Also media.
Hey everyone, Robert Evans here with Behind the Bastards, and we've got some kind of sad news today. This is going to hit members of the community pretty hard. But forty eight years ago, on November tenth, nineteen seventy five, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior, killing
all twenty nine crew members on board. This is a 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 expect into the entirety of their nuclear stockpiles, detonating
them over Lake Superior. You know that's my hope. I know it's all of your hope back at home, and I really think what can carry us through this is some classic MAO era propaganda posters sewing, Joe Biden, Zijen Ping and Vladimir Putin walking hand in hand, surrounded by a crowd of little kids in Red Guard uniforms, heading towards the light of a new atomic sun, while a series of mushroom clouds detonate over Lake Superior's debts. Anyway, 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, sort of what I was picturing. The image you described has that exact same and it just acts just throw someone in the back seat, same exact ship.
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 circular. Well, you're just like.
I mean, from your jacuzzie filled with one hundred dollars 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 resurrecrected, I think on the same timeline as Jesus Christ.
It was like, yeah, very similar characters.
Yes, yeah, and we can all agree that, Billow, they're both mar heads and they also and they both are you know, like middling authors.
You could say, yeah, yeah, that's fair to say. So Jamie, speaking of mediocre men, how do you feel have you been keeping up with the story of Bastard's pot alumni, Sam Bankman Freed?
Okay, so I have. I I know the broad strokes, but as soon as the joyous news became started coming in, I knew that we were going to be doing this. And I don't know any of the particulars except for tweets of yours that have been algorithm to the top of my feed. I'm just there's no one I would rather be with to let it just wash off for me.
Robert Family, Robert, can I ask you to please share your working title for this episode because it's funny.
Yeah, it's Sam Bankman, not Freed, and in parentheses because he is in jail.
I think it's fun, and I think I think that that is far superior to Sam Bankman jailed.
Yeah, that's not creative at all. You got to spend a lot of extra words I could create.
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, eighty percent of this episode is shitting on Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Shirt. Oh yeah, no, we're really This is gonna be a great one for the Lewis heads in the audience. Wow, okay, okay, this is gonna be Oh buckle up, yeah, now this is relevant. The man just said buckle up. Oh yeah, strap the fuck in and down.
Fuck ahead, we are.
We are starting with Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short.
James, We're okay. I feel like when I recently saw a picture of my three year old niece going to a Wiggles concert and I just caught myself smiling in the same way.
This is great. Yeah, this is great. So on January fifth, twenty twenty two, Sam Bankman freed send a message to one of his many signal loops. For what it's worth, February eight through sixteenth, Michael Lewis is going to be in the Bahamas profiling us. Now, if you haven't been following this story, and if Michael Lewis is not familiar to you, then you probably do remember like the most famous result of one of his novels, which is the
movie The Big Short. This was based on a book Lewis wrote about a group of traders who had the foresight to predict and profit off of the two thousand and eight financial crash. They realized that, like the subprime loan business was like a bunch of hooey, and they shorted it right, made a bunch of money while everybody else lost their jobs.
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 who uses which called saber metrics, which, without getting into it, is basically being Nate Silver but also actually running a sports team. Right.
That is also that in twenty twenty I started doing this bit on Cursed Zoom comedy shows called The Boyfriend Criterion Collection, and it's just like Blu Rays that are in your house against your living well, Yeah, mon Ball is very much a part of the boyfriend Criterion collection. It's right up there with Whiplash. It's like a disaster.
I must say, if you, if you did not date the worst man you've ever dated in your entire life in twenty seventeen that was obsessed with all things Michael Lewis, then were you really in Los Angeles?
Yeah? No, that's that's true. The problematic By the way, if.
Your worst boyfriend couldn't read, really.
Think you're you're the median American and honestly don't even know.
Who I'm talking about, Like it's impossible to say that, but I know.
The only non problematic piece of physical media that you can have on you in your house as a boyfriend is an original VHS tape of Trimmors. That's just the way it works.
I I and I would fight with you if I didn't, if I didn't feel the same way. I think that that is very much as a good sign.
Uh huh, that's excellent, Thank you, 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 in the country and almost certainly the wealthiest. There's not a lot of competition for that, but like, he's definitely in the running. He's what you'd call an access journalist. Who he is somebody whose stories come from his ability to get close to his subjects and just 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 he's pleasant company. Enough people have said this that I assume it's true based on just like how he does his stories. People he's good at putting folks at ease and they don't mind him being around, and that's how he gets a lot of his stories. Now, as general rule, if you are in the position that Sam bankman Freed and his friends who are in circa twenty twenty two running a massive financial shell game, you would be hesitant and welcome very well.
I think we can all agree based on kings talk about a game of four D chess.
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 diret of the finance industry. It's this is a guy who can make you into a celebrity. And in early twenty twenty two, that was the entire vision of everyone like connected business wise to Sam Bankman, Freed was, we need to turn this guy into a
celebrity who's constantly everywhere to raise the profile of this exchange. Right, They spent something like a billion dollars on a variety of different corporate and celebrity endorsements. Of the nine billion that was missing, about a billion went towards shit to boost FTX and to boost Sam's profile.
Right, I'm sorry, where's that. You gotta spend money to make money, I guess you because spent ten billion to make nothing. To go to jail. You have to see this has been ten billion dollars to go to jail.
That's what I'm saying, to go to to go to Forever prison, Shamie. Let's be honest about this.
He's going to. I for every time I've seen Forever prison, very often. For you, I hear it in the cadence of the Forever Purge trailer. You're like, Oh, it's the Forever prison.
Yeah, that is where he's going. And that's you know again, everyone is kind of cut ties. Everyone legitimate has cut ties with not just Sam, but like Crypto in general. In the wake of Sam's collapse, But there was about a year and a half period where like every bank was looking into it, every tech company was putting shit on the blockchain. The last kind of holdout, and the reason why Sam put so much money into this was politicians. Right.
There were a few who would cut but like most people who were in politics would not even take donations directly from crypto, right, you had to launder that shit. And Sam was looking to buy himself a sizable chunk of Congress so that he could make sure that regulations on crypto favored his company specifically, which is why he did stuff like you know, he spent tens of millions of dollars getting Tom Brady and Giselle Bunchen to like
pretend to be his friends. He sat down next to Bill Clinton on fucking stage in a very cringey interview. He paid Larry Davis to make a Super Bowl lad But all of that, the potential, all of that had to legitimize him paled in comparison to having the big short dude treat you like a financial genius. Right, If Michael Lewis treats you like Michael Burry, who's one of the characters from the Big short who became a big
name after Lewis wrote this book. If he's like, this guy is that kind of financial genius, then everybody's going to start taking your calls, even people who like have been hiding from Crypto because they don't they're worried that what happened would happen right, that you'd get ten million in donations, 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 when like Errol Morris like profiled and worked for Elizabeth Holmes. You're just like, it's that level of profile versus l.
