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

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hey everyone, Robert Evans here with Behind the Bastards, and
we've got some kind of sad news today. This is
going to hit members of the community pretty hard. But
forty eight years ago, on November tenth, nineteen seventy five,
the SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior, killing
all twenty nine crew members on board. This is a

(00:27):
hard time of the year for everybody here at Behind
the Bastards, for all of you at home, 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

(00:48):
nuclear weapons. And my hope, I think all of our hope,
is that the leaders of our world can kind of
band together in this time of conflict and sadness to
finally expect into the entirety of their nuclear stockpiles, detonating
them over Lake Superior. You know that's my hope. I
know it's all of your hope back at home, and
I really think what can carry us through this is

(01:12):
some classic MAO era propaganda posters sewing, Joe Biden, Zijen
Ping 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 debts. Anyway,

(01:32):
welcome to the show, Jamie.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
That's so. I mean, first of all, thank you, thank
you for that. I needed to hear it. I think
we all 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,
sort of what I was picturing. The image you described

(01:57):
has that exact same and it just acts just throw
someone in the back seat, same exact ship.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yes, that's the dream, Jamie, that's the dream. God, what
a beautiful, beautiful dream.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
I really think about being a member of Paul Walker's
family at the time that image was circular. Well, you're
just like.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
I mean, from your jacuzzie filled with one hundred dollars bills.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Yes, even so, my loved one, my dearly departed, being
thrown in a convertible next to a cartoon dog. Who
to add insult to injury would be resurrected within months,
and like Brian the Dog. Not okay, Brian the Dog
was resurrecrected, I think on the same timeline as Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
It was like, yeah, very similar characters.

Speaker 4 (02:45):
Yes, yeah, and we can all agree that Bill show
they're both mar heads and they also and they both
are you know, like middling authors.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
You could say, yeah, yeah, that's fair to say. So Jamie,
speaking of mediocre men, how do you feel have you
been keeping up with the story of Bastard's pot alumni,
Sam Bankman Freed?

Speaker 3 (03:13):
Okay, so I have. I I know the broad strokes,
but as soon as the joyous news became started coming in,
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. I'm just there's no one I would

(03:35):
rather be with to let it just wash off for me.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Robert Family, Robert, can I ask you to please share
your working title for this episode because it's funny.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yeah, it's Sam Bankman, not Freed, and in parentheses because
he is in jail.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
I think it's fun, and I think I think that
that is far superior to Sam Bankman jailed.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, that's not creative at all. You got to spend
a lot of extra words I could create.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
I'm not interested in other perspectives on that title. I
think that you got it exactly right.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Thank you, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, brevity is some bullshit,
As a great author once said, so Jamie, speaking of
great authors, eighty percent of this episode is shitting on
Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Shirt. Oh yeah, no,
we're really this is gonna be a great one for
the Lewis heads in the audience. Wow, okay, okay, this

(04:27):
is gonna be Oh buckle up, yeah, now this is relevant.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
The man just said buckle up.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
Oh yeah, strap the fuck in and down.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
Fuck ahead, we are.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
We are starting with Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
James, We're 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.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
This is great. Yeah, this is great. So on January fifth,
twenty twenty two, Sam Bankman freed send a message to
one of his many signal loops. For what It's worth,
February eight through sixteenth, Michael Lewis is going to be
in the Bahamas profiling us. Now, if you haven't been
following this story, and if Michael Lewis is not familiar
to you, then you probably do remember like the most

(05:16):
famous result of one of his novels, which is the
movie The Big Short. This was based on a book
Lewis wrote about a group of traders who had the
foresight to predict and profit off of the two thousand
and eight financial crash. 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 3 (05:34):
You love to see it.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
You love to see it. His other best known work
is probably Moneyball, which is about a baseball team manager
he uses which called saber metrics, which, without getting into it,
is basically being Nate Silver but also actually running a
sports team. Right.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
That is also that in twenty twenty I started doing
this bit on Cursed Zoom comedy shows called The Boyfriend
Criterion Collection, And it's just like blu rays that are
in your house against your living. Well, Yeah, money Ball
is very much a part of the Boyfriend Criterion collection.
It's right up there with Whiplash. It's like a disaster.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
I must say, if you, if you did not date
the worst man you've ever dated in your entire life
in twenty seventeen that was obsessed with all things Michael Lewis,
then were you really in Los Angeles?

Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yeah, no, that's that's true them.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
By the way, if your worst boyfriend couldn't read, really.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
Think you're you're the median American And honestly don't even know.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
Who I'm talking about, Like it's impossible to say, but
I know.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
The only non problematic piece of physical media that you
can have on you in your house as a boyfriend
is an original VHS tape of Trimmors. That's just the
way it works.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
I I and I would fight with you if I didn't,
if I didn't feel the same way. I think that
that is very much as a good sign.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Uh huh, that's excellent, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
The more prominently displayed, the better.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
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.
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. Who he is somebody whose stories come from
his ability to get close to his subjects and just

(07:26):
kind of exist with them during a crucial period of
time as a fly on the wall. There's a number
of ways to do this. 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. 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

(07:47):
he just kind of makes people comfortable around him. He
is a guy that you want to have at a party.
He's a 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, and
that's how he gets a lot of his stories. Now,
as general rule, if you are in the position that

(08:08):
Sam Bankman freed and his friends who are in circa
twenty twenty two running a massive financial shell game, you
would be hesitant and welcome very well.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
I think we can all agree based on Kings talk
about a game of four D chess.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
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

(08:44):
to be cautious about letting this guy into your house.
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. Oh, he's this
guy who exposes the diret of the finance industry. It's
this is a guy who can make you into a celebrity.

(09:05):
And in early twenty twenty two, 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,
They spent something like a billion dollars on a variety
of different corporate and celebrity endorsements. Of the nine billion

(09:27):
that was missing, about a billion went towards shit to
boost FTX and to boost Sam's profile.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
Right, I'm sorry, where's that. You gotta spend money to
make money, I guess you because I spent ten billion
to make nothing to go to jail. You have to
see this has been ten billion dollars to go to jail.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
That's what I'm saying, to go to to go to
Forever prison, Shamie. Let's be honest about this.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
He's going to I for every time I've seen Forever prison,
very often. For you, I hear it in the cadence
of the Forever Purge trailer. You're like, Oh, it's the
Forever prison.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, that is where he's going. And that's you know again,
everyone is kind of cut ties. 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, every tech company was putting shit
on the blockchain. The last kind of holdout, and the

(10:24):
reason why Sam put so much money into this was politicians. Right.
There were a few who would cut but like most
people who were in politics would not even take donations
directly from crypto, right, you had to launder that shit.
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

(10:48):
did stuff like you know, he spent tens of millions
of dollars getting Tom Brady and Giselle Bunchen to like,
pretend to be his friends. He sat down next to
Bill Clinton on fucking stage in a very cringey interview.
He paid Larry Davis to make a Super Bowl lad
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, if

(11:11):
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, that you'd get ten million

(11:31):
in donations, they have to pay them back because it
turned out that it was a con man.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
You know, there's there's a note of it that it
almost reminds me when like Errol Morris like profiled and
worked for Elizabeth Holmes. You're just like, it's that level
of profile versus l.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yes, this turns you into somebody who's like who can
be taken seriously because that's what who Lewis is, right,
he is that big a deal. I'm not like puffing
him up. He doesn't need it right now.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
He is people to care about Moneyball the most the
most boring ass thing I've ever heard about my life.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
Well, and that's the thing. He is one of these guys.
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. There's no other way you get people
to give a shit about Moneyball. He's like, I read
his whole Sam Bankman Freed book. I think it's bullshit,
but I didn't. I didn't get bored at any point.
You know, is at a pace a piece of writing,

(12:27):
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. Carolin 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.
She is basically like the and she does not like

(12:50):
the idea of having Michael Lewis around now. She can't
really confront Sam Bankman Freed when she has a bad idea.
Nobody can, so she just kind of hedges it and says,
the signal chat makes sense. I feel like my instincts
are more towards under the radar, but I might just
be irrationally biased towards that in general. And then like
an emoji of a face sticking its tongue out and

(13:13):
Sam replies same, except exactly the opposite that, right.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
Like, you know, you're down bad if you're asking Sam
Bankret Freed to make sense. Yeah, it's challenging. Oh god,
that's such I mean, I don't know, I know we've
talked about her in the past, but that's like a
what a mess, what a nightmare.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
She's in a rough situation, and he will talk a
lot about how he treats her in this. But Will
mccaskell is also in that signal chat, and Will is
basically the founder. He's not like literally the founder, but
he is the founder of what is most commonly talked
about as the effect of altruism movement, and definitely its figurehead. Right.
He is the big guy. He's this Oxford professor who

(13:53):
he pills Sam Bankman Freed on the idea, and his
response is kind of I think part of why this
winds up going down. He says, I think either approach
is reasonable, should just be a deliberate, coordinated plan. 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. Yep.
Responded Sam, and they did it. Michael Lewis spends like

(14:16):
a year with this guy, like he spends a lot
of time around them. Everyone's very excited because what happened
last year is Sam's world collapses and he gets charged
with like seven felonies. 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,

(14:38):
he's been front set, he's written about a financial collapse before.
He's got front seat tickets to this whole thing. And
then the book comes out, and unfortunately for Lewis, the
book comes out, he times the release right for when
the court case starts, 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 book,

(15:00):
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 as Friends to the
text of Lewis's book, is that like, oh, Michael got
kind of fucking conned by this dude, right, Oh yeah,
like he fell for it.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
Yeah, And I mean It speaks to the level of
confidence one would have to have in their own reporting
to time it with yep 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 in the area.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
I can see if you're if you're just some journalists
and this is your first book, or you just don't
have you're not like a huge hit. So like you
are very 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. Michael
Lewis can say we are putting this out this day

(15:59):
and like, suck my dick. I'm Michael Lewis. It'll make
you money, right, And he doesn't, which which suggests he
has the same kind of hubris that Sam Bankman Freed
did in a lot of ways. So to give you
an example of how emotionally involved Lewis is in this case,
here's a good write up on the court case by
a journalist who was there during the trial, which was

(16:20):
not filmed, writing for Jacobin, and this is how they
describe the devastating cross examination of Bankman Freed, who again
chose to take the stand in his own defense despite
every expert saying absolutely never do this. Quote across the
aisle for me and the section reserve for friends and family.
I could see Sam's parents growing increasingly agitated, his mom

(16:41):
visibly shaking 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 3 (16:51):
Nobody expects Michael Lewis in the court.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Yeah, and I you know, I do actually have I
don't think they're very good people, but I have sympathy
for Sam's parents. This is like a nightmare if like
to know that your kid is going to forever prison,
even if it's totally their fault.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
I mean, my empathy only goes so far. But also, like,
what a scene, What a fucking scene.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Absolutely phenomenal. Yeah, terrific. Can't wait for Jonah Hill to
start as Sam Bankman Freed in the movie based on this.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
No, I really don't want.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
No, No, there's no one I want to see play
him in a movie. Just do him like Maris and
Frasier have him always to be off.

Speaker 3 (17:40):
That would be oh, I love yeah, like the Parents
and Charlie Brown, Heather Sinclaire of Degrassi.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
And you know what, cast David Hyde Pierce as Michael Lewis.
Then we got a movie. Then we got a fucking film.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Then we got I mean, if if this whole ordeal
results in David Hype Pierce winning an oscar in a
bad absolutely, absolutely, there's good. There's no way it's good. Yes,
you know. And and it's possible that Adam McKay in
an effort to course directing or sure Adam McKay is, like,

(18:20):
he absolutely could and he's and 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 everyone's agent in the situation.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
You're gonna be rich, Jamie, I'm gonna be fucking rich. Yeah.
In in interviews he gave after the book came out
and the trial started, Lewis framed his book Going Infinite
about Sam Bankmanfried 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, and the judge specifically

(18:54):
instructed them not to. There's an interview with sixty minutes,
which is really something we will hear some clips from
it later. 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, and I think every war,
and I think neither one of those stories is as
good as the one I have. And like I on

(19:16):
one hand, yes, of course you're right, because you're a
better writer than any lawyer is going to be. But
on the other hand, this isn't a story. It's just
a question of what happened, Michael Lewis, and what happened
is massive fraud, and you don't put that in your book.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
That's so I mean to hear. I mean, I guess
I can be of many minds about characterizing it as
a story war, because that is like just how history
is written. And it's kind of almost refreshing to hear
someone refer it to as like, well, whoever could write
the better story, that's will we'll end up having the
historical precedent, but interesting that it would be said out

(19:53):
loud in that way.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah, and again I want to reiterate, while Michael is
the main character here, he's not like he's He's not
a bastard. He's not someone who's like impact on the
world has been monstrous as far as I've ever heard,
He's a reasonably nice person. We'll definitely get him being
mean in a couple of points here, but it's nothing
that I would like call someone that, like one of
history's greatest monster over But this is Bankman free. It

(20:16):
is a bastard. And so I think talking about the
way in which he kind of has Lewis wrapped around
his finger, in the degree to which Lewis tortures his
own logic and prose in order to ignore that is
just fascinating. So with that in mind, let's start with
a little bit more of Michael's backstory, because that is
important to understand why he falls for this. Michael Monroe

(20:37):
Lewis was born on October fifteenth, nineteen sixty in New Orleans. Now,
from the beginning, his life was about as far from
working class as you get, and to his credit, Lewis
does not deny this whenever he's.

Speaker 3 (20:50):
Asked to the only thing you can't do, I guess yeah, you've.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Got to be open about it. Here's him talking to
the Guardian Lewis's family stat at the very top of
the Wasp Aristocra in New Orleans. I was so inside,
he told me. I was literally trained how to sit
on a throne when I was fifteen years old, because
it was crowned the king of the Carnival ball, an
organization that didn't allow black people, didn't allow Jews. I
would go from baseball practice to sceptor waving lessons. I

(21:15):
was born into that world. Being an insider in New
Orleans made him feel like an outsider everywhere else, and
not always to his disadvantage. And first off, wow, that's
quite a backstory.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
Thank you, King, I do you, King?

