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

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Robert Evans is a Living God and can never lie.....Also we talk with Jamie Loftus about Sam Bankman-Fried and beloved biographer to con man Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short. Original Air Dates: 12.5.23 & 12.7.23 Sources: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/michael-lewiss-big-contrarian-bet https://archive.is/GnVkX#selection-2015.0-2029.125 https://archive.is/cZZcN#selection-455.0-523.30 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/03/michael-lewis-sam-bankman-fried-crypto-going-infinite https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/10/02/is-michael-lewis-throwing-out-his-reputation-to-defend-sam-bankman-fried/ https://archive.is/yrvL9#selection-1231.0-1271.105 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/02/sam-bankman-fried-trial-key-takeaways https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-fraud-was-in-the-code https://www.investopedia.com/why-ftx-plan-to-refund-90-percent-of-recovered-assets-doesnt-add-up-to-90-percent-of-what-customers-lost-8362556 https://jacobin.com/2023/11/sam-bankman-fried-convicted-crypto-fraud-michael-lewis https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-08-15/the-blind-side-michael-lewis-michael-oher-sean-leigh-anne-tuohy-original-review-archiveSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Podcast Network, IHeart. Follow Elizabeth Rafter and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. Join me, Danny Trejo in Nocturno, Tales from the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno, Tales from the Shadows. on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Coalzo Media Hey everyone, Robert Evans here with Behind the Bastards, and we've got some kind of sad news today.

You know, this is going to hit members of the community pretty hard. But 48 years ago on November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew members on board. This is a 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 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 expend 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 some classic Mao-era propaganda posters. So in Joe Biden, Zizien Ping, and Vladimir, Putin walking hand in hand, surrounded by a crowd of little kids and red guard uniforms, heading

towards the light of a new atomic sun, while a series of mushroom clouds detonate over Lake Superior's depths. Anyway, welcome to the show, Jamie. 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. That was sort of what I was picturing. The image you described has that exact same. Just throw someone in the backseat. Same exact shit. Yes.

That's the dream, Jamie. That's the dream. God, what a beautiful, beautiful dream. I really think about being a member of Paul Walker's family at the time that image was circulating. You mean from your jacuzzi filled with $100 bills, 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 to, okay, Brian the dog was resurrected, I think on the same timeline as Jesus Christ.

Yeah, more or less. Very similar characters, yes. Yeah. And we can all agree that Brian. Both have been on Bill Mars. show they're both marheads and they also and they both are you know like middling authors yeah 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 bastards pot alumni sam bankman freed okay so i have i know the

broad strokes, but as soon as the joyous news 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 rather be with to let it just wash over me. Robert, can I ask you to please share your working title for this episode? Because it's funny. Oh, yeah. It's Sam Bankman not freed and in parentheses because he is in jail.

I think it's funny. And I think that that is far superior to Sam Bankman jailed. Yeah. No, that's not creative at all. You got to spend a lot of extra words to make it creative. I'm not interested in other perspectives on that title. I think that you got it exactly right. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Brevity is some bullshit as a great author once said. So, Jamie, speaking of great authors. 80% of this episode is shitting on Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Short. Yee. Oh, yeah.

No, we're really, this is going to be a great one for the Lewis heads in the audience. Wow. I, okay, okay. This is going to be. Oh, buckle up. Yeah. Now, this is relevant. The man just said buckle up.

Oh, yeah. Strap the fuck in and down. Buckle up. Fuckle heads. We are starting with Michael Lewis, author of the big short, Jamie. Okay. I feel like when I recently saw a picture of my three-year-old niece going to a Wiggles concert and I just caught myself smiling in the same way. This is great. Yeah. This is great. So on January 5th, 2022, Sam Bankman Freed sent a message to one of his mini signal loops. For what it's worth, February 8 through 16th, Michael Lewis is going to be in the Bahamas profiling us. Now, if you haven't been following the story and if Michael Lewis is not familiar to you, then, you You probably do remember, like, the most 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 2008 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. You love to see it. You love to see it. His other best-known work is probably Moneyball, which is about a baseball team manager. he uses which called Sabre Metrics, which without getting into it, is basically being Nate Silver, but also actually running a sports team, right? Okay, that is also, that, in 2020, 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 will. Moneyball is very much a part of the Boyfriend Criterion Collection. It's right up there with Whiplash. It's like a disaster. say if you if you did not date the worst man you've ever dated in your entire life in 2017 that was obsessed with all things michael lewis then were you really in los angeles yeah no that that's that's true the only non-problematic by the way what if your what if your

worst boyfriend couldn't read really uh they're you're the median american and i honestly don't even know who i'm talking about like it's impossible to say But I know. The only non-problematic piece of physical media that you can have in your house as a boyfriend is an original VHS tape of tremors. That's just the way it works. And I would fight with you if I didn't feel the same way. I think that that is very much. That's a good sign.

It's an excellent sign. Thank you. The more prominently displayed, the better. To say that Michael Lewis is a famous writer or famous journalist puts it pretty lightly. He's probably the best known journalist and the kind of. 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. He is somebody whose stories come from his ability to get close to his subjects and just kind of exist with

them during a crucial period of time as a fly on the wall. 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 he just kind of makes people comfortable around him. He is a guy that you want to have at a party. He's a pleasant company.

Enough people have said this that I assume it's true based on just like how he does his stories. People, he is 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 a general rule, if you are in the position that Sam Bankman-Fried and his friends we're in, circa 2022, running a massive financial shell game, you would be hesitant to welcome in. And very well, I think we can all agree, basically. Yeah, like kings.

Talk about a game of 4D chess. Yeah. The last guy you might want hanging around your office is a dude who could literally, like Michael Lewis could literally in like the space of a phone call get articles greenlit in every newspaper in the country, right? He just is, he has that kind of pull. He is that reliable a seller for his stories. like nobody would not want to take a story that he had.

So you would want to be cautious. You would think you'd want to be cautious about letting this guy into your house. 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 dirt of the finance industry. It's this is a guy who can make you into a celebrity. And in early 2022, that was the entire.

vision of everyone, like, connected business-wise to Sam Bankman Freed was, we need to turn this guy into a celebrity who's constantly everywhere to raise the profile of this exchange, right? They spent something like a billion dollars on a variety of different corporate and celebrity endorsements of the nine billion that was missing. About a billion went towards shit to boost FTX and to boost Sam's profile, right? I'm sorry, where's the, you got to spend money to make money as the after reason goes. You got to spend $10 billion to make nothing to go to jail. You have to spend $10 billion to go to jail, is what I'm saying.

To go to Forever Prison, Jamie, let's be honest about this. Every time I've seen Forever Prison, very often from you, I hear it in the cadence of the Forever Purge trailer. You're like, it's the Forever Prison. Yeah, that is where he's going. And that's, you know, again, everyone is kind of cut ties. is 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 reason why Sam put so much money into this was politicians, right? There were a few who would, but like most people who were in politics would not even take donations directly from crypto, right? you had to launder that shit. And Sam was looking to buy himself a sizable chunk of Congress so that he could make sure that regulations on crypto favored his company specifically, which is why he did stuff.

Like, you know, he spent tens of millions of dollars getting Tom Brady and Giselle Bunchin to like pretend to be his friends. He sat down next to Bill Clinton on fucking stage in a very cringy interview. He paid Larry David to make a Super Bowl ad. 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 Michael Lewis treat 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 10 million in donations and they have to pay them back because it turned out that it was a con man you know there's there's a note of it that it almost reminds me it when like errol morris like profiled and worked for uh elizabeth holmes you're just like it's that level of profile versus l yes this turns you into somebody who's like um who can be taken seriously because that's what who louis is right he's that he is that big a deal i'm not like

puffing him up he doesn't need it right no he got people to care about money ball the most in the most boring-ass thing I've ever heard about my life. 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-free book. I think it's bullshit, but I didn't get bored at any point. He was at a pace of piece of writing, you know? So he decides to come knocking. Sam is immediately on board. All of their PR people are on board. Not everyone at FTX is on board. Carolyn Edison, who is his on-again, off-again girlfriend who testified against him repeatedly,

she is running Alameda, which is the company that bankrupts everything that he is illegally funneling consumer deposits into. She is basically like the – and she does not like the idea of having Michael Lewis around. Now, she can't really confront Sam Bankman Fried when she has a bad idea. Nobody can. So she just kind of hedges it and says, in the signal chat, makes sense. 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 Sam replies, same, except exactly the opposite. That, like, you know you're down bad if you're asking Sam Bankrantfried to make sense. That'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, like, what a, what a, mess. What a nightmare. She's in a rough situation and he will talk a lot about how he treats her in this. But Will McCaskill is also in that signal chat. And Will is basically the founder. 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 it's figurehead, right? He is the big guy. He's this Oxford professor who he pills Sam Bankman Freed on the idea. And his response is kind of, I think, part of why this winds up going down. 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 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. He's been front sit. He's written about a financial collapse before. He's got front seat tickets to this whole thing. And then the book comes out. 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 we're not in his book and kind of the overwhelming thing that you see when you compare what comes out in the

court case what comes out in the testimony of his friends to the text of lewis's book is that like oh michael got kind of fucking conned by this dude right oh yeah like he fell for it yeah and i mean it speaks to the level of confidence one would have to have in their own reporting to time it with the trial because if you had even a remote feeling that you have got you had gotten it wrong I would be like release it a year after the trial like bury it and that's the thing I can see if you're if you're just some journalist in this is your your first book or you just don't have you're not like a huge hit so like you are very your 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 and like suck my dick. I'm Michael Lewis. It'll make you money, right? And he doesn't, which suggests he has the same kind of hubris that Sam Bankman-Fried did in a lot of ways. So to give you an example of how emotionally involved Lewis is in this case, is a good write-up on the court case by a journalist who was there during the trial, which was 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 in the section reserve for friends and family, I could see Sam's parents growing increasingly agitated, his mom 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 arm. Nobody expects Michael Lewis in the court room. 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.

Michael Lewis just got conned. My empathy only goes so far, but also like, what a scene. What a fucking scene. Absolutely phenomenal. Yeah. Terrific. Can't wait for Jonah Hill to star a Sam Bankman Fried in the movie based on this? No, I really don't want to.

No, there's no one I want to see play him in a movie. Just do him like Maris and Frasier. Have him always be off-screen. That would be, oh, that makes me so, I love a good. Yeah, like the parents in Charlie Brown, Heather Sinclair of DeGrassey. I could go on. And fuck it, you know what, cast David. Hyde Pierce as Michael Lewis.