Yes, this turns you into somebody who's like who can be taken seriously because that's what who Lewis is, right, he is that big a deal. I'm not like puffing him up. He doesn't need it right now.
He is people to care about Moneyball the most, 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 Freed book. I think it's bullshit, but I didn't. I didn't get bored at any point. You know, is at a pace a piece of writing,
you know. So he decides to come knocking. Sam is immediately on board. All of their PR people are on board. Not everyone at FTX is on board. Carolin Edison, who is his on again, off again girlfriend who testified against him repeatedly. She is running Alameda, which is the company that bankrupts everything that he is illegally funneling consumer deposits into. She is basically like the and she does not like
the idea of having Michael Lewis around. Now. She can't really confront Sam Bankman Freed when she has a bad idea. Nobody can, so she just kind of hedges it and says the signal chat makes sense. I feel like my instincts are more towards under the radar, but I might just be irrationally biased towards that in general. And then like an emoji of a face sticking its tongue out, and Sam replies, Sam, except exactly the opposite that, right, like.
You know you're down bad if you're asking Sam Bankreant Freed to make sense. Yeah, it's challenging. Oh god, that's such I mean, I don't know, I know we've talked about her in the past, but that's like a what a mess, what a nightmare.
She's in a rough situation. And he will talk a lot about how he treats her in this. But Will mccaskell is also in that signal chat, and Will is basically the founder. He's not like literally the founder, but he is the founder of what is most commonly talked about as the effect of altruism movement, and definitely its figurehead. Right. He is the big guy. He's this Oxford professor who 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 set, he's written about a financial collapse before.
He's got front seat tickets to this whole thing. And then the book comes out, and unfortunately for Lewis, the book comes out, he times the release right for when the court case starts, so we get all of this
right alongside his book. We get all of these signal texts and stuff that were not in his book book, and kind of the overwhelming thing that you see when you compare what comes out in the court case what comes out in the testimony of as Friends to the text of Lewis's book, is that like, oh, Michael got kind of fucking conned by this dude, right, Oh yeah, Like he fell for it.
Yeah, And I mean it speaks to the level of confidence one would have to have in their own reporting to time it with yep the trial, because if you had even a remote feeling that you have got you had gotten it wrong, I would be like release it a year after the trial, like bury it in the area.
I can see if you're if you're just some journalists and this is your first book or you just don't have you're not like a huge hit. So like you are very Your publisher has a lot of power and they're like, we want this to drop when the case does, because that's when it'll sell best. I get that you might not have the suction necessary to move it. Michael Lewis can say we are putting this out this day
and like, suck my dick. I'm Michael Lewis. It'll make you money, right, And he doesn't, which which suggests he has the same kind of hubris that Sam Bankman Freed did in a lot of ways. So to give you an example of how emotionally involved Lewis is in this case, here's a good write up on the court case by a journalist who was there during the trial, which was
not filmed. Writing for Jacobin, and this is how they describe the devastating cross examination of Bankman Freed, who again chose to take the stand in his own defense despite every expert saying absolutely never do this. Quote across the aisle for me and the section reserve for friends and family. I could see Sam's parents growing increasingly agitated, his mom
visibly shaking two rows behind them. I couldn't help but notice author Michael Lewis leaning forward, arms draped over the bench in front of him, with his head down between his arms.
Nobody expects Michael Lewis in the court.
Yeah, and I you know, I do actually have I don't think they're very good people, but I have sympathy for Sam's parents. This is like a nightmare if like to know that your kid is going to forever prison, even if it's totally their faults.
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 start as Sam Bankman Freed in the movie based on this.
No, I really don't want.
No, No, there's no one I want to see play him in a movie. Just do him. Like Maris and Frasier, have him always be off.
That would be oh, I love yeah, like the Parents and Charlie Brown, Heather Sinclaire of Degrassi.
And you know what, cast David Hyde Pierce as Michael Lewis. Then we got a movie. Then we got a fucking film.
Then we got I mean, if if this whole ordeal results in David Hype Pierce winning an oscar a.
Bad absolutely, absolutely.
There's way is good.
There's no way it's good. Yes, you know.
And and it's possible that Adam McKay in an effort to course directing, endorse on sure Adam McKay is, like, he absolutely could, and he's and he would need to course correct on the Michael Lewis in the first place for having directed The Big Short. It's a great move for everyone. We could make everyone's agent in the situation.
You're gonna be rich, Jamie, I'm gonna be fucking rich. Yeah. In in interviews he gave after the book came out and the trial started, Lewis framed his book Going Infinite about Sam Bankmanfried as a letter to the jury, which is like kind of nonsense, because obviously the jury is never allowed to read a book about the guy that they're going on a trial about, and the judge specifically
instructed them not to. There's an interview with sixty minutes, which is really something we will hear some clips from it later. But in that interview, Lewis explained, I mean, there's going to be this trial, and the lawyers are going to tell two stories, and so there's a story war going on in the courtroom, and I think every war and I think neither one of those stories is
as good as the one I have. And like I on 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 to hear. I mean, I guess I can be of many minds about characterizing it as a story war, because that is like just how history is written, and it's kind of almost refreshing to hear someone refer it to as like, well, whoever could write the better story? That's will We'll end up having the historical precedent, but interesting that it would be said out loud in that way.
Yeah, and again I want to reiterate, while Michael is the main character here, he's not like he's he's not a bastard. He's not someone who's like impact on the world has been monstrous as far as I've ever heard, He's a reasonably nice person. We'll definitely get him being mean in a couple of points here, but it's nothing that I would like call someone that, like one of history's greatest monster over But this is Bankman free. It
is a bastard. And so I think talking about the way in which he kind of has Lewis wrapped around his finger, in the degree to which Lewis tortures his own logic and prose in order to ignore that is just fascinating. So with that in mind, let's start with a little bit more of Michael's backstory, because that is important to understand why he falls for this. Michael Monroe
Lewis was born on October fifteenth, nineteen sixty in New Orleans. Now, from the beginning, his life was about as far from working class as you get, and to his credit, Lewis does not deny this whenever he's.