Speaker 2 (21:32):
I do think I want to point out something here,
which is where I don't think he's obvious skating, but
I think he's missing something about his own what his
background has done for him. Because I don't 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. And I

(21:52):
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 breathed.
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

(22:13):
this way of making of making themselves feel like they
belong anywhere, right, It's why they can get away with
so much, 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 when you know people who
have family fortunes behind them, you know what I'm talking about, right,
Like it's the reason they are never going to get

(22:33):
like carded 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's part of how as.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
Receptible thing well, And I do think that there is,
I mean, and it sounds like what you're getting at is,
like there is 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 pass on your side,
but if they're but but also, you know, to an

(23:02):
extent and a liability because you never know, you know.
I'm curious what endears him to Sam.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, we'll get to that. So he goes to Princeton
University and he graduates kum laude, which which means pretty
good grades in nineteen eighty two. His senior thesis is
on Donatello, a prominent ninja turtle. 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

(23:31):
a blue blood, you probably are like, what the fuck
is an eating club? These are private dining halls that
are also kind of social clubs where upper classmen go
to get nicer food. There's like nine of them, I
think on campus, the Ivy Club at Princeton, or like
everywhere at Princeton. There's other fancy boys schools have these.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
Robert, this is full count the clue.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
I was like eating club. The like eating club to me,
is like drive through Taco bell one am starving. Yeah,
wow eating club eating.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
They Sophie, you said this is full cunt but it
did not admit women until nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 1 (24:13):
The addacy to not let a woman got it hut.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
Something that cunty. It just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
And it's 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 when he talks about,
you know, 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. He
doesn't mentioned that the Ivy Club doesn't admit women. I
think that is maybe interesting. It's also worth noting that

(24:46):
the Ivy Club. F Scott Fitzgerald writes about the Ivy
Club and calls it f Scott Fitzgerald calls it detached
and breathlessly aristocratic, and Scott Fitzgerald says that about your
blue Blood Club, like my god.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
I love that. Wow. What a treat? What a treat?
If yeah, if f Scott Fitzgerald is the one experiencing
like moral clarity about about your weird group. That's challenging.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
Now. While Lewis had a passion for art history, he
had a bigger passion in life and it's stacking motherfucking paper.
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. Uh no, no, no, no,
he's just making Dalla dollar bills, y'all.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Robert Dalla dollar Bill's time is happening now for us
as well.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Oh yeah, speaking of Dalla dollar bills, buy some of
these products and we.

Speaker 3 (25:47):
Think about things.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
I have a request for the listeners, which is not
something that I often. I don't I don't ask, I
don't ask anything of our listeners, just that just that
they're happy. But if somebody could please make a dating
profile for Michael Lewis as an art graphic, I.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
Just it, just please for me.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Oh man, Okay, 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. So
Lewis Lewis is you know, an investment banker for just
a few years. Actually you know who he reminds me of,
Oh okay, just.

Speaker 3 (26:35):
You know, hoping your toes in it. Then that kind
of doesn't It's like the just the tip of financial crime.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
He's in there at eighty seven, the market crashes and
he makes a pivot away from like doing that as
a job, and he writes a book called Liar's Poker
about the investment you know, Bang the stockbroker. That like
that kind of life that makes a shitload of money. Right,
this is we'll talk about it in a second, but
like I want to he minds me in this trajectory.
Do you know anything about Michael Crichton?

Speaker 3 (27:03):
Uh? Oh, I mean I yeah, Peaks and Valleys. I
had no attachment to him, but I know many do.
And like, yeah, the back half of Michael Crichton pretty
fucking brutal.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, I'm 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. Most
people are I don't think I actually know this, 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

(27:36):
a medical like he's the creator of ER and he
gets criticized by doctors who are like, oh you just
creator of ER. Yeah, Michael Crichton created a r Yes, oh.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
Okay, sorry, I thought we were talking about Michael Lewis. Yes,
I knew Michael.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
They have a similar They have a similar kind of
trajectory where they go to school for this thing 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.

Speaker 4 (27:58):
Right.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
I just find that interesting. So to give you a
further idea of Lewis's family background, Liar's 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. He gets a seat there because
of his cousin, Baroness Linda von Stauffenberg, and she seats

(28:19):
next to the manager of Salomon Brothers, which is how
he gets his job. Word salad crabs don't have bluer
blood than this man, Like that is that is the
bluest You fucking get if.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
Your cousin's a baroness and you're in your like late twenties,
what if.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
You know a baroness, you are like.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
That's okay.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yeah. Yeah. So Lewis's depiction of Wall Street guys from
Liar's Poker on because he writes a few books about
Wall Street types because he knows them, right, It's generally
noted as not being flattering, but I think that's by
people who like a very naive view of what's unflattering.
Because his Wall Street guys they curse a lot. They
use phrases like big swing and dick. They're like, they're

(29:07):
like kind of gross, but in a way that's glamorous, right,
Like I.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
Mean, I feel like it's like the Glengarry Glenn Ross,
Yes exactly, yeah, talking shit.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Yeah yeah yeah. It like 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 greeting men when to become stock traders. And
to extend the Michael Crichton comparison, it is Liar's Poker
is generally agreed to have had a similar impact on
its industry to how Jurassic Park influenced paleontology by like

(29:38):
bringing a shitload of people in.

Speaker 3 (29:40):
Wow, that's really interesting to me because I like, I
don't know. I have not read Liar's Poker. To be honest,
I have not read any of his books. I have
seen some of the adaptations in movies of his books.
But but yeah, in terms of like anytime someone writes
something about Wall Street, like you have to be so
fucking careful, and also even if you are extremely fucking careful,

(30:03):
it will still bring in the wrong people who refuse
to see the point, like they're like Wolf of Wall
Street is one of my favorite movies, hands down. At
it's great and it is exact time. Yeah, but it's
still like brought people in on the wrong fuck it
because brain dead people are going to be brain dead people.

Speaker 2 (30:21):
This is we're going in a more serious direction. But
if you've read Slaughterhouse five, in the opening of it,
Vonnagat talks about how when he said I'm going to
write my my war book, his wife was like, don't
do it. 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, yeah,

(30:42):
I mean one of the problems with even anti war
war fiction is it always makes it look cool because
it's it's cool, right, That doesn't mean it's good. It's like,
Joe Cammel is cool, he still killed one hundred million people.

Speaker 3 (30:56):
Joe Cammell gave my father lung cancer and I stand
by that. And to conjure a similar image Joe Cammell,
there's an image that I saw when I worked in
the Playboy archives of Joe Cammel and illustrated gorgeous like
painting essentially of Joe Camil in convertible with smoking, hot

(31:16):
human women. Hell yeah, big old titties, and you're like, no,
wonder this advertisement of killed people, this advertisement kill people
bec like this, you could be this ugly ass camel
with women with huge naturals, like just like.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
You can add up all the German generals on the
Eastern Front and they didn't kill as many people as
that act.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
Truly like, and it's a beautiful piece of artwork, but like,
let's be fucking honest.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, 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. This can be if
this is your first book and you write it in
nineteen eighty two and you really later, oh, this actually
might have made the problem worse. That's not a thing
you have any moral culpability for. That's just like writing

(32:07):
a thing with good intentions and it turns out badly.
But this does become a problem, and one that we
can critique is partly a moral problem when it becomes
part of a pattern, and it is a pattern with
Michael Lewis. 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.

(32:29):
And 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, 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 Short out,
but he just published an article at a major publication
attacking Wall Street big wigs as being greedy idiots, like

(32:49):
saying it in very unsparing terms, 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. One hedge fun
manager walked in with fifteen copies of Lewis's books. Michael
signed them all. And again, if you are a journalist,
that's a bad side, Like.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
Yeah, what is your take on that? I mean, like,
what is the game of chess that I'm not seeing here?

Speaker 2 (33:17):
I mean, I think it's just that he makes he
makes this look sexy, and it's if he writes about you.
Part of a big part of this is that 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,
All these guys in the big short you could say,

(33:39):
profited off of a lot of misery. Now they didn't
cause it. He didn't start this subprime loan thing. But
they profited off of a lot of misery. 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. And so at this point

(33:59):
he because of how often this has happened, is 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, 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, And this is part as

(34:21):
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. 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. Among the
few projects he has abandoned is a biography of George Soros,
who was so unhappy with Louis's portrayal of him as

(34:42):
a financier rather than an intellectual in a magazine profile
that he refused to cooperate. 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. He said, I
adore my parents. I couldn't write that part while they're alive.
And you know, again, none of this is like unforgivable.

(35:03):
But if you're admitting that as a journalist, what aren't
you able to admit? And I think in this case,
it's that he is not able to look at Sam
Bankman freed honestly because he found himself taken in by
the kid stick.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
Well, that's what I feel like is one of the
complicating factors of 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. We'll talk about that, well, okay, yeah,

(35:36):
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 tales, that sells all this shit.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, yeah, And I think it's also part of why
his stuff is successful in a commercial sense, is that
is this other fact that like it's always kind of uplifting.
Right again, the big short the whole collapse of the
financial industry is dark, but stuff goes well for these
characters that you've come to light, right. And Lewis himself
is kind of admitted he can't really end on a

(36:20):
not upbeat note. He has a lot of trouble with it.
He said, quote, once you identify yourself as happy, you're
always looking for happiness, and when things come along to
great on that happiness, you find ways to deflect them.
You can force the narrative. And I think what he
doesn't say there, but what is explains his Sam Bankman
Freed book, is that once you get in the habit
of writing about like these geniuses who are hidden in

(36:41):
the middle of systems, right 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.

Speaker 3 (36:53):
So yeah, mess, mess, and it's like, you know, ultimately,
nine times out of ten the person wearing like fucking
X ray glasses is wearing a pair of fucking Imax
glasses to go see Oppenheimer.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
Like, it's just embarrassing, exactly, It's just embarrassing. And yeah, yeah,
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
two thousand and six. Now, The blind Side, like a
lot of Swiss stories, there's a macro in a micro narrative.
The macro narrative is he's talking about the grow, the

(37:27):
explosive growth in the importance of the left tackle in football.
This is an offensive lineman whose job is basically to
make sure the quarterback doesn't get a maimed. 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 Oher who was He was placed in
foster care at age seven because his mother suffered from addiction.

(37:48):
His dad was generally in prison. His dad dies while
he's I think in high school 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
will like shows an aptitude for football. As a result
of this, he's kind of coaxed through getting into a
private school and he gets he gets literally adopted by

(38:09):
this rich white family, oh as a black man, black
child at this time, 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 NCAA
and college so that he can get an NFL contract.

Speaker 3 (38:23):
Right, So I'll be perfectly honest. I before we started,
before you told me that Michael Lewis was a main character,
I did not know that he wrote The blind Side.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
Oh yes he did, because this comes becomes a movie
that's huge, right also, And.

Speaker 3 (38:39):
I am very well acquainted with the the ensuing nasty,
fucking cultural narrative associated with the movie. But I didn't
realize that it was a book. I knew liar's poker
moneyball in the big Short.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
Holy Robert, Robert, I just want a fact, teck real quick.
He wasn't adopted by them.

Speaker 5 (38:56):
Not.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
We're getting to that, Okay. That was the narrow that
was the nar in the blind Side, right right right,
that they have basically adopted this guy. Yes, you are correct, Sophie,
but I'm building to that, Okay, So.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
Okay, okay, that's just like I don't I don't know
why I didn't know that, and also like who didn't
want me to know that, Michael Lewis, Yeah, I mean Blindside,
a book that is famously bullsh Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
So this family adopts or and they effectively adopt him,
is I think generally how it's framed. 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, And
I'm a quote from the La Times here. The administration
at his high school accepts him although he can barely read.

(39:41):
He secures a full time tutor. 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 he has over tested to
prove that he's learning disabled, then has him take numerous
easy online courses. Lewis treats these measures genius we are
meant to cheer the fact that Ore has gained the

(40:02):
educational process. And this is a tech. This is from
the book Leanne, 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. 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 a pressure, He'll tell you Tiffany's

(40:24):
if I go, I'll go through the whole golf game.
He can tell you what six under is, and what's
a birding and what's par I love that those are
her two examples of basic knowledge.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
This is Sandra Bullocks Oscar talking. Yes, is Sandra Bullocks
Oscar flat? This nasty little mound.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Two things every boy needs to know? Where to buy
jewelry and how to golf works. 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's how you cook eggs, but no fucking fucking

(40:59):
golf and Tiffany's well yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (41:01):
Also like I mean to state the obvious, like conflating
that with like this is what normal people, This is
normal doctoral thesis in the ways that that is okay,
great shit.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, 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,
just if you think about all of the head injuries
and shit involved, there's a lot this problematic here. Lewis
does quote Lane 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

(41:32):
be flipping burgers at McDonald's, would they really have had
an interest at me? But the book is ultimately positive
and uplifting. We're left thinking how nice it is that
these people help this kid out. 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. So the nice parts

(41:53):
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 conservaship. Two he's I don't care, fuck him and
instead created a conservatorship and used it to take his money. Right,
the Twohees or whatever the fuck deny doing this.

Speaker 3 (42:12):
They again, Yeah, I think it's actually props. I don't care.

Speaker 2 (42:20):
Dick bags deny this, and again I'm not being a
non biased journalist here, but.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
Fuck you not referend. It's actually dickman's dick Mans.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
The Dickmans. They call his claims hateful and absurd. Michael
Lewis has defended The Twohees by saying that they only
earned a few hundred thousand dollars off of The blind Side,
the book and the movie that was made off of it.
He's like, they didn't make millions, then they made a
few hundred grand. Now Lewis also does, and I'll give
him this. He also admits, right after saying that that

(42:50):
the two hees 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, Oh,
that might suggest that because The Blindside makes half a
billion dollars and a thirty five million dollar budget.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
In his own way, Michael Lewis in this.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Kind of Michael Lewis is super rich and always really
there's been buried.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
There's there so many articles about like.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
It is, there's shady ship.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
That's the first time I'm hearing about the daughter marriage
because I read a fair amount.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
About that fun stuff. So in his own twenty eleven book,
oh Like expresses issues with the movie based off of
Lewis's book. Primarily there's this part where like the twees
are teaching him how to play football, and he's like,
I knew football before I met them. I'm a teenager
in America, Like, like, what are you fucking talking about.

(43:46):
There are other problematic moments in the book. Uh, and
this is from The Guardian again. Lewis calls Oer big
mic throughout it, despite the fact that Oher is open
about hating that nickname. He also tells this guy's story
almost exclusively through the words of other people talking about him,
even though he had access to Oor. Lewis justifies this
by saying that or was not a strong voice on

(44:07):
his life. Yeah, this guy's not good at talking about himself.
I'm just gonna listen to everyone else about him.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
Out I'm out.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
I think what's really going on here is that power
is a black kid from a desperate poverty background, right,
and Lewis cannot identify or get inside of his head
because that is nothing even that even resembles the Michael
Lewis story.

Speaker 3 (44:30):
It feels like a very privileged dark take. Yes, like, well,
who do I consider to be a credible voice? Can
I get twenty white people who barely know this guy.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Who just met this kid to profit off him.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
To speak to him better than he can speak to
his own life, Because that's who I trust is white people's. Yeah, Oh,
that's so fucking gross.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
He doesn't try to get inside o'er his head, and
he just focuses most of the narrative on the twoees,
who who Lewis understands this is the final shoe. He
understands them for a very good reason. 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 ties, and I also wondered why
does he take such an uncritical view of their role.

