Andrew Ross Sorkin: Understanding this current economic moment | Masters of Scale Summit 2025

Andrew Ross Sorkin 0:00 Speculation is like the twin, it's not the evil twin of innovation, but they are connected. They're like Siamese twins to some degree. You need, you need one, you can't have one without the other. We all want more, and the question is, what are the guardrails? How much speculation is good speculation? And when you layer on credit and debt, what happens? That, by the way, unfortunately, is the magic ingredient of both a fabulous sort of growth period and what oftentimes ends it, and ends it badly. It's not that it's all gonna go wrong, it's that charlatans and frauds and others emerge, and the question is, how much protection do we want?

Jeff Berman 0:43 Hey, folks, Jeff Berman here. This week we are sharing a conversation I had recently with Andrew Ross Sorkin at our Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. Andrew is truly a brilliant journalist whose work appears in The New York Times and on CNBC. He's the author of the best-selling book about the 2008 financial crisis, Too Big To Fail. His new book is called 1929, and it is an incredibly well-researched history of that year's stock market crash, chock-full of parallels and cautionary tales for today's economy. I am so grateful he joined us on stage for this conversation. This is Masters of Scale. [applause] So A- Andrew and I were, were standing backstage as Reid and Fei-Fei were finishing up, and, um, Andrew shared that, uh, uh, he had a, an interview where the, the person you were sitting across from-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:52 Yeah

Jeff Berman 1:52 ... said, uh, uh, "Throw him as hard as you can." Uh-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:56 I was standing in the back of the stage-

Jeff Berman 1:58 Yeah

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:58 ... and a, a billionaire, who you all know-

Jeff Berman 2:01 Right

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:01 ... looked at me and said, "Throw it as hard as you can." And I looked at him and thought, "What is he doing? Is this some way to screw with me? Like, am I, to get me off my game?"

Jeff Berman 2:12 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:12 I didn't really know what was happening. We do the interview.

Jeff Berman 2:14 Yep.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:15 I try to throw a couple balls as hard as I can. Um, though I, by the way, prefer, uh, a tennis rally.

Jeff Berman 2:22 Okay.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:22 I mean, I always think we all-

Jeff Berman 2:23 All right

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:23 ... like to watch the ball go back and forth. You wanna, you wanna see whether they can run and get the ball and hit it back.

Jeff Berman 2:28 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:28 But anyway, we're backstage afterwards, and I look at him and I go, "Why did you say that?" 'Cause most people say, you know, "Take it easy on me. Don't, don't ask a hard question. I don't want..." You know. And he looked at me and he said, "Because if you throw it underhand, both of us lose." Um, and I thought it was the smartest thing.

Jeff Berman 2:47 And everyone here loses.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:48 Everybody here loses.

Jeff Berman 2:49 And so I, I threw-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:50 So throw them as hard as you can

Jeff Berman 2:50 ... I threw out my opener. Um,

Jeff Berman 2:52 based on your scholarship, based on the, the research you've done about the 1920s, what led up to the crash-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:57 Yeah

Jeff Berman 2:57 ... what, what created the crash, are we heading for a stock market crash and a second Great Depression? [laughter] You asked. I mean-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 3:05 Yeah

Jeff Berman 3:06 ... you know, that's my, that's my slice.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 3:09 Okay. So the truth is we are right now, there is no question... And I will say when I w- started working on this, I did not intend to write a book that mirrored or paralleled today. There is no question to me now, and I hate to say this, that we are directionally, um, in a bubble of some sort. When it's going to pop, I mean, you just talked about AI, it's a huge, amazing force in our economy, I'm excited about it, but along the way, something bad is gonna happen, and I think that there's a bunch of forces at play right now that will probably set us up for a massive hiccup. Now, will that hiccup look like 1929? Will it look like 1999? Will it look like 2008? I don't know. But I do think that there are a number of parallels today, which we can get into, that suggest something is, uh- [laughter] ... something is not right.

Jeff Berman 4:03 Okay. So, so let's, let's, let's lay the foundation for it then.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 4:06 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 4:06 Let's go, take us back to the late 1920s. What, what are you s- And by the way, I mean, the book is extraordinarily researched. It is, um, e- es- especially the second half, an absolute page-turner.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 4:18 Thank you.