Asked to 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 Aristocra in New Orleans. I was so inside, he told me. I was literally trained how to sit on a throne when I was fifteen years old, because it was crowned the king of the Carnival Ball, an organization that didn't allow black people, didn't allow Jews. I would go from baseball practice to sceptor waving lessons. I
was born into that world. Being an insider in New Orleans made him feel like an outsider everywhere else, and not always to his disadvantage. And first off, wow, that's quite a backstory.
Thank you, King, I do you, King?
I do think I want to point out something here, which is where I don't think he's obvious skating, but I think he's missing something about his own what his background has done for him. Because I don't I'm not going to question him when he says it made him feel like an outsider. But I think it's very clear that this is a guy whose work is defined by
his ability to make himself into an insider. And I think that's a big part of why he's able to do that, is he grows up in the middle of wealth and power, right where it's the air that he breathed. And you don't notice this if like you grow up
working class and don't know any super rich people. But when you meet some people who were born crazy rich, you note that, like a lot of them have this this way of making of making themselves feel like they belong anywhere, right, It's why they can get away with so much, Like even if they're totally out of their depth.
There's this kind of expectation you get when you grow up hyper rich that the world is going to show you a degree of deference when you know people who have family fortunes behind them, you know what I'm talking about, right, Like it's the reason they are never going to get like carded to see if they're a member of a place that's members only, right, because they they have that way about them. And I think that's part of how as.
Receptible thing well, And I do think that there is I mean, and it sounds like what you're getting at is like there is if you can get someone who grew up in those circumstances on the side of fucking decency.
There is a huge.
Value to having someone like that who knows how to navigate those places 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 endears him to Sam.
Yeah, we'll get to that. So he goes to Princeton University and he graduates kum laude, which which means pretty good grades in nineteen eighty two. His senior thesis is on Donatello, a prominent ninja turtle. And when he's in college, he's a member of Princeton's Ivy Club, which is the oldest eating club in the school. Now, if you're not a blue blood, you probably are like, what the fuck is an eating club? These are private dining halls that are also kind of social clubs where upper classmen go
to get nicer food. There's like nine of them, I think on campus, the Ivy Club at Princeton, or like everywhere at Princeton. There's other fancy boys schools have these.
Robert, this is full count the clue.
I was like eating club, the like eating club to me is like drive through Taco bell one am starving. Yeah, wow, eating club eating.
What they Sophie, you said, this is full cunt. But it did not admit women until nineteen ninety one.
The adacy to not let a woman go into hut.
Something that cunty. It just doesn't make sense.
And it's it's also very funny that like or not funny, but it's noteworthy. In this interview, it talks about how he was at the Ivy Club. Right when he talks about, you know, his upbringing. He's like, yeah, this like this contest I was in. You couldn't You couldn't be in this club if you were like black or Jewish. He doesn't mentioned that the Ivy Club doesn't admit women. I think that is maybe interesting. It's also worth noting that
the Ivy Club. F Scott Fitzgerald writes about the Ivy Club and calls it f Scott Fitzgerald calls it detached and breathlessly aristocratic, and Scott Fitzgerald says that about your blue Blood Club, like, my god.
I love that. Wow. What a treat, what a treat? If yeah, if f Scott Fitzgerald is the one experiencing like moral clarity about about your weird group. That's challenging. Now.
While Lewis had a passion for art history, he had a bigger passion in life and it's stacking motherfucking paper. So he goes to the London School of Economics next and eventually joins the bond desk at Salomon Brothers. He's in like the London branch of the Salomon Brothers. Uh no, no, no, no, he's just making Dalla dollar bills, y'all.
Robert Dalla dollar Bill's time is happening now for us as well.
Oh yeah, speaking of Dalla dollar bills, buy some of these products and we think about things.
I have a request for the listeners, which is not something that I often. I don't I don't ask, I don't ask anything of our listeners, just that just that they're happy. But if somebody could please make a dating profile for Michael Lewis as an art graphic, I just it, 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. Lewis is, you know, an investment banker for just a few years. Actually you know who? He reminds me of, Oh okay, just.
You know, hoping your toes in it. Then that kind of doesn't It's like the just the tip of financial crime.
He's in there at eighty seven, the market crashes and he makes a pivot away from like doing that as a job, and he writes a book called Liar's Poker about the investment you know, Bang the stockbroker. That like that kind of life that makes a shitload of money, right, this is we'll talk about it in a second, but like I want to he minds me in this trajectory. Do you know anything about Michael Crichton?
Uh? Oh, I mean I yeah, Peaks and Valleys. I had no attachment to him, but I know many do. And like, yeah, the back half of Michael Crichton pretty fucking brutal.
Yeah, I'm pretty pretty brutal. I'm not talking about like his actual career as a writer as much as Crichton goes to Harvard Medical School and becomes a doctor. Most people are I don't think I actually know this, but like he was an actual MD. But he doesn't really do the job, Like he gets his MD and then he quits to write books like some of which have a medical like he's the creator of ER and he gets criticized by doctors who are like, oh you just
creator of ER. Yeah, Michael Crichton created a r Yes.
Oh okay, sorry, I thought we were talking about Michael Lewis. Yes, I knew Michael.
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, Liar's Poker, which is semi autobiographical, revolves around a scene where Michael Lewis is invited to a banquet hosted by
the Queen Mother while he's working in London. He gets a seat there because of his cousin, Baroness Linda von Stauffenberg, and she seats next to the manager of Salomon Brothers, which is how he gets his job. Word salad crabs don't have bluer blood than this man like that is that is the bluest you fucking get.
If your cousin's a baroness and you're in your like late twenties, y, 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 a very naive view of what's unflattering because his Wall Street guys they curse a lot. They use phrases like big swing and dick. They're like they're like kind of gross, but in a way that's glamorous, right, Like I.
Mean I feel like it's like the Glengarry Glenn Ross, Yes exactly, yeah, talking shit, yeah yeah yeah.
It like it is a kind of thing where you could say he's not glamorizing it, but he's absolutely making it look a way that makes more young men greeting men when to become stock traders. And to extend the Michael Crichton comparison, it is Liar's Poker is generally agreed to have had a similar impact on its industry to how Jurassic Park influenced paleontology by like 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. But but yeah, in terms of like, anytime someone writes something about Wall Street, like you have to be so fucking careful, and also even if you are extremely fucking careful, it will still bring in the wrong people who refuse to see the point, like they're like Wolf of Wall
Street is one of my favorite movies, hands down. At it's great and it is exact time. Yeah, but it's still like brought people in on the wrong ye, Like fuck it, because brain dead people are going to be brain dead people.
