The FrontPoint Boys

Summary

Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion

Episode: The FrontPoint Boys

Host: Michael Lewis with Lidia Jean Kott
Date: October 28, 2025

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Overview

This episode of Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion revisits the real-life FrontPoint Partners traders whose story formed a core part of Michael Lewis’s 2010 book The Big Short and its Oscar-winning film adaptation. Michael Lewis and co-host Lidia Jean Kott reflect on the legacy of the financial crisis, focusing on the team led by Steve Eisman (fictionalized as Mark Baum in the film) and brought to life by the actors Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Jeremy Strong. The episode features candid conversations with the actual traders—Porter Collins, Danny Moses, and Vincent Daniel—probing what the subprime mortgage collapse meant to them, how it felt to be proven right against the financial system, and the burden of having profited while others lost everything. The group also reflects on the enduring impact of the crisis and how markets—and justice—have changed in the years since.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Real FrontPoint Boys: Fact vs. Film

• [02:16] Michael and Lidia Jean introduce the episode’s focus on the FrontPoint team.
• [02:51] Michael plays a movie clip, highlighting the personalities and camaraderie among the team, remarking on the accuracy of the film’s portrayal.
  • “The movie just kind of nailed them.” – Michael Lewis

2. Meeting Greg Lippmann – The Catalyst for the Short

• [04:31] Porter Collins describes meeting Deutsche Bank’s Greg Lippmann (the real-life inspiration for Ryan Gosling’s film character), whose confidence—and Wall Street “coolness”—made them skeptical.
  • “He walked in the room and he was 120% confident...made it so much easier for us to not like him and, and to be skeptical of him and to go after him.” – Porter Collins [04:48]

3. Explaining the Financial Crisis in Plain English

• [06:11] Michael asks Vincent Daniel to explain the financial crisis as if to a child.
  • “There was a lot of bad loans that were made to people who shouldn't have gotten those loans...and they had an inability to pay.” – Vincent Daniel [06:27]
• [07:02] On why they made money: They did their homework when others didn’t.
  • “So, kids, this is why you spend a lot of time going to school and doing your homework...” – Vincent Daniel

4. Who Was on the Other Side? Betting Against Wall Street

• [07:42] They describe how “middlemen” (brokers) allowed them to make their investment, so they rarely knew the other side of their trades.

5. Why Did Few See the Disaster Coming?

• [08:10] Michael pushes Vincent: Why didn’t others do their homework?
  • “Imagine if you’re in school and you’re getting away with good grades without doing your homework...”
• [09:00] Vincent: Their edge was deep experience—he “had a PhD in what was happening” from covering subprime mortgages since the 1990s.
  • “We had the data better than everyone.” – Vincent Daniel

6. The Ignorance (and Greed) of the Financial System

• [11:06] Michael probes why big institutions missed the warning signs; Vincent blames greed and money.
  • “There was just too much money to be made. So they all turned the most intelligent ones turned a blind eye.” – Vincent Daniel

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Disney World Anecdote – Chaos Amidst Normalcy

• [15:47] Vincent recalls being at Disney World with family as the markets crashed. His calm contrasted with his father-in-law’s panic over market news.
  • “I was there with my nieces, my nephews, my kids...thankfully that was the only solace was that [we were on the right side of it].” – Vincent Daniel
  • “He would just go, Vinny, what in the world is going on?” [16:33]

On Profiting From Crisis—and Trying to Warn People

• [18:01] Vincent on public reaction:
  • “Every once in a while you get, well, why didn’t you stop this? Or...how do you feel comfortable profiting from this?”
  • He and colleagues did try to warn D.C. but “no one really listens to you unless you go...with a suitcase full of money.” [18:29]

“Price Discovery” and the End of True Market Downturns

• [19:54] New market reality: Government prevents busts for the influential but lets the less powerful suffer.

