Pushkin. I'm Lyddy Egeen Coott and I'm Michael Lewis, and.
This is our Picture It companion series on Against the Rules. Michael, the other day you were telling me, when you were talking about this episode, how you were thinking about your days in college when you studied art history. Tell me about that. Why are you thinking about that?
One of the things that happens when you're studying our history is professors as just a teaching tool. Often they'll just throw up two pictures side by side and ask you to compare and contrast, and you just look at a Rembrandt painting differently if it's next to a Rubens, and you start thinking about what are the differences, Like, what are the similarities? What are the differences. It's a tool for forcing your mind to move, and as a
tool for forcing our mind to move. About the two thousand and eight financial crisis, I can't really think of a better event than the nineteen twenty nine crash and
the slow rolling depression that occurred after it. And it just so happens that a really great financial writer, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who wrote a really good book about the two thousand and eight financial crisis called Too Big to Fail has written a history of the nineteen twenty nine crash and the subsequent depression, and I just thought, that's holl I'm on and put the paintings next to each other and just talk about what happened then and how
it rhymes or doesn't rhyme with what happened in two thousand and.
Eight, right, and we should say that. Andrew Rossworkin also has a column for The New York Times, a financial column, and he's the co host of The Squalockbox on CNBC.
He's had basically he has basically four careers going at once. I don't know how he does it. I really don't know how he does it. But the book is really interesting. I've read it quite a bit about the nineteen twenty nine crisis. I read all the great things that were written back in the fifties and the sixties about it, and it's an original contribution.
And I can say, Michael's not the easiest person to get to like your book, so that's high praise it.
I began my conversation with the journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin by asking him to explain what led to the crisis of nineteen twenty nine, the one that eventually set off the Great Depression.
Quick summary is the nineteen twenties were probably one of the greatest stock booms in history, in large part because Americans got access to credit for the first time, and not just credit to go buy actual products for their homes, but to be able to go buy on margin stock. And people thought it was free money. And so you got into nineteen twenty seven, nineteen twenty eight, and then into ninety twenty nine, and it had become a national
pastime to trade. You know, they were broken on the corners the way there are Starbucks on the corners today. It was literally like that, and people go out of their minds, they start gambling. I mean, the American dream becomes the get rich quick dream, which, by the way, we live with to some degree today. But I think that emanated in a large way in the nineteen twenties, and you had investors piling in at the same time as you had folks on Wall Street and financiers taking
advantage of them. Insofar as they're both manipulating the market in a whole bunch of different ways, they're creating all sorts of increasingly leveraged instruments that look like Russian dolls of leverage piling on top of each other. And we'll never know, We'll never know what it exactly was. That sort of was tipped the balance, but the balance was tipped, and I think it ultimately fundamentally changed the psychology of
an entire scarred, an entire generation. You know, I don't tell the story in the book, Michael, but I'll tell you. My grandfather was eleven years old and was a messenger down in October nineteen twenty nine. He was down there during this. He was on Wall Street, he was on Wastered. He had an older brother who actually he had skipped school to go down there, and he watched somebody. He's to tell the story. He watched somebody jump out of
a building and kill himself. And my grandfather, who's no longer alive, lived till I think ninety two or ninety three now, never bought a share of stock his entire life. After that, he bought bonds and other things. But he would always say, the stock market is not for us. The stock market is like this other thing.
How'd you get interested in the first place of writing a history of the crash?
This is going to sound so silly.
I having written Too Big to Fail, I thought, ah, I should know something about nineteen twenty nine. I mean, I know sort of the contours, the outline. I read some of the more famous books, and while there were some fascinating books that totally intrigued me about the period, I was sort of searching, to be honest with you, for the Michael Lewis version of this. I was searching for the or the Too Big to Fail version.
You were looking for your own version of this.
