CZM Rewind: The Last Sam Bankman-Fried Episodes (Secretly About Michael Lewis)

Transcript

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Speaker 3 Hey everyone, Robert Evans here with Behind the Bastards and we've got some kind of sad news today.

Speaker 3 You know, this is going to hit members of the community pretty hard.

Speaker 3 But 48 years ago on November 10th, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew members on board.

Speaker 3 This is a hard time of the year for everybody here at Behind the Bastards, for all of you at home.

Speaker 3 And the only thing that makes it easier is the knowledge that both the Russian Federation and the Chinese government have recently substantially increased the sizes of their nuclear stockpile, while the United States is in the process of renovating its own nuclear weapons.

Speaker 2 And my hope, I think all of our hope, is that...

Speaker 3 The leaders of our world can kind of band together in this time of conflict and sadness to finally expend the entirety of their nuclear stockpiles, detonating them over Lake Superior.

Speaker 3 You know, that's my hope. I know it's all of your hope back at home.
And

Speaker 3 I really think what can carry us through this is some classic Mao era propaganda posters showing Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin walking hand in hand, surrounded by a crowd of little kids in red guard uniforms, heading towards the light of a new atomic sun while a series of mushroom clouds detonate over Lake Superior's depths.

Speaker 3 Anyway, welcome to the show, Jamie.

Speaker 2 That's so, I mean, first of all, thank you. Thank you for that.

Speaker 2 I needed to hear it. I think we all,

Speaker 2 the image you described, and I hate that my mind went here, conjured the image of Paul Walker in the convertible next to Brian Griffin. That's right.
That's right. That's right.

Speaker 2 That's sort of what I was picturing.

Speaker 2 The image you described has that exact same energy. Just add, just throw someone in the back seat.
Same Same exact shit.

Speaker 3 Yes. That's the dream, Jamie.
That's the dream. God, what a beautiful, beautiful dream.

Speaker 2 I really think about being a member of Paul Walker's family at the time that image was circulating.

Speaker 3 You mean from your jacuzzi filled with $100 bills? Yes.

Speaker 2 Even so, my loved one,

Speaker 2 my dearly departed,

Speaker 2 being thrown in a convertible next to a cartoon dog who, to add insult to injury, would be resurrected within months.

Speaker 2 Like Brian the dog, not okay, Brian the Dog was resurrected, I think, on the same timeline as Jesus Christ. Yeah, it was like, yeah, it was.

Speaker 3 Very similar characters.

Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And we can all agree that they're not. Both have been on Bill Maher's show.

Speaker 2 They're both Marr heads and they also,

Speaker 2 and they both are, you know, like middling authors, you could say. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. That's fair to say.
So, Jamie, speaking of mediocre men,

Speaker 2 how do you feel?

Speaker 3 Have you been keeping up with the story of Bastard's Pot alumni Sam Bankman Freed?

Speaker 2 Okay, so I have, I know the broad strokes, but as soon as the joyous news

Speaker 2 started coming in,

Speaker 2 I knew that we were going to be doing this, and I don't know any of the particulars except for tweets of yours that have been algorithm to the top of my feed.

Speaker 2 I'm just, there's no one I would rather be with to let it just wash over me. Robert, can I take my family? Robert, can I ask you to please share your working title for this episode?

Speaker 2 Because it's funny.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's Sam Bankman not freed in and in parentheses because he is in jail.

Speaker 2 I think it's funny. And I think that that is far superior to Sam Bankman jailed.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And I think that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, that's not creative at all. You got to spend a lot of extra words to make it creative.
I'm not interested in other perspectives on that title. I think that you got it exactly right.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Brevity is some bullshit, as a great author once said. So, Jamie, speaking of great authors, 80% of this episode is shitting on Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Shark.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 No, we're really, this is going to be a great one for the Lewis heads in the audience.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 Okay. Okay.
This is going to be. Oh, buckle up.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Now,

Speaker 2 this is relevant.

Speaker 2 My man just said, buckle up.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. Strap the fuck in and down.

Speaker 3 We are starting with Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, James.

Speaker 2 Okay. I feel like when I recently saw a picture of my three-year-old niece going to a Wiggles concert, and I just caught myself smiling in the same way.
This is great.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, this is great. So on January 5th, 2022, Sam Bankman Freed sent a message to one of his mini signal loops.

Speaker 3 For what it's worth, February 8th through 16th, Michael Lewis is going to be in the Bahamas profiling us.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 3 if you haven't been following the story, and if Michael Lewis is not familiar to you, then you probably do remember like the most famous result of one of his novels, which is the movie The Big Short.

Speaker 3 This was based on a book Lewis wrote about a group of traders who had the foresight to predict and profit off of the 2008 financial crash.

Speaker 3 They realized that like the subprime loan business was like a bunch of hooey and they shorted it, right? Made a bunch of money while everybody else lost their jobs.

Speaker 2 You love to see it.

Speaker 3 You love to see it.

Speaker 3 His other best-known work is probably Moneyball, which is about a baseball team manager who uses what's called Sabre Metrics, which without getting into it is basically being Nate Silver, but also actually running a sports team, right?

Speaker 2 Okay, that is also that in 2020, I started doing this bit on cursed Zoom comedy shows called The Boyfriend Criterion Collection.

Speaker 2 And it's just like Blu-rays that are in your house against your living will. Moneyball is very much a part of the Boyfriend Criterion Collection.
It's right up there with Whiplash.

Speaker 2 It's like a disaster. I must say,

Speaker 2 if you did not date the worst man you've ever dated in your entire life in 2017 that was obsessed with all things Michael Lewis, then were you really in Los Angeles?

Speaker 3 Yeah, no,

Speaker 3 that's true.

Speaker 2 The only non-problematic

Speaker 2 what if your what if your worst boyfriend couldn't read really

Speaker 3 You're the median American.

Speaker 2 I honestly don't even know who I'm talking about. Like, it's impossible to say.

Speaker 2 But I know.

Speaker 3 The only non-problematic piece of physical media that you can have in your house as a boyfriend is an original VHS tape of Trimmers. That's just the way it works.

Speaker 2 And I would fight with you

Speaker 2 if I didn't feel the same way. I think that that is very much, that's a good sign.

Speaker 2 It's an excellent sign. Thank you.
Thank you. The more prominently displayed, the better.

Speaker 3 To say that Michael Lewis is a famous writer or famous journalist puts it pretty lightly. He's probably the best-known journalist in the country and almost certainly the wealthiest.

Speaker 3 There's not a lot of competition for that, but like he's definitely in the running. He's what you'd call an access journalist.

Speaker 3 He is somebody whose stories come from his ability to get close to his subjects and just kind of exist with them during a crucial period of time as a fly on the wall.

Speaker 3 There's a number of ways to do this.

Speaker 3 There are a couple of like big Trump administration books written by journalists who basically just got to sit around Trump and his White House while things went insane.

Speaker 3 The route that Lewis takes is to befriend the people that he's writing about, right? He is this guy, and people who know him will say he just kind of makes people comfortable around him.

Speaker 3 He is a guy that you want to have at a party.

Speaker 3 He's pleasant company. Enough people have said this that I assume it's true based on just like how he does his stories.
People, he's good at putting folks at ease and they don't mind him being around.

Speaker 3 and that's how he gets a lot of his stories.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 3 as a general rule, if you are in the position that Sam Bankman-Fried and his friends were in circa 2022, running a massive financial shell game, you would be hesitant to welcome.

Speaker 2 Very well. I think we can all agree based on some of the factors that we have.

Speaker 2 Talk about a game of 4D chess.

Speaker 3 The last guy you might want hanging around your office is a dude who could literally, like Michael Lewis could literally, in like the space of a phone call, get articles greenlit in every newspaper in the country right he just is he has that kind of pull he is that reliable a seller for his stories like nobody would not want to take a story that he had so you would want to be cautious you would think you'd want to be cautious about letting this guy into your house um but there's a reason why they said yes when he reached out to sbf and it's that michael lewis's reputation among people in the finance industry was not, oh, he wrote this book that's critical of us.

Speaker 3 Oh, he's this guy who exposes the dirt of the finance industry. It's this is a guy who can make you into a celebrity.

Speaker 3 And in early 2022, that was the entire vision of everyone like connected business-wise to Sam Bankman-Freed was we need to turn this guy into a celebrity who's constantly everywhere to raise the profile of this exchange, right?

Speaker 3 They spent something like a billion dollars on a variety of different corporate and celebrity endorsements.

Speaker 3 Of the 9 billion that was missing, about a billion went towards shit to boost FTX and to boost Sam's profile, right?

Speaker 2 Sorry, where's the, you got to spend money to make money as the average goes.

Speaker 2 You got to spend 10 billion to make nothing, to go to jail. You have to spend $10 billion to go to jail, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 To go to forever prison, Jamie, let's be honest about this.

Speaker 2 He's going to,

Speaker 2 every time I've seen forever prison, very often for view, I hear it in the cadence of the forever purge trailer. You're like, oh, it's the forever prison.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that is where he's going. And that's, you know, again, everyone has kind of cut ties.

Speaker 3 Everyone legitimate has cut ties with not just Sam, but like crypto in general in the wake of Sam's collapse. But there was about a year and a half period where like every bank was looking into it.

Speaker 3 Every tech company was putting shit on the blockchain.

Speaker 3 The last kind of holdout and the reason why Sam put so much money into this was politicians, right?

Speaker 3 There were a few who would, but like most people who were in politics would not even take donations directly from crypto, right? You had to launder that shit.

Speaker 3 And Sam was looking to buy himself a sizable chunk of Congress so that he could make sure that regulations on crypto favored his company specifically, which is why he did stuff.

Speaker 3 Like, you know, he spent tens of millions of dollars getting Tom Brady and Giselle Bunchen to like pretend to be his friends.

Speaker 3 He sat down next to Bill Clinton on fucking stage in a very cringy interview. He paid Larry David to make a Super Bowl ad.

Speaker 3 But all of that, the potential all of that had to legitimize him, paled in comparison to having the big short dude treat you like a financial genius, right?

Speaker 3 If Michael Lewis treats you like Michael Burry, who's one of the characters from the big short who became a big name after Lewis wrote this book, if he's like, this guy is that kind of financial genius, then everybody's going to start taking your calls, even people who like have been hiding from crypto because they don't, they're worried that what happened would happen, right?

Speaker 2 That you'd get 10 million in donations and have to pay them back because it turned out that it was a con man you know there's there's a note of it that it it almost reminds me it when like Errol Morris like profiled and worked for

Speaker 2 Elizabeth Holmes you're just like it's that level of profile versus L

Speaker 3 Yes this turns you into somebody who's like

Speaker 3 who can be taken seriously because that's what who Lewis is right he's that he is that big a deal I'm not like puffing him up he doesn't need it right

Speaker 2 he's got people that care about about Moneyball.

Speaker 2 The most boring-ass thing I've ever heard about in my life.

Speaker 3 Well, and that's the thing. He is one of these guys.

Speaker 3 He's maybe the main character of this episode. I wouldn't call him quite a bastard.
But one of the things you have to give him is he is legitimately a very good writer.

Speaker 3 There's no other way you get people to give a shit about Moneyball. He's like, I read his whole Sam Bankman free book.
I think it's bullshit, but I didn't get bored at any point.

Speaker 3 He knows how to pace a piece of writing, you know? So he decides to come knocking. Sam is immediately on board.
All of their PR people are on board. Not everyone at FTX is on board.

Speaker 3 Carolyn Edison, who is his on-again, off-again girlfriend, who testified against him repeatedly, she is running Alameda, which is the company that bankrupts everything that he is illegally funneling consumer deposits into.

Speaker 3 She is basically like the, and she does not like the idea of having Michael Lewis around.

Speaker 3 Now, she can't really confront Sam Bankman Fried when she has a bad idea. Nobody can.
So she just kind of hedges it and says in the signal chat, makes sense.

Speaker 3 I feel like my instincts are more towards under the radar, but I might just be irrationally biased towards that in general.

Speaker 3 And then like

Speaker 3 an emoji of a face sticking its tongue out. And Sam replies, same, except exactly the opposite.

Speaker 2 That's great.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, you're down bad if you're asking Sam Bankrupt Fried to make sense. Yeah.
That's challenging. Oh, God.
That's such, I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I know we've talked about her in the past, but that, like, what a, what a mess. What a nightmare.

Speaker 3 She's in a rough situation. And he, we'll talk a lot about how he treats her in this, but Will McCaskill is also in that signal chat.
And Will is basically the founder.

Speaker 3 He's not like literally the founder, but he is the founder of what is most commonly talked about as the effective altruism movement. And definitely it's figurehead, right? He is the big guy.

Speaker 3 He's this Oxford professor who he pills Sam Bankman Freed on the idea. And his response is kind of, I think, part of why this winds up going down.

Speaker 3 He says, I think either approach is reasonable, should just be a deliberate coordinated plan.

Speaker 3 But if a whole bunch of attention is going to be on FTX, Sam, and EA, whatever happens, then getting ahead of the game and controlling the narrative is necessary. Yup, responded Sam.
And they did it.

Speaker 3 Michael Lewis spends like a year with this guy. Like he spends a lot of time around them.

Speaker 3 Everyone's very excited because what happened last year is Sam's world collapses and he gets charged with like seven felonies.

Speaker 3 And then right afterwards, Michael Lewis is like, by the way, I've been basically living with him for a year. And everyone's like, oh shit, this could be pretty good because like this guy can write.

Speaker 3 He's been front sit, he's written about a financial collapse before. He's got front seat tickets to this whole thing.
And then the book comes out.

Speaker 3 And unfortunately for Lewis, the book comes out. He times the release right for when the court case starts.

Speaker 3 So we get all of this right alongside his book, we get all of these signal texts and stuff that were not in his book.

Speaker 3 And kind of the overwhelming thing that you see when you compare what comes out in the court case, what comes out in the testimony of his friends to the text of Lewis's book is that like, oh, Michael got kind of fucking conned by this dude, right?

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 yeah. Like

Speaker 2 he fell for it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I mean, it speaks to the level of confidence one would have to have in their own reporting to time it with

Speaker 2 the trial. Because if you had even a remote feeling that you have got, you had gotten it wrong, I would be like, release it a year after the trial, like bury it.
And

Speaker 3 I can see if you're, if you're just some journalist and this is your first book, or you just don't have, you're not like a huge hit. So like you are very,

Speaker 3 your publisher has a lot of power. And they're like, we want this to drop when the case does, because that's when it'll sell best.
I get that you might not have the suction necessary to move it.

Speaker 3 Michael Lewis can say, we are putting this out this day and like, suck my dick. I'm Michael Lewis.
It'll make you money, right?

Speaker 3 And he doesn't, which suggests he has the same kind of hubris that Sam Bankman Freed did in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 So, to give you an example of how emotionally involved Lewis is in this case, there's a good write-up on the court case by a journalist who was there during the trial, which was not filmed, writing for Jacobin.

Speaker 3 And this is how they describe the devastating cross-examination of Bankman Fried, who, again, chose to take the stand in his own defense, despite every expert saying, absolutely never do this.

Speaker 3 Quote, across the aisle from me in the section reserved for friends and family, I can see Sam's parents growing increasingly agitated, his mom visibly shaking.

Speaker 3 Two rows behind them, I couldn't help but notice author Michael Lewis leaning forward, arms draped over the bench in front of him, with his head down between his arms.

Speaker 2 Nobody expects Michael Lewis in the courtroom. Yeah, there is.

Speaker 3 And I, I, you know, I do actually have, I don't think they're very good people, but I have sympathy for Sam's parents.

Speaker 3 This is like a nightmare if, like, to know that your kid is going to forever prison, even if it's totally their fault. Um,

Speaker 2 yeah, he just got conned. My empathy only goes so far, but also, like, what a scene.
What a fucking scene.

Speaker 3 Absolutely phenomenal. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Terrific.

Speaker 3 Can't wait for Jonah Hill to star as Sam Bankman Freed in the movie based on this.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 I really don't want to.

Speaker 3 No, no, there's no one I want to see play him in a movie. Um, just do him like Maris and Fraser, have him always be off screen.

Speaker 2 That would be, oh, that makes me so happy. I love it.
Yeah, like the parents and Charlie Brown, Heather Sinclair of DeGrassy. I want to go to the future.
And fuck it. You know what?

Speaker 3 Cast David Hyde Pierce as Michael Lewis. Then we got a movie.
Then we got a fucking film.

Speaker 2 Then we got, I mean, if this whole ordeal results in David Hyde Pierce winning an Oscar for a bad movie, absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 2 100%. There's no way this movie is good.
There's no way it's good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, and it's possible that Adam McKay, in an effort to course correct on his own.

Speaker 2 Sure. Adam McKay, he's like, he absolutely could, and

Speaker 2 he would need to course correct on the Michael Lewis in the first place for having directed the big short. It's a great move for everyone.
We could make that.

Speaker 2 Everyone's agent in this situation.

Speaker 3 You're going to be rich, Jamie.

Speaker 2 I'm going to be fucking rich. Yeah.

Speaker 3 In interviews he gave after the book came out and the trial started, Lewis framed his book, Going Infinite, about Sam Eggman-Fried as a letter to the jury, which is like kind of nonsense because obviously the jury is never allowed to read a book about the guy that they're going on a trial about.

Speaker 3 And the judge specifically instructed them not to. There's an interview with 60 Minutes, which is really something.
We will hear some clips from it later.

Speaker 3 But in that interview, Lewis explained, I mean, there's going to be this trial and the lawyers are going to tell two stories. And so there's a story war going on in the courtroom.

Speaker 2 And I think neither.

Speaker 3 And I think neither one of those stories is as good as the one I have. And like, I, I, I, on one hand, yes, of course you're right because you're a better writer than any lawyer is going to be.

Speaker 3 But on the other hand, this isn't a story. It's just a question of what happened, Michael Lewis.

Speaker 2 And what happened is massive fraud. And you don't put that in your book.

Speaker 2 That's so, I mean, hearing,

Speaker 2 I guess I can be of many minds about characterizing it as a story award because that is like just how history is written.

Speaker 2 And it's kind of almost refreshing to hear someone refer it to as like, well, whoever could write the better story

Speaker 2 will end up having the historical precedent.

Speaker 2 But interesting that it would be said out loud in that way.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And again, I want to reiterate, while Michael is the main character here, he's not like, he's not a bastard.
He's not someone whose like impact on the world has been monstrous.

Speaker 3 As far as I've ever heard, he's a reasonably nice person.

Speaker 3 We'll definitely get him being mean at a couple of points here, but it's nothing that I would like call someone that like one of history's greatest monster over.

Speaker 3 But this is Bankman Freed is a bastard.

Speaker 3 And so I think talking about the way in which he kind of has Lewis wrapped around his finger and the degree to which Lewis tortures his own logic and prose in order to ignore that is just fascinating.

Speaker 3 So with that in mind, let's start with a little bit more more of Michael's backstory, because that is important to understand why he falls for this.

Speaker 3 Michael Monroe Lewis was born on October 15th, 1960 in New Orleans. Now, from the beginning, his life was about as far from working class as you get.

Speaker 3 And to his credit, Lewis does not deny this whenever he's asked.

Speaker 2 That's the only thing you can do, I guess.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you've got to be open about it. Here's him talking to The Guardian.
Lewis's family stat at the very top of the WASP aristocracy in New Orleans. I was so inside, he told me.

