Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Last Sam Bankman-Fried Episodes (secretly about Michael Lewis)
Aired: 2023-12-07
Duration: 01:33:32


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (02:18) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
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[00:00:44]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:00:47]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:00:48]  That's so funny.
[00:00:50]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:00:58]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:06]  What's up, everyone?
[00:01:07]  I'm Ego Mode.
[00:01:08]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:01:12]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:01:15]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:01:16]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:01:23]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:01:26]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:01:33]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:35]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:36]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:38]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:46]  Cool Zone Media.
[00:01:52]  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, our special edition episodes on Sam Bankman, who is not freed because he is still in jail.
[00:02:03]  That's the intro I've got.
[00:02:05]  It's the same as the last episode.
[00:02:07]  It's still really funny.
[00:02:07]  Am I hacking our fraud?
[00:02:09]  Yes.
[00:02:09]  No, you're hilarious.
[00:02:10]  It's still very funny.
[00:02:12]  It's Sophie's favorite.
[00:02:13]  This is the only time I've made Sophie laugh in years.
[00:02:16]  That's not true.

=== The Napoleon Complex (15:10) ===

[00:02:18]  Well, okay.
[00:02:20]  You're hiring Switzerland on this issue.
[00:02:22]  You're Swiss on this issue.
[00:02:24]  Swiss you.
[00:02:25]  Jamie, speaking of Switzerland, you also were neutral in World War II.
[00:02:31]  Is that correct?
[00:02:33]  Yeah, I was sort of like, no, I'm kidding.
[00:02:37]  Robert, you made me laugh again.
[00:02:39]  Congrats.
[00:02:40]  God damn it.
[00:02:41]  Two for two, baby.
[00:02:43]  So we took a couple of days in between recording part one and part two to really let it sink in.
[00:02:48]  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?
[00:02:58]  So in the interceding days, I've talked about the Michael Lewis of it all with a couple different people just to see if I was like, if I had just missed something.
[00:03:10]  But every single person I talked to, I found had a similar experience to me where they did not know that he wrote the blind side.
[00:03:19]  Oh, good.
[00:03:19]  Okay.
[00:03:20]  Yeah.
[00:03:20]  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.
[00:03:28]  Yeah.
[00:03:29]  Well, maybe he is kind of a hack.
[00:03:30]  Yeah.
[00:03:31]  Right.
[00:03:31]  Well, because, yeah, they were like, yeah, Michael Lewis, Money Ball, the big short.
[00:03:35]  And you're like, and another thing.
[00:03:37]  How did that, how did, how did we collectively forget that he wrote that?
[00:03:42]  It feels like he got away with something.
[00:03:45]  Yeah.
[00:03:46]  And I guess I've been thinking about what he's doing with Sam Bankman Freed as I think about the upcoming Napoleon movie, which I will have watched by the time this comes out, but it's not out yet.
[00:03:55]  So excited about that.
[00:03:57]  I'm ready.
[00:03:58]  Everyone, especially like all of these history Twitter podcast people are so livid that Ridley Scott's basically like, who can who can say what the truth of Napoleon's life was?
[00:04:09]  Which is, it is a ridiculous thing to say.
[00:04:12]  He's very well documented.
[00:04:13]  We actually know a lot about Napoleon, but also I don't give a shit.
[00:04:16]  It's the guy who made Gladiator.
[00:04:18]  Like, well, and also, I appreciate because all biopics are, you know, nonsense.
[00:04:24]  Horseshit, right?
[00:04:25]  And so you're like, well, this is the one director who's going to say, my biopic is kind of horseshit.
[00:04:30]  It's just lies, which also very appropriate for Napoleon.
[00:04:34]  But what is the line with that?
[00:04:35]  Why, why am I angry at Michael Lewis for what he's doing?
[00:04:40]  And I don't really care.
[00:04:42]  He's a journalist.
[00:04:44]  He's a journalist for one.
[00:04:45]  He's not the director of fucking Gladiator, the least accurate movie about Rome ever made.
[00:04:51]  It's been a great, it's been a great week for like weird old guys who we could argue had have peaked creatively.
[00:04:58]  Although I wouldn't say that for Scorsese, but there was a great quote that was floating around in the last couple of days where I guess Scorsese said on the Killers of the Flower Moon press tour that he was like always worried about running out of time and he never knew what his last movie would be.
[00:05:13]  And Ridley Scott was asked to like react to that.
[00:05:16]  And he said, since he started Killers of the Flower Moon, I've made four films.
[00:05:21]  No, I don't think about it.
[00:05:22]  I get up in the morning and say, ah, great.
[00:05:25]  Another day of stress.
[00:05:28]  Honestly, those are both completely valid answers.
[00:05:33]  I refuse to be a part of some sort of like pretending that what Scott is saying isn't as valid as what Scorsese is saying.
[00:05:40]  There are two ways to deal with mortality.
[00:05:42]  One of them is two genders of creative mortality.
[00:05:45]  Yeah.
[00:05:46]  Yeah.
[00:05:46]  One is, oh my God, I will die and I won't have said everything I need to say.
[00:05:50]  And the other is, what the fuck?
[00:05:51]  I got shit to do.
[00:05:52]  I got to move.
[00:05:53]  I don't have time to answer this fucking question.
[00:05:55]  Meanwhile, Robert, Paul Schrader is on Facebook and Paul Schrader's posting about Taylor Swift in a kind of horny way.
[00:06:03]  So like, the old men are just, they're on one this week.
[00:06:06]  And Michael Lewis walks among them.
[00:06:09]  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.
[00:06:18]  I'm going to get high, play video games, watch basketball the rest of my life.
[00:06:23]  And God bless.
[00:06:24]  God bless him.
[00:06:25]  Yeah, God bless him.
[00:06:26]  There's a man who understands what's valuable in life.
[00:06:29]  A thing that Sam Bankman Freed never understood.
[00:06:32]  And we're back.
[00:06:33]  And we're back.
[00:06:34]  Yeah, we're back.
[00:06:36]  So one of the things that comes up a lot in Michael Lewis's book as he's sort of going into the mind and psyche of Sam Bankman Freed is that Sam had this belief that no one ever does anything useful after like age 40 to 45, somewhere around there is the last time you have a useful thought in your entire life, which I guess is relevant to our discussion of aging, aging powerful men.
[00:06:57]  I will say that that's true of many stand-up comedians, but I can't speak of that outside of that world.
[00:07:05]  Yeah.
[00:07:06]  Yeah.
[00:07:06]  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.
[00:07:14]  So I think that is somewhat accurate, at least for some creative professions.
[00:07:20]  But Sam is not in a creative profession.
[00:07:22]  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.
[00:07:35]  And most like really successful businessmen are just kind of getting started by their mid-40s, right?
[00:07:40]  Because it takes that much time to get momentum.
[00:07:43]  You've got a lot of evil left to do.
[00:07:44]  You've got a lot of horrible things left to do.
[00:07:47]  Plenty of time.
[00:07:48]  The worst is in front of you.
[00:07:50]  I think he's got three to five ethnic cleansings in him.
[00:07:52]  Minimum.
[00:07:53]  Minimum, Jamie.
[00:07:54]  Yeah.
[00:07:55]  Maybe eight.
[00:07:56]  You know, I could see him having eight more ethnic cleansings.
[00:07:59]  He does seem like someone who just will like have a Kissinger-like affinity for life.
[00:08:05]  Yeah.
[00:08:06]  So Bankman Fried's, I understand, belief that, like, after age 45, he's not going to be capable of having any useful ideas.
[00:08:13]  This is what pushed him, you know, along with his effective altruist idea.
[00:08:16]  This is why he felt like he had to, he had to continually gamble rather than like taking the slow, sustainable path, making money off of his exchange at like a reasonable pace.
[00:08:25]  No, no, no.
[00:08:26]  I only have a few more years left before my brain shrivels up.
[00:08:30]  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?
[00:08:40]  Which isn't it, which is like, I don't know, you should probably get help if you feel that about the world because that's a deeply self-destructive way to think about yourself and about your assets.
[00:08:49]  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?