Then we got a movie. Then we got a fucking film. I mean, if this whole ordeal results in David Hyde Pierce winning an Oscar for a bad movie. Absolutely. That's my dream. There's no way this movie is good. There's no way it's good. Yeah.

You know, and it's possible that Adam McKay in an effort to course direct on having endorsed. Yeah. Adam McKay, he's like, he absolutely. could, and he would need to course correct on the Michael Lewis in the first place for how he directed the big short. It's a great move for everyone. I'm everyone's agent in this situation. You're going to be rich, Jamie. I'm going to be fucking rich. Yeah. In interviews he gave after the book came out and the trial started, Lewis framed his book going infinite about Sam Beckman Fried as a letter to the jury, which is like kind of nonsense because obviously the jury is never allowed to read a book. about the guy that they're going on a trial about. And the judge specifically instructed them not to. There's an interview with 60 minutes, which is really something. We will hear some clips from it later.

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 neither one of those stories is as good as the one I have. And like, on 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. That's so, I mean, I mean, I guess I can be of many minds about characterizing it as a story work. 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 will end up having the historical precedent. but interesting that it would be said out loud in that way. Yeah. And again, I want to reiterate, while Michael is the main character here, he's not like, he's

not a bastard. He's not someone 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 like one of history's greatest monster over. But this is, Bankman Freed is a bastard. And so I think talking about the way in which he kind of has. Lewis wrapped around his finger, and the degree to which Lewis tortures his own logic and

prose in order to ignore that is just fascinating. 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 Lewis was born on October 15th, 1960 in New Orleans. Now, from the beginning, his life was about as far from working class as you get. And to his credit, Lewis does not deny this whenever he's asked. I mean, that's the only thing you can't do, I guess. Yeah, you've got to be open about it. Here's him talking to the Guardian.

Lewis's family stat at the very top of the wasp aristocracy in New Orleans. I was so inside, he told me. I was literally trained how to sit on a throne when I was 15 years old because it was crowned the king of the carnival ball, an organization that didn't allow black people, didn't allow Jews. I would go from baseball practice to scepter waving lessons. I 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 back story. Thank you, King. I do think I want to point out something here, which is where I don't think he's obfuscating, but I think he's missing something about his own, what his background has done for him. Because 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 think that's a big part of why he's able to do that is he grows up in the middle of wealth and power, right? Where it's the air that he breathes. 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 way of making, of. 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, like, carded to see if they're a member of a place that's members only, right?

Because they have that way about them. And I think that's part of how Lewis. It is like an imperceptible thing. Yeah. 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. He knows how to navigate those spaces on your side, but if they're, but, but also, you know, to an extent and a liability because you never know, you know, I'm curious what in what endears him to our Sam. Yeah, we'll get to that. So he goes to Princeton University, and he graduates cum laude, which means pretty good grades in 1982.

His senior thesis is on Donatello, a prominent Ninja Turtle. And when he's in college, he's a member of Princeton's Ivy Club, which is the oldest eating club in the school. Now, if you're not a blue blood, you probably are like, what the fuck is an eating club? These are private dining halls that are also kind of social clubs where upperclassmen go to get nicer food. There's like nine of them, I think, on campus. Robert. At the Ivy Club is the oldest. At Princeton or like everywhere?

At Princeton. There's other colleges. Other fancy boy schools have these. Robert, this is full cunt. The Ivy Club. I was like, wow, eating club. The, like, eating club to me is like drive-through Taco Bell 1.30 a.m. starving.

Yeah. Wow. Eating club. What are they eating? What are they eating? Sophie, you said this is full cunt, but it did not. admit women until 1991. The audacity to not let a woman go full-cut.

Something that cunty, it just doesn't make sense. And it's also very funny that like, or not funny, but it's noteworthy in this interview, it talks about how he was at the Ivy Club, right? When he talks about, you know, his upbringing, he's like, yeah, this, like this contest I was in, you couldn't be in this club if you were like black or Jewish. He doesn't mention that the Ivy Club doesn't admit women. I think that is maybe interesting. It's also worth noting that the Ivy Club, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes about the Ivy Club

and calls it F. Scott Fitzgerald calls it detached and breathlessly aristocratic. Full fucking cunt. Says that about your blue blood club? Like, my God. I love that. Wow, what a treat. What a treat. If F. Scott Fitzgerald is the little.

one experiencing like moral clarity about your, about your weird sandwich group. That's challenging. 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. No, no, no, no.

He's just making Dala Dala Dills, y'all. Robert, Dalla Dahlia Bills time is happening now for us as well. Oh, yeah. Speaking of Dalla Dala Bills, buy some of these products, and we will get Dalla Dola Dahlia. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him?

I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island. serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the path of worry, dump road, and fear creak. terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman. Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer. Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved.

Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects. We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightnourish secrets. From Tenderfoot TV, in iHeart podcasts. This is La Monsre Season 2, The Butcher of Mons, available now. Listen for free on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

And experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for now. on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura Podcast Network, available

on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Barry's

I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it ripped through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe. In season two of Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Berry? And why? She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing. The man and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture. It was the way of life. I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I have a request for the listeners, which is not something that I often, I don't ask, I don't ask anything of our listeners, just that they're happy. But if somebody could please make a dating profile for Michael Lewis as an art graphic, I just, it's just, please, for me.

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 is, you know, an investment banker for just a few years. Actually, you know who he reminds me of? Oh, okay. Just tipping your toes in it. Then that kind of doesn't count. It's like the just the tip of financial crime. He's in there. He at 87, the market crashes and he makes a pivot away from like doing that as a job. And he writes a book called Liars Poker about the investment, you know, bang the stockbroker that like that kind of life that, uh, makes a shitload of of money, right? This is, we'll talk about it a second, but like, I want to, he reminds me in this trajectory. Do you know anything about Michael Crichton? Oh, I mean, I, yeah, peaks and valleys. I,

I had no attachment to him, but I know many would do. And like, yeah, the back half of Michael Crichton pretty fucking brutal. Yeah, 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 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 a medical, like he's the creator of ER. And he gets criticized some by doctors who are like, oh, you just- He's the creator of ER? Yeah, Michael Crichton created ER, yes. Oh, okay. Sorry, I thought you were talking about Michael Lewis. Yes. No, no, no, I knew Michael. But 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, right? I just find that interesting. So to give you a further idea of Lewis's family background, Liars Poker, which is semi-autobiographical, revolves around a scene where Michael Lewis is invited to a banquet hosted by the Queen Mother while he's working in London. He gets a seat there because of his cousin, Baroness Lyndon von Stauffenberg, and she seats it next to the manager of Salomon Brothers, which is how he gets his job. Word salad.

There is crabs don't have bluer blood than this man. Like that is, that is the bluest you fucking get. If your cousin's a baroness and you're in your like late 20s, what? If you know a baroness, you are like

that's, okay. 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,

have a very naive view of what's unflattering because his Wall Street guys, they curse a lot, they use phrases like big swinging dick. They're like, they're like kind of gross, but in a way that's glamorous, right? I mean, I feel like it's like the Glenn, Gary, Glenn Ross school of talking shit, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it, like, it is a kind of thing where you could say he's not glamour. it, but he's absolutely making it look a way that makes more young, greedy young men when one of become stock traders. And to extend the Michael Crichton comparison, it is, Liars Poker is generally agreed to have had a similar impact on its industry to how Jurassic Park influenced paleontology by, like, bringing a shitload of people in. Wow.

That's really interesting to me, because I, 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. books. 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, it will still bring in the wrong people who refuse to see the point. Like they're like, like Wolf of Wall Street is one of my favorite movies, hands down. I think it's great. It's an

amazing satire. But it's still like brought people in on the wrong. Like, fuck it. Because brain dead people are going to be brain dead people. This is, we're going to. going in a more serious direction. But if you've read Slaughterhouse 5 in the opening of it, Vonnegut talks about how when he said, I'm going to write my war book, his wife was like, don't do it. 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. That's one of the problems with even anti-war war fiction is it always makes it look cool. Because it's cool, right? That doesn't mean it's good. It's like Joe Camel is cool. He still killed 100 million people. Joe Camel gave my father lung cancer. And I stand by that.

And to conjure a similar image, Joe Camel, there's an image that I saw when I worked in the Playboy archives of Joe Camel, an illustrated gorgeous, like, painting, essentially, of Joe Camel in convertible with smoking hot human women. Hell yeah. With big old titties. And you're like, no wonder. This advertisement killed people. This advertisement killed people because like, you could be this ugly-ass camel with women, women with huge naturals.

Yeah. Like, it just. Like, you can add up all the German generals on the Eastern Front and they didn't kill as many people as that at. Truly. And it's a beautiful piece of artwork, but like, let's be fucking honest. Yeah. So today, Lewis merely acknowledges that the psychos he wrote about. 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 1982 and you realize 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 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. In that Guardian article I've quoted from, there's a story about Michael Lewis attends this big New York party, and he's like warned ahead of time that it's going to be full of bankers and other finance guys, 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 and attacking Wall Street bigwigs as being greedy idiots, like 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 fund manager walked in with 15 copies of Lewis's books. Michael signed them all. And again, if you are a journalist, that's a bad sign. Yeah, what is your take on that?

I mean, like, what is the game of chess that I'm not seeing here. I mean, I think it's just that he makes this look sexy. And it's if he writes about you, 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 profited off of a lot of misery.

Now, they didn't cause it. They didn't start this subprime loan thing, but they profited off of a lot of. 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, because of how often this has happened, he 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 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 Lewis's portrayal of him as a financier, read the 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, 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-Fried honestly because he found himself taken in by the kid schick. 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. So far, right, as someone who's never read his work, but they're also inherently commercial because I feel like there's a journalistic value to explaining why someone is appealing, but there's also an even more commercial value to explaining why someone is appealing because that makes it, you know, that sells books, that sells movie deals, that sells all this shit. 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 like, right? And Lewis himself has kind of admitted he can't really end on a 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 explains his Sam Beckman-Fried book is that once you get in the habit of writing about like these geniuses who are hidden in the middle of systems right and see more than everybody else once you start doing that you see anybody you start focusing on is that kind of genius even when they're not and that's what's happened with Michael here so yeah mess mess it's like you know ultimately we nine times out of 10 the person wearing like fucking x-ray glasses is wearing a pair of fucking iMacs glasses to go see Oppenheimer. Like, it's just embarrassing. Exactly. It's just embarrassing. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the best example of this before we get into Sam Bankman-Fried prior in Lewis's history is a book called the

Blindside, which was published in 2006. Now, the blind side, like a lot of Lewis stories, there's a macro and a micro narrative. The macro narrative is he's talking about the growth, the 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 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 placed in foster care at age seven because his mother suffered from addiction. His dad was generally in prison. His dad dies while he's, I think, in high school. Orr was dealt a pretty tough hand in life, but he's also six foot six and very

fast, right? So he is someone who 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 this rich white family ores a black man um black child at this time um and they make it their business to coach him and coax him in through getting through the academics so that he can be in the NCAA and college so that he can get an NFL contract right so i'll be 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. Oh, yes, he did, because this becomes a movie that's huge, right?