This is we're going in a more serious direction. But if you've read Slaughterhouse five, in the opening of it, Vonnegut talks about how when he said I'm going to write my my war book, his wife was like, don't do it. There's no way to do it without making it look cool, Like no one has ever managed to not do it in a way that makes young men
think it's cool. And she was right, like, for the record, yeah, I mean one of the problems with even anti war war fiction is it always makes it look cool because it's it's cool, right, That doesn't mean it's good. It's like, Joe Cammel is cool, he still killed one hundred million people.
Joe Cammell gave my father lung cancer, and I stand by that. And to conjure a similar image Joe Cammell, there's an image that I saw when I worked in the Playboy archives of Joe Cammel and illustrated gorgeous like painting essentially of Joe Camil in convertible with smoking hot human women. Hell yeah, yeah, big old titties, And you're like, no,
wonder this advertisement killed people. This advertisement kill people being like this, you could be this ugly ass camel with women with huge naturals, like just like.
You can add up all the German generals on the Eastern Front and they didn't kill as many people as that act.
Truly like, 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 in Liar's Poker were more fun on the page than they were in person. This can be if this is your first book and you write it in nineteen eighty two and you really later, oh, this actually might have made the problem worse. That's not a thing you have any moral culpability for. That's just like writing 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.
And that Guardian article I've quoted from, there's a story about Michael Lewis attends this big New York party and he's like warned ahead of time that it's going to be full of bankers and other finance guys, and he's like, oh, I don't know if they're going to like me, because he had just not only was The Big Short out, but he just published an article at a major publication attacking Wall Street big wigs as being greedy idiots, like
saying it in very unsparing terms. And one of Lewis's friends later said, quote, but all these former heads of investment banks, all these current bankers, they ran not walked to the office just to meet him. One hedge fun manager walked in with fifteen copies of Lewis's books, Michael signed them all. And again, if you are a journalist, that's a bad side, Like.
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 he makes this look sexy, and it's if he writes about you. Part of a big part of this is that while he's maybe negative about greed within the overall finance industry, he cannot write about a person without making them look cool because he has to like them to write about them. Right, All these guys in the big short you could say, profited off of a lot of misery. Now they didn't cause it. He didn't start this subprime loan thing. But
they profited off of a lot of misery. And that's at least kind of grimy. But Lewis likes these guys and he turns them into celebrities because of how good he is at writing about them and making you see what's likable in them. Right. And so at this point he because of how often this has happened, is he is aware that his books are pr for their subjects.
He has a habit now of connecting people he writes about in his books to his PR manager so that they can set up speaking tours for them, right, Because he knows if I put you in a book, that's going to be a big business for you, you're going to be in demand. Yeah, And this is part as 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 rather than an intellectual in a magazine profile
that he refused to cooperate. Another is a book about New Orleans, which would have demanded a level of honesty about the city's society and about his family's place in it that might have hurt his parents. He said, I adore my parents. I couldn't write that part while they're alive. And 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 freed honestly because he found himself taken in by the kid stick.
Well, that's what I feel like is one of the complicating factors of And I don't say this in a way to seem like it's like an unsolvable puzzle, but it's, like Michael Lewis writes, it seems like, you know, largely accurate, you know, pieces of journalism. We'll talk about that, well, okay, yeah, so far right as someone who's never read his work.
But they're also inherently commercial, because I feel like there's a journalistic value to explaining why someone is appealing, but there's also an even more commercial value to explaining why someone is appealing because that makes it, you know, that sells books, that sells movie tales, that sells all this shit.
Yeah, yeah, And I think it's also part of why his stuff is successful in a commercial sense. Is that is this other fact that like it's always kind of uplifting. Right again, the big short the whole collapse of the financial industry is dark, but stuff goes well for these characters that you've come to light, right. And Lewis himself is kind of admitted he can't really end on a not upbeat note. He has a lot of trouble with it.
He said, quote, once you identify yourself as happy, you're always looking for happiness, and when things come along to great on that happiness, you find ways to deflect them. You can force the narrative. And I think what he doesn't say there, but what is explains his Sam Bankman Freed book, is that once you get in the habit of writing about like these geniuses who are hidden in the middle of systems, right and see more than everybody else.
Once you start doing that, you see anybody you start focusing on as that kind of genius, even when they're not. And that's what's happened with Michael here?
So yeah, mess, mess, And it's like, you know, ultimately, nine times out of ten the person wearing like fucking X ray glasses is wearing a pair of fucking Imax glasses to go see Oppenheimer.
Like, it's just embarrassing, exactly, It's just embarrassing. And yeah, yeah, So I think the best example of this before we get into Sam Bankman freed prior in Lewis's history, is a book called The blind Side, which was published in two thousand and six. Now, The blind Side, like a lot of Swiss stories, there's a macro in a micro narrative. The macro narrative is he's talking about the grow, the explosive growth in the importance of the left tackle in football.
This is an offensive lineman whose job is basically to make sure the quarterback doesn't get a maimed. The micro story, which contains the emotional heart of the book and is the core of the narrative, is the tale of a guy named Michael Oher who was He was placed in foster care at age seven because his mother suffered from addiction. His dad was generally in prison. His dad dies while he's I think in high school or was dealt a
pretty tough hand in life. But he's also six foot six and very fast, right, so he is someone who
will like shows an aptitude for football. As a result of this, he's kind of coaxed through getting into a private school and he gets he gets literally adopted by this rich white family, oh as a black man, black child at this time, and they make it their business to coach him and coax him in through getting through the academics so that he can be in the NCAA and college so that he can get an NFL contract.
Right, So I'll be perfectly honest. I before we started, before you told me that Michael Lewis was a main character, I did not know that he wrote The blind Side.
Oh yes he did, because this comes becomes a movie that's huge, right also, and.
I am very well acquainted with the the ensuing nasty, fucking cultural narrative associated with the movie. But I didn't realize that it was a book. I knew Liar's poker moneyball in the Big Short.
Holy Robert, Robert, I just want a fact teck real quick. He wasn't adopted by them.
Not We're getting to that Okay, that was the narrow, that was the nar in the blind Side, right right, that they have basically adopted this guy. Yes, you are correct, Sophie, but I'm building to that. Okay.
So okayah, okay, that's just like I don't I don't know why I didn't know that, and also like who didn't want me to know that? Michael Lewis Yeah, I mean Blindside a book that is famously bullsh Yeah.