  • “...the minute something goes bad, the SWAT team and the fire hoses are out immediately to make sure it doesn’t go poorly.” – Vincent Daniel [21:01]

• [21:36] Example: The sudden rescue of Silicon Valley Bank—trouble “remedied...in two days over the weekend.”

  • “The market, rightfully so, ignored the adverse price discovery because they realized that the Fed had its back...” – Vincent Daniel [22:08]

The St. Patrick’s Cathedral Moment

• [23:15] Danny Moses describes the shock of suddenly realizing the scale of the crisis as Lehman Brothers collapsed. They left their desk and sat on the Cathedral steps, overwhelmed.
  • “That moment on St Patrick's Cathedral on those steps was real.” – Danny Moses
  • “I wish I was one of the people who didn’t know anything that was going on...” [23:28]

Guilt and Public Perception

• [24:52] Porter Collins shares family discomfort with their windfall.
  • “He made all this money and everyone lost their homes. Like, how does that make you feel?” [24:52, Porter Collins quoting his grandfather]

Justice Not Served

• [25:58] On the lack of consequences for those most responsible and Vincent’s expectations for systemic reform:

  • “I would have imagined that there would have been more justice...But I was naive.” – Vincent Daniel

• [26:30] Danny underlines the core problem:

  • “The system is set up in a way to reward the risk and not really punish the people that make the wrong bets...No one went to jail afterwards.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:16 – Introduction to the FrontPoint episode; movie clip of team dynamic
• 04:31 – Porter Collins on meeting Greg Lippmann
• 06:11-11:48 – Vincent Daniel explains the crisis in simple terms; discussion on greed and ignorance
• 15:47-17:38 – Disney anecdote; how vivid memories conflict with movie/book adaptation
• 18:01-19:54 – Public criticism and attempts to warn the government; issues of morality
• 19:45-22:32 – Price discovery, Fed intervention, and market changes post-crisis
• 23:15-24:52 – The St. Patrick’s Cathedral moment; that day’s emotional impact
• 24:52-26:30 – Family reactions, guilt, lack of justice and lessons learned
• 26:30-27:00 – Consequences, moral hazard, and why justice hasn’t prevailed

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Tone & Language Notes

The episode is candid, reflective, and occasionally laced with dark humor and regret. The participants discuss complicated financial subjects in down-to-earth metaphors—“doing your homework,” “price discovery,” and gambling analogies—often converting Wall Street complexities into language accessible to any listener. There’s an undercurrent of frustration at system failures and a measure of sadness or unease about the aftermath and unresolved lessons of the crisis.

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Conclusion

This episode offers an insightful, personal look into the real FrontPoint traders’ experiences during the financial crisis, their feelings about being right when everyone else was wrong, and the lasting consequences—both personal and systemic—of 2008. The team stresses how little has changed at the highest levels, with markets and policymakers still protecting the powerful and leaving the underlying moral hazard unaddressed. For those interested in financial history, ethical dilemmas, or how Wall Street shapes (and escapes) crisis, it’s a must-listen.

Transcript

[Michael Lewis]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Bobby Bones]

2025 hey, it's Bobby from the Bobby Bones Show. I had an incredible time at this year's iHeartRadio music festival and even got the chance to hang out with Diplo and Bailey Zimmerman while I was there. How did Ashes come together?

[Diplo]

Diplo I pulled up real quick. He was about to leave on tour. You're about to jump in your tour bus and we had like three hours.

[Bailey Zimmerman]

It was really cool. He literally just like randomly showed up to my house and I'm like, oh hey Diplo, what are you doing? He's like, I have a song that I want to show you. And I was like, okay.