Also, and I am very well acquainted with 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, and the Big Short, holy fuck. Also, Robert, Robert, I just want a fact check real quick. He wasn't adopted by them. Not, we're getting to that. Okay. That was the narrative in the blind side, right?

Right. They have basically adopted this guy. Yes, you are correct, Sophie, but I'm building to that. Okay. Okay. Okay. Just like, I don't know why I didn't know that. And also, like, who didn't want me to know that Michael Lewis, the blind side?

I've booked that is famously bullshit. Yeah. 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 L.A. Times here. The administration at his high school accepts him, although he can barely read. 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 Tui, manages to find a crucial loophole. He has o'ertested to prove that he's learning disabled, then has him take numerous easy, online courses. Lewis treats these measures as ingenious. We are meant to cheer the fact that Ower has gamed the educational process. And 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 impressure? He'll tell you Tiffany's. If I go, I'll go through the whole golf game. He can tell you what six under is and what's a birdie and what's par. I love that those are her two examples of basic knowledge.

This is Sandra Bullock's Oscar talking. Uh-huh. This is Sandra Bullock's Oscar flapping this nasty little mouth. Okay. 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 is how you cook eggs. But no. Fucking golf. And Tiffany's. Well, yeah. And also, like, I mean, to state the obvious, like, conflating that with, like, this is what normal people do. This is normal basic life advice.

Like, he could write a, like, doctoral thesis in the ways that that is, like, bullshit. Yeah. So, we can all see the potential abusive issue with a wealthy white family adopting a teenage 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 that's problematic here. Lewis does quote Leanne at one point as saying, with me and Sean, I can see. him thinking, if they found me lying in a gutter and I was going to be flipping burgers at

McDonald's, would they really have had an interest at me? 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 of the story ended earlier this year when a now retired or filed a lawsuit in a Tennessee court alleging that the Twohy's never adopted him and instead created a conservatorship Tewis, I don't care, fuck them.

And instead created a conservatorship and used it to take his money, right? The Twohies or whatever the fuck deny doing this. It's also Leanne. I'm sorry, I think it's pronounced the Peepees. I don't care. The dick bags deny this.

And again, I'm not being a non-biased journalist here, but fuck it. No, no. Robert, it's actually Dickmins. Dickmonds. The Dickmans. They call his claims hateful and absurd. Michael Lewis has defended the Twohy's by saying that they only earned a few hundred thousand dollars off of the blindside, the book, and the movie that was made off of it.

He's like, they didn't make millions. They only made a few hundred grand. Now, Lewis also does, and I'll give him this, he also admits right after saying that, that the Twohy's biological daughter is married to the son of the main investor in the film, which might suggest that the family made a lot more money off of it, right? That might suggest that because the blind side makes half a billion dollars in a 35 million dollar budget. What happens to Michael Lewis in this kind of scrambling? Michael Lewis is super rich and always swoopy. There's been so many articles about this. There's been some shady shit that went down.

That's the first time I'm hearing about the daughter's marriage because I read a fair amount about that case. Fun stuff. So in his own 2011 book, Ower expresses issues with the movie based off of Lewis's book. Primarily, there's this part where like the Twos 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, what are you fucking talking about? There are other problematic moments in the book.

And this is from The Guardian again. Lewis calls Ower big mic throughout it, despite the fact that Ower 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 Ower. Lewis justifies this by saying that Ower was not a strong voice on his life. Yeah, this guy's not good at talking about himself. I'm just kind of listen to everyone else about him. I'm out. I'm out.

I think what's really going on here is that Ower is a black kid from a desperate poverty background, right? And Lewis cannot identify or get inside of his head. because that is nothing that even resembles the Michael Lewis story. It feels like a very privileged, dark take on like, well, who do I consider to be a credible voice? Can I get 20 white people who barely know this guy? Yeah, who just met this kid to profit off him? To speak to him better than he can speak to his own life because that's who I trust is white people. That's, oh, that's so fucking gross.

He doesn't try to get inside over his head and he just focuses most of the narrative of on the Twosys, 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 Twos. And I also wondered, why does he take such an uncritical view of their role? The authors note at the end provides the obvious explanation, stating that Lewis is a friend of Sean Twos and that they had been long-time classmates at the same New Orleans school. No. How is it even ethical? to take this fucking story on

if you have There's only one kind of ethics that I care about Jamie and it's dollar dollar fucking bills Well Jamie as you know Things could be unethical But still be legal That's how he lives his life

Ha ha ha ha I mean truly What a gift that we have that As that like I am A force of evil in the world certainly But I am grateful that he gave us that one thing, just the way of describing juvenile lawless capitalists. Yeah, it's so funny.

Now, 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 Ower's story, because Ower's former coach comes out and like, defends the Twohy's. 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. In my professional unbiased opinion, fuck you, yeah. 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 Ower as a shy young boy and found it hard to square that memory with the o'er 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. head. They run into problems with violence and aggression. It wouldn't surprise him, Lewis said, if we were seeing some confluence of ORA's history and football with other campaigns that Stoke claims in lawsuits like his. Perhaps some lawyer of Ours figured the time was ripe to sue the Twohies, Lewis speculated. Or perhaps Ower realized that people would get behind him if he makes these accusations. He's just a poor head injured boy. They're like, no, the perceived exploitation and racism you experienced was the result of CTE. That's, oh,

like that's fucking wild right that's gross as a hell oh i hate jamie wow i just thought he was the guy who wrote money ball i thought that that was the harm that is what i was thinking too now yeah so here i want you to keep in mind how he wrote about his former subject ower now here has him talking in a 60 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. The story of Sam's life is people not understanding him, misreading him. He's so different, he's so unusual.

I mean, I think in a funny way that the reason I have such a compelling story is I have a character that I do come to know and that the reader comes to know that the world still doesn't know. Now, that is not the case. Sam Bankman-Fried 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 it the smart way, right? And that's all that's going on. I mean, this is like, oh, this is a bummer.

This is like a case study and a journalist biases coming out in their work. 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 2014, Lewis published a book called Flash Boys, which is a book about Brad Katsuyama and a small group of Rebel Wall Street investors who form IEX, which is like a stock exchange that's supposed to – the idea is we want to protect investors from the unfair advantages that these high-frequency trading firms have on traditional exchanges due to like a whole

bunch of shit, but largely access to a special fiber optic cable. And with most Lewis books, there's a lot of insiders that will criticize him for getting some details wrong here and glossing over some issues that don't conform to his narrative. There's like a market crash that's largely, like, mitigated by some of these firms that he's criticizing, but I don't know enough about that to want to get into it. 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 system's rigged. I don't know about his characterization of them. But the book is a hit, and it makes Katsuyama and his crew

celebrities within the finance world. So Katsuyama reaches out to Lewis when he is considering an institutional investment in FDX. He's like, we're considering getting into crypto through these guys, putting a lot of money on their exchange. Would you look into this guy for me, right? And this is what Lewis says. Lewis, like, basically goes in there and, like, talks to Sam Bankman-Fried.

And he's so impressed that he quotes himself as telling Katsuyama, do whatever he wants to do, what could possibly go wrong, right? That's, which bad bet, Katsuyama does wind up putting money in. Really, you couldn't choose a worst person to ask what could go wrong with. 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. 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. He didn't claim to understand all the deep recesses of Bankman Fried's mind, but he knew it was a great story, and this was before the shit at the fan. That's one of his friends talking, yeah. 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 is. never not had money don't really care about money you're like well yeah no shit you've never

not had it you would really care if you dare that that reminds me of this is like i think about this easily once a week it happened over 10 years ago my freshman year of college it was my first time really encountering people who like grew up with like money you know and there was this guy on my floor and one night everyone was hanging out and he like put a this is the era this is the early 20-10s. 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 was 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. And I think about that all the time because he could just get 9,000 scarves. Yeah.

You could just get 9,000 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, not understanding how the world works. Yeah, it's a bunch of rich kids who are talking through, like, fucking philosophy 101 level shit and think, and so impressed by everyone else's answers to, like, dumb logic puzzles because they've never studied enough humanities to know that, like, no, man, people have been talking about this shit for thousands of years, and all of their takes are better than yours like anyway we're not getting into that as much right now we are about to get into the ads and if you really want to do some effective altruism purchased from the sponsors of this podcast a decade ago

i was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught the answers were there hidden in plain sight so why did it take so long to catch him. I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek. Terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.

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She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing. The man and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture. It was the way of life.

I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories

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available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Ah, so we've been talking around the 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 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, and it's about a phone call that Sam has during his billionaire era with fashion industry icon Anna Wintour before the Met Gala. No.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, Jamie. This is good. I'm exhausted. Because Anna Wintor is Bill Nihy's girlfriend right now, and I don't want to think poorly of Bill Nahi. That's hard for me. It is tragic.

My heart goes out to Bill Nye, who I'm incapable of feeling badly about. No, I'm here. I'm sitting my ass down and listening. Yeah. So Anna is who Merrill Streep's character. in The Devil Wears Prada is based on, right? Like, that's who this person is. Oh, I love when men try to explain what the Devil Wears Prada is about.

Yes, for all the men listening, pause and go watch the Devil Wears Prada. It is just like one of the greatest films of, I think, one of the greatest comedy films and books of our generation. Yeah, it's very good. Half the essays I wrote in college were based off of said book. Really? Yeah. 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 wear insane outfits that cost the GDP of a small island nation, right? Yes. And then a bunch of YouTubers I watch say that they looked ugly. Yes, yes. It's a treat. It's great. It's great. Everybody makes a feast off of it.

But somebody has to pay for the son of a bitch, right? And that year, Wintour wanted SBF to pay for the gala, right? No. He was spending way more money on stupider shit than that. So not unreasonable that he might actually agree to do this. 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 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 video game that he winds up buying because it's made by a friend of his called Storybook Brawl. What is it about tell me? It's about like fable characters fighting, right? Like it's that, it's a little strategy game. It's like an app game. It's not a real game. 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.

