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

Summary

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

Podcast: Behind the Bastards
Date: November 27, 2025
Hosts: Robert Evans, Jamie Loftus, Sophie
Theme: A scathing examination of Michael Lewis's approach to journalism, especially in his book on Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), and the broader issues with hagiographic coverage of financial "geniuses."

Overview

This two-part special episode of Behind the Bastards revisits the Sam Bankman-Fried saga but pivots hard to focus on Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite, who spent pivotal time profiling SBF during both his rise and infamous collapse. Robert Evans and Jamie Loftus dissect Lewis’s failings, his myth-making around financial criminals, and why his brand of “access journalism” can enable and excuse destructive figures.

The tone is irreverent and sarcastic, blending cultural jokes, millennial/Gen-Z pop references, and political asides. The episode is as much a critique of media hero worship as of crypto grifters themselves.

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1. Introduction: Dark Humor, Meta-Jokes, and Setting the Stage

• [02:38] Robert Evans opens with bleak satire about global tragedy and nuclear war, setting the show’s trademark irreverence.
• [04:13] Jamie Loftus riffs off Evans’ intro with meme culture (Paul Walker/Brian Griffin), establishing fast comedic rapport.
• [05:38] Evans steers the show to the main topic: "80% of this episode is shitting on Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Short."

  “So Jamie, speaking of mediocre men, have you been keeping up with the story of bastard’s pot alumni Sam Bankman-Fried?”
  — Robert Evans ([05:38])

• The episode’s working title: "Sam Bankman Not Freed (because he is in jail)."

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2. Who Michael Lewis Really Is

Background and Social Class:

• [09:44] Evans explains Michael Lewis is not just a famous journalist and author, but a paradigmatic “access journalist” — someone valued in finance not for exposés, but for making subjects celebrities.
• [10:56] “His stories come from his ability to get close to his subjects... An access journalist whose books turn Wall Street crooks into icons.” — Robert Evans
• [23:30] Lewis’s elite upbringing: New Orleans WASP aristocracy, literally taught to sit on a throne, the ultimate social insider.

  “I was so inside, I was literally trained how to sit on a throne…” — Michael Lewis, quoted ([23:31])

• [26:24] Attended Princeton’s Ivy Club (all-male until 1991), “full cunt” according to Sophie and Jamie.

Character and Method:

• He befriends powerful subjects, writes only about those he likes, and tails them “like a fly on the wall.”
• “The obverse of Lewis’s approach: he doesn’t write about people he can’t befriend or stories that might cost him relationships.” — Evans ([40:53])
• He admits abandoning books if they’d embarrass family or cost him friends.

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3. Michael Lewis’s Pattern: From Wall Street to The Blind Side

Wall Street Mythology

• [34:08] Lewis’s Liar’s Poker glamorized brash, “big swinging dick” Wall Street culture despite intending satire; like Wolf of Wall Street, the message is co-opted.

  “There’s no way to write about war without making it look cool. No way to write about Wall Street without making it look sexy.” — Evans ([36:06])

• The Big Short — intended as critique, but made its (real) protagonists heroes, resulting in speaking tours and celebrity for people who profited from disaster.
• Lewis enables the myth of the “hidden genius” outsider in corrupt systems, a narrative that flatters and excuses his subjects.

The Blind Side and Its Problems

• [44:08] The Blind Side — later exposed as a suspect real-life story — is shown to be grounded in Lewis’s blind spots on race and class.

  “How is it ethical to write this story when you went to school with the [white adoptive] father?” — Jamie ([51:07])

• Lewis narrates Michael Oher’s story through white saviors’ voices, calls Oher “Big Mike” (even though Oher hates the nickname), and omits Oher's voice out of supposed journalistic necessity.
  • “He cannot identify or get inside Oher’s head because that is nothing like the Michael Lewis story.” — Evans ([50:01])
• When Oher sues for control over his financial story, Lewis waves away the racism/abuse as “possible CTE” (concussions) — a deeply problematic dismissal ([52:16]).
• “If anyone’s therapy logs were leaked, it would be like, oh, they had this fixation on this issue… that’s why you fucking go, dude.” — Jamie ([77:33]), on the personal toll of Lewis’s reporting.

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4. Michael Lewis and SBF: Bro Culture, Biases, and Willful Gullibility

Lewis Gets “Conned”

• [12:24] SBF’s team welcomed Lewis not for critical reporting, but to be elevated as a genius by the “Big Short guy.” Being in a Lewis book was a bigger PR win than Bill Clinton or Tom Brady endorsements.
• [17:58] When SBF is charged, Lewis’s timing backfires: “The overwhelming thing you see is that Michael got kind of fucking conned.” — Evans

Michael Lewis as "Letter to the Jury"

• [21:14] Lewis calls Going Infinite “a letter to the jury,” dramatically overselling his role.
• [22:34] Despite his glowing treatment, he claims not to be a “bastard,” but his media power and gullibility directly add to harmful billionaire myth-making.

The Book’s Central Flaws

• [53:45] In 60 Minutes and other appearances, Lewis insists SBF is “so different, the world just doesn’t understand him,” directly parroting the myth SBF wants to create.
• [56:51] Lewis’s own excitement blinds him: “This kid is the richest and most interesting young person I’ve ever met.”
• [62:38] Anecdotes are structured to awe — Sam gaming during Anna Wintour’s call is cause for marvel, not criticism.

  “[Lewis] marvels at this… as if it’s evidence of how unique Sam is. When in reality, he’s just a Gen Z guy playing video games during a Zoom call.” ([66:23])

• [70:25] In a live interview: Lewis giggles about SBF ignoring Anna Wintour while playing a video game, showing uncritical adoration.
• [76:15] When covering SBF’s ADHD, Lewis pathologizes it in female subjects but not SBF — another sign of gendered bias.

Myth of the Disheveled Genius

• [167:01] The “eccentric, slovenly genius” look is shown to be deliberate PR, not a sign of brilliance — Sam believed his hair got him higher bonuses, even asking architects to shape FTX HQ after his hair.
• [168:04] “He was obsessed with his hair. His only design note [for new HQ] was it should look like his hairdo.” — Evans

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5. Deliberate Blindness to Fraud and Harm

Financial Incompetence as Genius

• [99:56] FTX lacked all basic controls — no CFO, no board, no risk officer. Lewis accepts SBF’s belief that only young people matter in business.
• [102:14] SBF’s self-justifications (Why do I need a CFO? “What do you think I do all day?”) are never questioned by Lewis after the collapse.

The John Ray III Problem

• [104:00] Lewis reserves real venom for John Ray III (the “boring” bankruptcy CEO brought to liquidate FTX/Enron). Lewis portrays Ray’s attempts to find missing billions as “stodgy old-man thinking,” showing utter contempt for accountability.
• [105:19] “He describes Ray as unable to appreciate the ‘genius’— like an archaeologist stumbling onto a lost civilization.”

The Massive Lie: There Was No Fraud; the Money Is Still There

• [131:34] Lewis claims the missing $9B is “nowhere, it was still there.” This is false; $1.5–2B remains unaccounted for, and most victims will get less than what they deposited (especially since crypto has surged in value since bankruptcy).

  “Stealing 15 or 20% of a bunch of people’s savings is a substantial crime.” — Evans ([139:14])

• [133:49] When challenged in interviews, Lewis gets defensive or evasive on the facts of missing money.

Exposing SBF’s Fraud

• [143:10] Court record and code analysis shows SBF deliberately misled customers, funneled deposits straight to Alameda, and generated fake balance numbers (“randomly generated by computer”)—this is called out as classic, deliberate fraud.
• [149:43] SBF gives himself (via coder Gary Wang) $65 billion of credit for Alameda, far beyond any logic—interpreted as gambling addiction, not genius.

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6. The Big Picture: Why Michael Lewis Keeps Failing Upwards

• [156:03] Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up offers contrast—Faux understands when he’s being lied to. Lewis fundamentally can’t (or won’t) see fraud among those he’s invested in.
• [157:14] “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? Bankman Fried admits that he would have changed the subject or rustled up a word salad… [yet] Lewis continues to describe SBF as ‘enigmatic but essentially genuine’.”
• When the verdict comes in, Lewis “has his head down between his arms” in court ([19:30]), emotionally invested in the fraudster, not the victims.

Sharp Quote:

"Maybe it’s even better than the answer to the question. Maybe it’s what you should have asked."
— Michael Lewis on SBF’s word salads ([166:27])

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7. The Cultural/Media Critique

• Myth-making and PR laundering is bad journalism. Lewis’s career pattern has been to make dodgy characters look like “misunderstood, eccentric geniuses.” His approach is inherently commercial—he can’t (and won’t) end on an unhappy note or write a story that really damns his subjects.
• Going Infinite is hagiography, not journalism; Lewis’s inability to “get the joke”—and his willingness to enable SBF’s myths—make him an unintentional but significant historical enabler (and thus, “an honorary bastard”).

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8. Notable and Hilarious Moments

• Boyfriend Criterion Collection: Jamie deadpans about every guy with Moneyball and Whiplash Blu-rays ([08:43]).
• “What if your worst boyfriend couldn’t read?” — Jamie ([09:06])
• Krafty, deeply unserious asides about Frasier, Sex and the City, and magic the Gathering rules.
• [121:01] Carolyn’s tragic, embarrassing correspondence with SBF; Jamie’s empathetic take on being “charmed by the world’s worst guy.”
• Pitch for a “David Hyde Pierce as Michael Lewis” movie adaptation.
• Extended aside: “Games” as false markers of genius, and the generational gap over Magic the Gathering and Neopets.
• [150:26] “If there’s anything that got the millennial generation hooked on capitalism and random gambling, it was Neopets. Sam Bankman-Fried is the worst endgame for a Neopets user.” — Jamie

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9. Conclusions & Looking Forward

• [170:33] Where does Lewis go from here? The hosts predict, only half-joking, that he’ll fall for “Sam Altman” next (OpenAI’s troubled CEO).
• [136:13] Lewis’s courtroom face likened to a Tim Robinson sketch.
• On accountability: “Maybe applying Sam’s own theory" (nothing valuable after 45) “applies to Michael Lewis now.” — Jamie ([132:04])
• SBF is “in forever jail.” Michael Lewis will likely keep writing bestsellers and making people rich and infamous.

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Timestamps for Key Takeaways

• 04:13: Opening comedic riff/Setup on pop-culture and death
• 05:38–07:00: Announcement: Episode’s about shitting on Michael Lewis
• 21:14 / 22:34: Lewis calls Going Infinite “a letter to the jury” and why access journalism is a problem
• 34:08: Wall Street books inadvertently glamorize their subjects
• 44:08: The Blind Side and Lewis’s blind spots
• 53:45: Lewis fawning narrative on SBF—“the world still doesn’t know him"
• 66:23 / 70:25: Anna Wintour gaming anecdote, Lewis’s unreadiness for meme culture/Generational gap
• 100:40: FTX’s lack of CFO/executive controls—Lewis never questions
• 131:34 / 133:49: The missing money—Lewis gets evasive & angry in interviews
• 143:10 / 144:50: Code audits reveal deliberate fraud—insurance funds were lies
• 149:43 / 150:26: SBF’s gambling addiction and Neopets generational joke
• 157:14: Lewis refuses to call SBF a liar
• 166:27: “Maybe it’s even better than the answer to the question...” — Lewis’s worshipful interpretation

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Memorable Quotes

• “Lewis is not a bastard, but when a smart man can’t see fraud right in front of him, and makes it sound sexy for millions, that’s how we get villains.”
• “If you think the biggest sign of ‘genius’ is that someone never puts effort into hygiene, you might just be writing PR fluff for billionaires.”
• “He’s an honorary bastard.” — Jamie, after realizing Lewis wrote The Blind Side

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a meta-critique—a takedown of not just scam artists, but also the journalists, cultural myth-makers, and prestige-media figures who help them craft and launder their image. It’s hilarious, biting, and unusually self-aware, asking what stories we elevate, why, and at what cost.

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Recommended Further Listening/Reading from the Episode:

• Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (real reporting on crypto’s dark side)
• Citation Needed newsletter by Molly White (for technical breakdowns of the FTX collapse)
• Anything but Going Infinite

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“There’s only one kind of ethics I care about, and it’s dolla dolla bills.” — Robert Evans ([51:15])

Transcript

[Jamie Loftus]

This is an I heart podcast, guaranteed human high key.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

U N D Callzone Media hey everyone. Robert Evans here with behind the Bastards. And we we've got some kind of sad news today. You know, this is going to hit members of the community pretty hard, but 48 years ago, on November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew members on board. This is a hard time of the year for, for everybody here at behind the Bastards, for all of you at home. And the only thing that makes it easier is the knowledge that both the Russian Federation and the Chinese government have recently substantially increased the sizes of their nuclear stockpile, while the United States is in the process of renovating own nuclear weapons. And my, my hope, I think all of our hope, is that the leaders of our world can kind of band together in this time of conflict and sadness to finally expend the entirety of their nuclear stockpiles, detonating them over Lake Superior. You know, that's my hope. I know it's all of your hope back at home. And I really think what can carry us through this is some classic Mao era propaganda posters showing Joe Biden, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin walking hand in hand, surrounded by a crowd of little kids in Red Guard uniforms, heading towards the light of a new atomic sun, while a series of mushroom clouds detonate over Lake Superior's depths. Anyway, welcome to the show, Jamie.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's so. I mean, first of all, thank you, thank you for that. I needed to hear it. I think we all. The image you described, and I hate that my mind went here, conjured the image of Paul Walker in the convertible next to Brian Griffin.

[Robert Evans]

That's right, that's right, that's right.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's sort of what I was picturing that the image you described has that. That exact same.

[Robert Evans]

Just add.

[Jamie Loftus]

Just throw someone in the backseat. Same exact shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. That's the dream, Jamie. That's the dream. God, what a beautiful, beautiful dream.

[Jamie Loftus]

I really think about being a member of Paul Walker's family at the time that image was circulating.

[Robert Evans]

You mean from your jacuzzi filled with hundred dollar bills? Yes.

[Jamie Loftus]

Even so. My loved one, my dearly departed, being thrown in a convertible next to a cartoon dog who, to add insult to injury, would be resurrected within months. Like Brian the Dog. Not. Okay, Brian the dog was resurrected, I think on the same timeline as Jesus Christ. Yeah, like it was like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it was very similar characters. Yes, yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

And we can all agree that both.

[Robert Evans]

Have been on Bill Maher's show.

[Jamie Loftus]

They're both mar heads and they also. And they both are, you know, like middling authors. Yeah, you could say.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah, that's fair to say. So, Jamie, speaking of mediocre men, how do you feel? Have you been keeping up with the story of bastards Pot alumni Sam Bankman fried.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay, so I have, I know the broad strokes, but as soon as the joyous news became started coming in, I knew that we were going to be doing this. And I don't know any of the particulars except for tweets of yours that have been algorithm to the top of my feed. I'm just, I, I, there's no one I would rather be with to let it just wash over me.

[Sophie]

Robert, Robert, can I ask you to.

[Jamie Loftus]

Please share your working title for this episode?

[Robert Evans]

Because it's funny. Yeah, it's Sam Bankman not freed and in parentheses because he is in Jail.

[Sophie]

I think it's funny and I think.

[Jamie Loftus]

I think that that is far superior to Sam Bankman Jailed.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, that's not creative at all. You gotta spend a lot of extra words to make it creative.

[Jamie Loftus]

I'm not interested in other perspectives on that title. I think that you got it exactly right.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Brevity is some bullshit, as a great author once said. So, Jamie, speaking of great authors, 80% of this episode is shitting on Michael Lewis, the author of the Big Short. Oh, yeah. No, we're really. This is gonna be a great one for the Lewis heads in the audience.

[Jamie Loftus]

Wow. Okay. O. Okay. This is gonna be.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, buckle up. Yeah. Now this is relevant.

[Sophie]

My man just said buckle up.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah. Strap the in and down. We are, we are starting with Michael Lewis, author of the Big Short. Jamie.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay, I feel like when I, I recently saw a picture of my three year old niece going to a Wiggles concert and I just caught myself smiling in the same way. This is great.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, this is great. So on January 5, 2022, Sam Bankman fried sent a message to one of his mini signal loops. For what it's worth, February 8th through 16th, Michael Lewis is going to be in the Bahamas profiling us. Now, if you haven't been following the story and if Michael Lewis is not familiar to you, then you probably do remember, like the most famous result of one of his novels, which is the movie the Big Short. This was based on a book Lewis wrote about a group of traders who had the foresight to predict and profit off of the 2008 financial crash, they realized that, like, the subprime loan business was like a bunch of hooey and they shorted it. Right. Made a bunch of money while everybody else lost their jobs.

[Jamie Loftus]

You love to see it.

[Robert Evans]

You love to see it. His other best known work is probably Moneyball, which is about a baseball team manager who uses what's called Sabre Metrics, which without getting into it, is basically being Nate Silver, but also actually running a sports team. Right. Okay.

[Jamie Loftus]

That is also that in 2020, I started doing this bit on cursed zoom comedy shows called the Boyfriend Criterion Collection. And it's just like Blu Rays that are in your house against your living will.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Moneyball is very much a part of the Boyfriend Criterion Collection. It's right up there with whiplash. It's like a disaster.

[Sophie]

I must say. If you, if you did not date the worst man you've ever dated in your entire life in 2017 that was obsessed with all things Michael Lewis, then were you really in Los Angeles?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, that's true. The only non problematic, by the way.

[Jamie Loftus]

What if your worst boyfriend couldn't read? Really.

[Robert Evans]

Makes you think you're the median American. And look, I'm sorry, I honestly don't.

[Jamie Loftus]

Even know who I'm talking about. Like, it's impossible to say, but I.

[Robert Evans]

Know the only non problematic piece of physical media that you can have in your house as a boyfriend is an original VHS tape of Tremors. That's just the way it works.

[Jamie Loftus]

And I would fight with you if I didn't feel the same way. I think that that is very much. That's a good sign. That's an excellent sign.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Jamie Loftus]

The more prominently displayed, the better.

