Speaker 1: I believe that the financial crisis let so many people down.
Speaker 1: And they said, we thought that they had it. We
Speaker 1: thought we thought these guys had it. They told us
Speaker 1: it was gonna be okay, and it wasn't okay. And
Speaker 1: I think that that unto itself, has changed America. My
Speaker 1: name is Jeffers Zick Carrian and you're listening to four
Speaker 1: Courses with Jeffers Zick Carrion from I Heart Radio, and
Speaker 1: four Courses I'll be taking you along for the ride
Speaker 1: while I talk with the top talent of our time.
Speaker 1: In each conversation, I focus on four different areas from
Speaker 1: my guest life and career, and during those four courses,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna dig deep and uncover new insights and inspirations
Speaker 1: that we can all use to fuel ourselves to push forward.
Speaker 1: My guest for this episode still has posters of Michael
Speaker 1: Jordan's and Spike Lee on his childhood bedroom wall. His
Speaker 1: part time job during college happened to be writing for
Speaker 1: The New York Times, where he penned seventy one articles
Speaker 1: before he graduated, and he is an extremely insightful observer
Speaker 1: of politics, nance technology, and power. Please enjoy my conversation
Speaker 1: with my friend and a daily regular customer at my
Speaker 1: Midtown restaurant, The Lambs Club, Andrew Ross Sorkin. Hey, Andrew,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for doing this. I know it's
Speaker 1: been a while, and I thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: It has been so long, you know. I follow you religiously.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I happened to I watch the reality show
Speaker 1: of your life as it happens on Instagram, and I
Speaker 1: can't claim to try to follow your recipes because I am.
Speaker 1: I will admit I like to go to your restaurants
Speaker 1: for a reason because I'm not nearly as handy in
Speaker 1: the kitchen. It's very kind of you to do this,
Speaker 1: and thank you for following me. So we're just gonna
Speaker 1: start with the first course, which is like an amused boost, right,
Speaker 1: you get a little something that chef gives you, right,
Speaker 1: and then you start to drink and talk and eat.
Speaker 1: So that's our first course. Well, do we get the
Speaker 1: the fifth course? For me? My favorite fifth course, by
Speaker 1: the way, typically when I go eat lunch at your
Speaker 1: place is when we get to talk right at the
Speaker 1: ball are at the end about the business of restaurants
Speaker 1: and typically how much I've over eaten and how you're
Speaker 1: in such good shape, and you happen to be a cook,
Speaker 1: and how about even supposed to work? For our first course,
Speaker 1: Andrew described his early exposure to the hustle and bustle
Speaker 1: of New York City and his fascination with an unexpected
Speaker 1: side of popular media. I am fascinated by always fascinating
Speaker 1: because I whoever I interview, and whatever I talk about,
Speaker 1: the childhood in that upbringing is always so so important
Speaker 1: because you can see six or seven definitive things in
Speaker 1: someone's upbringing that is so shockingly obvious in there successful careers.
Speaker 1: And I want to go there with you, if you
Speaker 1: don't mind, let's go there. My father worked very very hard.
Speaker 1: I mean, as I said, like incredibly hard, and had
Speaker 1: the just the greatest sort of work ethic and discipline.
Speaker 1: And I almost rebelled against that as a child. Most
Speaker 1: I didn't know. But it's so strange about it now
Speaker 1: is I work like a crazy person. But as a kid,
Speaker 1: I never wanted to be that. I never wanted that.
Speaker 1: In fact, I used to hate reading. If you can
Speaker 1: believe this, given the perfect given the profession I'm in,
Speaker 1: I hated reading because my dad was constantly reading, reading briefs,
Speaker 1: reading the newspaper. Oh my god, I couldn't stand the
Speaker 1: newspaper because he was reading and on a Saturday, I
Speaker 1: would want to go, you know, in the backyard, play
Speaker 1: soccer or whatever, and he was like reading the paper
Speaker 1: that was going on. My mother happened to be a playwright,
Speaker 1: and she wrote Children's Place by the way, in addition
Speaker 1: to adult Place, put we put on Place in our backyard,
Speaker 1: in our living room, all sorts of stuff. So I
Speaker 1: sort of got it. Whatever I got, I think from them.
Speaker 1: It's hard to explain, but there was a lot of drive.