Jeff Berman 4:18 Um, uh, y- you, you are gonna love this book and get a ton out of it. But take us back to the 1920s. What is happening that mirrors today where, where history might not just be rhyming-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 4:28 Right

Jeff Berman 4:28 ... but repeating?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 4:29 Okay, so here's the thing, and I didn't know any of this really before I began this book. I think I knew that something very bad happened in 1929, but I figured I needed to understand who the people were and what they were saying and what was really happening. So the first thing to know about the 1920s was it was this remarkable period of technological advancement, actually somewhat similar in a sort of AI-ish way to now, but in the context of radio, telecommunications. By the way, the hot stock back then, uh, was RCA. Ticker symbol was radio. It was like the, the meme stock would've been, like, Nvidia, basically. And it was also a period of time where people took on debt for the first time in America ever. So prior to 1919, taking on credit, us- I mean, this idea of a credit card today, all of that was almost a moral sin. Nobody did that. Um, and it wasn't till General Motors came along and said, "You know, we gotta sell more cars. How are we gonna do that? We're gonna start lending people money." And people started to do it. And then Sears Roebuck said, "Oh my goodness, they're doing that. We can offer, uh, credit as well for people with appliances." And then a guy named Charlie Mitchell, uh, Sunshine Charlie, ran a bank called National City, turned into Citigroup, came up with this idea, "We're gonna start lending people money so they can buy stocks." And brokerage houses across the country started to emerge on the corners of streets the way you see Starbucks today. And you could literally walk in to one of these brokerages, put down a dollar, and they would lend you $10. And for a very nice stretch of time, it was like free money. In che- in 1928, the stock market was up 48%. Between the beginning of 1928 and September of 1929, the stock was, the stock market was up 90%. And so if you were completely and utterly leveraged, it was this unbelievable thing. And all of this was done under the umbrella, this idea that they were gonna democratize finance. Um, that-

Jeff Berman 6:34 We're hearing, we're hearing that in other places

Andrew Ross Sorkin 6:35 We're hearing that a lot.

Jeff Berman 6:36 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 6:37 And it was this idea that, you know, the elites had gotten their fair share, but now we gotta give everybody else the opportunity at the lottery ticket. And I think you're hearing that a lot today in the context of, look, we just had a, a bill just passed that's gonna allow private equity, venture capital, private credit, to show up in our 401 [k] plans. Like, this is all happening. Crypto obviously, and so many other sort of component parts I think are very reflective of that moment.

Jeff Berman 7:05 So, uh, y- y- you're, you're also the too-big-to-fail guy.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 7:07 Yep.

Jeff Berman 7:07 So, um, uh, do we not learn our lessons here? Like, what, what, what, what is it about us that we're not looking at history and going, "Mm, gosh, like, th- this doesn't end well," given what we know?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 7:19 Look, the human condition-

Speaker 7:20 [laughs]

Andrew Ross Sorkin 7:23 ... um, is that we all want more.

Jeff Berman 7:26 Mm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 7:26 There's a great line. Um, Wall Street II, the movie, which was not nearly as good as Wall Street I, there's a, a great line where, um, you know, Douglas looks at, um, was it Shia LaBeouf, and says something like, you know, "What's your number?" And he looks at him and he says, "More." And I think that that's reflective-

Jeff Berman 7:43 Mm

Andrew Ross Sorkin 7:43 ... of what we all want. We all want more. And the question is, what are the guardrails? How much speculation is good speculation? And when you layer on credit and debt, what happens? That, by the way, unfortunately, is the magic ingredient of both a fabulous sort of growth period, and what oftentimes ends it, and ends it badly. It's the accelerant. It's the match that lights the fire. You could have all the bad actors on stage doing all the bad things you could possibly imagine, but it, that is the thing that sets you back. In 1929, it was, it was margin loans. People were buying stock, and they just had way too much debt. In 19... In 2008, you'd argue it was subprime loans. The question now, is it the leverage in the system around the AI ecosystem? And yes, it looks like, you know, whether it's Meta or Google, they're using cash. But if you look at, meaning to buy, to buy the chips and the data sy- But if you look at so many of these deals now to build these data centers, the energy companies, the construction companies, the real estate companies, that is a complete leveraged mess. And if you look even at some of the deals that Nvidia just made with OpenAI or OpenAI made with, um, AMD, they're almost circular deals with money that's literally being made out of nothing. So if you think about how the AMD deal worked that was just announced earlier this week, AMD selling chips to OpenAI. OpenAI technically can't really afford to buy the chips, okay? They don't have enough. If, if you actually look, they don't have enough cash to buy the chips technically. They take a warrant, a stake in AMD. They know that if they announce this deal, the stock of AMD is gonna go up. So now the warrants are worth something, and now you could effectively sell those warrants or, or take a loan against those warrants, and now you have cash to buy the chips.