Yes, yes. I want that, but Sam Bankman-Fried playing that game while Anna Wintour is like, what is he up to? What is he up to? The Jamie and I in unison when you said playing video game while talking to. Anna Wintour mouth wide open like 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 her and it's famously scary and he'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, okay, this is a do-to-s-M-A-D-H-D, right? Like, that's what that is. And this is a doo-to-s-A-D-H-D who's part of a generation that has ADHD. Well, no, this is a very dumb observation. But it's also clear to me that Sam Bank of Bankman-Fried has never seen The Devil Wears Prada, 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, that you're talking to

the protagonist of the Devil Wears' Project. then you lack a support structure in a fundamental way, I think. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, okay, that's good to know. That's why Sophie and I are here, Robert. What's funny about the way Lewis talks about this is that he marvels at this, right? Like, it's the most amazing thing and it's evidence of how unique Sam is. When you just noted one of the biggest pieces of entertainment for millennials and Gen Z is people playing video games and explaining politics, right?

That is, it is not at all. unique that Sam Bankman-Fried will not stop gaming to have a business meeting. But Michael Lewis treats it as like, this is evidence that he is too much of a genius. He can't bear to pay attention to her for a second. Also, there's a little bit of

anti-woman stuff in here because Lewis notes that... Yes, think. Sam would minimize 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

sentence. So, yeah. 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 of millennial and jinsey 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, that indicates to me that. Michael Lewis, because that's the way that you're like your doting parent would talk about you. And like that's that that is clear to me. The way he sees him is like, wow, look at this amazing kid. And also what SPF is doing here is like the inverse of what most easily distracted millennial and Gen Z people are doing. They're playing games 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. 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, 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 Horde dragon was dead. Anna Wintour had killed it. What to do? He made a half-hearted bid to begin another game and pick another hero, but then changed his mind and shut the game down. He could often occupy two worlds at once and win 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 had acquired a spell that interfered with

his abilities to multitask. What an amazing way to write that paragraph, Michael Lewis. Dude. Oh, God. 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 hung over and have trouble focusing Because I use Twitter too much 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 publishing industry are

That no one was like Michael I hate to tell you that this is just how kids are these days He's a real venture game genius 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 60 don't know what raw dog needs. And so you're, and that's most of the people in publishing. Like, it's ridiculous. That's so nuts that that made it to the final book. 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, he's trying to make Sam look kind of silly in that paragraph. I can see how you would have. 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 from about a month ago.

Yay. So on the screen, Zoom, Anna Wintor, and he does not know who she is. He doesn't know what the purpose of the meeting is. He doesn't know, well, the purpose of the meeting is, can Sam Bankman-Fried pay for the whole Met Gala? That's the purpose of the meeting. Because he'll pay for everything else. Why not that?

and she comes on the screen, and she is dressed to the nine. She's got those size of hair coming down around her chin. She's like ready to kill. And gorgeous. You know, she looks great. She's well prepared. He's playing storybook brawl, which is his video game. Pause.

I hate the way he talks about Anna Wintour. Thank you very much. Wow. Okay. We can deal with that in private. Before we can, no, no. Before we can talk about a woman on a Zoom call, does she look gorgeous or not? Yeah, that's the point.

It says nothing to do with Anna Winter. Also, she looks like that all the time. Thank you so much. It's her thing. And whenever she comes on the screen, he blacks her out and the video game pops up. So like she's talking and minotores are killing are killing dwarfs and trees with axes are coming in. And like, you know, weapons are appearing on the screen. And people are dying and exploding.

And you're hearing her talk about the Met Gala. And there's seven minutes in when he hits a bomb. and the Wikipedia entry for the mech gala comes up so he can figure out what the hell she's talking about and and he's doing I watched him do this he's doing this with her this is what he was doing on live television when he would be interviewed by Bloomberg TV it was like he and he had tricks it took him about one-tenth of his brain to have a conversation with with Anna Wintour and what he would do the 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 and

you ask me a question. He'd say, oh, that's a really good question. It's a really good question. Let me think about that for a minute. You know, meanwhile, the minotaur is killing the tree. And he comes off and then he thinks for a minute and he says some boilerplate thing. 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 multi-million dollar meeting. Right? Which is like fine, but that's not an example of him being smart. Well, and I think that that is a clear pattern 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 shit about people was like part and parcel to why he was cool and why he was seen as a visionary.

like that the same is true like just I mean you 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 guy. It's Michael Lewis. It's literally Michael Lewis Yeah and often literally Michael

Lewis. How did how did okay I'm sorry how did this resolve with Anna Wintor did she like the fact that she did he said basically he says yeah I'll pay for it and then he just ghosts her. Yeah so the fact the Anna Wintour didn't like smoke out that he was like

fully a fraud at the girlies are the girlies are disappointed I'm not I'm not caping for Anna Wintor here but famously named to the dragon lady well no SBF is lucky that he'll never encounter Bill Nighi because for Bill Nihai he

would be on sight oh Bill Nyee would fuck him up yeah so he was an eye Frankenstein for crying he was in detective of Pikachu. He was in a lot of great film. Like my brain. So,

my brain is broken. These are amusing anecdotes, right? What he's telling, potentially if you are someone who is critical about him, that same anecdote could form part of your thesis about why this kid got away with it for so long and why he ultimately flamed out. But Lewis has convinced that these show you evidence of Sam's genius.

And he sets this up early in the book, talking about Sam's childhood. Quote, he had a fault. line inside him pressure was building on it and one day in the seventh grade he slipped his mother returned from work to find sam alone in despair i came home and he was crying recalled barbara he said i'm so bored i'm going to die and like yeah i i have had a similar conversation with my mom and it's a sign you know certainly sam has been diagnosed with ADHD that's certainly one way in which that can manifest i'm sorry i'm sorry hold on one for the girlies again that is a direct quote

from sex in the city. Oh, okay. That is a direct quote from a sex of a city episode. I'm sure Sam's a big Samantha. Wait, who says it? She goes, I'm so bored I could die and she jumps out of it and she falls out of the window.

Oh, my God. This is literally one of the most famous moments in the back half of Sex and the City. Wow. I don't remember that. Anyway, so because, like Lewis, again, again, if you're just kind of being honest about Sam and writing a book,

you 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 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. And it's like if you're talking about that, behavior and I want to be like delicate but it's like it's contextually important. 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 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. 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, right?

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

I mean, I truly, like, how is it even legal or ethical for this information to be out there? I don't actually know. I don't actually know, Jamie. That does seem sketchy to me. 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, they had this fixation on this issue. Yeah, that's why you fucking go, dude. You don't go there to be a reasoned person. No, and especially since like what's messy to me is that he brings that he makes sure to bring

this up with Carolyn because he's kind of writing that like she was unreliable. He wasn't focusing enough. She was in love with him. She was being hysterical, perhaps. Whereas he's just this misunderstood genius. But he notes her ADHD and he doesn't note Sam's, even though Sam's ADHD is a matter of public fucking record now. Like his family went to court to get him his medicine. Well, it's like, and it's not a hidden thing.

It's like not even something that he particularly tries to obscure, right? No. No. Yeah. 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 10% of his brain to talk to people. Yeah. 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 and going infinite, which is Michael 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 Sam's embrace of this stuff at the expense of everything else to be evidence of brilliance. 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 own birthday. What gave pleasure and soul

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 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, like, 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 Lewis. Now, hold on, nerd. Hold on, nerd.

Hold on, nerd. Yeah. Hold on nerd. Any, any, put a, put up in that nerd. I do think that, like, this is of the, because I, because I don't play magic at the gathering. And I know that how he's describing it is well. It's so wrong. I think that speaks more to like a generation gap.

Yeah. Because I think that there's someone who could be on the opposite side of SBF and equally. with it like it's just like do your research just talk to it just talk to someone who plays magic the gathering they famously love to talk about it and it's it's funny because he's like he has to make this like he he goes on the 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 every like his computer brain wasn't amused by chess only magic could give him yeah it's so funny it's like man My friends and I all played Magic the Gathering.

And, like, as a spoiler, some people looked into Sam's, like, performance in League of Legends and the other online, 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 going to guess he wasn't different at Magic the Gathering because it, you know, like, it's, it is not a great, it's a wonderful game, not a great, like, yardstick for your intelligence, you know? No, I mean, it's like, no one should be, uh, I mean, not, but like, no one should be judged by the, intelligence by how they interact with like a beloved hobby. That's weird. Yeah, it's so weird. And it's like, it's interesting because like Sam's parents, a big part of this section is like he comes home and he's like, I'm so bored. I can't, I want to die. And his, you know,

his parents do what I think is the right thing. They lead the charge to get their school to add like an advanced math class. 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 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 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, there's no way that Shakespeare 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 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. And don't get me wrong, Sam. I also don't want to read a book. But I, there, sometimes we're.

Sometimes that's just what you need to do to understand the world And not go to prison for forever because you're a gambler Or just be willing to fucking Google your way around it Like you're not better than Shakespeare you're fucking weirdo There is like an element of like there are certain The lower side of SBFLs that he takes In the statements he makes He sounds like a like a one episode Frazier character

Yes You know He sounds like Freddy made a friend and he fucking sucks. Yeah, he's a piece of shit. Yeah. And then he even polarizes Frazier and Niles. And that's how you know you're in fucking trouble. Yeah.

Yeah. When Niles is like this kid's kind of got a fucking problem. This kid's incomprehensible. I wouldn't share a glass of brandy with him. Yeah. And man, if you know Niles, you know what that takes. Hey, everyone. Robert here.

Just wanted a quick note that the last like five or six minutes of this episode is all Frazier. It's all all Frazier talk. Jimmy and I got off on a tangent. There is a lot more Sam Bankman Fried in part two. It's another like hour and 20 minutes. So plenty more on Thursday. But as a heads up in case it's kind of confusing, we just wound up in a Frazier hole after this point. So if you want to hear us talk about Frazier, this is your chance.

Speaking of David Hyde Pierce, Jamie Loftus, you are starring in a floor show with David Hyde Pierce Based on the life of Kelsey Grammer, actually. You are playing Kelsey. You spent, like Michael Lewis, a full year living with him to really get his character down. What was that like? Look, it was pretty hostile. It was pretty hostile. And in the subsequent publishings that I've made, a lot of people 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 on the phone. And I think that that makes him a genius. I think that that makes him a genius. And 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 you even like just read his Wikipedia page and form an opinion, I beg to disagree. And I do love, I love Kelsey Grammar stories from the head of Frasier 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 director called action. And he was immediately in character. He was perfect. He was beautiful. His chest hair perked. Like, we'll never know. I was, I mean, I was fixated on Fraser reruns when I was a kid.