[00:09:00]  A risk officer's job is to analyze the deals the company's doing and go, well, that's an insane risk.
[00:09:05]  So let's not do that one.
[00:09:08]  Or, you know, that's an insane risk.
[00:09:10]  We need to offset it with this stuff.
[00:09:12]  They also did not have a chief financial officer or a bunch of other critical executive positions to be in.
[00:09:17]  Yeah, they had no CFOs.
[00:09:19]  That's one I've heard of.
[00:09:20]  You should have that one.
[00:09:22]  It's a really basic job.
[00:09:23]  And its job is basically to know how much money you have, right?
[00:09:27]  Like there's other stuff to it, but it's pretty critical.
[00:09:30]  FTX also did not have a board of directors and they're lacking a bunch of other very basic executive positions.
[00:09:36]  And a big part of why is that the only people Sam feels like he can trust are like his friends.
[00:09:42]  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.
[00:09:51]  He said in one interview with Michael, We tried having some grown-ups, but they didn't do anything.
[00:09:55]  This was true for everyone over the age of 45.
[00:09:58]  All they did was worry, which, like, again, given what happened, perhaps they ought to have been.
[00:10:03]  Maybe I'm just like sort of on one with the idea that very few stand-ups have a valuable thought after 45.
[00:10:10]  But I would say now, reflecting on it, like Sam Bankman-Fried is using the improv troop approach to a very high-stakes business.
[00:10:20]  Yes.
[00:10:20]  Like he's like, no, I will only work with people I went to college with.
[00:10:24]  We know best.
[00:10:25]  I don't want no fucking crusties in the room.
[00:10:28]  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.
[00:10:40]  So it's kind of like it's difficult.
[00:10:42]  It's difficult.
[00:10:43]  This is what Leavenworth should be, right?
[00:10:45]  The military needs to take stand-up comedians into custody.
[00:10:48]  I've always bars I've performed to know people.
[00:10:54]  I'm on a lot of lists.
[00:10:56]  So Sam's response when he was asked by Michael, like, why don't you guys even have a CFO?
[00:11:02]  That seems important.
[00:11:03]  He says, there's a functional religion around the CFO.
[00:11:06]  I'll ask them, why do I need one?
[00:11:08]  Some people cannot articulate a single thing the CFO is supposed to do.
[00:11:11]  They'll say, keep track of the money or make projections.
[00:11:14]  And I'm like, what the fuck do you think I do all day?
[00:11:16]  You think I don't know how much money we have?
[00:11:18]  Which is funny because his whole legal defense in court was I had no idea how much money we had or where it was.
[00:11:25]  Like, and that's why I didn't commit a crime, right?
[00:11:28]  Because I just was incompetent.
[00:11:29]  I just didn't know where the money was, but it's all somewhere.
[00:11:33]  Like, very silly thing to say, given what he's about to say.
[00:11:37]  Okay.
[00:11:38]  So after Sam's life fell apart, Michael Lewis continued to talk and visit multiple.
[00:11:44]  He sometimes would call like three or four times a day through the eight months that Sam was on house arrest.
[00:11:51]  And it's interesting to me because like Michael, if I was a journalist like Michael Lewis and I had had a conversation with somebody when they were one of the biggest names in an industry being like, a CFO is useless.
[00:12:03]  I know where the money is.
[00:12:05]  And then their entire life explodes because they didn't know what the money is.
[00:12:08]  I would at some point ask them the question, hey, was that maybe a bad idea?
[00:12:13]  Michael does not bring this up to Sam after the collapse in any of the dozens of conversations that they've had.
[00:12:20]  And in fact, and this is why that's weird, the actual villain of his book going infinite, the one person that Lewis is super critical of in like a really uncharitable way is the CEO brought in to take over the FTX after Sam like leaves and declares bankruptcy, a guy named John Ray III.
[00:12:38]  Now, I am not going to go to bat for John Ray III because he is, he's John, he's, his name is John Ray III.
[00:12:48]  So you know he's up to something.
[00:12:49]  That's a difficult name to go to bat for.
[00:12:51]  Yeah.
[00:12:52]  But he is, you know, he's the guy who got brought in to liquidate Enron and he's, he's a kind of a corporate undertaker, right?
[00:13:00]  When a, when there's a huge scandal at a company, when it like collapses, goes into bankruptcy, and you need someone to kind of do the post-mortem, you bring in John Ray.
[00:13:08]  And he, he's like, as far as I know.
[00:13:10]  Not the first or second.
[00:13:12]  No, not the first or second.
[00:13:13]  Those guys are useless.
[00:13:14]  No, fucking clowns.
[00:13:16]  Okay.
[00:13:16]  You're going to want to bring in the third.
[00:13:17]  You need a JR3.
[00:13:19]  I'm with you.
[00:13:20]  So nightmare.
[00:13:23]  Yeah.
[00:13:23]  It's interesting, like the degree to which he has, because this guy comes in later.
[00:13:29]  And I think because he's boring, Michael Lewis finds him disgusting.
[00:13:34]  Like, I haven't run into any info that he's like bad at what he does.
[00:13:37]  It's certainly not his fault.
[00:13:39]  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.
[00:13:48]  And he's just kind of exasperated at how badly it all works.
[00:13:52]  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 he should know as a journalist that boring people are often and maybe most often tremendously capable of doing bad shit.
[00:14:08]  But it seems like he's looking more for like, well, Bradley Cooper can't play you in a movie.
[00:14:12]  You're useless to me.
[00:14:13]  You're garbage.
[00:14:14]  You're boring.
[00:14:15]  There's nothing.
[00:14:15]  Yeah, there's nothing sexy about him.
[00:14:17]  He's just trying to deal up, like clean up after a disaster.
[00:14:21]  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.
[00:14:32]  Right.
[00:14:33]  And the answer that Lewis has come to is that money is all there, that he just didn't know where $9 billion was.
[00:14:39]  Oh.
[00:14:40]  Yeah.
[00:14:40]  He didn't steal it or gamble it away.
[00:14:43]  He just misplaced it due to rank incompetence that he committed because he was too smart to keep track of things.
[00:14:50]  And there's a, I'm going to read you a very, yeah, there's a really fun quote there.
[00:14:56]  He describes like Lewis describes FTX as a real business, but he says that John Ray, who like attacked it as the worst run company he'd ever seen, was just too much of an idiot to like understand it, right?
[00:15:09]  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.
[00:15:23]  He just started digging, right?
[00:15:25]  Like he's too dumb to understand the brilliant thing that Sam built up.
[00:15:29]  So he just starts like churning about in the wreckage without really appreciating everything that went into making this monumental edifice.
[00:15:37]  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?
[00:15:49]  It doesn't sound like he's hired a fact checker.
[00:15:52]  He's too bad.
[00:15:52]  He doesn't sound like he has a personal Jiminy cricket, so he's just saying shit.
[00:15:56]  Like his personal biases couldn't be more out.
[00:15:59]  They wanted to rush this thing out so you don't have much time to edit it, right?
[00:16:02]  That's true.
[00:16:03]  Yeah.
[00:16:03]  A year to write and release a book is not a long time.
[00:16:08]  No.
[00:16:08]  Not enough time, one might, one might argue.
[00:16:11]  Not enough time, one might argue.
[00:16:12]  And also Michael Lewis has the kind of clout to make that not happen.
[00:16:18]  Right.
[00:16:18]  And again, I also kind of think that his hatred of Ray here is based on the fact that Ray did not fall for Sam's bullshit the way Michael did, right?
[00:16:27]  Here's what Ray said shortly after taking over and getting a look at FTX's finances.
[00:16:31]  And this is from an article in Business Insider.
[00:16:34]  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.
[00:16:43]  Ray explained that FTX was unusual and that it had no record keeping whatsoever.
[00:16:47]  He said that employees would exchange invoices and expenses on Slack, the ubiquitous workplace chat room.
[00:16:53]  They used QuickBooks, he added, referring to the accounting software.
[00:16:56]  QuickBooks, Congresswoman Wagner asked for clarification.
[00:16:59]  QuickBooks, very nice tool, not for a multi-billion dollar company, Ray confirmed.
[00:17:03]  And that's like, basically, they're using the kind of thing that you would use if you're like a person keeping track of you or maybe your small business's accounting.
[00:17:12]  I've done that.
[00:17:15]  And like that, that's nuts.
[00:17:17]  Yeah.
[00:17:18]  That is like the closest thing.
[00:17:19]  That's Ray's attitude.
[00:17:20]  Yeah.
[00:17:21]  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.
[00:17:27]  QuickBooks?
[00:17:28]  Do we go to TurboTax?