[Bobby Bones]

You can listen to the full episode out now, wherever you get your podcast. And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible. Out of last Cruising around festival weekend in the all new Palisade Hybrid, introducing.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

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[Michael Lewis]

Lydia I'm Lydia Jean Cott. And I'm Michael Lewis and we're continuing our special series about the Big Short. In this episode, we're gonna hear from three guys who worked for Steve Eisman, a fund manager at FrontPoint Partners who bet on the housing market crashing in the late 2000s and was right in the movie version of the Big Short, Eisman is called Mark Baum. And I want to play you a clip that's narrated by Ryan Gosling in which we're introduced to the three guys who, who worked for him.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

What if you just say I just want to play you a clip and then I will explain afterwards.

[Michael Lewis]

Okay. It starts with Steve Carell playing Mark Baume.

[Colgate Advertiser]

Guys, Cynthia wants me to quit and.

[Vincent Daniel]

Open a BNB in Vermont.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

That sounds great.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

I'd love to see Mark Baum run.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

A bed and breakfast. Benny, Daniel, you know how to make a muffin.

[Vincent Daniel]

Mark's numbers guy. Cynthia's no joke. She could actually make a move to Vermin. I mean, she made me start wearing a seat. Hey, you want me to.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Porter Collins, former Olympic rower who went to Brown. Sorry, I think about the wrong front.

[Porter Collins]

Point because there is another front point.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

In the same building that is bonds. And Danny Moses, the optimist of the bunch and a hell of a traitor.

[Vincent Daniel]

Which is the only reason they put.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Up with his optimism.

[Vincent Daniel]

It was this guy from Deutsche who.

[Porter Collins]

Was talking about shorting housing bonds.

[Michael Lewis]

So that's the movie version of what the front point partners were like. Based on my interactions with them. That sounds about right. What was it like for you when you first met them?

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Oh, the movie completely nails their interactions. I think of Eisman as the sort of the main character and he was kind of the big picture person and then these other three guys were doing various little picture things. The big picture thing they were doing for me was watching Eisman. They each played kind of a slightly different role and each could contribute to the story, but they were sort of downstage voices but characters in and of themselves. And I kind of felt especially the Jeremy Strong character playing Vinnie. The movie just kind of nailed them.

[Michael Lewis]

This is the Big Short companion podcast and on today's episode, Michael Lewis talks with the three FrontPoint employees. Porter, Danny and Vinny.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

The first of the three FrontPoint traders I spoke to was Porter Collins. I asked him about meeting the trader from Deutsche bank who was going to let them in on the big short itself. The bet against subprime mortgage bonds. Greg Lippman walks into your life. Describe Greg Lippman to me.

[Porter Collins]

He looked like a Wall street salesman. Whoever walked in that door that was going to sell us credit default swaps on housing was going to get beaten up. But he walked in the room and he was 120% confident about everything. And so therefore it made it so much easier for us to not like him and, and to be skeptical of him and to go after him.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

You Know what?

[Vincent Daniel]

Would they.

[Porter Collins]

They have a scene in the movie. He said, I hung out with fashion friends.

[Vincent Daniel]

Right.

[Porter Collins]

He wanted to play that coolness factor as well. So he wasn't like a. A fuddy duddy Wall street salesman. He was a young, flashy Wall street salesman, and he put on a sales pitch, and all of us in the room thought it was too good to be true.

[Vincent Daniel]

The first thing that pops up in our head was how intense yet entertained we were during the whole process.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

That's Vincent Daniel, whose character would launch Jeremy Strong's acting career.

[Vincent Daniel]

It was very intensive every day to be thinking about this investment that we were doing, this trade we were doing. And then, like everything associated with our office, we made it quite entertaining to make sure that, like, we kept sane minds.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

So let's start this way. If you're just explaining to your kids what the hell the financial crisis was without using financial jargon, so in a way they'd understand, like what that what happened in 2008, it was such a big deal. And what role did you play in it?

[Vincent Daniel]

Well, the housing market crashed, right? And no one really talks about the why it crashed or what happened. There was a lot of bad loans that were made to people who shouldn't have gotten those loans at housing prices that were way too high and unaffordable for them. And they had an inability to pay those loans without getting into the intricacies of how we got there in the first place.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

I'm gonna play the role of your child. Okay, dad. So. So if that happened. So everybody lost a lot of money because the housing prices collapsed, how did you make money?