(45:13):
The author's note at the end provides the obvious explanation,
stating that Lewis is a friend of Sean Tooey's, and
that they had been longtime classmates at the same New
Orleans school.

Speaker 3 (45:22):
No, how is it even ethical to take this fucking
story on if you have.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
There's only one kind of ethics that I care about, Jamie,
and it's dolla dolla fucking bills.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
Well, well, Jamie, as you know, things could be unethical
but still be legal legal.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
That's how.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
I mean, truly, what a gift that we have as that,
Like I am he a force of evil in the world, certainly,
but I am grateful that he gave us that one thing.
Just the way of uh describing juvenile lawless capitalists.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Yeah, it's so funny.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
One thing I have started to notice watching some of
the more recent and critical interviews with Lewis after the
SBF book is that, well, 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.
And you see this in this story in the Oer story,
because Ower's former coach comes out and like defends the

(46:26):
twohees or whatever. Once the lawsuit goes out, He's like,
you know, I don't think they took advantage of him, basically,
and Ower calls it brave and my.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
Professional, unbiased opinion, thank you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
Lewis calls the coach brave for doing this and basically
says he's taking a stand against cancel culture. And then
here's the Guardian again. Lewis recalled Oer as a shy
young boy and found it hard to square that memory
with the Oer behind the lawsuit. What we're watching is
a change of behavior. He told me. This is what
happens to football players who get hit in the head.
They run into problems with violence and aggression. It wouldn't

(47:00):
surprise him. Lewis said. If we were seeing some confluence
of Ora's history in football with other campaigns that stoke
claims in lawsuits like his, perhaps some lawyer of Ores
figured the time was ripe to sue the twelies, Lewis speculated,
or perhaps Oer realized that people would get behind him
if he makes these accusations. He's just a poor head,
injured boy.

Speaker 3 (47:18):
I They're like, no, the perceived exploitation and racism you
experienced was the result of CTE.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
That's oh my god, that's fucking wild, right, that's gross
as hell oh, Jamie.

Speaker 3 (47:33):
Wow, I just thought he was the guy who wrote Moneyball.
I thought that that was the hard I was thinking too.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
Now yeah, so here, I want you to keep in
mind how he wrote about his former subject. Oor Now
hear his him talking in a sixty minutes interview about
Sam Bankman Free, the now convicted former billionaire, 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 6 (48:01):
The story of Sam's life is people not understanding him,
misreading him.

Speaker 7 (48:05):
He's so different, he's so unusual.

Speaker 6 (48:07):
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 then
the reader comes to know that the world still doesn't know.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Now, that is not the case. Sam Bakman Freed is
exactly the person he appears to be on the surface. Right.
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 with the smart way, Right,
And that's all that going.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
I mean, this is like, oh, this is a bummer
this is like a case study and a journalist biases
coming out on there.

Speaker 2 (48:42):
Oh it's so, it's so obvious. Yeah, No, story better
illustrates this part of the story than how Lewis wound
up writing Going Infinite in the first place. In twenty fourteen,
Lewis published a book called Flash Boys, which is a
book about Brad Katsuyama and a small group of rebel
Walst investors who form i ex which is like a

(49:02):
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. And with most Lewis books, there's
a lot of insiders that will criticize them foring some
details wrong here and glossing over some issues that don't

(49:23):
conform to his narrative. There's like a market crash that's
largely mitigated by some of these firms that he's criticizing.
But I don't know enough about that to want to
get into it. What's important is that Katsuyama and his
book of Rogue traders are depicted semi heroically, is that
they're kind of fighting against this rigged financial system, which
you know, the financial systems rigged. I don't know about
his characteristication of them, but the book is a hit

(49:45):
and it makes Katsuyama and his crew celebrities within the
finance world. So Katsuyama reaches out to Lewis when he
is considering an institutional investment in FTX. He's like, we're
considering getting into crypto through these guys putting a lot
of money on there exchange. Would you look into this
guy for me? Right? And this is what Lewis says.
Lewis like basically goes in there and like talks to

(50:08):
Sam Bankman Freed, and he's he's so impressed that he
quotes himself as telling Katsuyama do whatever he wants to do.
What could possibly go wrong?

Speaker 3 (50:16):
Right?

Speaker 2 (50:16):
That's which bad bet Uh does wind up putting money.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
He's a worst person to ask what to go wrong with?

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Yeah, okay, 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 Freed subscribed.
Effective altruists believe in giving away most of what they
make to do the most good in the world. Some
of them commit to earning as much as possible so
as to donate more to their chosen beneficiaries. Having spent
so long on Wall Street, Lewis wasn't used to meeting

(50:46):
a wealthy young man who claimed to have no interest
in wealth. Unusually for Lewis, he couldn't figure bankman freed out.
Michael just said, this kid is the richest and most
interesting young person I've ever met. Understand them all the
deep possesses of bank Reid's mind. But he knew it
was a great story. And this was before the shit
hit the fan. So this is real. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
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, You're like, well, yeah, no, shit,
you've never not had it.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
You would really.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
Care if you'd That reminds me of this is like,
I think about this easily once a week. It happened
over ten years ago, my freshman year of college. It
was my first time really encountering people who grew up
with like money, you know. And there was this guy
on my floor and one night everyone was hanging out
and he like, put a this is the era, this

(51:43):
is the early twenty tens. He put a skinny scarf
around my neck because it was cold, and he was like,
you can have that, and it smelled and I didn't
want it. But he's like, you could have that. And
I was like, oh, don't you like want it back
and he's like, no, I don't care about my material possessions.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
And great.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
I think about that all the time because he could
just get nine thousand scarves. You just get nine thousand scarves.
But that was like, but I feel like that is
so much of what effect of altruism is. It's just
a fundamental like, yeah, not understanding how the world works.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
Yeah, it's it's a bunch of rich kids who are
talking through like fucking philosophy one oh one 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

(52:40):
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. Ah. So, we've been talking around the

(53:01):
book Going Infinite, which is Michael's terrible book on Sam,
so I think now is probably a good time to
dig into exactly how it fails. I wanted to start
by introducing that contrast between Lewis's treatment of o OR
and SBF first, because it puts things into perspective. Now,
I think a good anecdote to start on here is
one of the stories Lewis uses to introduce Sam to
the reader. This is right at the start of Going Infinite,

(53:23):
and it's about a phone call that Sam has during
his billionaire era with fashion industry icon Anna Wintour before
the Metgala. No oh yeah, oh yeah, Jamie. This this
is good.

Speaker 3 (53:37):
So exhausted because Anna Wintour is Bill Nye, He's girlfriend
right now, and I don't want to think poorly of
Bill Nye. He does.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
No, no, it is tragic. My heart goes out to
Bill Nye, who I'm incapable of feeling badly about No, I'm.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Here, I'm sitting my ass down and listening.

Speaker 2 (53:54):
Yeah, so Anna is who Meryl Streep's character in The
Devilwar's product is based on, right, Like, that's who this
person is.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
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 pradac. It is
just like one of the greatest films of I think,
one of the greatest comedy films and books of Yeah,
very good, very good, happy essays.

Speaker 1 (54:21):
Half the essays I wrote in college were based off
of said book.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Really, the met Gala is an annual event. I think
Vogue puts it on technically, but like it's where rich, famous,
and occasionally even beautiful people were insane outfits that cost
the GDP of a small island nation.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
Right, Yes, and then and then a bunch of YouTubers
I watch say that they looked ugly.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
Yes, yes, it's a true. Yeah, it's 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 went Tour wanted SBF to pay for the gala, right,
he was spending way more money on stupider shit than that,
so not unreasonable that he might actually agree to do this.

(55:04):
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 met gala often does make
the news, and when it came to his side of
the job, though, Sam was he put as much work
into like this call with Anna Wintour where tens of
millions of dollars are on the line, that he did

(55:26):
to like everything else that he had a meeting about,
which is no work at all. Right, 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. It's this this video
game that he winds up buying because it's made by
a friend of his called Storybook Brawl, and is it
it's about like Fable characters fighting, right, like it's it's

(55:49):
that it's a little strategy game. It's like an it's
like an app game. It's not a real game, you know.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
You know how you watch those videos And I say
this with love and appreciation of like college students now
playing a video game while explaining like Marxism to you
and I want that. But Sam bankmin Freed playing that game, Well, well,

(56:15):
Anna Wintour is like what is he up to? What
is he up to?

Speaker 1 (56:19):
The Jamie and I in Unison when you said playing
video game while talking to Anna Wintour, mouth wide open, like.

Speaker 3 (56:28):
Well, it's like she could, I mean and and and
not even to like endorse her. I'm just like I
would be very afraid to do anything in front of
scary and she's famously scary.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
She's famously scary. And he's talking about a lot of money, right,
Like it's 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. And I would
take that. It's just like this is a this is
a dude too sm adhd, right, Like that's what that is.

(57:00):
And this is a dude who has ADHD, who's part
of a generation that has ADHD.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
Well, no, this is a very dumb observation. But it's
also clear to me that Sam bank Bankment Freed has
never seen the Devilwaar's product, which I've never been less
surprised at. But it's like, if you have no one
in your life who could tip you off you're talking
to me, protagonist of the Devilwaars product, then you lack

(57:26):
a support structure in a fundamental way.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
I think it's it's okay, that's good to know that
funny and I are here. 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 in gen
z is people playing video games and explaining politics. Right

(57:52):
that is, it is not at all unique that Sam
Bankman Freed 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. He can't
bear to pay attention to her for a second. It
also there's a little bit of anti woman stuff in
here because Lewis notes that I think Sam would minimize

(58:14):
the window with her face on it whenever she spoke
and bring it back up whenever he talked, right, curiously,
only when he was talking did he want to see her,
which I do think there's a lot in that sentence.
So yeahsting, Yeah. It is again like the way Lewis
describes this, this isn't just yeah, he's not very disciplined,
and he has the same thing that like a lot

(58:36):
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. 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 heroin. Right, Well, that
makes me.

Speaker 3 (58:53):
That indicates to me that Michael Lewis, because that's the
way that you're like, like you're doting parent would talk
about it, and like that's that is clear to me.
The way he sees him is like, wow, look at
this amazing kid. And also what SBF is doing here
is like the inverse of what most easily distracted millennial
and gen Z people are doing, which they're playing games

(59:14):
and explaining radical politics to you. 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, and I love that stupid
ass party.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
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.
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. The hoard dragon

(59:49):
was dead and a win tour 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. He could often occupy
two worlds at once in w in both. 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 it acquired a spell that interfered with his abilities
to multitask. What an amazing way to write that paragraph,

(01:00:14):
Michael Lewis, Dude, Oh god, it's 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. It's because I'm
hungover and have trouble focusing because I use Twitter too much.

Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
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. It speaks to how old people
in general who work in the public stitching industry are
that no one was like Michael, I have to tell
you that this is just how kids are these days.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
He's a real venture game ganius. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
I mean it's like we've both written books. Like I
was surprised that I got the title of my book through,
but it was because people over sixty don't know what
raw Dog needs. And that's most of the people I'm publishing. Like,
it's ridiculous. That's so nuts that that made it to
the final book.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
No, it's like that's yeah. 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 trying to make Sam look kind
of silly. In that paragraph. I can see how you
would assume that based on the text, but that is
not what's going on. Listener. Here is Lewis talking about
that exact same moment in an interview with Intelligence Squared

(01:01:32):
from about a month ago.

Speaker 6 (01:01:33):
Yay, so on the screen zoom and a win tour,
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 Bank mcfreed
pay for the whole met gala? 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

(01:01:54):
to the nine. She's got those size of hair coming
down around her. She's like ready to kill and gorgeous.
You know, she looks great, She's well prepared. He's playing
Storybook Brawl, which.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Is his video game.

Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
Pause. I hate the way he talks about Anna Wintour.

Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
Well, okay, okay, And first we can deal with that
in private zone.

Speaker 3 (01:02:14):
Fair we can no, no, before we can talk about
a woman on a zoom call. Does she look gorgeous
or yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
That's the point. It has nothing to do with Anna Winter.
Also she looks like that all the time, Thank you
so much. It's her thing.

Speaker 6 (01:02:26):
And wherever she comes on the screen, he blocks her
out and the video game pops up, so like she's
she's talking and and mons minuttaurs are killing, are killing dwarfs,
and trees with axes are coming in and like you know,
the weapons are appearing on the screen and people are
dying and exploding, and and you're hearing her talk about

(01:02:48):
the met Gala. And there's seven minutes in when he
hits a button in the Wikipedia entry for the met
galap comes up, so he can figure out what the
hell she's talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
And he's doing watched him do this. He's doing this
with her.

Speaker 6 (01:03:01):
This is what he was doing on live television when
he would be interviewed by Bloomberg TV.

Speaker 3 (01:03:06):
It was like and he had tricks.

Speaker 6 (01:03:08):
He took him about one tenth of his brain to
have a conversation with Anna Wintour. And what he would
do other part of his brain was either reading about
who she was or playing his game. And what he'd
do is he'd say, you asked me a question. He'd say,
that's a really good question. It's a really good question.
Let me think about that for a minute. You know, meanwhile,

(01:03:30):
the minutaur is killing the tree and he comes off,
and then he thinks for a minute, and he says
some boilerplate thing.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
So that does not show genius. He's obviously the smile
on his face, that is not him being critical. That's
him thinking about like that's him fawning over this kid
for not being prepared for a multimillion dollar meeting, right,
which is like, fine, but that's not an example of
him being smart.

Speaker 3 (01:03:57):
Well, and I think that that is a clear pattered
in the way that we cover the like young white
kid genius who comes from a rich background. There's a
lot of similarities in how early Mark Zuckerberg's like casual
misogyny and not giving a ship about people was like
part and parcel to why he was cool and why

(01:04:17):
he was seen as a visionary. Like that the same
is truth. 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. No one ever learns
their lesson because the guy covering them is often the same.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
Guy literally Michael Lewis, and often literally Michael Lewis.

Speaker 1 (01:04:38):
How did how did okay, I'm sorry, how did this
revolve with Anna Wintour?

Speaker 3 (01:04:42):
Did she like the fact that she.

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):
Did he said, he says, yeah, I'll pay for it,
and then he just ghosts her.

Speaker 3 (01:04:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
So the fact that Anna wind Tour didn't like like
smoke out that he was like fully a fraud at.

Speaker 3 (01:04:58):
The girlies are the girlies are disappointed? I'm not caping
for Anna Wintor here, but the famously named the Dragon Lady. Well, no,
SBF is lucky that he'll never encounter Bill Nai because
Bill for Bill Nihey, it would be on the phone.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Bill would fuck him.