=== A Pyramid Scheme (15:52) ===

[00:17:29]  What do we do?
[00:17:30]  I would.
[00:17:31]  It's like hire a CFO, maybe.
[00:17:32]  Yeah, I would hire someone who's done that before, right?
[00:17:35]  Yeah.
[00:17:36]  Yeah.
[00:17:36]  QuickBooks.
[00:17:37]  Holy shit.
[00:17:38]  Yeah.
[00:17:39]  So you can decide whose interpretation sounds more realistic.
[00:17:42]  John Ray recognized, you can basically the two possibilities are like either John Ray just recognizes basic incompetence when he sees it and gets angry, or he's just not brilliant and special enough to understand Sam's world, which is what that's what Michael Lewis, that's he in caps.
[00:17:58]  That's what Michael Lewis refers to FTX as is Sam's world, right?
[00:18:03]  This is a he basically treats the whole situation as like, yeah, 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.
[00:18:16]  And then John Ray came in and he tore it all apart because he's just the mean old grumpy businessman, right?
[00:18:22]  That's that's really like the thrust of Michael Lewis's book.
[00:18:26]  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?
[00:18:40]  Sam is a gaming addict.
[00:18:41]  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?
[00:18:48]  Yeah.
[00:18:49]  Yeah.
[00:18:50]  And it's interesting, both because storybook brawl was made by his childhood friend and he used consumer funds to purchase it.
[00:19:00]  It seems to have been a pretty mid-game.
[00:19:02]  It shut down after he got arrested.
[00:19:04]  So I can't play it to tell you if it's actually good.
[00:19:07]  But Lewis doesn't describe it as like a middlebrow app game.
[00:19:11]  He describes it as like better than chess, like more complex than chess, a greater intellectual expert exercise than chess.
[00:19:20]  And he writes this paragraph about it.
[00:19:22]  Sam didn't care for games like chess, where the players controlled everything and the best move was in theory perfectly calculable.
[00:19:30]  Chess he'd have liked better if robot voices wired into the board hollered rule changes at random intervals.
[00:19:35]  Knights are now rooks.
[00:19:36]  All bishops must leave the board.
[00:19:38]  Pawns can now fly or almost anything.
[00:19:40]  So long as the new rule forced all players to scrap whatever strategy they'd been pursuing and improvise another, better one.
[00:19:46]  The game Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation.
[00:19:50]  Trading crypto was like that.
[00:19:52]  And I...
[00:19:53]  This is getting fucking ridiculous.
[00:19:54]  Like, is there any chance that Sam Bankman Freed paid Michael Lewis to say this shit?
[00:20:00]  Like, I don't know.
[00:20:01]  Maybe.
[00:20:01]  I don't know that he would still have the money.
[00:20:03]  One of the things.
[00:20:04]  Not that there's no proof that he isn't dense, but this is like above and beyond.
[00:20:11]  The reason why I get that a lot.
[00:20:13]  They're like, well, Michael Lewis was obviously bribed, but like Michael Lewis is very rich.
[00:20:18]  Like, I don't know how you could bribe Michael Lewis, especially after you lose your money.
[00:20:22]  Yeah, and even if, and even if he wasn't from money, he'd be rich.
[00:20:26]  Yeah.
[00:20:26]  Yeah.
[00:20:27]  He's always been rich and always will be.
[00:20:29]  So I don't know how much I think that's likely.
[00:20:32]  I think he just this is his first time ever hearing about games.
[00:20:36]  And so he thinks Sam is brilliant and special because he played them obsessively.
[00:20:41]  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 England in like the mid-century to just gamble away all of their fucking money.
[00:20:57]  And a big part of why this kind of like old generation of the aristocracy lost so much is they were into these specifically games of chance like Shamanda Fair, which is a kind of baccara where basically there's no skill involved.
[00:21:10]  It's pure, it's as close to pure chance as possible because there was this like change in the kind of gambling the upper class like to do that I've heard theorized as basically just like, well, these people had nothing in their life but gambling, right?
[00:21:23]  They've always been rich.
[00:21:24]  They're born rich.
[00:21:25]  They've always lived these super safe lives.
[00:21:27]  The only thrill they had was throwing a bunch of money on like effectively a complete chance.
[00:21:33]  I never understand that because it's like, what's the worst that's going to happen?
[00:21:36]  You're going to become marginally less rich, but still maintain the same quality of life.
[00:21:40]  That sounds boring.
[00:21:42]  Yeah, you've just, they are just insulated from anything thrilling because they're insulated from any real danger, right?
[00:21:48]  Yeah.
[00:21:49]  And so I think Sam being this kind of rich, sheltered kid, that's, I, Lewis interprets this like he's too smart to play a game like chess.
[00:21:57]  He wants a game where he doesn't actually know what's going on and a lot of that's random.
[00:22:01]  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?
[00:22:11]  Like, and he put a lot of other people's money on those bets.
[00:22:14]  Yeah.
[00:22:15]  Anyway, this is a little beside the point, but I did want to read the actual part of the book where Lewis describes Magic the Gathering because it is very boomer.
[00:22:23]  Magic had been created in the early 1990s by a young mathematician named Richard Garfield.
[00:22:29]  It was the first kind of a new kind of game, designed, perhaps, for a new kind of person.
[00:22:34]  Garfield had started with an odd question.
[00:22:36]  Could a strategic game be designed that allowed the players to come to it with different equipment?
[00:22:40]  And again, Games Workshop had started making Warhammer years before Magic came out.
[00:22:45]  Like all games like this have existed forever.
[00:22:48]  I couldn't hear you over the sound of imagining Garfield the cat saying that.
[00:22:53]  Yeah.
[00:22:54]  Which Garfield?
[00:22:55]  Bill Murray or are we talking Chris Pratt?
[00:22:57]  There's also a secret third Garfield, Garfield, whoever did the voice acting on Garfield and Friends, which is my canonical Garfield voice.
[00:23:06]  Certainly not Chris Pratt Garfield.
[00:23:08]  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.
[00:23:19]  It's like it's his infinity punishment.
[00:23:21]  He'll be rich, but he can never leave the room.
[00:23:24]  I'm okay with that, actually.
[00:23:26]  Let's keep him in the room.
[00:23:27]  He doesn't have any good ideas.
[00:23:29]  No, no.
[00:23:30]  Keep him in the room.
[00:23:31]  Every six years, he can come out to do another Interminable Jurassic World movie.
[00:23:36]  No, the villain was Locust.
[00:23:41]  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.
[00:23:52]  Here's another clip from 60 Minutes where he describes how Sam treated effective altruism that ties into this.
[00:23:58]  And this is remarkable.
[00:24:01]  What it means in Sam's instance is you can go out and have a career where you do good.
[00:24:06]  You can go be a doctor in Africa or you can go out and make as much money as possible and pay people to be doctors in Africa.
[00:24:13]  If you're a doctor in Africa, you end up saving a certain number of lives, but you're only one doctor.
[00:24:18]  But if you can pay 40 people to become doctors in Africa, you're going to save 40 times the number of lives.
[00:24:25]  This is like a strategy game.
[00:24:26]  Well, you don't understand Sam Bankner Fried unless you understand that he turns everything into a game.
[00:24:31]  Everything is gamified.
[00:24:33]  He's describing a pyramid scheme of doctors.
[00:24:37]  Yes.
[00:24:40]  And he's saying this on 60 Minutes.
[00:24:41]  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 to bring it up.
[00:24:52]  This is too stupid.
[00:24:54]  Like to light the fact that people somehow collectively forgot that you wrote the blind side on fire to say this shit on 60 Minutes.
[00:25:02]  It just like is, it's, he's describing a pyramid scheme.
[00:25:07]  He sure is.
[00:25:08]  He is describing a fucking pyramid scheme.
[00:25:11]  And also like this whole, he turns everything into a game.
[00:25:16]  Like, cause the through line of the connection there is that like saw for good.
[00:25:21]  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.
[00:25:28]  And the through line you're meant to make is he was he was the guy who was best suited making a lot of money because he turned everything into a game.
[00:25:37]  And man, that's, again, not unique to Sam.
[00:25:41]  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?
[00:25:49]  Like that's fucking everywhere.
[00:25:51]  Like Sam is, again, not unique in this.
[00:25:53]  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.
[00:26:08]  We don't have a shortage of assholes who gamble with other people's money.
[00:26:11]  There's there's not actually enough doctors for the people who need them.
[00:26:15]  And also, I mean, to that point, it doesn't sound like, would I trust knowing what I do of Sam Bankman Freed's ability to multitask that would I trust him doing surgery?
[00:26:28]  I don't think I would.
[00:26:29]  I don't think I would.
[00:26:31]  I wouldn't trust him doing either of those.
[00:26:34]  Yeah.
[00:26:34]  Yeah.
[00:26:35]  No, he would, he would never have, right?
[00:26:37]  Like, but yeah.
[00:26:38]  Anyway.
[00:26:39]  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.
[00:26:47]  And like, he sounds ridiculous.
[00:26:49]  I kind of, outside of he's just completely deluded, his two options are he's just so out of touch with the youth that he thought Sam was unique in this, or he, he, he decided from the moment he met him, this is the framing device I want to use for Sam's genius in my book because I can think, I think they could film it easily, right?
[00:27:09]  Because I'm sure he thinks that way about the books he's written.
[00:27:11]  He's had so many of them adapted.
[00:27:13]  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?
[00:27:23]  Yeah.
[00:27:23]  So my guess is that he just couldn't get himself off of this idea he had for like the inevitable Sam Bankman Freed movie, you know, crafted for the Big Bang theory audience.
[00:27:34]  Yeah, like he's already, he's like, oh yeah, who's hot right now?
[00:27:37]  Paul Mezcow will dye his hair.
[00:27:40]  It's going to be fucking great.
[00:27:42]  No, I think they should have had Timothy Chalamay.
[00:27:44]  I think they should have had Timothy Chalamay do like a, you know, what's his name?
[00:27:48]  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.
[00:27:54]  No, no, don't talk about rubber patents in that way.
[00:27:57]  Or no, you're talking about Christian Bale.
[00:27:58]  I'm talking about Christian Bale.
[00:28:00]  I want to see Timothy Shalamay do a Christian bail to look like Sam Bankman Freed.
[00:28:05]  That sounds fun.
[00:28:06]  I just worry about Timothy Chalamet.
[00:28:08]  It looks like if you like touch him, he may shatter.
[00:28:10]  I just worry about him.
[00:28:11]  He looks so frail.
[00:28:13]  Yeah, that's the right thing.
[00:28:14]  He looks like he's got consumption.
[00:28:16]  Yeah.
[00:28:17]  Like that they would say that about him in the distant past.
[00:28:21]  Yeah.
[00:28:22]  And it's like, if Sam Bankman Freed is looking hardier than you are, like, you're in trouble, my man.
[00:28:27]  Uh-huh.
[00:28:27]  Yeah.
[00:28:28]  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.
[00:28:35]  This paragraph occurs right after the FTX customers pull a run on the bank, annihilating its cash reserves and starting its collapse as like the employees are all huddled inside their $30 million Bahamas suites to try to figure out how to fix things.
[00:28:50]  Nishad was agitated with Sam in a way that Romnik had never seen.
[00:28:53]  At one point, turning on him and screaming, will you please fucking stop playing storybook brawl?
[00:29:00]  And I like that anecdote, but it gets to another frustrating issue with Going Infinite, which is that Michael Lewis has all of the ingredients for a great modern Icarus story of Hubris and the Fall, but making it work tonally would require him to see these things that are obvious warning signs as warning signs and structure his book that way, right?
[00:29:19]  And then you get some catharsis in the payoffs.
[00:29:22]  But these warning signs are just sort of scattered around.
[00:29:25]  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.
[00:29:32]  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.
[00:29:40]  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.
[00:29:49]  It began with a seriously compelling list titled Arguments Against.
[00:29:52]  This is arguments against her dating him.
[00:29:54]  In a lot of ways, I don't really have a soul.
[00:29:57]  This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others, but in the end, there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake.
[00:30:02]  My feelings are fake.
[00:30:03]  My facial reactions are fake.
[00:30:04]  I don't feel happiness.
[00:30:05]  What's the point in dating someone you physically can't make happy?
[00:30:08]  I have a long history of getting bored and claustrophobic.
[00:30:11]  This has the makings of a time when I'm less worried about it than normal.
[00:30:14]  But the baseline prior might be high enough that nothing else matters.
[00:30:16]  I feel conflicted about what I want.
[00:30:18]  Sometimes I really want to be with you.
[00:30:20]  Sometimes I want to stay at work for 60 hours straight and not think about anything else.
[00:30:24]  And so I want to say that I have this amount of self-love to not fall for this, but I can't even say that 100%.
[00:30:32]  I just really feel for Carolyn at a lot of points in this story because it's, oh my God.
[00:30:38]  I feel like there's a version of someone who would be like, oh, I can fix him.
[00:30:44]  Where you're like, oh, no, this is like, it's like tween fiction of like, there's only one person.
[00:30:49]  And she loved tweeting.
[00:30:51]  I know.
[00:30:52]  I know.
[00:30:52]  She's at a disadvantage.
[00:30:55]  And it's difficult because like Lewis discusses kind of Sam's inability to be like functional with the people in his life.
[00:31:06]  And he clearly has a thing.
[00:31:08]  Like he funds another exchange by another woman in crypto who he tries to date.
[00:31:15]  Women in crypto.
[00:31:16]  Yeah, he's got this kind of thing going on, but Lewis kind of always writes off his behavior as like, well, you know, he just, he was too depressed.
[00:31:26]  He was too, he can't foe.
[00:31:27]  He's too brilliant to like be.
[00:31:29]  He's 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.
[00:31:39]  Happens every 10 years.
[00:31:42]  Like that happened with Zuckerberg.
[00:31:43]  They're like, no, he's like, he's a rampant misogynist because his business started off of misogyny because he just had so many good ideas that it was like pressing on the woman respect nerve.
[00:31:56]  It's ridiculous.
[00:31:58]  And meanwhile, when Lewis is describing why Carolyn did what she did, he includes language.
[00:32:04]  He's like, he's like, he quotes someone as saying she would throw away all of her principles to be loved.
[00:32:08]  Like she's the only one of the effective altruist kids who doesn't really believe in it.
[00:32:12]  She's just so desperate for affection that she would like do anything for it.
[00:32:18]  Which like, I don't know, like, I don't know the person, but it's, it's weird that Lewis is so cynical about her and so full of excuses for Sam.
[00:32:27]  I would have, I would have a fair amount of guesses as to why that may be.
[00:32:33]  And the way that it seems like in many ways that, you know, Lewis has seen himself in Sam.
[00:32:39]  And like, if you're, especially if you're used to like writing profiles of very successful, eccentric people, which he is, if, if this is the precedent you've set for the kind of behavior that you would excuse, such as clear racism or sexism, why would this be any different?
[00:32:58]  Like it's, it, it, it fucking sucks.
[00:33:00]  And then also on the other end of Carolyn being characterized as this like desperate for affection person, I, I, I try to like tap into that of like, God, if any of my personal correspondence came out, I'd be fucking cooked.
[00:33:17]  Oh, it would be devastating.
[00:33:19]  So many people.
[00:33:19]  And she wants to be singled out.