[Robert Evans]

To say that Michael Lewis is a famous writer or famous journalist puts it pretty lightly. He's probably the best known journalist in the country and almost certainly the wealthiest. There's not a lot of competition for that. But like, he's definitely in the running. He's what you'd call an access journalist who. He is somebody whose stories come from his ability to get close to his subjects and just kind of exist with them during a crucial period of time as a fly on the wall. There's a number of ways to do this. There are a couple of like, big Trump administration books written by journalists who basically just got to sit around Trump and his White House while things went insane. The route that Lewis takes is to befriend the people that he's writing. Right. He is this guy. And people who know him will say he just kind of makes people comfortable around him. He is a guy that you want to have at a party. He's a. He's pleasant company. Enough people have said this that I assume it's true based on just, like how he does his stories. People. He is good at putting folks at ease and they don't mind him being around. And that's how he gets a lot of his stories. Now, as a general rule, if you are in the position that Sam Bankman Fried and his friends were in circa 2022, running a massive financial shell game, you would be hesitant to welcome you.

[Jamie Loftus]

And it works very well. I think we can all agree, based.

[Robert Evans]

On the vision we have, Kings talk.

[Jamie Loftus]

About a game of 4D chess.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. The last guy you might want hanging around your office is a dude who could literally, like Michael Lewis could literally, in like the space of a phone call, get articles greenlit in every newspaper in the country. Right. He just is. He has that kind of pull. He is that reliable a seller for his stories. Like, nobody would not want to take a story that he had. So you would want to be cautious. You would think you'd want to be cautious letting this guy into your house. But there's a reason why they said yes when he reached out to sbf, and it's that Michael Lewis's reputation among people in the finance industry was not, oh, he wrote this book that's critical of us. Oh, he's this guy who exposes the dirt of the finance industry. It's. This is a guy who can make you into a celebrity. And in early 2022, that was the entire vision of everyone. Like, connected business wise to Sam Bankman Fried was we need to turn this guy into a celebrity who's constantly everywhere to raise the profile of this exchange. Right. They spent something like $1 billion on a variety of different corporate and celebrity endorsements. Of the 9 billion that was missing, about a billion went towards shit to boost FTX and to boost Sam's profile. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Sorry, where's that? You got to spend money to make money as the average. So you got to spend 10 billion to make nothing to go to jail. You have to spend $10 billion to go to jail is what I'm saying.

[Robert Evans]

Go to. To go to forever prison. Jamie, let's about this.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's going to I for every time I've seen Forever Prison, very often from you. I hear it in the cadence of the Forever Purge trailer. You're like, it's the forever prison.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That is where he's going. And that's you know, again, everyone has kind of cut ties. Everyone legitimate has cut ties with not just Sam, but, like, crypto in general in the wake of Sam's collapse. But there was about a year and a half period where, like, every bank was looking into it. Every tech company was putting on the blockchain, the last kind of holdout. And the reason why Sam put so much money into this was politicians, right? There were a few who would. But like most people who were in politics would not even take donations directly from crypto, right? You had to launder that shit. And Sam was looking to buy himself a sizable chunk of Congress so that he could make sure that regulations on crypto favored his company specifically. Which is why he did stuff like, you know, he spent tens of millions of dollars getting Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen to, like, pretend to be his friends. He sat down next to Bill Clinton on fucking stage in a very cringy interview. He paid Larry David to make a Super bowl ad. But all of that, the potential, all of that had to legitimize him paled in comparison to having the Big Short dude treat you like a financial genius, right? If Michael Lewis treats you like Michael Burry, who's one of the characters from the Big Short, who became a big name after Lewis wrote this book, if he's this guy is that kind of financial genius, then everybody's going to start taking your calls. Even people who, like, have been hiding from crypto because they don't. They're worried that what happened would happen, right? That you'd get 10 million in donations and have to pay them back because it turned out that it was a con man. You know, there's.

[Jamie Loftus]

There's a note of it that it, it almost reminds me when, like, Errol Morris, like, profiled and worked for Elizabeth Holmes. You're just like, in that level of profile versus L. Yes.

[Robert Evans]

This turns you into somebody who's like, who can be taken seriously because that's what. Who Lewis is, right? He's. That he is that big a deal. I'm not, like, puffing him up. He doesn't need it, right? No.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's got people to care about Moneyball the most. The most boring ass thing I've ever heard about in my life.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and that's the thing. He is one of these guys. He's. He's the. He's. He's maybe the main character of this episode. I wouldn't call him quite a bastard, but one of the things you have to give him is he is legitimately A very good writer. There's no other way you get people to give a shit about Moneyball. He's like, I read his whole Sam Bankman Fried book. I think it's bullshit, but I didn't get bored at any point. He knows how to pace a piece of writing, you know. So he decides to come knocking. Sam is immediately on board. All of their PR people are on board. Not everyone at FTX is on board. Carolyn Edison, who is his on again, off again girlfriend who testified against him repeatedly. She is running Alameda, which is the company that bankrupts everything that he is illegally funneling consumer deposits into. She is basically like the. And she does not like the idea of having Michael Lewis around now. She can't really confront Sam Bankman Fried when she has a bad idea, nobody can. So she just kind of hedges it and says in the signal chat, makes sense. I feel like my instincts are more towards under the radar, but I might just be irrationally biased towards that in general. And then like an emoji of a face sticking its tongue out. And Sam replies, same, except exactly the opposite. Great.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like, you know, you're down bad. If you're asking Sam Bankman Fried to make sense. Yeah, that's challenging. Oh God, that's such. I mean, I don't know. I know we've talked about her in the past, but that like, what a mess, what a nightmare.

[Robert Evans]

She's in a rough situation and he. We'll talk a lot about how he treats her in this, but Will McCaskill is also in that signal chat. And Will is basically the founder. He's not like literally the founder, but he is the founder of what is most commonly talked about as the effective altruism movement and definitely its figurehead. Right. He is the big guy. He's this Oxford professor who he pills Sam Bankman Fried on the idea. And his response is kind of, I think part of why this winds up going down. He says, I think either approach is reasonable, should just be a deliberate coordinated plan. But if a whole bunch of attention is going to be on ftx, Sam and ea, whatever happens, then getting ahead of the game and controlling the narrative is necessary. Yup, responded Sam. And they did it. Michael Lewis spends like a year with this guy. Like he spends a lot of time around them. Everyone's very excited because what happened last year is Sam's world collapses and he gets charged with like seven felonies. And then right afterwards, Michael Lewis is like, by the way, I've been basically living with him for a year and everyone's like, oh, shit, this could be pretty good. Because, like, this guy can write. He's been front. He's written about a financial collapse before. He's got front seat tickets to this whole thing. And then the book comes out. And unfortunately for Louis, the book comes out. He times the release. Right. For when the court case starts. So we get all of this alongside his book. We get all of these signal texts and stuff that were not in his book. And kind of the overwhelming thing that you see when you compare what comes out in the court case, what comes out in the testimony of his friends to the text of Lewis's book, is that like, oh, Michael got kind of fucking conned by this dude, right? Oh, yeah. Like he fell for it. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

And I mean, it speaks to the level of confidence one would have to have in their own reporting to time it with the trial. Because if you had even a remote feeling that you have got, you had gotten it wrong, I would be like, release it a year after the trial. Like, bury it. Bury it.

[Robert Evans]

And that's the thing I can see if you're just some journalist and this is your first book or you just don't. You're not like a huge hit. So, like, you are very. Your publisher has a lot of power. And they're like, we want this to drop when the case does, because that's when it'll sell best. I get that you might not have the suction necessary to move it. Michael Lewis can say, we are putting this out this day and like, suck my dick, I'm Michael Lewis. It'll make you money. Right. And he doesn't, which. Which suggests he has the same kind of hubris that Sam Bankman Fried did in a lot of ways.

[Jamie Loftus]

Bummer.

[Robert Evans]

So to give you an example of how emotionally involved Louis is in this case is a good write up on the court case by a journalist who was there during the trial, which was not filmed writing for Jacobin. And this is. This is how they describe the devastating cross examination of Bankman Fried, who again chose to take the stand in his own defense, despite every expert saying, absolutely never do this quote across the aisle from me in the section reserved for friends and family. I could see Sam's parents growing increasingly agitated, his mom visibly shaking two rows behind them. I couldn't help but notice author Michael Lewis leaning forward, arms draped over the bench in front of him with his head down between his arms.

[Jamie Loftus]

Nobody expects Michael Lewis in the courtroom. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I, you know, I do actually have. I don't think they're Very good people. But I have sympathy for Sam's parents. This is like a nightmare if like to know that your kid is going to forever prison even if it's totally their fault. Conned.

[Jamie Loftus]

My empathy the only goes so far, but also like what a scene. What a fucking scene.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely phenomenal. Yeah, terrific. Can't wait for Jonah Hill to star as Sam Bankman Fried in the movie based on this.

[Jamie Loftus]

No, I really don't want that.

[Robert Evans]

No, no. There's no one I want to see play him in a movie. Just do him like Maris and Frasier. Have him always be off screen.

[Jamie Loftus]

That would be. Oh, that makes me so happy. I love a good. Yeah, like the parents and Charlie Brown. Heather Sinclair of Degrassi. I could go on and fuck it.

[Robert Evans]

You know what Cast David Hyde Pierce as Michael Lewis. Then we got a movie, then we got a fucking film.

[Jamie Loftus]

Then we got. I mean if this whole ordeal results in David Hyde Pierce winning an Oscar for a bad movie.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely, absolutely, 100%.

[Jamie Loftus]

There's no way this movie is good. There's no way it's good.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's.

[Jamie Loftus]

You know, and. And it's possible that Adam McKay in an effort to course correct.

[Robert Evans]

Sure, Adam.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's like. He absolutely could and he's. And he would need to course correct on the Michael Lewis in the first place for how he directed the big short. It's a great move for everyone we could make so everyone's agent in this situation.

[Robert Evans]

You're gonna be rich, Jamie.

[Jamie Loftus]

I'm gonna be fucking rich.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. In. In interviews he gave after the book came out and the trial started, Lewis framed his book Going Infinite about Sam Egman Fried as a letter to the jury. Which is like kind of nonsense because obviously the jury is never allowed to read a book about the guy that they're going on a trial about. And the judge specifically instructed them not to. There's an interview with 60 Minutes, which is really something. We will hear some clips from it later. But in that interview, Lewis explained. I mean there's gonna be this trial and the lawyers are gonna tell two stories. And so there's a story war going on in the courtroom. And I think neither. And I think neither one of those is as good as the one I have. And like I. On one hand, yes, of course you're right because you're a better writer than any lawyer is going to be. But on the other hand, this isn't a story. It's just a question of what happened Michael Lewis and what happened is massive fraud. And you don't Put that in your book.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's so. I mean, here, I guess I can be of many minds about characterizing it as a story war, because that is, like, just how history is written. And it kind of. Of almost refreshing to hear someone refer it to as, like, well, whoever could write the better story. That's will. Will end up having the historical precedent. But. But interesting that it would be said out loud in that way.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And again, I want to reiterate, while Michael is the main character here, he's not, like. He's not a bastard. He's not someone whose, like, impact on the world has been monstrous, as far as I've ever heard. He's a reasonably nice person. We'll definitely get him being mean in a couple of points here. But it's nothing that I would, like, call someone, like, one of history's greatest monster over. But this is. Bankman Fried is a bastard. And so I think talking about the way in which he kind of has Lewis wrapped around his finger and the degree to which Lewis tortures his own logic and prose in order to ignore that is just fascinating. So with that in mind, let's start with a little bit more of Michael's backstory. Cause that is important to understand why he falls for this. Michael Monroe Lewis was born on October 15, 1960, in New Orleans. Now, from the beginning, his life was about as far from working class as you get. And to his credit, Louis does not deny this whenever he's asked.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's the only thing you can't do, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you gotta be open about it. Here's him talking to the Guardian. Lewis's family sat at the very top of the WASP aristocracy in New Orleans. I was so inside, he told me. I was literally trained how to sit on a throne when I was 15 years old because it was crowned the King of the Carnival Ball, an organization that didn't allow black people, didn't allow Jews. I would go from baseball practice to scepter waving lessons. I was born into that world. Being an insider in New Orleans made him feel like an outsider everywhere else, and not always to his disadvantage. And first off, wow, that's quite. Quite a backstory.

[Jamie Loftus]

Thank you, King. Thank you, King.

[Robert Evans]

I do think I want to point out something here, which is where I don't think he's obfuscating, but I think he's missing something about his own. What his background has done for him, because I'm not going to question him when he says it made him feel like an outsider. But I think it's Very clear that this, this is a guy whose work is defined by his ability to make himself into an insider. And I think that's a big part of why he's able to do that is he grows up in the middle of wealth and power, right? Where it's the air that he breathes. And you don't notice this if, like, you grow up working class and don't know any super rich people, but when you meet some people who were born crazy rich, you note that, like, a lot of them have this, this way of making, of making themselves feel like they belong anywhere, right? It's why they can get away with so much. Like, even if they're totally out of their depth, there's this kind of expectation you get when you grow up hyper rich that the world is going to show you a degree of deference when you know people who have family fortunes behind them. You know what I'm talking about, right? Like, it's the reason they are never going to get, like, carded to see if they're a member of a place that's members only, right? Because they, they have that way about them. And I think that's part of how.

[Jamie Loftus]

Lewis is a perceptible thing. Well, and I do think there is. I mean, and it sounds like what you're getting at is like, there is if, if you can get someone who grew up in those circumstances on the side of fucking decency. There is a huge value to having someone like that who knows how to navigate those spaces on your side. But if they're. But, but also, you know, to an extent and a liability because you never know. You know, I'm curious, what, in what endears him to our Sam?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we'll get to that. So he goes to Princeton University and he graduates cum laude, which, which means pretty, pretty good grades in 1982. His senior thesis is on Donatello, a prominent ninja turtle. And when he's in college, he's a member of Princeton's Ivy Club, which is the oldest eating club in the school. Now, if you're not a blue blood, you, you probably are like, what the fuck is an eating club? These are private dining halls that are also kind of social clubs where upperclassmen go to get nicer food. There's like nine of them, I think, on campus.

[Jamie Loftus]

The Ivy Club is the oldest at Princeton.

[Robert Evans]

Or like everywhere at Princeton, there's other colleges, other fancy boy schools have these.

[Jamie Loftus]

Robert.

[Sophie]

This is full cunt.

[Jamie Loftus]

The IV Club.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

I was like, wow, eating club. The, like, eating club to me is like Drive through Taco Bell, 1:30am Starving.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Wow. Eating club. Eating club.

[Jamie Loftus]

What are they eating? What are they eating?

[Robert Evans]

Sophie, you said this is full cunt, but it did not admit women until 1991.

[Sophie]

The audacity to not let a woman go for a hunt.

[Jamie Loftus]

Something that cunty. It just doesn't make sense.

[Robert Evans]

And it's also very funny that like, or not funny, but it's noteworthy. In this interview, it talks about how he was at the Ivy Club, right? When he talks about, you know, his upbringing, he's like, yeah, this, like this contest I was in, you couldn't, you couldn't be in this club if you were like black or Jewish. He doesn't mention that the Ivy Club doesn't admit women. I think that is maybe interesting. It's also worth noting that the Ivy Club. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes about the Ivy Club and calls it F. Scott Fitzgerald, calls it detached and breathlessly aristocratic. And if F. Scott Fitzgerald says that about your blue blood club, like, my.

[Jamie Loftus]

God, I love that. Wow, what a treat. What a treat.

[Robert Evans]

If.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, if. If F. Scott Fitzgerald is the one experiencing like moral clarity about your, about your weird sandwich group, that's challenging.

[Robert Evans]

Now. While Lewis had a passion for art history, he had a bigger passion in life and it's stacking motherfucking paper. So he goes to the London School of Economics next and eventually joins the bond desk at Salomon Brothers. He's in like the London branch of the Salomon Brothers. No, no, no, no. He's just making dolla dolla bills, y'. All.

[Sophie]

Robert Dolla Dolla bills. Time is happening now for us as well.

[Robert Evans]

Oh yeah, speaking of dolla dolla bills, buy some of these products and we will get Dolla dolla bills.

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

U n D okay, if you thought season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up. Season three is here and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper. They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff. This season they're covering it all, from circuit culture to hookup horror stories to locker room shenanigans. No stone is left unturned. And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze. So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction, and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate. Oh, and this season they want to hear your stories. Their call in segment is getting even hotter and they'll react to your wildest Cruising confessions on air. There. No pressure. So if you're ready for round three, just push play Sniffy's Cruising Confession sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. I have.

[Sophie]

I have a request for the listeners, which is not something that I often I don't.

[Robert Evans]

I don't ask.

[Sophie]

I don't ask anything of our listeners. Just that. Just that they're happy. But if somebody could please make a dating profile for Michael Lewis as An art graphic.

[Robert Evans]

I just.

[Jamie Loftus]

It Just please, for me.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man. Okay, that's. That's good. You've got. You've got two different requests this week, listeners. One is that propaganda poster and the other is Michael Lewis dating profile. So Louis is, you know, an investment banker for just a few years, actually. You know who he reminds me of?

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, okay. Just dipping your toes in it then that kind of doesn't count. It's like the. Just the tip of financial crime.

[Robert Evans]

He's in there, he Le At 87, the market crashes and he makes a pivot away from, like, doing that as a job. And he writes a book called Liars Poker about the investment, you know, bang. The stock broker. That, like, that kind of life that makes a shitload of money. Right. This is. We'll talk about it a second. But like. Like, I want to. He reminds me in this trajectory. Do you know anything about Michael Crichton?

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, I mean, I. Yeah, peaks and valleys. I had no attachment to him, but I know many who do. And like, yeah, the back half of Michael Crichton. Pretty fucking brutal.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, pretty, pretty brutal. I'm not talking about, like, his actual career as a writer. As much as Crichton goes to Harvard Medical School and becomes a doctor. Most people are, I don't think, actually know this, but like, he was an actual md, but he doesn't really do the job. Like, he gets his MD and then he quits to write books. Like, some of which have a meta. Like he's the creator of er, and he gets criticized some by doctors who are like, oh, you just.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's the creator of er?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Michael Crichton created er? Yes.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, okay. Sorry, I thought you were talking about Michael Lewis. Yes, I knew Michael Crichton, but they.