I wanted to understand the motivations and the personalities, and what they were actually thinking in that moment, and why they were thinking, what they thinking, and what they did afterwards, all those things. I was having to give a speech up at Harvard, and I got there early, and I went to the Baker Library and I walked in and I asked the libraria, the archivist there, if I could look at the Thomas Lamont papers from nineteen twenty nine.
Tell us quickly who Thomas Lamont was.
Thomas Lamont effectively was the de facto CEO of JP Morgan at the time. He wasn't actually the CEO. The real CEO was named Jack Morgan. He was the son of JP Morgan, but this was the guy who basically ran the place and made most of the important decisions. And his secretary used to keep transcripts of his phone conversations with Hoover. And so I'm sitting there in the library reading this stuff, going, oh, my goodness, well maybe
you could write a book like this. And interestingly I went and then talked to that archivist and she said that she had read Too Big to Fail, and she said, actually, Andrew, you really can't. You can't do what you want to do. I know what you're trying to do, and just it's not really possible. It's not like one or two or three archives either here at Baker or at Columbia or Yale, where you can sort of excavate the stuff and then you'll be able to write it the way you want
to write it. And I sort of just didn't want to believe her, and then I went on this sort of eight year journey to try to figure out and she was right in the following way.
It wasn't all in one place.
Or two places, or three places or four places had to do this sort of like just a different kind of excavation.
There is this line that I wrote you about that you must have found in the Lamont archives when you were at the Baker Library, and it's and this is your description of Thomas Lamont. His attraction to men in power reportedly even caused him to ask a senior German official, just what sort of fellow is Hitler? Is he the sort you'd go fishing with? The reply, my dear Lamont, he is the nicest fellow in the world, always making jokes.
You couldn't ask for a more delightful companion. Where on earth does that come from?
If I recall there was a book written in I want to say late thirties or maybe even late forties that mentioned Lamont and described this.
Fly fishing with Hitler is just an image that I couldn't get out of my mind I read it. Once I read it, I couldn't get it out of my head.
Once I saw it, I kept thinking, how am I going to work the sand?
So let's run through the characters and let's just describe them, and then the analogy. Thomas Lamont, You've given us a little sketch. Who do you think the closest to Thomas Lamont in two thousand and eight was well.
I would actually argue maybe he was the Jamie Diamond of that period. I think that he's probably the closest at that time actually to a Jamie Diamond who was trying to work with the government, who was trying to, you know, have these relationships.
It's kind of interesting that in both crises, JP Morgan running JP Morgan Morgan plays the analogous role.
And if you think about it, the government did rely. They were relying on Thomas Lamont's advice in nineteen twenty nine and after that, and they were relying not only on Jamie Diamond's advice in part, but they were also relying on his largess and money when he was, you know, saving bear Stearns and being used to buy.
Some of these other banks.
Yes, tell us about Jesse Livermore.
Jesse Livermore was a short seller. He was a trader, hedge fund manager. He wasn't just a short seller. He was the star short seller in the world. He was on the cover of magazines, he was a philosopher king. People listened to his every word. I'm trying to think in my head now though about two thousand and eight, and given that The Big Short has a lot, has a number of short sellers, but none of those short sellers had the sort of fame at the time.
There has a little Jesse Livermore and all my characters in The Big Short, I mean Livermore. I've told you this. I sold Showtime a TV pilot, a pilot based on the life of the Jesse Livermore, and it opens during the crash. One of the many things that appealed to me about him as a character was that he was so sure of his ability to make judgments under an uncertainty, and yet and made so many mistakes along the way. And he was so kind of seemingly in control of
his professional life. His personal life was absolute chaos.
He would call reporters and they would come to his office, and meanwhile, he, by the way, was you know, he was drinking. He had alcohol problems, he had personal problems. He was being sued constantly by everybody for everything.
And he's short the end of the crash.
He's short into the crash. He had actually prior to that almost got an out of the shorting business. Because the truth was being a short seller on Wall Street in nineteen twenty eight and in nineteen twenty nine seemed like terrible, terrible businesses. And then this guy comes back in at the last minute and wins.