=== Expected Value Priors (02:46) ===

[00:33:22]  Yeah, of course.
[00:33:23]  Yeah.
[00:33:24]  Everyone's desperate for affection.
[00:33:26]  So, you know, anytime you see Lewis writing about Sam, he writes in kind of the terms, Sam is one of the people in this weird effective altruism cult.
[00:33:34]  He uses terms like he talks about his priors, which is like, it's a way of like bringing Bayesian mathematics into personal decisions.
[00:33:41]  And all you, all you're saying when you're saying, like, well, these are my priors is like, well, this is the shit I believe without any kind of evidence, right?
[00:33:49]  That's that's largely what that means.
[00:33:50]  These are like my pre-existing biases.
[00:33:53]  But saying pre-existing biases like doesn't sound as smart as my priors.
[00:33:58]  And likewise, Sam would always talk about like, well, every decision I make is like a mathematical decision.
[00:34:03]  And I calculate what's the expected value of this outcome versus this outcome.
[00:34:06]  And then I do the thing with the highest expected value, right?
[00:34:09]  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.
[00:34:15]  That's human nature.
[00:34:16]  We are creatures of comfort in a lot of ways.
[00:34:21]  But there's Sam is just dressing up selfishness in lines like this.
[00:34:26]  Sam wanted to do whatever at any given moment offered the highest expected value.
[00:34:30]  And his estimate of her, Carolyn's expected value, seemed to peak right before they had sex and plummet immediately after.
[00:34:36]  And like, that's no different than a lot of guys in their 20s.
[00:34:40]  That's not special.
[00:34:41]  He just sounds like a fucking guy.
[00:34:44]  Oh, so you're saying he got horny and then he didn't care about her afterwards.
[00:34:48]  Well, that's not special.
[00:34:49]  Like, how I can't relate.
[00:34:52]  Wow.
[00:34:53]  Yeah.
[00:34:54]  That's not just millions of men.
[00:34:55]  That's millions of people.
[00:34:58]  It's so, I mean, even just outside of his relationships with women and his relationship with Carolyn, I don't know.
[00:35:05]  It gives me sort of like menta 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.
[00:35:18]  You could never understand why I am fucking up at this tremendous rate.
[00:35:23]  And then if they're challenged enough, it's like, well, actually, I'm, you know, 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.
[00:35:37]  It's actually, I'm using QuickBooks because I don't give a fuck.
[00:35:40]  It's like either I am a genius or I don't care and there's nothing in between.
[00:35:46]  And it's like what is in between is just the fact that they're full of shit.
[00:35:50]  Yeah.
[00:35:51]  Yeah.
[00:35:52]  And you know who else is full of shit?
[00:35:54]  Nope.
[00:35:55]  Time to head to ads.
[00:36:05]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

=== Irresponsible Sam Treats (13:08) ===

[00:36:09]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:36:12]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:36:15]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:36:18]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:36:22]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:36:24]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:36:26]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:36:28]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:36:33]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:36:35]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:36:37]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:36:39]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:36:42]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:36:43]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:36:46]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:36:50]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:36:52]  Trust me, babe.
[00:36:53]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:37:02]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:37:08]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:37:13]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:37:19]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:37:28]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:37:33]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:37:36]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:37:39]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:37:41]  That's so funny.
[00:37:42]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:37:51]  Say you love me.
[00:37:54]  You know I.
[00:37:56]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:38:03]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:38:09]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:38:15]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:38:22]  From power to parenthood.
[00:38:24]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:38:27]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:38:30]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:38:32]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:38:36]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:38:43]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:38:46]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:38:52]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:38:54]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:38:57]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:39:09]  Oh, boy, I sure do love ads.
[00:39:11]  Those were some good ones.
[00:39:13]  So, yeah, so we're back.
[00:39:15]  We're talking about Sam Bakeman Freed's issues with women as chronicled by Michael Lewis, who does, to his credit, make a point of noting that all of the company's moves as CEO from the U.S. 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.
[00:39:35]  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.
[00:39:45]  Like, this guy is, is just a word.
[00:39:48]  He's just a kind of can't avoid, like, deal with confrontation.
[00:39:52]  Like, yeah, that's not special.
[00:39:54]  Again, millions of us out there.
[00:39:57]  Every conflict avoidant person has their approach.
[00:40:00]  It knows no gender, but it skews towards one.
[00:40:03]  Yeah.
[00:40:04]  My last boyfriend bought an upright base.
[00:40:07]  That was how that was.
[00:40:11]  Bless his heart.
[00:40:12]  I don't think that's.
[00:40:14]  Yeah.
[00:40:16]  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.
[00:40:28]  Because there is a relate, like I'm not trying to discount his misogyny, which is certainly a thing.
[00:40:32]  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?
[00:40:51]  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.
[00:41:00]  Like they're willing to like have an AI just like come up with some crap that's vaguely patterned off of a historic.
[00:41:07]  See, isn't this picture of like, you know, isolation and anomi in modern society better now that we've turned it into a bunch of friends having brunch outside of a cafe?
[00:41:16]  Look, it's much brighter now and prettier.
[00:41:18]  It's like, no, that's not the point of the art.
[00:41:20]  You don't understand.
[00:41:21]  But like, they don't, yeah, it's this.
[00:41:23]  Do you think that a computer could come up with the image of Paul Walker and Brian the dog in a convertible?
[00:41:31]  No, that's a uniquely human artist.
[00:41:33]  Basically, it's an instinct.
[00:41:34]  Only we would understand.
[00:41:36]  Only humans would get it.
[00:41:38]  This idea that like, I am smart, and therefore, if I don't understand something, it's not important, right?
[00:41:44]  It's, it's something for like people who are less than me to deal with.
[00:41:48]  This is why the company fell apart.
[00:41:50]  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.
[00:42:02]  And I find that interesting.
[00:42:03]  I do too.
[00:42:05]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:06]  Good, good stuff.
[00:42:07]  So perhaps the biggest major through line in Going Infinite is Michael Lewis not getting the joke.
[00:42:12]  That section where he quotes SBF explaining why CFOs are dumb is a perfect example.
[00:42:17]  On a casual reading, you might even assume that we were supposed to find the line, what do you think I do?
[00:42:22]  What the fuck do you think I do all day?
[00:42:24]  Do you think I don't know how much money we have?
[00:42:26]  Funny, because Sam did not know how much money they had.
[00:42:29]  Of course.
[00:42:29]  But at the climax of the book, after FTX has crumbled, Lewis goes into detail to discuss all the money that was recovered by John Ray.
[00:42:38]  Quote, at the end of June 20, the third, at the end of June 2023, John Ray filed a report on his various collections.
[00:42:45]  To date, the debtors have recovered approximately $7 billion in liquid assets, he wrote, and they anticipate additional recoveries.
[00:42:52]  $7.3 billion, to be exact.
[00:42:54]  Ray was inching towards an answer to the question I'd been asking from the day of the collapse.
[00:42:58]  Where did all that money go?
[00:42:59]  The answer was nowhere.
[00:43:01]  It was still there.
[00:43:02]  And that's not true.
[00:43:04]  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.
[00:43:17]  And later they find it.
[00:43:18]  Like he had just misplaced it, basically.
[00:43:21]  And so Lewis is being like, that's just what happened.
[00:43:24]  They were never really in bankruptcy.
[00:43:26]  See, it was a good business.
[00:43:27]  Like, they just didn't have any record keeping.
[00:43:30]  So they lost the money.
[00:43:31]  And this meany John Ray thinks it's bad to lose several billion dollars.
[00:43:36]  But what Lewis is saying is not true.
[00:43:38]  He is kind of lying here.
[00:43:40]  Maybe he just, maybe it's an honest mistake.
[00:43:42]  I don't know, but it's not accurate because for one thing, seven-ish, $7.3 billion has been found.
[00:43:50]  Almost $9 billion is missing.
[00:43:51]  So that's $1.5 billion unaccounted for still.
[00:43:55]  That's still one of the largest financial frauds in history, right?
[00:44:00]  Significant.
[00:44:00]  That's why.
[00:44:01]  Maybe as much as $2 billion.
[00:44:03]  Yeah.
[00:44:04]  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 number they've got.
[00:44:15]  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.
[00:44:22]  And it's like, why would you think that?
[00:44:23]  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?
[00:44:30]  Well, see, this is interesting because now, oh, I feel bad because I know Michael Lewis is not the bastard of the episode.
[00:44:35]  However, if we're applying Sam Bankman-Fried's theory that you do not do any valuable work after 45, that may in fact apply to Michael Lewis?
[00:44:46]  Yeah.
[00:44:47]  Sounds like maybe he's lost the thread because the way that he's talking about money and I mean, and I have not read this book.
[00:44:55]  I have what you're just that's why they pay you the big bucks.
[00:45:01]  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 work into question.
[00:45:19]  Yeah.
[00:45:19]  Yeah.
[00:45:20]  And it's like, yeah, just the ridiculousness of being like, well, look, guys, seven, you know, they've recovered seven billion out of 9.3 billion.
[00:45:29]  So things are basically good.
[00:45:31]  Like that's insane.
[00:45:32]  But also, as we'll get to later, he is he, that even that doesn't tell the whole truth.
[00:45:37]  Like this idea that everyone's going to get their money back is not true.
[00:45:41]  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.
[00:45:48]  It was a misunderstanding.
[00:45:50]  It's all unfair.
[00:45:51]  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.
[00:46:00]  And I'm going to play you this clip.
[00:46:01]  It's the most revealing clip that I found.
[00:46:03]  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.
[00:46:11]  So while Sam is on trial, basically.
[00:46:13]  Okay.
[00:46:14]  7.3 billion.
[00:46:15]  So it's 1.3 billion that's missing.
[00:46:17]  Plus, and there's still more to be done.
[00:46:20]  And it's more than that.
[00:46:21]  It's more than that.
[00:46:22]  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?
[00:46:36]  And that in particular, can we, you're going to let me finish?
[00:46:39]  I am.
[00:46:42]  Oh, my God.
[00:46:44]  I think, well, I care about is the fact that at the very least, he's extremely important.
[00:46:50]  I still do think it's important.
[00:46:51]  I think at the very least, he's irresponsible.
[00:46:54]  Of course, I'm not saying he's not irresponsible.
[00:46:57]  I'm saying it's just different than you think.
[00:47:00]  Okay.
[00:47:01]  Okay.
[00:47:01]  A few observations.
[00:47:02]  First of all, to pay.
[00:47:04]  Second of all, uploaded for.
[00:47:10]  That is a toupee, right?
[00:47:11]  His hair does not look real.
[00:47:13]  Colors, it's not giving matching color.
[00:47:16]  Second observation, upload date four weeks ago.
[00:47:20]  Gnarly.
[00:47:21]  Third observation, obviously he cuts off a woman aggressively to be wrong.
[00:47:28]  And then finally, it 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 butt-chug a quart of milk.
[00:47:48]  It's ridiculous.
[00:47:49]  Yeah, Jamie, though, here's the thing.
[00:47:51]  This is the difference between what I call vulgar art, which is the stuff that will be forgotten, you know, within a generation, and immortal art, right?
[00:48:03]  Like the Parthenon, you know, you butt-chugging the contents of Infinite Jest was a Parthenon-level work of art.
[00:48:10]  It will be with us in 10,000 years.
[00:48:13]  Misunderstood it is.
[00:48:15]  Just like the Parthenon.
[00:48:16]  He's in like a fucking cathedral, though.
[00:48:19]  I mean, it does look like he's in.
[00:48:22]  Sophie, can you bring up a freeze frame of his face at like 1257 and that?
[00:48:27]  Because he is doing an I think you should leave face.
[00:48:29]  Like he is, he is almost a perfect character for one of those fucking sketches.
[00:48:34]  Tim Robinson could do this.
[00:48:38]  Tim Robinson could do an amazing job of this.
[00:48:41]  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.
[00:48:49]  That like Lewis is definitely doing that kind of face in this.
[00:48:54]  God.
[00:48:56]  That right there where he's like, that's what he's doing at Tim Robinson.
[00:49:04]  He's really.
[00:49:05]  Oh, boy.
[00:49:07]  And I'm doubling down on the toupee theory.
[00:49:10]  Yeah.
[00:49:11]  No, that hair does not.
[00:49:13]  I'm not touching us to see if we've got the veneers to match.