Jeff Berman 9:38 Andrew, I want you to imagine-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 9:39 Yeah

Jeff Berman 9:39 ... that, that, um, we're, we're, we're gonna... You're, you're temporarily not a journalist.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 9:43 Yes.

Jeff Berman 9:43 You have no ethical issues.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 9:45 Okay.

Speaker 9:45 [laughs]

Andrew Ross Sorkin 9:46 Here we go.

Jeff Berman 9:46 Uh, the, uh-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 9:47 No ethical issues

Jeff Berman 9:47 ... the, the, well, no ethical issues when, um, uh, the treasury secretary and commerce secretary and perhaps the president call you up-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 9:54 Yep

Jeff Berman 9:54 ... and say, "Boy, you, you seem to know a lot about this. What, what should we do?"

Speaker 9:58 [laughs]

Andrew Ross Sorkin 10:00 Well, I think that the answer is, and this is... You, you want some semblance of speculation in the market. So I just wanna say straight up, here we are in one of the greatest cities in, in, in the country, and it's a city that's about innovation. And no innovation has ever happened without some form of speculation. Speculation is like the twin, it's not the evil twin of innovation, but they are connected. They're like Siamese twins to some degree. You need, you need one, you can't have one without the other. Elon Musk would not exist, uh, SpaceX would not exist, Tesla would not exist without somebody deciding to speculate on something that seemed completely and utterly crazy. So you want that. However, you don't want it to go too far. So my anxiety today is about a lot of the things that we're doing to take the guardrails off.

Jeff Berman 10:49 Mm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 10:50 So there's a move afoot, you've probably read about. President's announced plans, doesn't believe that public corporations, for example, should, um, have to have quarterly earnings declared. Wants to do it twice a year. I... More transparency to me is better, typically. That's probably not the best idea. I'd say, "Mr. President, this is not gonna help the situation." The i-

Jeff Berman 11:14 Well, I, I mean, we could argue, we, we do need companies to think on longer horizons-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 11:17 100%

Jeff Berman 11:18 ... than quarter to quarter, right? I mean, yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 11:19 100%, and I get the argument. If you're a CEO, you don't wanna waste the time, you don't wanna waste the money, you don't wanna waste the energy. But there, one of the things that has kept us from going totally over the edge... And by the way, there was no SEC in 1929. None of these rules existed in 1929. That's why, one of the reasons I think we had the deepest r- uh, recession, if you will, or depression we've ever had. And so the, the argument I would make is you have to keep some of those guardrails around. One of the things we're doing right now is we're saying, "Okay, we wanna, we want the public to have access to private investments." Well, private investments are great, and it's true, if you had access to shares of Uber or shares of Facebook before they went public, you would've made a fortune. The conundrum is that there's not the same kind of disclosures that are required with those private companies. And if you look at most venture capital firms right now, I would argue to you there's some like mark to make believe-

Jeff Berman 12:14 Mm-hmm

Andrew Ross Sorkin 12:14 ... situation that goes on every day when you get the numbers, 'cause it's not a real market yet.

Jeff Berman 12:20 Yep.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 12:21 And it's not that it's all gonna go wrong, it's that charlatans and frauds and others emerge, and the question is how much protection do we want? Now, it's interesting. Some people say to me, "Andrew, don't protect me. And by the way, if you're trying to protect me, what you're really doing is you're protecting the man." I mean, like, that's the argument. "You're protecting the man, 'cause I want a shot." For years we had something called an accredited investor rule. You had to have a million bucks to invest in some of these things, because the argument was we didn't want people who couldn't afford to, to lose to lose. Is that the right argument? I don't know, but I think we have to start thinking about this and talking about it, because this is not the conversation that's happening in America right now.