[Vincent Daniel]

Well, we were betting that the housing prices would collapse, and that was based upon information and research. So, kids, this is why you spend a lot of time going to school and doing your homework, is because what we were doing was our homework and realized that housing prices were too high and these loans were going bad. And then. So we figured out a way to make an investment. I'll use the word investment rather than a bet, I guess, to the kids that it would all go bad and we would make money.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Who lets you make this investment? I mean, if you made money, somebody lost money.

[Vincent Daniel]

Yes, there was a middleman, right. Like any gambling ring usually has is there's a middleman who was a bookie, and he was taking both sides of the bets. So we didn't really know who was on the other side for the most part, up until the end, we just knew that we had the ability to do what we wanted to do. And These brokers, these middlemen, allowed us to do it.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Let me continue in this vein of childlike questions.

[Vincent Daniel]

Sure.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Why didn't everybody do their homework? Like, what happened?

[Vincent Daniel]

Imagine if you're in school and you're getting away with getting good grades without doing your homework. So more and more people will just not do their homework and everything will work out well. But if you actually did your homework, you would realize that at some point, not doing your homework was not going to work. In fact, it was going to be really bad. And if you did do your homework, you were going to be rewarded in some way, shape, or form or fashion. Yeah.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

How hard was it for you to get your mind around the idea that you all could be right and the whole world was wrong? You were making a bet against the supposedly smartest people on Wall street who were inside the biggest firms on Wall street, and they were all wrong.

[Vincent Daniel]

I'll tell you why, Mike. It was the only place that I had a PhD in what was happening. Right. I lived this in the late 90s because I was covering the subprime mortgage companies way back when. So this was secondhand knowledge to me. If the massive crisis of this country was happening in the healthcare industry, I would have been useless. I would have been just like every other schmuck Wall street person opining. But this was the one place where we were not opining. We had the data better than everyone. And at that time, you know, the data was not perfectly presentable to everyone because you could get it, it wasn't proprietary, but no one even knew what we were talking about. I remember seeing this data back in the 90s. So every month data would come out that would show the delinquencies and losses of these respective pools of mortgages.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

People not paying back their loans, Right?

[Vincent Daniel]

Correct. And. And you could comp them to the prior year vintages. And the ones that we were short, the ones that we were betting against, the curves were horrifically bad. Like, the delinquencies were well north of where they should be. The losses were starting to pile up and be well north of where they should be. So to us, to me, I'll speak for myself, it was simple math that we were going to be right. What I didn't realize was how far the Fed would go to make sure that I was wrong. And quite frankly, I think we were a little fortunate that they didn't understand what we understood. And at that point in time, this is probably one of the first and probably last times in our lives that we knew more than the most Important people in the world thought they knew about this subject matter.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

How do you explain the ignorance of the most important people in the world? I mean, you would have thought that Citigroup and Merrill lynch and the Federal Reserv have people equally expert on this subject who were looking at all the data and all the curves, just like you. But in retrospect, you look back on that, how do you explain it?

[Vincent Daniel]

Greed and money. That's the only way that, in my head, that rationalizes. I always assume that people saw what I saw, particularly the people that were this close to the situation, that were analyzing these bonds and these. They knew they had to know, but there was just too much money to be made on the incremental subprime loan. There was just too much money to be made. So they all turned the most intelligent ones turned the blind eye. Yeah. My opinion.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Yeah. That makes total sense that the only other people around who had access to the information were all being paid to misinterpret the information.

[Vincent Daniel]

Correct.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I ask Vinnie and the other frontpoint guys how being depicted in my book and in the movie affected their lives afterwards.