=== Insurance Fund Lies (14:52) ===

[00:49:17]  He's too rich to not have veneers.
[00:49:19]  I aspire to veneers.
[00:49:22]  I just want to have exactly that much money.
[00:49:24]  I wanted to tell you how angry he gets there because we're going to address the actual facts of his claim now.
[00:49:29]  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.
[00:49:39]  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.
[00:49:52]  But that is even not what it seems like.
[00:49:55]  And I'm quoting from Investopedia here.
[00:49:57]  To be clear, the 90% number refers to the funds FTX is able to gain access to rather than total customer deposits at the time of the exchange's collapse.
[00:50:06]  That doesn't necessarily mean customers will gain access to 90% of their assets that were left on the exchange.
[00:50:12]  Rather, customers will gain access to 90% of the funds FTX is able to distribute to their creditors.
[00:50:17]  FTX and FTX US had an estimated $8.7 billion combined shortfall by the time the crypto firm filed for bankruptcy.
[00:50:26]  Roughly 6.9%, roughly $6.9 billion of that shortfall, including a Bahamas real estate portfolio, has been recovered.
[00:50:33]  Let's consider Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capital, as a capitalization, as a proxy for the broader cryptocurrency markets.
[00:50:41]  On November 11th of last year, the petition date, Bitcoin was trading at around $17,000.
[00:50:45]  On Friday, it crossed 30,000.
[00:50:48]  So simply put, if the current plan goes through, you'd likely get 85% of the dollar value of your cryptocurrency held on FTX as of last November, even if the same coins have almost doubled in value today.
[00:50:58]  So one of those, like both he's kind of overestimating the amount that they're going to get back.
[00:51:03]  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.
[00:51:09]  Like people have had to sell their homes and shit because like they had all of their money.
[00:51:13]  Like that, there's harm here, right?
[00:51:16]  That's what the courts are taking.
[00:51:17]  Not only is there still money missing and not an insignificant amount, but like people suffered in the interim where they didn't have access to their money.
[00:51:24]  And yeah, they're crypto gamblers.
[00:51:26]  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% of a bunch of people's savings accounts is a substantial crime.
[00:51:39]  The legal question is, is it a scam?
[00:51:42]  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 happen a couple of years ago up to very recently, we're like, yeah, you're, what are you talking about?
[00:51:56]  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.
[00:52:06]  Yeah.
[00:52:07]  And yeah, and people are still suffering ongoing harm as a result of it.
[00:52:11]  He's acting like Lewis is acting as if there wasn't really anyone hurt.
[00:52:15]  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.
[00:52:25]  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?
[00:52:35]  No, you still didn't have that money for years.
[00:52:37]  And that's a problem for you.
[00:52:38]  That's a crime.
[00:52:40]  I mean, and I, 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.
[00:52:58]  And he's falling on the wrong side anyways.
[00:53:00]  And it's like gaming, rich, gaming the rich because like Larry, you did, they didn't hire Larry David to do a commercial so they could scam billionaires, right?
[00:53:09]  They hired Larry David to do a commercial so they could scam your mom, you know, because your mom likes Larry David.
[00:53:16]  I'm not saying the rest of us don't.
[00:53:19]  I mean, most moms do, right?
[00:53:21]  He's pretty popular amongst them all.
[00:53:24]  I don't know if my mom knows who.
[00:53:25]  I mean, all the women in my family were big Seinfeld fans.
[00:53:29]  Does your mom watch Curb message?
[00:53:31]  No, no, no, but Seinfeld.
[00:53:33]  Oh, my mom.
[00:53:34]  Yeah, my mom.
[00:53:34]  Yeah, my mom watched Seinfeld.
[00:53:36]  Okay, I'm back.
[00:53:36]  I'm back.
[00:53:37]  Yeah.
[00:53:37]  So anyway, Michael Lewis.
[00:53:40]  Yeah.
[00:53:41]  It's interesting to me, like the fact that the fact that Sam Bankman Fried stole money from depositors, because that's what it is when you take money out of one company illegally and use it to gamble in another company.
[00:53:53]  That's stealing.
[00:53:54]  Michael Lewis never uses the term stolen to describe what Sam did.
[00:53:59]  And he basically goes to great lengths to claim that Sam misplaced all this money.
[00:54:04]  This is, again, wildly inaccurate.
[00:54:06]  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.
[00:54:18]  So customers would put U.S. dollars into FTX and then use it to like buy cryptocurrency, right?
[00:54:25]  But those U.S. dollars needed to stay in the exchange so that people could cash out their positions, right?
[00:54:30]  Otherwise, you're not doing legitimately what you're supposed to do as a business.
[00:54:34]  FTX was not a bank.
[00:54:35]  A bank is allowed, only has to keep a certain amount in reserve, right?
[00:54:39]  That's what a reserve currency is.
[00:54:41]  This is an exchange.
[00:54:42]  They were supposed to keep enough reserve in there to cover the value of their deposits.
[00:54:47]  Sam instead took all that money and put it into Alameda.
[00:54:50]  And there's evidence that it like never, it went directly into Alameda.
[00:54:54]  The money people thought they were depositing into FTX went into another company entirely.
[00:55:00]  I would call that, and in fact, Sam was convicted because this is an example of fraud.
[00:55:06]  Lewis depicts it as an honest mistake.
[00:55:08]  And here's the New Yorker, quote, Lewis finds it not only wholly implausible that this was, in fact, a gigantic accounting error explained by FTX's difficulty securing bank accounts.
[00:55:18]  As Lewis concludes, his story, implausible as it sounded, remained irritatingly difficult to disprove.
[00:55:24]  And Lewis very gently insinuates that Ellison, in over her head, might have made some very bad decisions.
[00:55:30]  And in court, which again is a couple of weeks after his book comes out, it is proven with data from the company that Sam not only did not, like, not only knew what he was doing, but he ordered other people to obscure this fact from customers, right?
[00:55:44]  He ordered his employees to hide from customers that their money was going straight into another company.
[00:55:50]  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.
[00:55:59]  And I found an analysis of FTX's code by Molly White, who does a newsletter called Citation Needed, which is quite good.
[00:56:06]  Molly knows code and stuff.
[00:56:08]  So here's her analyzing that.
[00:56:10]  Prosecutors questioned Wang, who was the guy who was coding the exchange, about the FTX insurance fund, which was ostensibly supposed to protect both FTX and its customers from trades that went badly even more quickly than the exchange's risk engine could account for.
[00:56:23]  FTX published the fund's supposed balance on their website and bragged widely about its existence, including in testimony to U.S. Congress.
[00:56:30]  However, according to Wang, the number showed on the website was falsified.
[00:56:35]  And the question is like, is this a real number?
[00:56:37]  Wang, no.
[00:56:38]  So it's a fake number?
[00:56:39]  Yes.
[00:56:39]  Was the real number higher or lower than the fake number?
[00:56:42]  Lower.
[00:56:43]  And yeah, the way that they would do this, so like they're supposed to have this insurance fund, which is part of what makes FTX safer than the other exchanges is that we keep, you can't do a run on the bank because our entire, like, like all of our deposits are backed up by cash, right?
[00:57:00]  So we can't collapse the way that other exchanges do.
[00:57:03]  And like to make people feel comfortable, they had, they would show them, they had like, you could see like what the insurance fund was at.
[00:57:11]  They would regularly brag, we have this much money in our insurance fund.
[00:57:15]  Was that number accurate?
[00:57:16]  Like, no.
[00:57:17]  All they were doing is just, I don't know why I even asked.
[00:57:20]  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.
[00:57:31]  Like the amount of, basically they would, 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.
[00:57:42]  So it wouldn't describe how you do business.
[00:57:48]  They're like, so there was never an insurance, a real insurance fund of any like meaningful amount of money.
[00:57:55]  They just pretended it was there by having a computer do a random equation.
[00:57:59]  So it seemed like it was fluctuating over time.
[00:58:02]  Yeah, that's that's not legal to do that's fraud.
[00:58:07]  And I feel like this, like this level of like splitting hairs in the New Yorker wouldn't happen unless the two main players, Michael Lewis and Sam Bankman Fried, weren't tremendously privileged.
[00:58:21]  Like for any other people, you would be like, yeah, so this was a lie and then this happened.
[00:58:26]  Like you wouldn't be splitting hairs like this.
[00:58:28]  To be fair, the actual thrust of that New Yorker article is like Michael Lewis is what the fuck is happening with this guy because he's clearly fallen for something.
[00:58:36]  Like the New Yorker article is very critical of him.
[00:58:38]  It's bringing up that he is not calling Sam Bankman Fried a fucking con man when he clearly is, right?
[00:58:44]  So they're like, headline, Michael Lewis low-key fell off.
[00:58:49]  Yeah, low-key, he fell off.
[00:58:50]  That's right.
[00:58:51]  Molly also brings up something else that was left out of court, but the prosecution published evidence of it.
[00:58:57]  And I found this really telling.
[00:58:58]  Elsewhere in the code, it's possible to observe that the amount of FTT, which is the token created that represented basically voting shares.
[00:59:06]  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.
[00:59:16]  So again, they're lying about how much money is in this fund.
[00:59:19]  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.
[00:59:26]  It was just doing the calculation on your own machine, right?
[00:59:30]  Which is evidence that there was never any attempt to give people accurate information.
[00:59:35]  Wow.
[00:59:36]  It's fun stuff.
[00:59:37]  There's other fun reveals during the court case.
[00:59:40]  For example, during FTX's days as a functioning business, a lot of crypto people noticed there was a potential conflict of interest between FTX and Alameda.
[00:59:49]  They were like, hey, it seems like you run both these companies and like traders on Alameda are trading on FTX.
[00:59:58]  Is it possible that they're getting preferential treatment on the exchange that you also owned?
[01:00:02]  There's a really telling Twitter conversation on Molly's blog where someone asks this and SBF says, Alameda is the liquidity provider, but their account is just like everyone else's.
[01:00:12]  And the respondent rightfully says, I guess we're just supposed to trust you.
[01:00:15]  And it turned out they were right to be worried.
[01:00:17]  One of the chief selling points about FTX is that it's crash-proof, right?
[01:00:21]  Crypto exchanges have this weird habit, like 20 years old now, of getting really big and then collapsing, taking everyone's money with them.
[01:00:28]  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?
[01:00:40]  Everybody loses money because one bad gambler gambled too much.
[01:00:43]  One of FTX's like selling points was that it was different.
[01:00:48]  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?
[01:00:56]  So you can't lose more money than you put in is the basic idea.
[01:01:01]  So that's how it was supposed to work.
[01:01:03]  And that's how it worked initially.
[01:01:05]  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-Fried's orders.
[01:01:14]  And in court, Gary Wang, Sam's business partner, explained how Sam directed them to do this.
[01:01:20]  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.
[01:01:28]  Sam Bankman Fried kept asking him to increase their credit limit to prevent it from happening.
[01:01:33]  According to Wang, the limit was originally set to a few million dollars, but then it was increased to a billion.
[01:01:38]  After they ran up against that limit too, Bankman-Fried asked him to set it to a number so large they wouldn't likely hit the limit.
[01:01:44]  At that point, Wang set it to around 65 billion.
[01:01:47]  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.
[01:01:54]  Like he's like.
[01:01:55]  You just imagine like someone on their knees in like shitty pinstripe dance being like, come on, man.
[01:02:02]  Yeah, give me, just give me some credit, man.
[01:02:04]  I'm good for it.
[01:02:06]  But he got up to 65 billion in credit.
[01:02:09]  Yeah, yeah, which is insane.
[01:02:10]  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?
[01:02:19]  Which is my, by the way, that's my interpretation.
[01:02:22]  I mean, to me, it sounds like this shit is Neo Points to him.
[01:02:27]  Like it really is.
[01:02:29]  If there's anything that got the millennial generation hooked on capitalism and random gambling, it was Neopets.
[01:02:37]  And if anyone has proof that Sam Bankman Fried was a Neopets user, he just sounds like the worst version of a Neopets user to me.
[01:02:45]  The worst endgame for a Neopets user is what you've been describing to me for several hours.
[01:02:52]  And I think you and I, we're not invested in Sam Bankman Fried ever being particularly smart.
[01:02:57]  So we can see this.
[01:02:58]  Lewis.
[01:02:59]  He's a Neopets user.
[01:03:01]  And I bet I was better at it than him.
[01:03:04]  Well, that's the other thing.
[01:03:05]  He was never very good at games.
[01:03:06]  Like people found his League of Legends account and were like, yeah, he was mid.
[01:03:10]  Like, I'm sure he wasn't good at storybook brawl, right?
[01:03:13]  Like, he's just, he was never good at this.
[01:03:16]  But it was the first time that Michael Lewis had heard of Storybook Bled.
[01:03:19]  Yeah, so Sam Bank and Fried said he was the best at it.
[01:03:22]  Why not believe him?
[01:03:23]  Yeah.
[01:03:24]  And just the idea, like, again, Lewis can't be like, yeah, this kid had a gambling problem and he also owned a bank.
[01:03:30]  So it became everyone's issue.
[01:03:33]  But like, you're not.
[01:03:34]  He's a bank man.
[01:03:35]  It's hard to portray someone as smart if they're just addicted to gambling, right?
[01:03:39]  Because that's not a smart person thing.
[01:03:41]  It actually, a lot of smart people are horrible addicts in a variety of ways, but like in a Hollywood way, make it look like somebody's a genius if they just can't control themselves, right?
[01:03:52]  Yeah, it's a serious, serious problem.
[01:03:54]  Yeah.
[01:03:54]  Yeah.
[01:03:55]  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?
[01:04:02]  And yeah, speaking of things that don't work, shit.