Speaker 1: Part of it was, I think I needed to prove
Speaker 1: myself to them, to be honest with you and to
Speaker 1: myself and to myself. There was a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of it was that you're around a playwright and
Speaker 1: a very successful attorney and a lot of paper. I mean,
Speaker 1: just imagine, I imagine your mom leaving manuscripts or my god,
Speaker 1: you don't want to even her office right now. It's
Speaker 1: like up to that. Oh my god, it's like a
Speaker 1: fire hazard. The paper. That's just amazing. So you were
Speaker 1: surrounded by paper, and I couldn't stand paper. I couldn't
Speaker 1: stand any of it. All. I want to do is
Speaker 1: watch television. But I was, and this part is hard
Speaker 1: for me to explain. I was fastered by media the
Speaker 1: whole time. All I cared about was the media. I
Speaker 1: would watch TV like it was going, you know, like
Speaker 1: it was the last day you could ever watch TV.
Speaker 1: I would watch anything. What were your favorite shows? That's
Speaker 1: really important, It's really important. Oh my gosh. I mean,
Speaker 1: I love like the A Team back in the day,
Speaker 1: if you remember the eight team, Mr T like that
Speaker 1: was sort of in my I don't think you could
Speaker 1: say today that you liked the Dukes of hazard, right,
Speaker 1: I think that that's not I don't know what I know,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. You know, those Confederate flags and
Speaker 1: lots of things, So I don't know what I'm just.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying the world's moved in different, different different ways.
Speaker 1: I was also gonna say, look I up watching The
Speaker 1: Cosby Show right again, it's all there's hazard everywhere everywhere,
Speaker 1: a hazard right there. I feel like I'm gonna ruin
Speaker 1: myself here. I was gonna say, when I was in
Speaker 1: fifth grade, I want to say fifth grade. It was
Speaker 1: probably the first, maybe the first concert I ever went
Speaker 1: to in my life, and probably the Best and again,
Speaker 1: now you can't say this aloud, Michael Jackson the Bad
Speaker 1: There was the Bad Tour, and I remember thinking, wow,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. I mean, what he did on the on
Speaker 1: the stage. Let's put everything else aside for for the moment.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's that's the kind of thing. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe reruns of The Brady Bunch, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But I also I would come home in the afternoon
Speaker 1: and against my my mother if she saw me watching TV,
Speaker 1: but I would watch The People's Court, Supreme Court, all
Speaker 1: of these nonsense shows. And if I was sick at home,
Speaker 1: I'd be watching what was the Great Show? Where the
Speaker 1: guy would say, dinoh my, what's you know what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about? Chicago, Jesus, what show is that? And so
Speaker 1: that's a little bit of a culture in terms of
Speaker 1: what I grew you know, I grew up listening to
Speaker 1: Z one and you know five W P l J.
Speaker 1: That was like, that was how in the world I imagine?
Speaker 1: Now this makes some sense here, so media it's very important.
Speaker 1: You didn't really know it, but sort of seems to
Speaker 1: me like uh, legal briefs, here we go, dack a
Speaker 1: playwright that your mom's you know stack here right, You're
Speaker 1: basically bored. You're in between them. You're trying to play
Speaker 1: soccer and watch some games, and you're you don't know
Speaker 1: where to go. You want to get away from both,
Speaker 1: but you're drawn into both. It just seems like that
Speaker 1: was it. I love I love the media, but I
Speaker 1: put it but in particular, as you tell you, I
Speaker 1: loved advertising. Really I was. I was fascinated by advertising.
Speaker 1: I used to watch the Super Bowl as much for
Speaker 1: the game as for the ads, and I would read
Speaker 1: you know, back then, I don't think there's still in business.
Speaker 1: I think maybe they are add Age Magazine and add Week.
Speaker 1: These were like the trades, and I was fascinated by
Speaker 1: like Widen and Kennedy, which back then had created those
Speaker 1: fabulous ad campaigns around you know, Michael Jordan's Spike Lee together.
Speaker 1: I still have posters in my my childhood room, which
Speaker 1: has not been changed. My wife joke is like a museum,
Speaker 1: but I have these old posters. That's what I what
Speaker 1: I loved. I loved advertising, and back then by the
Speaker 1: time I got to high school, obviously sports and in
Speaker 1: particular you know Jordan's was like, you know, I love
Speaker 1: I love the Knicks. It's harder to love the Knicks today,
Speaker 1: but back then, it was like, you know, that was
Speaker 1: a Patrick que the age of Patrick Ewing. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking baseball. I love baseball, but you know that
Speaker 1: was like Darryl Strawberry. Another problem. Mookie will remember Mookie.
Speaker 1: I love Mookie. Remember Mookie. I mean you were in
Speaker 1: the cross has of problems. Michael Jackson. We just named
Speaker 1: like seven lightning rocks. It's amazing, it was. It was
Speaker 1: a generational thing. It was a generation. Mookis lt on
Speaker 1: the giants lt lt. I mean, you know this is
Speaker 1: this is what I grew up with. I mean, advertising, playwright, attorney.