Speaker 3 I was literally trained how to sit on a throne when I was 15 years old because it was crowned the king of the carnival ball, an organization that didn't allow black people, didn't allow Jews.

Speaker 3 I would go from baseball practice to scepter waving lessons. I was born into that world.

Speaker 3 Being an insider in New Orleans made him feel like an outsider everywhere else, and not always to his disadvantage. And first off, wow,

Speaker 2 that's

Speaker 3 quite a backstory.

Speaker 2 Thank you, King.

Speaker 2 I do. Thank you, King.

Speaker 3 I do think I want to point out something here, which is where I don't think he's obfuscating, but I think he's missing something about his own, what his background has done for him. Because

Speaker 3 I'm not going to question him when he says it made him feel like an outsider, but I think it's very clear that this is a guy whose work is defined by his ability to make himself into an insider.

Speaker 3 And I think that's a big part of why he's able to do that is he grows up in the middle of wealth and power, right? Where it's the air that he breathes.

Speaker 3 And you don't notice this if like you grow up working class and don't know any super rich people, but when you meet some people who were born crazy rich, you note that like a lot of them have this

Speaker 3 way of making of making themselves feel like they belong anywhere, right? It's why they can get away with so much.

Speaker 3 Like even if they're totally out of their depth, there's this kind of expectation you get when you grow up hyper-rich that the world is going to show you a degree of deference.

Speaker 3 When you know people who have family fortunes behind them, you know what I'm talking about, right?

Speaker 3 Like it's the they are never going to get like carted to see if they're a member of a place that's members only, right? Because they, they have that way about them. And I think that

Speaker 2 it is like an imperceptible thing.

Speaker 2 Well, and I do think that there is, I mean, and it sounds like what you're getting at is like it, there is, if, if you can get someone who grew up in those circumstances on the side of fucking decency, there is a huge value to having someone like that who knows how to navigate those spaces on your side, but if they're, but, but also, you know, to an extent and a liability because you never know, you know, so I'm curious what in what endears him towards Sam.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we'll get to that. So he goes to Princeton University and he graduates cum laude, which means pretty good grades in 1982.
His senior thesis is on Donatello, a prominent ninja turtle.

Speaker 3 And when he's in college, he's a member of Princeton's Ivy Club, which is the oldest eating club in the school. Now, if you're not a blue blood, you probably are like, What the fuck is an eating club?

Speaker 3 These are private dining halls that are also kind of social clubs where upperclassmen go to get nicer food. There's like nine of them, I think, on campus.

Speaker 2 Robert, and the Ivy Club is the oldest at Princeton or like everywhere. At Princeton, there's other colleges, other

Speaker 3 fancy boy schools have these.

Speaker 2 Robert, this is full cunt. The oddest eating club.

Speaker 2 I was like, bro, Eden Club, the like eating club to me is like drive-through Taco Bell 1.30 a.m.

Speaker 2 starving. Yeah.
Wow. Eating club.

Speaker 2 What are they eating? What are they eating?

Speaker 3 Sophie, you said this is full cunt, but it did not admit women until 1991.

Speaker 2 The audacity to not let a woman go full cunt?

Speaker 2 Something that cunty.

Speaker 2 It just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 3 And it's also very funny that like, or not funny, but it's noteworthy. In this interview, it talks about how he was at the Ivy Club, right?

Speaker 3 When he talks about his upbringing, he's like, Yeah, this, like, this contest I was in, you couldn't, you couldn't be in this club if you were like black or Jewish.

Speaker 3 He hasn't mentioned that the Ivy Club doesn't admit women, I think that is maybe interesting. Um, it's also worth noting that the Ivy Club, F.

Speaker 3 Scott Fitzgerald, writes about the Ivy Club and calls it, F. Scott Fitzgerald calls it detached and breathlessly aristocratic.

Speaker 2 And if F. Scott Fitzgerald says that about your blue blood club, like my God,

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 love that. Wow.
What a treat. What a treat.
If, yeah, if F. Scott Fitzgerald was the one experiencing like moral clarity about your weird

Speaker 3 weird sandwich group.

Speaker 2 That's that's challenging.

Speaker 3 Now, while Lewis had a passion for art history, he had a bigger passion in life, and it's stacking motherfucking paper.

Speaker 3 So he goes to the London School of Economics next and eventually joins the bond desk at Salomon Brothers. He's in like the London branch of the Salomon Brothers.
No, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 He's just making dolla dollar bills, y'all.

Speaker 2 Robert, dolla dollar bills time is happening now for us as well.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. Speaking of dollar dollar bills, buy some of these products and we will get dolla dollar bills.

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Speaker 2 I have a request for the listeners, which is not something that I often,

Speaker 2 I don't ask, I don't ask anything of our listeners,

Speaker 2 just that they're happy. But if somebody could please make a dating profile for Michael Lewis as an art graphic, I just, it just, please, for me.
Oh, man. Okay.

Speaker 3 That's, that's good. You've got, you've got two different requests this week, listeners.
One is that propaganda poster, and the other is Michael Lewis' dating profile.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 3 Lewis, Lewis is, you know, an investment banker for just a few years. Actually, you know who he reminds me of?

Speaker 2 Oh, okay. You're just sipping your toes in it.
Then that kind of doesn't count. It's like the just the tip of financial crime.

Speaker 3 He's in there. He at 87, the market crashes and he makes a pivot away from like doing that as a job.

Speaker 3 And he writes a book called Liars Poker about the investment, you know, bang, the stockbroker, that like that kind of life that makes a shitload of money, right?

Speaker 3 This is, we'll talk about it in a second, but like, I want to, he reminds me in this trajectory. Do you know anything about Michael Crichton?

Speaker 2 Uh, oh, I mean, I, I, yeah, peaks and valleys. I, I had no attachment to him, but I know many of you do.
And like, yeah, the back half of Michael Crichton, pretty fucking brutal.

Speaker 3 Yeah, pretty, pretty brutal. I'm not talking about like his actual career as a writer as much as Crichton goes to Harvard Medical School and becomes a doctor.

Speaker 3 Most people are, I don't think, actually know this,

Speaker 3 but like he was an actual MD, but he doesn't really do the job. Like he gets his MD and then he quits to write books, like some of which have a meta.

Speaker 3 Like he's the creator of ER and he gets criticized some by doctors who are like, oh, you just.

Speaker 2 He's the creator of ER?

Speaker 3 Yeah, Michael Crichton created ER. Yes.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 Sorry. I thought you were talking about Michael Lewis.
Yes.

Speaker 2 I knew Michael Crichton.

Speaker 3 But they have a similar, they have a similar kind of trajectory where they go to school for this thing.

Speaker 3 They do like a teeny amount of it, just dip their toes in, and then they get famous writing these books that are inspired by it, right? I just find that interesting.

Speaker 3 So to give you a further idea of Lewis's family background, Liars Poker, which is semi-autobiographical, revolves around a scene where Michael Lewis is invited to a banquet hosted by the Queen Mother while he's working in London.

Speaker 3 He gets a seat there because of his cousin, Baroness Linden von Stauffenberg, and she seats him next to the manager of Salomon Brothers, which is how he gets his job.

Speaker 2 Word salad. Word

Speaker 2 salad.

Speaker 3 Crabs don't have bluer blood than this man. Like,

Speaker 3 that is the bluest you fucking get.

Speaker 2 If your cousin's a baroness and you're in your like late 20s,

Speaker 2 what? If you know a baroness, you are like.

Speaker 2 That's okay. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So Lewis's depiction of Wall Street guys from Liars Poker on, because he writes a few books about Wall Street types because he knows them, right?

Speaker 3 It's generally noted as not being flattering, but I think that's by people who like have a very naive view of what's unflattering because his Wall Street guys, they curse a lot.

Speaker 3 They use phrases like big swinging dick. They're like, they're like kind of gross, but in a way that's glamorous, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, I feel like it's like the Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. Yes, yes, exactly.
Yeah. Talking shit.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It is a kind of thing where you can say he's not glamorizing it, but he's absolutely making it look a way that makes more young men, greedy young men want to become stock traders.

Speaker 2 And to extend the Michael Crichton comparison, it is liars poker is generally agreed to have had a similar impact on its industry to how jurassic park influenced paleontology by like bringing a shitload of people in wow that's really interesting to me because i i i like i don't know i have not read liars poker to be honest i have not read uh any of his books i have seen some of the adaptations uh in movies of his books but um But yeah, in terms of like anytime someone writes something about Wall Street, like you have to be so fucking careful.

Speaker 2 And also, even if you are extremely fucking careful, it will still bring in the wrong people who refuse to see the play.

Speaker 2 Like Wolf of Wall Street is one of my favorite movies, hands down. I think it's great.
It's an amazing satire.

Speaker 2 But it still

Speaker 2 brought people in on the wrong

Speaker 2 fucking because brain-dead people are going to be brain-dead people.

Speaker 3 This is, we're going in a more serious direction, but if you've read Slaughterhouse 5 in the opening of it, Vonnegut talks about how when he said, I'm going to write my war book, his wife was like, Don't do it.

Speaker 3 There's no way to do it without making it look cool. Like, no one has ever managed to not do it in a way that makes young men think it's cool.
And she was right. Like, for the record,

Speaker 3 that's one of the problems with even anti-war war fiction is it always makes it look cool because it's

Speaker 3 cool, right? That doesn't mean it's good. It's like Joe Camill is cool.
He still killed 100 million people.

Speaker 2 Joe Camill gave my father lung cancer, and I stand by that. And to conjure a similar image,

Speaker 2 Joe Camill, there's an image that I saw when I worked in the Playboy archives of Joe Camill, an illustrated, gorgeous

Speaker 2 painting, essentially, of Joe Camill in

Speaker 2 Convertible with smoking hot human women. Hell yeah.
Big old titties. And you're like, no wonder this advertisement killed people.
This advertisement killed people.

Speaker 2 Like you could be this ugly ass camel with women, women with huge naturals. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like, it just like you can add up all the German generals on the Eastern Front, and they didn't kill as many people as that ass.

Speaker 2 Mike.

Speaker 2 Truly. Like, and it's a beautiful piece of artwork, but, like, let's be fucking honest.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So today, Lewis merely acknowledges that the psychos he wrote about in Liar's Poker were more fun on the page than they were in person.

Speaker 3 This can be, if this is your first book and you write it in 1982 and you realize later, oh, this actually might have made the problem worse,

Speaker 3 that's not a thing you have any moral culpability for. That's just

Speaker 3 like writing a thing with good intentions and it turns out badly.

Speaker 3 But this does become a problem and one that we can critique as partly a moral problem when it becomes part of a pattern. And it is a pattern with Michael Lewis.

Speaker 3 The big short is obviously not a Wall Street puff piece, but it became beloved by exactly the same people you might assume it was trying to criticize.

Speaker 3 In that Guardian article I've quoted from, there's a story about Michael Lewis attends this big New York party, and he's like warned ahead of time that it's going to be full of bankers and other finance guys.

Speaker 3 And he's like, oh, I don't know if they're going to like me because he had just not only was the big shortout, but he just published an article

Speaker 3 at a major publication attacking Wall Street bigwigs as being greedy idiots, like saying it in very unsparing terms.

Speaker 3 And one of Lewis's friends later said, quote, but all these former heads of investment banks, all these current bankers, they ran, not walked to the office just to meet him.

Speaker 3 One hedge fund manager walked walked in with 15 copies of Malouis's books. Michael signed them all.
And again, if you are a journalist, that's a bad sign.

Speaker 2 Yeah, what is your take on that? I mean, like, what is the game of chess that I'm not seeing here?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think it's just that

Speaker 3 he makes this look sexy. And it's if he writes about you, part of a big part of this is that.

Speaker 3 While he's maybe negative about greed within the overall finance industry, he cannot write about a person without making them look cool because he has to like them to write about them, right?

Speaker 3 All these guys in the big short, you could say, profited off of a lot of misery. Now, they didn't cause it.
They didn't start this subprime loan thing, but they profited off of a lot of misery.

Speaker 3 And that's at least kind of grimy. But Lewis likes these guys and he turns them into celebrities because of how good he is at writing about them and making you see what's likable in them, right?

Speaker 3 And so at this point,

Speaker 3 because of how often this has happened,

Speaker 3 he is aware that his books are PR for their subjects. He has a habit now of connecting people he writes about in his books to his PR manager so that they can set up speaking tours for them, right?

Speaker 3 Because he knows if I put you in a book, that's going to be a big business for you. You're going to be in demand.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And this is part as a result of him, he doesn't, he can't really be critical about the individuals, right? And this is, this is another quote from that Guardian article.

Speaker 3 The obverse of Lewis's approach is that he doesn't write about people he can't befriend or about stories that might cost him relationships.

Speaker 3 Among the few projects he has abandoned is a biography of George Soros, who was so unhappy with Lewis's portrayal of him as a financier rather than an intellectual in a magazine profile that he refused to cooperate.

Speaker 3 Another is a book about New Orleans, which would have demanded a level of honesty about the city's society and about his family's place in it that might have hurt his parents.

Speaker 3 He said, I adore my parents. I couldn't write that part while they're alive.

Speaker 3 And, you know, again, none of this is like unforgivable, but if you're admitting that as a journalist, what aren't you able to admit?

Speaker 3 And I think in this case, it's that he is not able to look at Sam Bankman Freed honestly because

Speaker 3 he found himself taken in by the kid shtick.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what I feel like is one of the complicating factors of,

Speaker 2 and I don't say this in a way to seem like it's like an unsolvable puzzle, but it's like Michael Lewis writes, it seems like, you know, largely accurate, you know, pieces of journalism.

Speaker 2 We'll talk about that.

Speaker 2 Well, okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So far, right, as someone who's never read his work, but they're also inherently commercial because I feel like there's a journalistic value to explaining why someone is appealing, but there's also an even more commercial value to explaining why someone is appealing because that makes it, you know, that sells books, that sells movie deals, that sells all this shit.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I think it's also part of why his stuff is successful in a commercial sense is that yeah is is this other fact that like it's always kind of uplifting right again the big short the the whole collapse of the financial industry is dark but stuff goes well for these characters that you've come to like right and lewis himself has kind of admitted he he can't really end on a not upbeat note.

Speaker 3 He has a lot of trouble with it.

Speaker 3 He said, quote, once you identify yourself as happy, you're always looking for happiness. And when things come along to grade on that happiness, you find ways to deflect them.

Speaker 3 You can force the narrative.

Speaker 3 And I think what he doesn't say there, but what explains his Sam Bankman Freed book is that once you get in the habit of writing about like these geniuses who are hidden in the middle of systems, right?

Speaker 3 And see more than everybody else. Once you start doing that, you see anybody you start focusing on as that kind of genius, even when they're not.
And that's what's happened with Michael here. So.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Mess.
Mess. And it's like, you know, ultimately, we, nine times out of 10, the person wearing like fucking x-ray glasses is wearing a pair of fucking IMAX glasses to go see Oppenheimer.

Speaker 2 Like it's just embarrassing.

Speaker 3 Exactly. It's just embarrassing.
And yeah.

Speaker 3 So I think the best example of this before we get into Sam Bankman Freed prior in Lewis's history is a book called The Blind Side, which was published in 2006.

Speaker 3 Now, The Blind Side, like a lot of Lewis stories, there's a macro and a micro narrative.

Speaker 3 The macro narrative is he's talking about the growth, the explosive growth and the importance of the left tackle in football.

Speaker 3 This is an offensive lineman whose job is basically to make sure the quarterback doesn't get maimed.

Speaker 3 The micro story, which contains the emotional heart of the book and is the core of the narrative, is the tale of a guy named Michael Or who

Speaker 3 was placed in foster care at age seven because his mother suffered from addiction. His dad was generally in prison.
His dad dies while he's, I think, in high school.

Speaker 3 Or was dealt a pretty tough hand in life, but he's also six foot six and very fast, right? So he is someone who like shows an aptitude for football.

Speaker 3 Um, as a result of this, he's kind of coaxed through getting into a private school and he gets he gets literally adopted by this rich white family or is a black man, um, black child at this time.

Speaker 3 Um, and they make it their business to coach him and coax him in through getting through the academics so that he can be in the NCA and college, so that he can get an NFL contract, right?

Speaker 2 So, I'll be, I'll be perfectly honest. I, before

Speaker 2 we started, before you told me that Michael Lewis was a a main character, I did not know that he wrote the blind side.

Speaker 3 Oh, yes, he did, because this becomes a movie that's huge, right?

Speaker 2 Awesome. Well, also, and I'm very well acquainted with the ensuing

Speaker 2 nasty fucking cultural narrative associated with the movie, but I didn't realize that it was a book. I knew Liars, Poker, Moneyball, and The Big Short.
Holy shit.

Speaker 2 Also, Robert, Robert, I just want to fact-trick real quick. He wasn't adopted by them.

Speaker 3 Not we're getting to that. Okay.
That was the narrative. That was the narrative in the blind side, right?

Speaker 2 Right, right.

Speaker 3 That they have basically adopted this guy. Yes, you are correct, Sophie, but I'm building to that.

Speaker 2 Okay, so

Speaker 2 I just like,

Speaker 2 I don't know why I didn't know that. And also, I'm like, who didn't want me to know that Michael Lewis

Speaker 2 Blindside, a book that is famously bullshit?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So this family adopts or and

Speaker 3 they effectively adopt him is, I think, generally how it's framed.

Speaker 3 And they help him get through high school, get into a college, and kind of like help usher him into this NFL career where he makes a significant amount of money, obviously.

Speaker 3 And I'm going to quote from the LA Times here.

Speaker 3 The administration at his high school accepts him, although he can barely read. He secures a full-time tutor.

Speaker 3 When his grade point average still proves too low for the NCAA, his adoptive father, a canny former college basketball standout named Sean Touhey, manages to find a crucial loophole.

Speaker 3 He has Or tested to prove that he's learning disabled, then has him take numerous easy online courses. Lewis treats these measures as ingenious.

Speaker 3 We are are meant to cheer the fact that Orr has gamed the educational process. And

Speaker 3 this is from the book.

Speaker 3 Leigh Ann, who's the wife of Sean, was now making it her personal responsibility to introduce him to the most basic facts of life, the sort of thing any normal person would have learned by osmosis.

Speaker 3 Every day I try to make sure he knows something he doesn't know, she said. If you ask him, where should I shop for a girl to impress her? He'll tell you, Tiffany's.

Speaker 3 If I go, I'll go through the whole golf game. He can tell you what six under is, and what's a birdie, and what's par.

Speaker 2 I love that those are her two examples of basic knowledge. This is Sandra Bullock's Oscar talking.

Speaker 2 This is Sandra Bullock's Oscar flapping his nasty little mouth.

Speaker 3 Two things every boy needs to know where to buy jewelry and how to golf works.

Speaker 3 Really says a lot about her socioeconomic status, right? Not like, here's how you pay your taxes. Not like, you know, literally anything else.
Like, here is how you cook eggs, but no, fucking

Speaker 2 fucking golf and Tiffany's. Well, yeah, and also, like, I mean, to state the obvious, like, conflating that with, like, this is what normal people

Speaker 2 are like, he could write a fucking doctoral thesis in the ways that that is like great.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 3 so we can all see the potential abusive issue with a wealthy white family adopting a teenaged black boy to coach him into launching a pro-football career, right?

Speaker 3 Just if you think about all of the head injuries and shit involved, there's a lot that's problematic here.