=== Reality vs Advertisement (03:26) ===

[01:04:09]  Everything you're about to advertise.
[01:04:11]  We won't have to work if you purchase these products.
[01:04:14]  Okay, good, good self-correction.
[01:04:16]  Yeah, I say we'll continue to work.
[01:04:20]  More accurate.
[01:04:22]  Yeah, both true.
[01:04:30]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[01:04:34]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
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[01:04:48]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
[01:04:54]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
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[01:05:01]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
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[01:05:04]  So they take matters into their own hands.
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[01:05:29]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[01:05:34]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:05:41]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[01:05:48]  From power to parenthood.
[01:05:50]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[01:05:53]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[01:05:55]  From addiction to acceleration.
[01:05:58]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[01:06:02]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[01:06:09]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[01:06:11]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
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[01:07:04]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
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=== Word Salad Answers (14:49) ===

[01:07:35]  So, you know, I think it's clear from the stuff that came out in the court case that I just read some of, there's no way Alameda and FTX would have done the things that I just described if they hadn't meant to disguise the reality of their business from the world, which is fraud, right?
[01:07:49]  The reality is that Sam Bankman Fried used depositor money to gamble.
[01:07:53]  And he was gambling in part on his own chances.
[01:07:56]  He wasn't just gambling.
[01:07:57]  This is the thing that is important to understand.
[01:07:59]  Past a certain point, most of his gambling was not him betting on cryptocurrencies, right?
[01:08:05]  The big shit he did that made the news, the billion dollars that he pumped into naming, renaming that stadium in Florida, to bringing in all these celebrities, to these high-dollar Super Bowl ads, that was a gamble.
[01:08:16]  He was pulling a slot machine on his own chances of ascending to the halls of power, right?
[01:08:21]  Sounds like him, yeah.
[01:08:22]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:23]  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.
[01:08:32]  He thought he'd had a 5% chance of becoming president of the United States.
[01:08:38]  Well, I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but also like, look at some of the dumbasses we've got.
[01:08:43]  He's probably not wrong that he, I mean, he at least could have been like, who is that fucking loser from Starbucks?
[01:08:49]  He could have at least been that.
[01:08:51]  Yeah, he could have, I think he could have had a failed presidential, but no, like.
[01:08:54]  Yeah, oh, yeah.
[01:08:56]  They're all dumb.
[01:08:56]  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.
[01:09:05]  That's the same.
[01:09:05]  Right.
[01:09:06]  That's true.
[01:09:06]  That's true.
[01:09:08]  Again, say what you will about Joe Biden.
[01:09:10]  He wouldn't have been in politics this long if he couldn't make enough people like him.
[01:09:14]  And obviously, Donald Trump is very charismatic.
[01:09:17]  Sam Bankman Freed just isn't.
[01:09:18]  Like, you don't become the president if you are avoid of charisma.
[01:09:22]  No, and we've learned that time and time again.
[01:09:25]  Yeah.
[01:09:26]  And that's the thing.
[01:09:27]  Like he was always all of his sudden rise to public prominence was not based on him actually being interesting.
[01:09:33]  It was based on him spending tens of millions of dollars to get like Bill Clinton to pretend to be his buddy.
[01:09:39]  Like that was all there ever was to it, you know?
[01:09:42]  In my general research on the crypto industry, and if you're looking for actual good reading, don't buy Going Infinite.
[01:09:48]  You won't get anything valuable at it.
[01:09:50]  If you do want to get something valuable and a deeper understanding about like how grifty this whole industry was and also how grifty Sam was, there's a book called Number Go Up by Zeke Foe, Zeke F-A-U-X.
[01:10:02]  Really good book, Number Go Up, which I do recommend to people curious for the dark side of crypto.
[01:10:08]  Zeke also spent time with Sam in the Bahamas, and I found this passage from his book relevant to what I just mentioned.
[01:10:15]  A few hours into our conversation, Bankman Fried told me he had to make a call.
[01:10:18]  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.
[01:10:25]  In walked a haughty man with a long, scraggly beard, a potbelly, and mismatched socks, one of them with a Pac-Man design.
[01:10:32]  He was an employee of FTX who'd stuck around to help Bankman Fried try to find an investor to rescue the exchange.
[01:10:38]  I threw out an easy question.
[01:10:39]  Why are you still here? I asked.
[01:10:41]  He started off by saying he wanted to help FTX's customers.
[01:10:44]  Then, unprompted, he told me he thought there wasn't much of a risk that Bankman Fried would ever get in trouble.
[01:10:49]  I firmly believe once somebody becomes a certain level of rich, they're never poor again, he said.
[01:10:54]  They don't go to jail.
[01:10:55]  Nothing bad happens to them.
[01:10:57]  Wait, he has his own Zuckerberg quote.
[01:11:00]  He has his own.
[01:11:01]  You can be unethical and still be legal.
[01:11:03]  That's the way I live my life.
[01:11:04]  Ha ha.
[01:11:05]  Wait, read it again for me so I can really take it in.
[01:11:07]  And again, this is Sam's friend who stuck by him after his business collapsed.
[01:11:12]  I firmly believe once somebody becomes a certain level of rich, they're never poor again.
[01:11:16]  They don't go to jail.
[01:11:18]  Nothing bad happens to them.
[01:11:20]  Poetry.
[01:11:21]  Yeah, it's beautiful.
[01:11:22]  It's a beautiful thing to think in that moment, too, where all of the smarter people have just fled the island.
[01:11:28]  And in that moment, he was infinite.
[01:11:30]  That was, wow, wow.
[01:11:32]  Yeah.
[01:11:33]  I'm speechless.
[01:11:34]  It's so funny, too, because, I don't know, man, just historically, you remember like Marie Antoinette was pretty rich and like that didn't end well, you know?
[01:11:42]  Like, like, there's a lot of czar had a lot of money.
[01:11:46]  It didn't go well for him.
[01:11:48]  You know, bad things happen to rich people, too.
[01:11:52]  And that's that's your main political stance, as I recall.
[01:11:55]  Yeah.
[01:11:56]  Yeah.
[01:11:56]  I will hang out with anybody rich because nothing bad can happen to them.
[01:12:00]  Obviously, untrue.
[01:12:02]  I kind of suspect that that, that sort of, I don't know, you know, the fact that so much of what was said, like Zeke Foe is clearly someone who's smart enough to like understand when he's being lied to by these people and understand their fundamental absurdity.
[01:12:18]  And that comes across in his book.
[01:12:20]  I don't think Lewis got that, right?
[01:12:23]  He believed fundamentally in the fundamental honesty at the center of Sam Bankman-Fried.
[01:12:28]  And I kind of suspect that's why he covered his face with his hands that day in court.
[01:12:33]  He's not a dumb man, and he must have realized by that point the evidence that came out in the trial was undeniable, made it undeniable that he got conned too.
[01:12:41]  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.
[01:12:49]  The Guardian's review noted this too.
[01:12:51]  He thought Bankman Fried hadn't lied to him at all, or at least that he'd only lied by omission, not by commission.
[01:12:56]  Late in the book, Lewis asks Bankman Fried, what would you have done if I'd asked you specifically about FTX customer funds being used by Alameda?
[01:13:03]  Bankman Freed admits that he would have changed the subject or rustled up a word salad.
[01:13:08]  And whatever the facades erected by other effective altruists, Lewis considers Bankman Freed to be enigmatic, but essentially genuine and certainly not out to enrich himself because he has no desire for the things that money can buy.
[01:13:19]  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.
[01:13:28]  That explains why he's so adamant about pushing the line that there was no money missing.
[01:13:32]  And it's why he continued to defend Sam's dissembling as a fun, quirky character trait while the trial was going on.
[01:13:38]  See, as part of the cash-in on Going Infinite, Michael Lewis launched a podcast, Judging Sam, the trial of Sam Bankman-Freed.
[01:13:47]  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.