Speaker 1: Now we're cooking right now, we're going I see what's
Speaker 1: going on for our second course. Andrew outlined his path
Speaker 1: for landing a role at The New York Times, which
Speaker 1: began with excitement for selling advertisements in his high school
Speaker 1: sports magazine. But to back the story for half a second,
Speaker 1: because it's really what actually led to the whole career,
Speaker 1: even pre Cornell was I was fifteen years old, loving,
Speaker 1: loving advertising, as I was just telling you, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to. I decided when inside my high school to
Speaker 1: start a sports magazine. That's how this all began. I
Speaker 1: want to start a sports magazine, not because I cared
Speaker 1: actually about sports per se, but because I thought I
Speaker 1: could sell advertising two kids inside the school and kids
Speaker 1: like sports, and that was the idea. I was trying
Speaker 1: to be like, you know what Christopher Whittle was. Of
Speaker 1: course he I just he's selling his home in the
Speaker 1: Hampton's because he's got to pay off the right. So
Speaker 1: he started right. He started the private school, yes, but
Speaker 1: before that he had something called Channel one where he
Speaker 1: was he was distributing TV's all over the country to schools.
Speaker 1: There's a little a little bit of advertising attached to
Speaker 1: some news, and I thought I would do that in
Speaker 1: the magazine world. So I start this thing when when
Speaker 1: I'm fifteen, we try to turn into a national magazine.
Speaker 1: We failed spectacularly along the way by the time about
Speaker 1: seventeen or eighteen, but we had advertising. We had all
Speaker 1: sorts of amazing things going. There was a guy who
Speaker 1: I owe my career to get, Richard Holt at Sachi
Speaker 1: and Sachi Holt, who bought He bought some of the
Speaker 1: first ads. He bought the back page, full page ad
Speaker 1: for wheaties with Michael Jordan on the back and he
Speaker 1: represented Champion sweatshirts, and so those are why I think
Speaker 1: the first two big advertisers we had. Anyway, it was
Speaker 1: that experience from fifteen and seventeen that got me totally
Speaker 1: hooked on wanting to be in the media. And all
Speaker 1: I wanted to do was me an entrepreneur. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to be a writer. I never I don't even
Speaker 1: like writing today, by the way, I find it very hard.
Speaker 1: I have visions of people like Michael Lewis playing the
Speaker 1: keyboard like a piano. I don't play like a piano.
Speaker 1: I played it with two fingers. It's painful, it's not
Speaker 1: it's not possible. I mean, I've learned how to do
Speaker 1: it a little bit, but but for me, it was
Speaker 1: never a natural act. Never, never, never. Okay, so we're
Speaker 1: going into the senior year. You're editing. Can you describe
Speaker 1: your senior year because you published like seventy articles. So
Speaker 1: I'm in high school, I do this magazine, The New
Speaker 1: York Times. Happens to actually write about this magazine that
Speaker 1: I'm working on, which of course and then does doesn't
Speaker 1: go anywhere. But it was sort of a you know,
Speaker 1: you're your fifteen minutes of fame or whatever, and who
Speaker 1: knew something that would happen Anyway. When I'm at the
Speaker 1: end of my senior year in high school, all I
Speaker 1: wanted to do in life was worked for a guy
Speaker 1: named Stuart Elliott, who was the advertising columnist of the the
Speaker 1: New York Times. This guy was my like literal god.
Speaker 1: I used to read him every day. Most people picked
Speaker 1: up the New York Times, they read the front page,
Speaker 1: they'd read the sports page. I would go to page
Speaker 1: C six or C seven to read what Stewart had
Speaker 1: to write about advertising. That was it. So I wrote
Speaker 1: him a letter and I said I wanted to go
Speaker 1: work for him for free for five weeks. Before you know,
Speaker 1: before I died, all I want to do is meet
Speaker 1: this man. And somehow he was kind enough. There was
Speaker 1: no internship program. So he says, why do you come
Speaker 1: in and have lunch with me? And I went in.
Speaker 1: I had lunch actually virgils with him. That's next door,
Speaker 1: next door to you, and we and then we went
Speaker 1: back to the building and he to he toreed me
Speaker 1: around the building, and somehow I persuaded him to let
Speaker 1: me come for five weeks. We didn't tell anybody what
Speaker 1: the deal was. We just sort of did it. I
Speaker 1: didn't have a desk or anything. I used to wait
Speaker 1: in the in the in the lobby, and I get
Speaker 1: a visitor pass every day and I would xerox and
Speaker 1: staple for him. That is incredible, What a great story.
