. Does it all flip back again? Do people have short memories? Do they have long memories? What does that look like? I wish that's the part that's so hard to really know. And whether a speech like that is a one-off that we'll forget about because the world will move back to what it used to look like or whether that is really a defining speech that whoever writes the book about 2026, you know, will start that in the program at the Marcarony moment, as you know, the US recently attacked Iran. Now maybe this is a war crime that will result in the disabilization of the entire world leading to a global nuclear war that ends all life on Earth. But let's stick to what people who watch CNBC really care about. How will this affect gas prices? One way they go up in the short term. I mean, I think right now, the big worry, and I don't know when this is all going to air, but the big worry right now is that gas prices are going to go through the roof. And they are going through the roof as we speak, the idea that the Straits of Promoos, which is basically the think of a lane on a high, or think of like a single lane on a highway getting closed, but this is the lane that all the oil is moving through. It's blocked means that it's going to be, we're going to have a real supply shock. And that's what the worry is right now. Everybody's concerned about what's going to happen tomorrow? Will nuclear war happen or not? And for that, I suggest people check out our amazing episode with Annie Jacobson. It was an incredible episode. People also are looking to 2028, and they talk about how this current president has no guardrails. Donald Trump has no guardrails. He is completely unhinged. But other people argue that the stock market is his only guardrail. He will not allow the stock market to dip. Do you think the president sees that as the ultimate thing that he serves? Look, I've long thought that the only real governor on this president is the market. Sometimes that's the stock market, sometimes that's the bond market. It may very well turn into the oil market. but when I look at the decisions that he's made and the only times that he has really pulled the rope back, if you will, it has been because the reaction in the markets were poor. Tariffs 1.0, you remember it, came out, big headline numbers. It seemed like the bond market was about to do a nasty dance. Yeah, yeah. And let's reel it back. Let's reel it back. Psych. I didn't mean it. Fall in the fall. Tariffs, China. Stock market, tank. Yep. Undo-send. Let me pull it back. The question about the situation Iran is if the price of gas, which by the way is like a billboard for the economy on every corner of the street, and was a signature of something he'd spoke about a lot during his state of the union, really spikes. Again, ahead of the midterms thinking about the politics of this country, does he say, you know what? I thought this was going to go on for four weeks, five weeks, maybe we'd put some boots on the ground. Hmm, maybe we won't. And I just don't know. But I think that's possible. Why is everyone in my industry freaking out about this Warner Paramount merger? Well, I think everybody in your industry, which by the way is partially my industry too, is freaking out. They're freaking out at a couple levels. One is that Warner is just, you know, one of the great historic iconic franchises and businesses in Hollywood. So the idea that that's going to disappear, A, I think is a freak out, I think the idea that there's going to be one less buyer for programming in the country, just unto itself. That's a freak out, meaning how to go into Netflix, how to go into Paramount, I think that that's unto itself would, is going to create pressure, even more pressure on an industry that feels like there's extraordinary pressure. If it had gone to Netflix, you know, all my filmmaker friends were worried about what was going to happen to theatrical, theatrical. Was anyone ever going to do the theaters again? Are they ever going to make movies that they're going to put in the theaters? Are they going to short in the window so that the movies, you know, they're for a week or two, but then all of a sudden everyone knows they're on Netflix anyway. So no one goes in the context of the Paramount transaction. There is a question, I think the, I think it's more political is what I think the issue is, I think that the view is that Larry Ellison and David Ellison are closer to this White House, to Trump. There's a famous story about rush hour four. Yeah, yeah, it's back. So I think that by the way, in the news business, in this case, CNN is going to be owned by the same people on CBS. And there's questions about, you know, how the news is going to be operated. The editorial independence. So I think, I think it's a combination of all those things. And I think one of the biggest ones about the Paramount deal, which is the deal that's going forward, is that there's going to be extraordinary amount of debt on this company. Talk about loans. Right. It is mind-blowing. The tens of billions of dollars of debt that this company is going to have, which means that they're going to have to pay it off. How are they going to pay it off? Well, they don't have to lower their own costs. How are they going to lower their own costs? They're going to have to shed a lot of people. And so I think if you're working around that business, that's complicated to be right. So complicated place to be right. You've been covering mergers for a very long time. Yeah. But what's interesting about the Paramount Warner merger is as someone who's not only works in this business, covered this business, and then covered mergers at large. Warner's as a property has been a hot potato for a quarter century. My goodness, yes. Look, and again, I just recently, as you know, I've been only watching Squawk Box for the past five years. Your boy was bored during the pandemic and I dove in deep. Okay. But even in my preliminary research, it previously was owned by Time Warner, AOL. AT&T. AT&T, I think Discovery Inc. was the thing. I didn't even know what Discovery Inc. was. Discovery is a separate company. I didn't know it was the own company. I mean, it was a thing I would occasionally watch during college when my roommate wanted to get high. Let's watch Discovery Channel. I didn't know it was a circuit. It was a circuit. Sure, of course, sure. But I didn't know it was, I'm going to be Warner Brothers daddy. Right. I didn't think it was that big. So if it's been this hot potato for a long time, was this inevitable? Is there ever going to be a story where Warner has turned into a property that can be a little bit more consistent and not have a new step that every five to 10 years? That's a great question. I wish I knew the answer. I honestly, I wish these folks well. As a customer of these services, I wanted to work. I love it to work. This is going to, there's like a high bar here to jump. This is going to be like a really, this is going to be a tough one for them to make it really work. It could work, but it's going to take a lot and it's going to be a lot of pain along the way. For our audience that isn't, you know, as dialed into this stuff, how do mergers affect Wall Street but affect the American people at large? So you obviously said, hey, there's going to be some job layoffs in that particular company. But how should Americans look at these sorts of mergers? How will it affect their lives? Well, I make it easy. Let's say you are a subscriber to Paramount Plus and you're a subscriber to HBO Max. It is unclear whether HBO Max ultimately even exists. By the way, you talked about billions being on Showtime. Showtime hardly exists anymore. It's now part of Paramount Plus. So there's just a consolidation of all of these things into one place. And then the question is, what's the price of it? Are you as the consumer ultimately to be spending more money for effectively the same product, more product, better product, worse product? I think that's the, that's a debate question. Andrew, thank you for writing your book. Thank you for telling the story of optimism, of risk, of corruption. 1929 is available right now. You can get it at every Hudson newsstand that's available. I've been doing a lot of traveling. Your book is there. I saw it at the Charlotte Airport. I also saw the DWR. Wow. I feel like I just told the story of pessimism. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. Have you subscribed to Lemon Out of Premium yet? You can listen completely ad-free and get access to exclusive bonus content. You won't hear anywhere else. Like my discussion with Malala on how therapy changed her life. Or my convo with Mel Robbins on how her Let Them Theory applies to parenting. Tap subscribe on Apple Podcasts or head to LemonOutofPremium.com to sign up on any app that's LemonOutofPremium.com.