I would stay up late to watch them. Yeah, it's one of my comfort shows for sure. Yeah. The best. And like when I remember getting Kelsey Graham, 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 well men are scary you could you can just do that you could just be Kelsey Grammer and be evil and then and I will still like base my

sexuality on you forever sure absolutely seem fair whomst among us right um oh man but I will say having watched the new Frazier show, it becomes very clear how much of that show's charm was John Mahoney and David Hyde Pierce? Oh, well, I think Kelsey's doing, I mean, and he's an evil person. He's doing his damn best. He is, he is perfect. He is like literally his voice has not changed in 20 years, which is remarkable. No.

And he's been, you know, physically preserved well enough. Yes. Yeah. One of the big problems that show has is they've cast that kid as Niles and Daphne's son. And they're relying on. him to hold up a lot of the physical comedy end that David Hyde Pierce used to. And if you are going up next to

David Hyde Pierce in like a physical comedy competition, you're going to look like shit. Good fucking luck, because he's David Hyde Pierce. He's the guy. Robert, I thought you would love the Frazier reboot because it's some of the most abysmal Boston accents I've ever heard in my fucking life.

Don't get me wrong. I've watched every episode, Jamie. Some of the nastiest little, I have to like pause sometimes and like get a glass of water. Yeah. It's not nearly that good. Yeah.

I mean, you have, and I have conceded long ago that you've got it down. Thank you. Thank you. Well, anything to plug Jamie after our five-minute Frasier digression? Well, I'd like to, I guess I'd like to plug the Frasier Rebitt because I would like a second season. Check it out, everybody. It's not shit. It's on Paramount Plus.

And I also just read. read raw dog and follow me online if 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 yeah all right what about you that's it I'm done um you're go find find find figure out where David Hyde Pierce lives you know don't do that bye send him a nice letter I wonder if I could walk there bye bye let Jimmy know A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the path of worry, dump road, and Fear Creek. Terrible discoveries made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.

Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer. Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, The murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects. We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets. From Tenderfoot TV and IHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome fellow seekers of the dark.

I'm Danny Dregor. Won't you join me in Nocturno, Tales from the Shadows? An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. and experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura Podcast Network, available on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Barry's car. I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it ripped through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe. In season two of Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Barry and why?

She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing. The man and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture. It was the way of life. I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.

Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, our special edition episodes on Sam Bankman, who is not freed, because he is still in jail. That's the intro I've got. It's the same as the last episode. It's still really funny. Am I a hack and a fraud? Yes. No, you're hilarious.

It's still very funny. It's Sophie's favorite. This is the only time I've made Sophie. laugh in years. That's not true. Well, okay. I'm Switzerland on this issue. You're Swiss on this issue.

Yes. Jamie, speaking of Switzerland, you also were neutral in World War II. Is that correct? Yeah, I was sort of like, no, I'm kidding. Robert, you made me laugh again. Congrats. Two for two, baby. So we took a couple of days.

in between recording part one and part two to really let it sink in. How are you feeling on our technically not a behind the bastards on Michael Lewis, but basically a behind the bastards on Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short? So in the interesting days, I've talked about the Michael Lewis of it all with a couple 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 blindside. Oh, good.

Okay. Yeah. And then when they found out that he wrote the blind side, they were like, oh, yeah, I could see that he is a, you know, he's an honorary bastard. Yeah. Well, maybe he is kind of a hack. Yeah. Right. Well, because, yeah, they were like, yeah, Michael Lewis, Moneyball, the big short.

And you're like, and another thing. How did that, how did we collectively forget that he wrote that? It feels like he got away with something. Yeah. And I guess I've been thinking about what he's doing with Sam Bankman-Fried 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 the Napoleon. 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 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. Well, and also, I appreciate, because all biopics are, you know. Nonsense.

Yeah. Horshit, right? And so you're like, well, this is the one director who's going to say, my biopic is kind of horrid shit. It's just lies, which also very appropriate for Napoleon. But what is the line with that? Why am I angry at Michael Lewis for what he's doing? And I don't really care. He's a journalist.

He's a journalist. for one, he's not the director of fucking gladiator, the least accurate movie about Rome ever made. It's been a great week for like weird old guys who we could argue had peaked creatively. Although I

wouldn't say that for Scorsese, but there was a great quote that was floating around in the last couple days where I guess Scorsese said on the Killers of the Flower Moon press store that he was like always worried about running out of time and he never knew what his last movie would be. 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 honestly those are both completely valid answers i i i refuse to be a part of some sort of like pretending that that what what scott is saying isn't as valid as what scorsese is saying there are two ways to deal with mortality one of them is the two genders of creative 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 got to move. I got to have time to answer this fucking question. Yeah. Meanwhile, Robert, Paul Schrader is on Facebook and Paul Schrader is posting

about Taylor Swift in a kind of horny way. So like the old men are just, they're on one this week. And Michael Lewis walks among them. There's only one old great creative who has taken the reasonable response like answer to mortality and it's john carpenter who's like nah i'm done directing movies i'm going to get high play video games watch basketball the rest of my life and god bless him yeah god bless him there's a man who understands what's valuable in life a thing that sam bankman freed never understood and we're back 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-Fried is that Sam had this belief that no one ever does anything useful after

like age 40 to 45 somewhere around there is the last time you have a useful thought in your entire life, which I guess is relevant to our discussion of aging, aging powerful men. I will say that that's true of many stand-up comedians, but I can't speak of that outside of that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's true, especially like once you get really rich, 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 40 like Steve Jobs did all of his best shit like well after that point like his most influential

like evil things and most like really successful businessmen are just kind of getting started by their mid-40s, right? Because it takes that much time to get momentum. You've got a lot of evil left to do. You've got a lot of horrible things left to do plenty of time. Your worst is in front of you.

I think he's got three to five ethnic cleansings in a minimum, minimum, Jamie. Yeah, maybe eight, you know. I could see him having eight more ethnic cleansings. He does seem like someone who just will, like, have a Kissinger-like affinity for life. Yeah. So Bankman Freeds, I understand, belief that, like, After age 45, he's not going to be capable of having any useful ideas. This is what pushed him, you know, along with his effective altruist idea.

This is why he felt like 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. I only have a few more years left before my brain shrivels up. And so if I'm going to do anything good for the world, I have to keep putting every dollar I've made on a 50-50 bet endlessly, right? which is like, I don't know, you should probably get help if you feel that about the world because that's a deeply self-destructive way to think about yourself and about your assets. 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 not do that one. Or, you know, that's an insane risk. We need to offset it with this stuff. They also did not have a chief financial officer or a bunch of other critical executive positions. Really? Yeah. They had no CFO.

That's one I've heard of. You should have that one. 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. FTC 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 he has this deep aversion to bringing in adults like people who are not in their 20s, like the friends he went to college with and shit. He said in one interview with Michael, we tried having some grownups, but they didn't do anything. This was true for everyone over the age of 45. All they did was worry, which like, again, given what happened, perhaps they ought to have then. Maybe I'm just like sort of on one with the idea that very few standups have a valuable thought after 45. But I would say now reflecting on it, like Sam Bankman Fried is using the improv troop approach to a very high stakes business. Like he's like, no, I will only work with people

I went to college with. We know best. I don't want no fucking crusties in the room. Like if he, I mean, and we could, we could debate all day about whether Sam Bankman Fried would have done more evil in his life so far or in his life as an improv comedian because I think they should all be in forever jail. So it's kind of like it's difficult. It's difficult. This is what Leavenworth should be, right? The military needs to take stand up comedians into custody. I've always said that. I mean, I'm on a lot of lists. Yeah. You know how many bars have performed in to know people? I'm on a lot of lists. 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 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. And that's why I didn't commit a crime, right? Because I just was incompetent. I just didn't know where the money was, but it's all somewhere. Like, very silly thing to say, given what he's about to say. Okay. 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 were one of the biggest names in an industry being like, 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 some point ask them the question, hey, was that maybe a bad idea? Michael does not bring this up to Sam after the collapse in any of the dozens of conversations that they've had. And in fact, and this is why that's weird, the actual villain of his book Going Infinite, the one person that Lewis is super critical of in like a really uncharitable way is the CEO brought in to take over the FTX after Sam, like, leaves and declares bankruptcy, a guy named John Ray the 3rd. Now, I am not going to go to bat for John Ray the 3 because he is John, his name is John Ray the third.

I was going to say, so you know, he's up to something evil, right? Yeah, but he is, you know, he's the guy who got brought in to liquidate in Ron, and 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 postmortem, you bring in John Ray. And he's like, as far as I know. Not the first or second. No, not the first or second. Those guys are useless. No, fucking clowns. Okay. You're going to want to bring in the third. You need a JR3. I'm with you. So it's, 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 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. 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 you're garbage you're boring 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 $9 billion, right? And the answer that Lewis has come to is that money is all there that he just didn't know where $9 billion was. Oh. Yeah, he didn't steal it or gamble it away. He just misplaced it due to rank incompetence that he committed because he was too smart to keep track of things. 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 FTCS as a real business, but he says that John Ray, who like attacked it as the worst run company

he'd ever seen, was just too much of an idiot to like understand it, right? He describes Ray trying to figure out what company assets actually existed and what didn't as quote, like an amateur archaeologist who had stumbled upon a previously unknown civilization, unable to learn anything about its customs or language he just started digging right like he's too dumb to understand the brilliant thing that sam built up so he just starts like churning about in the wreckage without really appreciating everything that went into making this monumental edifice 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. It doesn't sound like he has a personal jimini cricket, so he's just saying shit. Like, his personal biases couldn't be more out. They wanted to rush this thing out so you don't have much time to edit it, right? That's true. Yeah. A year to write and release a book is not a long time. No.

Not enough time, one might argue. 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. 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 article in Business Insider.

At the hearing, Congresswoman Ann Wagner of Missouri asked Ray to elaborate on the specific ways FTX was worse than, quote, one of the largest corporate frauds in history. Ray explained that FtX was unusual and that it had no record keeping whatsoever. He said that employees would exchange invoices and expenses on site. Flack, the ubiquitous workplace chat room. They used QuickBooks, he added, referring 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. I was like, I've done that. And like that's nuts. Yeah. That is like the closest thing I've come to. Yeah, I was like, that's the closest thing I've come to being like, wow, if I was also tasked with multi-billion dollars, I'd be like, I don't know. Quickbooks?

Do we go to TurboTax? What do we do? I would. But it's like hire a CFO maybe. Yeah, I would hire someone who's done that before, right? Yeah. Quick books. Holy shit.

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, or he's, He's just not brilliant and special enough to understand Sam's world, which is what, that's what Michael Lewis, that's, he in caps. That's what Michael Lewis refers to FTX as is Sam's world. Right. This is a, he basically treats the whole situation as like, yeah, 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 he's just the mean old, grumpy businessman, right? 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 storybook brawl, that's an addiction, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting, both because storybook brawl was made by his childhood friend and he used consumer funds to purchase it.