Speaker 1: And then there was a fabulous editor named Felicity Barranger
Speaker 1: who had no idea who I was or he old
Speaker 1: I was. And I wear a you know, a tie
Speaker 1: and a blazer trying to look at the park and
Speaker 1: I'm only a team and she overhears me talking about
Speaker 1: this thing called the internet right back when you know,
Speaker 1: we'd write modem comma a device that transmits data over
Speaker 1: a phone line. Right And she comes up to me
Speaker 1: and she had just been assigned to start a section
Speaker 1: all around technology. She needed anything, She needed anything, so
Speaker 1: so she so she asked me to write this story.
Speaker 1: I go to Stewart and I tell him. He's like,
Speaker 1: you're in You're in fing high school. You can't do this.
Speaker 1: And then somehow we went for pizza, actually we went
Speaker 1: for pizza and he said, he said, okay, why don't
Speaker 1: you try to write the article? So I wrote the article.
Speaker 1: He of course edited. I say edited, probably rewrote it
Speaker 1: and they published it the next day or the next Monday,
Speaker 1: because I remember there was a weekend in between. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's how my career began. As I said, I had
Speaker 1: no intention of ever putting two words together, let alone
Speaker 1: a sentence. I still find it very challenging. But it
Speaker 1: seems like you had some people who really watched after
Speaker 1: Oh my God the best, like some mentors and this
Speaker 1: episode tell let's talk about like like who really shaped
Speaker 1: you and said, like, you're really good, this is what
Speaker 1: you gotta do, and this is if you just do this,
Speaker 1: you you're gonna You're gonna do great. Who your mentors
Speaker 1: and who like gave you some really good advice early on.
Speaker 1: Stewart Elliott was it. I mean he you know, Stuart
Speaker 1: used to come to my restaurant. Yep. He would have
Speaker 1: breakfast there every morning. Sometimes I meet him there and
Speaker 1: walked to the office with him. Well, he was one
Speaker 1: of the nicest, kindest guys. Well he still is one
Speaker 1: of the nicest, kindest guys. No, he is, I mean
Speaker 1: he's always has been. I don't talk to him enough
Speaker 1: these days. He retired from the from the Times, but
Speaker 1: he was He was probably singularly the most important person
Speaker 1: in terms of my early life. Glenn Cramon, who was
Speaker 1: the Business editor, and the and the business editor following him,
Speaker 1: Larry and Gracia played huge, you know, instrumental roles in
Speaker 1: and everything. And then briefly, I, you know, I lived
Speaker 1: in London for a while working for the New York
Speaker 1: Times and Warren Hogue. I don't know if you remember Warre.
Speaker 1: That's my dream to leave in London. I love that city.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful city. Warren was the London beueau chief
Speaker 1: and he had a place the New York Times back
Speaker 1: then had an apartment really it was almost like a
Speaker 1: house townhouse for him, near Sloane Square. And he told
Speaker 1: me when I he told me when I moved to London,
Speaker 1: he said, you have to find a flat near here
Speaker 1: so we can walk to work. And those walks and
Speaker 1: all of the stuff we did together was so great.
Speaker 1: I lived in a you know, I was trying to
Speaker 1: live in Sland Square and had no money. I've lived
Speaker 1: in a basement flat with rats and it was kind
Speaker 1: of gross, but it was but the walks were worth it.
Speaker 1: We were right was right behind Peter Jones. If you
Speaker 1: know where Peter Jones is. I know what Peter Jones is. Wow.
Speaker 1: For our third course, Andrew told me about how he
Speaker 1: came up with the idea for his innovative newsletter deal Book,
Speaker 1: which was one of the first major financial news aggregators
Speaker 1: on the Internet. So you came back. I came back
Speaker 1: in two thous in two thousand, two thousand one, I guess,
Speaker 1: and then right before nine eleven in fact, and that's
Speaker 1: and it was actually right when I started thinking about
Speaker 1: trying to create I was actually thinking about what I
Speaker 1: was going to stay in the business, to be honest
Speaker 1: with you, because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I
Speaker 1: told you I wanted to be on the business side
Speaker 1: of business in a way. When I graduated from college
Speaker 1: and went to the New York Times in London. I
Speaker 1: have friends who are all going to be consultants and
Speaker 1: this and that, and I sort of always thought, I would,
Speaker 1: you know, do something for a couple of years and
Speaker 1: go to law school at business school or something. And
Speaker 1: that was just sort of like the classic path that
Speaker 1: all these kids were doing. So I thought, oh, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'll work at the New York Times. This
Speaker 1: is an unbelievable opportunity. I'll learn about a lot of
Speaker 1: different businesses and industries and meet some interesting people, and
Speaker 1: then I'll go to school and I'll then I'll figure
Speaker 1: out what to do with the rest of it. But anyway,
Speaker 1: that was my that was the thought. Anyway, I came
Speaker 1: back to New York and I had this crazy idea
Speaker 1: to create a newsletter. I thought, if you could, if
Speaker 1: you could start sending stuff out to people by email.