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):
So he was an I Frankenstein for crying. He was
in Detective pikat chip Areak was broken like my brain.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
So Bra, these are these are amusing anecdotes, right what
he's what he's telling. Potentially, if you are someone who
is critical about him, that same anecdote could could form
part of your thesis about why this kid got away
with it and for so long and why he ultimately
flamed out. But Lewis is convinced that these show you
evidence of Sam's genius, and he sets this up early

(01:05:45):
in the book talking about Sam's childhood quote he had
a fault line inside him. 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 by b
he said, I'm so bored, I'm going to die, and like, oh, yeah,
I have had a similar conversation with my mom. And

(01:06:09):
it's a sign. You know, certainly Sam has been diagnosed
with ADHD. That's certainly one way in which that can manifest.

Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Hold on one for the girlies again.
That is a direct quote from Sex and the City.

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
Oh okay, that is.

Speaker 3 (01:06:21):
A direct quote from a Sex in the City.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
Sure, I'm sure Sam's a big Samantha.

Speaker 3 (01:06:26):
Hey who says it?

Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
But she goes, I'm so bored I could die and
she jumps out of and she falls out of the window.

Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
Oh my god. Really one of the most famous events
in the city.

Speaker 2 (01:06:37):
Yeah, I don't remember that anyway. So, because like Lewis again, again,
if you're if you're just kind of being honest about
Sam writing a book, he might be like, well, Sam
gets diagnosed with ADHD. 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. But Lewis does not acknowledge

(01:06:58):
that Sam has ADHD in his book. He doesn't say
anything about it because that would that's not a bad thing, obviously,
but it's also that you 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 3 (01:07:14):
Well, and it's like if you're if you're talking about
that behavior and I want to be like delicate, and
then you talk about it, but it's like it's contextually important.

Speaker 2 (01:07:25):
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
and it it and then it means those things aren't
a sign of his brilliance right 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,

(01:07:45):
and it's Carolyn Ellison, who comes across as one of
the villains in the book. And I should note that
the following paragraph comes to me part of the book
where Lewis is talking to George, who is a therapist
who worked for FTX as the company shrink. So, among
other things, this is a therapist talking about his patient.

Speaker 3 (01:08:03):
Right, Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
When she'd first come to him back in twenty eighteen,
she'd had two issues. She wanted to talk about, her
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and her new and emotionally complicated
polyamorous lifestyle. 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. Sam didn't love her back,
and that fact alone left her deeply unhappy. I thought

(01:08:25):
of her as an exception, said George. I thought she
might be willing to trade effective altruism for reciprocation of
love any day. Right, Sorry, how is it?

Speaker 1 (01:08:34):
Like?

Speaker 3 (01:08:34):
I mean, I truly like, how was it even legal
or ethical for this information to may? I don't actually know.
I don't like that truly, because it's seems 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
that if anyone's therapy logs were leaked, it would be like, oh,

(01:08:57):
if they had this fixation on this issue. Yeah, that's
why you fucking go damn, you know, go there to
be a reasoned person.

Speaker 2 (01:09:05):
No, and especially since like's 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, she wasn't focusing enough, she was in
love with him, hysterical, whereas he's just this misunderstood genius.
But he notes her ADHD and he doesn't note Sam's,

(01:09:25):
even though Sam's ADHD is a matter of public fucking record. Now,
like his family went to court to get him his
medicine is a thing.

Speaker 3 (01:09:34):
It's like not even looking that he particularly tries to obscure, right, No,
like no, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
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 only needing ten percent of
his brain to talk to people. Yeah, 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

(01:09:59):
my Lewis does not understand games right 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. He
talks about them like he's an alien who's just arrived
on the planet. And as a result, he talks about

(01:10:20):
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. 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
holder's tribal identity. He and his family ignored the rituals
that punctuated most people's existence. He didn't even celebrate his

(01:10:40):
own birthday. What gave pleasure and solace and a sense
of belonging to others left Sam cold. 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.
To his unrelenting alienation. There was only one exception. Games.
In sixth grade, Sam learned about a game called Magic

(01:11:01):
the Gathering. For the next four years, it was the
only activity that consumed him faster than he could consume it.
And this is so funny because like Lewis has to
describe Magic the Gathering after this point, and he like
he describes it basically, it's the first game ever made
where like you like the way that you play it,

(01:11:24):
like it's it's different, Like every character can come into
this strategy game with a different set of equipment. 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.
There were decades, decades of war games and strategy games
that Magic was influenced by. Like that's just wrong, Michael, Now.

Speaker 3 (01:11:44):
Hold on, hold on magic, Yeah, hold on, nerd any
any put up. I do think that like this is
of the because because I don't play Magic the Gathering
and I know that how he's describing it is, I was.

Speaker 2 (01:12:01):
Like, it's so wrong.

Speaker 3 (01:12:02):
Yeah, I think that speaks word to like a generation gap,
because I think that you're someone who could be on
the opposite side of SBF and equally with it, Like
it's just like do your research.

Speaker 2 (01:12:15):
Just talk to it.

Speaker 3 (01:12:16):
Just talk to someone who plays Magic the Gathering. They
famously love to talk about it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
And it's it's funny because he's like he has to
make this, Like he goes on a limb about like
Sam Bankman Freed couldn't didn't like chess. It was too boring.
There were too few possibilities, like you could calculate everything,
like his computer brain wasn't amused by chess. Yeah, it's
so funny. It's like, man, my friends and I all

(01:12:42):
played Magic the Gathering and like as a spoiler, some
people looked into Sam's like performance in League of Legends
and the other only he was never good at anything.
He was not very good. He wasn't particularly bad, but
he was not very good. And I'm gonna guess he
was indifferent at Magic the Gathering because you like it's
it is not a great it's a wonderful game, not
a great like yardstick for your intelligence, you know, Oh,

(01:13:05):
it's just a guard game.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:13:16):
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, and it seems to have
a good impact on him. He's excited to go to
school now, and that's a good thing. But what we

(01:13:38):
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, they
they don't bother to make him into a well rounded person.
Sam grows up hating art. He thinks books are useless.
He has this big rant he goes about like, well,

(01:13:59):
there's no way that Shape is the best author ever,
because there have been this many billion people born since
he was alive, 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, 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

(01:14:20):
the quote unquote best author ever. 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.
That's why he's important.

Speaker 3 (01:14:32):
Don't get me wrong, Sam, I also don't want to
read a book, but I there sometimes we're sometimes.

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
That's just what you need to do to understand the
world and not go to prison for forever because you're
a gambler or just.

Speaker 3 (01:14:46):
Be willing to fucking google your way around it. Like
that you're not better than Shakespeare. Weird. There is like
an element of like there are certain the lower side
of sbf L's that he takes in the statements he makes.
He sounds like like a one episode Fraser character. Yes,

(01:15:07):
you know, he sounds like Freddy made a friend and
he fucking sucks and.

Speaker 2 (01:15:13):
He's a piece as shit.

Speaker 3 (01:15:15):
Yeah, and then he even polarizes Fraser and Niles and
that's how you know you're in fucking trouble.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
Yeah. Yeah, when Niles, Niles is like, this kid's kind
of got a fucking problem.

Speaker 3 (01:15:26):
This kid's incomprehensible. I wouldn't I wouldn't share a glass
of brandy with him.

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):
Yeah, and man, if you know Niles, you know what
that takes. Hey, everyone, Robert here just wanted a quick
note that the next like the last like five or
six minutes of this episode is all Fraser. It's all
all all Fraser talk. Jamie and I got off on
a tangent. There is a lot more Sam Bankman Freed
than part two. It's another like hour and twenty minutes,
so plenty more on Thursday. But as a heads up

(01:15:54):
in case it's kind of confusing, we just we just
wound up in a Fraser hole after this point. So
if you want to hear us talk about Frasier, this
is your chance. Speaking of David Hyde Peers, Jamie Loftus,
you are starring in a floor show with David Hyde
Peers based on the life of Kelsey Grammar. Actually you

(01:16:16):
are playing Kelsey. You spent, like Michael Lewis, a full
year living with him to really get his character down.
What was that like?

Speaker 3 (01:16:25):
Look, it was pretty hostile. It was pretty hostile. 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 Grammer was playing for the year that I
was following him around, and I resent that I was
in the room with Kelsey while he was berating women

(01:16:47):
on the phone. And I think that that makes him
a genius. 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. 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

(01:17:07):
you even like just we read his Wikipedia page in
four am an opinion, I beg to disagree.

Speaker 2 (01:17:15):
And I do love I love Kelsey Grammar stories from
the head 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. He looked
like he was dying. We were all worried that he
was going to drop dead that day, and then the

(01:17:37):
director called action and he was immediately care He was perfect,
He was.

Speaker 3 (01:17:42):
Beautiful, his chest hair hurt like We'll never know I was.
I mean, I was fixated on Fraser reruns when I
was a kid. I would stand late to watch them.

Speaker 2 (01:17:54):
Yeah, it's one of my conference shows for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:17:56):
Yeah, the best. And like when I remember remember getting
Kelsey Grammer's like memoir from the library and read that
he broke up with his wife on the phone, and
it may have been one of the first times that
I was like, wow, Wow, men are scary. You can
just do that. You could just beat Kelsey Grammar and

(01:18:16):
be evil and then and I will still like base
my sexuality on you forever.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):
Absolutely seem fair. Who's among us, right, ah man? But
I will say, having watched the new Fraser show, it
becomes very clear how much of that show's charm was
John Mahoney and David Hyde Pierce.

Speaker 3 (01:18:35):
Oh well, I think tell Kelsey's doing I mean, and
he's an evil person, He's doing his damn best.

Speaker 2 (01:18:41):
He is he is perfect, he is like literally his
voice is not changed in twenty years, which is remarkable.

Speaker 3 (01:18:46):
No, and he's been you know, physically preserved well enough.

Speaker 2 (01:18:50):
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 con many ends that David and Hyde Pierce
used to And if if you are going up next
to David Hyde Peers in like a physical comedy competition,
you're gonna look like shit fu.

Speaker 3 (01:19:10):
David Peers like 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 of my fucking Lutch.

Speaker 2 (01:19:20):
Don't get me wrong, I've watched every episode, some.

Speaker 3 (01:19:23):
Of the nastiest little I have to like pause sometimes
and like get a water. Yeah, I like walk nearly
that acsence. Yeah, I mean you have and I have
conceded long ago that you've got it down.

Speaker 2 (01:19:38):
Thank you, Thank you well. Anything to plug Jamie after
our five minute Fraser digression, Well, i'd like to.

Speaker 3 (01:19:45):
I guess I'd like to plug the Fraser reboot because
I would like a second season. Check it out, everybody,
It's not ship, it's on Paramount Plus. And I also
just read read Raw Dog and follow me online. You're
so inclined. And that's that's all I have to say.
Listen to the Bexel Cast while you're at it. Why not?

Speaker 2 (01:20:08):
Yeah, all right, what about you? That's it. I'm done.
You're gonna find fine figure out where David Hyde Pierce lives.
You know, have a nice letter, a letter, jim.

Speaker 1 (01:20:32):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:34):
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 it's the intro I've got. It's
the same as the last episode.

Speaker 3 (01:20:51):
No, you're hilarious. It's still very funny. It's Sophie's favorite.

Speaker 2 (01:20:55):
This is the only time I've made Sophie laugh in years.

Speaker 3 (01:20:58):
That's not true. Well, okay, you're Switzerland on this issue.

Speaker 2 (01:21:04):
You're Swiss on this issue. Swiss you Jamie speaking of Switzerland. Yeah,
you also were neutral in World War Two? Is that correct? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:21:15):
I was sort of like, no, I'm kidding. Why you
made me laugh again?

Speaker 2 (01:21:20):
Congrats two for two, baby, So we took a couple
of days in between recording part one and part two.
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.

Speaker 3 (01:21:39):
I so in the interesting days, I've talked about the
Michael Lewis of it all with a couple of different people,
just to see if I was like 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 know that he wrote The blind Side. Oh good, okay, yeah,

(01:22:02):
and then when they found out that he wrote the
blind Side, They're like, oh, yeah, I could see that
he is a you know, he's an honorary bastard.

Speaker 2 (01:22:10):
Yeah, maybe he is kind of a hack.

Speaker 3 (01:22:12):
Yeah right, well yeah, they were like, yeah, Michael Lewis, Moneyball,
the Big Short, And You're like, and another thing, how
did that? How how do we collectively forget that he
wrote that? It feels like he got away with something.

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):
Yeah, And 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. I'm ready. Everyone, especially like all of
these history Twitter podcast people, are so livid that Ridley
Scott's basically like, who can say what the truth of

(01:22:50):
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 the guy who made Gladiator.

Speaker 3 (01:23:00):
Well, and also I appreciate because all biopics are you know, nonsense,
yeah or shit right, and so you're like, well, this
is the one director who's going to say my biopic is.

Speaker 2 (01:23:11):
Kind of horse it's just lies, which also very appropriate
for Napoleon. But what is the line with that? Why
Why am I angry at Michael Lewis for what he's doing?
And I don't really care.

Speaker 3 (01:23:23):
Yeah, he's a journalist, there is.

Speaker 2 (01:23:26):
He's a journalist. For one, he's not the director of
the fucking Gladiator, the least accurate movie about Rome ever made.

Speaker 3 (01:23:32):
It's been a great it's been a great week for
like weird old guys who we could argue had have
peaked creatively, 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 stour that
he was like always worried about running out of time
and he never knew what his last movie would be.

(01:23:55):
And Ridley Scott was asked to like 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,
another day of stress.

Speaker 2 (01:24:10):
Honestly, those are both completely valid answers. I yeah, I
refuse to be a part of some sort of like
pretending that what Scott is saying isn't as valid as
what Scorsese's saying. There are two ways to deal with mortality,
one of the.

Speaker 3 (01:24:25):
Two genders of creative mortality.

Speaker 2 (01:24:27):
Yeah, yeah, 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 I
got shit to do. I gotta move, I gotta have
the answer to this fucking question. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:24:37):
Meanwhile, Robert Paul Schrader is on Facebook, and Paul Schrader's
posting about Taylor Swift in a kind of horny way.
So like, yeah, the old men are just they're on
one this week, and Michael Lewis walks among them.

Speaker 2 (01:24:50):
There's only one old, great creative who has taken the reasonable,
respect like answer to mortality, and it's John Carperdue, who's like, Nah,
I'm done directing movies. I'm gonna get high, play video games,
watch basketball the rest of my life.

Speaker 3 (01:25:05):
And God bless God, bless them.