So any other characters that you would like to highlight.
So to me, the other major character that drives the entire story is Carter Glass.
Oh.
Yes, Carter Glass is a senator from Virginia. He had been the Treasury Secretary. He later gets asked to be the Treasure Secretary again by Roosevelt, and he helped create the law that established the Federal Reserve. He was the Elizabeth Warren of his time.
That's right.
He creates what is now known as Glass Stegel, the Glass Steagle Act, which ultimately broke up the banks between the sort of casino gambling side of the bank and
traditional commercial lending side of the bank. And of course this becomes a feature of what ultimately happened in two thousand and eight, a lot of the calls for by Elizabeth Warren in fact, after two thousand and eight to break up the banks all over again, in large part because the rules that had been put in place by the Glass Steagle Act in nineteen thirty three got watered down in the nineties, and some people argue ultimately led to some of the things that took place in two thousan eight.
When we return, I asked Andrew to compare these reformers who arose after each disaster on Wall Street.
How did the Volkswagen Beetle go from being Hitler's dream car to a hippie icon. How did a disgruntled center fielder change the business of sports. I'm Jacob Goldstein and on Business History. My co host Robert Smith and I dig into the people and companies who created the modern world. Business History is full of innovations and failures and insights into how.
Business works today.
At the end of today's episode of Against the Rules, We're going to play a clip from our episode about Jim Simon's decades ago. Simon's basically invented modern algorithmic trading, and after a few early hiccups, including buying up all the potatoes in Maine, Simon's built a machine that generated incredible returns for decades. The show is called Business History and the previous coming up. At the end of today's episode of Against the.
Rules, I'm back with Andrew ross Orkin. When you compare and contrast these two characters and what they wanted to do. Carter Glass and Elizabeth Warren, what differences do you see? Like they're they're policing a different event, the coming in after a different The first event is it's a stock market bubble, or it's a it's a debt fueled stock market boom. The second event is a debt fueled housing boom.
The role of the bank's slightly different in each case, and the institutions that get created a different The SEC gets created out of the twenty nine crisis they CFPB. He gets created out of the out of the two thousand and eight crisis. So like, what differences do you see between kind of what they are thinking about what bothers them?
Well, so the similarities are they are vocal, they are allowed, they lots of press, and they are the Cassandra's. They are the Cassandras in the room. From the beginning. The biggest distinction between the two of them is that card Glass, I think, actually was genuinely a capitalist and somebody who believed in the banking system, in large part because he had helped develop the Federal Reserve and he believed in
these systems. He wasn't so quick to completely and utterly break them up and without giving away too much of the story, the actual creation of that law, while it has his name on it, is so much more complicated and dramatic and wild, I think actually too in my estimation. It was actually one of the great surprises to me as I was reporting on this, because there are so many other players who get involved in the creation of that law, including people in banking itself, which I think.
Would shock.
Which shock Elizabeth Warren given her love for citing that bill today. I think Elizabeth Warren was much more about protectingary.
Americans from the financial predators.
From the predators.
I think she was much more focused on that that, you know, the ordinary American, the quote unquote little guy. She really wanted to make sure that the system quote unquote worked for them, that it was equal for them. Whereas I'm not sure those were the instincts or at least what was the motivation for carter Glass.
No, there is in the aftermath. It seems to be there's a really different tone to the aftermath of eight than there was from the aftermath of twenty nine. The aftermath of twenty nine, it doesn't in your story as you tell the story Anyway, I don't really get the feeling that ordinary Americans are thought to have been exploited, that these financial predators came in and got them to do things that they wouldn't have done wise, and we should all feel sorry for them. Whereas in the aftermath
of Oh wait, that was very much the story. It's like, we got the strippers in Las Vegas to buy six houses with subprime loans, and we should be ashamed of
ourselves for having done that. There was much more emphasis on bashing the financial elites, well thankful for their predatory behavior, because you could very easily say at the back end of eight, one natural sort of interpretation is like, once again, ordinary Americans got carried away and they borrowed money they shouldn't have borred to make to speculate whiys they shouldn't and they should be held responsible for that kind of thing.