Speaker 1: It was actually a bit of an end run around
Speaker 1: the paper because I was sad. I moved back to
Speaker 1: New York and I was meeting all these bankers and
Speaker 1: lawyers and you know that, the fancy people I wanted
Speaker 1: to cover frankly and get there, you know, the big
Speaker 1: business news stories in the New York Times. And very
Speaker 1: sadly I'd meet with them. They'd say, you know Sorkin,
Speaker 1: you know I. I we get the Times at home.
Speaker 1: I read the front page, I read the sports section.
Speaker 1: I take the journal with me on the train. Oh
Speaker 1: ouch ouch. And now it was really but it was
Speaker 1: it was an awakening back then, how do I get
Speaker 1: in front of these people? Then? How's the New York
Speaker 1: Time is going to get in front of these people,
Speaker 1: and and so in a way, deal Book That's how
Speaker 1: it began. It was okay, let's send everybody. So early on,
Speaker 1: how did you put deal book together? The internet was
Speaker 1: just it was, it was sprightly. Then it wasn't what
Speaker 1: it is now. How did you How did you transition
Speaker 1: to that? How did you find that out so soon? Now? Well,
Speaker 1: there were people who are doing but I didn't want
Speaker 1: to say that. Really it was early. It was early,
Speaker 1: and I thought this. I thought this was a way
Speaker 1: inside the inbox. If I could get to the inbox,
Speaker 1: we might have a shot, and then we could show
Speaker 1: how competitive we were. And so I thought I could
Speaker 1: really aggregate lots of news from lots of different sources,
Speaker 1: because I was spending my day running around the Internet
Speaker 1: trying to find stuff, and I knew that all these
Speaker 1: people in the business were doing the same thing. So
Speaker 1: if I could put it in one place for him
Speaker 1: and show them all the New York Time stuff on
Speaker 1: top of it, that was That was sort of the
Speaker 1: what I saw is the opportunity. The deal book really,
Speaker 1: to me, seemed like your your spring up, your leverage,
Speaker 1: you're like everything. It seemed like that that brought everything
Speaker 1: you were doing very much together, and you've got some
Speaker 1: real sam going on there. I gotta tell I remember
Speaker 1: that when we first started. I think somebody at the
Speaker 1: time said maximum subscriber list you'll ever get I think
Speaker 1: was fifty thou or sixty thousand, and I think we
Speaker 1: blew through that like two days. I don't know if
Speaker 1: we did that, but we know we blew through that
Speaker 1: in in the first couple of months. And then I remember,
Speaker 1: you get emails from back then. I remember getting people.
Speaker 1: I remember getting Joe Perella, you know, Joe Parlo, the banker.
Speaker 1: I remember his his assistant or secretary calling us up
Speaker 1: and saying, could you facts this to us in the morning.
Speaker 1: And I mean that was what was going on. And
Speaker 1: you'd get Jeffrey in Wolt and all these people. Anyway,
Speaker 1: so we had this whole sort of crew that was reading.
Speaker 1: I mean today we're getting close to a million, Like,
Speaker 1: get this thing every morning. What does it cost? Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's a part of the New York Times, so
Speaker 1: if you're just it's free. But it was always based
Speaker 1: on advertising model, which was that this was going to
Speaker 1: be the most premium, premier people that advertisers were trying
Speaker 1: to reach. In fact, the first advertiser was Brooks Brothers,
Speaker 1: which I'll never forget because when we started, we started
Speaker 1: write as the dot com bust was beginning, and I said,
Speaker 1: I don't want to do this unless we can make
Speaker 1: it profitable. And we were profitable from the beginning. So
Speaker 1: that was that was That was crazy. That was important
Speaker 1: to me because I wanted you great journalism, but I
Speaker 1: also wanted to have a good business. You must have
Speaker 1: known that the internet was going to be a tremendous
Speaker 1: opportunity at that point to sort of spread the news
Speaker 1: quickly and sort of collate for everyone, curate for everyone,
Speaker 1: and just sort of give them what they need in
Speaker 1: dribs and drabs, which is now gone. It was probably
Speaker 1: a thousand words now it's down to a hundred forty characters.
Speaker 1: So can you talk about that, like how did you
Speaker 1: how did you know? And when when did you say?
Speaker 1: What was your h Well, look, if I'm being if I,
Speaker 1: if I really knew right and I was a demonstrable entrepreneur,
Speaker 1: you probably wouldn't. You probably got a left and left
Speaker 1: and you want to start a Twitter and yourself, which
Speaker 1: I did not do. Obviously, It's okay I don't know.