Jeff Berman 13:00 So the, the... One of the other things that's happening in our economy is, um, I think unprecedented in American history. Uh, we are seeing companies, uh, kicking a share of profits to the federal government, um, outside of the normal tax code. Uh, we are seeing the federal government take stakes in companies. Um, uh, you, you did a recent long piece on this and then-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 13:22 Yeah

Jeff Berman 13:22 ... an episode of The Daily talking about this. Um, h- how do you think about whether you wanna call it state capitalism or, or-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 13:29 Right

Jeff Berman 13:29 ... some other phrase? H- how do you think about what's happening on that front, particularly as we look at the broader economy? I wanna come to specific companies-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 13:37 Right

Jeff Berman 13:37 ... in a minute.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 13:37 So I don't think it's unprecedented, because it happens in Russia and China every day.

Speaker 13:40 [laughs]

Andrew Ross Sorkin 13:41 Um, it's unprecedented here, and I'm surprised that more people are not raising their hand and saying, "Hello, what's happening here? This is a little crazy." Um, I think that in the short term, maybe it's not a problem. In the long term, the idea of a free market and the capitalism I think we've all enjoyed, having the government I think pick, pick winners and losers, this idea of, of industrial policy, nobody's doing these deals genuinely because they want to. They're doing these deals because they're being coerced into doing them. Let's just call a spade a spade. That is what is happening. And I don't know what that portends longer term in this country. Now, by the way, the flip side is China's been doing this for a very long time, and by the way, it's been working for them. Most of the time in our country when we've tried things like this, it hasn't worked.

Jeff Berman 14:37 Is there an example of where we've tried it?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 14:38 Well, you could argue, I mean, look, the Obama administration used to get, uh, a lot of criticism for giving money to Solyndra, for example.

Jeff Berman 14:46 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 14:46 Or there have been these instances where we have subsidized, you know, EV, uh, plugin stations across the country. That was a terrible waste of money. So there's been lots of things where, and where we've had a piece of it. We historically haven't taken pieces of companies unless it was after a financial crisis.

Jeff Berman 15:03 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 15:03 So we did this with the banks, and by the way, that did work. We did this with General Motors, um, and that did work to some degree.

Jeff Berman 15:10 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 15:10 So but we haven't done it just because we want some.

Jeff Berman 15:15 Okay, so-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 15:15 And that's, there's a bit of a mafioso kind of thing like, "Hey, give me some. Otherwise, if you don't give me some, we're not gonna let you do X, Y, Z."

Jeff Berman 15:22 So let me just play devil's advocate for a moment, because certainly it, I think it's undeniable the president-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 15:27 Right

Jeff Berman 15:27 ... himself would say some of this has been coercive and, and, and proudly say so. Um, one could argue, I mean, ser- seriously, uh, but one could argue that, you know, Jensen is like, "I want access to the Chinese market."

Andrew Ross Sorkin 15:40 Yep.

Jeff Berman 15:41 "There are legitimate reasons for us not to have it. There are legitimate reasons for us to have it. Boy, if I just sweeten the pot a little bit, I can get access to the market. So, Mr. President, what if we kick 15% of our profits to, to the federal government? Everyone wins, and we'll only sell a lower quality of chip to China." Like, is that coercive or is that a CEO simply playing the system?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 16:03 Oh, no. He's playing a system, but I'm arguing that the system is not right.

Jeff Berman 16:07 Hmm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 16:08 And what I'm suggesting is if, if we have a national security concern, we should make the decision based on that, not because we're getting paid off as the taxpayer to do something that we would otherwise not do. That, that to me is the fundamental question here about all of these transactions. Are these deals that we would otherwise do or not do? And here's where it gets complicated. Over time, so now we, all of us in this room, we own a stake in Intel. We should be rooting for Intel. In truth, we should be rooting hopefully for all American companies, I would like to think, but we now actually need to all root a little bit more for Intel.