So I think there's two distinctions here. One is that the sort of turn on Wall Street, the Occupy Wall Street sort of movement that happened in the aftermath of two thousand and eight, did happen to some degree after twenty nine. It just took a lot longer for it to happen, and it oddly happened for slightly different reasons, which is to say, it was like a very slow collapse. People think that nineteen twenty nine the market collapse. You hear about this, you know, the one day collapse, and
that's it. It was really not just that. It was the psychological break of that, and then into thirty and a whole bunch of other things that happened, including by the way, Smooth Hawlly, which was a terrifact somewhat similar to what was happening today, but it had a hugely deleterious effect on the economy, and you had unemployment then
spike at one point to twenty five percent. Once we got to that, which by the way, didn't really happen until nineteen thirty two, then you had people pointing fingers and doing lots of things in terms of how they thought about Wall Street and the bankers. But I don't think people were putting that all together immediately in the aftermath of ninet twenty nine, also in part because people did have to blame themselves in the following way. They
knew they were gambling to some degree. It was a gambler, weren't trying to in two thousand and eight. At least it was framed up in the idea of this American dream that we would all own a home, and it wasn't you actually got something ostensibly for it. Yep, this was truly about trading paper back in nineteen twenty nine.
Yeah, that's a big distinction. The other difference, And I didn't know this. I just assumed that the leftward turn in American politics and the rise of Roosevelt was a direct response to the hostility towards financial elites and the crash. And you make the point that like that wasn't even the most salient issue. No, Roosevelt's first campaign.
Prohibition prohibition, was we need to do away with prohibition. People wanted to drink. I really wanted to drink.
Can you imagine after the SEC is created in.
What nineteen thirty three, nineteen thirty four, thirty four.
Yep, that ten years later, or even eight years later, people are calling for it's dismantling it because it's getting in the way of Wall Street doing what it needs to do. I mean, the CFPP is created on the back end of the financial crisis, and it's a historical terms of kind of nanosecond before there's already attacks on it, attempt to kind of neuter it, don't.
I look at the two thousand and eight financial crisis and almost draw a straight line to the election of President Trump in twenty sixteen, and arguably again in twenty four this idea that the institutions, the experts let us all down.
They failed us. They told us it was all going to be fine.
They you know those quotes from even Ben Bernaki and others in two thousand and seven, you know, suggesting that we weren't on the precipice, and then we were in twenty nine.
We were. The experts weren't similarly defenestrated. They were were like empowered in a way at the back end of it.
They were empowered until they weren't. Hoover immediately empowered them because he was a Republican and he he was having meetings with CEOs the way Trump is having meetings with CEOs. He was calling them all to the White House. They were doing photo ops left and right.
Now.
He was desperately trying to press them to do certain things, less successfully than Trump was in certain cases, in that he would tell them, for example, that he wanted them to hire more people, and then the question is would they and of course they did the opposite. So the other character that I fell in love with, to be honest with you, is John Rascob. John Rascob to me, actually is very much the Elon Musk of that moment. John Rascob helped develop General Motors, So there was.
No Elon Musk in two thousand and eight.
There was no Elon Musk in two thousand and eight. But back in the nineteen twenties, John Rascob had become a hugely successful executive in the automobile business. He helped effectively create the idea of credit like truly because he created the credit unit at General Motors to help them sell cars. Prior to that, actually most people thought it was a sin to take on debt, and he really
fundamentally reshaped that. He then took his winnings from his General Motors' days and became a hugely successful investor and was making more money investing than he had ever been made at General Motors. He then, like Elon, decides that he has all this money, has all this power, He's going to get into politics. And now he doesn't choose the winner in this case, he doesn't choose Hoover. He chooses al Smith, who was running against Hoover, and he
becomes the head of the Democratic Committee. I mean, that's what he becomes. And once he loses, and it was really hit, the first loss in his whole life, almost he then makes it his mission to undo Hoover's reputation, to hurt Hoover reputationally by effectively paying people to write articles and give speeches undermining his reputation. And by the way, Hoover has a very bad reputation even to this day. I believe to some degree you can look back at
John Rascob and say he was responsible for that. Of course, Elon musk and did a buying Twitter and uses it in all sorts of interesting ways to bolster and undermine political reputations. And then he goes off and does the equivalent of building a spaceship back in nineteen twenty nine called the Empire State building right, and.