Speaker 1: We all could have invested in Twitter, right. I don't
Speaker 1: think I knew where it would all go. I was,
Speaker 1: for example, I'll tell you I didn't know. I understood
Speaker 1: the advertising model very well. I was never sure how
Speaker 1: easily in The Times is now doing spectacularly with the
Speaker 1: subscription business. You know, there was a whole period where
Speaker 1: people didn't know if there would be a t where
Speaker 1: you can make the transition whether people really pay for news.
Speaker 1: And I remember being very anxious about that. Clearly I was.
Speaker 1: I was too anxious about it. And they do and
Speaker 1: they do. But part of that, I think is the
Speaker 1: tremendous quality of the Times. But I also give an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of credit frankly to the Netflix is and
Speaker 1: Spotify is of the world that I think trained people
Speaker 1: to pay. And I think it was those on ramps
Speaker 1: originally that sort of shifted the mind's interesting so people
Speaker 1: would be willing to pay for news and just willing
Speaker 1: to pay for stuff in a way that they subscriptions
Speaker 1: that they hadn't before. For our fourth and final course,
Speaker 1: Andrew breaks down how we meticulously researched his book, Too
Speaker 1: Big to Fail, a book which made it consider the
Speaker 1: finest account of the two thousand and eight financial crisis.
Speaker 1: But I want to like focus a bit of on
Speaker 1: your book, Too Big to Fail, and then the movie,
Speaker 1: and what struck me about it It was the ease
Speaker 1: at which I read that, and the ease at which
Speaker 1: you've collected this information. And it was almost like, I
Speaker 1: say to myself, how did he know what was happening?
Speaker 1: It was like you were in the room when it happened.
Speaker 1: So how did that happen? And tell me how did
Speaker 1: you get people to become offinit enough to tell you
Speaker 1: that story so you could write that down and make
Speaker 1: this an incredible well, thank you incredible? How did you
Speaker 1: know how to put all those pieces together so seamlessly? Obviously,
Speaker 1: the truth is I didn't know. I didn't. I didn't.
Speaker 1: I remember when I got I know when I got
Speaker 1: I had never written probably more than five thousand words.
Speaker 1: Maybe I've written some magazine pieces and stuff. I remember
Speaker 1: when I first got the advance for the book, I
Speaker 1: told my wife, we're gonna have to give the money
Speaker 1: back like this, this, We're never gonna It was almost
Speaker 1: the personal challenge to myself to see whether I could
Speaker 1: write a book. I didn't know how it was all
Speaker 1: gonna work out. I didn't have all the reporting in
Speaker 1: my notebook ready to go, and and I didn't know
Speaker 1: necessarily all the people, especially at the top. I knew
Speaker 1: a lot of people down the ladder. How did you
Speaker 1: sell the books? So when you said, like, I have
Speaker 1: three books, I have to go when I write a synopsis, right,
Speaker 1: So I wrote a synopsis. There was a crazy sort
Speaker 1: of frenzy mania around this whole whole thing. There were
Speaker 1: about three or four people on to sell books at
Speaker 1: the same time. My friend Joan Jonah Sarah who you
Speaker 1: probably know, and and several others. Everybody was trying to
Speaker 1: do this. Charlie Gasparino had a book. There was there
Speaker 1: was a lot of people trying to write books about
Speaker 1: during the Roger Lowenstein, who I love, so many, so
Speaker 1: many talents and people trying to do this, And so
Speaker 1: I went instead, I'm just going to do the inside
Speaker 1: I wanted. I loved a great yarn. I used to read,
Speaker 1: you know, Barbarians at the Gate, you know by Brian
Speaker 1: Burrow or Dan of Thieves, and I just want to
Speaker 1: I thought, if somebody could do that to this, and
Speaker 1: the only inside I had about this whole thing that
Speaker 1: might have been helpful or different was that I really
Speaker 1: did see it as a people's story. I didn't see
Speaker 1: I think at the time everybody saw this as a
Speaker 1: big institutional story of big institutions and big numbers, or
Speaker 1: they saw it as a sideload stories. You know, people
Speaker 1: want to do books about leaving brothers, or they want
Speaker 1: to do a book about Mary Lynch or a I
Speaker 1: G or this is that I saw it as a
Speaker 1: story about people who I who I, and this was
Speaker 1: something I knew from the reporting, who were all interconnected.