Speaker 3 Lewis does quote Leigh Ann at one point as saying, with me and Sean, I can see him thinking, if they found me lying in a gutter and I was going to be flipping burgers at McDonald's, would they really have had an interest at me?

Speaker 3 But the book is ultimately positive and uplifting. We're left thinking, how nice it is that these people helped this kid out.

Speaker 3 The LA Times note that Lewis seems to be like amused at these rich people cheating the system to usher this kid into a dangerous job without like educating him.

Speaker 3 So the nice parts of the story ended earlier this year when a now retired Or filed a lawsuit in a Tennessee court alleging that the Two He's never adopted him and instead created a conservatorship.

Speaker 3 Tuis. I don't care.

Speaker 2 Fuck them.

Speaker 3 And instead created a conservatorship and used it to take his money, right? The Twohees or whatever the fuck deny doing this. They call this place.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry, I think it's fucker.

Speaker 2 It's actually pronounced the peepees.

Speaker 2 I don't care.

Speaker 3 The dick bags deny this. And again, I'm not being a non-biased journalist here, but fucking.
No, no,

Speaker 2 Robert, it's actually Dickmans.

Speaker 3 Dickmans.

Speaker 2 The Dickmans.

Speaker 3 They call his claims hateful and absurd.

Speaker 3 Michael Lewis has defended the Twohees by saying that they only earned a few hundred thousand dollars off of the Blindside, the book, and the movie that was made off of it.

Speaker 3 He's like, they didn't make millions. They only made a few hundred grand.

Speaker 3 Now, Lewis also does, and I'll give him this, he also admits right after saying that, that the Two He's biological daughter is married to the son of the main investor in the film, which might suggest that the family made a lot more money off of it, right?

Speaker 2 Oh, that might suggest that

Speaker 3 Because the blindside makes half a billion dollars on a $35 million budget.

Speaker 2 What happens to Michael Lewis in this kind of thing?

Speaker 3 Michael Lewis is super rich.

Speaker 2 They really

Speaker 3 buried some leads.

Speaker 2 There's been so many articles about this.

Speaker 2 It is some shady shit. That's the first time I'm hearing about the daughter's marriage.
Because I read a fair amount about that case.

Speaker 3 Fun stuff.

Speaker 3 So in his own 2011 book, Oer like expresses issues with the movie based off of Lewis's book.

Speaker 3 Primarily, there's this part where, like, the Twoies are teaching him how to play football, and he's like, I knew football before I met them. I'm a teenager in America.

Speaker 2 Like, what are you fucking talking about?

Speaker 3 There are other problematic moments in the book, and this is from The Guardian again. Lewis calls Or Big Mike throughout it, despite the fact that Or is open about hating that nickname.

Speaker 3 He also tells this guy's story almost exclusively through the words of other people talking about him, even though he had access to Or.

Speaker 3 Lewis justifies this by saying that Or was not a strong voice on his life.

Speaker 3 Yeah, this guy's not good at talking about himself. I'm just gonna listen to everyone else about him.

Speaker 2 I'm out. I'm out.

Speaker 3 I think what's really going on here is that Or is a black kid from a desperate poverty background, right?

Speaker 3 And Lewis cannot identify or get inside of his head because that is nothing even that even resembles the Michael Lewis story.

Speaker 2 It feels like a very privileged, dark take on like, well, who do I consider to be a credible voice? Can I get 20 white people who barely know this guy?

Speaker 3 Who just met this kid to profit off him?

Speaker 2 To speak to him better than he can speak to his own life because that's who I trust is white people. That's yeah.
Oh, that's so fucking gross.

Speaker 3 He doesn't try to get inside Or his head and he just focuses most of the narrative on the Twoys who who Lewis understands this is the final shoe. He understands them for a very good reason.

Speaker 3 And I'm going to quote from the LA Times here. As I tore through the book, I kept wondering how Lewis got such remarkable access to the Twoys.

Speaker 3 And I also wondered, why does he take such an uncritical view of their role?

Speaker 3 The author's note at the end provides the obvious explanation, stating that Lewis is a friend of Sean Twoey's and that they had been longtime classmates at the same New Orleans school.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 How is it even ethical to take this fucking story on if you have?

Speaker 3 there's only one kind of ethics that I care about, Jamie, and it's dolla-dala fucking bills.

Speaker 2 Well, well, Jamie, as you know, things could be um unethical, but still be legal.

Speaker 2 That's how that's how he lives his life.

Speaker 2 I mean, truly, what a gift that we have

Speaker 2 as that, like I've, I am

Speaker 2 he a force of evil in the world, certainly, yeah, but I am grateful that he gave us that one thing, just the way of uh describing juvenile, lawless capitalists.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's so funny.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 3 one thing I have started to notice watching some of the more recent and critical interviews with Lewis after the SBF book is that while he's generally a pretty friendly seeming guy, he starts to get really angry the instant you question him on anything regarding one of his stories.

Speaker 3 And you see this in this story, in the Oer story, because Or's former coach comes out and like defends the Twohees or whatever once the lawsuit goes out.

Speaker 3 He's like, you know, I don't think they took advantage of him basically and oer calls it brave in my professional unbiased opinion

Speaker 3 yeah lewis calls the coach brave for doing this and basically says he's taking a stand against cancel culture and then

Speaker 3 here's the guardian again Lewis recalled Or as a shy young boy and found it hard to square that memory with the Or behind the lawsuit. What we're watching is a change of behavior, he told me.

Speaker 3 This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head. They run into problems with violence and aggression.

Speaker 3 It wouldn't surprise him, Lewis said, if we were seeing some confluence of Orr's history in football with other campaigns that stoke claims in lawsuits like his.

Speaker 3 Perhaps some lawyer of Orr's figured the time was ripe to sue the Two He's, Lewis speculated. Or perhaps Orr realized that people would get behind him if he makes these accusations.

Speaker 2 He's just a poor head-injured boy.

Speaker 2 They're like, no, the perceived exploitation and racism you experienced was the result of CTE. That's, oh my God, that's fucking wild, right?

Speaker 3 That's gross as hell.

Speaker 2 Oh, I hate it. Jamie, wow.
I just thought he was the guy who wrote Moneyball. I thought that that was the hard part of the world.
That is what I was thinking, too.

Speaker 3 Now, yeah, so here I want you to keep in mind how he wrote about his former subject, Or.

Speaker 3 Now, here is him talking in a 60-minutes interview about Sam Bankman-Free, the now-convicted former billionaire.

Speaker 3 And I just want to, I really want to emphasize the contrast between how he writes about these two different people who are subjects of his books.

Speaker 3 The story of Sam's life is people not understanding him, misreading him. He's so different.
He's so unusual.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think in a funny way that the reason I have such a compelling story is I have a character that I do come to know and that the reader comes to know that the world still doesn't know.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 3 that is not the case. Sam Bakeman-Fried is exactly the person he appears to be on the surface, right?

Speaker 3 He is a guy who committed a bunch of financial crimes and didn't get away with it because he was too lazy and undisciplined to do it the smart way, right?

Speaker 2 And that's all that's going on. I mean, this is like a, oh, this is a bummer.
This is like a case study and a journalist's biases coming out on their own.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's so, it's so obvious.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 No story better illustrates this part of the story than how Lewis wound up writing Going Infinite in the first place.

Speaker 3 In 2014, Lewis published a book called Flash Boys, which is a book about Brad Katsuyama and a small group of rebel Wall Street investors who form IEX, which is like a stock exchange that's supposed to, the idea is we want to protect investors from the unfair advantages that these high-frequency trading firms have on traditional exchanges due to like a whole bunch of shit, but largely access to a special fiber optic cable.

Speaker 3 And with most Lewis books, there's a lot of insiders that will criticize him for getting some details wrong here and glossing over some issues that don't conform to his narrative.

Speaker 3 There's like a market crash that's largely like mitigated by some of these firms that he's criticizing, but I don't know enough about that to want to get into it.

Speaker 3 What's important is that Katsuyama and his book of rogue traders are depicted semi-heroically, as if they're kind of fighting against this rigged financial system, which, you know, the financial system's rigged.

Speaker 3 I don't know about his characterization of them, but the book is a hit and it makes Katsuyama and his crew celebrities within the finance world.

Speaker 3 So Katsuyama reaches out to Lewis when he is considering an institutional investment in FTX.

Speaker 3 He's like, we're considering getting into crypto through these guys, putting a lot of money on their exchange. Would you look into this guy for me? Right.
And this is what Lewis says.

Speaker 3 Lewis like basically goes in there and like talks to Sam Bankman Freed. And he's, he's so impressed that he quotes himself as telling Katsuyama, do whatever he wants to do.

Speaker 3 What could possibly go wrong? Right.

Speaker 2 That's which bad bet.

Speaker 2 Katsuyama does wind up putting money on. He is a worse person to ask what could go wrong with.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And I'm going to continue from The Guardian here.
Okay. He did find himself intrigued in particular by effective altruism, the movement to which Bankman Fried subscribed.

Speaker 3 Effective altruists believe in giving away most of what they make to do the most good in the world.

Speaker 3 Some of them commit to earning as much as possible so as to donate more to their chosen beneficiaries.

Speaker 3 Having spent so long on Wall Street, Lewis wasn't used to meeting a wealthy young man who claimed to have no interest in wealth. Unusually for Lewis, he couldn't figure Bankman Fried out.

Speaker 3 Michael just said, This kid is the richest and most interesting young person I've ever met.

Speaker 3 He claimed to understand all the deep recesses of Bankman Fried's mind, but he knew it was a great story. And this was before the shit hit the fan.

Speaker 2 That's what his friends were talking. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And also, it takes someone who grew up in that environment to not have alarm bells going off in their mind when they hear, oh, I, as someone who has never not had money, don't really care about money.

Speaker 2 You're like, well, yeah, no shit. You've never not had it.
You would really care if you dare. That reminds me of, this is like, I think about this easily once a week.
It happened over 10 years ago.

Speaker 2 My freshman year of college, it was my first time really encountering people who like grew up with like money, you know, and there was this guy on my floor.

Speaker 2 And one night everyone was hanging out, and he like put a, this is the era, this is the early 2010s, he put a skinny scarf around my neck because it was cold. And he was like, you can have that.

Speaker 2 And it smelled and I didn't want it. But he's like, you can have that.
And I was like, oh, don't you like want it back?

Speaker 3 And he's like, no, I don't care about my material possessions and great i think about that all the time because he could just get 9 000 scarves yeah he'd just get 9 000 scarves but that was like but i feel like that is so much of what effective altruism is it's just a fundamental like yeah not understanding how the world works yeah it's it's a bunch of rich kids who are talking through like fucking philosophy 101 level shit and think and so impressed by everyone else's answers to like dumb logic puzzles because they've they've never studied enough humanities to know that like no man people have been talking about this shit for thousands of years and all of their takes are better than yours like anyway we're not getting into that as much right now we are about to get into the ads and if you really want to do some effective altruism purchase from the sponsors of this podcast

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Speaker 3 so we've been talking around the book Going Infinite, which is Michael's terrible book on Sam.

Speaker 3 So, I think now is probably a good time to dig into exactly how it fails.

Speaker 3 I wanted to start by introducing that contrast between Lewis's treatment of Or and SBF first because it puts things into perspective.

Speaker 3 Now, I think a good anecdote to start on here is one of the stories Lewis uses to introduce Sam to the reader.

Speaker 3 This is right at the start of Going Infinite, and it's about a phone call that Sam has during his billionaire era with fashion industry icon Anna Wintour before the Met Gala.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, Jamie.
This is

Speaker 2 good.

Speaker 2 So for reference. I'm exhausted.
Because Anna Wintour is Bill Nighy's girlfriend right now, and I don't want to think poorly of Bill Nighy. That's horrific.
No, it is tragic.

Speaker 3 My heart goes out to Bill Nahey, who I'm incapable of feeling badly about.

Speaker 2 No, I'm here. I'm sitting my ass down and listening.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So Anna is who Meryl Streep's character in The Devil Wears Prada is based on, right? Like, that's who this person is.

Speaker 2 Oh, I love when men try to explain what The Devil Wears Prada is about. Yes, for all the men listening, pause and go watch The Devil Wears Prada.

Speaker 2 It is just like one of the greatest films of, I think, one of the greatest comedy films and books of

Speaker 2 our generation.

Speaker 2 Half the essays I wrote in college were based off of said book.

Speaker 2 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 3 The Met Gala is an annual event.

Speaker 3 I think Vogue puts it on technically, but like it's where rich, famous, and occasionally even beautiful people wear insane outfits that cost the GDP of a small island nation, right?

Speaker 2 Yes. And then

Speaker 2 a bunch of YouTubers I watch say that they looked ugly. Yes, yes.

Speaker 3 It's a treat.

Speaker 3 It's great. It's great.
Everybody makes a feast off of it, but somebody has to pay for the son of a bitch, right? And that year, Wintour wanted SBF to pay for the gala, right?

Speaker 3 And he was spending way more money on stupider shit than that.

Speaker 3 so not unreasonable that he might actually agree to do this um he had instructed at this point his publicity woman to do whatever she could to increase ftx's reputation and keep his name in the news so not a bad way to do that right the the met gala often does make the news um and when it came to his side of the job though sam was he put as much work into like this call with anna win tour where tens of millions of dollars are on the line that he did to like everything else that he had a meeting about which is no work at all, right?

Speaker 3 Lewis goes into detail about the fact that he's playing this dumb video game like while he's on a Zoom call with her. It's the same game he's always playing.

Speaker 3 It's this video game that he winds up buying because it's made by a friend of his called Storybook Brawl.

Speaker 2 What is it about television?

Speaker 3 It's about like fable characters fighting, right? Like it's that, it's a little strategy game.

Speaker 3 It's like an app game. It's not a real game.

Speaker 2 You know how you watch those videos? And I say this with love and appreciation of uh like college students now playing a video game while explaining like uh marxism to you yes and like

Speaker 2 I want that, but Sam Bankman Freed playing that game while Anna Wintour is like, what is he up to? What is he up to?

Speaker 2 The JB and I in unison when you said playing video game while talking to Anna Wintour. Mouth wide open.

Speaker 2 Well, it's like she could, I mean, and not even to like endorse her. I'm just like, I would be very afraid to do anything in front of scary.

Speaker 2 And it's famously scary.

Speaker 3 She's famously scary, and he's talking about a lot of money, right?

Speaker 3 Like, it's not that he's blowing her off because, like, I don't feel precious about Anna Wintour's time, but like, it's that this is a big money deal, and he just, he can't focus on it.

Speaker 3 And I would take that as just like, oh, yeah, this is a, this is a dude who has some ADHD, right? Like, that's what that is. And this is a dude who has ADHD who's part of a generation that has ADHD.

Speaker 2 Well, no, this is a very dumb observation, but it's also clear to me that Sam Bankman Freed has never seen the Devil Wears Prada, which I've never been less surprised at.

Speaker 2 But it's like, if you have no one in your life who could tip you off, if you're talking to the protagonist of the Devil Wears Prada, then you lack a support structure in a fundamental way, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 it's it's it's okay that's good to know that's why sophie and i are here right what's what's funny about the way lewis talks about this is that he marvels at this right like it's the most amazing thing and it's evidence of how unique sam is when you just noted one of the biggest pieces of entertainment for millennials and gen z is People playing video games and explaining politics, right?

Speaker 3 That is, it is not at all unique that Sam Bankman Fried will not stop gaming to have a business meeting. but Michael Lewis treats it as like this is evidence that he is too much of a genius.

Speaker 3 He can't bear to pay attention to her for a second. He also, there's a little bit of anti-woman stuff in here because Lewis notes that

Speaker 3 Sam would minimize the window with her face on it whenever she spoke and bring it back up whenever he talked, right?

Speaker 3 Curiously, only when he was talking did he want to see her, which I do think there's a lot in that sentence.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 3 yeah, it is, again, like the way Lewis describes this.

Speaker 3 This isn't just, yeah, he's not very disciplined, and he has the same thing that like a lot of millennial and Gen Z people have, which is, you know, an inability to stop distracting yourself no matter what important shit you're doing.

Speaker 3 He describes this as SBF's brain being so big that like games are, he's like a Sherlock Holmes character, and games are his heroine, right?

Speaker 2 Well, that makes me, that indicates to me that Michael Lewis, because that's the way that your, like, like your doting parent would would talk about you. And like, that's, that, that is clear to me.

Speaker 2 The way he sees him is like, wow, look at this amazing kid. And also what SPF is doing here is like the inverse of what most easily distracted millennial and Gen Z people are doing.

Speaker 2 They're playing games and explaining radical politics to you.

Speaker 2 They're not playing games and talking to some, like, like half listening to someone before they part with millions of dollars to throw the world's stupidest annual party. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I love that stupid ass party.

Speaker 3 It's, it's I mean, I think both of those things are on a similar level, potentially, but it depends on how you do them. And he's not actually good at it.

Speaker 3 But the way Lewis describes this is he just is in awe of this kid's ability to have attention deficit disorder. Quote, yeah, absolutely, said Sam.
But his mind was elsewhere.

Speaker 3 The horde dragon was dead. Anna Wintour had killed it.
What to do? He made a half-hearted bid to begin another game and pick another hero, but then changed his mind and shut the game down.

Speaker 3 He could often occupy two worlds at once and win in both.

Speaker 3 In this case, he clearly stood no chance of winning in one world unless he paid less attention in the other, and this woman somehow had acquired a spell that interfered with his abilities to multitask.

Speaker 3 What an amazing way to write that paragraph.

Speaker 2 Michael Lewis. Dude.
Oh, God.

Speaker 3 It's something else. Like, I have played video games through some important work meetings.
Sophie has often had to pick my ass up off that. It's not because I'm a genius.

Speaker 3 It's because I'm hungover and have trouble focusing because I use Twitter too much.

Speaker 2 There's so many, there's like so many, I mean, whatever. And also, you have to imagine that this manuscript made it through a lot.

Speaker 2 It speaks to how old people in general who work in the publishing industry are that no one was like, Michael, I have to tell you that this is just how kids are these days.

Speaker 3 He's a real venture game genius.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's like we've both written books. Like I, I was surprised that I got the title of my book through, but it was because people over over 60 don't know what raw dog means.
No.

Speaker 2 And so you're, and that's most of the people in publishing. Like, it's ridiculous.
That's so nuts that that made it to the final book.

Speaker 3 No, it, it's like, that's, yeah.

Speaker 3 Um, so if you're not reading critically and inclined to give Lewis the bit of, the benefit of the doubt, I can see how you might assume that, like, he's, he's trying to make Sam look kind of silly in that paragraph.

Speaker 3 I can see how you would assume that based on the text, but that is not what's going on, listener.

Speaker 3 Here is Lewis talking about that exact same moment in an interview with Intelligent Squared from about a month ago. Yay.

Speaker 3 So on the screen, Zoom, Anna Wintour.

Speaker 3 And he does not know who she is. He doesn't know what the purpose of the meeting is.
He doesn't know, well, the purpose of the meeting is: can Sam Bankman Fried pay for the whole Met Gala?

Speaker 3 That's the purpose of the meeting. Because he'll pay for everything else.
Why not that? And she comes on the screen and she is dressed to the nine.

Speaker 3 She's got those scythes of hair coming down around her skin.

Speaker 3 She's like ready to kill. And gorgeous.
You know, she looks great. She's well prepared.
He's playing Storybook Brawl, which is his video game.