[Robert Evans]

Have a similar kind of trajectory where they go to school for this thing. They do like a teeny amount of it. Just dip their toes in and then they get famous writing these books that are inspired by it. Right. I just find that. That interesting. So to give you a further idea of Lewis's family background, Liars Poker, which is semi autobiographical, revolves around a scene where Michael Lewis is invited to a banquet hosted by the Queen Mother while he's working in London. He gets a seat there because of his cousin, Baroness Linda von Stauffenberg, and she seats him next to the manager of Salomon Brothers, which is how he gets his job.

[Jamie Loftus]

Word salad, fucking salary salad.

[Robert Evans]

Crabs don't have bluer blood than this man. Like, that is. That is the bluest you fucking get.

[Jamie Loftus]

If Your cousin's a baroness and you're in your, like, late 20s.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. What if you know a baroness?

[Jamie Loftus]

You are like, that's okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. So Louis's depiction of Wall street guys from Liars Poker on, because he writes a few books about Wall street types, because he knows them. Right. It's generally noted as not being flattering, but I think that's by people who, like, have a very naive view of what's unflattering. Because his Wall street guys, they curse a lot. They use phrases like big swinging dick. They're like, they're like, kind of gross, but in a way that's glamorous. Right?

[Jamie Loftus]

I mean, I feel like it's like the Glengarry Glen Ross.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Talking shit.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jamie Loftus]

Wow, that's really interesting to me because I, I, I, like, I don't know. I have not read Liars Poker, to be honest. I have not read any of his books. I have seen some of the adaptations in movies of his books. But, but yeah, in terms of, like, anytime someone writes something about Wall street, like, you have to be so fucking careful. And also, even if you are extremely fucking careful, it will still bring in the wrong people who refuse to see the point. Like, they're like, Wolf of Wall street is one of my favorite movies, hands down.

[Robert Evans]

I think it's great.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's an amazing satire.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

But it's still, like, brought people in on the wrong, like, because brain dead people are going to be brain dead people.

[Robert Evans]

This is, we're going in a more serious direction. But if you've read Slaughterhouse Five opening of it, Vonnegut talks about how when he said, I'm going to write my, my war book, his wife was like, don't do it. There's no way to do it without making it look cool. Like, no one has ever managed to not do it in a way that makes young men think it's cool. And she was right. Like, for the record, like, I mean, one of the problems with even anti war war fiction is it always makes it look cool because it's, it's cool, right? That doesn't Mean, it's good. It's like, Joe Camel is cool. He still killed 100 million people.

[Jamie Loftus]

Joe Camel gave my father lung cancer, and I stand by that. And to conjure a similar image, Joe Camel. There's an image that I saw when I worked in the Playboy archives of Joe Camel. An illustrated, gorgeous, like, painting essentially, of Joe Camel in convertible with smoking hot human women.

[Robert Evans]

Hell, yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Big old titties. And you're like, no wonder this advertisement killed people. This advertisement killed people because, like, you could be this ugly ass Camel with women. Women with huge naturals.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like, it just, like, you can add up all the German generals on the Eastern front, and they didn't kill as many people as that ad.

[Jamie Loftus]

Truly like. And it's a beautiful piece of artwork, but, like, let's be fucking honest.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So today, Louis merely acknowledges that the psychos he wrote about in Liars Poker were more fun on the page than they were in person. This can be. If this is your first book and you Write it in 1982, and you realize later, oh, this actually might have made the problem worse, that's not a thing you have any moral culpability for. That's just like writing a thing with good intentions and it turns out badly. But this does become a problem, and one that we can critique is partly a moral problem when it becomes part of a pattern. And it is a pattern. With Michael Lewis, the Big Short is obviously not a Wall street puff piece, but it became beloved by exactly the same people you might assume it was trying to criticize. In that Guardian article I've quoted from, there's a story about Michael Lewis attends this big New York party, and he's, like, warned ahead of time that it's gonna be full of bankers and other finance guys. Guys. And he's like, I don't know if they're gonna like me. Because he had just. Not only was the Big Short out, but he just published an article at a major publication attacking Wall street bigwigs as being greedy idiots. Like, saying it in very unsparing terms. And one of Lewis's friends later said, quote, but all these former heads of investment banks, all these current bankers, they ran, not walked to the office just to meet him. One hedge fund manager walked in with 15 copies of Lewis's books. Michael signed them all. And again, if you are a journalist, that's a bad side.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. What is your take on that? I mean, like, what is the game of chess that I'm not seeing here?

[Robert Evans]

I mean, I think it's just that he Makes. He makes this look sexy. And it's. If he writes about you, part of a big part of this is that while he's maybe negative about greed within the overall finance industry, he cannot write about a person without making them look cool because he has to like them to write about them. Right. All these guys in the Big Short, you could say, profited off of a lot of misery. Now, they didn't cause it. They didn't start this subprime loan thing, but they profited off of a lot of misery. And that's at least kind of grimy. But Lewis likes these guys and he turns them into celebrities because of how good he is at writing about them and making you see what's likable in them. Right. And so at this point, because of how often this has happened, he is aware that his books are PR for their subjects. He has a habit now of connecting people he writes about in his books to his PR manager so that they can set up speaking tours for them. Right. Cause he knows if I put you in a book that's gonna be a big business for you, you're going to be in demand. Yeah. And this is part as a result of him. He doesn't. He can't really be critical about the individuals. Right. And this is. This is another quote from that Guardian article. The obverse of Lewis's approach is that he doesn't write about people he can't befriend or about stories that might cost him relationships. Among the few projects he has abandoned is a biography of George Soros, who was so unhappy with Lewis's portrayal of him as a financier rather than an intellectual in a magazine profile that he refused to cooperate. Another is a book about New Orleans, which would have demanded a level of honesty about the city's society and about his family's place in it that might have hurt his parents. He said, I adore my parents. I couldn't write that part while they're alive. And, you know, again, none of this is, like, unforgivable. But if you're admitting that as a journalist, what aren't you able to admit? And I think in this case it's that he is not able to look at Sam Bankman Fried honestly, because he found himself taken in by the kid's shtick.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, that's what I feel like is one of the complicating factors of. And. And I don't say this in a way to seem like it's like an unsolvable puzzle, but it's like Michael Lewis Writes it seems like, you know, largely accurate, you know, pieces of journalism.

[Robert Evans]

We'll talk about that.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, okay. Yeah, so far. Right. As someone who's never read his work, but they are also inherently commercial because I feel like there's a journalistic value to explaining why someone is appealing, but there's also an even more commercial value to explaining why someone is appealing. That makes it, you know, that sells books, that sells movie deals, that sells all. All this shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's also part of why his stuff is successful in a commercial sense is that is this other fact that, like, it's always kind of uplifting. Right. Again, the big short. The whole collapse of the financial industry is dark, but stuff goes well for these characters that you've come to like. Right. And Lewis himself is kind of admitted. Admitted.

[Jamie Loftus]

He.

[Robert Evans]

He can't really end on a not upbeat note. He has a lot of trouble with it. He said, quote, once you identify yourself as happy, you're always looking for happiness. And when things come along to grade on that happiness, you find ways to deflect them. You can force the narrative. And I think what he doesn't say there, but what is. Explains his Sam Bankman Fried book, is that once you get in the habit of writing about, like, these geniuses who are hidden in the middle of systems. Right. And see more than everybody else, once you start doing that, you see anybody you start focusing on as that kind of genius, even when they're not. And that's what's happened with Michael here. So, yeah, mess.

[Jamie Loftus]

And it's like, you know, ultimately, nine times out of ten, the person wearing, like, fucking X ray glasses is wearing a pair of fucking IMAX glasses to go see Oppenheimer.

[Robert Evans]

Like, exactly, exactly. It's just embarrassing. And. Yeah. So I think the best example of this before we get into Sam Bankman Free Prior in Lewis's history is a book called the Blind side, which was published in 2006. Now, the blind side, like a lot of Lewis stories, there's a macro and a micro narrative. The macro narrative is he's talking about the growth, the explosive growth and the importance of the left tackle in football. This is an offensive lineman whose job is basically to make sure the quarterback doesn't get maimed. The micro story, which contains the emotional heart of the book and is the core of the narrative is the tale of a guy named Michael Oher who was. He was placed in foster care at age 7 because his mother suffered from addiction. His dad was generally in prison. His dad dies while he's I think in high school, Ohr was, was dealt a pretty tough hand in life. But he's also 6 foot 6 and very fast. Right. So he is, he is someone who like shows an aptitude for football as a result of this. He's kind of coaxed through getting into a private school and he gets. He gets literally adopted by this rich white family or is a black man, black child at this time. And they make it their business to coach him and coax him in, through getting through the academics so that he can be in the NCAA in college so that he can get an NFL contract. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

So I'll be, I'll be perfectly honest. I. Before we started, before you told me that Michael Lewis was a main character, I did not know that he wrote the Blind side.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yes, he did. Because this comes becomes a movie. That's huge. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

And I am very well acquainted with the, the ensuing nasty cultural narrative associated with the movie. But I didn't realize that it was a book. I knew Liars poker, Moneyball in the Big Short. Holy.

[Robert Evans]

Oh yeah.

[Sophie]

Also, Robert. Robert, I just want to fact check real quick. He wasn't adopted by them.

[Robert Evans]

Not. We're getting to that.

[Sophie]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

That was the narrow. That was the narrative in the Blind side. Right, right, right. That they have basically adopted this guy. Yes, you are correct, Sophie. But I'm building to that.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay. So. Okay. Yeah, okay, that's. I just like, I, I don't. I don't know why I didn't know that. And also like, who didn't want me to know that? Michael Lewis, the Blindside, a book that is famously bullshit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So this family adopts or. And they effectively adopt him is I think generally how it's framed. And they help him get through high school, get into a college, and kind of like help usher him into this NFL career where he makes a significant amount of money, obviously. And I'm a quote from the LA Times, the administration at his high school accepts him. Although he can barely read. He secures a full time tutor when his grade point average still proves too low for the ncaa. His adoptive father, a canny former college basketball standout named Sean Tuohy, manages to find a crucial loophole. He has Ohr tested to prove that he's learning disabled, then has him take numerous easy online courses. Lewis treats these measures as ingenious. We are meant to cheer the fact that Oher has gamed the educational problem process. And this is a te. This is from the book Leanne, who's the wife of Sean, was Now making it her personal responsibility to introduce him to the most basic facts of life. The sort of thing any normal person would have learned by osmosis. Every day, I try to make sure he knows something he doesn't know. She said, if you ask him, where should I shop for a girl to impress her, he'll tell you Tiffany's. If I go, I'll go through the whole golf game. He can tell you what six under is and what's a birdie and what's paw. I love that. Those are her two examples of basic knowledge.

[Jamie Loftus]

This is Sandra Bullock's Oscar talking. This is Sandra Bullock's Oscar flapping its nasty little mouth.

[Robert Evans]

Two things every boy needs to know. Where to buy jewelry and how to golf works. Really says a lot about her socioeconomic status. Right? Not like, here's how you pay your taxes. Not like, you know, literally anything else. Like, here's how you cook eggs, but no fucking. Fucking golf and Tiffany's.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, yeah, and also, like. I mean, to state the obvious, like, conflating that with, like, this is what normal people.

[Robert Evans]

This is normal. Basic.

[Jamie Loftus]

Write a fucking doctoral thesis in the ways that that is.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, great. Yeah. So we can all see the potential abusive issue with a wealthy white family adopting a teenaged black boy to coach him into launching a pro football career. Right? Just. If you think about all of the head injuries and shit involved, there's a lot that's problematic here. Lewis does quote Leanne at one point as saying. Saying, with me and Sean, I can see him thinking, if they found me lying in a gutter and I was going to be flipping burgers at McDonald's, would they really have had an interest at me? But the book is ultimately positive and uplifting. We're left thinking how nice it is that these people help this kid out. The LA Times note that Lewis seems to be, like, amused at these rich people cheating the system to usher this kid into a dangerous job without, like, educating him. So the nice parts of the story ended earlier this year when a now retired oher filed a lawsuit in a Tennessee court alleging that the Twohees never adopted him and instead created a conservatorship Tuis. I don't care. Fuck them. And instead created a conservatorship and used it to take his money. Right. The Twohees or whatever the fuck, deny doing this they call Leanne.

[Jamie Loftus]

I'm sorry, I think it's pronounced. It's actually pronounced the pee pees.

[Robert Evans]

I don't care. The dick bags deny this. And again, I'm not being a non biased journalist here, but.

[Jamie Loftus]

No, no, Robert, it's actually Dickmans.

[Robert Evans]

It's Dickman. The Dickmans call his claims hateful and absurd. Michael Lewis has defended the Twohees by saying that they only earned a few hundred thousand dollars off of the Blind side, the book and the movie that was made off of it. He's like, they didn't make millions. They only made a few hundred grand. Now, Louis also does, and I'll give him this, he also admits, right after saying that, that the Twohees biological daughter is married to the son of the main investor in the film, which might suggest that the family made a lot more money off of it. Right? Oh, that might suggest that the Bland Blindside makes half a billion dollars and a $35 million budget.

[Jamie Loftus]

In his own way, Michael Lewis in this Kind of.

[Robert Evans]

Michael Lewis is super rich and always really.

[Jamie Loftus]

There's been buried some leads.

[Sophie]

There's been so many articles about this.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like, it is.

[Robert Evans]

There's shady.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's the first time I'm hearing about the daughter's marriage because I. I read a fair amount about that case.

[Robert Evans]

Fun stuff. So in his own 2011 book, Oyer, like, expresses issues with the movie based off of Lewis's book. Primarily, there's this part where, like, the Twoes are teaching him how to play football and he's like, I knew football before I met them. I'm a teenager in America. Like, what are you fucking talking about? There are other problematic moments in the book. And this is from the Guardian again, Lewis calls Oher Big Mike throughout it, despite the fact that Oher is open about hating that nickname. He also tells this guy's story almost exclusively through the words of other people talking about him, even though he had access to Oher. Lewis justifies this by saying that Oher was not a strong voice on his life. Yeah, this guy's not good at talking about himself. I'm just gonna listen to everyone else about him.

[Jamie Loftus]

I'm out. I'm out.

[Robert Evans]

I think what's really going on here is that Oher is a black kid from a desperate poverty background, right? And Lewis cannot identify or get inside of his head because that is nothing. Even that even resembles the Michael Lewis story.

[Jamie Loftus]

It feel feels like a very privileged, dark take on, like, well, who do I consider to be a credible voice? Can I get 20 white people who.

[Robert Evans]

Barely know this guy who just met this kid to profit off him, to.

[Jamie Loftus]

Speak to him better than he can speak to his own life? Because that's who I trust, is white people. That's.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, that's so gross.

[Robert Evans]

He doesn't try to get inside over his head and he just focuses most of the narrative on the 20th twoes, who Lewis understands this is the final shoe. He understands them for a very good reason. And I'm going to quote from the LA Times here. As I tore through the book, I kept wondering how Louis got such remarkable access to the Twoes. And I also wondered, why does he take such an uncritical view of their role? The author's note at the end provides the obvious explanation, stating that Lewis is a friend of Sean Twohy's and that they had been longtime classmates at the same New Orleans school.

[Jamie Loftus]

No. How is it even ethical to take this fucking story on if you have.

[Robert Evans]

There's only one kind of ethics that I care about, Jamie, and it's dolla dolla bills.

[Sophie]

Well, well, Jamie, as you know, things could be unethical but still be legal.

[Robert Evans]

Legal. That's how he lives his life.

[Jamie Loftus]

Haha. I mean, truly, what a gift that we have as the like. I am he a force of evil in the world, certainly. But I am grateful that he gave us that one thing. Just the way of describing juvenile lawless capitalists.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's so funny now. One thing I have started to notice watching some of the more recent and critical interviews with Louis after the SBF book is that while he's generally a pretty friendly seeming guy, he starts to get really angry the instant you question him on anything regarding one of his stories. And you see this in this story, in the Ower story, because Ower's former coach comes out and like defends the twees or whatever once the lawsuit goes out, he's like, you know, I don't think they took advantage of him basically.

[Jamie Loftus]

And O calls it brave in my professional unbiased opinion. Fuck you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Lewis calls the coach brave for doing this and basically says he's taking a stand against Cancel culture. And then here's the Guardian again. Lewis recalled Oher as a shy young boy and found it hard to square that memory with the Oher behind the lawsuit. What we're watching is a change of behavior, he told me. This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head. They run into problems with violence and aggression. It wouldn't surprise him, Lewis said, if we were seeing some confluence of or his history in football with other campaigns that Stoke claims in lawsuits like his. Perhaps some lawyer of Orr's figured the time was ripe to sue the Twohees. Louis Spectrum speculated, or perhaps Ower realized that people would get behind him if he makes these accusations. He's just a poor head injured boy.

[Jamie Loftus]

I. They're like, no, the perceived exploitation and racism you experienced was the result of cte. That's. Oh my.

[Robert Evans]

That's fucking wild, right? That's gross as hell. Oh, I hate Jamie.

[Jamie Loftus]

Wow. I just thought he was the guy who wrote Moneyball. I thought that that was the harmony.

[Robert Evans]

That is what I was thinking too now. Yeah. So here I want you to keep in mind how he wrote about his former subject Oher. Now here is him talking in a 60 Minutes interview about Sam Bankman Fried, the now convicted former billionaire. And I just want to. I really want to emphasize the contrast between how he writes about these two different people who are subjects of his books.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

The story of Sam's life is people not understanding him, misreading him. He's so different. He's so unusual. I mean, I think in a funny way that the reason I have such a compelling story is I have a character that I do come to know and that the reader comes to know that the world still doesn't know.

[Robert Evans]

Now, that is not the case. Sam Bankman Fried is exactly the person he appears to be on the surface. Right. He is a guy who committed a bunch of financial crimes and didn't get away with it because he was too lazy and undisciplined to do with the smart, smart way. Right. And that's all that's going on.

[Jamie Loftus]

I mean, this is like, oh, this is a bummer. This is like a case study and a journalist biases coming out in their work.