[01:14:01]  That's right, right.
[01:14:02]  It's the last refuge of fools and scoundrels.
[01:14:06]  Yeah.
[01:14:06]  Please pay for the cool free subscription.
[01:14:09]  What do we call it, Sophie?
[01:14:12]  So the trial, Judging Sam is part of Lewis's Against the Rules podcast on Pushkin.
[01:14:17]  And I can't speak for the regular episodes of that podcast.
[01:14:20]  I have not listened to any of the other ones.
[01:14:22]  But I can say his Sam Bankman-Freed trial podcast is an uneven effort at best.
[01:14:28]  Most of the work is done by Lydia Jean.
[01:14:30]  She's a journalist.
[01:14:32]  She's okay.
[01:14:32]  I don't have any huge issues with her.
[01:14:35]  I think we get a little too much like, here's what the court kitchen is like.
[01:14:38]  Here's anecdotes from the fun lives of the journalists covering it.
[01:14:41]  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.
[01:14:52]  And you're like, oh my God, I get it.
[01:14:54]  You're in fucking New Hampshire in October.
[01:14:56]  It's permanently fall where you NPR people leave.
[01:14:59]  We understand.
[01:15:00]  Yes.
[01:15:01]  But every podcast on this trial does something like that.
[01:15:04]  I think it's just because they have to, they were doing like basically daily episodes and needed to fill runtime.
[01:15:09]  And like, look, is that lazy?
[01:15:11]  Yes.
[01:15:11]  Have we all been there?
[01:15:13]  Yes.
[01:15:13]  So I simply can't throw stones at this glasshouse.
[01:15:18]  What are you talking about?
[01:15:20]  What do you mean?
[01:15:22]  As someone who's never had a daily podcast, I condemn this behavior because I've never had to do it.
[01:15:28]  So Lillian takes most of the lifting on this show because Lewis was on tour for his book, right?
[01:15:36]  And so he couldn't be there for most of it.
[01:15:39]  He was barely at the trial.
[01:15:40]  Yeah, he was screaming at women in cathedrals.
[01:15:43]  He was busy.
[01:15:44]  Yeah.
[01:15:45]  But he does occasionally come on.
[01:15:48]  And one of the episodes does show like he shows up to court on the day that Sam takes the trial or takes the stand in his own defense.
[01:15:57]  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.
[01:16:04]  Here's how a write-up from The Verge summarizes his time on the stand.
[01:16:08]  Bankman Fried's demeanor suggested a spoiled child complaining he didn't get the biggest scoop of ice cream at his birthday party.
[01:16:14]  He didn't want to answer the prosecutor's questions or his lawyers' questions.
[01:16:17]  He wanted to answer his own questions, which he liked better.
[01:16:20]  He often replied to yes and no questions with nonsense.
[01:16:23]  We were getting introduced to a document where Bankman Fried listed his priorities, including getting accounting right on FTX.
[01:16:29]  Cohen and Bankman Fried Cohen's lawyer and Bankman Fried use this to show how devoted Bankman Fried was to getting to the bottom of the general fiasco with Alameda's money.
[01:16:38]  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.
[01:16:44]  This did reveal Bankman Fried's priorities.
[01:16:47]  Getting accounting right was ranked ninth.
[01:16:50]  So for the stories Bankman Fried wanted to tell, we had to rely on Bankman Fried.
[01:16:55]  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.
[01:17:05]  God, this is more stand-up behavior.
[01:17:08]  The actual evidence suggests that Ellison is both a better trader and much savvier than Bankman Fried.
[01:17:13]  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.
[01:17:21]  And like what happens is he's putting, you know, all this money into advertising, into like playing celebrities.
[01:17:27]  He's putting like $2 billion into these random series of investments.
[01:17:30]  And she's like, hey, we've taken depositor money to gamble with.
[01:17:34]  We have to keep more cash on hand.
[01:17:35]  Otherwise, the whole exchange could collapse.
[01:17:38]  Sam ignores her.
[01:17:39]  The exchange collapses.
[01:17:40]  And then he blames her for not hedging.
[01:17:42]  Right.
[01:17:43]  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?
[01:17:54]  Right.
[01:17:55]  But there's no hedging the kind of risks that FTX was taking because the fundamental risk was we don't have enough money if there's a run on the bank, you know?
[01:18:03]  Well, it's like their risk goes, we're never going to die.
[01:18:05]  Like there, you can't, you can't hedge that.
[01:18:08]  Yeah.
[01:18:10]  What is wild to me is like everything you're describing is ridiculous.
[01:18:14]  And it makes total sense that it fucking imploded in the catastrophic way that it did.
[01:18:19]  But then you also, I mean, so much of it sounds like the kind of stuff that, for example, Michael Lewis might report on is a tremendous scam that worked out great for everybody.
[01:18:32]  Yeah.
[01:18:32]  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.
[01:18:43]  It is wildly different from how Michael Lewis describes how Sam reacts on the stage, right?
[01:18:49]  Oh, okay.
[01:18:50]  Yeah.
[01:18:50]  And it's interesting because like, obviously, most people were able to see, oh, yeah, Sam is just lying on the stand.
[01:18:56]  He's obfuscating.
[01:18:56]  He's refusing to answer the question.
[01:18:58]  But Michael Lewis, not only does Michael Lewis like being lied to by Sam Bakeman Freed, he thinks Sam's defensive cloud of bullshit, right?
[01:19:06]  This like word salad is better than the truth.
[01:19:09]  And he says this in his fucking podcast.
[01:19:12]  Jamie, you're going to love this clip.
[01:19:14]  Today he didn't get in as much trouble as he got yesterday, though.
[01:19:19]  Not as much.
[01:19:19]  I think.
[01:19:19]  But still a little bit.
[01:19:21]  More than other witnesses.
[01:19:23]  Yeah, that's true.
[01:19:24]  The bigger point is the judge is sitting there listening to see if Sam is actually answering the question.
[01:19:30]  Because he now knows he doesn't do that.
[01:19:31]  Yeah.
[01:19:32]  Or generating a word salad for us all to consume.
[01:19:35]  And I was thinking about this thing today.
[01:19:37]  Why Sam's word salads are so fun.
[01:19:41]  Like why he gets away with it.
[01:19:42]  Like most people, when they don't answer a question, your alarm bells go off pretty quickly.
[01:19:47]  Like that, you just redirect it in some way.
[01:19:50]  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.
[01:19:57]  And then making a little jump into things that are actually interesting to know about.
[01:20:02]  So you're not bored.
[01:20:03]  You're actually interested in what he's saying.
[01:20:05]  You're saying like there's substance to it.
[01:20:06]  He's not just saying nothing.
[01:20:07]  He's saying something that's substantive and makes you think it's just not what you asked.
[01:20:12]  But then you're thinking and you forget what you asked.
[01:20:15]  That's exactly what happens.
[01:20:17]  Yeah.
[01:20:17]  So that's like he, he's, he's, he's just saying that like, yeah, Sam's lies, he's really good at lying.
[01:20:24]  Like, and it's fun to listen to him lie as if that's a defense, right?
[01:20:29]  Where they're saying like, well, they really painted a different picture of Sam because they, you know, he, he got to get up on the stage and bullshit.
[01:20:37]  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.
[01:20:46]  I don't know.
[01:20:47]  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.
[01:20:56]  And that like exchange too is like, no, like I know what you're saying, but yeah.
[01:21:01]  And even in what she's describing, like the court approach is either he's a genius or he's like an incompetent sweetie pie, but you're just like, or he's a malevolent dumbass.
[01:21:13]  Yeah, or he just does seem to be the case.
[01:21:15]  But like, yeah, I love this idea that like, yeah, we're, we're getting to see the real Sam, who is a guy who never answers your actual question.
[01:21:25]  But like, I want to continue the clip because Lewis says something very, very ridiculous right after this.
[01:21:31]  Okay.
[01:21:32]  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.
[01:21:39]  And then making a little jump into things that are actually interesting to know about.
[01:21:44]  So you're not bored.
[01:21:45]  You're actually interested in what he's saying.
[01:21:47]  You're saying like there's substance to it.
[01:21:48]  He's not just saying nothing.
[01:21:49]  He's saying something that's substantive and makes you think it's just not what you asked.
[01:21:54]  But then you're thinking and you forget what you asked.
[01:21:57]  That's exactly what happens.
[01:21:59]  It's engaging.
[01:22:00]  It's like, maybe it's even better than the answer to the question.
[01:22:05]  Like maybe it's what you should have asked.
[01:22:08]  Yes, maybe it's what even what you should have asked.
[01:22:09]  That's exactly right.
[01:22:11]  Yeah, it's Sam, the questions Sam answers that aren't what he's being asked are what you should have asked, right?
[01:22:17]  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.