Speaker 2 Pause. I hate the way he talks about Anna Wintora.
Thank you very much. Well,

Speaker 3 first of all. We can deal with that in private.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. Before we can talk about a woman on a Zoom call, does she look gorgeous or not?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the point. This has nothing to do with Anna Wintor.
Also, she looks like that all the time. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 It's her thing.

Speaker 3 And whenever she comes on the screen, he blacks her out and and the video game pops up. So like

Speaker 3 she's talking and monster. Minotaurs are killing, are killing dwarfs and

Speaker 3 trees with axes are coming in and like, you know,

Speaker 3 weapons are appearing on the screen and people are dying and exploding.

Speaker 3 And you're hearing her talk about the Met Gala.

Speaker 3 And they're seven minutes in when he hits a button and the Wikipedia entry for the Met Gala comes up so he can figure out what the hell she's talking about.

Speaker 12 And he's doing, I watched him do this.

Speaker 3 He's doing this with her. This is what he was doing on live television when he would be interviewed by Bloomberg TV.
It was like he, and he had tricks.

Speaker 3 It took him about one-tenth of his brain to have a conversation with Anna Wintor. And

Speaker 3 what he would do,

Speaker 3 the other part of his brain was either reading about who she was or playing his game. And

Speaker 3 what he'd do is he'd say, you asked me a question. He'd say, oh, that's a really good question.
It's a really good question. Let me think about that for a minute.

Speaker 3 You know, meanwhile, the Minotaur is killing the tree and he comes off and he thinks for a minute and he says some boilerplate thing.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that does not show genius. He's obviously the smile on his face.
That is not him being critical.

Speaker 3 That's him thinking about like, that's him fawning over this kid for not being prepared for a multi-million dollar meeting, right? Which is like fine, but that's not an example of him being smart.

Speaker 2 Well, and I think that that is a clear clear pattern in the way that we cover the like young white kid genius who comes from a rich background.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of similarities in how early Mark Zuckerberg's like casual misogyny and not giving a shit about people was like part and parcel to why he was cool and why he was seen as a visionary.

Speaker 2 Like that, the same is true of like just, I mean, I feel like every generation has at least one of these guys, and they're all covered in the same way.

Speaker 2 No one ever learns their lesson because the guy covering them is often the same guy. It's Michael Lewis.

Speaker 3 It's literally Michael Lewis.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and often literally Michael Lewis. How did, how did, okay, I'm sorry.
How did this resolve with Anna Wintor? Did she, like, the fact that she didn't?

Speaker 3 He said, basically, he says, yeah, I'll pay for it. And then he just ghosts her.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so the fact that Anna Wintour didn't like smoke out that he was like fully a fraud.

Speaker 2 That's a girl.

Speaker 2 The girlies are are disappointing.

Speaker 2 I'm not caping for Anna Wintor here, but

Speaker 2 famously named to the dragon lady. Well, no.

Speaker 2 SBF is lucky that he'll never encounter Bill Nahee because for Bill Nahee, it was a fancy.

Speaker 3 Oh, Bill Nahey would fuck him up.

Speaker 2 Beyoncé.

Speaker 2 He was an I-Frankenstein for crying. He was in Detective Pikachu.

Speaker 2 This episode has broken my brain.

Speaker 2 My brain is.

Speaker 3 These are amusing anecdotes, right?

Speaker 3 What he's telling.

Speaker 3 Potentially, if you are someone who is critical about him, that same anecdote could form part of your thesis about why this kid got away with it for so long and why he ultimately flamed out.

Speaker 3 But Lewis is convinced that these show you evidence of Sam's genius. And he sets this up early in the book, talking about Sam's childhood.
Quote, he had a fault line inside him.

Speaker 3 Pressure was building on it. And one day, in the seventh grade, he slipped.
His mother returned from work to find Sam alone, in despair. I came home and he was crying, recalled Barbara.

Speaker 3 He said, I'm so bored, I'm going to die.

Speaker 2 And like, yeah,

Speaker 3 I have had a similar conversation with my mom, and it's a sign, you know, certainly Sam has been diagnosed with ADHD. That's certainly one way in which that can manifest.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Hold on. One for the girlies again.
That is a direct quote from Sex in the City. Oh, okay.
That is a direct quote from a Sex in the City episode.

Speaker 3 I'm sure Sam's a big Samantha.

Speaker 2 Wait, who says it?

Speaker 2 She goes, I'm so bored, I could die. And she jumps out and she falls out of the window.

Speaker 2 Oh my God. Iconic.
It's literally one of the most famous moments since

Speaker 2 Six of the City. Wow.
Yeah. I don't remember that.

Speaker 3 Anyway, so because, like, Lewis, again, again, if you're, if you're just kind of being honest about Sam and writing a book, you might be like, well, Sam gets diagnosed with ADHD.

Speaker 3 This moment makes total sense as, like, yeah, this is a kid who's got ADHD and he's also, you know, good at math and stuff. He's bored in the classes that he's in.

Speaker 3 But Lewis does not acknowledge that Sam has ADHD in his book. He doesn't say anything about it because that would, that's not a bad thing, obviously.

Speaker 3 But it's also that you do, like, you're not a genius just because you have ADHD, right? Plenty of people who are not super geniuses have ADHD. It's just a thing.

Speaker 2 And well, and it's like if you're, if you're talking about that behavior, and I want to be like delicate in the way I talk about it, but it's like, it's contextually important.

Speaker 3 If you proceed from the principle, like, yeah, this is a kid with ADHD, then there's another explanation for his addiction to games, his inability to focus on stuff, right?

Speaker 3 And it, it, and then it means those things aren't a sign of his brilliance, right?

Speaker 3 Um, now, part of why I'm critical of Michael for this is that he does make a note about one character's ADHD in the book, and it's Carolyn Ellison, who comes across as one of the villains in the book.

Speaker 3 And I should note that the following paragraph comes from a part of the book where Lewis is talking to George, who is a therapist who worked for FTX as the company Shrink.

Speaker 3 So, among other things, this is a therapist talking about his patient, right?

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 When she'd first come to him back in 2018, she'd had two issues she wanted to talk about: her attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and her new and emotionally complicated polyamorous lifestyle.

Speaker 3 Every subsequent session after the first, Carolyn came back with just one issue she wanted to discuss. Sam.
She'd fallen in love with Sam.

Speaker 3 Sam didn't love her back, and that fact alone left her deeply unhappy. I thought of her as an exception, said George.

Speaker 3 I thought she might be willing to trade effective altruism for reciprocation of love any day, right?

Speaker 2 Sorry, how is it like, I mean, I truly, like, how is it even legal or ethical for this information to begin with? I don't actually know. I don't actually know

Speaker 2 because it's

Speaker 2 not supposed to be able to do, like, they're famously not supposed to be able to do that. And also, not to like overly come to her defense, but also it's like the

Speaker 2 if anyone's therapy logs were leaked, it would be like, oh, they had this fixation on this issue. Yeah, that's why you fucking go, dude.

Speaker 2 You don't go there to be a reasoned person.

Speaker 3 No, and especially since, like, what's messy to me is that he brings that, he makes sure to bring this up with Carolyn because he's kind of writing that, like, she was unreliable.

Speaker 3 She wasn't focusing enough. She was in love with him.

Speaker 2 She was being hysterical perhaps.

Speaker 3 Whereas he's just this misunderstood genius, but he notes her ADHD and he doesn't note Sam's, even though Sam's ADHD is a matter of public fucking record now.

Speaker 3 Like, his family went to court to get him his medicine.

Speaker 2 Like, this is not a hidden thing. It's like not even something that he particularly tries to obscure, right? No, like, no.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And again, it's critical to understand him because it provides an alternate explanation for all this behavior that Lewis chalks up to him just like

Speaker 3 only needing 10% of his brain to talk to people.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, there's another, like, there's another very fun bit in this, which kind of relates to that, which is that, and this is like the weirdest through line in going infinite, which is Michael Lewis does not understand games, right?

Speaker 3 Like he is so, he writes about like video games and board games and other popular nerd pastimes that are now like the dominant form of entertainment by money in our country.

Speaker 3 He talks about them like he's an alien who's just arrived on the planet.

Speaker 3 And he, and as a result, he talks about Sam's embrace of this stuff at the expense of everything else to be evidence of brilliance. Quote, he felt nothing in the presence of art.

Speaker 3 He found religion absurd. He thought both right-wing and left-wing political opinions kind of dumb, less a consequence of thought than of their holders' tribal identity.

Speaker 3 He and his family ignored the rituals that punctuated most people's existence. He didn't even celebrate his own birthday.

Speaker 3 What gave pleasure and solace and a sense of belonging to others left Sam cold.

Speaker 3 When the Bankman Freeds traveled to Europe, Sam realized that he was just staring at a lot of old buildings for no particular reason. We did a few trips, he said.
I basically hated it.

Speaker 3 To his unrelenting alienation, there was only one exception. Games.
In sixth grade, Sam learned about a game called Magic the Gathering.

Speaker 3 For the next four years, it was the only activity that consumed him faster than he could consume it. And

Speaker 3 this is so funny because, like, Lewis has to describe Magic the Gathering after this point. And he, like, he describes it basically.

Speaker 3 It's the first game ever made where, like, you, like, the way that you play it, like, it's, it's different. Like, every character can come into this strategy game with a different set of equipment.

Speaker 3 No one had ever done this before. It was all like chess where everyone's the same.
And it's like, no, it wasn't.

Speaker 3 There were decades, decades of war games and strategy games that magic was influenced by. Like, that's just wrong, Michael Lewis.

Speaker 2 Now, hold on, nerd. Hold on.
Magic. Yeah.
Hold on, nerd. Any, any,

Speaker 2 put a pin in that, nerd. I do think that, like, this is

Speaker 2 of the,

Speaker 2 because I don't play Magic the Gathering, and I know that how he's describing it is wildly.

Speaker 3 It's so wrong.

Speaker 2 I think that speaks more to like a generation gap because I think that there's someone who could be on the opposite side of SPF and equally with it. Like, it's just like, do your research.

Speaker 2 Just talk to an just talk to someone who plays Magic the Gathering. They famously love to talk about it.

Speaker 3 And it's funny because he's like, he has to make this, like, he goes on a limb about like Sam Bankman Freed didn't like chess. It was too boring.

Speaker 3 There were too few possibilities, like you could calculate everything, like his computer brain wasn't amused by chess.

Speaker 2 Only Magic

Speaker 2 wasn't enough for him. Yeah, it's so funny.

Speaker 3 It's like, man, my friends and I all played Magic the Gathering. And like, as a spoiler, some people looked into Sam's like performance in League of Legends and the other online.

Speaker 3 He was never good at anything. He was not very good.
He wasn't particularly bad, but he was not very good.

Speaker 3 And I'm going to guess he wasn't different at Magic the Gathering because it, you know, like it's, it is not not a great it's a wonderful game not a great like yardstick for your intelligence you know it's it's just a card game no one should be uh i mean not but like no one should be judged by their intelligence by how they interact with like a beloved hobby that's weird yeah it's so weird and it's like it's interesting because like sam's parents a big part of this section is like he comes home and he's like i'm so bored i can't i want to die and his you know his parents do what i think is the right thing They lead the charge to get their school to add like an advanced math class.

Speaker 3 And it seems to have a good impact on him. He's excited to go to school now.
And that's a good thing.

Speaker 3 But what we find hints of in parts of this story, and I don't think Lewis is able, either knows it or is able to admit it to himself, is the troubling fact that once Sam's parents decide he's a math genius,

Speaker 3 they don't bother to make him into a well-rounded person. Sam grows up hating art.
He thinks books are useless.

Speaker 3 He has this big rant he goes about like, well, there's no way that Shakespeare is the best author ever because there have been this many billion people born since he was alive.

Speaker 3 And if you want to calculate the odds that none of them were better at writing than him, then there's really no reason to read Shakespeare.

Speaker 3 And it's like, well, Sam, the fact that you think that means that like no one even casually tried to teach you the humanities because like the reason you should study Shakespeare is not that he's the quote-unquote best author ever.

Speaker 3 That doesn't exist. It's that there is not a day in your life or the life of anyone that you love that they don't use words and phrases Shakespeare introduced to the English language.

Speaker 3 That's why he's important.

Speaker 2 Don't get me wrong, Sam. I also don't want to read a book, but I, there, sometimes we're.

Speaker 3 Sometimes that's just what you need to do to understand the world and not go to prison for forever because you're a gambler.

Speaker 2 Or just be willing to fucking Google your way around it. Like, you're not better than Shakespeare.
You fucking weirdo. There is like an element of, like, there are certain

Speaker 2 lower side of SBF L's that he takes in the statements he makes. He sounds like a one-episode Frasier character.
Yes. You know, he sounds like Freddie made a friend and he fucking sucks.

Speaker 2 And he's a piece of shit. Yeah.
And then he even polarizes Frasier and Niles. And that's how you know you're in fucking trouble.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 When Niles, Niles is like, this kid's kind of got a fucking problem.

Speaker 2 This kid's incomprehensible.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't share a glass of brandy with him. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And man, if you know Niles, you know what that takes.

Speaker 2 Hey, everyone. Robert here.

Speaker 3 Just wanted a quick note that the next like, the last like five or six minutes of this episode is all Frasier. It's all Frazier talk.
Jamie and I got off on a tangent.

Speaker 3 There is a lot more Sam Bankman Freed in part two. It's another like hour and 20 minutes.

Speaker 3 Plenty more on Thursday. But as a heads up, in case it's kind of confusing,

Speaker 3 we just wound up in a Frasier hole after this point. So if if you want to hear us talk about Frasier, this is your chance.

Speaker 3 Speaking of David Hyde Pierce, Jamie Loftus, you are starring in a floor show with David Hyde Pierce. I sure

Speaker 3 based on the life of Kelsey Grammer, actually. You are playing Kelsey.

Speaker 3 You spent, like Michael Lewis, a full year living with him to really get his character down. What was that like?

Speaker 2 Look, it was pretty hostile. It was pretty hostile.

Speaker 2 And in the subsequent publishings that i've made a lot of people have said that i couldn't explain the video games that kelsey grammar was playing for the year that i was following him around and i i resent that uh i was in the room with kelsey while he was berating women on the phone and i think that that's That makes him a genius.

Speaker 2 I think that that makes him a genius. And, you know, do I believe he's the greatest sitcom actor of all time? Well, I'll keep that to myself.
But wink, wink.

Speaker 2 I think that he's kind of a beautiful genius and is above criticism. And if you don't think that he's kind of the perfect person, or if you even like just read his Wikipedia page and form an opinion,

Speaker 2 I beg to disagree. And

Speaker 3 I do love, I love Kelsey Grammar stories from the Height of Fraser because they're all like members of the cast being like, Well, yeah, he was very, like, he came on set and he had clearly just woken up after vomiting up his seven martini lunch.

Speaker 3 He looked like he was dying. We were all worried that he was going to drop dead that day.
And then the director called action and he was immediately in character.

Speaker 2 He was

Speaker 2 perfect. He was beautiful.
His chest hair perked. Like,

Speaker 2 we'll never know.

Speaker 2 I was, I mean, I was.

Speaker 2 fixated on Fraser reruns when I was a kid. I would stay up late to watch them.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's one of my comfort shows for sure.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The best. And like when I remember getting Kelsey Grammer's memoir from the library and read that he broke up with his wife on the phone.

Speaker 2 And it may have been one of the first times that I was like, wow,

Speaker 3 men are scary.

Speaker 2 Like, you could just, you can just do that. You could just beat Kelsey Grammer and be evil.
And then, and I will still like base my sexuality on you forever. Sure, absolutely.

Speaker 3 Seemed fair. Poomst Among Us, right?

Speaker 3 Oh, man.

Speaker 3 But I will say, having watched the new frasier show it becomes very clear how much of that show's charm was john mahoney and david hyde pierce oh well i i i think tell kelse i mean and he's an evil person he's doing his damn best he he is he is perfect he is like literally his voice has not changed in 20 years which is remarkable no and and he's been you know physically preserved well enough yes yeah One of the big problems that show has is they've cast that kid as Niles and Daphne's son, and they're relying on him to hold up a lot of the physical comedy and that David Hyde Pierce used to.

Speaker 3 And if you are going up next to David Hyde Pierce in like a physical comedy competition, you're going to look like shit.

Speaker 2 Fuck

Speaker 2 myself. He's David Hyde Pierce.

Speaker 2 He's the guy. Robert, I thought you would love the Fraser reboot because it's some of the most abysmal Boston accents I've ever heard in my fucking life.
Don't get me wrong.

Speaker 2 I've watched every episode, too. Some of the nastiest little, I have to like pause sometimes and like get a

Speaker 2 glass of water.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I have to like walk

Speaker 2 in the accents.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, you have, and I, and I have conceded long ago that you've got it down.

Speaker 3 Thank you, thank you. Well, anything to plug, Jamie, after our five-minute Fraser digression?

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I'd like to, I guess I'd like to plug the Fraser reboot because I would like a second season.

Speaker 2 Check it out, everybody. It's not shit.

Speaker 2 It's on Paramount Plus.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I also just read, read Raw Dog

Speaker 2 and uh follow me online if you're so inclined. And that's uh, that's all I have to say.
Listen to the Bextelcast while you're at it. Why not?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 all right, what about you?

Speaker 3 Uh, that's it.

Speaker 2 Uh, I'm done.

Speaker 3 Um, you're done. Go find, find, figure out where David Hyde Pierce lives.

Speaker 2 You know, send him a letter, send him a nice letter. I want to creep a letter.

Speaker 2 Bye.

Speaker 2 Let's let Jamie know

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Speaker 3 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, our special edition episodes on Sam Bankman, who is not freed because he is still in jail. That's the intro I've got.
It's the same as the last episode.

Speaker 2 It's still really funny.

Speaker 2 No, you're hilarious. It's still very funny.
It's Sophie's favorite.

Speaker 3 This is the only time I've made Sophie laugh in years.

Speaker 2 That's not true.

Speaker 2 Well, okay. You're

Speaker 2 Switzerland on this issue.

Speaker 3 You're Swiss on this issue. Swiss you.

Speaker 3 Jamie, speaking of Switzerland,

Speaker 3 you also

Speaker 3 were neutral in World War II. Is that correct?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was sort of like,

Speaker 2 no, I'm kidding.

Speaker 2 Robert, you made me laugh again. Congrats.

Speaker 2 God damn it.

Speaker 3 Two for two, baby.

Speaker 3 So we took a couple of days in between recording part one and part two to really let it sink in how are you feeling on our technically not a behind the bastards on michael lewis but basically a behind the bastards on michael lewis author of the big short i so in the in the interceding days i've talked about the michael lewis of it all with a couple different people just to see if i was like

Speaker 2 if if if i had just missed something but every single person i talked to i found had a similar experience to me where they did not not know that he wrote The Blind Side. Oh, good.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then when they found out that he wrote The Blind Side, they were like, oh, yeah, I could see that he is a,

Speaker 2 you know, he's an honorary bastard. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, maybe he is kind of a hack.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Right.
Well, because, yeah, they were like, yeah, Michael Lewis, Moneyball, The Big Short. And you're like, and another thing.