[Robert Evans]

It's so, it's so obvious.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

No story better illustrates this part of the story than how Lewis wound up writing Going Infinite in the first place. In 2014, Lewis published a book called Flash Boys, which is a book about Brad Katsuyama and a small group of rebel Wall street investors who form iex, which is like a stock exchange that's supposed be to Posta. The idea is we want to protect investors from the unfair advantages that these high frequency trading firms have on traditional exchanges due to like a whole bunch of shit, but largely access to a special fiber optic cable. And with most Lewis books, there's a lot of insiders that will criticize him for getting some details wrong here and glossing over some issues that don't conform to his narrative. There's like a market crash that's largely like mitigated by some of these firms that he's criticizing. But I don't know enough about that. To want to get into it. What's important is that Katsuyama and his book of rogue traders are depicted semi heroically, as if they're kind of fighting against this rigged financial system, which, you know, the financial system's rigged. I don't know about his characterization of them, but the book is a hit and it makes Katsuyama and his crew celebrities within the finance world. So Katsuyama reaches out to Lewis when he is considering an institutional investment in ftx. He's like, we're considering getting into crypto through these guys, putting a lot of money on their exchange. Would you look into this guy for me? Right. And this is what Lewis says. Lewis like basically goes in there and like talks to Sam Bankman Fried. And he's. He's so impressed that he quotes himself as telling Katsuyama, do whatever he wants to do. What could possibly go wrong? Right. That's which bad bet Katsuyama does wind up putting money.

[Jamie Loftus]

She's a worse person to ask what could go wrong with. Yeah, okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I'm going to continue from the guardian here.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

He did find himself intrigued in particular by effective altruism, the movement to which Bankman Free subscribed. Effective altruists believe in giving away most of what they make to do the most good in the world. Some of them commit to earning as much as possible so as to donate more to their chosen beneficiaries. Having spent so long on Wall Street, Lewis wasn't used to meeting a wealthy young man who claimed to have no interest in wealth. Unusually for Lewis, he couldn't figure Bankman Fried out. Michael just said, this kid is the richest and most interesting young person I've ever met. Oh my God. He did claim to understand all the deep recesses of Bankman Fried's mind, but he knew it was a great story. And this was before the shit hit the fan. That's one of his friends talk. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

And. And also it takes someone who grew up in that environment to not have alarm bells going off in their mind when they hear, oh, I, as someone who has never not had money, don't really care about money. You're like, well, yeah, no, you've never not had it. You would really care if you don't. That reminds me of. This is like, I think about this easily once a week. It happened over 10 years ago, my freshman year of college. It was my first time really encountering people who like, grew up with. With like money, you know, and there was this guy on my floor and one night everyone was hanging out. And he like put a. This is the era. This is the early 2010s. He put a skinny scarf around my neck because it was cold. And he was like, you can have that. And it smelled and I didn't want it. But he's like, you can have that. And I was like, oh, don't you like want it back? And he's like, no, I don't care about my material possessions.

[Robert Evans]

And great.

[Jamie Loftus]

I think about that all the time because he could just get, get 9,000 scarves. Yeah, you just get 9,000 scarves. But that was like. But I feel like that is so much of what effective altruism is. It's just a fundamental like, yeah, not understanding how the world works.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's, it's a bunch of rich kids who are talking through like Philosophy 101 level shit and think and so impressed by everyone else's answers to like dumb logic puzzles because they've, they've never stopped studied enough humanities to know that like nah man, people have been talking about this shit for thousands of years and all of their takes are better than yours. Like anyway, we're not getting into that as much right now. We are about to get into the ads and if you really want to do some effective altruism purchase from the sponsors of this podcast.

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[Robert Evans]

O U n D okay, if you thought season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up. Season three is here and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper. They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexual experts who know their stuff. This season they're covering it all. From circuit culture to hookup horror stories to locker room shenanigans. No stone is left unturned. And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze. So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction, and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate. Oh, and this season they want to hear your stories. Their call in segment is getting even hotter and they'll react to your wildest Cruising Confessions on air. No pressure. So if you're ready for round three, just push play Sniffy's Cruising Confession. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Ah, so we've been talking around the book Going Infinite, which is Michael's terrible book on Sam, so I think now is probably a good time to dig into exactly how it fits fails. I wanted to start by introducing that contrast between Lewis's treatment of Oher and sbf first, because it puts things into perspective. Now I think a good anecdote to start on here is one of the stories Lewis uses to introduce Sam to the reader. This is right at the start of Going Infinite and it's about a phone call that Sam has during his billionaire era with fashion industry icon Anna Wintour before the Met Gala.

[Jamie Loftus]

No?

[Robert Evans]

Oh yeah. Oh yeah, Jamie, this is. This is good.

[Jamie Loftus]

So for reference, because Anna Wintour is Bill Nighy's girlfriend right now. And I don't want to think poorly of Bill Nighy.

[Robert Evans]

That's hard for me. It is tragic. My heart goes out to Bill Nighy, who I'm incapable of feeling badly about.

[Jamie Loftus]

No, I'm here. I'm sitting my ass down and listening.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Anna is who Meryl Streep's character in the Devil Wears Prada is based on, Right? Like, that's who this person is.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, I love when men try to explain what the Devil Wears Prada is about. Yes. For all the men listening, pause and go watch the Devil Wears Prada. It is true. Just like one of the greatest films of. I think, one of the greatest comedy films and books of our generation.

[Robert Evans]

Very good movie.

[Sophie]

Half the essays I. Half the essays I wrote in college were based off of said book.

[Robert Evans]

Really? Yeah. The Met Gala is an annual event. I think Vogue puts it on technically, but, like, it's where rich, famous, and occasionally even beautiful people wear insane outfits that cost the GDP of a small island nation, right?

[Jamie Loftus]

Yes. And then a bunch of youtubers I watch say that they looked ugly.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yes.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's a treat.

[Robert Evans]

It's great. It's great. Everybody makes a feast off of it. But somebody has to pay for the son of a bitch, right? And that year, Wintour wanted SBF to pay for the gala, right? And he was spending way more money on stupider shit than that. So not unreasonable that he might actually agree to do this. He had instructed, at this point, his publicity woman to do whatever she could to increase FTX's reputation and keep his name in the news. So not a bad way to do that, Right? The Met Gala often does make money the news. And when it came to his side of the job, though, Sam was. He put as much work into, like, this call with Anna Wintour where tens of millions of dollars are on the line that he did to, like, everything else that he had a meeting about, which is no work at all. Right. Lewis goes into detail about the fact that he's playing this dumb video game, like, while he's on a zoom call with her. It's the same game he's always playing. It's this. This video game that he winds up buying because it's made by a friend of his called Storybook Brawl.

[Jamie Loftus]

What is it about? Tell me.

[Robert Evans]

It's about, like, fable characters fighting, right? Like, it's a little strategy game. It's like an. It's like an app game. It's not a real game.

[Jamie Loftus]

You know how you you know how you watch those videos and I say this with love and appreciation of, like, college students now playing a video game while explaining, like, Marxism to you. Yes, I want that. But Sam Bankman Fried playing that game while Anna Wintour is like, what is he up to? What is he up to?

[Robert Evans]

The.

[Sophie]

The Jamie and I, in unison. When you said playing video game while talking to Anna Wintour.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Mouth wide open, like, well, it's like she could.

[Jamie Loftus]

I mean, and, and, and not even to, like, endorse her. I'm just like, I would be very afraid to do anything in front of scary.

[Robert Evans]

And it's.

[Jamie Loftus]

She's famously scared.

[Robert Evans]

She's famously scary. And he's talking about. About a lot of money, Right? Like, it's, it's not that he's blowing her off because, like, I don't feel precious about Anna Wintour's time, but, like, it's that this is a big money deal and he just, he can't focus on it. And I would take that. It's just like, oh, yeah, this is a, this is a dude who has some adhd, right? Like, that's what that is. And this is a dude who has adhd, who's part of a generation that has adhd.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, I know this is a very dumb observation, but it's also clear to me that Sam Bankman Bankman Fried has never seen the Devil Wears Prada, which I've never been less surprised at. But it's like, if you have no one in your life who could tip you that you're talking to the protagonist of the Devil Wears Prada, then you lack a support structure in a fundamental way, I think.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's. Okay. That's good to know. That's what I think.

[Jamie Loftus]

Sophie and I are here.

[Robert Evans]

What's funny about the way Louis talks about this is that he marvels at this. Right? Like, it's the most amazing thing. And it's evidence of how unique Sam is. When you just noted one of the biggest pieces of entertainment for millennials and Gen Z is people playing video games and explaining politics. Right. That is, it is not at all unique that Sam Bankman Fried will not stop gaming to have a business meeting. But Michael Lewis treats it as like, this is evidence that he is too much of a genius. He can't bear to pay attention to her for a second. He also, there's a little bit of anti woman stuff in here because Louis notes that Sam would minimize the window with her face on it whenever she spoke and bring it back up whenever he talked. Right. Curiously, only when he was talking did he want to see her, which I do think there's a lot in that sentence. So. Yeah, yeah, it is. Again, like the way Lewis describes this, this isn't just. Yeah, he's not very disciplined. And he has the same thing that like a lot of Millennial and Gen Z people have, which is, you know, an inability to stop distracting yourself no matter what important shit you're doing. He describ describes this as SBF's brain being so big that like games are. He's like a Sherlock Holmes character and games are his heroine. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, that makes me. That indicates to me that Michael Lewis. Because that's the way that you're like, like your doting parent would talk about you and like, that's.

[Robert Evans]

That.

[Jamie Loftus]

That is clear to me. The way he sees him is like, wow, look at this amazing kid. And also what SBF is doing here is like the inverse of what most easily distracted millennial and Gen Z people are doing, which they're playing games and explaining rad to you. They're not playing games and talking to some like, like half listening to someone before they part with millions of dollars to throw the world's stupidest annual party. Yeah, and I love that stupid ass party.

[Robert Evans]

It's, it's. I mean, I think both of those things are on a similar level potentially, but it depends on how you do them. And he's not actually good at it. But the way Louis describes this is he. He just is in awe of this kid's ability to have attention deficit disorder? Yeah, absolutely, said Sam. But his mind was elsewhere. The Horde Dragon was dead. Anna Wintour had killed it. What to do? He made a half hearted bid to begin another game and pick another hero, but then changed his mind and shut the game down. He could often occupy two worlds at once and win in both. In this case, he clearly stood no chance of winning in one world unless he paid less attention in the other. And this woman somehow had acquired a spell that interfered with his abilities to multitask. What an amazing way to write that paragraph. Michael Lewis.

[Sophie]

Dude.

[Robert Evans]

Oh God. Dude, it's something else. Like, I have played video games through some important work meetings. Sophie has often had to pick my ass up off that. It's not cause I'm a genius, it's because I'm hungover and have trouble focusing because I use Twitter too much.

[Jamie Loftus]

There's so many. There's like so many. I mean, whatever. And also you have to imagine that this manuscript made it through a lot. It speaks to how old people in general. General. Who work in the publishing industry are that no one was like, michael, wow. Tell you that this is just how kids are these days.

[Robert Evans]

He's a real video game genius.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. I mean, it's like, we've both written books. Like, I. I was surprised that I got the title of my book through, but it was because people over 60 don't know what Raw Dog needs.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Jamie Loftus]

And so you're. And that's most of the people in publishing. Like, it's ridiculous. That's so nuts that that made it to the. The final book.

[Robert Evans]

No, it's like, that's. Yeah. So if you're not reading critically and inclined to give Lewis the benefit of the doubt, I can see how you might assume that, like, he's trying to make Sam look kind of silly in that paragraph. I can see how you would assume that based on the text, but that is not what's going on. Listener here is Lewis talking about that exact same moment in an interview with Intelligence Squared from about a month ago.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yes.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

So on the screen, Zoom. Anna Wintour. And he does not know who she is. He doesn't know what the purpose of the meeting is. He doesn't know. Well, the purpose of the meeting is, can Sam Bankman Fried pay for the whole Met Gala. That's the purpose of the meeting. Because he'll pay for everything else. Why not that? And she comes on the screen and she is dressed to the nine. She's got those scythes of hair coming down around her face. She's, like, ready to kill and gorgeous. You know, she looks great. She's well prepared. He's playing Storybook Brawl, which is his video game.

[Jamie Loftus]

Pause.

[Sophie]

I hate the way he talks about Anna Wintour. Thank you very much. Okay, okay.

[Robert Evans]

We can deal with that in private.

[Jamie Loftus]

So before we can. No, no. Before we can talk about a woman on a zoom call, does she look gorgeous or not?

[Sophie]

Yeah, that's the point. This has nothing to do with Anna Wintour. Also, she looks like that all the time. Thank you so much. It's her thing.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

And whenever she comes on the screen, he blacks her out. And the video game pops up. So, like, she's talking and minotaurs are killing. Are killing dwarfs and trees with axes are coming in and, like, you know, weapons are appearing on the screen and people are dying and exploding. And you're hearing her talk about them at gala, and they're seven minutes in when he hits a box. And the Wikipedia entry for the Met Gala Comes up so we can figure out what the hell she's talking about. And he's doing. I watched him do this. He's doing this with her. This is what he was doing on live television. When he would be interviewed by Bloomberg tv, it was like. And he had tricks. It took him about one tenth of his brain to have a conversation with Anna Wintour. And what he would do. Other part of his brain was either reading about who she was or playing his game. And what he'd do is he'd say, you asked me a question. He'd say, that's a really good question. It's a really good question. Let me think about that for a minute. You know, meanwhile, the minotaur is killing the tree and he comes off and then he thinks for a minute and he says some boilerplate thing.

[Robert Evans]

So that does not show genius. He's obviously the smile on his face. That is not him being critical. That's him thinking about. About like. That's him fawning over this kid for. For not being prepared for a multi million dollar meeting. Right. Which is like, fine. But that's not an example of him being smart.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, and I. I think that that is a clear pattern in the way that we cover the like, young white kid genius who comes from a rich background. There's a lot of similarities in how early Mark Zuckerberg's like, casual misogyny and not giving a shit about and parcel to why he was cool and why he was seen as a visionary like that. The same is true of, like, just. I mean, I feel like every generation has at least one of these guys and they're all covered in the same way. And no one ever learns their lesson because the guy covering them is often the same guy.

[Robert Evans]

It's literally Michael Lewis.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. And often literally Michael Lewis.

[Robert Evans]

How did.

[Jamie Loftus]

How did.

[Sophie]

Okay, I'm sorry. How did this resolve with Anna Wintour? Did she like the fact that she basically.

[Robert Evans]

He says, yeah, I'll pay for it. And then he just ghosts her.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

So the fact that Anna Wintour didn't like, like, smoke out, that he was like, fully a fraud at the. The girlies are. The girlies are disappointed.

[Jamie Loftus]

I'm not caping for Anna Wintour here.

[Sophie]

But it's famously named to the dragon lady.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, no. SBF is. Is lucky that he'll never encounter Bill Nigh, because Bill for Bill Nighy. It would be on.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, Bill Nighy would him up.

[Jamie Loftus]

It would be on site. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So he was in.

[Jamie Loftus]

I Frankenstein for crying. He was in Detective Pikachu.

[Robert Evans]

He was in a lot of great films.

[Jamie Loftus]

He has broken my brain.

[Robert Evans]

My brain is broken. These are amusing anecdotes, right? What he's telling. Potentially, if you are someone who is critical about him, that same anecdote could form part of your thesis about why this kid got away with it for so long and why he ultimately flamed out. But Lewis is convinced that these show you evidence of Sam's genius. And he sets this up early in the book, talking about Sam's childhood. Quote, he had a fault line inside him. Pressure was building on it. And one day in the seventh grade, he slipped. His mother returned from work to find Sam alone in despair. I came home and he was crying, recalled Barbara. He said, I'm so bored, I'm going to die. And like, yeah, I. I have had a similar conversation with my mom. And it's a sign, you know, certainly Sam has been diagnosed with adhd. That's certainly one way in which that can manifest.

[Sophie]

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

[Jamie Loftus]

Hold on.

[Sophie]

One for the girlies. Again, that is a do. Direct quote from Sex and the City.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, okay.

[Sophie]

That is a direct quote from a Sex in the City episode.

[Robert Evans]

Sure, I'm sure. Sam's a big Samantha head.

[Jamie Loftus]

Wait, who says it?

[Sophie]

She goes, I'm so bored, I could die. And she jumps out and she falls out of the window.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's literally one of the most famous moments in the back half of Sex in the City.

[Robert Evans]

Wow. Yeah, I don't remember that. Anyway, so. Because, like, Lewis again, again, if you're. If you're just kind of being honest about Sam writing a book, you know, might be like, well, Sam gets diagnosed with adhd, this moment makes total sense as like, yeah, this is a kid who's got adhd, and he's also good at math and stuff. He's bored in the classes that he's in. But Lewis does not acknowledge that Sam has ADHD in his book. He doesn't say anything about it because that's not a bad thing, obviously. But it's also that you're not a genius just because you have adhd. Right? Plenty of people who are not super geniuses have adhd. It's just a thing.

[Jamie Loftus]

And. Well, and it's like, if you're talking about that behavior, and I want to be, like, delicate in the way I talk about it, but it's contextually important.

[Robert Evans]

If you proceed from the principle, like, yeah, this is a kid with adhd, then there's another explanation for his addiction to Games, his inability to focus on stuff. Right. And then it means those things aren't a sign of his brilliance right. Now, part of why I'm critical of Michael for this is that he does make a note about one character's ADHD in the book. And it's Carolyn Ellison who comes across as one of the villains in the book. And I should note that the following paragraph comes from a part of the book where Lewis is talking to George, who is a therapist who worked for FTX as the company shrink. So, among other things, this is a therapist talking about his patient. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

When she'd first come to him back in 2018, she'd had two issues. She wanted to talk about her attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and her new and emotionally complicated polyamorous lifestyle. Every subsequent session after the, Carolyn came back with just one issue she wanted to discuss. Sam. She'd fallen in love with Sam. Sam didn't love her back, and that fact alone left her deeply unhappy. I thought of her as an exception, said George. I thought she might be willing to trade effective altruism for reciprocation of love any day. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Sorry. How is it, like. I mean, I truly. Like, how is it even legal or ethical for this information to be.