So this family adopts or and they effectively adopt him, is I think generally how it's framed. And they help him get through high school, get into a college, and kind of like help usher him into this NFL career where he makes a significant amount of money obviously, And I'm a quote from the La Times here. The administration at his high school accepts him although he can barely read. He secures a full time tutor. When his grade point
average still proves too low for the NCAA. His adoptive father, a canny former college basketball standout named Sean Touhey, manages to find a crucial loophole he has over tested to prove that he's learning disabled, then has him take numerous easy online courses Lewis treats these measures genius. We are meant to cheer the fact that Ore has gained the educational process. And this is a tech. This is from
the book. Leanne, who's the wife of Sean, was now making it her personal responsibility to introduce him to the most basic facts of life, the sort of thing any normal person would have learned by osmosis. Every day, I try to make sure he knows something he doesn't know, she said. If you ask him, where should I shop for a girl to a pressure, He'll tell you Tiffany's if I go, I'll go through the whole golf game.
He can tell you what six under is, and what's a birding and what's par I love that those are her two examples of basic knowledge.
This is Sandra Bullocks Oscar talking. Yes, is Sandra Bullocks Oscar flat? This nasty little mound.
Two things every boy needs to know? Where to buy jewelry and how to golf works. Really says a lot about her socioeconomic status, right, not like here's how you pay your taxes, not like you know literally anything else, like here's how you cook eggs, But no fucking fucking 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, This is normal the doctoral thesis in the ways that that is.
Okay, great shit. Yeah, So we can all see the potential abusive issue with a wealthy white family adopting a teenaged black boy to coach him into launching a pro football career. Right, just if you think about all of the head injuries and shit involved, there's a lot this problematic here. Lewis does quote Lane at one point as saying, with me and Sean, I can see him thinking if they found me lying in a gutter and I was going to 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 two He's never adopted him and instead created a conservaship two He's, I don't care, fuck him, and instead created a conservatorship and used it to take his money. Right, the Twohees or whatever the fuck deny doing this.
They again, Yeah, I think it's it's actually for the pepes, I don't care.
Dick bags deny this, And again I'm not being a non biased journalist here, but.
Fuck you know, referend it's actually dickman's, dick Mans.
The Dickmans. They call his claims hateful and absurd. Michael Lewis has defended the Twohees by saying that they only earned a few hundred thousand dollars off of The blind Side, the book and the movie that was made off of it. He's like, they didn't make millions, then they made a few hundred grand. Now Lewis also does and I'll give him this. He also admits, right after saying that that the two hees biological daughter is married to the son of the main investor in the film, which might suggest
that the family made a lot more money off of it. Right, Oh, that might because The Blindside makes half a billion dollars and a thirty five million dollar budget.
In his own way, Michael Lewis in this.
Kind of Michael Lewis is super rich and always really there's been buried.
There's there's so many articles about like it is the Shady Ship.
That's the first time I'm hearing about the daughter marriage because I read a fair amount.
About that fun stuff. So in his own twenty eleven book, oh Like expresses issues with the movie based off of Lewis's book. Primarily, there's this part where like the twees are teaching him how to play football and he's like, I knew football before I met them. I'm a teenager in America, Like, like, what are you fucking talking about? There are other problematic moments in the book, uh, and this is from The Guardian Again. Lewis calls Oer big mic throughout it, despite the fact that Oher is open
about hating that nickname. He also tells this guy's story almost exclusively through the words of other people talking about him, even though he had access to Oor. Lewis justifies this by saying that or was not a strong voice on his life. Yeah, this guy's not good at talking about himself. I'm just gonna listen to everyone else about him. I'm out.
I think what's really going on here is that poor is a black kid from a desperate poverty background, right, and Lewis cannot identify or get inside of his head because that is nothing even that even resembles the Michael Lewis story.
It feels like a very privileged dark take. Yes, Like, well, who do I consider to be a credible voice? Can I get twenty white people who barely know this guy.
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 yeah, Oh, that's so fucking gross.
He doesn't try to get inside o'er his head, and he just focuses most of the narrative on the twoees, who who Lewis understands this is the final shoe. He understands them for a very good reason. And I'm going to quote from the La Times here. As I tore through the book, I kept wondering how Lewis got such remarkable access to the ties, and I also wondered why does he take such an uncritical view of their role.
The author's note at the end provides the obvious explanation, stating that Lewis is a friend of Sean Tooey's and that they had been longtime classmates at the same New Orleans school.
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 dolla dolla fucking bills.
Well, well, Jamie, as you know, things could be unethical but still be legal legal.
That's how.
I mean, truly, what a gift that we have as that, Like I am he a force of evil in the world, certainly, but I am grateful that he gave us that one thing, just the way of uh describing juvenile lawless capitalists.
Yeah, it's so funny.
Yeah.
One thing I have started to notice watching some of the more recent and critical interviews with Lewis after the SBF book is that, well, he's generally a pretty friendly seeming guy. He starts to get really angry the instant you question him on anything regarding one of his stories. And you see this in this story in the Oer story, because Ower's former coach comes out and like defends the
twohees or whatever. Once the lawsuit goes out, He's like, you know, I don't think they took advantage of him, basically, and Ower calls it brave.
And my professional, unbiased opinion, thank 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 Oer as a shy young boy and found it hard to square that memory with the Oer behind the lawsuit. What we're watching is a change of behavior. He told me. This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head. They run into problems with violence and aggression. It wouldn't
surprise him. Lewis said, if we were seeing some confluence of Ora's history in football with other campaigns that stoke claims in lawsuits like his, perhaps some lawyer of Ores figured the time was ripe to sue the tweilies, Lewis speculated, or perhaps Oer realized that people would get behind him if he makes these accusations. He's just a poor head, injured boy.
I They're like, no, the perceived exploitation and racism you experienced was the result of CTE that's Oh my.
God, that's fucking wild. Right, that's gross as hell.
Oh, Jamie, Wow, I just thought he was the guy who wrote Moneyball. I thought that that was the hard I was thinking too.
Now. Yeah, so here, I want you to keep in mind how he wrote about his former subject. Oor Now hear his him talking in a sixty minutes interview about Sam Bankman Free, the now convicted former billionaire, and I just want to I really want to emphasize the contrast between how he writes about these two different people who are subjects of his books.
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 then the reader comes to know that the world still doesn't know.
Now, that is not the case. Sam Bakman Freed is exactly the person he appears to be on the surface. Right, He is a guy who committed a bunch of financial crimes and didn't get away with it because he was too lazy and undisciplined to do with the smart way, right, and that's all that going.
I mean, this is like, oh, this is a bummer. This is like a case study and a journalist biases coming out on there.