It seems to have been a pretty midgame. It shut down after he got arrested, so I can't play it to tell you if it's actually good. But Lewis doesn't describe it as like a middlebrow app game. He describes it as like better than chess, like more complex than chess, a greater intellectual exercise or 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 have liked better of robot voices wired into the board, hollered rule changes at random intervals. Knights 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. And I think... This is getting fucking ridiculous. Like, is there any chance that Sam Bankman-Fried paid Michael Lewis to say this shit? Like, I don't understand. I mean, not that there's no proof that he isn't dense, but this is like above and beyond. The reason why I get that a lot.

Like, well, Michael Lewis is obviously bribed, but like Michael Lewis is very rich. Like, I don't know how you could bribe Michael Lewis. especially after you lose your money. Yeah, and even if he wasn't from money, he'd be rich. Yeah, yeah, he's always been rich and always will be. So I don't know how much I think 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 British gambling maven who took away, who like basically, got the upper class of the England in 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 Shemanda Fair, which is a kind of backerah,

where basically there's no skill involved. It's as close to pure chance as possible because there was this like change in the kind of gambling the upper class liked to do that I've heard theorized is 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 effectively a complete chance. I never understand that because it's like what's the worst that's going to happen. You're going to become marginally less rich but still maintain the same quality of life. That sounds boring. Yeah, you've just, they're just insulated from anything thrilling because they're insulated from any real danger, right? Yeah. And so I think Sam being this kind of rich sheltered kid, that's, Lewis interprets 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 in 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 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 part of the book where Lewis describes Magic the Gathering because it's it is very

boomer. Magic had been created in the early 1990s by a young mathematician named Richard Garfield. It was the first kind of a new kind of game designed perhaps for a new kind of person. 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. I couldn't hear you over the sound of imagining Garfield the cat saying that. Yeah. Which Garfield?

Bill Murray? Are we talking Chris Pratt? 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. I forget who tweeted this, but there is a vibe with the new Garfield that Chris Pratt has been locked in a room, forced to voice every major IP. it's like a it's his infinity punishment he'll be rich but he can never leave the room

I'm okay with that actually yeah let's keep him in the room he doesn't have any good ideas no no keep in the room every every six years he can come out to do another interminable Jurassic world movie no the villain was locust 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 60 minutes where he describes how Sam treated effective altruism that ties into this. And this is remarkable. 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. 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 40 people to become doctors in Africa, you're going to save 40 times a number of lives. This is like a strategy game. Well, you don't understand San Bachm Friede unless you understand that he turns everything into a game. Everything is gamified. He's describing a pyramid scheme of doctors. Yes. Am I wrong? Like, yes. And he's saying this on 60 minutes. I like, I cannot put, wrap my, okay, now

I'm like taking him being paid off like, or paid on or off off the table because you're just like, this is ridiculous. This is too stupid. Yeah. Like to like the fact that people somehow collectively forgot that you wrote the blind side on fire to say this

shit on 60 minutes. It just like is, it's, he's describing a pyramid scheme. 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 line the connection there is that like he's like 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 U.S. economy is 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, we have a shortage of doctors. We don't have a shortage of assholes who gamble with other people's money. There's not actually enough doctors for the people who need them. 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 things. Yeah. Yeah. No, he would, he would never have, right? Like, but yeah, anyway. But it sounds like he, I mean, Maybe I'm, like, you know, giving him too much credit and he's playing a game of 40 chess, but it doesn't seem that way.

And, like, he sounds ridiculous. I kind of, outside of he's just completely diluted, his two options are he's just so out of touch with the youth that he thought Sam was unique in this. Or 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 they could film it easily, right? Because I'm sure 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? Mm-hmm.

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-Fried movie, you know, crafted for the Big Bang Theory audience. Yeah, like, he's already, he's like, oh, yeah, who's hot right now? Paul Mescal will dye his hair. It's going to be fucking great. No, I think they should have had Timothy Shalame. I think they should have had Timothy Shalemay 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 months for a movie. No, no, don't talk about Robert Patton's in that way. I'm not talking about Christian Bale. I'm not talking about Christian Bale. I want to see Timothy Salome do a Christian Bale to look like Sam Bankman-Fried. That sounds fun. I just worry about Timothy. Shalmet. It looks like if you, like, touch him, he may shatter. I just worry about him. He looks so frail.

Yeah, that's the right. He looks like he's got consumption. Yeah. Like that they would say that about him in the, in the distant past. Yeah. And it's like if Sam Bankman Fried is looking heartier than you are, like you're in trouble, my man. 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. It's like the employees are all huddled inside their $30 million Bahamas suites to try to figure out how to fix things. Nishad was agitated with Sam in a way that Romnik had never seen. At one point, turning on him and screaming, will you please fucking stop playing storybook brawl?

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 Icarus story of hubris and the fall, but making it work tonally would require him to see these things that are obvious warning signs as warning signs and structure his book that way, right? 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, Lewis seems to have missed, is Bankman-Fried'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 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 and claustrophobic. This has the makings of a time when I'm less worried about it than normal. But the baseline prior might be high enough that nothing else matters. I feel conflicted about what I want. Sometimes I really want to be with you. Sometimes I want to stay at work for 60 hours straight and not think about anything else. So I want to say that I have the amount of self-love to not fall for this,

but I can't even say that 100%. I just really feel for Carolyn at a lot of points in this story because it's, oh, my god i really like i i feel like there's a version of someone who would um be like oh i can fix him where you're like oh no this is like it's like tween fiction of like there's only one and she loves tween fiction i know i know she's a disadvantage 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 like and he he clearly has a thing like he's he let he funds another another exchange by another woman in crypto who he tries to date women in crypto like yeah he

he's got this kind of thing going on but lewis kind of always writes off his his his behavior is like well you know he just he was too depressed he was too he can't fo he's too brilliant to like be a tortured 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 And this happens

Every 10 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 good ideas That it was like pressing on the woman respect Like nerve

It's ridiculous Kind of meanwhile when Lewis is describing like Why Carolyn did what she did He includes the language She'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 effect of altruist kids who doesn't really believe in it. She's just so desperate for affection that she would like do anything for it, which like, I don't know. Like, I don't know the person.

But it's weird that Lewis is so cynical about her and so full of excuses for Sam. I would have a fair amount of guesses as to why that may be. and the way that it seems like in many ways that 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 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 yeah it fucking sucks and then also on the other end of Carolyn being characterized as this like desperate for affection person. I try to like tap into that of like, God, if any of my personal correspondence came out, I'd be fucking cooked. Oh, it would be devastating. There's like so many people.

And if she's being singled out. Yeah, of course. Yeah, everyone's desperate for affection. 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 as priors, which is like it's a way of like bringing

Bayesian mathematics into personal decisions. And all you're saying when you're saying like, well, these are my priors is like, well, this is the shit I believe without any kind of evidence, right? That's largely what that means. These are like my preexisting biases. But saying preexisting 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 versus this outcome. And then I do the thing with the highest expected value, right? Which is another way of saying, I do whatever will make me feel good, which is, you know, a lot of us are like that. A lot of the time, that's human nature. 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 offer 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, that's no different than a lot of guys in their 20s. That's not special. It just sounds like a fucking guy. Oh, so you're saying he got horny

and then he didn't care about her afterwards. Well, that's not special. Like. I can't relate. Wow. Yeah. That's not just millions of men. That's millions of people.

It's so, I mean, even just outside. of his relationships with women and 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 on my level you could never 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 quickbooks because I don't give a fuck. It's like either I am a genius or I don't care. And there's nothing in between. And it's like what is in between is just the fact that they're full of shit. Yeah. Yeah. And you know who else is full of shit? Nope. Time to head to ads. Oh, boy, I sure do love ads. Those were some good ones. So, yeah, so we're back. we're talking about Sam Bakeman-Freid's issues with women, as chronicled by Michael Lewis, who does, to his credit, make a point of noting that all of the companies moves as CEO from the U.S. to Hong Kong and then from Hong Kong to the Bahamas were prompted by, like, he and Ellison would have some big relationship conversation, and she would say, like,

I want to have a closer relationship, and then he would move the entire company without telling anybody, which again, like, the instant you hear that anecdote, you're like, oh, well, this guy, there's nothing, this guy is not a super genius. Like, this guy is, is just a, he's just a guy. Can't avoid, like deal with confrontation. Like, yeah, that's not special. Again, millions of us out there. Every, 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 his heart. I don't think... 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 that is present outside of just his dealing with, like, the women that he was in relationships with and worked with is that Sam doesn't think, anyone besides him has worthwhile thoughts or ideas and that anything he doesn't understand is not worth paying attention to, which is a big thing in tech guys, right? This attitude that like, you're seeing it now with these AI freaks where they don't think that 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 anonymy 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 brighter now and prettier it's like no that's not the point of the art you don't understand but like they don't yeah it's this thing do you think that a computer could come up with the image of hall walker and brian the dog in a convertible no that's a uniquely human artistic instinct only we would understand it only humans would get it this idea that like I am smart and therefore if I don't understand something, it's not important, right? 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 treats like everybody who's not him. And I find that interesting. I do too. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. So perhaps the biggest major through line in going in. 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, because Sam did not know how much money they had. Of course not. But at the climax of the book, after FTAX is crumbled, Lewis goes into detail to discuss all the money that was recovered by John Ray. Quote, at the end of June 21st. Yeah, the third. At the end of June, 2023, John Ray filed a report on his various collections. To date, the debtors have recovered approximately $7 billion in liquid assets, he wrote,

and they anticipate additional recoveries, $7.3 billion, to be exact. 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 he loses $4 million,

and they think that he's lost $4 million in investor money. And he's a dick about it. And later they find it. Like he had just misplaced it, basically. 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.

And this meany John Ray thinks it's bad to lose several billion dollars. But what Lewis is saying is not true. He is kind of lying here. Maybe he just, maybe it's an honest mistake. I don't know. But it's not accurate because for one thing, seven-ish, $7.3 billion has been found. Almost $9 billion is missing.