[Robert Evans]

I don't actually know. I don't actually know.

[Jamie Loftus]

That does seem sketchy to me to be able to do, like. They're famously not supposed to be able to do that. And also not to, like, overly come to her defense. But also it's like that if anyone's therapy logs were leaked, it would be like, oh, they had this fixation on this issue. Yeah. That's why you fucking go, dude. You don't go there to be a reasoned person.

[Robert Evans]

No. And especially since, like, what's. What's messy to me is that he brings that. He makes sure to bring this up with Carolyn because he's kind of right. Writing that like, she was unreliable, she wasn't focusing enough. She was in love with him.

[Jamie Loftus]

She was being hysterical, perhaps.

[Robert Evans]

Whereas he's just this misunderstood genius. But he notes her adhd and he doesn't note Sam's. Even though Sam's ADHD is a matter of public fucking record now. Like, his family went to court to get him his medicine. This is not a hidden thing.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's like, not even something that he particularly tries to obscure. Right. No. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And again, it's critical to understand him because it provides an alternate explanation for all this behavior that Lewis chalks up to him just, like, only needing 10% of his brain to Talk to people. Yeah. Now there's another very fun bit in this which kind of relates to that, which is that. And this is like the weirdest through line in Going Infinite which is. Michael Lewis does not understand games. Right. Like he is. So he writes about like video games and board games and other popular nerd pastimes that are now like the dominant form of entertainment by money in our country. He talks about them like he's an alien who's just arrived on the planet and he. And as a result he talks about Sam's embrace of this stuff at the expense of everything else to be evidence of brilliance. Quote, he felt nothing in the presence of art. He found religion absurd. He thought both right wing and left wing political opinions kind of dumb. Less a consequence of thought than of their holders tribal identity. He and his family ignored the rituals that punctuated most people's existence. He didn't even celebrate his own birthday. What gave pleasure and solace and a sense of belonging to others left Sam cold. When the bankman frieds traveled to Europe, Sam realized that he was just staring at a lot of old buildings for no particular reason. We did a few trips, he said, I basically hated it. To his unrelenting alienation, there was only one exception. Games. In sixth grade, Sam learned about a game called Magic the Gathering. For the next four years it was the only activity that consumed him fast, faster than he could consume it. And this is so funny because like Lewis has to describe Magic the Gathering after this point and he like, he describes it basically. It's the first game ever made where like you like the way that you play it, like it's, it's different. Like every character can come into this strategy game with a different set of equipment. No one had ever done this before. It was all like chess where everyone's the same. And it's like, like no it wasn't. There were decades, decades of war games and strategy games that, that magic was influenced by. Like that's just wrong. Michael Lew.

[Jamie Loftus]

Now hold on.

[Robert Evans]

Magic.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, hold on nerd. Any, any. Put a, put a pin in that nerd. I, I do think that like this is of the Cuz. Cuz I don't play Magic the Gathering and I know that how he's describing it is wildly incorrect.

[Robert Evans]

I feel like it's so wrong.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, I think that speaks more to like a generation, generation gap because I think that there's someone who could be on the opposite side of SBF and equally with it, like it's just like do your research. Just talk to A just talk to someone who plays Magic the Gathering. They famously love to talk about it.

[Robert Evans]

And it's, it's funny because he's like, he has to make this like he, he goes on a limb about like Sam Bankman. Fried couldn't, didn't like chess. It was too boring. There were too few possibilities. Like you could calculate every. Like his computer brain wasn't amusing by.

[Jamie Loftus]

Chess, only Maxim wasn't enough for him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's so funny. It's like, man, my friends and I all played Magic the Gathering and like, as a spoiler, some people looked into Sam's like performance in League of Legends and the other online. He was never good at anything. He was not very good. He wasn't particularly bad, but he was not very good. And I'm going to guess he was indifferent at Magic the Gathering because, you know, like, it's, it is not a great, it's a wonderful, wonderful game. Not a great like yardstick for your intelligence. You know, it's just a card game.

[Jamie Loftus]

No one should be, I mean not. But like no one should be judged by their intelligence, by how they interact with like a beloved hobby. That's weird.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's so weird. And it's like, it's interesting because like Sam's parents, a big part of this section is like he comes home and he's like, I'm so bored. I can't. I want to die. And his parents do what I think is the right thing. They lead the charge to get their school to add like an advanced math class. And it seems to have a good impact on him. He's excited to go to school now, and that's a good thing. But what we find hints of in parts of this story, and I don't think Lewis is able either knows it or is able to admit it to himself, is the troubling fact that once Sam's parents decide he's a math genius, they, they don't bother to make him into a well rounded person. Sam grows up hating art. He thinks books are useless. He has this big rant, he goes about like, well, there's no way that Shakespeare is the best author ever because there have been this many billion people born since he was Al. And if you want to calculate the odds that none of them were better at writing than him, then there's really no reason to read Shakespeare. And it's like, well, Sam, the fact that you think that means that like no one even casually tried to teach you the humanities because, like the reason you should study Shakespeare is Not that he's the quote unquote, best author ever that doesn't exist. It's that there is not a day in your life or the life of anyone that you love that they don't use words and phrases. Shakespeare introduced to the English language. That's why he's important.

[Jamie Loftus]

Don't get me wrong, Sam. I also don't want to read a book. But I there. Sometimes we're.

[Robert Evans]

Sometimes that's just what you need to do to understand the world and not go to prison for forever because you're.

[Jamie Loftus]

A gambler or just be willing to Google your way around it. Like you're not better than Shakespeare, you weirdo. There is like an element of like there are certain. The. The lower side of SBF. Ls that he takes. In the statements he. He makes, he sounds like a, like a one episode Frasier character.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Jamie Loftus]

You know, he sounds like Freddy made a friend and he fucking sucks and.

[Robert Evans]

He'S a piece of shit. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

And then he even polarizes Frasier and Niles and that's how you know you're in fucking trouble.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. When Niles. Niles is like, this kid's kind of got a fucking problem.

[Jamie Loftus]

This kid's incomprehensible. I wouldn't, I wouldn't share a glass of brandy with him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And man, if you know Niles, you know what that takes. Hey, everyone. Robert here just wanted a quick note that the next, like, the last like five or six minutes of this episode is all Frasier. It's all. All Frazier talk. Jamie and I got off on a tangent. There is a lot more Sam Bankman, fried in part two. It's another like hour and 20 minutes, so plenty more on Thursday. But as a heads up in case it's kind of confusing, we just. We just wound up in a Frasier hole after this point. So if you want to hear us talk about Frasier, this is your chance. Speaking of David Hyde Pierce, Jamie Loftus, you are starring in a floor show with David Hyde Pierce.

[Jamie Loftus]

I sure am.

[Robert Evans]

Based on the life of Kelsey Grammer. Actually, you are playing Kelsey. You spent like Michael Lewis a full year living with him to really get his character down. What was that like?

[Jamie Loftus]

Look, it was pretty hostile. It was pretty hostile. And in the subsequent publishings that I've made, a lot of people have said that I couldn't explain the video games that Kelsey Grammer was playing for the year, that I was following him around. And I resent that. I was in the room with Kelsey while he was berating Women on the phone. And I. I think that that's. That makes him a genius. I think that that makes him a genius. And, you know, do I believe he's the greatest sitcom actor of all time? Well, I'll keep that to myself, but wink, wink. I think that he's kind of a beautiful genius and is above criticism. And if you don't think that he's kind of the perfect person or if you even, like, just read his Wikipedia page and form an opinion, I beg to disagree.

[Robert Evans]

And I do love. I love Kelsey grammar stories from the heid of Fr. Because they're all, like, members of the cast being like. Well, yeah, he was very, like. He came on set and he had clearly just woken up after vomiting up his seven martini lunch. He looked like he was dying. We were all worried that he was going to drop dead that day. And then the director called action, and he was immediately in character. He was perfect. He was beautiful.

[Jamie Loftus]

His chest hair perched like. We'll never. We'll never know. I was. I. I mean, I was fixated on Frasier reruns when I was a kid. I would stay up late to watch them.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's one of my comfort shows, for sure. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

The. The best. And, like, when I. I remember getting Kelsey Grammer's, like, memoir from the library and read that he broke up with his wife on the phone, and it may have been one of the first times that I was like, wow. Wow, men are scary. Like, you could just. You can just do that. You could just be Kelsey Grammer and be evil and then. And I will still, like, base my sexual forever.

[Robert Evans]

Sure. Absolutely.

[Jamie Loftus]

Doesn't seem fair.

[Robert Evans]

Whomst among us, right? Oh, man. But I will say, having watched the new Frasier show, it becomes very clear how much of that show's charm was John Mahoney and David Hyde Pierce.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, I think Kelsey's doing. I mean, and he's an evil person. He's doing his damn best.

[Robert Evans]

He is perfect. He has, like, literally, his voice has not changed in 20 years, which is remarkable. No.

[Jamie Loftus]

And he's. He's been physically preserved well enough.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yeah. One of the big problems that show has is they've cast that kid as Niles and Daphne's son, and they're relying on him to hold up a lot of the physical comedy that Dave and Hyde Pierce used to. And if you are going up next to David Hyde Pierce in, like, a physical comedy competition, you're gonna look like shit. He's David Hyde Pierce.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's the guy.

[Robert Evans]

Robert.

[Jamie Loftus]

I thought you would love the Frasier reboot because it's some of the most abysmal Boston accents I've ever heard in my.

[Robert Evans]

Don't get me wrong, I've watched every episode.

[Jamie Loftus]

Some of the nastiest little. I have to like pause sometimes and like, get a glass of water.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I used to like walk off.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's not nearly that good since. Yeah, I mean, you have. And I have conceded long ago that you've got it down.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you. Thank you. Well, anything to plug Jamie after our five minute Frasier digression.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, well, I'd like to. I guess I'd like to plug the Frasier reboot because I would like a second season.

[Robert Evans]

Check it out, everybody. It's not shit.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's on Paramount plus and I also just read Raw Dog and follow me online if you're so inclined. And that's all I have to say. Listen to the Bechtel cast while you're at it. Why not?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. All right.

[Jamie Loftus]

What about you?

[Robert Evans]

That's it. I'm done. Go figure out where to David Hyde Pierce lives. You know, don't do that. Send him a nice letter or a creepy letter.

[Sophie]

Bye.

[Robert Evans]

Let Jamie know.

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[Robert Evans]

O u n D okay, if you thought Season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions with Spicy Buckle up. Season three is here and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper. They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff. This season they're covering it all, from circuit culture to hookup horror stories to locker room shenanigans. No stone is left unturned. And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze. So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction, and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate. Oh, and this season they want to hear your stories. Their call in segment is getting even hotter and they'll react to your wildest Cruising confessions on air. No pressure. So if you're ready for round three, just push play Sniffy's Cruising Confession. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilly Sciences now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Ah, welcome back to behind the Bastards, our special edition episodes on Sam Bankman, who is not freed because he is still in jail. That's the intro I've got. It's the same as the last episode.

[Sophie]

It's still really funny.

[Robert Evans]

Hacking our fraud. Yes.

[Sophie]

No, you're hilarious. It's still very funny.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's Sophie's favorite.

[Robert Evans]

This is the only time I've made Sophie laugh in years.

[Sophie]

That's not true.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, okay, you're Switzerland on this issue.

[Robert Evans]

You're Swiss on this issue. Swish you, Jamie. Speaking of Switzerland, you also were neutral in World War II, is that correct?

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, I was sort of like, no, I'm kidding, Robert.

[Sophie]

You made me laugh again. Congrats.

[Jamie Loftus]

God damn it.

[Robert Evans]

Two for two, baby. So we took a couple of days in between recording Part one and Part two to really let it sink in. How are you feeling on our technically not a behind The Bastards on Michael Lewis, but basically a Behind the Bastards on Michael Lewis, author of the Big Short.

[Jamie Loftus]

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, if, if I had just missed something. But every single person I talked to, I found had a similar experience to me where they did not know that he wrote the Blind side.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, good. Okay.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. And then when they found out that he wrote the Blind side, they're like, oh, yeah, I could see that he is a, you know, he's an honorary bastard.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Maybe he is kind of a hack. Yeah. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, because, yeah, they were like, yeah, Michael Lewis, Moneyball, the Big Short. And you're like, and another thing, how did we collectively forget that he wrote that? It feels like he got away with something.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I guess I've been thinking about what he's doing with Sam Bankman Fried as I think about the upcoming Napoleon movie, which I will have watched by the time this comes out, but it's not out yet. So excited about the Napoleon. I'm ready. Everyone, especially like all of these history, Twitter, podcast people are so livid that Ridley Scott's basically like, who can say what the truth of Napoleon's life was? Which is. It is a ridiculous thing to say. He's very well documented. We actually know a lot about Napoleon. But also, I don't give a shit. It's the guy who made Gladiator. Like, well.

[Jamie Loftus]

And also I appreciate because all biopics.

[Robert Evans]

Are, you know, nonsense. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Horseshit. Right. And so you're like, well, this is the one director who's going to say my biopic is kind of horseshit.

[Robert Evans]

It's just lies. Which also very appropriate for Napoleon. But what is the line with that? Why. Why am I angry at my Michael Lewis for. For what he's doing? And I don't really care.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, he's a. He's a journalist there.

[Robert Evans]

He's a journalist for one. He's not the director of fucking Gladiator. The least accurate movie about Rome ever made.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's been a great. It's been a great week for like weird old guys who we could argue had. Have peaked creatively. Although I wouldn't say that for Scorsese, but there was a great quote that was floating around in the last couple days where I guess Scorsese said on the Killers of the Flower Moon press tour that he was like, always worri about running out of time and he never knew what his last movie would be. And Ridley Scott was asked to, like, react to that. And he said, since he started Killers of the Flower Moon, I've made four films. No, I don't think about it. I get up in the morning and say, ah, great, another day of stress.

[Robert Evans]

Honestly, those are both completely valid answers. 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. There are two ways to deal with mortality. One of them is there are two.

[Jamie Loftus]

Genders of creative mortality.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. One is, oh, my God, I will die and I won't have said everything I need to say. And the other is, what the fuck? I got. I got shit to do. I gotta move. I gotta have time to answer this fucking question. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Meanwhile, Robert Paul Schrader is on Facebook, and Paul Schrader is posting about Taylor Swift in a kind of horny way. So, like, the old men are just. They're on one this week, and Michael Lewis is walks among them.

[Robert Evans]

There's only one old great creative who has taken the reasonable answer to mortality. And it's John Carpenter who's like, nah, I'm done directing movies. I'm gonna get high, play video games, watch basketball the rest of my life.

[Jamie Loftus]

And God bless.

[Robert Evans]

God bless him. Yeah, God bless him. There's a man who understands what's valuable in life. A thing that Sam Bankman Fried never understood.

[Jamie Loftus]

And we're back.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. Yeah, we're back. 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 Fried, is that Sam had this belief that no one ever does anything useful after, like, age 40 to 45. Somewhere around there is the last time you have a useful thought in your entire life, which I guess is relevant to our discussion of aging. Aging powerful men.

[Jamie Loftus]

I will say that that's true of many standup comedians, but I can't speak of that outside of that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, I. I think it's true. Especially, like, once you get really rich, it's. You tend to, like, lose complete touch with the world and go insane. So I think that is somewhat accurate, at least for some creative professions. But Sam is not in a creative profession. And it's actually kind of ridiculous to me the idea that, like, people in business after age 40, like Steve Jobs did all of his best shit like, well, after that point, like, his most influence. Influential like, like, evil things. And. And most, like, really successful businessmen are just Kind of getting started by their mid-40s. Right. Because it takes that much time to.

[Jamie Loftus]

Get that Zuckerberg momentum. You've got a lot of evil left.

[Robert Evans]

You got a lot of horrible things left to do. Plenty of time.

[Jamie Loftus]

Worst is in front of you.

[Robert Evans]

I think he's got three to five ethnic cleansings in a minimum. Minimum, Jamie? Yeah, maybe eight. You know, I could see him having eight more ethnic cleansings.

[Jamie Loftus]

He does seem like someone who just will like have a Kissinger like affinity for life.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Bankman Fried's I understand belief that like after age 45 he's not going to be capable of having any useful ideas. This is what pushed him, you know, along with his effective altruist idea. This is why he felt like he had to, he had to continually gamble rather than like taking the slow sustainable path, making money off of his exchange at like a reasonable pace. No, no, no, I only have a few more years left before my shrivels up. And so if I'm going to do anything good for the world, I have to keep putting every dollar I've made on a 5050 bet endlessly. Right. Which isn't it which is like, I don't know, you should probably get help if you feel that about the world because that's a deeply self destructive way to think about yourself and about your assets. This is a big part of why FTX did not have a really crucial thing for any company, particularly a financial company to have, which is a risk. Risk officer. Right. A risk officer's job is to analyze the deals the company's doing and go well, that's an insane risk. So let's not, let's not do that one or you know, that's an insane risk. We need to offset it with this stuff. They also did not have a chief financial officer or a bunch of other critical executive positions. Really? Yeah. They had no cfo.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's one I've heard of. You should have that one.

[Robert Evans]

It's a really basic job and its job is basically to know how much money you have. Right. Like there's other stuff to it, but it's basically pretty critical. FTX also did not have a board of directors and they're lacking a bunch of other very basic executive positions. And a big part of why is that the only people Sam feels like he can trust are like his friends. And he has this deep aversion to bringing in adults like people who are not in their 20s, like his, the friends he went to college with and shit. He said in one interview with Michael we tried having some grownups, but they didn't do anything. This was true for everyone over the age of 45. All they did was worry. Which, like, again, given what happened, perhaps they ought to have been.

[Jamie Loftus]

Maybe I'm just like, sort of on one with the idea that very few standups have a valuable thought after 45. But I would say now, reflecting on it, like, Sam Bankman Fried is using the improv troupe approach to a very high stakes business.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like, he's like, no, I will only work with people I went to college with. We know best. I don't want no fucking crusties in the room. Like, if he. I mean, and we could. We could debate 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.

[Robert Evans]

So it's kind of like.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's difficult. It's difficult.

[Robert Evans]

This is what Leavenworth should be. Right? The military needs to take stand up comedians into custody. I've always.