Oh it's so it's so obvious. Yeah, No, story better illustrates this part of the story than how Lewis wound up writing Going Infinite in the first place. In twenty fourteen, Lewis published a book called Flash Boys, which is a book about Brad Katsuyama and a small group of rebel Walst investors who form I ex which is like a
stock exchange that's supposed to. The idea is we want to protect investors from the unfair advantages that these high frequency trading firms have on traditional exchanges due to like a whole bunch of shit, but largely access to a special fiber optic cable. And with most Lewis books, there's a lot of insiders that will criticize them foring some details wrong here and glossing over some issues that don't
conform to his narrative. There's like a market crash that's largely mitigated by some of these firms that he's criticizing. But I don't know enough about that to want to get into it. What's important is that Katsuyama and his book of Rogue Traders are depicted semi heroically, is that they're kind of fighting against this rigged financial system, which
you know, the financial systems rigged. I don't know about his characteristication of them, but the book is a hit and it makes Katsuyama and his crew celebrities within the finance world. So Katsuyama reaches out to Lewis when he is considering an institutional investment in FTX. He's like, we're considering getting into crypto through these guys putting a lot of money on there exchange. Would you look into this guy for me? Right? And this is what Lewis says.
Lewis like basically goes in there and like talks to Sam Bankman Freed, and he's he's so impressed that he quotes himself as telling Katsuyama do whatever he wants to do. What could possibly go wrong? Right? That's which bad bet Uh does wind up putting money.
He is a worst person to ask what to 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. Understand them all the deep possesses of bank Reid's mind. But he knew it was a great story. And this was before the shit hit the fan. So this is real 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 has 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'd. That reminds me of this is like, I think about this easily once a week. It happened over ten years ago my freshman year of college. It was my first time really encountering people who grew up with like money, you know. And there was this guy on my floor and one night everyone was hanging out and he like, put a this is the era, this is the early twenty tens. He put a skinny scarf around my neck because it was cold, and he was like, you can have that, and it smelled and I didn't
want it. But he's like, you could have that. And I was like, oh, don't you like want it back and he's like, no, I don't care about my material possessions.
And great.
I think about that all the time because he could just get nine thousand scarves. You just get nine thousand scarves. But that was like, but I feel like that is so much of what effect of altruism is. It's just a fundamental like, yeah, not understanding how the world works.
Yeah, it's it's a bunch of rich kids who are talking through like fucking philosophy one oh one level shit and think and so impressed by everyone else's answers to like dumb logic puzzles because they've they've never studied enough humanities to know that like no man, people have been talking about this shit for thousands of years and all of their takes are better than yours. Like anyway, we're
not getting into that as much right now. We are about to get into the ads and if you really want to do some effective altruism, purchase from the sponsors of this podcast. Ah. So, we've been talking around the book Going Infinite, which is Michael's terrible book on Sam, so I think now is probably a good time to dig into exactly how it fails. I wanted to start by introducing that contrast between Lewis's treatment of o OR and SBF first, because it puts things into perspective. Now,
I think a good anecdote to start on. Here is one of the stories Lewis uses to introduce Sam to the reader. This is right at the start of Going Infinite, and it's about a phone call that Sam has during his billionaire era with fashion industry icon Anna Wintour before the Metgala. No oh yeah, oh yeah, Jamie. This this is good.
So exhausted because Anna Wintour is Bill Nye, He's girlfriend right now, and I don't want to think poorly of Bill Nye.
He does no, No, 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 Meryl Streep's character in The Devilwar's product 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 Yeah, very good.
Very good, happy essays.
Half the essays I wrote in college were based off of said book.
Really, the met Gala is an annual event. I think Vogue puts it on technically, but like it's where rich, famous, and occasionally even beautiful people were insane outfits that cost the GDP of a small island nation.
Right, yes, and then and then a bunch of YouTubers I watch say that they looked ugly.
Yes, yes, it's a true. Yeah, it's it's great. It's great. Everybody makes a feast off of it. But somebody has to pay for the Son of a Bitch, right, and that year went Tour wanted SBF to pay for the gala, right. He was spending way more money on stupider shit than that, so not unreasonable that he might actually agree to do this. 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 win Tour where tens of millions of dollars are on the line, that he did to like everything else that he had a meeting about, which is no work at all. Right. Lewis goes into detail about the fact that he's playing this dumb video game, like while he's on a zoom call with her. It's
the same game he's always playing. It's this this video game that he winds up buying because it's made by a friend of his called Storybook Brawl, and it's it's about like Fable characters fighting, right, Like it's it's that it's a little strategy game. It's like an it's like an app game. It's not a real game.
You know, you know how you watch those videos And I say this with love and appreciation of like college students now playing a video game while explaining like Marxism to you and I want that. But Sam Bankmin Freed playing that game. Well, well, 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 scary and she's famously scary.
She's famously scary. And he's talking about a lot of money, right, Like it's it's not that he's blowing her off, because like I don't feel precious about Anna Wintour's time, but like it's that this is a big money deal and he just he can't focus on it. And I would take that. It's just like this is a this is a dude too, smadhd right, Like that's what that is. And this is a dude who has ADHD, 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 Bankment Freed has never seen the Devilwaar's product, which I've never been less surprised at. But it's like, if you have no one in your life who could tip you off you're talking to me, protagonist of the Devilwaars product, then you lack a support structure in a fundamental way. I think it's it's okay, that's good to know that funny and I are here.
What's funny about the way Lewis talks about this is that he marvels at this right like it's the most amazing thing, and it's evidence of how unique Sam is. When you just noted one of the biggest pieces of entertainment for millennials in gen z is people playing video games and explaining politics. Right that is, it is not at all unique that Sam Bankman Freed will not stop
gaming to have a business meeting. But Michael Lewis treats it as like this is evidence that he is too much of a genius he can't bear to pay attention to her for a second. It also there's a little bit of anti woman stuff in here, because Lewis notes that I think Sam would minimize the window with her face on it whenever she spoke and bring it back up whenever he talked. Right, curiously, only when he was talking did he want to see her, which I do
think there's a lot in that sentence. So yeahsting, Yeah. It is again like the way Lewis describes this, this isn't just yeah, he's not very disciplined, and he has the same thing that like a lot of millennial and gen Z people have, which is, you know, an inability to stop distracting yourself no matter what important shit you're doing. He describes this as SBF's brain being so big that like games are he's like a Sherlock Holmes character and games are his heroin. Right, Well, that makes me.