=== The Cool Hand Luke (07:51) ===

[01:22:25]  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?
[01:22:39]  Sam just didn't have time to like take care of his appearance in any way.
[01:22:44]  He was too smart to waste any of like his brain power on that.
[01:22:48]  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.
[01:22:56]  The prosecutor followed with questions about Sam's approach to public relations.
[01:23:00]  Ellison explained he was trying to cultivate an image of himself as a sort of very smart, competent, somewhat eccentric founder.
[01:23:06]  I was sitting in an overflow room on that day.
[01:23:08]  So, when the prosecutor asked how would you describe the defendant's personal appearance through 2022, the room was allowed to erupt into laughter.
[01:23:15]  Ellison replied, He looked like he didn't put a lot of effort into his personal appearance.
[01:23:18]  He dressed sort of sloppy, sloppily, and didn't cut his hair often.
[01:23:22]  He said he thought his hair had been very valuable.
[01:23:24]  He said, Ever since Jane Street, he thought he had gotten higher bonuses because of his hair, and it was an important part of FTX's narrative and image.
[01:23:31]  God, yeah, first, embarrassing, but also, I think, you know, clearly predicated on the dipshit billionaires that came before him.
[01:23:43]  Like, there is a clear aesthetic and a clear, like, you know, slovenly genius thing that he's like, it's strategic.
[01:23:51]  And that's interesting, right?
[01:23:53]  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 genocide hoodie that he wears.
[01:24:05]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:24:06]  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.
[01:24:13]  And no, what everyone says at FTX is like he was obsessed with like his hair.
[01:24:17]  When they were spending trying to build their $200 million or whatever new headquarters, his only design note was that it should be shaped so it looked from the side like his hairs do because he thought that like he thought it was iconic, right?
[01:24:31]  Like, which is also based on what we were just listening to, what the like logo to that podcast is is the shape of his hair.
[01:24:40]  Everyone's playing into it.
[01:24:42]  Yeah.
[01:24:42]  It's fucking wild.
[01:24:43]  Anyway, Jamie, that's my episode.
[01:24:45]  Do you think we should fire Michael Lewis into the sun?
[01:24:49]  Well, I was, I was thinking earlier, I am very curious because, you know, I think it's like a waste of time to ask, will Michael Lewis have another opportunity to course cracked his career?
[01:24:59]  Of course he will.
[01:25:00]  Of course he will.
[01:25:01]  Yes.
[01:25:02]  He's going to write 70 more books.
[01:25:05]  Well, what I'm curious about is like where he goes from here.
[01:25:08]  I feel like it's pretty telling if you've been conned to this fucking degree, because no one clocked him in the blind side, but now he's been pretty severely clocked as like giving in to his worst biases and reporting it as fact.
[01:25:24]  And I do wonder if that's the position you're in and you will absolutely write another book because you're unkillable financially.
[01:25:31]  Like, I wonder which direction he's going to go in.
[01:25:35]  Is he going to be hyper cautious?
[01:25:36]  Is he going to play it safe?
[01:25:38]  Is he going to be self-reflective at all?
[01:25:40]  Or is he going to double down on the falling for it kind of stuff?
[01:25:44]  I genuinely don't know because I just like, it's very hard to discern what kind of person.
[01:25:48]  Like, it seems like he's certainly, you know, like high in his own supply and is like, well, you know, of course, anyone could have fallen for it, but he is sort of conceding to the fact that he fell for it.
[01:26:00]  I just am curious what happens to someone from there.
[01:26:03]  My suspicion, and maybe I'll be wrong about this.
[01:26:05]  I think we'll know pretty soon.
[01:26:07]  I think he's going to do another Sam.
[01:26:09]  I specifically think he's going to.
[01:26:11]  Yeah, a second Sam has hit the Michael Lewis bibliography.
[01:26:16]  And it's going to be Sam Altman.
[01:26:17]  Like he's going to do a Sam Altman, the open AI guy who just got fired from his job.
[01:26:22]  He's going to do a book on Sam Altman.
[01:26:24]  I suspect.
[01:26:26]  For fuck's sake.
[01:26:27]  You're probably right.
[01:26:27]  You're probably because then he'll be like, and I would know.
[01:26:30]  I can see through Sam's now.
[01:26:32]  Having been conned by one, I certainly won't be conned.
[01:26:36]  Sam me once, Sam on you.
[01:26:37]  Sam me twice won't get Sammed again.
[01:26:40]  You know, I am just like, father of Sam, son of Sammy.
[01:26:44]  Shit.
[01:26:44]  Wow.
[01:26:45]  Yeah.
[01:26:45]  No, that.
[01:26:46]  That's my guess as to where this goes is Sam Altman.
[01:26:51]  Why is Michael Lewis being presented with a second Sam?
[01:26:54]  Doesn't seem fair.
[01:26:55]  A second Sam is at the, well, I've already done that joke once.
[01:26:58]  And it worked.
[01:27:00]  And it always works, Jamie.
[01:27:02]  It always works.
[01:27:03]  Yeah.
[01:27:04]  Yeah.
[01:27:06]  Well, I don't feel, well, you know, I would say that this is like in the top 20 percentile of bastards episodes.
[01:27:15]  I've come out feeling like, you know, I don't feel that bad.
[01:27:18]  I usually feel like really dire.
[01:27:20]  I feel, I feel pretty good.
[01:27:22]  Yeah.
[01:27:22]  He's in forever.
[01:27:23]  He's in forever jail.
[01:27:25]  He's in, he is in forever jail, right?
[01:27:29]  Yeah.
[01:27:29]  Speaking of forever jail, Jamie, talent is like a jail that locks you into, for example, making a weekly podcast.
[01:27:39]  And I am happy that you and I are about to be cellmates.
[01:27:43]  We are.
[01:27:44]  I'm so excited.
[01:27:46]  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.
[01:27:51]  Jamie Loftus Weekly is coming to the Cool Zone Network.
[01:27:55]  You are going to be the Cool Hand Luke of our podcast, Prince.
[01:27:59]  You're welcome.
[01:28:00]  God, I would love to be the Cool Hand Luke of the podcast.
[01:28:04]  I got to get some new outfits.
[01:28:06]  Got to get some new outfits.
[01:28:07]  No, that's not the one.
[01:28:08]  Is that the one where he throws a baseball at the wall or is that the Great Escape?
[01:28:12]  I feel like that was Cool Hand.
[01:28:13]  I've been Luke a long time.
[01:28:15]  Neither have I. Not since I was like seven.
[01:28:17]  So I don't know.
[01:28:18]  Wow.
[01:28:18]  You saw Cool Hand Luke when you were seven?
[01:28:20]  Yeah, my mom loved that movie.
[01:28:22]  Nice.
[01:28:24]  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.
[01:28:36]  That explains so much about you to me, too.
[01:28:39]  Like you saw me.
[01:28:41]  She was so excited that all the men die and the woman didn't.
[01:28:45]  But like, yeah, she wanted me to see that movie at a very young age.
[01:28:48]  What a legacy.
[01:28:49]  Truly, what a legacy.
[01:28:51]  The sentence, because men are stupid, was uttered two or three times during that movie.
[01:28:57]  Which does unpack a lot of the plot, intended or not.
[01:29:01]  My mom would let me watch soap operas very young and would I would be like, what do they mean when they say making love?
[01:29:07]  And she would say, what do you think?
[01:29:09]  Like, I don't know.
[01:29:10]  I'm seven.
[01:29:12]  Yeah.
[01:29:13]  You haven't, you have not equipped me to answer that question, mother.
[01:29:19]  Well, yes, weekly podcast coming soon early next year.
[01:29:22]  What's it about?
[01:29:24]  You guess, but don't contact me about it because you're wrong.
[01:29:27]  Yeah.
[01:29:27]  Yeah.
[01:29:28]  A second Jamie has hit the cool zone.
[01:29:32]  I mean, you've done more than two podcasts.
[01:29:34]  This joke never worked, but whatever.
[01:29:37]  A first Jamie has hit the cool zone weekly.
[01:29:40]  That's right.
[01:29:41]  Jamie, what podcast is this of ours?
[01:29:44]  Oh, God.
[01:29:45]  How many, how many?
[01:29:46]  This is, well, this will be what?
[01:29:47]  Oh, my God.
[01:29:48]  Oh, it's impossible to say.
[01:29:50]  It's impossible to say.
[01:29:52]  I think it's like six.
[01:29:54]  Yeah.
[01:29:54]  I think it's like six.
[01:29:56]  We've entered the half dozen range.
[01:29:57]  It's getting dangerous.
[01:29:58]  That's so cool for us.
[01:30:00]  I know.
[01:30:00]  We're forever wives.
[01:30:02]  Sam Bankman Freed, Forever Jail.
[01:30:04]  Forever Jail.
[01:30:05]  Us forever wives.
[01:30:08]  So, Jamie, anything else you wanted to plug before we ride on out of here?
[01:30:12]  Like Michael Lewis.
[01:30:15]  Yeah, it's the holidays.

=== Forever Jail (03:14) ===

[01:30:17]  Are you looking for something to get for your loved or hated one?
[01:30:21]  I won't know.
[01:30:22]  Buy a copy of Raw Dog.
[01:30:23]  It's my book about hot dogs.
[01:30:25]  And if you don't like hot dogs, the title is funny.
[01:30:28]  And I think that's, you know, about 60% of the purchases I've gotten have been off that alone.
[01:30:33]  So you should buy Raw Dog.
[01:30:35]  And yeah.
[01:30:37]  Buy Raw Dog.
[01:30:38]  And no, I'm not going to make a Raw Dog joke.
[01:30:40]  That's just going to get me in trouble.
[01:30:42]  Anyway, buy a CoolerZone Media subscription and you won't have to hear ads.
[01:30:48]  Or don't buy a CoolerZone Media subscription and continue to listen to ads.
[01:30:53]  I don't care.
[01:30:54]  Live your life.
[01:30:55]  I'm not your fucking dad.
[01:30:57]  If you really want to hear the advertisings that Robert's disparaging, I personally think it's more fun to imagine it.
[01:31:03]  So you should get a CoolerZone Media subscription.
[01:31:06]  Yeah, once everyone's on Cooler Zone Media, then we can finally get that sweet Lockheed Martin subscription that I've, or whatever, ad deal that I've been wanting to have.
[01:31:16]  And then Robert can finally live inside a grenade like it's always been his dream.
[01:31:21]  That's been my dream.
[01:31:22]  That's been my dream, Jamie.
[01:31:24]  Yeah.
[01:31:25]  All right, we're done.
[01:31:26]  Bye.
[01:31:27]  We did it.
[01:31:30]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:31:33]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:31:48]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:31:56]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:31:58]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:32:00]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:32:02]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:32:07]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:32:08]  Trust me, babe.
[01:32:09]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:32:19]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[01:32:24]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:32:27]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:32:30]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:32:32]  That's so funny.
[01:32:33]  Surely stay with me each night, each morning.
[01:32:41]  Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:32:49]  What's up, everyone?
[01:32:50]  I'm Ago Mode.
[01:32:51]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:32:55]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:32:58]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:33:00]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:33:06]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:33:09]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:33:16]  Yeah, it would not be right.
[01:33:18]  It wouldn't be that.
[01:33:19]  There's a lot of life.
[01:33:21]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:33:28]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:33:30]  Guaranteed human.