New York Times Reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin discussed his new book “Too Big To Fail” with CNBC today in which he discloses some behind-the-scenes conversations that took place at Goldman Sachs and at Lehman Brothers when Wall Street was forced to work with Washington to save the banking system.

What emerges is a sense that major firms were already laying out plans to become bank holding companies right after Bear Stearns went under and was sold to J.P. Morgan.

“Really the book starts the day after Bear Stearns at Dick Fuld’s house,“ Sorkin, the NYT's chief mergers and acquisitions reporter, told CNBC.

Here are a few surprising revelations from this interview: In June of 2008, Goldman Sachs held a board meeting in Russia and one morning the topic of discussion for several hours is whether it should become a bank holding company, does it need to get deposits, and whether it should buy A.I.G.

“They spent several hours talking about the idea of should they buy AIG because they need deposits to weather the storm. I give them enormous credit because they seemed to see it coming,” said Sorkin. Goldman board members also also get on a bus at 9:30 pm that night in Russia to meet with Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulsen. This may be controversial since this was not a meeting on Paulsen’s calendar, though it was listed as a social engagement.

Meanwhile, Lehman Brothers went to Tim Geithner, who was then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, on July 12th with the idea that it wanted to become a banking holding company too. So the idea of becoming a bank holding company was already being raised way before the crisis erupted with Lehman’s bankruptcy on Sept. 15th.

Human drama and emotion is of course part of the book. “It’s really a story about people who think they are too big to fail and it hopefully is a new look into what actually happened so you can hopefully make sense of your own judgments about what’s happened in the last couple of years,” said Sorkin.

Another surprise- TARP was written in April of 2008, as an 11-page memo. “There was a sense that people saw the train coming down the tracks but no one was able to get out of the way,” says Sorkin. Some of the emotions behind it are so visceral, such as the way that John Mack is angry at the shorts, said Sorkin.