That indicates to me that Michael Lewis, because that's the way that you're like, like you're doting parent would talk about it, and like that's that is clear to me. The way he sees him is like, wow, look at this amazing kid. And also what SBF is doing here is like the inverse of what most easily distracted millennial and gen Z people are doing, which they're playing games
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 just is in awe of this kid's ability to have attention deficit disorder. Quote. Yeah, absolutely, said Sam. But his mind was elsewhere. The hoard dragon was dead and a win tour had killed it. What to do? He made a half hearted bid to begin another game and pick another hero, but then changed his
mind and shut the game down. He could often occupy two worlds at once in w in both. In this case, he clearly stood no chance of winning in one world unless he paid less attention in the other. And this woman, somehow it acquired a spell that interfered with his abilities to multitask. What an amazing way to write that paragraph. Michael Lewis, dude, Oh god, it's it's something else. Like I have played video games through some important work meetings. Sophie has often had to pick my ass up off
that it's not because I'm a genius. It's because I'm hungover and have trouble focusing because I use Twitter too much.
There's so many there's like so many, I mean whatever. And also you have to imagine that this manuscript made it through a lot. It speaks to how old people in general who work in the public stitching industry are that no one was like Michael, I have to tell you that this is just how kids are these days.
He's a real venture game ganius. Yeah.
I mean it's like we've both written books. Like I was surprised that I got the title of my book through, but it was because people over sixty don't know what raw Dog needs. And that's most people I'm 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 trying to make Sam look kind of silly in that paragraph. I can see how you would assume that based on the text, but that is not what's going on. Listener. Here is Lewis talking about that exact same moment in an interview with Intelligence Squared from about a month ago.
Yay, so on the screen zoom and a win tour, and he does not know who she is. He doesn't know what the purpose of the meeting is. He doesn't know, well, the purpose of the meeting is can Sam Bank mcfreed pay for the whole met gala? That's the purpose of the meeting, because he'll pay for everything else. Why not that? And she comes on the screen and she is dressed to the nine. She's got those size of hair coming down around her. She's like ready to kill and gorgeous.
You know, she looks great, She's well prepared. He's playing Storybook Brawl.
Which is his video game.
Pause.
I hate the way he talks.
About Anna Wintour, Thank you very much.
Well, okay, okay, And first we can deal with that in private, ze fair.
We can no, no, before we can talk about a woman on a zoom call. Does she look gorgeous or yeah.
That's the point. It has nothing to do with Anna Winter. Also, she looks like that all the time, Thank you so much.
It's her thing.
And wherever she comes on the screen, he blacks her out and the video game pops up, so like she's she's talking and and mons, minotaurs are killing, are killing dwarfs, and trees with axes are coming in and like you know, the weapons are appearing on the screen and people are dying and exploding, and and you're hearing her talk about the met Gala.
And there's seven minutes in when he hits.
A button in the Wikipedia entry for the met galap comes up, so he can figure out what the hell she's talking about.
And he's doing 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 and he had tricks.
He took him about one tenth of his brain to have a conversation with Anna Wintour, And what he would do other part of his brain was either reading about who she was or playing his game. And what he'd do is he'd say, you asked me a question. He'd say, that's a really good question. It's a really good question. Let me think about that for a minute. You know, meanwhile, the minutaur 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 multimillion 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 pattered in the way that we cover the like young white kid genius who comes from a rich background. There's a lot of similarities in how early Mark Zuckerberg's like casual misogyny and not giving a ship about people was like part and parcel to why he was cool and why he was seen as a visionary. Like that the same is truth. Like just I mean, I feel like every generation has at least one of these guys, and they're
all covered in the same way. No one ever learns their lesson because the guy covering them is often the same guy. Literally Michael Lewis and often literally Michael Lewis.
How did how did okay, I'm sorry, how did this revolve with Anna Wintour?
Did she like the fact that she.
Didn't he said, He says, yeah, I'll pay for it, and then he just ghosts her.
Yeah. So the fact that Anna wind Tour didn't like like smoke out that he was like fully a fraud at the girlies.
The girlies are disappointed.
I'm not caping for Anna Wintor here, but the famously.
Named the Dragon Lady.
Well, no, SBF is lucky that he'll never encounter Bill Nai because Bill for Bill Nihey, it would be on the phone.
Bill would fuck him.
So he was an I Frankenstein for crying. He was in Detective pikat Chip break was broken like my brain.
So Bra, these are these are amusing anecdotes right what he's what he's telling. Potentially, if you are someone who is critical about him, that same anecdote could could form part of your thesis about why this kid got away with it and for so long and why he ultimately flamed out. But Lewis is convinced that these show you evidence of Sam's genius, and he sets this up early in the book, talking about Sam's childhood quote. He had a fault line inside him. Pressure was building on it,
and one day in the seventh grade, he slipped. His mother returned from work to find Sam alone in despair. I came home and he was crying. Recalled by b he said, I'm so bored, I'm going to die, and like, oh, yeah, I have had a similar conversation with my mom. And 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 and the City.
Oh okay, that is.
A direct quote from a Sex in the City.
Sure, I'm sure Sam's a big Samantha.
Hey who says it?
But she goes, I'm so bored I could die And she jumps out of and she falls out of the window.
Oh my god. Really one of the most famous in the city.
Yeah, I don't remember that anyway. So, because like Lewis again, again, if you're if you're just kind of being honest about Sam writing a book, he might be like, well, Sam gets diagnosed with ADHD. This moment makes total sense as like, yeah, this is a kid who's got ADHD and he's also you know, good at math and stuff. He's bored in the classes that he's in. But Lewis does not acknowledge
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.
Well, and it's like if you're if you're talking about that behavior and I want to be like delicate, and then they talk about it, 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 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 twenty eighteen, she'd had two issues. She wanted to talk about, her attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and her new and emotionally complicated
polyamorous lifestyle. Every subsequent session after the first, Carolyn came back with just one issue. She wanted to discuss Sam. She'd fallen in love with Sam. Sam didn't love her back, and that fact alone left her deeply unhappy. I thought 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 was it even legal or ethical for this information.
To I don't actually know. I don't like that truly, because it seems.
You're 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 know, go there to be a reasoned person.
No, and especially since like what's what's messy to me is that he brings that he makes sure to bring this up with Carolyn because he's kind of writing that like she was unreliable, she wasn't focusing enough, she was in love with him, hysterical, whereas he's just this misunderstood genius. But he notes her ADHD and he doesn't note Sam's, even though Sam's ADHD is a matter of public fucking record. Now, like his family went to court to get him his medicine a thing.