Speaker 2 How did that, how did, how did we collectively forget that he wrote that? It feels like he got away with something.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I i guess i've been thinking about what he's doing with sam bankman freed as i think about the upcoming napoleon movie which i will have watched by the time this comes out but it's not out yet so excited about that

Speaker 3 i'm i'm ready everyone especially like all of these history twitter podcast people are are so livid that ridley scott's basically like who can who can say what the truth of napoleon's life was which is it is a ridiculous thing to say he's very well documented we actually know a lot about napoleon but also i don't give a shit it's It's the guy who made Gladiator.

Speaker 2 Well, and also, I appreciate because all biopics are, you know, nonsense.

Speaker 2 Horseshit, right? And so you're like, well, this is the one director who's going to say, my biopic is kind of horseshit.

Speaker 3 It's just lies, which also very appropriate for Napoleon. But what is the line with that? Why am I angry at Michael Lewis? for what he's doing and I don't really care.

Speaker 2 He's a journalist.

Speaker 3 He's a journalist, for one. He's not the director of fucking Gladiator, the least accurate movie about Rome ever made.

Speaker 2 It's been a great week for weird old guys who we could argue have peaked creatively.

Speaker 2 Although I wouldn't say that for Scorsese, but there was a great quote that was floating around in the last couple of days where I guess Scorsese said on the Killers of the Flower Moon press tour that he was always worried about running out of time and he never knew what his last movie would be.

Speaker 2 And Ridley Scott was asked to react to that. And he said, since he started Killers of the Flower Moon, I've made four films.
No, I don't think about it. I get up in the morning and say, ah, great.

Speaker 2 Another day of stress.

Speaker 3 Honestly, those are both completely valid answers.

Speaker 3 I refuse to be a part of some sort of like pretending that what Scott is saying isn't as valid as what Scorsese is saying. There are two ways to deal with mortality.

Speaker 2 One of them is... There's two genders of creative mortality.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 One is, oh my God, I will die and I won't have said everything I need to say. And the other is, what the fuck? I got shit to do.
I got to move.

Speaker 2 I got to have time to answer this fucking question.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, Robert, Paul Schrader is on Facebook, and Paul Schrader is posting about Taylor Swift in a kind of horny way. So, like, the old men are just, they're on one this week.

Speaker 2 And Michael Lewis walks among them.

Speaker 3 There's only one old, great creative who has taken the reasonable response, like, answer to mortality, and it's John Carpenter, who's like, nah, I'm done directing movies.

Speaker 3 I'm going to get high, play video games, watch basketball the rest of my life.

Speaker 2 And God bless. God bless him.

Speaker 3 Yeah, God bless him. There's a man who understands what's valuable in life, a thing that Sam Bankman-Freed never understood.

Speaker 2 And we're back.

Speaker 3 And we're back. Yeah, we're back.
So.

Speaker 3 One of the things that comes up a lot in Michael Lewis's book as he's sort of going into the mind and psyche of Sam Bankman-Freed is that Sam had this belief that no one ever does anything useful after like age 40 to 45, somewhere around there is the last time you have a useful thought in your entire life, which I guess is relevant to our discussion of aging, aging powerful men.

Speaker 2 I will say that that's true of many stand-up comedians, but I can't speak of that outside of that world.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I think it's true, especially like once you get really rich,

Speaker 3 you tend to like lose complete touch with the world and go insane. So I think that is somewhat accurate, at least for some creative professions.
But Sam is not in a creative profession.

Speaker 3 And it's actually kind of ridiculous to me the idea that like people in business after age 40, like Steve Jobs did all of his best shit like well after that point, like his most influential, like

Speaker 3 evil things.

Speaker 3 And most like really successful businessmen are just kind of getting started by their mid-40s, right? Because it takes that much time to get

Speaker 2 momentum. You've got a lot of evil left to do.
You've got a lot of horrible things left to do. Plenty of time.
The worst is in front of you.

Speaker 3 I think he's got three to five ethnic cleansings in him. Minimum.

Speaker 2 Minimum, Jamie. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Maybe eight. You know, I could see him having eight more ethnic cleansings.

Speaker 2 He does seem like someone who just will like have a Kissinger-like affinity for life.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So Bankman Freed's, I understand, belief that like after age 45, he's not going to be capable of having any useful ideas. This is what pushed him, you know, along with his effective altruist idea.

Speaker 3 This is why he felt like

Speaker 3 he had to continually gamble rather than like taking the slow, sustainable path, making money off of his exchange at like a reasonable pace. No, no, no.

Speaker 3 I only have a few more years left before my brain shrivels up. And so if I'm going to do anything good for the world, I have to keep putting every dollar I've made on a 50-50 bet

Speaker 3 endlessly, right?

Speaker 3 Which isn't it, which is like, I don't know, you should probably get help if you feel that about the world, because that's a deeply self-destructive way to think about yourself and about your assets.

Speaker 3 This is a big part of why FTX did not have a really crucial thing for any company, particularly a financial company, to have, which is a risk officer, right?

Speaker 3 A risk officer's job is to analyze the deals the company's doing and go, well, that's an insane risk. So let's not.
Let's not do that one.

Speaker 3 Or, you know, that's an insane risk. We need to offset it with this stuff.
They also did not have a chief financial officer or a bunch of other critical executive positions. to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they had no CFOs.

Speaker 2 That's one I've heard of. You should have that one.

Speaker 3 It's a really basic job, and its job is basically to know how much money you have, right? Like there's other stuff to it, but it's pretty critical.

Speaker 3 FTX also did not have a board of directors and they're lacking a bunch of other very basic executive positions.

Speaker 3 And a big part of why is that the only people Sam feels like he can trust are like his friends.

Speaker 3 And he has this deep aversion to bringing in adults, like people who are not in their 20s, like his, the friends he went to college with and shit.

Speaker 3 He said in one interview with Michael, We tried having some grown-ups, but they didn't do anything. This was true for everyone over the age of 45.

Speaker 3 All they did was worry, which, like, again, given what happened, perhaps they ought to have been.

Speaker 2 Maybe I'm just like sort of on one with the idea that very few stand-ups have a valuable thought after 45.

Speaker 2 But I would say now, reflecting on it, like Sam Bankman-Fried is using the improv troop approach to a very high-stakes business.

Speaker 2 Yes, like he's like, No, I will only work with people I went to college with. We know best.
I don't want no fucking crusties in the room.

Speaker 2 Like, if he, I mean, and we could, we could debate all day about whether Sam Bankman-Fried would have done more evil in his life so far or in his life as an improv comedian, because I think they should all be in forever jail.

Speaker 2 So, it's kind of like it's difficult. It's difficult.

Speaker 3 This is what Leavenworth should be, right? The military needs to take stand-up comedians into custody. I've always

Speaker 2 performed to know people. I'm on a lot of lists.

Speaker 3 So, Sam's response when he was asked by Michael, like, why don't you guys even have a CFO? That seems important. He says, there's a functional religion around the CFO.

Speaker 3 I'll ask them, why do I need one? Some people cannot articulate a single thing the CFO is supposed to do. They'll say, keep track of the money or make projections.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, what the fuck do you think I do all day? You think I don't know how much money we have? Which is funny because

Speaker 3 his whole legal defense in court was I had no idea how much money we had or where it was. Like, and that's why I didn't commit a crime, right? Because I just was incompetent.

Speaker 3 I just didn't know where the money was, but it's all somewhere. Like, very silly thing to say, given what he's about to say.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 So.

Speaker 3 After Sam's life fell apart, Michael Lewis continued to talk and visit multiple. He sometimes would call like three or four times a day

Speaker 3 through the eight months that Sam was on house arrest.

Speaker 3 And it's interesting to me because like Michael, if I was a journalist like Michael Lewis and I had had a conversation with somebody when they were one of the biggest names in an industry being like, a CFO is useless.

Speaker 3 I know where the money is. And then their entire life explodes because they didn't know what the money is.
I would at some point ask them the question, hey, was that maybe a bad idea?

Speaker 3 Michael does not bring this up to Sam after the collapse in any of the dozens of conversations that they've had.

Speaker 3 And in fact, and this is why that's weird, the actual villain of his book, Going Infinite, the one person that Lewis is super critical of in like a really uncharitable way is the CEO brought in to take over the FTX after Sam like leaves and declares bankruptcy, a guy named John Ray III.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 3 I am not going to go to bat for John Ray III because

Speaker 3 his name is John Ray III.

Speaker 2 So you know he's up to his battle. He's got a difficult name to go to bat for.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But he is, you know, he's the guy who got brought in to liquidate Enron. And he's he's a kind of a corporate undertaker, right?

Speaker 3 When there's a huge scandal at a company, when it like collapses, goes into bankruptcy, and you need someone to kind of do the post-mortem, you bring in John Ray. And he's like, as far as I know.

Speaker 2 Not the first or second.

Speaker 3 No, not the first or second. Those guys are useless.

Speaker 2 No, fucking clowns. Okay, you're going to want to bring in the third.

Speaker 3 You need a JR3.

Speaker 2 I'm with you. So

Speaker 2 nightmare.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's interesting, like the degree to which he, he has, because this guy comes in later. And I think because he's boring, Michael Lewis finds him disgusting.

Speaker 3 Like, I haven't run into any info that he's like bad at what he does. It's certainly not his fault.

Speaker 3 But Michael is livid because he's this kind of like stodgy old businessman and he doesn't understand Sam's special playground or like the wonderful thing that he built.

Speaker 3 And he's just kind of exasperated at how badly it all works.

Speaker 2 See, that's fascinating to me because to me that says like Michael Lewis is, I mean, either just hates boring people, which fair enough, but you know, he should know as a journalist that boring people are often and maybe most often tremendously capable of doing bad shit.

Speaker 2 But it seems like he's looking more for like, well, Bradley Cooper can't play you in a movie. You're useless to me.
You're garbage. You're boring.

Speaker 3 There's nothing. Yeah, there's nothing sexy about him.
He's just trying to deal up,

Speaker 3 clean up after a disaster.

Speaker 3 And there's some really funny lines in the book because like one of the things that Lewis has to do in order to kind of defend Sam as a genius is explain how he didn't steal $9 billion. Right.

Speaker 3 And the answer that Lewis has come to is that money is all there, that he just didn't know where $9 billion

Speaker 3 was.

Speaker 2 Oh.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he didn't steal it or gamble it away. He just misplaced it due to rank incompetence that he committed because he was too smart to keep track of things.

Speaker 3 And there's a, I'm going to read you a very,

Speaker 3 yeah, there's a really fun quote there.

Speaker 3 He describes, like Lewis describes FTX as a real business, but he says that John Ray, who like attacked it as the worst run company he'd ever seen, was just too much of an idiot to like understand it, right?

Speaker 3 He describes Ray trying to figure out what company assets actually existed and what didn't as quote, like an amateur amateur archaeologist who had stumbled upon a previously unknown civilization, unable to learn anything about its customs or language, he just started digging, right?

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 3 he's too dumb to understand the brilliant thing that Sam built up, so he just starts like churning about in the wreckage without really appreciating everything that went into making this monumental edifice.

Speaker 2 I really wonder, like, what, I mean, this is like getting into the weeds a little bit, but I'm very curious, like, what, like, who on Michael Lewis's editorial team is keeping him in check it doesn't sound like he's hired a fact checker it doesn't sound like he has a personal Jiminy cricket so he's just saying shit like his personal biases couldn't be more out they wanted to rush this thing out so you don't have much time to edit it right

Speaker 3 a year to write and release a book is not a long time no not enough time one might one might argue not enough time one might argue and also michael lewis has the kind of clout to to make that not happen.

Speaker 3 Right. And again, I also kind of think that his hatred of Ray here is based on the fact that Ray did not fall for Sam's bullshit the way Michael did, right?

Speaker 3 Here's what Ray said shortly after taking over and getting a look at FTX's finances. And this is from an article in Business Insider.

Speaker 3 At the hearing, Congresswoman Ann Wagner of Missouri asked Ray to elaborate on the specific ways FTX was worse than, quote, one of the largest corporate frauds in history.

Speaker 3 Ray explained that FTX was unusual and that it had no record keeping whatsoever. He said that employees would exchange invoices and expenses on Slack, the ubiquitous workplace chat room.

Speaker 3 They used QuickBooks, he added, referring to the accounting software. QuickBooks, Congresswoman Wagner asked for clarification.

Speaker 3 QuickBooks, very nice tool, not for a multi-billion dollar company, Ray confirmed.

Speaker 3 And that's like, basically, they're using the kind of thing that you would use if you're like a person keeping track of you or maybe your small business's accounting.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I've done that.

Speaker 2 And like, that,

Speaker 2 nuts. Yeah.
That is like the closest thing. That's Ray's attitude.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I was like, that's the closest thing I've come to to being like, wow, if I was also tasked with multi-billion dollars, I'd be like, I don't know.
Yeah. QuickBooks? Do we go to TurboTax?

Speaker 2 What do we do? I would. But it's like hire a CFO, maybe.
Yeah. I would hire someone who's done that before, right? Yeah.
Yeah. QuickBooks.
Holy shit.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So you can decide whose interpretation sounds more realistic.

Speaker 3 John Ray recognizes, you can basically, the two possibilities are like either John Ray just recognizes basic incompetence when he sees it and gets angry, or he's just not brilliant and special enough to understand Sam's world, which is, is what, that's what Michael Lewis, that's he in caps, that's what Michael Lewis refers to FTX as is Sam's world, right?

Speaker 3 This is,

Speaker 3 he basically treats the whole situation as like, yeah, Sam's, Sam lived in this magical world,

Speaker 3 and, you know, his business was actually secretly good, but it encountered this temporary issue and he was forced out.

Speaker 3 And then John Ray came in and he tore it all apart because he's just the mean old grumpy businessman, right? That's that's really like the thrust of Michael Lewis's book.

Speaker 3 Um, and part of how he kind of emphasizes the magical inner world Sam lived in is this kind of obsession with gaming, returning to like Lewis is just sort of fascinated with like the fact that Sam was an addict, right?

Speaker 3 Sam is a gaming addict. That's what when you can't like handle your basic functions because you're too busy playing storybook brawl, that's an addiction, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it's interesting, both because Storybook Brawl was made by his childhood friend and he used consumer funds to purchase it.

Speaker 3 It seems to have been a pretty mid-game. It shut down after he got arrested, so I can't play it to tell you if it's actually good.
But Lewis doesn't describe it as like a middlebrow app game.

Speaker 3 He describes it as like better than chess, like more complex than chess, a greater intellectual expert

Speaker 3 exercise than chess. And he writes this paragraph about it.
Sam didn't care for games like chess, where the players controlled everything, and the best move was, in theory,

Speaker 3 perfectly calculable. Chess he'd have liked better if robot voices wired into the board hollered rule changes at random intervals.
Knights are now rooks. All bishops must leave the board.

Speaker 3 Pawns can now fly, or almost anything, so long as the new rule forced all players to scrap whatever strategy they'd been pursuing and improvise another, better one.

Speaker 3 The game Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that.

Speaker 2 And I this is getting fucking ridiculous. Like, is there any chance that Sam Bankman-Fried paid Michael Lewis to say this shit? Like, I don't know if you can do it.
Maybe.

Speaker 2 I don't know that he would still have the money. One of the things.
Not that there's no proof that he isn't dense,

Speaker 2 but this is like above and beyond.

Speaker 3 The reason why I get that a lot, like, well, Michael Lewis is obviously bribed, but like Michael Lewis is very rich.

Speaker 3 Like, I don't know how you could bribe Michael Lewis, especially after you lose your money.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and even if, and even if he wasn't from money, he'd be rich.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. He was, he's always been rich and always will be.
So I don't know how much I think that's, that's likely. I think he just,

Speaker 3 this is his first time ever hearing about games. And so he thinks Sam is brilliant and special because he, he played them obsessively.

Speaker 3 I also think, you know, we just did our episodes on Lord John Aspinall, who was like this, this this British gambling maven who took away, who like basically

Speaker 3 got the upper class of England in like the mid-century to just gamble away all of their fucking money.

Speaker 3 And a big part of why this kind of like old generation of the aristocracy lost so much is they were into these specifically games of chance like Shimanda Fair, which is a kind of baccara, where basically there's no skill involved.

Speaker 3 It's pure, it's as close to pure chance as possible because there was this like change in the kind of gambling the the upper class like to do that I've heard theorized as basically just like, well, these people had nothing in their life but gambling, right?

Speaker 3 They've always been rich, they're born rich, they've always lived these super safe lives. The only thrill they had was throwing a bunch of money on like effectively a complete chance.

Speaker 2 I never understand that because it's like, what's the worst that's going to happen? You're going to become marginally less rich, but still maintain the same quality of life. That sounds boring.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you've just,

Speaker 3 they are just insulated from anything thrilling because they're insulated from any real danger, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And so I think Sam being this kind of rich, sheltered kid, that's I Lewis interprets it's like he's too smart to play a game like chess.

Speaker 3 He wants a game where he doesn't actually know what's going on and a lot of that's random.

Speaker 3 It's like, well, I just see these old British gamblers and Sam Bankman Freed, where again, this kid has nothing but the throw of the dice inside him and that's what he liked, right?

Speaker 3 Like, and he put a lot of other people's money on those bets.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Anyway, this is a little beside the point, but I did want to read the actual part of the book where Lewis describes Magic the Gathering because it is very boomer.

Speaker 3 Magic had been created in the early 1990s by a young mathematician named Richard Garfield. It was the first kind of a new kind of game, designed perhaps for a new kind of person.

Speaker 3 Garfield had started with an odd question. Could a strategic game be designed that allowed the players to come to it with different equipment? And again,

Speaker 3 Games Workshop had started making Warhammer years before Magic came out. Like, all Games like this have existed forever.

Speaker 2 I couldn't hear you over the sound of imagining Garfield the cat saying that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Which Garfield, Bill Murray, or are we talking Chris Pratt?

Speaker 2 There's also a secret third Garfield, Garfield, whoever did the voice acting on Garfield and Friends, which is my canonical Garfield voice. Certainly not Chris Pratt Garfield.

Speaker 2 I forget who tweeted this, but there is a vibe with the new Garfield that Chris Pratt has been locked in a room forced to voice every major IP. It's like

Speaker 2 it's his infinity punishment. He'll be rich, but he can never leave the room.

Speaker 3 I'm okay with that, actually.

Speaker 2 Let's keep him in the room. He doesn't have any good ideas.
No, no.

Speaker 3 Keep him in the room. Every six years, he can come out to do another Interminable Jurassic World movie.

Speaker 2 No, the villain was Locust.

Speaker 3 So Lewis is so ignorant of kind of the basics of youth culture to this day that he sort of transposes a lot of completely normal millennial and Zoomer behaviors as evidence of Sam's unique brilliance.

Speaker 3 Here's another clip from 60 Minutes where he describes how Sam treated effective altruism that ties into this. And this is remarkable.

Speaker 3 What it means in Sam's instance is you can go out and have a career where you do good. You can go be a doctor in Africa.

Speaker 3 Or you can go out and make as much money as possible and pay people to be doctors in Africa. If you're a doctor in Africa, you end up saving a certain number of lives, but you're only one doctor.

Speaker 3 But if you can pay 40 people to become doctors in Africa, you're going to save 40 40 times the number of lives. This is like a strategy game.

Speaker 3 Well, you don't understand Sam Bank McFried unless you understand that he turns everything into a game. Everything is gamified.

Speaker 2 He's describing a pyramid scheme of doctors. Yes.

Speaker 2 And he's saying this on 60 minutes. I like, I cannot put wrap my, okay, now I'm like taking him being paid off,

Speaker 2 like, or paid on or off off the table because you're just like, this is ridiculous. This is too stupid.