So that's one and a half billion dollars unaccounted for still. That's still one of the largest financial frauds in history, right? Significant. That's what I mean, even the fact that. Maybe as much as $2 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 the first one. He tries to close that hole by being like, and a lot of that money is in these, you know, money they paid to these companies that they'll probably get back. And it's like, why would you think that? A lot of that money went to other shady crypto people who don't bank in the U.S. Why do you think the money's going to come back? Well, see, this is interesting because now, I feel bad because I know Michael Lewis is not the bastard of the episode. However, if we're applying Sam Bankman-Freid's theory that you do not do

any valuable work after 45, that may in fact apply to Michael Lewis. Sounds like maybe he's lost the thread because it's the way that he's talking about money and I mean, and I have not read this book. I have. Don't worry. That's why they pay you the big bucks. 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 blind side, which everyone forgets that he wrote, like, it calls his entire body of working the question. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, just the ridiculousness of being like, well, look, guys, seven, you know, they've recovered $7 billion out of $9.3 billion. So things are basically good. Like, that's insane. But also, as we'll get to later, he is, he, that even that doesn't tell the whole truth. Like this idea that everyone's going 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 story 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 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 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. 7.3 billion.

So it's 1.3 billion that's missing. Plus it, and there's still more to be found. Hold on. And it's more than that. It's more than that. This is where today, today, the prosecution, the prosecution sent a motion to the court saying, can we please. not talk about the possibility that customers are all going to get their money back. And that in particular, can we, you're going to let me finish?

I am. You want to, come on. I'll let me ask you. I need to let them in. Do you care how much he's missing? I think what I care about is the fact that at the very least, he's extraordinary. No, I do think it's important. I think at the very least, he's irresponsible.

Of course. I'm not saying he's not irresponsible. I'm saying it's just different than you think. Okay. Okay, a few observations. First of all, a toupee. Second of all,

uploaded four. That is a toupee, right? His hair does not look real. Colors, it's not giving matching color. Second observation, upload date four weeks ago, gnarly. Yeah. Third observation, 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 15 people show up to watch me

but chug a quart of milk it's ridiculous yeah Jamie though here's the thing this is the difference between it's the same the cultural contribution of the same what I call vulgar art which is the stuff that will be forgotten you know, within a generation,

an 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 us in 10,000 years. Misunderstood it is time. Just like the Parthenon. He's in like a fucking cathedral, though.

I mean, that is a very weird venue. Sophie, can you bring up a freeze frame of his face at like 1257 in that? Because he is doing it, I think you should leave face. Like, he is almost a perfect character for one of those fucking sketches. Tim Robinson could do this guy. 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, Lewis is definitely doing that kind of face in this. God. That right there where he's like he's got his head. Yeah, that's what he's doing it, Tim Robinson. He's really, oh boy. It's so funny. And I'm doubling down on the toupee theory. I'm right.

No, that hair does not move the way hair does. I can't see his teeth fall enough to see if we've got the, if we've got the veneers to match, but. He's too rich to not have veneers. I aspire to veneers. I just want to have exactly that much money. I wanted to play 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 recovered 7.3 out of like $9.3 billion. He's obfuscating the

truth. It is accurate that Ray has announced FTX customers will see 90% of every dollar of recovered assets returned, which I would still call that problematic because if somebody stole 10% of your bank account, you'd be kind of miffed. But that is even not what it seems like. And I'm quoting from Investipedia here. To be clear, the 90% number refers to the funds FTX is able to gain access to rather than total customer deposits at the time of the exchanges collapse. That doesn't necessarily mean customers will gain access to 90% of their assets that were left on the exchange. Rather, customers will gain access to 90% of the funds FTX is able to distribute to their creditors. FtX and FTX U.S. had an estimated $8.7 billion

combined shortfall by the time the crypto firm, filed for bankruptcy. Roughly $6.9 billion of that shortfall, including a Bahamas real estate portfolio, has been recovered. Let's consider Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, as a proxy for the broader cryptocurrency markets. On November 11th of last year, the petition date, Bitcoin was trading at around $17,000. On Friday, it crossed $30,000. So simply put, if the current plan goes through, you'd likely get 85% of the dollar value of your cryptocurrency held on FDX as of last November, even if the same coins 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 had all of their money. Like, that there's harm here, right? That's what the courts are taking. 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 the. 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 15 or 20 percent of a bunch of people's savings accounts is a substantial crime. The legal question is, is it a scam? Which like, yes. You know, and I'm sure that like everyone who, and understandably, because I walk amongst them, like everyone who was seeing this happened a couple of 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, Sam Bankman Fried was taking advantage of every possible mark he could. Yeah. And yeah, and people are still suffering ongoing harm as a result of it. He's acting, like Lewis is acting as if there wasn't really anyone hurt. And it's like, well, no. Like, even if all of them, which will not happen, at least about 20% of that,

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 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. 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. And it's not gaming

rich gaming the rich because like Larry 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 the stone I mean most moms do right he's pretty popular amongst the moms in the comments i don't know if my mom knows who i mean all the women in my family were big Seinfeld fans so does your mom watch curb message no no no no but signfeld oh my mom yeah yeah yeah my mom watched okay okay i'm back i'm back yeah so anyway

michael lewis yeah it's interesting to me like the fact that the the fact that sam bankman freed stole money from depositors because that's what it is when you take money out of one company illegally and use it to gamble in another company. 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. 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 U.S. dollars that customers put in the exchange. So customers would put U.S. into FTX and then use it to like buy cryptocurrency, right? But those U.S. 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 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 New Yorker. Quote, Lewis finds it not only wholly implausible that this was, in fact, a gigantic accounting error explained by FTC's difficulty securing bank accounts. As Lewis concludes, his story implausible. as it sounded, remained irritatingly difficult to disprove, and Lewis very gently insinuates that Ellison, in over her head, might have made some very bad decisions. And in court, which again is a couple of weeks after his book comes out, it is proven with data from the company that Sam not only 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 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 the exchange, about the FTCS insurance fund, which was ostensibly supposed to protect both FDX and its customers from trades that went badly even more quickly than the exchange's risk engine could account for. FtX published the fund's supposed balance on their website and bragged widely about its existence, including a testimony to U.S. Congress. However, according to Wang, the number showed on the website was falsified. And the question is like, is this a real number? Wang, no. So it's a fake number? Yes. 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 FTCS safer than the other exchanges is that we keep, you can't do a run on the bank because our entire, like, all of our deposits are backed 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 were regularly brag. We have this much money in our insurance fund. It came out. Was that number accurate? Like, no. all they were doing. I don't know I even asked. The code snippets show that, like, they had Sam ordered Nishad Singh to write some code that would update the insurance fund amount randomly by adding it to the daily trading volume, like the amount of money. Basically, it would calculate how much has been traded today and they would multiply that by a random number somewhere around $7,500 and then divide it by a billion. So it would that way that way that it was just lying, right? How you do business. They're like, oh, so.

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. Yeah, that's not legal to do. No, no, that's fraud. And I feel like this, like this level of, like, splitting hairs in the New Yorker wouldn't happen unless the two main places. players Michael Lewis and Sam Bankman Fried 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. To be fair, the actual thrust of that New Yorker article is like Michael Lewis is what the fuck is happening with this guy because he's clearly fallen for. Like the New Yorker 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. Okay. So they're like headline Michael Lewis low key fell off. Yeah, lokey fell off. That's right. Molly also brings up something else that was left out of court, but the prosecution published evidence of it. And I found this really telling. 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 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 doing the calculation on your own machine, right? Which is evidence that, like, there was never any attempt to give people accurate information. Wow. It's fun stuff. There's other fun reveals during the court case. For example, during FTX's days as a functioning business.

business. A lot of crypto people noticed 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 trading on FTC. 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 blog where someone asked 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 were 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 20 years old now of getting 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 FTCs's like selling points was that it was different. They had an algorithm to automatically freeze trades on an account once that account had suffered losses equal to the amount of money they'd put in the exchange, right? 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 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. Wang explained that Alameda had not started out with such a high credit limit, but that periodically the trading firm had run into issues placing trades

because they didn't have enough collateral. Sam Bankman-Freed kept asking him to increase their credit limit to 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 $65 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. Like he's like... Yeah, you just imagine like someone just like on their knees in like shitty pinstripe pants being like, come on, man. Yeah, give me some credit, man.

I'm good for it. But he got up to $65 billion in credit. Yeah, yeah, which is in. 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 my, by the way, that's my interpretation. I mean, to me, it sounds like this shit is Neo points to him. Like, it really is, like, if there's anything that got the millennial generation hooked on capitalism and random gambling, it was Neo pets. And if anyone has proof that Sam Bank Fried was a neopets user. He just sounds like the worst version of a neopets user to me. The worst end game for a neopets user is what you've been describing to me for several hours. And I think you and I were not invested in Sam Beckman Fried ever being particularly smart. So we can see this.

He's a neopets user. Lewis can't. 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 storybook brawl, right? Like, he's just, he was never good at this. But it was the first time that Michael Lewis had heard of storybook brawl. So Sam Bang and Fried said he was the best at it. Why not believe him?

Yeah. And just the idea, like, again, Lewis can't be like, yeah, this kid had a gambling problem. And he also owned a bank. So it became everyone's issue. But like, you're not. He's the bank man. 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, but like you can't in a Hollywood way make it look like somebody's a genius if they just can't control themselves, right? Yeah, it's a serious, serious problem. 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, shit. Everything you're about to advertise. We won't have to work if you purchase these products. Okay, good self-correction. Yeah, I saved it. Actually, we'll continue to work more accurate. 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 and F. TX would have done the things that I just described if they hadn't meant to disguise the reality of their business from the world, which is fraud, right? The reality is that Sam Bankman-Fried used depositor money to gamble. And he was gambling in part on his own chances. He wasn't just gambling.

This is the thing that is important to understand. Past a certain point, most of his gambling was not him betting on cryptocurrencies, right? The big shit he did that made the news, the billion dollars that he pumped into renaming that stadium in Florida, to bringing in all these celebrities to these high-dollar 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 him, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. One of my favorite aside bits from the court case is that on the stand, when she was being questioned, Carolyn Ellison told everybody that Sam confided in her he thought he'd had a 5% chance of becoming president of the United States, which. 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, I mean, he at least could have been, like, who is that fucking loser from Starbucks? He could have at least been that. Yeah, he could have, I think he could have had a failed presidential, but no, like.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. No. Like, 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. Right. That's true.

That's true. They, they, 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 a void of charisma. No, and we've learned that time and time again. 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. You won't get anything valuable at it.

If you do want to get something valuable in 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 F-A-U-X. 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 the Bahamas, and I found this passage from his book relevant to what I just mentioned. A few hours into our conversation, Bankman 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 waited. In walked a haughty

man with a long scraggly beard, a pot belly, and mismatched socks, one of them with a Pac-Man design. It was an employee 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 Bankman 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. Nothing bad happens to them. Wait, he has his own Zuckerberg quote. He has his own, you can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way I live my life.