[Bobby Bones]

Hey, it's Bobby from the Bobby Bones show. I had an incredible time at this year's iHeartRadio music festival and even got the chance to hang out with Diplo and Bailey Zimmerman while I was there. Check this out. So how did Ashes come together, Diplo?

[Diplo]

Well, I kind of briefly met Bailey, I think, at Morgan's show, one of them. And I think he's just the guy in Nashville. He's cool as hell. And I had a new kind of sound I wanted to do, and I think he's the one guy that could carry it. And I came to his house, I had a show, I pulled up real quick. He was about to leave on tour. You're about to jump in your tour bus. And we had like three hours play the record for him. We kind of like got a scratch and then he handled on his own on the road.

[Bailey Zimmerman]

Yeah, it was really cool. He really just like randomly showed up to my house and like, oh, hey, Diplo, what are you doing? He's like, I have a song that I want to show you. And I was like, okay. And then now we're here playing it live.

[Bobby Bones]

You can listen to the full episode out now, wherever you get your podcasts. And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible. Had a blast cruising around festival weekend in the all new Palisade hybrid.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Introducing the redesigned Dell PC powered by the Intel Core Ultra processor. It helps you handle a lot even when your holiday to do list gets to be a lot because it's built with all day battery plus powerful AI features that help you do it all with ease. From editing images to drafting emails to summarizing large documents to multitasking. So you organize your holiday shopping and make custom holiday decorations and search for great holiday deals and respond to holiday requests and customer questions and customers requesting custom things. And plan the perfect holiday dinner for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet. Whew. Luckily you can get a PC that helps you do it all faster so you can get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside. Get [e-mail].

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[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Have the book and the movie sort of screwed up your memory of the experience in the way you're, you know, pictures from a family vacation? Screw up your memory of the family vacation because all you end up remembering is the pictures. Or do you have scenes in your head that are just separate from that that are vivid to you about the experience?

[Vincent Daniel]

I'll give you a great personal business scene that really gets to, I think what you're getting at. So I might get the date slightly wrong. October 2008. Okay, my now deceased father in law takes the entire family on a Disney Vacation and we were there during the time that the markets were blowing up. So while I'm on It's a Small World. I know that the S and p is down 3, 4%, but I'm there with my nieces, my nephews, my kids and thankfully we're on the right side of it, right? Thankfully that was the only solace was that. And my father in law had money in the markets. He was somewhat financially, sadly he did pretty well in markets. And I remember him going, we're in the pool, we're in the pool with all the kids. And I remember him going to, I guess go to the bathroom and I just sat there saying, he's going to come out, check markets and he's going to have the face of the grim reaper and look for me immediately. And sure as shit, every day that I was there about 4:30 he comes out and I'm sitting there, I probably have a cocktail in my hand, I go, here it comes, right? And he would just go, vinny, what in the world is going on? And so that is kind of one of my like memories of it gets back to, wow, we knew a lot back then. And I'm sitting in Disney World where everyone's playing around, no one's paying attention to anything. But come after 4 o' clock my father in law started paying attention every day. And I think the market was down like 10% that week.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

And what do you say to him when he says, vinnie, what the hell's going on?

[Vincent Daniel]

It's like, well I go, there's a problem with the housing market. And what you don't want to say is I've been trying to tell you this, but no one really listens to you until, until the markets actually go down.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Has anybody been angry at you for being right?

[Vincent Daniel]

No.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

You've got no anger?

[Vincent Daniel]

No, no anger. Every once in a while you get, well, why didn't you stop this? Right? Or I remember a few years ago I would get the like, how do you feel comfortable profiting from this? And the way I explained our way around, it was like, look, we went down to Washington D.C. many a times pre crisis, we are not silent wallflowers. We went there and said, you guys are screwing up royally. And I've come to learn and I have this line, I was like, unless you go to D.C. with a suitcase full of money on the Accel Express, no one's gonna listen to you. And they didn't. So it's not like we didn't try, we did. And I know we didn't cause the crisis that I know. Did we accelerate the crisis by increasing the amount of like, synthetic stuff that was put on it? Maybe someone could maybe make that argument. But by the time we got involved, it was already gone.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

So when you look back, looking back at the way you may have played a poker hand, is there any. If you could replay it, would you replay it any differently?