It really does. It maps pretty neatly onto Elon's life.
And he was also a philosopher, king in that the media paid at ten to everything this man said.
He had all sorts of other ideas.
At one point he was trying to create the equivalent of probably what would have been one of the first mutual funds in the world. And he also it becomes an advocate for what ultimately turns out to be the five day work week. I didn't know this back then, most people worked six days a week, including by the way people in the stock market. The stock market was
open on Saturdays in the morning. But he writes a paper in November of nineteen twenty nine that actually got overlooked until nineteen until the nineteen thirties, where he basically made the argument that would be better for the economy if there was a five day work week because that people would have more leisure time. They would have to go out and buy more cars. He owned stock in
general motors. They would you know, buy camping equipment, they would do home home decorps and other things, and it would spur the economy. And that was his argument, and ultimately he was proved right. So I found him to be just a fascinating human at the intersection of all of these different component parts.
We're going to take a quick break. When we come back. Andrew and I talk about how the Federal Reserve failed to save the day back in nineteen twenty nine, I'm back with Andrew Ross Sorkin so to push this poem a little further and talk more about how these two
events nineteen twenty nine rhyme. The people at the Federal Reserve in two thousand and eight were scholars of what had happened in nineteen twenty nine, and how the Federal Reserve, which really faced its first test in nineteen twenty nine, responded to it. Talk a little bit about that response and how was similar or different from the response in two thousand and eight.
So the response to the crisis in nineteen twenty nine was mostly for the Federal Reserve to on its hands. And there's a major distinction to understand the almost insecurity that people on the Federal Reserve felt in nineteen twenty nine, because it was still a new institution. He'd only been born in nineteen thirteen. There were genuine concerns, and I have diary memos and notes about this that the board members really felt that Congress could decide to shut them down.
I mean, you know, we have debates today about the independence of the Federal Reserve. Back then, they were scared that they weren't going to be. They weren't going to exist if they made, you know, the wrong move, they were going to be, you know, completely hung out to dry.
And so, for the most part, you know, nineteen twenty eight, nineteen twenty nine, as the market was getting frothier and frothier, as much as they wanted to tamp it down, even by raising interest rates, by raising interest rates, they were very worried about doing that, and they were very worried about harming the economy because they thought if they harmed the economy politically, that would not be a palatable situation
vis a vis their own independence. And so they did not take the kinds of steps that you would have wanted them to, and they were debating them, they were having conversations constantly about raising interest rates, and yet they for the most part didn't want to. What they did instead, which is they would send out memos to banks and say, you know, stop speculative lending. But they wouldn't explain what that even meant. They would just tell them to do this,
and then some banks would just stop lending completely. By the way, as they function of this, they would take the memo as gospel and they would stop lending, which is a real problem for the economy as well. Two thousand and eight. Obviously, Ben Bernanke, who was the FED chair at that point, his thesis in college at Princeton
was on the financial crisis of nineteen twenty nine. That's what he studied, the Great depres and I think one of the lessons was that the Federal Reserve needed to flood the system with money.
That that is the.
Way you keep the arteries of the system moving. And of course that's what they did. Now in the context of doing that, that was also remarkably unpopular. I mean, bailouts were unpopular. All of it was quite unpopular. Yet, and I don't know where you stand on this. I think in the end, as we look back, I think a lot of those were probably the right decisions, as politically unpopular as they were.