Speaker 2 (01:25:07):
Yeah, God bless them. There's a man who understands what's
valuable in life, a thing that Sam Bankman Freed never understood.
And we and we're back, Yeah, we're back. So one
of the things that comes up a lot in Michael
Lewis's book is 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

(01:25:29):
like age forty to forty five, 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 3 (01:25:39):
I will say that that's true of many stand up comedians,
but I can't speak of that outside of that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:47):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's true, especially like
once you get really rich, it's 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,
and it's actually kind of ridiculous to me the idea
that like people in business after age forty four, like

(01:26:09):
Steve Jobs did all of his best shit like well
after that point, like his most influential like like evil
things and most like really successful businessmen are just kind
of getting started by their mid forties, right, because it
takes that much time to get that's momentum. You've got
a lot of evil left, You've got a lot of
horrible things left to do, plenty of time.

Speaker 3 (01:26:30):
First is in front of you.

Speaker 2 (01:26:31):
I think he's got three to five ethnic cleansings and
a minimum minimum Jamie, Yeah, maybe eight. You know, I
could see him having eight more ethnic cleansings.

Speaker 3 (01:26:41):
He does seem like someone who is just will like
have a kissinger like affinity for life.

Speaker 2 (01:26:47):
Yeah, so bankman Freed's I understand belief that like after
age forty five, 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. This is why he
felt like he had to 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,

(01:27:08):
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 fifty to fifty bet endlessly, right,
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

(01:27:29):
yourself and about your assets. 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. 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 let's not do that
one or you know, that's an insane risk. We need

(01:27:52):
to offset it with this stuff. They also did not
have a chief financial officer or a bunch of other
critical executive positions to me, Yeah, they had no SEA.

Speaker 3 (01:28:01):
That's one I've heard of. You should have that one.

Speaker 2 (01:28:04):
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. FTX also
did not have a board of directors, and they're lacking
a bunch of other very basic executive positions. And a
big part of why is that the only people Sam
feels like he can trust are like his friends, and

(01:28:25):
he has this deep aversion to bringing in adults, like
people who were not in their twenties, like his the
friends he went to college with. And shit, 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 forty five. All they did was worry, which, like, again,
given what happened, perhaps they auto have been.

Speaker 3 (01:28:45):
Maybe I'm just like sort of on one with the
idea that very few stand ups have a valuable thought
after forty five. But I would say now reflecting on it,
like Sam bankman Fred is using the improv troop approach
to have very high stakes business. Yes, like He's like, no,
I will only work with people I went to college with,

(01:29:05):
we know best. I don't want no fucking crusties in
the room. Like if he I mean? And we could
debate all day about whether Sam Bank mcfred 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. Soh yahsind of, it's difficult,
It's difficult.

Speaker 2 (01:29:25):
This is what Levenworth should be right. The military needs
to take stand up comedians into custody. I've always and
I'm on.

Speaker 3 (01:29:31):
A lot of lists. Yeah, you know how many bars
have performed into no people, I'm on a lot of lists.

Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
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. 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,
And I'm like, what the fuck do you think I
do all day? You think I don't know how much

(01:29:59):
money we have? Which is funny because 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. I didn't know where the money was. But
it's all somewhere, Like very silly thing to say, give
it what he's about to say.

Speaker 3 (01:30:19):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:30:20):
So, 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 through the eight months that
Sam was on house arrest. 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

(01:30:41):
were one of the biggest names in an industry, being
like a CFO is useless, I know where the money is,
and then their entire life explodes because they didn't know
what the money is. I would at at some point
asked him the question, Hey, was that maybe a bad idea?
Michael does not bring this up to Sam after the
collapse and any of the does of conversations that they've had,

(01:31:01):
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 into take over the
FTX after Sam like leaves and declares bankruptcy, a guy
named John Ray the Third. Now, I am not going

(01:31:23):
to go to bat for John Ray the third because
he he's John His name is John Ray the Third.

Speaker 3 (01:31:30):
Like that's the difficult name to go to bat for.

Speaker 2 (01:31:33):
Yeah, but he is. You know, he's the guy who
got brought into liquidate in Ran and he's he's kind
of a corporate undertaker. Right when a 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.

Speaker 3 (01:31:52):
I know, not the first or second.

Speaker 2 (01:31:54):
No, not the first or second. Those guys are useless.

Speaker 3 (01:31:56):
No fucking clowns. Okay, you're gonna want to bring in
the third?

Speaker 2 (01:31:59):
You need a j are three?

Speaker 3 (01:32:01):
I'm with you, so nicer.

Speaker 2 (01:32:04):
Yeah, it's interesting, like the degree to which he has
because this guy comes in later and I think because
he's boring. Michael Lewis finds him disgusting. Like I haven't
run into any info that he's like bad at what
he does. It's certainly not his fault, but Michael is
livid because he's this kind of like stodgy old businessman

(01:32:25):
and he doesn't understand Sam's special playground or like the
wonderful thing that he built, and he's just kind of
exasperated at how badly it all works.

Speaker 3 (01:32:33):
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. 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, guards

(01:32:56):
you're boring.

Speaker 2 (01:32:57):
There's nothing. Yeah, there's nothing sexy about him. He's just
trying to deal up, like clean up after a disaster.
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 nine billion dollars, right,
And the answer that Lewis has come to is that
money is all there, that he just didn't know where

(01:33:19):
nine billion dollars was. Oh yeah, he didn't steal it
or gamble it away. He just misplaced it due to
rank and competence that he committed because he was too
smart to keep track of things. And there's a I'm
going to read you a very Yeah, there's a really
fun quote there. He describes like Lewis describes FTX as

(01:33:41):
a real business, but he says that John Ray, who
like attacked it as the worst run company I'd ever seen,
was just too much of an idiot to like understand it, right.
He describes Ray trying to figure out what company assets
actually existed in what didn't, as quote, like an amateur
archaeologist who had stumbled upon a previously unknown civilization. Unable

(01:34:03):
to learn anything about its customs or language, he just
started digging, right. Likely, 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 monufental edifice.

Speaker 3 (01:34:19):
And 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. He's to sound like he
has a personal Jimminy cricket, So he's just saying shit
like his personal biases couldn't be more out.

Speaker 2 (01:34:41):
They wanted to rush this thing out, so you don't
have much time to edit it, right, True, Yeah, a
year to write and release a book is not a
long time.

Speaker 3 (01:34:50):
No, not enough time on one might.

Speaker 2 (01:34:52):
Not enough time, one might argue. And also Michael Lewis
has the kind of clout to make that not happen, 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.
Here's what Ray said shortly after taking over and getting
a look at ftx's finances, And this is from an

(01:35:14):
our article in Business Insider. At the hearing, Congresswoman and
Wagner of Missouri asked Ray to elaborate on the specific
ways FTX was worse than quote, one of the largest
corporate frauds in history. 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. They used QuickBooks, he added, referring

(01:35:37):
to the accounting software QuickBooks. Congresswoman Wagner asked for clarification.
QuickBooks very nice tool, not for a multi billion dollar company.
Ray confirmed, 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
is accounting.

Speaker 3 (01:35:53):
Yeah, I've done that and like that that's nuts.

Speaker 2 (01:35:59):
Yeah, that is like the close attitude too. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:36:02):
I was like, that's the closest thing I've come to debuting. Like, Wow,
if I was also the tasked with multi billion dollars,
I'd be like, I don't know, yeah, books, we will
we go to Turbo tax, what do we do? I
would like hire a CFO me.

Speaker 2 (01:36:14):
Yeah, I would hire someone who's done that before.

Speaker 3 (01:36:17):
Right, Yeah, yeah, quick Books Holy shit.

Speaker 2 (01:36:20):
Yeah. So you can decide whose interpretation sounds more realistic,
John Ray recognize 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

(01:36:40):
what Michael Lewis refers to FTX as is Sam's world, right,
This is a he basically treats the whole situation as like, yes,
Sam's Sam lived in this magical world and you know
his business was actually secretly good, but it encountered this
temporary issue and he was forced out and then John
Ray came in and he tore it all apart because

(01:37:01):
he's just the mean, old, grumpy businessman.

Speaker 1 (01:37:03):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:37:04):
That's really like the thrust of Michael Lewis's book, 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,
Sam is a gaming addict. That's what when you can't
like handle your basic functions because you're too busy playing

(01:37:28):
storybook brawl. That's an addiction, right, yeah, yeah, And it's
interesting both because storybook bral was made by his childhood
friend and he used consumer funds to purchase it. 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

(01:37:50):
describe it as like a middle brow app game. He
describes it as like better than chess, like more complex
than chess, a greater intellectual expert are 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 perfectly calculable Chess. He'd

(01:38:12):
have liked better if robot voices wired into the board.
Hollered rule changes at random intervals. Nights are now rooks,
all bishops must leave the board, Ponds 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. The game Sam loved allowed for
only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading Crypto was like that,

(01:38:34):
and I think getting.

Speaker 3 (01:38:35):
Fucking ridiculous like, is there any chance that Sam Bankman
Freed paid Michael Lewis to say this shit?

Speaker 2 (01:38:42):
Like, I maybe I don't know that he the money
one of the things.

Speaker 3 (01:38:46):
That there's no proof that he isn't dense. But this
is like above and beyond.

Speaker 2 (01:38:53):
The reason why I get that a lot. They're like, well,
Michael Lewis is obviously bribed, but like, Michael Lewis is
very rich. I don't know how you could bribe Michael Lewis,
especially after you lose your money.

Speaker 3 (01:39:04):
Yeah, and even if he wasn't from money, he'd be there.

Speaker 2 (01:39:07):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, 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 this is his first time ever
hearing about games, and so he thinks Sam is brilliant
and special because he played them obsessively. I also think,
you know, we just did our episodes on Lord John Aspinall,
who was like this this British gambling maven who took

(01:39:30):
away who like basically got the upper class of the
England and like the mid century to just gamble away
all of their fucking money. 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 Shamanda fair, which is a kind of
bacca where basically there's no skill involved. It's pure it's

(01:39:53):
as close to pure chance as possible. Because there was
this like change in the kind of gambling the upper
class like to do. And I've heard thee or ice.
It's basically just like, well, these people had nothing in
their life but gambling. Right, 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 the effectively a complete chance.

Speaker 3 (01:40:14):
And 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.

Speaker 2 (01:40:22):
That sounds boring, Yeah, you've just they've they are just
insulated from anything thrilling because they're insulated from any real danger, right.

Speaker 3 (01:40:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:31):
And so I think Sam being this kind of rich,
sheltered kid that's Lewis interprets. It's like he's too smart
to play a game like chess. He wants a game
where he doesn't actually know what's going on, and a
lot of that's random. 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 like, and

(01:40:53):
he put a lot of other people's money on those bets. Yeah, 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's it is very boomer.
Magic had been created in the early nineteen nineties by
a young mathematician named Richard Garfield. It was the first
kind of a new kind of game, designed perhaps for

(01:41:14):
a new kind of person. 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,
Games Workshop had started making Warhammer years before Magic came out,
Like all games like this have existed forever.

Speaker 3 (01:41:30):
I couldn't hear you over the sound of imagining Garfield
the cat saying.

Speaker 2 (01:41:34):
That, Yeah, which Garfield, Bill Murray or are we talking Chris Pratt?

Speaker 3 (01:41:39):
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 there. 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 It's like a it's

(01:42:02):
his infinity punishment. He'll be rich, but he can never
leave the room.

Speaker 2 (01:42:06):
I'm okay with that. Actually, yeah, let's.

Speaker 3 (01:42:08):
Keep him in the room. He doesn't have any good ideas.

Speaker 2 (01:42:11):
No, no, keep him in the room. Every every six
years he can come out to do another interminable Jurassic
World movie.

Speaker 3 (01:42:18):
No, the villain was Locus.

Speaker 2 (01:42:22):
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. Here's another clip from
sixty Minutes where he describes how Sam treated effective altruism.
That that ties into this and this is remarkable.

Speaker 6 (01:42:43):
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, 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 get you end up saving a
certain number of lives. But you're only one doctor. But
if you can pay forty people to become doctors in Africa,

(01:43:04):
are gonna You're gonna save forty times a number of lives.

Speaker 2 (01:43:07):
This is like a strategy game.

Speaker 6 (01:43:08):
Well you don't understand Sam Backmfreed. Unless you understand, then
he turns everything into a game. Everything is gamified.

Speaker 3 (01:43:15):
He's describing a pyramid scheme of doctors.

Speaker 2 (01:43:18):
Yes, am I like?

Speaker 3 (01:43:21):
And he's saying this on sixty minutes, I like, I
cannot put wrap my Okay, now I am like taking
him being paid off like or paid on or we're
off off the table because you're just like, this is ridiculous.
This is like you're stupid, like to like the fact
that people somehow collectively forgot that you wrote the blind
Side on Fire to say this shit on sixty minutes,

(01:43:44):
it just like, is it's what he's describing a pyramid scheme?

Speaker 2 (01:43:49):
He sure is, he is describing a fucking pyramid scheme.
And also like this whole he turns everything into a
game like because the through life connection there.

Speaker 3 (01:44:01):
Is like Chi saw for good.

Speaker 2 (01:44:03):
Yes, 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. And the through line
you're meant to make is 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 a significant percentage of the US economy.

(01:44:25):
It's based around taking the logic and addictive strategies game
developers use and applying it to every imaginable industry, right,
Like that's fucking everywhere, like Sam is again not unique
in this. And also the 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, well,

(01:44:47):
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 3 (01:44:57):
And also, I mean to that point, it doesn't sound
like would I trust knowing what I do of Sam
Bankman Fried'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 doing either of those
in Africa.

Speaker 2 (01:45:16):
Yeah, yeah, no, he would, he would never have, right,
Like but yeah, anyway, but.

Speaker 3 (01:45:21):
It sounds like he I mean, maybe I'm like, you know,
giving him too much credit and he's playing a game
of forty chess, but it doesn't seem that way, and
I like, he sounds ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:45:31):
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 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, because I'm sure

(01:45:51):
he thinks that way about the books he's written. He's
had so many of them adapted, 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, m hm, yeah,
So I 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

(01:46:15):
Big Bang Theory audience.

Speaker 3 (01:46:16):
Yeah, like he's already he's like, oh yeah, who's hot
right now, Paul Mezcal, we'll we'll dye his hair. It's
gonna be fucking great.

Speaker 2 (01:46:23):
No, I think they should have had Timothy Schallomey. I
think they should have had Timothy Shallow may do like
a 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 time.

Speaker 3 (01:46:36):
Don't talk about Rubbert Pattens in that way.

Speaker 2 (01:46:39):
Or I want to see Timothy do a Christian bale
to look like Sam Bankman Freed. That's that sounds fun.