It's like not even looking that he particularly tries to obscure, right, No, like 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 ten percent of
his brain to talk to people. Yeah, now there's another like there's another very fun bit in this which kind of relates to that, which is that, and this is like the weirdest through line in Going Infinite, which is my Lewis does not understand games right like he is, so he writes about like video games and board games and other popular nerd pastimes that are now like the dominant form of entertainment by money in our country. He talks about them like he's an alien who's just arrived
on the planet. And as a result, he talks about Sam's embrace of this stuff at the expense of everything else to be evidence of brilliance. Quote. He felt nothing in the presence of art. He found religion absurd. He thought both right wing and left wing political opinions kind of dumb, less a consequence of thought than of their holder's tribal identity. He and his family ignored the rituals that punctuated most people's existence. He didn't even celebrate his
own birthday. What gave pleasure and solace and a sense of belonging to others left Sam cold. When the bankman Freeds traveled to Europe, Sam realized that he was just staring at a lot of old buildings for no particular reason. We did a few trips, he said, I basically hated it to his unrelenting alienation. There was only one exception. Games. In sixth grade, Sam learned of had 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 it's different, Like every character can come into this strategy game with a different set of equipment. No one had ever done this before. It was all
like chess where everyone's the same. And it's like, no, it wasn't. There were decades, decades of war games and strategy games that Magic was influenced by. Like, that's just wrong, Michael, Now, hold.
On, hold on magic, Yeah, hold on nerd any any put up. I I do think that like this is of the because because I don't play Magic the Gathering and I know that how he's describing it is, I was.
Like, it's so wrong. Yeah, I think that.
Speaks word to like a generation gap, because I think that you're someone who could be on the opposite side of SBF and equally with it. Like it's just like do your research.
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 goes on a limb about like Sam Bankman Freed couldn't didn't like chess. It was too boring. There were too few possibilities, like you could calculate everything, like his computer brain wasn't amused by chess. Only 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 only he was never good at anything. He was not very good. He wasn't particularly bad, but
he was not very good. And I'm gonna guess he was indifferent at Magic the Gathering because you know, like it's it is not a great it's a wonderful game, not a great like yardstick for your intelligence, you know, Oh, it's just a guard game.
No one should be uh, I mean not, but like no one should be judged by their intelligence, by how they interact with like a beloved hobby.
That's weird. Yeah, it's so weird, and it's like it's interesting because like Sam's parents, A big part of this section is like he comes home and he's like, I'm so bored, I can't I want to die, and his you know, his parents do what I think is the right thing. They lead the charge to get their school to add like an advanced math class, 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 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 shape is the best author ever, because there have been this many billion people born since he was alive, and if you want to calculate the odds that none of them were better at writing than him,
then there's really no reason to read Shakespeare. And it's like, well, Sam, the fact that you think that means that like no one even casually tried to teach you the humanities, because like, the reason you should study Shakespeare is not that he's 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.
Don't get me wrong, Sam, I also don't want.
To read a book, but I there sometimes were 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 that you're not better than Shakespeare.
Weird.
There is like an element of like there are certain the lower side of sbf L's that he takes in the statements he makes. He sounds like like a one episode Fraser character.
Yes, you know, he sounds like.
Freddy made a friend and he fucking sucks and.
He's a piece as shit.
Yeah, and then he even polarizes Fraser and Niles. And that's how you know you're in fucking trouble.
Yeah. Yeah, when Niles Niles is like, this kid's kind of got a fucking problem.
This kid's incomprehensible. I wouldn't 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 next like the last like five or six minutes of this episode is all Fraser. It's all all all Fraser talk. Jamie and I got off on a tangent. There is a lot more Sam Bankman Freed than Part two. It's another like hour and twenty minutes, so plenty more on Thursday. But as heads up in case it's kind of confusing, we just we just wound
up in a Fraser hole after this point. So if you want to hear us talk about Frasier, this is your chance. Speaking of David Hyde Peers, Jamie Loftus, you are starring in a floor show with David Hyde Peers based on the life of Kelsey Grammar. Actually you 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 have said that I couldn't explain the video games that Kelsey Grammer was playing for the year that I was following him around, and I resent that I was in the room with Kelsey while he was berating women on the phone. And I think that that makes him a genius. I think that that makes him a genius. And you know, do I believe he's the greatest sitcom
actor of all time? Well, I'll keep that to myself, but wink wink. I think that he's kind of a beautiful genius and is above criticism. And if you don't think that he's kind of the perfect person, or if you even like just we read his Wikipedia page in four am an opinion, I beg to disagree.
And I do love I love Kelsey Grammar stories from the head of Fraser because they're all like members of the cast being like, well, yeah, he was very like he came on set and he had clearly just woken up after vomiting up his seven martini lunch. He looked like he was dying. We were all worried that he was going to drop dead that day, and then the director called action and he was immediately care He was perfect, He was.
Beautiful, his chest hair hurt like We'll never know I was. I mean, I was fixated on Fraser reruns when I was a kid. I would stand late to watch them.
Yeah, it's one of my conference shows for sure.
Yeah, the best. And like when I remember remember getting Kelsey Grammer's like memoir from the library and read that he broke up with his wife on the phone, and it may have been one of the first times that I was like, wow, Wow, men are scary.
You can just do that.
You could just be Kelsey Grammar and be evil and then and I will still like base my sexuality on you forever.
Absolutely seem fair. Who's among us, right, ah man? But I will say, having watched the new Fraser show, it becomes very clear how much of that show's charm was John Mahoney and David Hyde Pierce.
Oh well, I think tell 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 is not changed in twenty years, which is remarkable.
No, and he's been, you know, physically preserved well enough.
Yeah. One of the big problems that show has is they've cast that kid as Niles and Daphne's son, and they're relying on him to hold up a lot of the physical con many ends that David and Hyde Pierce used to. And if if you are going up next to David Hyde Peers in like a physical comedy competition, you're gonna look like shit fu. David Peers like he's the guy. Robert.
I thought you would love the Fraser reboot because it's some of the most abysmal Boston accents I've ever heard of my fucking Lutch.
Don't get me wrong, I've watched every episode, some.
Of the nastiest little I have to like pause sometimes and like get a water. Yeah, I like walk nearly that acsence. Yeah, I mean you have and I have conceded long ago that you've got it down.
Thank you, thank you well. Anything to plug Jamie after our five minute Fraser digression, Well, i'd like to.
I guess I'd like to plug the Fraser reboot because I would like a second season.
Check it out, everybody. It's not ship.
It's on Paramount Plus. And I also just read read Raw Dog and follow me online. You're so inclined. And that's that's all I have to say. Listen to the Bexel Cast while you're at it. Why not?
Yeah, all right, what about you? Uh, that's it. I'm done. You're gonna find find figure out where David Hyde Pierce lives. You know, have a nice letter. A letter.
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