People who get upset about that decision don't really fully imagine the counterfactual and who's going to pay the price in the counterfactual. The counterfactual so ugly. The counterfactual is the depression. It's twenty five percent unemployment rate. I mean. One of the striking things about some of the numbers in your narrative is one point you describe the cost of the economy by the thirties, like GDP or GNP
or whatever they were measuring time is down by fifty percent. Right, Nothing like that happened after two thousand and eight, And there's a reason it didn't happen, because they flooded the economy with.
Dollars in the nineteen thirties.
Everything moved almost into an austerity period, not just at the Phoederal reserve, but even politically. There wasn't an ability or a view that they should be, you know, completely propping up the economy until, of course Roosevelt shows up on the scene, and you know, some people thought he was going to spend money like, you know, like a wild drunken sailor. But ultimately that was the New Deal did provide for a lot of employment that ultimately helped
the economy out. On top of that, of course, there was a war and a whole bunch of other things that were going on.
Yes, when I first got in touch with you, the first question I asked you, and what I wasteing on is the different narratives that emerge at the back end of one of these events and how they can be competing narratives like it takes a while for the society to agree upon a truth if it ever does, about what just happened, And their competing narrative is about two thousand and eight. Now, was there a similar thing in
the back end of the nineteen twenty nine crash? Were there people trying to tell different stories than the one that emerges as the consensus.
Yes, in that there were some folks who were blaming the banks for being reckless in terms of lending. And the other competing narrative was the idea that somehow short sellers were responsible for all of this. For a period of time, Congress was looking at short sellers. They were trying to name names. They thought some of the short sellers, by the way, were in cahoots with certain politicians about
how all of this was going on. Then there was another version of this that blamed this on stock manipulators.
The idea of what.
Was back then, and it was a real thing called investment pools, where you'd have a financier who who would get a whole bunch of his friends together and say we're literally going to pump this stock.
And it was, by the way, it was legal. It was not illegal to do this.
No, it was amazing what they could do. They could do the equivalent of I buy some Pfizer stock and I call you Andrews say, could you go on television and say everybody should buy Pfizer buy some Pfizer too.
Even crazier than that, because they would have the specialist at the stock exchange and RCA, by the way, back
then was the meme stock of the moment. It was the glamour stock of that period, and the specialist who was in charge of that stock would literally run almost a theatrical routine on the floor of the exchange, where he would have people placed almost like actors, saying, Okay, I'm gonna buy for this, you're gonna buy for this, You're gonna buy for this, You're gonna buy, and literally they would ladder up the prices and then they would quote unquote pull the rug, and everybody almost knew this
was happening. In fact, some investors were trying to get on the back of these pools. They knew was happening, and they thought, if I can get in and out before they get out, I can win too. So there was a whole sort of game that was being played by the way that game is being played today in the world of crypto. In the world of crypto, I don't know if I ever told you this wild story
that happened to me earlier this year. I was on TV with Larry Fink and he makes a joke, says, there should be a Sorkin coin.
Okay.
Two hours later, somebody has created the Sorkin coin, no joke, and this sorcing coin is now going up by millions of dollars, millions of dollars. And I get a text message on x formerly Twitter inviting me into a DM group, one of these direct message groups, and there are people saying to each other, you know, I'm going to put in a million dollars here, then you're going to put in three million dollars. It was just happening digitally. In my hand, I was watching this happen. It was the
wildest thing. At one point, they were reaching out to my sons. I have two twin boys who are fourteen, and they were trying to get them. They thought if they could show that the Sorkins owned this coin, which we never did, that that would help them pump the stock. And so I had to call my son and they're offering my son fifty thousand dollars worth of Sorking coin. And I'm calling up Henry and I'm saying, Henry, you cannot talk to these people. Do not respond to these people.
We're going to be in jail. We're going to go to court. This is horrible. Please don't do this. And of course Henry says, you know, Dad, I'm leaving a lot of money on the table. But so, yes, the investment pools of nineteen twenty nine are very much alive and well today, and.