Speaker 2 Like, to light the fact that people somehow collectively forgot that you wrote the blind side on fire to say this shit on 60 Minutes. It just like is, it's,

Speaker 2 he's describing a pyramid scheme.

Speaker 3 He sure is. He is describing a fucking pyramid scheme.
And also, like,

Speaker 3 this whole, he turns everything into a game. Like, like, because the through line

Speaker 2 there is that like saw for good.

Speaker 3 Sure, Sam could have been a doctor in Africa, but by making a lot of money, he could hire a bunch of doctors in Africa.

Speaker 3 And the through line you're meant to make is he was he was the guy who was best suited making a lot of money because he turned everything into a game. And man, that's again, not unique to Sam.

Speaker 3 A significant percentage of the U.S. economy is based around taking the logic and addictive strategies game developers developers use and applying it to every imaginable industry, right?

Speaker 3 Like, that's fucking everywhere. Like, Sam is, again, not unique in this.
And also,

Speaker 3 it's just such a, the fact that Lewis seems to have bought into the basic logic of like, well, it's better to pay a bunch of doctors than becoming one is silly because, like,

Speaker 3 well, we have a shortage of doctors. We don't have a shortage of assholes who gamble with other people's money.
There's, there's not actually enough doctors for the people who need them.

Speaker 2 And also, I mean, to that point,

Speaker 2 it doesn't sound like,

Speaker 2 would I trust knowing what I do of Sam Bankman Freed's ability to multitask, that would I trust him doing surgery? I don't think I would. I don't think I would.
I wouldn't trust him being either.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. No, he would, he would never have, right? Like, but yeah, anyway.

Speaker 2 But it sounds like he, I mean, maybe I'm like, you know, giving him too much credit and he's playing a game of 4D chess, but it doesn't seem that that way. And I like, he sounds ridiculous.

Speaker 3 I kind of, outside of he's just completely deluded, his two options are he's just so out of touch with the youth that he thought Sam was unique in this, or he, he, he decided from the moment he met him, this is the framing device I want to use for Sam's genius in my book because I can think, I think they could film it easily, right?

Speaker 3 Because I'm sure he thinks that way about the books he's written. He's had so many of them adapted.

Speaker 3 And like, yeah, if I, you know, there's a lot of fun ways you could film this super genius solving his math problems through like imagining games out in the real world, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so

Speaker 3 my guess is that he just couldn't get himself off of this idea he had for like the inevitable Sam Bankman Freed movie, you know, crafted for the Big Bang theory audience.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like he's already, he's like, oh, yeah, who's hot right now? Paul Mezcow

Speaker 2 will dye his hair. It's going to be fucking great.

Speaker 3 No, I think they should have had Timothy Chalamet. I think they should have had Timothy Chalamet do like a,

Speaker 3 you know, what's his name? The Batman guy, where he would like wildly change his appearance in ways that are bad for his health every six months for a movie.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, don't talk about rubber patents in that way.

Speaker 2 I'm talking about Christian Bale. I want to see Timothy Chalamet

Speaker 3 do a Christian bale to look like Sam Bankman Freed. That sounds fun.

Speaker 2 I just worry about Timothy Chalamet. It looks like if you like touch him, he may shatter.
I just worry about him. He looks so frail.
Yeah, that's the right thing.

Speaker 3 He looks like he's got consumption. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like that they would say that about him

Speaker 3 in the distant past. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's like, if Sam Bankman-Freed is looking hardier than you are, like, you're in trouble, my man. Uh-huh.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, I wouldn't say that about Sam, but so there's an amusing coda to Lewis's loving descriptions of Sam as a compulsive gamer.

Speaker 3 This paragraph occurs right after the FTX customers pull a run on the bank, annihilating its cash reserves and starting its collapse as like the employees are all huddled inside their $30 million Bahamas suites to try to figure out how to fix things.

Speaker 3 Nishad was agitated with Sam in a way that Romnik had never seen, at one point turning on him and screaming, will you please fucking stop playing storybook brawl?

Speaker 3 And I like that anecdote, but it gets to another frustrating issue with Going Infinite, which is that Michael Lewis has all of the ingredients for a great modern Icarus story of Hubris and the Fall, but making it work tonally would require him to see these things that are obvious warning signs as warning signs and structure his book that way, right?

Speaker 3 And then you get some catharsis in the payoffs. But these warning signs are just sort of scattered around.

Speaker 3 They're not given the significance he would give them if he saw them as warning signs because he's clearly taken with all of this stuff.

Speaker 3 Another example of a valid through line Lewis seems to have missed is Bankman Fried's complete disregard, even distaste, for the competence of the women around him.

Speaker 3 Lewis spends a fair amount of time on Sam's relationship with Carolyn, and he reprints these letters between them that certainly don't make Sam look great.

Speaker 3 It began with a seriously compelling list titled, Arguments Against. This is Arguments Against Her Dating Him.
In a lot of ways, I don't really have a soul.

Speaker 3 This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others, but in the end, there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake, I don't feel happiness.

Speaker 3 What's the point in dating someone you physically can't make happy? I have a long history of getting bored and claustrophobic.

Speaker 3 This has the makings of a time when I'm less worried about it than normal, but the baseline prior might be high enough that nothing else matters. I feel conflicted about what I want.

Speaker 3 Sometimes I really want to be with you. Sometimes I want to stay at work for 60 hours straight and not think about anything else.

Speaker 2 And so I want to say that I have this amount of self-love to not fall for this, but I can't even say that 100%.

Speaker 2 I just really feel for Carolyn

Speaker 2 at a lot of points in this story because it's, oh my God. I really like, I feel like there's a version of someone who would be like, oh, I can fix him.

Speaker 2 Where you're like, oh, no, this is like, it's like tween fiction of like, there's only one person.

Speaker 2 I know, I know, she's at a disadvantage.

Speaker 3 And it's difficult because like Lewis

Speaker 3 discusses kind of Sam's inability to be like

Speaker 3 functional with the people in his life.

Speaker 3 And he clearly has a thing. Like

Speaker 3 he funds another

Speaker 3 exchange by another woman in crypto who he tries to date.

Speaker 2 Women in crypto.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he's got this kind of thing going on, but Lewis kind of always writes off his, his, his behavior as like, well, you know, he just, he was too depressed. He was too, he can't vote.

Speaker 3 He's too brilliant to like be.

Speaker 2 He's a tortured genius playbook of just like, oh, and he's horrible to women, but only because his mind is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like there's, I mean, they did the same.
This happens.

Speaker 2 every 10 years. Like that happened with Zuckerberg.

Speaker 2 They're like, no, he's like, he's a rampant misogynist because like his business started off of misogyny because he just had so many good ideas that it was like pressing on the woman respect

Speaker 2 like nerve. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 3 And meanwhile, when Lewis is describing like why Carolyn did what she did, he includes language.

Speaker 3 He's like, he's like, he quotes someone as saying she would throw away all of her principles to be loved. Like she's the only one of the effective altruist kids who doesn't really believe in it.

Speaker 3 She's just so desperate for

Speaker 3 affection that she would like do anything for it, which like,

Speaker 3 I don't know, like, I don't know the person, but it's, it's weird that Lewis is so cynical about her and so full of excuses for Sam.

Speaker 2 I would have a fair amount of guesses as to why that may be.

Speaker 2 And the way that it seems like in many ways that, you know, Lewis has seen himself in Sam.

Speaker 2 And like, if you're, especially if you're used to like writing profiles of very successful, eccentric people, which he is yeah if if this is the precedent you've set for the kind of behavior that you would excuse such as clear racism or sexism why would this be any different like it's it yeah it it sucks and then also on the other end of carolyn being characterized as

Speaker 2 this like

Speaker 2 desperate for affection person i i try to like

Speaker 2 tap into that of like, God, if

Speaker 2 any of my personal correspondence came out, I'd be fucking cooked. Oh, it would be devastating.

Speaker 2 So many people. And I think she's being singled out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 Yeah, everyone's desperate for affection.

Speaker 3 So, you know, anytime you see Lewis writing about Sam, he writes in kind of the terms, Sam as one of the people in this weird effective altruism cult.

Speaker 3 He uses terms like he talks about his priors, which is like,

Speaker 3 it's a way of like bringing Bayesian mathematics into personal decisions.

Speaker 3 And all you're saying when you're saying, like, well, these are my priors is like, well, this is the shit I believe without any kind of evidence, right? That's largely what that means.

Speaker 3 These are like my pre-existing biases. But saying pre-existing biases like doesn't sound as smart as my priors.

Speaker 3 And likewise, Sam would always talk about like, well, every decision I make is like a mathematical decision. And I calculate what's the expected value of this outcome versus this outcome.

Speaker 3 And then I do the thing with the highest expected value, right? Which is another way of saying, I do whatever will make me feel good, which is, you know, a lot of us are like that a lot of the time.

Speaker 3 That's human nature. We are, we are

Speaker 3 creatures of comfort in a lot of ways. But there's Sam is just dressing up selfishness in lines like this.

Speaker 3 Sam wanted to do whatever at any given moment offered the highest expected value.

Speaker 3 And his estimate of her, Carolyn's expected value, seemed to peak right before they had sex and plummet immediately after. And like,

Speaker 3 that's no different than a lot of guys in their 20s. That's not special.

Speaker 2 He just sounds like a fucking guy.

Speaker 3 Oh, so you're saying he got horny and then he didn't didn't care about her afterwards. Well, that's not special.

Speaker 2 I can't relate. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's not just millions of men. That's millions of people.

Speaker 2 It's so, I mean, even just outside of his relationships with women and his relationship with Carolyn, I don't know.

Speaker 2 It gives me sort of like menta PTSD where there is this like two-hander where it's either

Speaker 2 you can't understand what I'm doing because I am a super genius and you are not operating on my level. You could never understand why I am fucking up at this tremendous rate.

Speaker 2 And then if they're challenged enough, it's like, well, actually, I'm, you know,

Speaker 2 I don't know the correct way to like characterize this, but it almost becomes like internet speak, where it's like, no, I'm actually just like, I don't give a shit.

Speaker 2 It's actually, I'm using QuickBooks because I don't give a fuck. It's like either I am a genius or I don't care.
And there's nothing in between.

Speaker 2 And it's like what is in between is just the fact that they're full of shit. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And you know who else is full of shit? No.

Speaker 3 Time to head to ads.

Speaker 3 Oh boy, I sure do love ads.

Speaker 2 Those were some good ones.

Speaker 3 So Yeah, so we're back.

Speaker 3 We're talking about Sam Bakeman-Fried's issues with women as chronicled by Michael Lewis, who does, to his credit, make a point of noting that all of the company's moves as CEO from the U.S.

Speaker 3 to Hong Kong and then from Hong Kong to the Bahamas were prompted by like he and Ellison would have some big relationship conversation and she would say like I want to have a closer relationship and then he would move the entire company without telling anybody which again like the instant you hear that anecdote you're like oh well this guy there's nothing this guy is not a super genius like this guy is is just a

Speaker 2 guy. He can't

Speaker 3 deal with confrontation. Like, yeah, that's not special.
Again, millions of us out.

Speaker 2 Every conflict avoidant person has their approach. It knows no gender, but it skews towards one.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 My last boyfriend bought an upright base. That was how that was.

Speaker 2 Bless his sword.

Speaker 2 I don't think that's it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 The real shame here is that I don't think Lewis draws any sort of connection between how Sam treats the women at his company and how like Sam treats adults with the specialized financial knowledge that might have saved his company.

Speaker 3 Because there is a relate, like I'm not trying to discount his misogyny, which is certainly a thing.

Speaker 3 But like I think the bigger through line with Sam that is present outside of just his dealing with like the women that he was in relationships with and worked with is that Sam doesn't think anyone besides him has worthwhile thoughts or ideas and that anything he doesn't understand is not worth paying attention to, which is a big thing in tech guys, right?

Speaker 3 This attitude that like you're seeing it now with these AI freaks where they're, they don't think that there's any value in the human creation of art because they don't understand it.

Speaker 3 Like they're willing to like have an AI just like come up with some crap that's vaguely patterned off of a historic art.

Speaker 3 See, isn't this picture of like, you know, isolation and anomi in modern society better now that we've turned it into a bunch of friends having brunch outside of a cafe?

Speaker 3 Look, it's much brighter now and prettier. It's like, no, that's not the point of the art.
You don't understand. But like, they don't, yeah, it's this idea of a.

Speaker 2 Do you think that a computer could come up with the image of Paul Walker and Brian the dog in a convertible? No, that's a uniquely human artist. Exactly.
It's an instinct. Only we would understand

Speaker 2 it.

Speaker 3 Only humans would get it. This idea that like I am smart and therefore, if I don't understand something, it's not important, right?

Speaker 3 It's it's something for like people who are less than me to deal with. This is why the company fell apart.

Speaker 3 And it's interesting to me that like Lewis, he clearly does see aspects of how Sam treats women unfairly, but he doesn't make any sort of leaps between the way Sam treats like everybody who's not him.

Speaker 3 And I find that interesting.

Speaker 2 I do too. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Good stuff. So perhaps the biggest major through line in Going Infinite is Michael Lewis not getting the joke.
That section where he quotes SBF explaining why CFOs are dumb is a perfect example.

Speaker 3 On a casual reading, you might even assume that we were supposed to find the line, what do you think I do? What the fuck do you think I do all day? Do you think I don't know how much money we have?

Speaker 3 Funny, because Sam did not know how much money they had.

Speaker 2 Of course.

Speaker 3 But at the climax of the book, after FTX has crumbled, Lewis goes into detail to discuss all the money that was recovered by John Ray.

Speaker 2 Quote,

Speaker 3 the third. At the end of June 2023, John Ray filed a report on his various collections.

Speaker 3 To date, the debtors have recovered approximately $7 billion in liquid assets, he wrote, and they anticipate additional recoveries, $7.3 billion, to be exact.

Speaker 3 Ray was inching towards an answer to the question I'd been asking from the day of the collapse. Where did all that money go? The answer was nowhere.
It was still there.

Speaker 3 And that's not true. The reason he's writing this is that earlier in Sam's career, a bunch of people leave Alameda because he loses $4 million

Speaker 3 and they think that he's lost $4 million in investor money and he's a dick about it. And later they find it, like he had just misplaced it, basically.

Speaker 3 And so, Lewis is being like, that's just what happened. They were never really in bankruptcy.
See, it was a good business. Like, they just didn't have any record keeping, so they lost the money.

Speaker 3 And this meanie, John Ray, thinks it's bad to lose several billion dollars. But what Lewis is saying is not true.
He is kind of lying here.

Speaker 3 Maybe he just, maybe it's an honest mistake. I don't know, but it's not accurate because for one thing,

Speaker 3 seven-ish, $7.3 billion has been found. Almost $9 billion is missing.
So that's $1.5 billion unaccounted for still. That's still one of the largest financial frauds in history, right?

Speaker 2 Significant. That's why.
Maybe as much as $2 billion, yeah.

Speaker 2 Even if you're trying to get through to someone who knows nothing about finance, the second number, the missing number, is bigger than

Speaker 2 the number they've

Speaker 2 got.

Speaker 3 He tries to close that hole by being like, and a lot of that money is in these, you know, money they paid to these companies that they'll probably get back. And it's like, why would you think that?

Speaker 3 A lot of that money went to other shady crypto people who don't bank in the U.S. Why do you think the money's going to come back?

Speaker 2 Well, see, this is interesting because now, oh,

Speaker 2 I feel bad because I know Michael Lewis is not the bastard of the episode. However,

Speaker 2 if we're applying Sam Bankman-Fried's theory that you do not do any valuable work after 45, that may in fact apply to

Speaker 2 Michael Lewis, yeah. Like, sounds like maybe he's lost the the thread because it's the way that he's talking about money.
And I mean, and I have not read this book. I have what you're just

Speaker 2 that's why they pay you the big bucks.

Speaker 2 But, like, to

Speaker 2 hear how he talks about money in this book and to know that his most famous works have to do with finance, with the exception of

Speaker 2 The Blind Side, which everyone forgets that he wrote, like it calls his entire body of work into question. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And it's like, yeah, just the ridiculousness of being like, well, look, guys, seven, you know,

Speaker 3 they've recovered seven billion out of 9.3 billion. So things are basically good.
Like, that's insane. But also, as we'll get to later, he is, he, that even that doesn't tell the whole truth.

Speaker 3 Like, this idea that everyone's going to get their money back is not true.

Speaker 3 But Lewis, in order to continue believing that Sam was a super genius, he has to have this kind of tragic story where like he didn't really lose the money. It was a misunderstanding.
It's all unfair.

Speaker 3 And because he needs to believe this, I think for the sake of his own ego, bringing up the fact that there's a lot of money missing is a really easy way to piss him off.

Speaker 3 And I'm going to play you this clip. It's the most revealing clip that I've found.

Speaker 3 And this is from an interview he did on a YouTube channel called Intelligence Squared after the FTX collapse, like after his book came out. So while Sam is on trial, basically.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 7.3 billion. So it's 1.3 billion that's missing.
Plus, and they said there's still more to be found.

Speaker 2 Hold on, it's more than that.

Speaker 3 It's more than that.

Speaker 3 The prosecution sent a motion to the court saying, Can we please not talk about the possibility that customers are all going to get their money back?

Speaker 3 And that, in particular, can we, you're going to let me finish?

Speaker 2 I am. You want to let me know?

Speaker 2 Let me ask you. I need to let them know.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 I think what I care about is the fact that at the very least he's irresistible.

Speaker 2 I know I do think it's important. I think at the very least he's irresponsible.

Speaker 3 Of course. I'm not saying he's not irresponsible.
I'm saying it's just different than you think.

Speaker 2 Okay. Okay.
A few observations. First of all, toupee.

Speaker 2 Second of all, uploaded four.

Speaker 2 That is a toupee, right? His hair does not look real.

Speaker 2 Colors, it's not giving matching color. Second observation, upload date four weeks ago.
Gnarly. Right.
Third observation, obviously, he, he cuts off a woman aggressively to be wrong.

Speaker 2 And then finally, it just,

Speaker 2 because the listeners cannot see the size of that venue, it gave me a brief, like, it, I felt it in my stomach to be like, wow, that many people will gather to.

Speaker 2 be to see Michael Lewis just spew bullshit and yet 15 people show up to watch me butt chug a quart of milk. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Jamie, though, here's the thing. This is the difference between

Speaker 3 what I call vulgar art, which is the stuff that will be forgotten, you know, within a generation, and immortal art, right? Like the Parthenon, you know?

Speaker 3 You butt-chugging the contents of Infinite Jest was a Parthenon-level work of art.

Speaker 2 It will be with us in 10,000 years.

Speaker 2 Misunderstood it is.

Speaker 3 Just like the Parthenon.

Speaker 2 He's in like a fucking cathedral, though. I mean, it does look like

Speaker 2 Sophie.

Speaker 3 Can you bring up a freeze frame of his face at like 1257 and that? Because he is doing an I Think You Should Leave face. Like he is, he is almost a perfect character for one of those fucking sketches.

Speaker 2 Tim Robinson

Speaker 2 could do this.

Speaker 3 Tim Robinson could do an amazing job of this.

Speaker 3 There's that sketch from the recent season where he's being like an on-air pundit who like gets on his phone and gets real quiet whenever he loses an argument.