Ha ha. Wait, read it again for me so I can really take. it in and put it on a t-shirt. This is Sam's friend who stuck by him after his business collapsed. I firmly believe once somebody becomes a certain level of rich, they're never poor again. They don't go to jail. Nothing bad happens to them. Poetry.

Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing to think in that moment, too, where all of the smarter people have just fled the island. And in that moment, he was infinite. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Yeah.

I'm speechless. It's so funny, too, because, like, I don't know, man, just historically. do you remember like Marie Antoinette was pretty rich and like that didn't end well you know like like there's a long the czar had a lot of money it didn't go well for him you know bad things happened to rich people too and that's that's your main political stance as I recall yeah yeah I will hang out with anybody rich because nothing bad can happen to them obviously untrue um 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 Fo is clearly someone who's smart enough to, like, understand when he's being lied to by these people

and to understand their fundamental absurdity, and that comes across in his book, I don't think Lewis got that, right? He believed fundamentally, in the fundamental honesty at the center of Sam Bankman-Fried, and I kind of suspect that's why he covered his face with his hands that day in court. He's not a dumb man, and he must have realized by that point the evidence that came out in the trial 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 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 Bankman Fried to be enigmatic but essentially genuine, and certainly not out to enrich himself because he has no desire for the things that money can buy. Lewis's refusal to believe that Sam Bankman Fried is a liar in the most venal, base sense of the 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 trial of Sam Bankman-Fried. Oh, it was a, oh, see, who, but everyone on this call knows that the first sign that your life is about to be fucking torched is starting a podcast. That's right, right. It's the last refuge of fools and scound. Yes. Please pay for the Cool Zone free subscription app. What do we call it, Sophie? So the trial, judging Sam is part of Lewis's Against the Rules podcast on Pushkin. And I can't speak for the regular episodes of that podcast. I have not listened to any of the other ones. But I can say his Sam Bankman-Free trial podcast is an uneven effort at best. Most of the work is done by Lydia Jean. She's a journalist. She's okay. I don't have any huge issues with her.

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. But also... Yeah, then it's like my least favorite part of every public radio. And I love public radio. But the broadcast where it like begins with six minutes of a guy stepping on leaves. And you're like, oh my God, I get it. You're in fucking New Hampshire in October.

What happens? It's permanently 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 were doing like basically daily episodes and needed to fill runtime. And like, look, is that lazy? Yes.

Have we all been there? Yes. So I simply can't throw stones at this glass house. What are what are you talking about? What do you mean? As someone who's never had a daily podcast, I condemn this behavior because I've never had to do it. So, Louis, Lydia takes most of 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. Yeah, he was screaming at women in cathedrals. He was busy. Yeah. But he does occasionally come on. And one of the episodes that does show, like he shows up to court on the day that Sam takes the trial or takes the stand in his own defense. And, you know, during this portion where he's like, Sam's being cross-examined, he says, I don't recall more than a hundred times.

here's how a write-up from the verge summarizes his time on the stand Bankman Freed'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 Fried listed his priorities, including getting accounting right on FTX. Cohen and Bankman Fried, Cohen's lawyer, and Bankman Fried used this to show how to vote 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 for the stories Bankman Fried wanted to tell, we had to rely on, Bankman Freed. We moved on to Bankman Fried's argument about hedging, which I still do not understand, except as a way for him to say he's a smarter trader than his ex-girlfriend, the former Alameda research CEO Carolyn Ellison.

God, this is more stand-up behavior. The actual evidence suggests that Ellison is both a better trader and much savier than Bankman Freed. She modeled out a risk scenario that matched almost exactly what happened at FTX, for instance, to try to keep him from sinking $2 billion into venture investing. And like, what happens is he's putting, you know, all this money into advertising into like playing celebrities. He's putting like $2 billion into these random series of investments.

And she's like, hey, we've taken depositor money to get. 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 so that if no matter what happens, you can't lose too much money, right? 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 know? Well, it's like their risk goes, we're never going to die.

Like, you can't, you can't hedge that. Yeah. What is wild 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 the kind of stuff that, for example, Michael Lewis might report on is a tremendous scam that worked out great for every. for everybody. 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, yeah, Sam is just lying on the stand. He's obfuscating. He's refusing to answer the question.

But Michael Lewis, not only does. Michael Lewis like being lied to by Sam Bankman-Fried, 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 going to love this clip. Today

he didn't get in as much trouble as he got yesterday, though. Not as much, but still a little bit. More than other witnesses. Yeah, that's true. The bigger point is the judge is sitting there listening to see if Sam is actually answering the question. Because he now

He doesn't do that, yeah. Or generating a word salad for us all to consume. And I was thinking about this again today. Why Sam's word salads are so fun. Like why he gets away with it. Like most people, when they don't answer a question, your alarm bells go off pretty quickly. Like that, you just redirect it in some way.

He's really, really good at starting the answer in a place where you think, oh, that's where the beginning of the answer belongs. And then making a little jump into things are actually interesting. interesting to know about. So you're not bored. You're actually interested in what he's saying. 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. That's exactly what happens. Yeah. So that's like he's he's he's just saying that like, yeah, 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,

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 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. Like, I know what you're saying, 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, which does seem to be the case. 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 actual question. But, like, I want to continue the clip because Lewis. says something very, very ridiculous right after this. Okay. He's really, really good at starting the answer in a place where you think,

oh, that's where the beginning of the answer belongs. And then making a little jump into things are actually interesting to know about. So you're not bored. You're actually interested in what he's saying. 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.

That's exactly what happens. it's engaging. It's like maybe it's even better than the answer to the question. Right. Maybe it's what you should have asked. Yes, maybe it's what even was you should have asked. That's exactly right. Yeah, it's Sam, the question Sam answers that aren't what he's being asked are what you

should have asked, right? Like he's smarter than you, the interviewer, and he knows what you actually should have asked, which I just thought was a wild thing for a journalist to say. This is, you know, we're getting to the end here. But the last thing I wanted to bring up was maybe the most interesting case of Michael Lewis following Sam's crap, which is him believing that Sam's outfit, his hairstyle, his poor hygiene are all evidence of his brilliance, right? 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 brainpower 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 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 a centric 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 2022, the room was allowed to erupt into laughter? Ellison replied, he looked like he didn't put a lot of effort into his personal appearance. He dressed sort of sloppily and didn't cut his hair often. He said he thought his hair had been very valuable. He said ever since Jane Street, he thought he had gotten higher bonuses because of his hair.

And it was an important part of FDX's narrative and image. 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 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 when he dresses like a...

His like genocide hoodie that he wears. 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 a 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 $200 million or whatever new headquarters, his own. only design note was that it should be shaped so it looked from the side like his hair's do because he thought that like he thought it was iconic right like which is also based on the what we were just listening to what the like logo to that podcast is is the shape of his hair

everyone's playing into it it's fucking wild anyway jamie that's my episode do you think we should fire michael lewis into the sun well i was i was thinking earlier i am very curious because I think it's like a waste of time to ask like, will Michael Lewis have another opportunity to course correct his career? Of course he will. Of course he will. Yes. He's going to write 70 more books. 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 wonder, like, if that's the position you're in and you will absolutely write another book because you're unkillable financially. Like, I wonder which direction he's going to go in. Is he going to be hyper cautious? 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 person. 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. 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. A second Sam. A second Sam has hit the Michael Lewis bibliography. And it's going to be Sam Altman. Like, he's going to be Sam Altman. Like, he's 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 book on Sam Altman, I suspect.

Oh, for fuck sick. You're probably right. You're probably, because then he'll be like, and I would know, I can see through Sam's now. Having been conned by one, I certainly won't be conned by two. Sam me once, Sam on you. Sam me twice won't get sammed again, you know? I am father of Sam, son of Sammy shit. Wow.

Yeah, no, that. That's my guess as to where this. goes is Sam Altman. What, why is Michael Lewis being presented with a second Sam? Doesn't seem fair. A second Sam is it that, well,

I've already done that joke once. And it worked. And it all, it always works, Jamie. It always works. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Well, I don't feel, well, you know, I, I would say that this is like in the top 20 percentile of bastards

episodes I've come out feeling like, you know, I don't feel that bad. I usually feel like really dire. I feel I feel pretty good. Yeah. He's in forever. He's in forever jail.

Mm-hmm. 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 cellmates. 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 weekly podcast coming. But Jamie Loftis Weekly is coming to the Cool Zone Network. You are going to be the cool hand luke of our podcast prison. You're welcome. God, I would love to be the cool hand look with the podcast prison. I got to get some new outfits.

Got to get some new outfits. 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 that was cool hand Luke. I haven't seen a long time. Neither have I. Not since I was like seven. So I don't know.

Wow, you saw a cool-haired look when you were seven? Yeah, my mom loved that movie. Nice. 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. Ooh, that explains so much about you, to me, too. She was so excited that all the men die and the woman didn't.

But like, yeah, she wanted me to see that movie at a very young age. what a legacy truly what a legacy The sentence because men are stupid was uttered two or three times during that movie

which does unpack a lot of the plot intended or not my mom would let me watch soap operas very young and I would be like what do they mean

when they say making love and she would say what do you think I'm like I don't know I'm seven yeah you have not equipped

me to answer that question mother Well, yes, weekly podcast coming soon early next year. What's it about? You guess, but don't contact me about it because you're wrong. Yeah, yeah. A second Jamie has hit the cool zone. I mean, you've done more than two podcasts.

This joke never worked, but whatever. A first Jamie has hit the cool zone weekly. That's right. Jamie, what podcast is this of ours? Oh, God. how many how many this is this will be what oh my god oh it's impossible to say it's impossible to say when 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 bangman freed forever jail forever jail us forever wives oh uh so jamie anything else you wanted to plug before we ride on out of here like michael lewis into the sunset 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 60% of the purchases I've gotten have been off that alone. So you should buy Raw Dog. And, yeah. Buy Raw Dog and, no, I'm not going to make a raw dog joke. That's just going to get me in trouble. Anyway, buy a 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 fucking dad if you

really want to hear the uh ad advertisers that robert's disparaging i personally think it's more fun to imagine it so you should get a cooler zone media subscription yeah once everyone's on cooler zone media then we can finally get that sweet lockheed martin subscription that i or a whatever ad deal that i've been wanting to have. Mm-hmm. And then Robert can finally live inside a grenade. Like, it's always been his dream. That's been my dream.

That's been my dream, Jamie. Yeah. All right. We're done. Bye. We did it. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,

coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. behind the bastards is now available on youtube new episodes every wednesday and friday subscribe to our channel youtube.com slash at behind the bastards a new true crime podcast from tenderfoot tv in the city of malls in belgium women began to go missing it was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them the murders have never been

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