Speaker 16:43 [laughs]

Andrew Ross Sorkin 16:43 Okay. So in the past, if Intel wanted to do a merger, let's say, with another company that historically the Department of Justice and, um, regulators would look at askance and say, "We don't want that much concentration. That's not good for consumers," well, how does that decision now change-

Jeff Berman 17:05 Hmm

Andrew Ross Sorkin 17:05 ... that the government and all of us are taxpayers? It may be bad for consumers, but may be good for us. These are the kinds of things that I don't think unfortunately we're talking about in terms of what the true implication of these things could be.

Jeff Berman 17:20 Um, the, the, the flip side, um, it, it was difficult for me to watch Tim Cook go into the White House and hand a gift to the president or to see Mark Zuckerberg at a, at a dinner with tech leaders whispering-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 17:37 Right

Jeff Berman 17:37 ... to the president, "I didn't know what number you wanted me to say."

Andrew Ross Sorkin 17:39 Right.

Jeff Berman 17:40 Um, uh, the, the-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 17:44 You say diff- it was difficult for you?

Jeff Berman 17:45 Difficult.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 17:45 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 17:45 I'm choosing my words-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 17:46 That's a polite, that's polite, yes

Jeff Berman 17:47 ... carefully.

Speaker 17:48 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 17:48 Yeah. Um, thank you. Um, [laughs] I'm being very careful here. Um, uh-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 17:54 See, by the way, we're all being very careful now. That's the other thing. We're all being a little too careful probably, but maybe not.

Jeff Berman 17:59 I'm, I'm curious about your perspective on, on two things. Um, and I wanna go micro then macro.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 18:04 Yep.

Jeff Berman 18:05 Micro, uh, you're the CEO of a company that has the opportunity to, uh, play to these tendencies of this administration. Um, uh- But you know that, like, long term it's probably bad for the, the, the overall economy and for capitalism. Um, it feels like a collective action problem almost. Like, if you're the one who doesn't do it-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 18:26 Right

Jeff Berman 18:26 ... your competition-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 18:27 Mm-hmm

Jeff Berman 18:28 ... may do it and they win. H- what's a CEO to do right now, particularly when they're in a regulated industry?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 18:34 Okay, so this is where I will probably break with the other comments that I made. I don't actually begrudge Tim Cook or Jensen or any of the other leaders of these companies that are making deals with the government, even though I think these deals are not in the necessary long-term interest of the country. Because the truth is, if you are running a business today, and you're trying to play a long-term game, there's very little advantage in raising your hand right this moment politically and saying, "I don't like what's happening here." Because what exactly can you change in this moment? Meaning, the politics of this country are, are clearly almost lopsided in one, one way in, in Washington. Nothing is gonna be adjusted as a result of you raising your hand on your own. Maybe the politics of the country change after the midterms, I don't know. But I think that raising your hand now only means you're likely to get slaughtered tomorrow. And so if you're trying to play for the ... play for later, this doesn't help. The question is when do you raise your hand if you don't like what's happening, and I think that is a very big question. I think there's a lot of people who say, "Well, you need to raise your hand now, because if you don't raise your hand now, by the time you wanna raise your hand, you won't be able to." I don't know if that's true.

Jeff Berman 19:51 Mm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 19:52 But I, I'm very cognizant of, look, we're living in a world of trade-offs. Everything is a trade-off. And I try in my own way as a journalist to meet people where they are, to put myself in their shoes, and I at least c- I, I hope that we're all cognizant of what those trade-offs look like.

Jeff Berman 20:09 You, you referenced Russia and China. I wanna reference Hungary.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 20:12 Okay.

Jeff Berman 20:12 Because, um, it is a, a softer form of autocracy, effectively. Um, and, uh, but, but Viktor Orbán has picked his winners.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 20:20 Yep.

Jeff Berman 20:20 And the winners do very well, and their competition gets, gets eliminated or swallowed up by, by the winners. Um, uh, and so in my, in m- my mind, democracy and capitalism are inextricably intertwined. Like, you cannot have a free market without, without democracy, small D, democrat. Um, am I, am I right? Am I wrong about that?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 20:40 I think generally you're right about it, but then I look ... Again, it's a very strange thing to say. I look at China, and [laughs] China's been one heck of a success story, and they've done it a completely different way. And so you tell me where things really are. I don't know long term ... And, and by the way, AI could change all of this. That's the other, that's-

Jeff Berman 21:02 Mm

Andrew Ross Sorkin 21:02 ... another piece of this that I just don't know. Are we on s- the cusp of something that's so revolutionary that it upends even the way we think about capitalism and free markets?