Speaker 3 (01:46:48):
I just worry about Timothy Shalomey. It looks like if
you like touch him, he may shatter. I just worry
about him. He looks a frail.

Speaker 2 (01:46:55):
Yeah, that's the right thing. He looks like he's got consumption.
Yeah like that. They would say that about him in
the distant past.

Speaker 3 (01:47:03):
Yeah, And that's like if Sam Bankmin Freed is looking
heartier than you are, Like you're in trouble, my man.

Speaker 2 (01:47:09):
Uh huh, yeah, 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. This paragraph occurs right
after the FTX customers pull a run on the bank,
annihilating its cash reserves and starting its collapse. Is like
the employees are all huddled inside their thirty million dollar
Bahamas suites to try to figure out how to fix things.

(01:47:32):
Nishad was agitated with Sam in a way that Romnick
had never seen, at one point, turning on him and screaming,
will you please fucking stop playing storybook brawl? And I
like that anecdote, but it gets to another frustrating issue
with Going Infinite, which is that Michael Lewis has all
the ingredients for a great modern Charis story of Hubris
and the Fall, but making it work tonally would require

(01:47:55):
him to see these things that are obvious warning signs
as warning signs and structure his that way, right, and
then you get some Catharsis in the payoffs. But these
warning signs are just sort of scattered around. 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. Another example of a valid through line

(01:48:16):
Lewis seems to have missed is Bankman Freed's complete disregard,
even distaste, for the competence of the women around him.
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. 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

(01:48:37):
really have a soul. This is a lot more obvious
in some context 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. What's the point in dating someone you physically
can't make happy. I have a long history of getting
bored in claustrophobic. That says 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.

(01:48:58):
I feel conflicted about what I want. Sometimes I really
want to be with you. Sometimes I want to stay
at work for sixty hours straight and not think about
anything else. And so I.

Speaker 3 (01:49:07):
Want to say that I have this amount of self
love to not fall for this, but I can't even
say that one hundred percent. I just really feel for Carolyn,
and 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, where you're like, oh no, this is

(01:49:28):
like it's like queen fiction of like there's only one
day and she loves me. I know, I know she's
a disadvantage.

Speaker 2 (01:49:36):
And it's it's difficult because, like Lewis discusses kind of
Sam's inability to be like functional with the people in
his life because and he clearly has a thing like
he lets he funds another another exchange by another woman
in Crypto who he tries.

Speaker 3 (01:49:56):
To date women in Cristis.

Speaker 2 (01:49:58):
Yeah, he's got this kind of thing going on. But
Lewis kind of always writes off his behaviors like, well,
you know, he just he was too depressed, he was
too he can't foe. He's too brilliant to like be it's.

Speaker 3 (01:50:11):
A torture genius playbook of just like, oh, and he's
horrible to women, but only because his mind is like
there's I mean, they did the same. This happens every
ten years, like that happened with Zuckerberg. 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

(01:50:33):
good ideas that it was like pressing on the woman
respect Like yeah, it's ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:50:39):
Kind of Meanwhile, when Lewis is describing like why Carolyn
did what she did, he includes the lane, which 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. She's just so desperate for affection
that she would like do anything for it. Like I

(01:51:01):
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 3 (01:51:09):
I would have I would have a fair amount of
guesses as to why that may be, uh, and the
way that it seems like in many ways that you know,
Lewis has seen himself in Sam, and like, if you're
especially if you're used to like writing profiles of very successful,
eccentric people, which he is, if this is the precedent

(01:51:31):
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 fucking And then also on
the other end of Carolyn being characterized as this like
desperate for affection person, I try to like tap into

(01:51:52):
that of like, God, if any of my personal correspondents
came out, I'd be fucking cooked.

Speaker 2 (01:51:59):
Oh it would be devastating so.

Speaker 3 (01:52:01):
Many people and single thing. Yeah, of course, yeah, everyone's
desperate for affection.

Speaker 2 (01:52:08):
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. He
uses terms like he talks about his priors, which is
like it's a way of like bringing Baysian mathematics into
personal decisions and all you 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,

(01:52:30):
that's largely what that means. These are like my pre
existing biases. But saying pre existing biases like doesn't sound
as smart as my priors. 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? Ers is this outcome? And then I
do the thing with the highest expected value, right, Which

(01:52:51):
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. That's
human nature.

Speaker 5 (01:52:58):
We are.

Speaker 2 (01:52:59):
We are creatures of comfort in a lot of ways.
But there's Sam is just dressing up selfishness in lines
like this. Sam wanted to do whatever at any given
moment off her the highest expected value, and his estimate
of her Carolyn's expected value seemed to peak right before
they had sex and plummet immediately after. And like, oh,

(01:53:19):
that's no different than a lot of guys in their twenties.

Speaker 3 (01:53:22):
That's it just sounds like a fucking guy.

Speaker 2 (01:53:25):
Oh so you're saying he got horny and then he
didn't care about her afterwards, Well, that's not special.

Speaker 3 (01:53:31):
Like how I I can't relate. Wow, yeah that is.

Speaker 2 (01:53:36):
That's not just millions of men, that's millions of people.

Speaker 3 (01:53:39):
Like it's so I mean even just outside of his
relationships with women, in his relationship with Carolyn, I don't know.
It gives me sort of like mensa PTSD, where there
is this like two hander where it's either you can't
understand what I'm doing because I am a super genius
and you are not operating a level you could never

(01:54:01):
understand why I am fucking up at this tremendous rate.
And then if they're challenged enough, it's like, well, actually
I'm you know it. 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. It's actually I'm using quick books
because I don't give a fuck. It's like either I

(01:54:23):
am a genius or I don't care, and there's nothing
in between. And it's like what is in between is
just the fact that they're full of shit.

Speaker 2 (01:54:32):
Yeah yeah, and you know who else is full of
no time to head to ads? Ah boy, I sure
do love ads. Those were some good ones. So yeah,

(01:54:53):
So we're back. We're talking about Sam Bakman Free's issues
with women, as chronicled by Michael Lewis, who does do
his credit make point of noting that all of the
companies moves as CEO from the US 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

(01:55:16):
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 just a can't deal with confrontation. Like, yeah, that's
not special again, millions of us.

Speaker 3 (01:55:35):
Every conflict avoidant person has their approach. It knows no gender,
but it skews towards one. Yeah, my last boyfriend bought
an upright base. That was how bless is sorry, I
don't rot.

Speaker 2 (01:55:53):
Yeah, 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 because there is a relate. Like, I'm not
trying to discount his misogyny, which is certainly a thing,
but like, I think the bigger through line with Sam

(01:56:13):
that is present outside of justice dealing with like the
women that he was in relationships with and work 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, This attitude that like you're seeing
now with these AI freaks, where they don't think that

(01:56:35):
there's any value in the human creation of art because
they don't understand it. Like they're willing to like have
an AI just like come up with some crap that's
vaguely patterned off of a historic See, isn't this picture
of like, you know, isolation an anomy in modern society
better now that we've turned it into a bunch of
friends having brunch outside of a cafe. Look, it's much

(01:56:56):
brighter now and prettier. It's like, no, that's not the
point of the art. Don't understand, But like they don't, Yeah,
it's this thing.

Speaker 3 (01:57:02):
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 artistic instinct we would need to create.
Only humans would get it.

Speaker 2 (01:57:17):
This idea that like I am smart and therefore if
I don't understand something, it's not important, right, It's it's
something for like people who are less than me to
deal with. This is why the company fell apart. 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

(01:57:38):
treats like everybody who's not him, and I find that interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:57:42):
I do too.

Speaker 2 (01:57:44):
Yeah, yeah, good, 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. 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? Funny,

(01:58:06):
because Sam did not know how much money they had.
But at the climax of the book, after FTX is crumbled,
Lewis goes into detail to discuss all the money that
was recovered by John Ray. Quote at the end of
June twenty yeah, the third. At the end of June
twenty twenty three, John Ray filed a report on his
various collections. Today the debtors have recovered approximately seven billion

(01:58:27):
in liquid assets, he wrote, and they anticipate additional recoveries
seven point three billion to be exact. 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, 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

(01:58:49):
he loses four million dollars and they think that he's
lost four million dollars in investor money, and he's a
dick about it, and later they find it like he
had just misplaced it, basically, 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. In this

(01:59:10):
meanie John Ray thinks it's bad to lose several billion dollars,
But Lewis is saying is not true. He is kind
of lying here. Maybe he just maybe it's an honest mistake.
I don't know, but it's not accurate because for one thing,
seven ish seven point three billion has been found, almost
nine billion is missing, So that's one and a half

(01:59:32):
billion dollars unaccounted for. Still, that's still one of the
largest financial frauds in history.

Speaker 3 (01:59:38):
Right significant. That's why maybe as much as two billion, yeah,
does even if you're trying to get through to someone
who knows nothing about finance. The second number, the missing number,
is bigger than this first.

Speaker 2 (01:59:51):
The number good. He tries to cut 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 a lot of that money went to
other shady crypto people who don't bank in the US.
Why do you think the money's gonna come back?

Speaker 1 (02:00:09):
Well?

Speaker 3 (02:00:09):
See this is interesting because now, ugh, I feel bad
because I know Michael Lewis is not the bastard of
the episode. However, if I'm applying Sam, if we're applying
Sam bankman Free's theory that you do not do any
valuable work after forty five, that may in fact apply
to Michael Lewis. Yeah. Like sounds like maybe he's lost
the thread because it's the way that he's talking about money.

(02:00:32):
I mean, and I have not read this book.

Speaker 2 (02:00:34):
Well you're just.

Speaker 3 (02:00:37):
That's why they pay you the big blunt, but like
to 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 the of the Blindside,
which everyone forgets that he wrote like it calls his
entire body of work in the question.

Speaker 2 (02:00:57):
Yeah, yeah, and it's like, yeah, just the ridiculousness of
being like, well, look, guys, seven you know, they've recovered
seven billion out of nine point three 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, Like this idea that everyone's going

(02:01:17):
to get their money back is not true. But Lewis,
in order to continue believing that Sam was a super genius.
He has to have this kind of tragic store where
like he didn't really lose the money, it was a misunderstanding.
It's all unfair 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. And

(02:01:39):
I'm going to play you this clip. It's the most
revealing clip that I found. And this is from an
interview he did with on a YouTube channel called Intelligence
Squared after the FTX collapse, like after his book came out.
So while Sam is on trial, basically okay, seven.

Speaker 6 (02:01:53):
Point three billion, so it's one point three billion that's
missing plus it and there's still more to and.

Speaker 2 (02:01:59):
It's more than that, it's more thought.

Speaker 6 (02:02:01):
This is where today today the prosecution, the prosecution sent
emotion to the court saying can we please not talk
about the possibility the customers are all going to get
their money back? And and and that in particular, can
we you're gonna let me finish?

Speaker 3 (02:02:21):
My god, I think well, I care is the fact
that at the very least it's important you don't think
you do think it's important. I think at the very
least he's irresponsible.

Speaker 6 (02:02:33):
Of course, I'm not saying he's not irresponsible. I'm saying
it's just different than you think.

Speaker 3 (02:02:39):
Okay, okay, a few observations. First of all, to pay.
Second of all, uploaded that is right. His head is
not looking real colors. It's not giving matching color. Second
observation upload date four weeks ago, gnarly right. Third observation,

(02:03:01):
obviously he cuts off a woman aggressively to be wrong.
And then finally it's just the 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 be
to see Michael Lewis just spew bullshit, and yet fifteen

(02:03:24):
people show up to watch me butt chug a quart
of milk.

Speaker 2 (02:03:27):
It's ridiculous, Yeah, Jamie. Though, here's the thing. This is
the difference between.

Speaker 3 (02:03:32):
You know, it's the same.

Speaker 2 (02:03:33):
The culture is the difference between the 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, you butt chugging the Contents of
Infinite Jest was a Parthenon level work of art. It
will be with.

Speaker 3 (02:03:50):
Us misinterest in your time, misunderstood. It's just like he's
in like a fucking cathedral, though, I mean it.

Speaker 2 (02:03:58):
Does look like he's in And think, Sophie, can you
bring up a freeze frame of his face at like
twelve fifty seven in that because he is doing and
I think you should leave face like he is. He
is almost a perfect character from one of those fucking sketches.

Speaker 3 (02:04:13):
If Tim Robinson.

Speaker 2 (02:04:16):
Could do this, Tim Robinson could do an amazing job
of this. 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. That like, yeah, Lewis is definitely doing that kind.

Speaker 3 (02:04:31):
Of face in this God right there.

Speaker 2 (02:04:39):
That's he's doing it, Tim Robinson.

Speaker 3 (02:04:43):
He's really Oh boy, it's enough doubling down on my
two on the two pay theory, right yeah, no, that
hair to see if we've got the if we've got
the Veneers to match.

Speaker 2 (02:04:55):
But he's too rich to not have veneers.

Speaker 3 (02:04:58):
I aspire to veneers. I just want to have exactly
that much money.

Speaker 2 (02:05:03):
I wanted to you how angry he gets there, because
we're going to address the actual facts of his claim. Now,
even if you take Lewis at his word, which is
that it's basically fine because they were covered seven point
three out of like nine point three billion dollars, he's
obfuscating the truth. It is accurate that Ray has announced
FTX customers will see ninety percent of every dollar of

(02:05:23):
recovered assets returned, which I would still call that problematic
because if somebody stole ten percent of your bank account,
you'd be kind of miffed. But that is even not
what it seems like. And I'm quoting from Investipedia here
to be clear, the ninety percent 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.

(02:05:45):
That doesn't necessarily mean customers will gain access to ninety
percent of their assets that were left on the exchange. Rather,
customers will gain access to ninety percent of the funds
FTX is able to distribute to their creditors. FTX and
FTXUS had an estimated eight point seven billion dollars combined shortfall.
By the time the crypto firm filed for bankruptcy, roughly
six point nine percent roughly six point nine billion dollars

(02:06:08):
of that shortfall, including a Bahama's real estate portfolio, has
been recovered. Let's consider Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market
capulation as a capitalization as a proxy for the broader
cryptocurrency markets. On November eleventh of last year, the petition date,
bitcoin was trading at around seventeen thousand. On Friday, it
crossed thirty thousand. So simply put, if the current plan
goes through, you'd likely get eighty five percent of the

(02:06:30):
dollar value of your cryptocurrency had held on FTX as
a flast November, even if the same points have almost
doubled in value today. So one of those like both,
he's 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. Like people have
had to sell their homes and shit because like they

(02:06:51):
had all of their money like that. There's harm here, right,
That's what the courts aretaining. 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. I'm not This
isn't the most sympathetic population, but that is not relevant
to determining whether or not Sam has legal He's stealing

(02:07:12):
fifteen or twenty percent of a bunch of people's savings
accounts is a substantial crime.