[Jamie Loftus]

I mean, I'm on a lot of lists.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

You know how many bars I've performed in to know people. I'm on a lot of lists.

[Robert Evans]

So Sam's response when he was asked by Michael, like, why, why don't you guys even have a cfo? That seems important. He says, there's a functional religion around the cfo. I'll ask them, why do I need one? Some people cannot articulate a single thing the CFO is supposed to do. They'll say, keep track of the money or make projections. And I'm like, what the fuck do you think I do all day? You think I don't know how much money we have? Which is funny because his whole legal defense in court was, I had no idea how much money we had or where it was. And that's why I didn't commit a crime. Right. Because I just was incompetent. I just didn't know where the money was. But it's all somewhere, like. Very silly thing to say given what he's about to say.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

So after Sam's life fell apart, Michael Lewis continued to talk and visit multiple. He sometimes would call like three or four times a day through the eight months that Sam was on house arrest. And it's interesting to me because, like Michael, if I was a journalist like Michael Lewis and I had had a conversation with somebody when they were one of the biggest names in an industry, being like, a CFO is useless. I know where the money is. And then their Entire life explodes because they didn't know what the money is. I would at some point ask them the question, hey, was that maybe a bad idea? Michael does not bring this up to Sam after the collapse in any of the dozens of conversations that they've had. And in fact, and this is why that's weird, the actual villain of his book Going Infinite, the one person that Lewis is super crit 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. Now, I am not gonna go to bat for John Ray iii, because he. He's John. He's. His name is John Ray iii.

[Jamie Loftus]

So, you know, he's up to go to bat for.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, but he is, you know, he's the guy who got brought in to liquidate Enron, and he's a kind of a corporate undertaker, right? When there's a huge scandal at a company when it, like, collapses, goes into bankruptcy, and you need someone to kind of do the postmortem, you bring in John Ray and he's like, as far.

[Jamie Loftus]

As I know, not the first or second.

[Robert Evans]

No, not the first or second. Those guys are useless.

[Jamie Loftus]

No Fucking clowns. Okay, you're gonna want to bring in the third.

[Robert Evans]

You need a JR3.

[Jamie Loftus]

I'm with you. So, nightmare.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's interesting the degree to which, because this guy comes in later, and I think because he's boring, Michael Lewis finds him disgusting. Like, I haven't run into any info that he's, like, bad at what he does. It's certainly not his fault, but Michael is livid because he's this kind of, like, stodgy old businessman and he doesn't understand Sam's special playground or, like, the wonderful thing that he built, and he's just kind of exasperated at how badly it all works.

[Jamie Loftus]

See, that's fascinating to me because to me, that says, like, Michael Lewis is. I mean, either just hates boring people, which. Fair enough. But, you know, he should know as a journalist that boring people are often and maybe most often, tremendously capable of doing bad shit. But it seems like he's looking more for, like, well, Bradley Cooper can't play you in a movie. You're useless to me.

[Robert Evans]

You're garbage.

[Jamie Loftus]

You're boring.

[Robert Evans]

There's nothing. Yeah, there's nothing sexy about him. He's just trying to deal up, like, clean up everything after a disaster. And there's some really funny lines in the book because, like, one of the things that Lewis has to do in order to kind of defend Sam as a genius is explain how he didn't steal $9 billion. Right. And the answer that Lewis has come to is that money is all there, that he just didn't know where $9 billion was. Oh yeah, he didn't steal it or gamble it away. He just misplaced it due to rank incompetence that he committed because he was too smart to keep track of things. And there's a. I'm going to read you. Yeah, there's a really fun quote there. He describes like Louis describes FTX as a real business, but he says that John Ray, who like attacked it as the worst run company I'd ever seen, was just too much of an idiot to like understand it. Right. He describes Ray trying to figure out what company assets actually existed and what didn't as quote, like an amateur archaeologist who had stumbled upon a previously unknown civilization, unable to learn anything about its customs or language. He just started digging. Right. Like he's too dumb to understand the brilliant thing that Sam built up. So he just starts like churning about in the wreckage without really appreciating everything that went into making this monumental edifice.

[Jamie Loftus]

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 editorial team is keeping him him in check? It doesn't sound like he's hired a fact checker.

[Robert Evans]

He's too big.

[Jamie Loftus]

He has a personal Jiminy Cricket. So he's just saying shit like his personal biases couldn't be more out.

[Robert Evans]

They wanted to rush this thing out. So you don't have much time to edit it.

[Jamie Loftus]

Right? That's true. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

A year to write and release a book is not a long time.

[Jamie Loftus]

No, not enough time. One might. One might.

[Robert Evans]

Not enough time. One might argue. And also Michael Lewis has the kind of clout to make that not happen.

[Jamie Loftus]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And again, I also kind of think that his hatred of Ray here is based on the fact that Ray did not fall for Sam's bullshit the way Michael did. Right. Here's what Ray said shortly after taking over and getting a look at FTX's finances. And this is from an article in Business Insider. At the hearing, Congresswoman Ann Wagner of Missouri asked Ray to elaborate on the specific ways FTX was worse than, quote, one of the largest corporate frauds in history. Ray explained that FTX was unusual and that it had no record keeping whatsoever. He that employees would exchange invoices and expenses on slack, the ubiquitous workplace chat room they used QuickBooks, he added, referring to the accounting software QuickBooks. Congresswoman Wagner asked for clarification. QuickBooks, very nice tool. Not for a multi billion dollar company. Ray confirmed. And that's like, basically they're using the kind of thing that you would use if you're like a person keeping track of you or maybe your small business is accounting.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, I've done that. And, and like that's nuts. Yeah, that is like the closest thing.

[Robert Evans]

That's Ray's attitude.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, that's the closest thing I've come to, to being like, wow, if I was also tasked with multi billion dollars, I'd be like, I don't know. QuickBooks. Do we go to TurboTax? What do we do? I would hire a CFO maybe.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I would hire someone who's done that before, right?

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, yeah. QuickBooks. Holy shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So you can decide whose interpretation sounds more realistic. John Ray recognizes basically the two possibilities are like either John Ray just recogn basic incompetence when he sees it and gets angry, or he's just not brilliant and special enough to understand Sam's world. Which is. Is what, that's what Michael Lewis. That's he in caps. That's what Michael Lewis refers to FTX as is Sam's world. Right. This is. He basically treats the whole situation as like, yes, Sam's. Sam lived in this magical world and you know, his business was actually secretly good but it encountered this temporary issue and he was forced out. And then John Ray came in and he tore all apart because he's just the mean old grumpy businessman. Right. That's, that's really like the thrust of Michael Lewis's book and part of how he kind of emphasizes the magical inner world Sam lived in is this kind of obsession with gaming returning to like Lewis is just sort of fascinated with like the fact that Sam was an addict. Right. Sam is a gaming addict. That's what. When you can't like handle your basic functions because you're too busy playing Storybook Brawl. That an addiction, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting both because Storybook Brawl was made by his childhood friend and he used consumer funds to purchase seems to have been a pretty mid game. It shut down after he got arrested. So I can't play it to tell you if it's actually good. But Lewis doesn't describe it as like a middlebrow app game. He describes it as like better than chess, like more complex than chess, a greater intellectual expert exerc than chess. And he writes this paragraph about it. Sam didn't care for games like chess, where the players controlled everything and the best move was in theory, perfect, perfectly calculable. Chess he'd have liked better if robot voices wired into the board hollered rule changes at random intervals. Knights are now rooks, all bishops, bishops must leave the board. Pawns can now fly, or almost anything, so long as the new rule forced all players to scrap whatever strategy they'd been pursuing and improvise another, better one. The game Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge, knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that and I.

[Jamie Loftus]

Think getting fucking ridiculous. Like, is there any chance that Sam Bankman Fried paid Michael Lewis to say this shit?

[Robert Evans]

Like I maybe, I don't know that he would still have the money.

[Jamie Loftus]

One of the things, not that there's no proof that he isn't dense, but this is like above and beyond the.

[Robert Evans]

The reason why I get that a lot like, well, Michael Lewis is obviously bribed, but like Michael Lewis is very rich. Like I don't know how you could bribe Michael Lewis, especially after you lose your money.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. And even if, and even if he wasn't from money, he'd be rich.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, he was. He's always been rich and always will be. So I don't know how much. I think that's, that's likely. I think he just, this is his first time ever hearing about games and so he thinks Sam is brilliant and special because he, he played them obsessively. I also think we just did our episodes on Lord John Aspinall who was like this British gambling maven who took away, who basically got the upper class of England in the mid century to just gamble away all of their fucking money. And a big part of why this kind of 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 back or etc, where basically there's no skill involved. 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 is basically just like, well, these people had nothing in their life but gambling, right. They've always been rich, they're born rich, they've always lived these super safe lives. The only thrill they had was throwing a bunch of money on like effectively a complete chance.

[Jamie Loftus]

I never understand that because it's like, what's the worst that's going to happen? You're going to become marginally less rich. But still maintain the same quality of life. That sounds boring.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you've just. They are just insulated from anything thrilling because they're insulated from any real danger. Right. Yeah. And so I think Sam being this kind of rich, sheltered kid that's Lewis interprets, it's like he's too smart to play a game like chess. He wants a game where he doesn't actually know what's going on. And a lot of that's random. It's like, well, I just see these old British gamblers in Sam Bankman Fried, where, again, this kid has nothing but the throw of the dice inside him. And that's what he liked. Right. Like. And he put a lot of other people's money on those bets. Yeah. Anyway, this is a little beside the point, but I did want to read the actual part of the book where Lewis describes Magic the Gathering, because it's. It is very. Boomer. Magic had been created in the early 1990s by a young mathematician named Richard Garfield. It was the first kind of a new kind of game designed perhaps for a new kind of person. Garfield had started with an odd question. Could a strategic game be. Design allowed the players to come to it with different equipment. And again, Games Workshop had started making Warhammer years before magic came out. Like, all games like this have existed forever.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like, I couldn't hear you over the sound of imagining Garfield the cat saying that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, which Garfield? Which Garfield? Bill Murray. Are we talking Chris Pratt?

[Jamie Loftus]

There's also a secret third Garfield. Garfield. Whoever did the voice acting on Garfield and Friends, which is my canonical Garfield voice. Certainly not Chris Pratt. Garfield there. I forget who tweeted this, but there. There is a vibe with the new Garfield that Chris Pratt has been locked in a room, forced to voice every major ip. It's like a. It's his infinity punishment. He'll be rich, but he can never leave the room.

[Robert Evans]

I'm okay with that, actually.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, let's keep him in the room. He doesn't have any good ideas.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, keep him in the room. Every. Every six years, he can come out to do another interminable Jurassic World movie.

[Jamie Loftus]

No, the villain was Locust.

[Robert Evans]

So Lewis is so ignorant of kind of the basics of youth culture to this day that he sort of transposes a lot of completely normal millennial and zoomer behaviors as evidence of Sam's unique brilliance. Here's another clip from 60 Minutes where he describes how Sam treated effective altruism. That ties into this, and this is remarkable.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

What it means in Sam's instance is you can go out and have a career where you do good. You can go be a doctor in Africa, or you can go out and make as much money as possible and pay people to be doctors in Africa. If you're a doctor in Africa, you end up saving a certain number of lives, but you're only one doctor. But if you can pay 40 people to become doctors in Africa, you're going to save 40 times the number of lives.

[Robert Evans]

This is like a strategy game.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

Well, you don't understand Sam Bankman fried unless you. You understand that he turns everything into a game. Everything is gamified.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's describing a pyramid scheme of doctors.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Jamie Loftus]

And he's saying this on 60 Minutes. I, like, I cannot put. Wrap my. Okay, now I am, like, taking him being paid off, like, or paid on or off off the table. Because you're just like, this is ridiculous to light stupid.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like, to light the fact that people somehow collectively forgot that you wrote the Blind side on fire to this shit on 60 Minutes. It just, like, is. It's. What he's describing a pyramid scheme.

[Robert Evans]

He sure is. He is describing a fucking pyramid scheme. And also, like, this whole. He turns everything into a gay like, like, because the, the through line of.

[Jamie Loftus]

The connection there is that like Jigsaw for good.

[Robert Evans]

He was sure Sam could have been a doctor in Africa, but by making a lot of money, he could hire a bunch of doctors and in Africa. 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. And, man, that's, again, not unique to Sam. A significant percentage of the US economy is based around taking the logic and addictive strategies game developers use and applying it to every imaginable industry. Right. Like, that's fucking everywhere. Like, Sam is, again, not unique in this. And also the. It's just such a. The fact that Louis seems to have bought into the basic logic of, like, well, it's better to pay a bunch of doctors than becoming one is silly because, like, well, we have a shortage of doctors. We don't have a shortage of assholes who gamble with other people's money. There's. There's not actually enough doctors for the people who need them.

[Jamie Loftus]

And also, I mean, to that point, it doesn't sound like, would I trust, knowing what I do of Sam Bankman Fried's ability to multitask that? Would I trust him doing surgery? I don't think I would. I don't think I would.

[Robert Evans]

I wouldn't trust him doing either of those in Africa. Yeah, yeah, no, he would. He would never have. Right. Like. But yeah. Anyway.

[Jamie Loftus]

But it sounds like he. I mean, maybe I'm like, you know, giving him too much credit and he's playing a game of 40 chess, but it doesn't seem that way. And I, like, he seems. Sounds ridiculous.

[Robert Evans]

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 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 think they could film it easily. Right. Because I'm sure he thinks that way about the books he's written. He's had so many of them adapted and like, yeah, if I. You know, there's a lot of fun ways you could film this super genius solving his math problems through, like, imagine imagining games out in the real world. Right. Yeah. So I. My guess is that he just couldn't get himself off of this idea he had for like, the inevitable Sam Bankman Fried movie, you know, crafted for the Big Bang Theory audience.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. Like, he's already. He's like, oh, yeah, who's hot right now, Paul Mezcal?

[Robert Evans]

We'll.

[Jamie Loftus]

We'll dye his hair. It's gonna be fucking great.

[Robert Evans]

No, I think they should have had Timothee Chalamet. I think they should have had Timothy Chalamet do like a, you know, what's his name, the. 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

No, no, don't talk about Robert Patton in that way or. No, you're talking about Christian Bale.

[Robert Evans]

I'm talking about Christian Bale. I want to see Timothy Chalamet do a Christian Bale to look like Sam Bankman Fried. That's. That sounds fun.

[Jamie Loftus]

I just worry about Timothy Chalamet. It looks like if you, like, touch him, he may shatter. I just worry about him. He. He looks so frail.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's the right. He looks like he's got consumption. Yeah. Like that. They would say that about him in the. In the. In the. In the distant past. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

And it's like if Sam Bankman Fried is looking hardier than you are, like, you're in trouble, my man.

[Robert Evans]

Uh huh. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't say that about Sam, but. So there's an amusing coda to Lewis's loving descriptions of Sam as a compulsive gamer. This paragraph occurs right after the FTX customers pull a run on the bank, annihilating its cash reserves and start a its collapse is like the employees are all huddled inside their $30 million Bahamas suites to try to figure out how to fix things. Nishad was agitated with Sam in a way that Romnik had never seen, at one point turning on him and screaming will you please fucking stop playing Storybook Brawl. And I like that anecdote. But it gets to another frustrating issue with Going Infinite, which is that Michael Lewis has all the ingredients for a great modern Icarus story of human hubris and the fall. But making it work tonally would require him to see these things that are obvious warning signs as warning signs and structure his book that way, right? And then you get some catharsis in the payoffs. But these warning signs are just sort of scattered around. They they're not given the significance he would give them if he saw them as warning signs, because he's clearly taken with all of this stuff. Another VAL example of a valid through line Lewis seems to have missed is Bankman Fried's complete disregard, even distaste for the competent of the women around him. Lewis spends a a fair amount of time on Sam's relationship with Carolyn, and he reprints these letters between them that certainly don't make Sam look great. It began with a seriously compelling list titled Arguments against this is Arguments against her Dating Him. In a lot of ways, I don't really have a soul. This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others, but in the end there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake, I don't feel happiness. What's the point in dating someone you fit physically can't make happy? I have a long history of getting bored and claustrophobic. This has the makings of a time when I'm less worried about it than normal, but the baseline prior might be high enough that nothing else matters. I feel conflicted about what I want. Sometimes I really want to be with you. Sometimes I want to stay at work for 60 hours straight and not think about anything else.

[Jamie Loftus]

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%. I just really feel for Carolyn at a lot of points and in this story because it's oh my God, I really like I I feel like there's a version of someone who who would be like oh, I can fix him where you're like, oh, no, this is like, it's like tween fiction of, like, there's only one.

[Robert Evans]

And she loves tween fiction.

[Jamie Loftus]

I know, I know. She's at a disadvantage.

[Robert Evans]

And it's. It's difficult because, like, Lewis come discusses kind of Sam's inability to be, like, functional with the people in his life because, like, and he. He clearly has a thing. Like, he. He lets. He funds another. Another exchange by another woman in crypto who he tries to date.

[Jamie Loftus]

Women in crypto.

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah, he. He's got this kind of thing going on. But Louis kind of always writes off his. His. His behavior as, like, well, you know, he just. He was too depressed. He was too. He. He can't f. Too brilliant to, like.

[Jamie Loftus]

Be in a torture genius playbook of just like, oh, and he's horrible to women, but only because his mind is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, there's. I mean, they did the same. This happens every 10 years. Like, that happened with Zuckerberg. They're like, no, he's like. He's a rampant misogynist because, like, his business started off of misogyny because he just had so many good ideas that it was, like, pressing on the woman. Respect, like, nerve. It's ridiculous.

[Robert Evans]

Hannah. Meanwhile, when. When Lew describing, like, why Carolyn did what she did, he. He includes the line where she's like. He's like. He quotes someone as saying she would throw away all of her principles to be loved. Like, she's the only one of the effective altruist kids who doesn't really believe in it. She's just so desperate for. For. For affection that she would, like, do anything for it, which, like, I don't know. Like, I don't know the person. But it's. It's weird that Lewis is so cynical about her and so full of excuses for Sam.