Speaker 2 That like, Lewis is definitely doing that kind of face in this.

Speaker 2 God.

Speaker 2 That right there, where he's like, he's got his hair.

Speaker 2 That's what he's doing at Tim Robinson.

Speaker 2 He's really.

Speaker 2 Oh boy.

Speaker 2 And I'm doubling down on

Speaker 2 the toupee theory.

Speaker 2 Yeah. No, that hair does not.

Speaker 2 He's tall enough to see if

Speaker 2 we've got the veneers to match, but.

Speaker 3 He's too rich to not have veneers.

Speaker 2 I aspire to veneers. I just want to have exactly that much money.

Speaker 3 I wanted to play how angry he gets there, because we're going to address the actual facts of his claim now.

Speaker 3 Even if you take Lewis at his word, which is that it's basically fine because they recovered 7.3 out of like 9.3 billion dollars,

Speaker 3 he's obfuscating the truth.

Speaker 3 It is accurate that Ray has announced FTX customers will see 90% of every dollar of recovered assets returned, which I would still call that problematic because if somebody stole 10% of your bank account, you'd be kind of miffed.

Speaker 3 But that is even not what it seems like. And I'm quoting from Investopedia here.

Speaker 3 To be clear, the 90% number refers to the funds FTX is able to gain access to rather than total customer deposits at the time of the exchange's collapse.

Speaker 3 That doesn't necessarily mean customers will gain access to 90% of their assets that were left on the exchange.

Speaker 3 Rather, customers will gain access to 90% of the funds FTX is able to distribute to their creditors.

Speaker 3 FTX and FTX US had an estimated $8.7 billion combined shortfall by the time the crypto firm filed for bankruptcy.

Speaker 3 Roughly $6.9 billion of that shortfall, including a Bahamas real estate portfolio, has been recovered.

Speaker 3 Let's consider Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capulation, as a capitalization, as a proxy for the broader cryptocurrency markets.

Speaker 3 On November 11th of last year, the petition date, Bitcoin was trading at around $17,000. On Friday, it crossed $30,000.

Speaker 3 So, simply put, if the current current plan goes through, you'd likely get 85% of the dollar value of your cryptocurrency held on FTX as of last November, even if the same coins have almost doubled in value today.

Speaker 3 So, one of those, like, both he's kind of overestimating the amount that they're going to get back, and also because they lost, like, they still lost access to that money for it'll probably turn out to be two or three years.

Speaker 3 Like, people have had to sell their homes and shit because, like, they had all of their money. Like, that there's harm here, right? That's what the courts are taking.

Speaker 3 Not only is there still money missing and not an insignificant amount, but like people suffered in the interim where they didn't have access to their money. And yeah, they're crypto gamblers.

Speaker 3 I'm not, this isn't the most sympathetic population, but that is not relevant to determining whether or not Sam has legal.

Speaker 3 He's stealing 15 or 20% of a bunch of people's savings accounts is a substantial crime.

Speaker 2 The legal question is, is it a scam? Which, like, yes.

Speaker 2 You know, and I'm sure that like everyone who, and understandably, because I walk amongst them, like everyone who was seeing this happen a couple of years ago up to very recently were like, yeah, you're, what are you talking about?

Speaker 2 This happening is like a very, you know, it's like easy to cheer it on, but it's also like, yeah, no, Sam Bankman Fried was taking advantage of every possible mark he could. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And yeah, and people are still suffering ongoing harm as a result of it. He's acting like Lewis is acting as if there wasn't really anyone hurt.

Speaker 3 And it's like, well, no, like even if all of them, which will not happen, happen, at least about 20% of that money of depositor money is just gone, probably more.

Speaker 3 But even if he hadn't done that, if you're still locked out of your money for two years because a guy illegally gambled with it, are you going to be fine that it came back eventually?

Speaker 3 No, you still didn't have that money for years. And that's a problem for you.
That's a crime.

Speaker 2 I mean, and I, and I would be.

Speaker 2 more amenable to that perspective if it was coming from someone who wasn't as like historically fabulously rich as Michael Lewis is because it's like a rich gaming the rich story can be really satisfying but this is not the guy to be making it and he's falling on the wrong side anyways and it's like gaming the rich gaming the rich because like Larry you did they didn't hire Larry David to do a commercial so they could scam billionaires right they hired Larry David to do a commercial so they could scam your mom You know, because your mom likes Larry David.

Speaker 3 I'm not saying the rest of us don't.

Speaker 3 I mean, most moms do, right? He's pretty popular amongst them.

Speaker 2 Drop off in the comments. I don't know if my mom knows who.

Speaker 3 All the women in my family were big Seinfeld fans.

Speaker 2 Does your mom watch Curb? Message me.

Speaker 3 No, no, no, but Seinfeld.

Speaker 2 Oh, my mom. Yeah, my mom.

Speaker 3 Yeah, my mom watched.

Speaker 3 Okay, I'm back.

Speaker 2 I'm back.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So anyway, Michael Lewis.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's interesting to me, like the fact that the idea, the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried stole money from depositors, because that's what it is when you take money out of one company illegally and use it to gamble in another company.

Speaker 3 That's stealing. Michael Lewis never uses the term stolen to describe what Sam did.

Speaker 3 And he basically goes to great lengths to claim that Sam misplaced all this money.

Speaker 3 This is, again, wildly inaccurate.

Speaker 3 And a good example of that is Alameda's hashtag fiat account, which is like, that was one of the names for like the account where they were putting all of the actual U.S.

Speaker 3 dollars that customers put in the exchange. So customers would put US dollars into FTX and then use it to like buy cryptocurrency, right? But those U.S.

Speaker 3 dollars needed to stay in the exchange so that people could cash out their positions, right? Otherwise, you're not doing legitimately what you're supposed to do as a business. FTX was not a bank.

Speaker 3 A bank is allowed, only has to keep a certain amount in reserve, right? That's what a reserve currency is. This is an exchange.
They were supposed to keep.

Speaker 3 enough reserve in there to cover the value of their deposits. Sam instead took all that money and put it into Alameda.
And there's evidence that it like never went directly into Alameda.

Speaker 3 The money people thought they were depositing into FTX went into another company entirely. I would call that, and in fact, Sam was convicted because this is an example of fraud.

Speaker 3 Lewis depicts it as an honest mistake.

Speaker 3 And here's the New Yorker, quote, Lewis finds it not only wholly implausible that this was, in fact, a gigantic accounting error explained by FTX's difficulty securing bank accounts.

Speaker 3 As Lewis concludes, his story, implausible as it sounded, remained irritatingly difficult to disprove.

Speaker 3 And Lewis very gently insinuates that Ellison, in over her head, might have made some very bad decisions.

Speaker 3 And in court, which again is a couple of weeks after his book comes out, it is proven with data from the company that Sam not only did not, like, not only knew what he was doing, but he ordered other people to obscure this fact from customers, right?

Speaker 3 He ordered his employees to hide from customers that their money was going straight into another company.

Speaker 3 This was proven when they, like, actually, during the court case, they had the people who programmed the exchange on Sam's behalf, like, post code.

Speaker 3 And I found an analysis of FTX's code by Molly White, who does a newsletter called Citation Needed, which is quite good. Molly knows code and stuff, so here's her analyzing that.

Speaker 3 Prosecutors questioned Wang, who was the guy who was coding the exchange, about the FTX Insurance Fund, which was ostensibly supposed to protect both FTX and its customers from trades that went badly even more quickly than the exchange's risk engine could account for.

Speaker 3 FTX published the fund's supposed balance on their website and bragged widely about its existence, including in testimony to U.S. Congress.

Speaker 3 However, according to Wang, the number showed on the website was falsified. And the question is like, is this a real number? Wang, no.
So it's a fake number? Yes.

Speaker 3 Was the real number higher or lower than the fake number?

Speaker 2 Lower.

Speaker 3 And yeah, the way that they would do this, so like they're supposed to have this insurance fund, which is part of what makes FTX safer than the other exchanges is that we keep, you can't do a run on the bank because our entire, like, like all of our deposits are backed up by cash, right?

Speaker 3 So we can't collapse the way that other exchanges do.

Speaker 3 And like to make people feel comfortable, they had, they would show them, they had like, you could see like what the insurance fund was at.

Speaker 3 They would regularly brag, we have this much money in our insurance fund.

Speaker 2 Was that number accurate?

Speaker 2 No. All they were doing.

Speaker 2 I don't know why I even asked.

Speaker 3 The code snippets show that they had Sam ordered Nishad Singh to write some code that would update the insurance fund amount randomly by adding it to the daily trading volume.

Speaker 3 Like the amount of money. Basically, it would calculate how much has been traded today.

Speaker 3 And it would multiply that by a random number, somewhere around 7,500, and then divide it by a billion.

Speaker 2 So it would, that was how an 11-year-old describe how you do business. They're like,

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 3 there was never an insurance, a real insurance fund of any meaningful amount of money. They just pretended it was there by having a computer do a random equation.

Speaker 3 So it seemed like it was fluctuating over time.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 that's not legal to do that.

Speaker 3 No, no, that's fraud.

Speaker 2 And I feel like this, like this level of like

Speaker 2 splitting hairs in the New Yorker wouldn't happen unless the two main players, Michael Lewis and Sam Bank Midfried, weren't weren't tremendously privileged.

Speaker 2 Like for any other people, you would be like, yeah, so this was a lie, and then this happened. Like you wouldn't be splitting hairs like this.

Speaker 3 To be fair, the actual thrust of that New Yorker article is like, Michael Lewis is what the fuck is happening with this guy? Because he's clearly fallen for something.

Speaker 3 Like the New Yorker article is very critical of him. It's bringing up that he is not

Speaker 3 calling Sam Bankman Freed a fucking con man when he clearly is, right?

Speaker 2 So they're like,

Speaker 2 headline, Michael Lewis low-key fell off? Yeah, low-key, he fell off. That's right.

Speaker 3 Molly also brings up something else that was left out of court, but the prosecution published evidence of it, and I found this really telling.

Speaker 3 Elsewhere in the code, it's possible to observe that the amount of FTT, which is the token created that represented basically voting shares.

Speaker 3 It was like, it was FTX's funny money, was actually represented by a hard-coded value in the user interface and was not pulling from an external data source to get a real number.

Speaker 3 So again, they're lying about how much money is in this fund. And part of how you can tell is when you would ask to see the insurance fund, it wouldn't consult back to the servers.

Speaker 3 It was just paint, it was doing the calculation on your own machine, right? Which is evidence that like there was never any attempt to give people accurate information.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 3 It's fun stuff. There's other fun reveals during the court case.
For example,

Speaker 3 during FTX's days as a functioning business, a lot of crypto people noticed there was a potential conflict of interest between FTX and Alameda.

Speaker 3 They were like, hey, it seems like you run both these companies and like traders on Alameda

Speaker 3 are trading on FTX. Is it possible that they're getting preferential treatment on the exchange that you also owned?

Speaker 3 There's a really telling Twitter conversation on Molly's blog where someone asks this and SBF says, Alameda is the liquidity provider, but their account is just like everyone else's.

Speaker 3 And the respondent rightfully says, I guess we're just supposed to trust you. And it turned out they were right to be worried.

Speaker 3 One of the chief selling points about FTX is that it's crash-proof, right?

Speaker 3 Crypto exchanges have this weird habit, like 20 years old now, of getting really big and then collapsing, taking everyone's money with them.

Speaker 3 Sometimes this is due to hacks, but also there's a lot of because there's no regulation, a lot of times major traders will go bust and that causes losses for the whole exchange, which gets socialized, right?

Speaker 3 Everybody loses money because one bad gambler gambled too much. One of FTX's like selling points was that it was different.

Speaker 3 They had an algorithm to automatically freeze trades on an account once that account had suffered losses equal to the amount of money they'd put in the exchange, right?

Speaker 3 So you can't lose more money than you put in is the basic idea.

Speaker 3 So that's how it was supposed to work, and that's how it worked initially.

Speaker 3 But the limit that Alameda had for its gambling to make sure that it couldn't get in over its skis was removed later on Sam Bankman Freed's orders.

Speaker 3 And in court, Gary Wang, Sam's business partner, explained how Sam directed them to do this.

Speaker 3 Wang explained that Alameda had not started out with such a high credit limit, but that periodically the trading firm had run into issues placing trades because they didn't have enough collateral.

Speaker 3 Sam Bankman Fried kept asking him to increase their credit limit to prevent it from happening.

Speaker 3 According to Wang, the limit was originally set to a few million dollars, but then it was increased to a billion.

Speaker 3 After they ran up against that limit, too, Bankman Fried asked him to set it to a number so large they wouldn't likely hit the limit. At that point, Wang set it to around 65 billion.

Speaker 3 And when I read that, what I see is this is a a gambler in Vegas who's like taking out loans to keep gambling because he's run out of money. Like he's like...

Speaker 2 You just imagine like someone

Speaker 2 on their knees in like shitty pinstripe pants being like, come on, man. Yeah, give me, just give me some credit, man.

Speaker 3 I'm good for it.

Speaker 2 But he got up to $65 billion in credit.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, which is insane. Now, when you pair all this with the stories that SBF tells, that Lewis tells of SBF's gaming addiction, you might conclude, was this kid just a fucking gambling addict?

Speaker 3 Which is my, by the way, that's my interpretation.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 to me, it sounds like this shit is neo points to him. Like, it really is.
Like, if there's anything that got the millennial generation hooked on capitalism and random gambling, it was neo pets. And

Speaker 2 if anyone has proof that Sam Bankman Fried was a Neopets user, he just sounds like the worst version of a Neopets user to me.

Speaker 2 The worst endgame for a Neopets user is what you've been describing to me for several hours.

Speaker 3 And I think you and I, we're not invested in Sam Bankman Freed ever being particularly smart. So we can see this.

Speaker 2 Lewis. He's a Neopets user.

Speaker 2 And I bet I was better at it than him.

Speaker 2 Well, that's the other thing.

Speaker 3 He was never very good at games. Like, people found his League of Legends account and were like, yeah, he was mid.
Like, I'm sure he wasn't good at storybook brawl, right?

Speaker 3 Like, he's just, he was never good at this.

Speaker 2 But it was the first time that Michael Lewis had heard of storybook brawl. So Sam Bank and Freed said he was the best at it.
Why not believe him? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And just the idea, like, again, Lewis can't be like, yeah, this kid had a gambling problem. And he also owned a bank.
So it became everyone's issue. But like, you're not.

Speaker 2 He's a smart bank man.

Speaker 3 It's hard to portray someone as smart if they're just addicted to gambling, right? Because that's not a smart person thing.

Speaker 3 It actually, a lot of smart people are horrible addicts in a variety of ways, but like

Speaker 3 in a Hollywood way, make it look like somebody's a genius if they just can't control themselves, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a it's a it's a serious, serious problem. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And I'm again, no shame on people who have that problem, but like that, that does not work with how Lewis wants to portray him, right?

Speaker 3 And yeah, speaking of things that don't work,

Speaker 3 shit.

Speaker 2 Everything you're about to advertise.

Speaker 3 We won't have to work if you purchase these products.

Speaker 2 Okay, good, good self-correction. Yeah,

Speaker 2 we'll continue to work. It's

Speaker 2 more more accurate.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 3 both true.

Speaker 3 We're back.

Speaker 3 So, you know, I think it's clear from the stuff that came out in the court case that I just read some of, there's no way Alameda and FTX would have done the things that I just described if they hadn't meant to disguise the reality of their business from the world, which is fraud, right?

Speaker 3 The reality is that Sam Bankman-Fried used depositor money to gamble. And he was gambling in part on his own chances.
He wasn't just gambling. This is the thing that is important to understand.

Speaker 3 Past a certain point, most of his gambling was not him betting on cryptocurrencies, right?

Speaker 3 The big shit he did that made the news, the billion dollars that he pumped into naming, renaming that stadium in Florida, to bringing in all these celebrities to these high-dollar Super Bowl ads, that was a gamble.

Speaker 3 He was pulling a slot machine on his own chances of ascending to the halls of power, right?

Speaker 2 Sounds like him, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 One of my favorite aside bits from the court case is that on the stand, when she was being questioned, Carolyn Ellison told everybody that Sam confided in her, he thought he'd had a 5% chance of becoming president of the United States, which,

Speaker 2 well, I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but also like, look at some of the dumbasses we've got.

Speaker 2 He's probably not wrong that he, I mean, he at least could have been like, who is that fucking loser from Starbucks? He could have at least been that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he could have, I think he could have had a failed presidential, but no, like.

Speaker 2 Yeah, oh, yeah, no, he was like, they're all dumb.

Speaker 3 Like, Joe Biden and Donald Trump

Speaker 3 have both done very stupid things, different kinds of very stupid things, but they both have charisma.

Speaker 2 It's the same. Right? That's true.
That's true.

Speaker 3 Like, you could, again, say what you will about Joe Biden. He wouldn't have been in politics this long if he couldn't make enough people like him.
And obviously, Donald Trump is very charismatic.

Speaker 3 Sam Bankman-Free just isn't. Like, you don't become the president if you are avoid of charisma.

Speaker 2 No, and we've learned that time and time again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And that's the thing. Like, he was always all of his, his, his sudden rise to public prominence was not based on him actually being interesting.

Speaker 3 It was based on him spending tens of millions of dollars to get like Bill Clinton to pretend to be his buddy. Like, that was all there ever was to it, you know?

Speaker 3 In my general research on the crypto industry, and if you're looking for actual good reading, don't buy Going Infinite. You won't get anything valuable at it.

Speaker 3 If you do want to get something valuable and a deeper understanding about about like how grifty this whole industry was and also how grifty Sam was, there's a book called Number Go Up by Zeke Foe, Zeke F-A-U-X.

Speaker 3 Really good book, Number Go Up, which I do recommend to people curious for the dark side of crypto.

Speaker 3 Zeke also spent time with Sam in the Bahamas, and I found this passage from his book relevant to what I just mentioned. A few hours into our conversation, Bankman Fried told me he had to make a call.

Speaker 3 I had asked him if there was anyone who'd support his version of events, and he said I could talk with one of his few remaining supporters while I waited.

Speaker 3 In walked a haughty man with a long, scraggly beard, a pot belly, and mismatched socks, one of them with a Pac-Man design.

Speaker 3 He was an employee of FTX who'd stuck around to help Bankman Fried try to find an investor to rescue the exchange. I threw out an easy question.
Why are you still here? I asked.

Speaker 3 He started off by saying he wanted to help FTX's customers. Then, unprompted, he told me he thought there wasn't much of a risk that Bankman Fried would ever get in trouble.

Speaker 3 I firmly believe once somebody becomes a certain level of rich, they're never poor again, he said. They don't go to jail, nothing bad happens to them.

Speaker 2 Wait, he has his own Zuckerberg quote. He has his own, you could be unethical and still be legal.
That's the way I live my life. Ha ha.
Wait, read it again for me so I can really take it in.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and again, this is Sam's friend who stuck by him after his business collapsed. I firmly believe once somebody becomes a certain level of rich, they're never poor again.

Speaker 3 They don't go to jail, nothing bad happens to them.

Speaker 2 Poetry. Yeah, it's beautiful.

Speaker 3 It's a beautiful thing to think in that moment, too, where all of the smarter people have just fled the island.

Speaker 2 And in that moment, he was infinite. That

Speaker 2 was wow. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm speechless. It's so funny, too, because, like, I don't know, man, just historically, do you remember like Marie Antoinette was pretty rich? And like, that didn't end well, you know?