Speaker 1: I knew that there was basically twenty or thirty people
Speaker 1: basically running the world at that point. And then if
Speaker 1: you could tell it through those people and what was
Speaker 1: actually happening, you could see it, it would hopefully help
Speaker 1: the public understand what was going on because and I
Speaker 1: knew it was dramatic, but I didn't know how dramatic.
Speaker 1: I love the fact that it was on a timeline.
Speaker 1: It's a very effective way to tell a story. It
Speaker 1: was told in a way that felt like, Okay, this
Speaker 1: guy is in the room, he's looking at every meeting,
Speaker 1: he sees everybody's face, he understands who the players are
Speaker 1: their importance where they are on the food chain? How
Speaker 1: did you establish that and how did you get your
Speaker 1: information to be so accurate? I was so literally we
Speaker 1: made crazy timelines, I mean the most detailed timelines that
Speaker 1: could exist. I I had a great researcher who would
Speaker 1: put help me put these timelines together, and then I
Speaker 1: would go and do lots. I mean just I was
Speaker 1: interviewing everybody constantly, and I started obviously farther down the chain.
Speaker 1: If you will, live at the corporate ladder and people
Speaker 1: would say, oh, you know, do you know about the
Speaker 1: meeting of john X House on Saturday morning? Do you
Speaker 1: know about that meeting like that? Well, but sometimes they'd
Speaker 1: say that they weren't at the meeting that they'd say,
Speaker 1: there was a meeting. You need to go find out
Speaker 1: about that meeting, because that's because I remember after that meeting,
Speaker 1: we got a million emails, and then I'd go find
Speaker 1: out who's at the meeting. Then maybe I'd finally find
Speaker 1: somebody who went to the meeting. They said, yeah, I
Speaker 1: was at the meeting, and we showed up and I'd
Speaker 1: said what time is it at? And I'd say, would
Speaker 1: you guys eat? Like I was asking the kind of questions.
Speaker 1: The one thing I used to do that you would
Speaker 1: appreciate is because I was always trying to get the
Speaker 1: detail of what was happening at the restaurant or this
Speaker 1: or that. A lot of people forget. They don't know,
Speaker 1: the people who don't have the best memory. If they
Speaker 1: said to me, I had lunch with a group of people,
Speaker 1: are dinner, I remember this one at San Pietro. You'd
Speaker 1: ask some questions about about what was said at dinner.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't necessarily remember. However, I used to go on
Speaker 1: menu pages and I would print out the menus, print
Speaker 1: them out from menu pages dot com, and I'd show
Speaker 1: up at the interview and I to jostle their memory.
Speaker 1: I showed them the menu and I said, well, what
Speaker 1: do you what do you eat? Do you remember what
Speaker 1: you ate? And they tell you what they and they'd say, yeah,
Speaker 1: actually I ate this, And you know what. So and
Speaker 1: so was across from me, and you know, he was
Speaker 1: really annoying because he was chewing ice the whole time,
Speaker 1: and then he kept wanting and then and then he
Speaker 1: wanted to eat, you know, and then he's eating off
Speaker 1: on my plate, and then and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: they're thinking, right, and then they're like oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then in the middle of it, this happened whatever.
Speaker 1: So all of these little things to sort of prod
Speaker 1: people to get their memory back. I used to look
Speaker 1: at the I get the weather, the humidity. I remember
Speaker 1: a guy told me that he walked from one building
Speaker 1: to another building and he didn't really remember anything about it.
Speaker 1: And then I called him back off. I said, do
Speaker 1: you realize that it was ninety eight degrees that day
Speaker 1: and like the humidity was like a p He's like, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: you're right, because when I got there, my undershirt was
Speaker 1: totally sweating and I had to go to the bathroom
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you know, you know, trying to towel off.
Speaker 1: And then I ran into so and so in the
Speaker 1: hallway and it was so it's a lot of it
Speaker 1: is trying to sort of do that. It's like gum
Speaker 1: shoe journalism almost like I don't know, I don't think
Speaker 1: it's gum shoe. I know a lot of great real
Speaker 1: investigative reporters I like to do. I think I do
Speaker 1: something investigator point. But this is this is more, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a different it's a different approach in a
Speaker 1: certain way to just get them to to to talk.
Speaker 1: And so, how did you reveal? How did you know?
Speaker 1: The book is so detailed about what was discussed. How
Speaker 1: do you find who told you this stuff? I mean,
Speaker 1: I was a beneficiary. I would say. I would say,
Speaker 1: you know, usually if there were five people in the room,
Speaker 1: I oftentimes got to speak to you know, four out
Speaker 1: of five, sometimes five out of the five, sometimes three
Speaker 1: out of the five. But you know, and then oftentimes
Speaker 1: there were emails that we get sent after the after
Speaker 1: the meetings saying so and so this just happened. There
Speaker 1: were you know, a lot of people back then had
Speaker 1: speaker phones, so a lot of the calls would happen.