[Jamie Loftus]

I would have. I would have a fair amount of guesses as to why that may be and the way that. It seems like in many ways that, you know, Lewis has seen himself in Sam. And like, if you're. Especially if you're used to, like, writing profiles of very successful eccentric people, which he is. If. If this is the precedent you've set for the kind of behavior that you would excuse, such as clear racism or sexism, why would this be any different? Like, it's.

[Robert Evans]

It.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, it. It sucks. And then also on the other end of Carolyn being characterized as this, like, desperate for affection person, I. I try to, like, tap into that of, like, God, if any of my personal correspondence came out, I'd be cooked.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, it would be devastating.

[Jamie Loftus]

So many people and any one singled out. Yeah, of course.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Everyone's desperate for affection.

[Robert Evans]

So, you know, anytime you see Lewis writing about Sam, he writes in kind of the terms. Sam as one of the people in this weird, effective altruism cult. He uses terms like, he talks about his priors, which is like. It's a way of like bringing Bayesian mathematics into personal decisions. And all you. All you're saying, when you're saying like, well, these are my priors is like, well, this is the shit I believe without any kind of evidence. Right? That's. That's largely what that means. These are like my, my pre existing biases, but pre existing biases, like, doesn't sound as smart as my priors. And likewise, Sam would always talk about like, well, every decision I make is like a mathematical decision. And I calculate what's the expected value of this outcome versus this outcome, and then I do the thing with the highest expected value, right? Which is another way of saying, I do whatever will make me feel good. Which is, you know, a lot of us are like that a lot of the time. That's human nature. We are, we are creatures of comfort in a lot of ways. But there's. Sand is just dressing up selfishness in lines like this. Sam wanted to do whatever at any given moment, offered the highest expected value. And his estimate of her. Carolyn's expected value seemed to peak right before they had sex and plummet immediately after. And like, that's no different than a lot of guys in their 20s. That's not special.

[Jamie Loftus]

He just sounds like a fucking guy.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, so you're saying he got horny and then he didn't care about her afterwards? Well, that's not special.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like how I can't relate. Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That's not just millions of men, that's millions of people.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like, it's so. I mean, even just outside of his relationships with women and his relationship with Carolyn, I don't know, it gives me sort of like Mensa PTSD where there is this like two hander where it's either you can't understand what I'm doing because I am a super genius and you are not operating on my level. You could never understand why I am fucking up at this tremendous rate. And then if they're challenged enough, it's like, well, actually I'm, you know, it, it. I don't know the correct way to like characterize this, but it almost becomes like Internet speak, where it's like, no, I'm actually just like, I don't give a shit. It's actually, I'm using QuickBooks because I don't give a fuck. It's like, either I am a genius or I don't care. And there's nothing in between. And it's like, what is in between is. Is just the fact that they're full of shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. And you know who else is full of shit? Nope. Time to head to ads. Oh, boy, I sure do love ads. Those were some good ones. So, yeah, so we're back. We're talking about Sam Bakeman 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 moves as CEO from the US To Hong Kong and then from Hong Kong to the Bahamas were prompted by, like, he. He and Ellison would have some big relationship conversation and she would say, like, I want to have a closer relationship. And then he would move the entire company without telling anybody. Which, again, like, the instant you hear that anecdote, you're like, oh, well, this guy. There's nothing. This guy is not a super genius. Like, this guy is. Is just a guy. He's just a guy. Can't avoid, like, deal with confrontation. Like, yeah, yeah, that's not special. Again, millions of us out there, every.

[Jamie Loftus]

Conflict avoidant person has their approach. It knows no gender, but it skews towards one. Yeah, my last boyfriend bought an upright base. That was how, bless his heart, I don't think he rot.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The real shame here is that I don't think Lewis draws any sort of connection between how Sam treats the. The women at his company and how, like, Sam treats adults with the specialized financial knowledge that might have saved his company. Because there is a relate. Like, I, I'm not trying to discount his misogyny, which is certainly a thing, but like, I think the bigger through line with Sam that is present outside of just his dealing with, like, the women that he was in relationships with and worked with is that Sam doesn't think anyone besides him has worthwhile thoughts or ideas and that anything he doesn't understand is not worth paying attention to, which is a big thing in tech guys, right? This attitude that, like, you're seeing it now with AI freaks where they're. They don't think that there's any value in the human creation of art because they don't understand it. Like, they're willing to, like, have an AI just, like, come up with some crap that's vaguely patterned off of a Historic. See, isn't this picture of, like, you know, isolation and anomie in modern society better now that we've turned it into a bunch of friends having brunch outside of a cafe? Look, it's much brighter now and prettier. It's like, no, that's not the point of the art. You don't understand. But, like, they don't. Yeah, it's this.

[Jamie Loftus]

Do you think that a computer could come up with the image of Paul Walker and Brian the dog in a convertible? No, That's a uniquely human artistic instinct.

[Robert Evans]

Only we would understand it.

[Jamie Loftus]

Only humans would get it.

[Robert Evans]

This idea that, like, I am smart and therefore if I don't understand something, it's not important. Right? It's. It's something for, like, people who are less than me to deal with. This is why the company fell apart. And it's interesting to me that, like, Lewis, he clearly does see aspects of how Sam treats women unfairly, but he doesn't make any sort of leaps between the way Sam treats, like, everybody who's not him. And I find that interesting.

[Jamie Loftus]

I do, too.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah, Good. Good stuff. So perhaps the biggest major through line in going infinite is Michael Lewis not getting the joke. That section where he quotes SBF Explaining why CFOs are dumb is a perfect example. On a casual reading, you might even assume that we were supposed to find the line, what do you think I do? What the fuck do you think I do all day? Do you think I don't know how much money we have? Funny, because Sam did not how much money they had, of course. But at the climax of the book, after FTX is crumbled, Lewis goes into detail to discuss all the money that was recovered by John Ray, quote, at the end of June20. Yeah, the third. At the end of June 2023, John Ray had filed a report on his various collections. To date, the debtors have recovered approximately 7 billion in liquid assets, he wrote, and they anticipate additional recoveries. 7.3 billion, to be exact. Ray was inching towards an answer to the question I'd been asking from the day of the collapse. Where did all that money go? The answer was nowhere. It was still there. And that's not true. The reason he's writing this is that earlier in Sam's career, a bunch of people leave Alameda because he loses $4 million and they think that he's lost $4 million in investor money and he's a dick about it. And later they find it like he had just misplaced it, basically. And so Louis is being like, that's just what happened. They were never really in bankruptcy. See, it was a good business. Like they just didn't have any record keeping. So they lost the money. And this meanie John Ray thinks it's bad to lose several billion dollars. But Louis is saying is not true. He is kind of lying here. Maybe he just. Maybe it's an honest mistake. I don't know. But it's not accurate because for one thing, 7 ish 7.3 billion has been found. Almost 9 billion is missing. So that's one and a half billion dollars unaccounted for. Still, that's still one of the largest financial in history. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Significant.

[Robert Evans]

That's why maybe as much as 2 billion. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Just 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 not good.

[Robert Evans]

Well, he tries to close that hole by being like. And a lot of that money is in these, you know, money they paid to these companies that they'll probably get back. And it's like, why would you think that a lot of that money went to other shady crypto people who don't bank in the U.S. why do you think that the money's gonna come back?

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, see, this is interesting because now I, I feel, I feel bad because I know Michael Lewis is not the bastard of the episode. However, he's kind of Sam. If we're applying Sam Bankman Freed's theory that you do not do any valuable work after 45, that may in fact apply to Michael.

[Robert Evans]

Michael Lewis. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like, sounds like maybe he's lost the thread because it's the way that he's talking about money. And I mean, and I have not read this book.

[Robert Evans]

I have.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's why they pay you the big bucks. But like to, to hear how he talks about money in this book and to know that his most famous works have to do with finance with the exception of the, of the Blind side, which everyone forgets that he wrote like it calls his entire body of work into question.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And it's like, yeah, just the, the ridiculousness of being, being like, well look guys, 7, you know, they've recovered 7 billion out of 9.3 billion. So things are basically good. Like that's insane. But also, as we'll get to later, he is he. That even that doesn't tell the whole truth. Like this idea that everyone's going to get their money back is not true. But Louis, in order to continue believing that Sam was a Super genius. He has to have this kind of tragic story where like, he didn't really lose the money, it was a misunderstanding. It's all unfair. And because he needs to believe this, I think for the sake of his own ego, bringing up the fact that there's a lot of money missing is a really easy way to piss him off. And I'm gonna play you this clip. It's the most revealing clip that I found. And this is from an interview he did on a YouTube channel called Intelligence Squared after the FTX collapse, like after his book came out. So while Sam is on trial, basically, okay, 7.3 billion.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

So it's 1.3 billion that's missing plus and there's still more to be found.

[Robert Evans]

And it's more than that. It's more than that.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

This is where today, today the prosecution. The prosecution sent a motion to the court saying, can we please not talk about the possibility that customers are all going to get their money back. And, and, and that in particular, can we. You going to let me finish?

[Robert Evans]

I am.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

You want me ask.

[Robert Evans]

I need to let them in. Oh my God.

[Jamie Loftus]

I think what I can care about.

[Anabe Sofas Ad]

Is the fact that at the very.

[Robert Evans]

Least you thought it was important, but now you don't think it's.

[Jamie Loftus]

No, I do think it's important. I think at the very least he's irresponsible.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

Of course, I'm not saying he's not irresponsible. I'm saying it's just different than you think.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay, Okay, a few observations. First of all, to pay. Second of all, uploaded four.

[Robert Evans]

That is a toupee, right? His hair does not look real colors.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's not giving matching color. Second observation, upload date four weeks ago. Gnarly, right? Third observation. Obviously he. He cuts off a woman aggressively to be wrong. 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 feels. 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. It's ridiculous.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Jamie, though, here's the thing. This is the difference between, you know.

[Jamie Loftus]

It'S the same the culture.

[Robert Evans]

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, like the Parthenon, you know, you butt chugging the contents of Infinite Jest was a Parthenon level work of. It will be with us in 10,000 years.

[Jamie Loftus]

Misunderstood this time. Misunderstood.

[Robert Evans]

Just like the Parthenon.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's in like a fucking cathedral though.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it does look like. Yeah, he's in. Sophie, can you bring up a freeze frame of his face at like 12:57 in that? Because he is doing an. I think you should leave face. Like, he is almost a perfect character from one of those fucking sketches.

[Jamie Loftus]

Tim Robinson could do this. Dodge.

[Robert Evans]

Tim Robinson could do an amazing job of this. There's that sketch from the recent season where he's being like an on air pundit who like gets on his phone and gets real quiet whenever he loses an argument. That like, Lewis is definitely doing that kind of face in this.

[Jamie Loftus]

God, that right there where he's got his.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's. He's doing a Tim Robinson.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's really. Oh boy, it's so fun. And I'm doubling down on my two on the two page theory. Right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. No, that hair does not move the.

[Jamie Loftus]

Way to see if we've got the, if we've got the veneers to match.

[Robert Evans]

But he's too rich to not have veneers.

[Jamie Loftus]

I, I aspire to veneers. That's. I just want to have exactly that much money.

[Robert Evans]

I wanted to play how angry he gets there because we're going to address the actual facts of his claim. Now, even if you take Lewis at his, his word, which is that it's basically fine because they recovered 7.3 out of like $9.3 billion, he's. He's obfuscating the truth. It is accurate that Ray has announced FTX customers will see 90% of every dollar of recovered assets returned, which I would still call that problematic because if somebody stole 10% of your bank account, you'd be kind of miffed. But that is even not what it seems like, and I'm quoting from Investopedia here. To be clear, the 90% number refers to the funds FTX is able to gain access to rather than total customer deposits at the time of the exchange's collapse. That doesn't necessarily mean customers will gain access to 90 of their assets that were left on the exchange. Rather, customers will gain access to 90% of the funds FTX is able to distribute to their creditors. FTX and FTX US had an estimated $8.7 billion combined shortfall by the time the crypto firm filed for bankruptcy. Roughly 6.9%. Roughly $6.9 billion of that shortfall, including a Bahamas real estate portfolio, has been recovered. Let's consider Bitcoin the largest Cryptocurrency by market cap as a proxy for the broader cryptocurrency markets. On Nove 11th of last year, the petition date, Bitcoin was trading at around 17,000. On Friday, it crossed 30,000. So, simply put, if the current plan goes through, you'd likely get 85% of the dollar value of your cryptocurrency held on FTX as of last November, even if the same coins have almost doubled in value today. So one of those, like both, he's. He's kind of overestimating the amount that they're going to get back and also because they lost, like, they still lost access to that money for. It'll probably turn out to be two or three years. Like, people have had to sell their homes and shit because, like, they had all of their. Like that. There's harm here. Right? That's what the courts are saying. Not only is there still money missing and not an insignificant amount, but, like, people suffered in the interim where they didn't have access to their money. And yeah, they're crypto gamblers. I'm not. This isn't the most sympathetic population, but that is not relevant to determining whether or not Sam has legal. He's stealing 15 or 20% of a bunch of people's savings accounts is a substantial crime.

[Jamie Loftus]

The legal question is, is it a scam? Which. Yeah, 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 were like, yeah, you're. What are you talking about? This happening is like a very, you know, it's like, easy to cheer it on, but it's also like, yeah, no, Sam Bankman Fried was taking advantage of every possible mark he could.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And yeah. And people are still suffering ongoing harm as a result of it. He's acting like Louis is acting as if there wasn't really anyone hurt. And it's like, well, no, even if all of them, which will not happen, at least about 20% of that money, of depositor money is just gone, probably more. But even if he hadn't done that, if you're still locked out of your money for two years because a guy illegally gambled with it, are you gonna be fine that it came back eventually? No, you still didn't have that money for years, and that's a problem for you. That's a crime.

[Jamie Loftus]

I mean. And I would be more amenable to that perspective if it was coming from someone who wasn't as like historically fabulously rich as Michael Lewis is because it's like a rich gaming the rich story can be really satisfying, but this is not the guy to be making it and he's falling on the wrong side anyways.

[Robert Evans]

And it's like gaming the rich. Gaming the rich. Because like they didn't hire Larry David to do a commercial so they could scam billionaires. Right? They hired Larry David to do a commercial so they could scam your mom, you know, because your mom likes Larry David. I'm not saying the rest of us don't. I mean, most moms do, right? He's pretty popular amongst the moms off in the comments.

[Jamie Loftus]

I don't know if my mom knows.

[Robert Evans]

Who I mean, all the women in my family were big Seinfeld fans.

[Jamie Loftus]

Does your mom watch Curb Message?

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, But Seinfeld.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, my mom. Yeah, my mom watched her.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, my mom.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay, I'm back.

[Robert Evans]

I'm back. Yeah. So anyway, Michael Lewis. Yeah, 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, that's stealing. Michael Lewis never uses the term stolen to describe what Sam did. And he basically goes to great lengths to claim that Sam misplaced all this money. This is again wildly inaccurate. And a good example of that is Alameda's hashtag fiat account, which is like. That was one of the names for like the account where they were putting all of the actual US Dollars that customers put in the exchange. So customers would, would put US dollars into FTX and then use it to like buy cryptocurrency. Right. But those US dollars needed to stay in the exchange so that people could cash out out their positions. Right. Otherwise you're not doing legitimately what you're supposed to do as a business. FTX was not a bank. A bank is allowed only has to keep a certain amount in reserve. Right? That's what a reserve currency is. This is an exchange. They were supposed to keep enough reserve in there to cover the value of their deposits. Sam instead took all that money and put it into Alameda. And this, there's evidence that it like never. It went directly into Alameda. The money people thought they were depositing into FTX went directly into another company entirely, I would call that. And in fact, Sam was convicted because this is an example of fraud. Lewis depicts it as an honest mistake. And here's the New Yorker Quote, Lewis finds it not only wholly implausible that this was in fact a gigantic accounting error explained by FTX's difficulty securing bank accounts. As Lewis concludes, his story, implausible as it sounded, remained irritatingly difficult to disprove. And Lewis very gently insinuates that Ellison, in over her head, might have made a some very bad decisions. And in court, which again is a couple of weeks after his book comes out, it is proven with data from the company that Sam not only did not like, not only knew what he was doing, but he ordered other people to obscure this fact from customers. Right. He ordered his employees to hide from customers that their money was going straight into another company. This was proven when they, like actually during the court case, they had the people who programmed the exchange on Sam's behalf, like, post code Jesus. And I found an analysis of FTX's code by Molly White, who does a newsletter called Citation Needed, which is quite good. Molly knows code and stuff, so here's her analyzing that. Prosecutors questioned Wang, who was the guy who was coding the exchange, about the FTX insurance fund, which was ostensibly supposed to protect both FDX and its customers from trades that went badly even more quickly than the exchange's risk engine could account for. FTX published the fund's supposed balance on their website and bragged widely about its existence, including in testimony to US Congress. However, according to Wang, the number showed on the website was falsified. And the question is like, is this a real number, Wang? No. So it's a fake number? Yes. Was the real number higher or lower than the fake number? Lower. And yeah, the way that they would do this. So like, they're supposed to have this insurance fund, which is part of what makes FTX safer than the other exchanges, is that we keep. You can't do a run on the bank because our entire, like, all of our deposits are backed up by cash. Right. So we can't collapse the way that other, other exchanges do. And like to make people feel comfortable, they had, they would show them they had, like you could see, like, what the insurance fund was at. They would regularly brag, we have this much money in our insurance fund. It came.

[Jamie Loftus]

Was that number accurate?

[Robert Evans]

Like, no. All they were doing.

[Jamie Loftus]

I don't know why I even asked.

[Robert Evans]

The code snippets show that, like, they had. Sam ordered Nishad Singh to write some code that would update the insurance fund amount randomly by adding it to the daily trading volume. Like the amount of. 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. So it would.

[Jamie Loftus]

This is how an 11 year old.

[Robert Evans]

It was just lying how you do business. They're like, so there was never an insurance, a real insurance fund of any like meaningful amount of money. They just pretended it was there by having a computer do a random equation. So it seemed like it was fluctuating over time.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, that's, that's not legal to do.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, that's fraud there.

[Jamie Loftus]

I. 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. Like for any other people you would be like, yeah, so this was a lie. And then this happened. Like you wouldn't be splitting hairs like this.