[Vincent Daniel]

I would replay the after effects. What I didn't realize was how they were going to, quote, remedy the issue. I wasn't of the belief that a lot of people were going to go to jail and the like. But what I didn't realize to this day, I think that episode, that incident, the Great Recession, was the last time material adverse price discovery can happen in markets.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Explain that. Explain that to a child. What material adverse price selection is okay in markets?

[Vincent Daniel]

Things go up, things go down. Right. We have been taught by textbooks to believe that that's just how markets work. That's how capitalism works. Specifically, is that, yes, you will have booms, but you will also have busts. The government said, we don't want busts anymore. We don't want prices to go bad. Particularly, we don't want prices to go bad. And this is probably where I don't think it's controversial at all. We don't want prices to go bad. For the people who could actually afford for prices to go bad, meaning the wealthy people, you're too influential, you're too powerful, you're too required to continue to spend the money that you do, your wealth, such that at the end of the day, we're going to bail you out. Because if we don't bail you out, there's some major negative implications to the overall economy. Right. Whereas sadly for the people who can't afford price discovery, poor lower middle class, you're allowed to go bust because you're not that important. So if I had to do something different, I would recognize that sad fact a lot earlier than I have that the way they're gonna remedy every calamity going forward, the minute something goes bad, the SWAT team and the fire hoses are out immediately to make sure it doesn't go poorly.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Give me an example of the fire hoses coming.

[Vincent Daniel]

Silicon Valley bank. And they're making it as if Silicon Valley bank was small. It wasn't that small. Right. If a major bank of that kind went under in a market where price discovery was allowed, you would probably see the markets go down a material amount. They remedied that situation in two days over the weekend. They just basically Flooded the lines with Fed credit, right? A line of credit to make sure that any bank that was about to go under, regional bank that was about to go under, would be saved by this line of credit. And so the market, rightfully so, ignored the adverse price discovery because they realized that the Fed had its back and they did not allow this to fester for more than a week. That's it. There used to be a time when price discovery was allowed. It's not allowed anymore.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

I get asked a bunch why I opened and closed the big short with these characters, these frontpoint guys, in particular, Steve Eisman. Part of it was they had this really deep experience with the subprime lending market that went back to the early 1990s. They'd seen firsthand this ugly border between high finance and the American lower middle class. And so they were, in a way, there at the very beginning of the story. But I ended the book with him because they just handed me an ending on a platter. The day Lehman Brothers failed and they became rich, they were actually totally shell shocked. They wandered around midtown Manhattan and wound up on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Here's Danny Moses.

[Danny Moses]

Literally until the day that Lehman went down. And we never realized how big this thing was. And so that moment on St Patrick's Cathedral on those steps was real.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

So I want you to describe the moment on St. Patrick's Cathedral.

[Danny Moses]

We realized that, like, this is, this is bad, like this is going to be over. Like, what, how is this going to play out? And so literally left the trading desk, gave it to Junior Trader Porter, and Vinnie walked me out. You know, St. Patrick's Cathedral was about one avenue over and Steve was at a conference down at Goldman Sachs that day, probably raising as much money as he wanted to at that point. And we were sitting up there on the steps and we just had a very cathartic kind of moment watching people go by. Some were construction workers, some bus drivers, some, some oblivious. But then the lawyers and the Wall street people walking by that probably knew. And I guess at that moment in time you felt like, I wish I was one of the people who didn't know anything that was going on. I thought to myself, they have no idea what's about to happen to them. Meaning if the economic system collapses, they're going to feel it because the government's going to be effectively in dire straits. And, you know, it's amazing when you fast forward to today, all the consequences of all those things that happened 17 years ago are not only still with us, potentially end up getting a lot worse because of the moral hazard and the hubris that's, you know, still out there.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

When I talk to them about publishing their stories, all the characters in the book shared this one concern. They were all really worried how it would look to have made a fortune from the collapse of a system and the ruin of so many careers and lives. Porter Collins especially brought this up.