Jeff Berman 21:10 Yeah. Um, I, I wanna go back to, uh, the crash and the Depression, because coming out of the Great Depression-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 21:17 Yeah

Jeff Berman 21:18 ... uh, we saw unprecedented social change in America. Um, when, when you look at the history and you look at today, what gives you optimism about the next phase of this future that, that we're gonna be building?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 21:33 Well, look, I do think, and this is cer- maybe it's Pollyanna to say, but I think that for the most part, when we do have these sort of inflections, um, amazing things come out of it. By the way, look at the end of '99. You could say there was a crash, terrible thing happened, and then an explosion. So it's not to say that, you know, we're gonna go off a cliff and then we end up at the, at the bottom of a, some ravine somewhere.

Jeff Berman 21:58 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 21:59 I do think we do learn our lessons. It's just a little bit more painful than we'd like-

Jeff Berman 22:03 Mm

Andrew Ross Sorkin 22:03 ... the lessons to be.

Jeff Berman 22:05 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 22:05 That, that's really where I land, and I'm optimistic that we as a collective have found ways almost invariably, you know, there is a mother of invention that happens in these moments, and I, and I think we will find our way to the other side of the, you know, the other side of the cliff, if you will.

Jeff Berman 22:26 Um, I, I, [laughs] um, uh, other side of the chasm, hopefully we'll, we'll get over it.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 22:31 Chasm, yes.

Jeff Berman 22:31 Yeah. Um,

Jeff Berman 22:33 uh-

Speaker 22:33 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 22:33 ... I, I wanna, I wanna close on this.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 22:35 Yeah.

Jeff Berman 22:35 Um, one of the things that I was struck by in the book i- was the relationship between journalists and the barons of the era. Um, and so putting your journalist hat back on-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 22:48 Mm-hmm

Jeff Berman 22:50 ... um, how's journalism doing covering what's happening?

Speaker 22:53 [laughs]

Jeff Berman 22:57 That's, that's my slice backhand.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 22:59 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Berman 23:00 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 23:00 Yeah, yeah. Look, I actually think right now that journalism is doing a pretty good job. I do. And I, and I would say, I would say journalism, capital J, but big tent. I think we now know more than we've ever known before.

Jeff Berman 23:21 Mm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 23:21 I really do believe that. I know that everybody thinks that journalism and legacy journalism is dying, and maybe it is. I don't think that's true, but I think we now have more inputs than we've ever had before in real time. I think it's more complicated. I think the other component thing that's a component part of journalism and our society that's shifted is that everybody in this room has become their own journalist. This is actually to me the biggest shift that's taken place over the last decade or two, which is to say 20 years ago, we all went to one or two or three different media sources, and that was our diet of how we learned about what was going on. And I think we believed what we were, what we were reading. Today, it's very different. We might go to five or six or seven or 10 different sources, and knowingly go to places, um, and to writers and to speakers and to other sources that we may not, that we know may not be accurate.

Jeff Berman 24:20 Mm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 24:21 Or at least completely accurate, but we think that there's a, a grain of truth in it.

Jeff Berman 24:24 Mm.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 24:24 And we're all searching for our own truth. Now, that's a complicated situation. And so I think that there's journalism which is trying to get at truth, but then there's a public that's, that sh- has almost shifted the way it thinks about that truth, and I think that ultimately right now is the greatest challenge that at least what I've done historically f- at, professionally faces.

Jeff Berman 24:48 The book is 1929.

Speaker 24:51 [clapping]

Andrew Ross Sorkin 24:51 Thank you.

Jeff Berman 24:56 Thanks again to Andrew Ross Sorkin for joining us. Again, the book is 1929, and it's available everywhere you find books. Make sure you check out Masters of Scale on YouTube to watch more videos from our fantastic speakers and really riveting conversations at our summit. [outro music]