Speaker 1: There'd be a principle on the phone, and maybe I
Speaker 1: wouldn't maybe the principle wouldn't be the person who told
Speaker 1: me the first thing, but there'd be other people in
Speaker 1: the room would be listening to it. The other thing
Speaker 1: I always found was a junior person. If you can
Speaker 1: find a junior person who happened to be at the meeting.
Speaker 1: So like Hank Paulson had a million meetings with ben
Speaker 1: Ver Nankee, they might not have actually remembered anything about
Speaker 1: the meeting. If you could find a junior person who
Speaker 1: happened to be at that meeting, that was like the
Speaker 1: most important thing that ever happened their whole life. And
Speaker 1: they usually took notes. It's like this has been tested,
Speaker 1: so it was just you know it. That's that's how
Speaker 1: it happened. So that's two thousand seven and eight, and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, it's what are your thoughts. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: thirteen years later. Where's your head at with what happened
Speaker 1: then and what happened what's happening now. Not that there
Speaker 1: are anything to do with each other, but it was
Speaker 1: a total sort of like a reaction, almost a clinical
Speaker 1: mathematical reaction, and here we are in a a personal
Speaker 1: life or death reaction. They were both pandemics. I actually
Speaker 1: do think they're connected in a in a in an
Speaker 1: important way. Obviously, the pandemic didn't happen as a result
Speaker 1: of the but I think actually something happened during the
Speaker 1: crisis that's changed America and that manifests itself over the
Speaker 1: last decade, and it manifests itself. I think it goes
Speaker 1: in a terrible way during the pandemic, which is the
Speaker 1: financial crisis, effectively undermined the idea of credibility for big institutions,
Speaker 1: for experts, for authority in America, for the plutocrats, for
Speaker 1: the one percent, and for the idea of truth. Actually,
Speaker 1: I believe that. I believe that the financial crisis let
Speaker 1: so many people down. And they said, we thought that
Speaker 1: they had it, We thought we thought these guys had it.
Speaker 1: They told us it was gonna be okay, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't okay. And I think that that, unto itself, has
Speaker 1: changed America in so many different ways. But I think
Speaker 1: it manifested itself when it comes to not listening to experts,
Speaker 1: when it when it comes to not listening to big institutions,
Speaker 1: in in how so much of this pandemic has played
Speaker 1: out in our response to it, so asking what doctors
Speaker 1: are saying. Everybody's made it, everyone's prating their own truth down.
Speaker 1: And I think that the financial crisis have how to
Speaker 1: roll on that actually interesting? What's next for you? In
Speaker 1: a quick, quick dessert, We'll have a quick dessert. What's next?
Speaker 1: I kind of like this approach. I'd love to I'd
Speaker 1: love to write more books. I told you we're working
Speaker 1: with Jason Blum and let the motto now and the
Speaker 1: folks at HBO to to put some together on Game
Speaker 1: Stop and I and I you know, I love waking
Speaker 1: up in the morning with with the team on Squawk.
Speaker 1: It's I get to have breakfast every day with some
Speaker 1: of the most interesting people in the world, and then
Speaker 1: putting together to do a book every day and writing
Speaker 1: these columns. So if I if I get to just
Speaker 1: keep doing that that way, I get to touch a
Speaker 1: lot of different meals right, a lot of different kind
Speaker 1: of food, food choices there For me, it tastes good,
Speaker 1: it's fun. So we'll keep up everything. And I can't
Speaker 1: wait to see you back at the Lambs Club. I
Speaker 1: don't know when we're gonna open um. We're working at well.
Speaker 1: My fingers are crossed, and I hope we all get
Speaker 1: the vaccine since yeah, I really I believe that I've
Speaker 1: used up all my time, but I thing really wisely.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Thank you, and have a wonderful day. Cool,
Speaker 1: Thank you, cheers, cheers, Thanks very much for listening to
Speaker 1: Four Courses with Jeffreys Acarrian, a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and Corner Table Entertainment. Our executive producer is Christopher
Speaker 1: Hasiotis Four Courses is produced by Jonathan Hawes Dressler. Our
Speaker 1: research is conducted by Jesselyn Shields. This episode was edited
Speaker 1: and mixed by Joe Tisdall. Our talent booking is by
Speaker 1: Pamela Bauer at Dogtown Talent. This episode was engineered by
Speaker 1: Andrew Ross, Sorkin and Molly Swanson and special thanks to
Speaker 1: our entire team Margaret Sakarion, Jared Keller, Tara Halper and
Speaker 1: Molly Swanson, without whom this would not have come together.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.