Speaker 2 Like, like, there's a lot of

Speaker 2 czar had a lot of money. It didn't go well for him.

Speaker 3 You know, bad things happen to rich people, too.

Speaker 2 And that's that's your main political stance, as I recall. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 I will hang out with anybody rich because nothing bad can happen to them.

Speaker 2 Obviously, untrue.

Speaker 3 I kind of suspect that that, that sort of,

Speaker 3 I don't know,

Speaker 3 you know, the fact that so much of what was said, like Zeke Foe is clearly someone who's smart enough to like understand when he's being lied to by these people and understand their fundamental absurdity.

Speaker 3 And that comes across in his book. I don't think Lewis got that, right?

Speaker 3 He believed fundamentally in the fundamental honesty at the center of Sam Bankman-Fried, and I kind of suspect that's why he covered his face with his hands that day in court.

Speaker 3 He's not a dumb man, and he must have realized by that point the evidence that came out in the trial was undeniable, made it undeniable that he got conned too.

Speaker 3 One of the most remarkable things about going into it is how much detail Lewis provides about FTX's collapse without ever calling Sam a liar. The Guardian's review noted this too.

Speaker 3 He thought Bankman Freed hadn't lied to him at all, or at least that he'd only lied by omission, not by commission.

Speaker 3 Late in the book, Lewis asks Bankman Fried, what would you have done if I'd asked you specifically about FTX customer funds being used by Alameda?

Speaker 3 Bankman Fried admits that he would have changed the subject or rustled up a word salad.

Speaker 3 And whatever the facades erected by other effective altruists, Lewis considers Bankman Fried to be enigmatic but essentially genuine, and certainly not out to enrich himself because he has no desire for the things that money can buy.

Speaker 3 Lewis's refusal to believe that Sam Bankman Fried is a liar in the the most venal, base sense of the word, is based, I think, on a sense of professional pride.

Speaker 3 That explains why he's so adamant about pushing the line that there was no money missing, and it's why he continued to defend Sam's dissembling as a fun, quirky character trait while the trial was going on.

Speaker 3 See, as part of the cash-in on Going Infinite, Michael Lewis launched a podcast, Judging Sam, the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried.

Speaker 2 Oh, it was a oh, see, and

Speaker 2 who but everyone on this call knows that the, the, the first sign that your life is about to be fucking torched

Speaker 2 is starting a podcast.

Speaker 3 That's right, right. It's the last refuse, refuge of fools and scoundrels.
Yeah. Please pay for the cool

Speaker 3 free subscription. What do we call it, Sophie?

Speaker 3 So the trial, Judging Sam is part of Lewis's Against the Rules podcast on Pushkin. And I can't speak for the regular episodes of that podcast.
I have not listened to any of the other ones.

Speaker 3 But I can say his Sam Bankman-free trial podcast is an uneven effort at best. Most of the work is done by Lydia Jean.
She's a journalist. She's okay.
I don't have any huge issues with her.

Speaker 3 I think we get a little too much like, here's what the court kitchen is like. Here's anecdotes from the fun lives of the journalists covering it.

Speaker 2 But also,

Speaker 2 yeah, then it's like my least favorite part of every public radio, and I love public radio, but the broadcast where it like begins with six minutes of a guy stepping on leaves, and you're like, oh my God, I get it.

Speaker 2 You're in fucking New Hampshire in October. What is it?

Speaker 3 It's permanently fall where you NPR people leave. We understand.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 But every podcast on this trial does something like that. I think it's just because they have to, they were doing like basically daily episodes and needed to fill runtime.

Speaker 3 And like, look, is that lazy? Yes. Have we all been there? Yes.
So

Speaker 3 I simply can't throw stones at this glasshouse.

Speaker 2 What are you talking about?

Speaker 2 What do you mean?

Speaker 2 As someone who's never had a daily podcast, I condemn this behavior because I've never had to do it.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 Lewis, Lydia takes most of

Speaker 3 the lifting on this show because Lewis was on tour for his book, right? And so he couldn't be there for most of it. He was barely at the trial.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he was screaming at women in cathedrals. He was busy.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But he does occasionally come on.

Speaker 3 And one of the episodes that does show, like, he shows up to court on the day that Sam takes the trial or takes the stand in his own defense.

Speaker 3 And, you know, during this portion where he's like, Sam's being cross-examined, he says, I don't recall more than 100 times. Here's how a write-up from the verge summarizes his time on the stand.

Speaker 3 Bankman Fried's demeanor suggested a spoiled child complaining he didn't get the biggest scoop of ice cream at his birthday party.

Speaker 3 He didn't want to answer the prosecutor's questions or his lawyer's questions. He wanted to answer his own questions, which he liked better.
He often replied to yes and no questions with nonsense.

Speaker 3 We were getting introduced to a document where Bankman Fried listed his priorities, including getting accounting right on FTX.

Speaker 3 Cohen and Bankman Fried Cohen's lawyer and Bankman Fried used this to show how devoted Bankman Fried was to getting to the bottom of the general fiasco with Alameda's money.

Speaker 3 The idea was to display in real time FTX's revenue and expenses, where its bank accounts were, how much investor money it had, and so on. This did reveal Bankman Fried's priorities.

Speaker 3 Getting accounting right was ranked ninth.

Speaker 3 So for the stories Bankman Fried wanted to tell, we had to rely on Bankman Fried.

Speaker 3 We moved on to Bankman Fried's argument about hedging, which I still do not understand, except as a way for him to say he's a smarter trader than his ex-girlfriend, the former Alameda Research CEO Carolyn Ellison.

Speaker 2 God, this is more stand-up behavior.

Speaker 3 The actual evidence suggests that Ellison is both a better trader and much savvier than Bankman Fried.

Speaker 3 She modeled out a risk scenario that matched almost exactly what happened at FTX, for instance, to try to keep him from sinking $2 billion into venture investing.

Speaker 3 And like, what happens is he's putting, putting, you know, all this money into advertising, into like playing celebrities.

Speaker 3 He's putting like two billion dollars into these random series of investments. And she's like, hey, we've taken depositor money to gamble with.
We have to keep more cash on hand.

Speaker 3 Otherwise, the whole exchange could collapse. Sam ignores her.
The exchange collapses. And then he blames her for not hedging.
Right.

Speaker 3 And a hedge is when you take like a bet that one thing will happen, you take the opposite bet at a smaller amount of money so that if no matter what happens, you can't lose too much money, right?

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 But there's no hedging the kind of risks that FTX was taking because the fundamental risk was we don't have enough money if there's a run on the bank, you know?

Speaker 2 Well, it's like their risk was, we're never going to die. Like

Speaker 2 you can't hedge that.

Speaker 2 What is wild to me is like everything you're describing is

Speaker 2 ridiculous and it makes total sense that it fucking imploded in the catastrophic way that it did.

Speaker 2 But then you also, I mean, so much of it sounds like the kind of stuff that, for example, Michael Lewis might report on is a tremendous scam that worked out great for everybody. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it's, it's, so, you know, again, that quote from The Verge is pretty similar to how most reporters who were there at the trial described it.

Speaker 3 It is wildly different from how Michael Lewis describes how Sam reacts on the stage, right?

Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And it's interesting because, like, obviously, most people were able to see, oh, yeah, Sam is just lying on the stand.
He's obfuscating. He's refusing to answer the question.

Speaker 3 But Michael Lewis, not only does Michael Lewis like being lied to by Sam Bakeman Freed, he thinks Sam's defensive cloud of bullshit, right? This like word salad is better than the truth.

Speaker 3 And he says this in his fucking podcast. Jamie, you're going to love this clip.

Speaker 3 Today, he didn't get in as much trouble as he got yesterday, though.

Speaker 26 Not as much, but still a little bit. More than other witnesses.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's true. The bigger point is the judge is sitting there listening to see if Sam is actually answering the question because he now knows he doesn't do that, yeah.

Speaker 3 Or generating a word salad for us all to consume. And I was thinking about this again today.

Speaker 3 Why Sam's word salads are so fun. Like why he gets away with it.
Like most people, when they don't answer a question, your alarm bells go off pretty quickly.

Speaker 3 Like that, you just redirect it in some way. He's really, really good at starting the answer in a place where you think, oh, that's where the beginning of the answer belongs.

Speaker 3 And then making a little jump into things that are actually interesting to know about. So you're not bored.
You're actually interested in what he's saying.

Speaker 26 You're saying, like, there's substance to it. He's not just saying nothing.
He's saying something that's substantive and makes you think it's just not what you asked.

Speaker 26 But then you're thinking and you forget what you asked.

Speaker 3 That's exactly what happens. Yeah, so that's like he's he's he's just saying that like, yeah, Sam's lies.

Speaker 3 He's really good at lying like and and it's fun to listen to him lie as if that's a defense right where they're saying like well they really painted a different picture of Sam because they you know he he got to get up on the stage and bullshit That's good.

Speaker 2 That's a very interesting exchange to listen to as well because it's like you know because it's very clear that Michael Lewis has very little to do with this podcast. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Like I can think of a number of examples of a like big name podcaster coming on their show to like be combative with the people who are actually making the show for them.

Speaker 2 And that like exchange, too, is like, no, like, I know what you're saying, but yeah.

Speaker 2 And, and even in what she's describing, like, the court approach is either he's a genius or he's like an incompetent sweetie pie, but you're just like, or he's a malevolent dumbass.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or he just does seem to be the case.

Speaker 3 But, like, yeah, I love this idea that, like,

Speaker 3 yeah, we're, we're getting to see the real Sam, who is a guy who never answers your actual question but like i i want to continue the clip because lewis says something very very ridiculous right after this okay he's really really good at starting the answer in a place where you think oh that's where the beginning of the answer belongs and then making a little jump into things are actually interesting to know about So you're not bored.

Speaker 3 You're actually interested in what he's saying.

Speaker 26 You're saying like there's substance to it. He's not just saying nothing.

Speaker 26 He's saying something that's substantive and makes you think it's just not what you asked but then you're thinking and you forget what you asked that's exactly what happens it's engaging it's like maybe it's even better than the answer to the question like

Speaker 2 it's what you should have asked

Speaker 3 yes maybe it's not even what you should have asked that's exactly right yeah it's sam the questions sam answers that aren't what he's being asked are what you should have asked right like he's smarter than you the interviewer and he knows what you actually should have asked which i just thought was a wild thing for a journalist to say.

Speaker 3 This is, you know, we're getting to the end here, but the last thing I wanted to bring up was maybe the most interesting case of Michael Lewis following Sam's crap, which is him believing that Sam's outfit, his hairstyle, his poor hygiene are all evidence of his brilliance, right?

Speaker 3 Sam just didn't have time to like...

Speaker 3 take care of his appearance in any way. He was too smart to waste any of it, like his, his brain power on that.

Speaker 3 And that article in Jacobin gives a really good summary of how the actual testimony of Sam's former friends in court blew this idea out of the water.

Speaker 3 The prosecutor followed with questions about Sam's approach to public relations.

Speaker 3 Ellison explained, he was trying to cultivate an image of himself as a sort of very smart, competent, somewhat eccentric founder. I was sitting in an overflow room on that day.

Speaker 3 So when the prosecutor asked, how would you describe the defendant's personal appearance through 2022, the room was allowed to erupt into laughter.

Speaker 3 Ellison replied, he looked like he didn't put a lot of effort into his personal appearance. He dressed sort of

Speaker 3 sloppily and didn't cut his hair often. He said he thought his hair had been very valuable.
He said ever since Jane Street, he thought he had gotten higher bonuses because of his hair.

Speaker 3 And it was an important part of FTX's narrative and image.

Speaker 2 God.

Speaker 2 Yeah. First, embarrassing, but also, I think,

Speaker 2 you know, clearly predicated on the dipshit billionaires that came before him. Like there is a clear

Speaker 2 aesthetic and a clear, like, you know, slovenly genius thing that he's like, it's strategic.

Speaker 3 And that's interesting, right? The fact that Sam is standing on the shoulders of giants of Steve Jobs' unwashed shoulders, like,

Speaker 3 you know, Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie and whatever when he dresses like

Speaker 2 a genocide hoodie that he wears. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it's like, yeah, Lewis describes it as like everything in Sam's appearance felt less like a decision than a decision not to make a decision.

Speaker 3 And no, what everyone says at FTX is like he was obsessed with like his hair.

Speaker 3 When they were spending, trying to build their $200 million or whatever new headquarters, his only design note was that it should be shaped so it looked from the side like his hairs do because he thought that like he thought it was iconic, right?

Speaker 2 Like, which is also based on the, what we were just listening to, what the like logo to that podcast is, is the shape of his hair. Everyone's playing into it.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's fucking wild. Anyway, Jamie, that's my episode.

Speaker 3 Do you think we should fire Michael Lewis into the sun?

Speaker 2 Well, I was thinking earlier, I am very curious because, you know, I think it's like a waste of time to ask, will Michael Lewis have another opportunity to course crack his career? Of course he will.

Speaker 2 Of course he will. Yes.

Speaker 3 He's going to write 70 more books.

Speaker 2 Well, what I'm curious about is like where he goes from here.

Speaker 2 I feel like it's pretty telling if you've been conned to this fucking degree, because no one clocked him in the blind side, but now he's been pretty severely clocked as like giving in to his worst biases and reporting it as fact.

Speaker 2 And I do wonder

Speaker 2 if that's the position you're in and you will absolutely write another book because you're unkillable financially. Like, I wonder which direction he's going to go in.
Is he going to be hyper cautious?

Speaker 2 Is he going to play it safe? Is he going to be self-reflective at all? Or is he going to double down on the falling for it kind of stuff?

Speaker 2 I genuinely don't know because I just like, it's very hard to discern what kind of person. Like, it seems like he's certainly,

Speaker 2 you know, like high in his own supply and is like, well, you know, of course, anyone could have fallen for it, but he is sort of conceding to the fact that he fell for it.

Speaker 2 I just am curious what happens to someone from there.

Speaker 3 My suspicion, and maybe I'll be wrong about this, I think we'll know pretty soon. I think he's going to do another Sam.
I specifically think he's going to.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 3 a second Sam has hit the Michael Lewis bibliography.

Speaker 3 And it's going to be Sam Altman. Like he's going to do a Sam Altman, the open AI guy who just got fired from his job.
He's going to do a book on Sam Altman, I suspect.

Speaker 2 For fuck's sake, you're probably right. You're probably, because then he'll be like, and I would know, I can see through Sam's now.
Having been conned by one, I certainly won't be conned by Sam.

Speaker 3 Sam me once, Sam on you. Sam me twice, won't get Sammed again.
You know, I am

Speaker 2 Sam, son of Sammy. Shit.
Wow. Yeah, no, that.

Speaker 3 That's my guess as to where this goes is Sam Altman.

Speaker 2 Why is Michael Lewis being presented with a second Sam? Doesn't seem fair.

Speaker 3 A second Sam is at the well, I've already done that joke once.

Speaker 2 And it worked.

Speaker 3 And it always works, Jamie.

Speaker 2 It always works. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, I don't feel.

Speaker 2 Well, you know,

Speaker 2 I would say that this is like in the top 20 percentile of bastards episodes I've come out feeling like, you know, I don't feel that bad. I usually feel like really dire.
I feel, I feel pretty good.

Speaker 2 Yeah. He's in forever.
He's in forever jail.

Speaker 3 He is in forever jail, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Speaking of forever jail, Jamie,

Speaker 3 talent is like a jail that locks you into,

Speaker 3 for example, making a weekly podcast. And I am happy that you and I are about to be cellmates.

Speaker 2 We are. I'm so excited.

Speaker 2 We get to do the fun thing where we're like, we can't talk much about it yet, but there's a weekly podcast.

Speaker 3 But Jamie Loftus Weekly is coming to the CoolZone Network. You are going to be the Cool Hand Luke of our podcast, Prince.

Speaker 2 You're welcome. God, I would love to be the Cool Hand Luke of the podcast, Prison.
I got to get some new outfits.

Speaker 3 Got to get some new outfits.

Speaker 3 No, that's not the one. Is that the one where he throws a baseball at the wall, or is that the Great Escape?

Speaker 2 I feel like that was Cool Hand. I've been having a Luke a long time.

Speaker 3 Neither have I. Not since I was like seven.
So I don't know.

Speaker 2 Wow, you saw Cool Hand Luke when you were seven?

Speaker 3 Yeah, my mom loved that movie.

Speaker 2 Nice.

Speaker 3 My mom had very strict rules on what I could watch as movies as a kid, unless it was a movie she liked, which is why I was in first grade when we watched Alien.

Speaker 2 Ooh, that explains so much about you to me, too.

Speaker 2 Like you saw

Speaker 2 her.

Speaker 3 She was so excited that all the men die and the woman didn't, that like, yeah, she wanted me to see that movie at a very young age.

Speaker 2 What a legacy. Truly, what a legacy.

Speaker 3 The sentence, because men are stupid, was uttered two or three times during that movie.

Speaker 2 Which does unpack a lot of the plot, intended or not.

Speaker 2 My mom would let me watch soap operas very young and would, I would be like, what do they mean when they say making love? And she would say, what do you think? Like, I don't know. I'm seven.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 You haven't, you have not equipped me to answer that question, mother.

Speaker 2 Well, yes, weekly podcast coming soon, early next year. What's it about? You guess, but don't contact me about it because you're wrong.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 A second Jamie has hit the cool zone. I mean, you've done more than two podcasts.

Speaker 2 This joke never worked, but whatever.

Speaker 2 A first Jamie has hit the cool zone weekly. That's right.
Jamie, what podcast is this of ours?

Speaker 2 Oh, God. How many, how many? This is, well, this will be what? Oh, my God.
Oh, it's impossible to say. It's impossible to say.

Speaker 2 I think it's like six. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think it's like six. We've entered the half-dozen range.
It's getting dangerous. That's so cool for us.
I know. We're forever wives.
Sam Bankman Freed, Forever Jill. Forever Jill.
Us forever wives.

Speaker 3 So, Jamie, anything else you wanted to plug before we ride on out of here?

Speaker 2 Like Michael Morrison?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's the holidays. Are you looking for something to get for your loved or hated one? I won't know.
Buy a copy of Raw Dog. It's my book about hot dogs.

Speaker 2 And if you don't like hot dogs, the title is funny. And I think that's, you know, about 60% of the purchases I've gotten have been off that alone.
So you should buy Raw Dog.

Speaker 2 And yeah.

Speaker 3 Buy Raw Dog. And no, I'm not going to make a Raw Dog joke.
That's just going to get me in trouble. Anyway, buy a CoolerZone media subscription and you won't have to hear ads.

Speaker 3 Or don't buy a CoolerZone Media subscription and continue to listen to ads. It's, I don't care.
Live your life. I'm not your fucking dad.

Speaker 2 If you really want to hear the

Speaker 2 advertisers that Robert's disparaging, I personally think it's more fun to imagine it. So you should get a Cooler Zone Media subscription.

Speaker 3 Yeah, once everyone's on Cooler Zone Media, then we can finally get that sweet Lockheed Martin subscription that I've, or

Speaker 3 whatever, ad deal that I've been wanting to have.

Speaker 2 And then Robert can finally live inside a grenade. Like it's always been his dream.
That's been my dream.

Speaker 3 That's been my dream, jamie

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 all right we're done

Speaker 2 we did it

Speaker 2 behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.

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