Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Buck Rogers and I'm joined by Jean Lightyear.
Hi.
I am a fan of our guest.
Me too.
I'm just a legit fan. Andrew Ross Sorkin. I met him at a conference one time and we had a couple of lunches together and I just really adore him. And he's prolific as a motherfucker.
Yes.
This kid was working at the New York Times in high school.
I know. I find this to be so... It's such a sweet story.
It is. He's such a funder kid and a cutie pie. Andrew is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times and a co-anchor of Squawk Box, CNBC's signature morning program. And, of course, he wrote the ever-popular Too Big to Fail.
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Chapter 2: How did Andrew Ross Sorkin get his start in journalism?
You can't do this. Oh. Because this is not going to work out for you.
Why?
Because she said, and she was not totally wrong about this, but I think I took it again. It's sort of like a personal challenge. Yeah. She said, there's not one or two or three archives where you're just going to be able to go there and just excavate the material. It was not clear that all the material that you wanted existed. And it was true that it was not all in one place.
It was like in dozens of places. Yeah. It was a little bit of like a mystery, putting these puzzle pieces together and you're trying to figure out, well, this guy doesn't have any archives. The main character in this book named Charlie Mitchell, nobody seemed to save his notes or letters or anything. I went to the bank he worked out to try to get all, they had nothing. There's no library.
But you have to say to yourself, okay, I know he's at this meeting. And I know that these other eight people were at the meeting, or he would have had to talk to these people after the meeting. Can I go find their stuff? And then you just sort of pray to God that you'd find some other material. And then I found some depositions and other transcripts and other crazy things.
He ends up getting arrested and doing some super shenanigans with his wife and found some fascinating transcripts. He would get asked, so when did you tell your wife you were going to do this? He would say, well, I did this. I was in the room. This is what I said to her. And then they interview her. And then I thought, okay. I could put that together.
So it was a lot of that kind of thing over and over again. It sounds very hard to organize once you have all your snippets. The biggie was getting the New York Federal Reserve, the minutes of their board meetings had never been made public. So here we are 100 years later, no one's ever really seen this stuff.
Are they somehow exempt from Freedom of Information Act? They don't have to do it.
I don't know. And I went and I begged and pleaded And for a while, I didn't get anything for like two years. I just got nothing. Then they finally agreed. They sent me the minutes, but redacted. They would literally have redactions over these lines. I'm like, what's going on here? And then they finally anyway, not really help sort of ground the whole story.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of journalistic integrity in today's media?
You guys have the illusion of journalistic integrity, but it's become so politicized. Like the New York Times is very, very clearly left and Fox is clearly, clearly right. And that's the problem. It has the illusion of journalistic integrity, but it's interesting that it falls so perfectly that they've become so political. Do you think that's a valid point at all?
And I'm going to bring up your book review. So I read the book review of 1929 in the New York Times, a place where you worked forever and helped build. Yes, yes, yes. And it's not a great review. And it's not a great review because the person doesn't like the stock market. It's not a review of your book. It would be like someone who hates gas-powered cars reviewing the Honda Accord.
Don't review the Honda Accord. You've already established you only like electric vehicles. The notion that the New York Times had the audacity to review Joe Rogan's stand-up routine I thought was preposterous. You've got to recuse yourself. yourself from it. You've already declared. So I don't think that review of your book was fair at all.
And I think it reeks of the thing that I am suggesting is happening. Wow.
I have a couple of thoughts. One is, so I grew up with the times. I started when I was 18. I love the times. Let me say. No, you don't have to say that. No, I do. I'm just saying it's hard for me. There are things I agree with and there's things I don't agree with, like anything in life. And so the only thing I feel like I can be responsible for is me. Yes.
I think what happens is, and maybe this goes to then the audience. I think that I am channeling the audience. I think as a journalist, my job is to sort of channel the public. What does the public think? And you may say to yourself, well, who is the public? Who are your listeners versus who's listening or watching MSNBC or reading the New York Times or who's watching Fox?
I like to think of myself, this is selfish to say, as a completely independent actor.