Speaker 3 (02:07:18):
The legal question is is it a scam, which like, yes,
you know, and I'm sure that like everyone who understandably
because I walk amongst them, like everyone who was seeing
this happen a couple years ago up to very recently,
we're like, yeah, you're what are you talking about? This
happening is like a very you know, it's like easy
to cheer it on, but it's also like, yeah, no,

(02:07:40):
Sam Bankmtrede was taking advantage of every possible mark he could.

Speaker 2 (02:07:45):
Yeah, and yeah, and people are still suffering ongoing harmer
as a result of it. He's acting like Lewis is
acting as if there wasn't really anyone hurt, and it's like, well, no,
like even if all of them, which will not happen
at least about twenty percent of the money of depositor
money is just gone, probably more. But even if he
hadn't done that, if you're still locked out of your

(02:08:07):
money for two years because a guy illegally gambled with it,
are you going to be fine that it came back eventually. No,
you still didn't have that money for years, and that's
a problem for you. That's a crime.

Speaker 3 (02:08:19):
I mean, And I would be 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.

Speaker 2 (02:08:39):
And it's like gaming the rich, gaming the rich because
like larrydn't. 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. I'm not
saying the rest of this show. I mean most moms do, right,

(02:09:00):
He's pretty popular amongst the moms.

Speaker 3 (02:09:02):
In the comments. I don't know if my mom knows who.

Speaker 2 (02:09:04):
I mean, all the women in my family were Seinfeld fans.

Speaker 3 (02:09:08):
So does your mom watch curb message?

Speaker 2 (02:09:10):
No, no, no, but Seinfeld? Oh yeah yeah my mom come back. Yeah.
So anyway, Michael Lewis, Yeah, it's interesting to me, like
the fact that the idea, the fact that Sam bankmin
Freed stole money from depositors, because that's what it is
when you take money out of one company illegally and

(02:09:30):
use it to gamble in another company, that's stealing. Michael
Lewis never uses the term stolen to describe what Sam did,
and he basically goes to great lengths to claim that
Sam misplaced all this money.

Speaker 3 (02:09:42):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (02:09:43):
This is again wildly inaccurate. 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 US dollars that
customers put in the exchange, so customers would put US
dollars into FTX and then use it to buy cryptocurrency, right,

(02:10:04):
But those US 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. 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 enough reserve in there to
cover the value of their deposits. Sam instead took all

(02:10:27):
that money and put it into Alameda. And there's evidence
that it like never it went directly into Alameda. 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.
Lewis depicts it as an honest mistake, and here's the

(02:10:48):
New Yorker quote. Lewis finds it not only wholly implausible
that this was in fact a gigantic accounting error, explained
by ftx's difficulties securing bank accounts. As Lewis concludes, his
story implausible as it's sounded, remained irritatingly difficult to disprove.
And Lewis very gently insinuates that Ellison, inover her head,
might have made some very bad decisions. And in court,

(02:11:10):
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, he ordered his employees
to hide from customers that their money was going straight
into another company. This was proven when they like actually,

(02:11:31):
during the court case, they had the people who programmed
the exchange on Sam's behalf like post code, 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.
Prosecutors questioned Wang, who was the guy who was coding

(02:11:52):
the exchange, about the FTX insurance fund, which was ostensibly
supposed to protect both FDx and its customers from trades
that went badly even more quick then the exchange's risk
engine could account for. FTX published the funds supposed balance
on their website and bragged widely about its existence, including
a testimony to US Congress. However, according to Wang, the
numbers showed on the website was falsified. And the question

(02:12:15):
is like, is this a real number, Wang, No, so
it's a fake number. Yes, was the real number higher
or lower than the fake number lower? 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

(02:12:37):
up by cash, right, so we can't collapse the way
that other exchanges do. 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. That
they would regularly brag, we have this much money in
our insurance fund.

Speaker 3 (02:12:53):
It can number accurate. Like no.

Speaker 2 (02:12:56):
All they were doing is so the code snippets show
that like they had Sam ordered Nashad Sing to write
some code that would update the insurance fund amount randomly
by adding it to the daily trading volume, like the
amount of Basically they would it would calculate how much
has been traded today, and that would multiply that by
a random number somewhere around seventy five hundred and then

(02:13:20):
divide it by a billion, So it would this was how.

Speaker 3 (02:13:23):
An alleged it was. Just describe how you do business.

Speaker 2 (02:13:27):
They're like, Bulso there was never an insurance, a real
insurance fund of any like meaningful amount of money. They
just pretended it was there by having a computer do
a random equation, so it seemed like it was fluctuating
over time.

Speaker 3 (02:13:40):
Yeah, that's that's not legal to do.

Speaker 2 (02:13:44):
No, No, that's that there.

Speaker 3 (02:13:46):
And I feel like this, like this level of like
splitting hairs in the New Yorker wouldn't happen unless the
two main players, Michael Lewis and Sam Bake Midfreed, weren't
tremendously privileged 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 2 (02:14:07):
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 falling, Like the
New york article is very critical of him. It's bringing
up that he is not calling Sam Bankman free to
fucking con man when he clearly is right.

Speaker 3 (02:14:23):
So they're like headline, Michael Lewis, Loki fell off.

Speaker 2 (02:14:28):
Yeah, Loki, he fell off. That's right, Molly I also
brings up something else that was left out of court,
but the prosecution published evidence of it, and I found
this really telling. Elsewhere in the code, it's possible to
observe that the amount of FTT, which is the token
created that represented basically voting shares. It was like it
was ftx's funny money was actually represented by a hard

(02:14:49):
coded value in the user interface and was not pulling
from an external data source to get a real number.
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. It was just it
was doing the calculation on your own machine, right, which

(02:15:10):
is evidence that like, there was never any attempt to
give people accurate information. Wow, it's fun stuff. There's other
fund reveals during the court case.

Speaker 3 (02:15:19):
For example twists. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:15:20):
During ftx's days as a functioning business, a lot of
crypto people notice there was a potential conflict of interest
between FTX and Alameda. They were like, hey, it seems
like you run both these companies and like traders on
Alameda are using our trading on FTX. Is it possible
that they're getting preferential treatment on the exchange that you
also owned. There's a really telling Twitter conversation on Molly's

(02:15:44):
blog where someone asks this and SBF says, Alameda is
the liquidity provider, but their account is just like everyone else's,
and the respondent rightfully says, I guess we're just supposed
to trust you, And it turned out they were right
to be worried. One of the chief selling points about
FTX is that it's crash proof. Right. Crypto exchanges have
this weird habit, like twenty years old now, of getting

(02:16:04):
really big and then collapsing, taking everyone's money with them.
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, everybody loses money
because one bad gambler gambled too much. One of ftx's
like selling points was that it was different. They had

(02:16:27):
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, so you can't
lose more money than you put in is the basic idea.
So that's how it was supposed to work, and that's
how it worked initially. But the limit that Alameda had
for its gambling to make sure that it couldn't get

(02:16:48):
in over its skis, was removed later on Sam Bankman
Freed's orders, and in court, Gary Wang, Sam's business partner,
explained how Sam directed them to do this, explain 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. Sam Bankman
Freed kept asking him to increase their credit limit to

(02:17:11):
prevent it from happening. According to Wang, the limit was
originally set to a few million dollars, but then it
was increased to a billion. After they ran up against
that limit too, Bankman Freed 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 sixty
five billion. And when I read that, what I see
is this is a gambler in Vegas who's like taking
out loans to keep gambling because he's run out of money,

(02:17:33):
Like he's like, hey.

Speaker 3 (02:17:34):
You just imagine like someone like on their knees in
like shitty pinstripe. Yeah's being like, come on, man, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:17:41):
Give me, just give me some credit. Man, I'm good
for it.

Speaker 3 (02:17:44):
But he got up to sixty five billion in credit.

Speaker 2 (02:17:48):
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, which is, by the way,
that's my interpretation.

Speaker 3 (02:18:01):
There, I mean there. 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 Neopets. And if
anyone has proof that Sam Bankminfreed was a Neopets user,
he just sounds like the worst version of a Neopets user.

(02:18:24):
To me, the worst endgame for a Neopets user is
what you've been describing to me for for several hours.

Speaker 2 (02:18:31):
And I think you and I were not invested in
Sam Bankman Freed ever being particularly smart. So we can
see this Lewis, He's a Neopets userwis, I bet I
was better at it than him. Well, that's the other thing.
He was never very good at games. Like people found
his like League of Legends account and were like, yeah,
he was mid Like I'm sure he wasn't good at

(02:18:51):
storybook Brawl, right, Like, he's just he was never good
at this.

Speaker 3 (02:18:55):
But it was the first time that Michael Lewis had
heard of story But yeah, so Sam bank Freed said
he was the best at it, why not believe him?

Speaker 2 (02:19:02):
Yeah, and that's 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.

Speaker 3 (02:19:12):
But like, you're not a bank man.

Speaker 2 (02:19:14):
It's hard to portray someone as smart if they're just
addicted to gambling, right, because that's not a smart person thing.
It Actually a lot of smart people are horrible addicts
in a variety of ways.

Speaker 3 (02:19:22):
But like, but it's a serious press.

Speaker 2 (02:19:25):
In a Hollywood way. Make it look like somebody's a
genius if they just can't control themselves, right.

Speaker 3 (02:19:31):
Yeah, it's a serious, serious problem.

Speaker 2 (02:19:33):
Yeah. Yeah, and again, no shame on people who have
that problem. But like that that does not work with
how Lewis wants to portray him, right, and yeah, speaking
of things that don't work.

Speaker 3 (02:19:46):
Shit, everything you're about to advertise.

Speaker 2 (02:19:49):
We won't have to work if you purchase these products.

Speaker 3 (02:19:52):
Okay, good, good self crush.

Speaker 1 (02:19:54):
Yeah, I actually will continue to work more accurate.

Speaker 2 (02:20:00):
Yeah, both both true. We're back. 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 NFTX would have done the things that
I just described if they hadn't meant to disguise the

(02:20:21):
reality of their business from the world, which is fraud. Right.
The reality is that Sam Bankman Freed used to positor
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. Past a certain point.
Most of his gambling was not him betting on cryptocurrencies.

Speaker 5 (02:20:39):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:20:40):
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 dollars Super Bowl ads, that was a gamble he
was pulling a slot machine on his own chances of
ascending to the halls of power, right, sounds like yeah,
yeah yeah. One of my favorite side bits from the

(02:21:01):
court cases that on the stand when she was being questioned,
Carolyn Ellison told everybody that Sam confided in her he
thought he'd had a five percent chance of becoming president
of the United States.

Speaker 3 (02:21:11):
Which, well, I mean it sounds ridiculous, but also like,
look at some of the dumbasses we've got. He's probably
not wrong that he eman. He at least could have
been like who is that fucking loser from Starbucks? He
could have always been that.

Speaker 2 (02:21:26):
Yeah, he could have. I think he could have had
a failed presidential but no, like yeah, oh yeah, no,
they're all dumb, Like Joe Biden and Donald Trump are
both have both done very stupid things, different kinds of
very stupid things, but they both have charisma.

Speaker 3 (02:21:40):
Right, that's true, that's.

Speaker 2 (02:21:42):
They But like, 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. Sam Bankman Free
just isn't like you don't become the president, if you
are avoid of charisma.

Speaker 3 (02:21:58):
No, we and we've learned that time and time.

Speaker 2 (02:22:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the thing, like he was
always all of his sudden rise to public prominence was
not based on him actually being interesting. 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,
in my general research on the crypto industry, and if
you're looking for actual good reading, don't buy Going Infinite.

(02:22:23):
You won't get anything valuable at it. If you do
want to get something valuable and a deeper understanding 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 Faux really good book, Number Go Up,
which I do recommend to people curious for the dark
side of crypto. Zeke also spent time with Sam in

(02:22:46):
the Bahamas, and I found this passage from his book
relevant to what I just mentioned. A few hours into
our conversation, bank man Freed told me he had to
make a call. 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 in walked a haughty man with a long,
scraggly beard, a pot belly, and mismatched socks, one of
them with a pac man design who was an employee

(02:23:08):
of FTX who'd stuck around to help bankman Freed try
to find an investor to rescue the exchange. I threw
out an easy question, why are you still here? I asked.
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 bankment Freed would ever get in trouble. I
firmly believe once somebody becomes a certain level of rich,
they're never poured again. He said, they don't go to jail,

(02:23:30):
nothing bad happens to them.

Speaker 3 (02:23:32):
Wait, he has his own Zuckerberg quote. He has his
own You can be unethical and still be late. That's
the way I live my life. Haha. Wait, read it
again for me so I can really take it in.

Speaker 2 (02:23:43):
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 poured again, they don't go
to jail, nothing bad happens to them.

Speaker 3 (02:23:55):
Poetry.

Speaker 2 (02:23:56):
Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing to think. In
that moment too, all of the smarter people have just
fled the island.

Speaker 3 (02:24:03):
And in that moment he was infinite that yeah, wow, wow.

Speaker 2 (02:24:07):
Yeah, speless. 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, like
like there's a lot had a lot of money. It
didn't go well for him. You know, bad things happened
to rich people too.

Speaker 3 (02:24:26):
Wow, And that's that's your main political stance, as I recall.

Speaker 2 (02:24:30):
Yeah, yeah, I will hang out with anybody rich because
nothing bad can happen to them. Obviously untrue. I kind
of suspect that that that sort of I don't know,
you know the fact that so much of what was said,
like Zeke Foe is probably is clearly someone who's smart
enough to like understand when he's being lied to by

(02:24:51):
these people and understand their fundamental absurdity, and that comes
across in his book. I don't think Lewis got that right.
He believed fundamentally in the fundament honesty at the center
of Sam Bankman Freed, and I kind of suspect that's
why he covered his face with his hands that day
in court. He's not a dumb man, and he must
have realized by that point the evidence that came out

(02:25:12):
in the trial was and made it undeniable that he
got conned too. One of the most remarkable things about
Going Infinite is how much detail Lewis provides about ftx's
collapse without ever calling Sam a liar. The Guardian's review
noted this too. He thought bankman Freed hadn't lied to
him at all, or at least that he'd only lied
by a mission, not by commission. Late in the book,
Lewis asks bankman Freed, what would you have done if

(02:25:34):
I'd ask you specifically about FTX customer funds being used
by Alameda? Bankman Freed admits that he would have changed
the subject or rustled up a word salad and whatever
the facades erected by other effective altruists. Lewis considers bankment
Freed 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. Lewis's refusal to believe

(02:25:56):
that Sam Bankman Freed is a liar in the most
venal base sense of the world word is based, I think,
on a sense of professional pride. 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 see as part of the Cash in
Ongoing Infinite, Michael Lewis launched a podcast Judging Sam The

(02:26:20):
Trial of Sam Bankman Freed.