It does seem like we're living through a period of you know, increased distrust of the institutions and erosion of the authority of central authority. But maybe I'm wrong. Do you disagree with that?
I wish I could disagree with you, just to make the conversation more fun, But I violently agree with you. I violently agree with you. And my real worry is that when you look at all of the rules that are being undone today, it's not just do we need new rules that haven't been implemented, it's we have rules that are coming off and a disinterest in looking at some of these things. I'm shocked, for example, that you know, investors are now buying these things called tokens in private
companies and that's not technically allowed. If you ask the new head of the SEC, who's part of the Trump administration, you know what he wants to do about what seemed like clear violations of the rule.
He looks at tokenization says.
That's a form of innovation, and he doesn't want to slow down innovation. And so I'm not sure where the police on the beat really are going to be when and if there's a problem. There's a lot less people minding the store. And when people are minding the store and you add in the leverage, and you add a little speculation, you get problems.
On that cheery note we're going to end, I really love the book. It was terrific, and I do think it's curious that your two big master works are studies of financial crises. You yourself are such a calm and reasonable person, you seem to be attracted to the other.
I am attracted to whatever is the most interesting thing in crises and failure, not because I love failure.
I root for people's success, but.
I think that there's so many lessons in failure and failure onto itself is interesting because there's oftentimes so much we could learn from it.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.
Thanks for taking the time to read the book and to talk to me.
Andrew ross Orkin writes Deal Book for The New York Times and is the author of the new book nineteen twenty nine Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered In.
A Against the Rules, The Big Short Companion is hosted by Michael Lewis. It's produced by Me, Ludy, Jean Kott, and Catherine Girardeau. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our theme was composed by Nick Burtel, and our engineer is Hans Dale. She special thanks to Nicole opten Bosch, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela Lawrence and the rest of the Pushkin Audiobooks team. Against
the Rules is the production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you'd like to listen ad free and learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin, dot Fm, slash Plus or Honor Apple show page, and you can get the big short now at Pushkin, dot fm, Slash Audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
It's Jacob Goldstein. I'm the co host of a new show called Business History, and we're bringing you a clip right now from an episode we did about a mathematician named Jim Simon's. Simons wanted to take human emotions out of investing, and after a few early hiccups, including buying up all the potatoes in Maine, he created one of the greatest money machines in history. I really hope you like the clip, and if you want to hear more,
please check out the show. It's called Business History and it's available wherever you're listening right now.
They were doing what we would call today machine learning.
A machine learning is like, essentially, you build a system in a computer, You feeded a bunch of data, and the system sort of builds a map of the relationships in that data, and then with new data it can kind of enter or extrapolate and make guesses about.
What should come next.
And of course today we have an exciting, maybe misleading, confounding term for machine learning.
We call it AI.
Exactly right, right, this is still very basic machine learning, and the computer at the time keeps making mistakes that they didn't really understand. So, for instance, once the computer developed a taste for potatoes, main potatoes, the system kept buying main potato futures in the state of Maine, potato.
Potatoes, big harvest next year or whatever.
Yes, okay, until two thirds of the company's money was in potatoes. They were all in potatoes.
And they got a call from the regulators.
The cft A CFPP Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Right, yeah, saying whoa who are you guys, Like, what are you doing over there? You have almost cornered the market on potatoes. You have to sell. And they ended up losing money on the trade because blown out on potatoes, they had stopped the computer or whatever the computer's plan was. But you know, this was just one small weird thing. Simon and Baum were really kind of nervous about this whole thing. They had taken investors' money, they didn't really
know if their system worked. And as the story gets told, they start to like second guess the computer and themselves, and they start to think, well, I have this intuition that gold's gonna go up because of the geopolitical situation, and they'd make some money on that, and then they'd lose some money on that, and so by doubting their
own system, it just wasn't really working. And at that point, they're just Wall Street investors right with a big computer, trying to buy more potatoes, and the man won't let them buy potatoes.