You're thinking on your own.
Whether it's The Times or CNBC or any other part of my life, there's no model. There's nobody saying to me, hey, Sorkin, you got to do it this way. This is what you have to do. I'm asking you to do it or I'm instructing you to do it. You're smart enough to predict the I am cognizant of that. Maybe that's not good.
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Chapter 4: How does Andrew Ross Sorkin critique the New York Times review of his book?
Maybe it's great. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I don't either. I wanted to talk about it. I'm not unhappy that you did. It's a little uncomfortable. I won't tell you it's not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't figure out what the public actually wants. This is the thing I grapple with in the following way. I think that part of the public wants questions that are super newsy, super accountable.
There's part of that audience that wants that. And increasingly, there seems to be an audience that doesn't want that at all. And... Maybe we're sort of just moving in these different directions. I don't know what the right answer is. By the way, I think about this all the time.
So I don't want you to think that this is like, this is like clearly, unfortunately on my mind in a way that you've sort of got in there.
Yeah, I think all sides are claiming they're doing it. But then there's these very big and public and known failings of it, right?
Chapter 5: What does Andrew Ross Sorkin suggest about the current state of journalism?
So even on the daily, these two Princeton professors on talking about, you know, there's a huge failure of the media during COVID. Distancing didn't work. work. It was already known by the WHO six months before and it was shut down. So it's a bummer. And that's not what the fourth estate is supposed to be. So it's like just if we acknowledge that there's some failures, why are these failures?
My hunch is that because all of these things have become really dedicated to one side or the other. And that to me is what's scary.
I think there is, again, get out your salt shaker because this is what I've been doing for my career. I think there's a value in journalism, capital J. Me
Me too.
Me too. No, no. But so here's the complicated part, because now we're going to get into like the economics of the media business and where this all goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If journalism, capital J, dies, or if it can't do what it's supposed to do, which is actually to provide news and information that you can learn from, we can't have a conversation using facts. And we need the facts. Yeah. Yeah.
Somehow. And by the way, sometimes in these interviews that I'm doing, and by the way, sometimes in the interviews that you're doing, you are collecting facts. You're in the business of collecting facts that then get put into the public bloodstream and are hopefully picked up and used in the right way. Yeah. Sometimes, obviously, they can get spun and all sorts of things, but we need the facts.
Yeah, I agree. And so I always wish I could do it better. Every single time. Even something that I've done that's great. I never think anything I've done is great, to be honest with you. I always sort of go, oh, it could be better. The book could be better. Everything could be better. Always. You're pretty fucking good, though.
The bar is pretty goddamn high.
You know what I'm saying? For me, that's what's going on constantly. I'll write an email, send the email, and think I could have sent a better email.
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Chapter 6: How does the conversation transition to discussing personal accountability in storytelling?
And I think what's happening that's so interesting right now is, especially in the media landscape, it seems like individuals are trusted more than brands are trusted. Mm-hmm. Except then you... Until they... Yeah, yeah. I'm just saying, I don't know. I wish I had a better answer for you.
Well, I love the book. You're a phenomenal writer. You take too long between books. Takes a while. Because we're going on like eight years. Oh, no. Much longer. Yeah. Too big to fail is a while.
I wonder if they'll make a movie out of it. 16 years? Maybe.
16 years, yeah. This is definitely going to get made into a show, and you know it. Maybe. We can hope. I'm watching it. It's going to be a great show. The characters are phenomenal. They're all so interesting. It's from such a different era, too. Like, the way people are living is just so fascinating. It's the birth of all the stuff that we're still kind of seeing now, like on steroids.
Now they're going to space instead of building the Empire State Building. Yeah, yeah. Well, Andrew, I adore you. I really, really, really, really am grateful for what you do as a journalist and the different things I've read that you've exposed and the loopholes and you do hold power accountable and I'm very grateful for it. And I just think you're a wonderful dude and I hope you'll come back.
I appreciate it. Thank you guys. This was fun and a little scary.
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We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. You know, sometimes you're just grumpy.
Yeah.
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