[Porter Collins]

I was scared, you know, when the book came out, my grandfather read it, and he didn't really approve. He was like, well, you made all this money and everyone lost their homes. Like, how does that make you feel? And so, like, that was that other side of the coin.

[Vincent Daniel]

Right.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

And what did you say? What did you say to him?

[Porter Collins]

I said he was right, you know, and he had the memory going back to, you know, the Depression.

[Vincent Daniel]

Right.

[Porter Collins]

He came from a different era. People forget all this stuff. And so, you know, I had a bit of that. Maybe it's the waspiness in me or whatever it is. I was scared.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

If I'd have asked you to predict, as you're sitting on the steps of the St. Patrick's Cathedral, what the world's going to look like in 15 years, and I mean, not just the financial markets, but also the political markets, how far off would you have been? What did you imagine was going to happen? And what did happen?

[Vincent Daniel]

I would have imagined that we would have had. I would have been wrong, put it that way. I would have imagined that there would have been more justice, or if you looked at prior times in history, there would have been more time to remedy the situation through price discovery. We wouldn't have allowed the proliferation of some of the excess leverage that has happened. But I was naive.

[Danny Moses]

So the system is set up in a way to reward the risk and not really punish the people that make the wrong bets. And so, yes, you can lose your job, but as we saw during the financial crisis, no one went to jail afterwards. And who bailed them out? The taxpayer and the shareholders over time, that was it. No one else. No one else did. Some people paid fines here and there, but that's pretty much all it was. So the moral hazard that was created as a result of this and the crisis stays with us today.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

I want to thank Danny Moses, Vincent Daniel and Porter Collins for talking with me once again. Starting next week, we're going to widen out our lens and look at all the ways the financial crisis changed our world, but also how maybe the system averted something even worse than. Than what we got.

[Michael Lewis]

Against the rules. The Big Short Companion is hosted by Michael Lewis. It's produced by me, Ludy Jean Cott and Catherine Girardot. Our editor is Julia Barton, our theme was composed by Nick Britell and our engineer is Hans Dale Shee. Special thanks to Nicole Opten Bosch, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela Lawrence, and the rest of the Pushkin Audiobooks team. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin Podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to listen ad free and learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a Pushkin subscription at Pushkin FM plus or on our Apple show page. And you can get the big short now at Pushkin FM Audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.

[Bobby Bones]

Hey, it's Bobby from the Bobby Bones Show. I had an incredible time at this year's iHeartRadio music festival and even got the chance to hang out with Diplo and Bailey Zimmerman while I was there. How did Ashes come together?

[Diplo]

Diplo? I pulled up real quick. He was about to leave on tour. You're about to jump in your tour bus and we had like three hours.

[Bailey Zimmerman]

It was really cool. He really just like randomly showed up to my house and like, oh, hey Diplo, what are you doing? He's like, I have a song that I want to show you. And I was like, okay, you can.

[Bobby Bones]

Listen to the full episode out now wherever you get your podcasts. And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible. Had a blast cruising around festival weekend in the all new Palisade hybrid.

[Colgate Advertiser]

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[Michael Lewis]

Hola.

[Colgate Advertiser]

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[Vincent Daniel]

The redesigned LPC with Intel Core Ultra helps you handle a lot when your holiday to dos get to be a lot like organizing holiday shopping, responding to.

[Interviewer (Michael Lewis or Host)]

Holiday requests and customers requesting custom things.

[Vincent Daniel]

That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside. Get [e-mail] holiday this is an iHeart podcast.