Andrew Ross Sorkin

Some of them are shooting themselves in the head, literally.

And you really get to understand the sort of human condition that leads to these moments of both euphoria on the one end and panic on the other.

Well, it was a lot more complicated, to be honest, than writing Too Big to Fail, because, you know, back then, Ben Bernanke and the president of the United States and Jamie Dimon and all those people were alive.

And you could go talk to them if you wanted to.

Everybody in the book is dead.

And so the big challenge, one of the reasons it took me eight years to do was I was trying to be able to write the story with the same kind of granular detail, the same the quotes.

You know, you'll see people talking to each other.

Those are all real quotes.

That's what they were saying to each other.

And the only way to get that kind of detail was ultimately to find diaries and letters and memos and depositions and trial transcripts and all sorts of things like that.

And that's what took so long because just even to figure out who the characters were, who I wanted to focus on, were they all in the same room together?

Where were they in any given moment?

Finding all that information was not all sitting in one archive somewhere, unfortunately for me.

It was spread out, frankly, in archives in universities and libraries across the country.

It was collecting documents from the Federal Reserve.

It was going to Washington.

It was, in some parts, going to Europe.

It was from all over, all over.

Oh, totally.

I mean, I think we're in a unique moment now where our president, our current president, has probably more power than we've ever seen.