Speaker 3 (02:26:22):
Oh it was a doe.

Speaker 2 (02:26:26):
Who?

Speaker 3 (02:26:27):
But everyone on this call knows that the first sign
that your life is about to be fucking torched. Yes,
is starting a podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:26:36):
That's right, right, It's the last refuse, refuge of fools
and scoundrels. Yeah, please pay for the cool sound free
subscription at what do we call it, Sophie so uh.
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, but I can say his

(02:26:59):
Sam Bankman Read 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. 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 3 (02:27:16):
That also gets Yeah. Then it's like my least favorite
part of every public radio and I love public radio,
but the broadcast where it begins with six minutes of
a guy stepping on leaves and you're like, oh my god,
I get it. You're in fucking New Hampshire in October.

Speaker 2 (02:27:31):
What hot fall where you NPR people leave? We understand, yes,
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 run time,
and like, look, is that lazy? Yes? Have we all
been there? Yes? So I simply can't throw stones at

(02:27:51):
this class house.

Speaker 3 (02:27:52):
What are what are you talking about? As someone who's
never had a daily podcast, I can this behavior because
I've never had to do it.

Speaker 2 (02:28:04):
So Lucas Lydia takes most of the have 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 3 (02:28:15):
Yeah, he was screaming at women in cathedrals. He was busy.

Speaker 2 (02:28:19):
Yeah, but he does occasionally come on and one of
the episodes that does shit like he shows up to
court on the day that Sam takes the trial or
it takes the stand in his own defense and you know,
during this portion where he's like Sam's being cross examined,
he says, I don't recall more than one hundred times.
Here's how a right up from the Verge summarizes his

(02:28:42):
time on the stand. Bank mcfreed's demeanor suggested a spoiled
child complaining he didn't get the biggest scoop of ice
cream at his birthday party. 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. We were
getting introduced to a document where Bankman Freed listed his
priorities including getting accounting right on FTX. Cohen and Bankman Freed.

(02:29:06):
Cohens's lawyer and bankman Freed used this to show how
devoted bankman Freed was to getting to the bottom of
the general fiasco with Alameda's money. 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. Getting accounting
right was ranked ninth, so so for the stories bankman

(02:29:27):
Freed wanted to tell, we had to rely on Bankman Freed.
We moved on to bankman Freed'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 Alimeter Research CEO, Carolynellis.

Speaker 3 (02:29:40):
God, this is more stand up behavior.

Speaker 2 (02:29:43):
The actual evidence suggests that Ellison is both a better
trader and much savvier than bankman Freed. She modeled out
her risk scenario that matched almost exactly what happened at FTX,
for instance, to try to keep him from sinking two
billion into venture investing, and like what happens is he's
putting you know, all this money and advertising into like
playing celebrities. He's putting like two billion dollars into these

(02:30:04):
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 otherwise the whole exchange could collapse. Sam
ignores her, the exchange collapses, and then he blames her
for not hedging, right, 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,

(02:30:25):
so that if no matter what happens, you can't lose
too much money, right. But there's no hedging the kind
of risks that FDx was taking because the fundamental risk
was we don't have enough money. If there's a run
on the bank, you.

Speaker 3 (02:30:37):
Know, well, it's like there are risk goes. We're never
gonna die. Like, you can't you can't hedge that. Yeah,
what is well to me is like everything you're describing
is ridiculous, and it makes total sense that it fucking
imploded in the catastrophic way that it did. But then
you also, I mean, so much of it sounds like

(02:30:59):
the kind of stuff that for example, michael Lewis might
report on is a tremendous scam that worked out great
for everybody.

Speaker 2 (02:31:07):
Yeah, 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. It is
wildly different from how michael Lewis describes how Sam reacts
on the stage, right, Oh okay, yeah, And it's interesting because,
like obviously most people were able to see, Oh yes,

(02:31:29):
Sam is just lying on the stand. He's obfuscating, he's
refusing to answer answer the question. But Michael Lewis not
only does Michael Lewis like being lied to by Sam
Bankman freed, he thinks Sam's defensive cloud of bullshit right
this like word salad, is better than the truth. And
he says this in his fucking podcast, Jamie, You're gonna
love this clip.

Speaker 7 (02:31:50):
Today. He didn't get in as much trouble as he
got yesterday, though not as.

Speaker 5 (02:31:54):
Nothing, but still a little bit more than other witnesses.

Speaker 2 (02:31:59):
That's true.

Speaker 7 (02:32:00):
And the bigger point is the judge is sitting there
listening to see if Sam is actually answering the.

Speaker 5 (02:32:05):
Question, because he knows he doesn't do that yet.

Speaker 7 (02:32:07):
Or generating a word salad for us all to consume.
And I was thinking about this again to day why
Sam's word salads are so fun, Like why he gets
waiting Like most people when they don't answer a question,
your alarm bells go off pretty quickly, like that you
just redirected in some way. He's really really good at
starting the answer in a place where you think, oh,

(02:32:29):
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, You're actually interested in
what he's saying.

Speaker 5 (02:32:40):
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. But then you're
thinking and you forget what you asked.

Speaker 7 (02:32:50):
That's exactly what happens.

Speaker 2 (02:32:52):
Yeah, so that's like he's just saying that. Like, yes,
Sam's lies. He's really good at lying, like 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
got to get up on the stage and bullshit. That's good.

Speaker 3 (02:33:12):
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, 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, and that like
exchange too is like no, like I know what you're saying,

(02:33:35):
but yeah, and even in what she's describing, like the
court approaches either he's a genius or he's like an
incompetent sweetie pie but you're just like or he's a
malevolent dumb ass, or he don't seem to be the
King con Man.

Speaker 2 (02:33:50):
Yeah, but like, yeah, I love this idea that like, yeah,
we're getting to see the real Sam, who is a
guy who never answers your action will question. But like
I want to continue the clip because Lewis says something
very very ridiculous right after this.

Speaker 7 (02:34:06):
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, You're actually interested in what he's saying.

Speaker 5 (02:34:22):
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. But then you're
thinking and you forget what you asked.

Speaker 7 (02:34:32):
That's exactly what happens. It's engaging. It's like, maybe it's
even better than the answer to the question.

Speaker 2 (02:34:40):
Like, rye, it's what you should ask.

Speaker 7 (02:34:43):
Maybe it's not even what you should have asked. That's
exactly right.

Speaker 2 (02:34:46):
Yeah, it's Sam the answer the question. Sam answers that
aren't what he's being asked or 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. 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,

(02:35:07):
which is him believing that Sam's outfit, his hairstyle, his
poor hygieneral evidence of his brilliance, right, Sam just didn't
have time to like take care of his appearance in
any way. He was too smart to waste any of it,
like his brain power on that 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

(02:35:29):
out of the water. The prosecutor followed with questions about
Sam's approach to public relations. Ellison explained he was trying
to cultivate an image of himself as a sort of
very smart competence somewhat acentric founder. I was sitting in
an overflow room on that day, so when the prosecutor asked,
how would you describe the defendant's personal appearance through twenty
twenty two, the room was allowed to erupt into laughter.

(02:35:50):
Ellison replied, he looked like he didn't put a lot
of effort into his personal appearance. He dressed sort of sloppery, sloppily,
and didn't cut his hair often. He said he thought
his hair had been very valuable. He said ever since
j Street, he thought he had gotten higher bonuses because
of his hair, and it was an important part of
ftx's narrative and image.

Speaker 3 (02:36:06):
God Yeah, first, embarrassing, but also I think, you know,
clearly predicated on the dipshit billionaires that came before him,
Like there is a clear aesthetic and a clear like
you know, slovenly genius thing that he's like, it's.

Speaker 2 (02:36:25):
Strategic and that's interesting, right, the fact that Sam is
standing on the shoulders of giants of Steve Jobs, unwashed shoulders,
like you know, Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie and whatever.

Speaker 3 (02:36:37):
Was like this genocideary that he wears.

Speaker 2 (02:36:40):
Yeah, yeah, 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 it decision and no,
what everyone says at FTX is like he was obsessed
with like his hair. When they were spending trying to
build their two hundred million dollars or whatever new headquarters.
His only design note was that it should be shaped
so it looked from the side like his hairs do,

(02:37:03):
because he thought that, like he thought it was iconic, right, like.

Speaker 3 (02:37:07):
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 2 (02:37:16):
It's yeah, fucking it's fucking wild anyway, Jamie, that's my episode.
Do you think we should fire Michael Lewis into the sun?

Speaker 3 (02:37:24):
Well, I was, I was thinking earlier. I am very
curious because you know, I think it's like a waste
of time to ask, like, well, Michael Lewis have another
opportunity to course cract his career. Of course he will,
of course he will.

Speaker 2 (02:37:36):
Yes, He's gonna write seventy more books.

Speaker 3 (02:37:40):
Well, what I'm curious about is like where he goes
from here. I feel like it's pretty telling if you've
been con 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. And I do want you're like,

(02:38:01):
if that's the position you're in, and you will absolutely
read another book because you're unkillable financially. Like, I wonder
which direction he's going to go it. Is he going
to be hyper cautious, 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? I genuinely don't know because I
just like, it's very hard to discern what kind of

(02:38:23):
person like. It seems like he's certainly, 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. I just am curious what happens to someone
from there.

Speaker 2 (02:38:38):
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 yeah, second,
a second Sam has hit the Michael Lewis bibliography, and
it's going to be Sam Altman, like he's going to
do with Sam Altman, the Open AI guy who just
got fired from his job. He's going to do a

(02:38:58):
book on Sam Altman.

Speaker 3 (02:38:59):
I suspect you're 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 coming.

Speaker 2 (02:39:10):
By Sammy want Sam on you Sam me twice, won't
get Sammed again? You know, I am father.

Speaker 3 (02:39:17):
Of Sam Sammy chit wow, yeah no.

Speaker 2 (02:39:21):
That that's my guess as to where this goes is Sam.

Speaker 3 (02:39:25):
What and why is Michael Lewis being presented with the
second Sam doesn't seem fair?

Speaker 2 (02:39:30):
Second Sam, Well, I've already done that joke once and
it worked and it all it always works, j it
always works. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:39:39):
Yeah, Well I don't feel well, you know, I've I
would say that this is like in the top twenty
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. Yeah, he's in forever.
He's in forever jail.

Speaker 2 (02:40:00):
M hm, he's in he is in forever jail, right, Yeah,
speaking of forever jail, Jamie, talent is like a jail
that locks you into, for example, making a weekly podcast.
And I am happy that you and I are about
to be cell mates.

Speaker 3 (02:40:18):
We are. I'm so excited. Yeah, we get to do
the fun thing where we're like, we can't talk much
about it yet, but there's a weird podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:40:26):
Jamie Loftus Weekly is coming to the Cool Zone Network.
You were going to be the cool hand Luke of
our podcast.

Speaker 3 (02:40:34):
Pre Welcome God. I would love to be the cool
hand look of the podcast. I gotta get some new outfits.

Speaker 2 (02:40:41):
Got to get some new outfits. Gotta no, that's not
the one. Is that the one where he throws a
baseball at the wall or is that the Great Escape?
I feel like a long time neither of I not
since I was like seven, so I don't know why.

Speaker 3 (02:40:53):
He's a cool head. Look when you were seven?

Speaker 2 (02:40:56):
Yeah, my mom loved that movie.

Speaker 3 (02:40:58):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (02:40:58):
My mom had very strict rules on like what I
could watch on as movies as a kid, unless it
was a movie she liked, which is why I was
in first grade when we watched Alien so ooh.

Speaker 3 (02:41:11):
That explains so much about you to me too.

Speaker 2 (02:41:15):
She was so excited that all the men die and
and and the woman didn't that, Like, Yeah, she wanted
me to see that movie at a very young age.

Speaker 3 (02:41:23):
What a legacy, truly.

Speaker 2 (02:41:26):
The sentence because men are stupid was uttered two or
three times during.

Speaker 3 (02:41:30):
That movie, which does unpack a lot of the plot
intended or not. Huh there. 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? I don't know?
I'm seven?

Speaker 2 (02:41:47):
Yeah you haven't, you have not equipped me to answer
that question.

Speaker 3 (02:41:51):
Mother, Well, yes, weekly podcast coming soon early next year?
Was it about you? Guess? Don't contact me about it
because you're wrong?

Speaker 2 (02:42:02):
Yeah? Yeah, a second Jamie has hit the cool zone.
I mean, you've done more than two podcasts. This joke
never worked, But.

Speaker 3 (02:42:12):
A first Jamie has hit the cool zone weekly?

Speaker 2 (02:42:15):
That's right?

Speaker 3 (02:42:16):
What podcast is this of ours?

Speaker 5 (02:42:20):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (02:42:20):
God? How many? How many? This is? This will be?

Speaker 5 (02:42:22):
What?

Speaker 3 (02:42:22):
Oh my god?

Speaker 2 (02:42:23):
Oh possible to say? It's impossible to say.

Speaker 3 (02:42:27):
I think it's like six. Yeah, 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 for ever jail us forever wives.

Speaker 2 (02:42:42):
Oh uh so, Jamie, anything else you wanted to plug
before we ride on out of here, like Michael dog bit.

Speaker 3 (02:42:51):
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. And if you don't like hot dogs. The
title's funny. And I think that's you know, about sixty
percent of the purchases I've gotten have been off bat alone.
So you should buy raw Dog and.

Speaker 2 (02:43:10):
Yeah, buy raw Dog, and now I'm not going to
make a raw Dog jake. That's just going to get
me in trouble anyway. Buy a Cooler Zone Media subscription
and you won't have to hear ads, or don't buy
a Cooler Zone Media subscription and continue to listen to ads.
It's I don't care live your life. I'm not your

(02:43:30):
fucking dad.

Speaker 3 (02:43:32):
If you really want to hear the advertisings that Robert's disparaging,
I personally think it's more fun to imagine it. So
you should get a Cooler Zone Media subscription.

Speaker 2 (02:43:41):
Yeah, once everyone's on Cooler Zone Media, then we can
finally get that sweet Lockheed Martin subscription that I've or
whatever ad deals that I've been wanting to have.

Speaker 3 (02:43:52):
Robert can finally live inside a grenade like it's always
been his dream.

Speaker 2 (02:43:56):
That's been my dream, that's been my dream, Jamie. Yeah,
all right, we're done.

Speaker 3 (02:44:01):
Bye, we did it.

Speaker 1 (02:44:06):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(02:44:27):
at Behind the Bastards

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