[Robert Evans]

To be fair, the actual thrust of that New Yorker article is like, Michael Lewis is what the fuck is happening with this guy? Because he's clearly fallen for like the New York article is very critical of him. It's bringing up that he is not calling Sam Bankman Fried a fucking con man when he clearly is. Right?

[Jamie Loftus]

So they're like, headline, Michael Lewis low key, fell off.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, low key. He fell off. That's right. Molly also brings up something else that was left out of court, but the prosecution published evidence of it. And I found this really telling elsewhere in the code. It's possible to observe that the amount of ftt, which is the token created, that represented basically voting shares, it was like it was FTX's funny money was actually represented by a hard coded value in the user interface and was not pulling from an external data source to get a real number. So again, they're lying about how much money is in this fund. And part of how you can tell is when you would ask to see the insurance fund, it wouldn't consume back to the servers. It was just, it was doing the calculation on your own machine. Right. Which is evidence that like there was never any attempt to give people accurate information. Wow, it's fun stuff. There's other fun reveals during the court case, for example.

[Jamie Loftus]

Give me the twists. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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. They were like, hey, it seems like you run both these companies and like traders on Alameda are using are trading on ftx. Is it possible that they're getting preferential treatment on the exchange that you also owned There's a really telling Twitter conversation on Molly's blog where someone asks this. And SBF says, alameda is the liquidity provider, but their account is just like everyone else's. And the respondent rightfully says, I guess we're just supposed to trust you. And it turned out they were right to be worried. One of the chief selling points about FTX is that it's crash proof. Right? Crypto exchanges have this weird habit like 20 years old now of getting really big and then collapsing, taking everyone's money with them. Sometimes this is due to hacks, but also there's a lot of because there's no regulation, a lot of times major traders will go bust. And that causes losses for the whole exchange, which gets socialized. Right. Everybody loses money because one bad gambler gambled too much. One of FTX's like selling points was that it was different. They had an algorithm to automatically freeze trades on an account once that account had suffered losses equal to the amount of money they'd put in the exchange. Right. So you can't lose more money than than you put in is the basic idea. So that's how it was supposed to work. And that's how it worked initially. But the limit that Alameda had for its gambling to make sure that it couldn't get in over its skis was removed later on Sam Bankman Fried's orders. And in court, Gary Wang, Sam's business partner, explained how Sam did directed them to do this. Wang explained that Alameda had not started out with such a high credit limit, but that periodically the trading firm had run into issues placing trades because they didn't have enough collateral. Sam Bankman Fried kept asking him to increase their credit limit to prevent it from happening. According to Wang, the limit was originally set to a few million dollars, but then it was increased to a billion after they ran up against that limit too. Bankman Fried asked him to set it to a number so large they wouldn't likely hit the limit at that point. Wang said it it to around 65 billion. And when I read that, what I see is this is a gambler in Vegas who's like taking out loans to keep gambling cause he's run out of money.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like he's like, yeah, you just imagine like someone like on their knees in like shitty pinstripe pants being like, come on man.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, just give me some credit man. I'm good for it.

[Jamie Loftus]

But he got up to 65 billion in credit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Which is insane now when you pair all this with the stories that SBF tells that Lewis tells of SBF's gaming adventures addiction, you might conclude was this kid just a gambling addict? Which is my. By the way, that's my interpretation there.

[Jamie Loftus]

I mean, there to be. It sounds like this shit is Neo. Points to him like, it really is. Like, if there's anything that got the millennial generation hooked on capitalism and random gambling, it was neopets. And if anyone has proof that Sam Bankman Fried was a neopets user, he just sounds like the worst version of. Of a neopets user to me. The worst end game for a neopets user is what you've been describing to me for. For several hours.

[Robert Evans]

And I think you and I, we're not invested in Sam Bankman Fried ever being particularly smart. So we can see this Lewis, he's a neopets user.

[Jamie Loftus]

And I bet I was better at it than him.

[Robert Evans]

Well, that's the other thing. He was never very good at games. Like people found his like League of Legends account and were like, yeah, he was mid. Like, I know, don't. Sure. He wasn't good at Storybook Brawl. Right? Like, he's just, he was never good at this.

[Jamie Loftus]

But it was the first time that Michael Lewis had heard of Storybook Brawl. So Sam Bankman Fried said he was the best at it. Why not believe him? Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And that just the idea like, again, Louis can't be like, yeah, this kid had a gambling problem and he also owned a bank, so it became everyone's issue. But like, you're not.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's a bank man.

[Robert Evans]

It's hard to portray someone as smart if they, they're just addicted to gambling. Right. Because that's not a smart person thing. It actually, a lot of smart people are horrible addicts in a variety of ways, but like, but it's like it's a serious problem in a Hollywood way. Make it look like somebody's a genius if they just can't control themselves. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a serious, serious problem.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. And I again, no shame on people who have that problem. But like, that, that does not work with how Lewis wants to portray him. Right. And yeah, speaking of things that don't.

[Jamie Loftus]

Work, shit, everything you're about to advertise.

[Robert Evans]

We won't have to work if you purchase these products.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay, good, good self correction.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I saved.

[Sophie]

Actually we'll continue to work more accurate.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, both tr. We're back. So, you know, I think it's clear from the stuff that came out in the court case That I just read some of. There's no way Alameda and 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. The reality is that Sam Bankman Fried used depositor money to gamble. And he was gambling in part on his own chances. He wasn't just gambling. This is the thing that is important to understand past a certain point. Most of his gambling was not him betting on cryptocurrencies. Right. The big shit he did that made the news, the billion dollars that he pumped into naming, renaming that stadium in Florida to bringing in all these celebrities to these high dollar super bowl ads, that was a gamble. He was pulling a slot machine on his own chances of ascending to the halls of power. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Sounds like him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of my favorite aside bits from the court case is that on the stand when she was being questioned, Carolyn Ellison told everybody that Sam confided in her he thought he'd had a 5% chance of becoming President of the United States.

[Jamie Loftus]

United States, which, well, I mean it sounds ridiculous, but also like, look at some of the dumbasses we've got. He's probably not wrong that he, I mean he at least could have been like, who is that fucking loser from Starbucks? He could have at least been that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he could have. I think he could have had a failed presidential. But no, like, yeah, oh yeah. No, like they're all dumb like Joe Biden and Donald Trump are. Both have both done very stupid things. Different kinds of very stupid things. But they both have charisma. Right?

[Jamie Loftus]

That's true, that's true.

[Robert Evans]

They, they like, like you could again say what you will about Joe Biden, he wouldn't have been in politics this long if he couldn't make enough people like him. And obviously Donald Trump is very charismatic. Sam Bankman Fried just isn't. Like you don't become the President if you are a void of charisma.

[Jamie Loftus]

No, we, and we've learned that time and time again.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the thing, like he was always all of his, his, his sudden rise to public prominence was not based on him actually being interesting. It was based on him spending tens of millions of dollars to get like Bill Clinton. Clinton to pretend to be his buddy. Like that was all there ever was to it, you know, in my general research on the crypto industry. And if you're looking for actual good reading, don't buy going infinite. You won't get anything valuable at it. If you do want to get something valuable 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. Faux Zeke F A U X. Really good book, Number Go up, which I do recommend to people curious for the dark side of crypto. Zeke also spent time with Sam in the Bahamas, and I found this passage from his book relevant to what I just mentioned. A few hours into our conversation, Bankman Fried told me he had to make a call. I had asked him if there was anyone who'd support his version of events, and he said I could talk with one of his few remaining supporters. While I waited, in walked a haughty man with a long scraggly beard, a pot belly and mismatched socks. One the of one of them with a Pac man design. He was an employee of FTX who'd stuck around to help Bankman Fried try to find an investor to rescue the exchange. I threw out an easy question. Why are you still here? I asked. He started off by saying he wanted to help FTX's customers. Then, unprompted, he told me he thought there wasn't much of a risk that Bankman Fried would ever get in trouble. I firmly believe once somebody becomes a certain level of rich, they're never poor again. He said they don't go to jail, nothing bad happens to them.

[Jamie Loftus]

Wait, he has his own Zuckerberg quote. He has his own you can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way I live my life. Haha. Wait, read it again for me so I can really take it in.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And again, this is, this is Sam's friend who stuck by him after his business collapsed. I firmly believe once somebody becomes a certain level of rich, they're never poor again. They don't go to jail, nothing bad happens to them.

[Jamie Loftus]

Poetry.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing to think in that moment too, where all of the smarter people have been just fled the.

[Jamie Loftus]

Island and in that moment he was infinite. That was. Wow. Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

I'm speechless.

[Robert Evans]

It's so funny too. Cause like, I don't know man, just historically, do you remember like Marie Antoinette was pretty rich and like that didn't end well, you know, like there's a.

[Jamie Loftus]

Lot of Kirsten Benz player in a.

[Robert Evans]

Movie, Bizarre, had a lot of money. It didn't go well for him. You know, bad things happen to rich people too.

[Jamie Loftus]

I mean, fuck it. And that's your main political stance. As I Recall.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, I will hang out with anybody, Rich, because nothing bad can happen to them. Obviously untrue. I kind of suspect that that sort of. I don't know. The fact that so much of what was said, like Zeke Faux is clearly someone who's smart enough to understand when he's being lied to by these people and understand their fundamental absurdity. And that comes across in his book. I don't think Lewis got that right. He believed fundamentally in the fundamental honesty at the center of Sam Bankman Fried, and I kind of suspect that's why he covered his face with his hands that day in court. He's not a dumb man, and he must have realized by that point the evidence that came out in the trial was undeniable. It made it undeniable that he got conned too. One of the most remarkable things about Going Infinite is how much detail Lewis provides about FTX's collapse without ever calling Sam a liar. The Guardian review noted this too. He thought Bankman Fried hadn't lied to him at all, or at least that he'd only lied by omission, not by commission. 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? Bankman Fried admits that he would have changed the subject or rustled up a word salad. And whatever the facades erected by other effective altruists, Lewis considers Bankman Fried to be enigmatic but essentially genuine, and certainly not out to enrich himself because he has no desire for the things that money can buy. Lewis's refusal to believe that Sam Bankman Fried is a liar in the most venal base sense of the word is based, I think, on a sense of professional pride. That explains why he's so adamant about pushing the line that there was no money missing. And it's why he continued to defend Sam's dissembling as a fun, quirky character trait while the trial was going on. See as part of the cash in ongoing Infinite, Michael Lewis launched a podcast, Judging the Trial of Sam Bankman Fried.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, it was a dumb. 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.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. Right. It's the last refuge of fools and scoundrels.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Please pay for the Cool Zone free subscription app. What do we call it? Sophie. So the trial judging Sam is part of Louis's against the Rules podcast on Pushkin. And I can't speak for the Regular episodes of that. I have not listened to any of the other ones.

[Jamie Loftus]

Nor have I.

[Robert Evans]

But I can say his Sam Bankman Fried Trial podcast is an uneven effort at best. Most of the work is done by Lydia Jean. She's a journalist. She's okay. I don't have any huge issues with her. I think we get a little too much, like, here's what the Court Kitchen is like. Here's anecdotes from the fun lives of the journalists covering it.

[Jamie Loftus]

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, stepping on leaves and you're like, oh, my God, I get it. You're in fucking New Hampshire in October. What happens?

[Robert Evans]

It's permanently fall where you NPR people leave. We understand. Yes. But every podcast on this trial does something like that. I think it's just because they have to. They were doing, like, basically daily episodes and needed to fill runtime and, like, look, is that lazy? Yes. Have we all been there? Yes. So I simply can't throw stones at this glass house.

[Jamie Loftus]

What are you talking about?

[Robert Evans]

What do you mean?

[Jamie Loftus]

As someone who's never had a daily podcast, I condemn this behavior because I've never had to do it.

[Robert Evans]

So you're welcome. Lydia takes most of the lifting on this show because Louis was on tour for his book. Right. And so he couldn't be there for most of it. He was barely at the trial.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. He was screaming at women in cathedrals. He was busy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. But he does occasionally come on. 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. And, you know, during this portion where he's like, sam's being cross examined, he says, I don't recall more than a hundred times. Here's how a write up from the Verge summarizes his time on the stand. Bankman Fried's demeanor suggested a spoiled child complaining he didn't get the biggest scoop of ice cream at his birthday party. He didn't want to answer the prosecutor's questions or his lawyer's questions. He wanted to answer his own questions, which he liked better. He often replied to yes and no questions with nonsense. We were getting introduced to a document where Bankman Fried listed his priorities, including getting accounting right on FTX Cohen and Bankman Fried, Cohen's lawyer and Bankman Fried used this to show how devoted Bankman Fried was to getting to the bottom of the general fiasco with Alameda's money. The idea was to display in real time FTX's revenue and expenses, where its bank accounts were, how much was it, investor money it had, and so on. This did reveal Bankman Fried's priorities. Getting accounting right was ranked ninth. So. So for the stories Bankman Fried wanted to tell, we had to rely on Bankman Fried. 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

God, this is more stand up behavior.

[Robert Evans]

The actual evidence suggests that Ellison is both a better trader and much savvier than Bankman Fried. She modeled out a risk scen that matched almost exactly what happened at FTX, for instance, to try to keep him from sinking 2 billion into venture investing. And like what happens is he's putting, you know, all this money into advertising, into like playing celebrities. He's putting like $2 billion into these random series of investments. And she's like, hey, we've taken depositor money to gamble with. We have to keep more cash on hand, otherwise the whole exchange could collapse. Sam ignores her, the exchange collapses, and then he blames her for not hedging. Right. And a hedge is when you take like a bet that one thing will happen. You take the opposite bet at a smaller amount of money so that if no matter what happens, you can't lose too much money. Right, right. But there's no hedging the kind of risks that FTX was taking because the fundamental risk was we don't have enough money if there's a run on the bank, you know, well, it's like their.

[Jamie Loftus]

Their risk was we're never going to die. Like they're, you can't, you can't head hedge that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

What is wild to me is like everything you're describing is ridiculous and it makes total sense that it imploded in the catastrophic way that it did. But then you also, I mean, so much of it sounds like the kind of stuff that, for example, Michael Lewis might report on is a tremendous scam that worked out great for everybody.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's, it's so, you know, again, that quote from the Verge is pretty similar to how most reporters who were there at the trial described it. It is wildly different from how Michael Lewis describes how Sam reacts on the stage. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's interesting because like obviously most people were able to see, oh yeah, Sam is Just lying on the stand. He's obfuscating. He's refusing to answer. Answer the question. But Michael Lewis. Not only does Michael Lewis like being lied to by Sam Bankman fried, he thinks Sam's def cloud of bullshit. Right. This like, word salad is better than the truth. And he says this in his fucking podcast. Jamie, you're going to love this clip today.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

He didn't get in as much trouble as he got yesterday, though.

[Jamie Loftus]

Not as much. But still a little bit more than other witnesses.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

Yeah, that's true. The bigger point is the judge is sitting there listening to see if Sam is actually answering the question because he.

[Jamie Loftus]

Now knows he doesn't do that. Yeah.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

Or generating a word salad for us all to consume. And I was thinking about this again today, why Sam's word salads are so fun, like, why he gets away with it. Like most people when they don't answer a question, your alarm bells go off pretty quickly like that. You just redirect it in some way. He's really, really good at starting the answer in a place where you think, oh, that's where the beginning of the answer belongs. And then making a little jump into take the are actually interesting to know about. So you're not bored. You're actually interested in what he's saying.

[Jamie Loftus]

You're saying, like, there's substance to it. He's not just saying nothing. He's saying something that's substantive and makes you think it's just not what you asked. But then you're thinking and you forget what you asked.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

That's exactly what happens.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, so that's like, he's just saying that like, yeah, Sam's lies. He's really good at lying. And it's fun to listen to him lie as if that's a defense. Right. Where they're saying like, well, they really, really painted a different picture of Sam because they, you know, he got to get up on the stage and Bullshit.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's a very interesting exchange to listen to as well, because it's like, you know, because it's very clear that Michael Lewis has very little to do with this podcast. I don't know, like, I, I, I, I can think of a number of examples of a, like, big name podcaster coming on their show to, like, be combative with the people who are actually making the show for them. And that, like, exchange too is like, no, like, I know what you're saying, but yeah, and, 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, which does seem to be the case.

[Robert Evans]

Con man.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But, like, yeah, I love this idea that, like, yeah, we're getting to see the real Sam, who was a guy who never answered your actual question. But, like, I want to continue the clip because Lewis says something very, very ridiculous right after this.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

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

[Jamie Loftus]

You're saying, like, there's substance to it. He's not just saying nothing. He's saying something that's substantive and makes you think it's just not what you asked. But then you're thinking and you forget what you asked.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

That's exactly what happens. It's engaging. It's like, maybe it's even better than the answer to the question.

[Jamie Loftus]

Right. Maybe it's what you should have asked.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Michael Lewis (quoted/interviewed)]

Maybe it's even what you should have asked. That's exactly right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's Sam. The questions, Sam answers that aren't what he's being asked are what you should have asked. Right. Like, he's smarter than you, the interviewer, and he knows. Knows what you actually should have asked, which I just thought was a wild thing for a journalist to say. This is, you know, we're getting to the end here, but the last thing I wanted to bring up was maybe the most interesting case of Michael Lewis following Sam's crap, which is him believing that Sam's outfit, his hairstyle, his poor hygiene are all evidence of his brilliance. Right. Sam just didn't have time to, like, take care of his appearance in any way. He was too smart to waste any of it, like his. His brain power on that. And that article in Jacobin gives a really good summary of how the actual testamen of Sam's former friends in court blew this idea out of the water. The prosecutor followed with questions about Sam's approach to public relations. Ellison explained he was trying to cultivate an image of himself as a sort of very smart, competent, somewhat eccentric founder. I was sitting in an overflow room on that day. So when the prosecutor asked, how would you describe the defendant's personal appearance through 2022? The room was allowed to erupt into laughter. Ellison replied, he looked like he didn't put a lot of effort into his personal appearance. He dressed sort of sloppy, sloppily and didn't cut his hair often. He said he thought his hair had been very valuable label. 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. God, yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

First embarrassing, but also, I think, you know, clearly predicated on the dipshit billionaires that came before him. Like, there is a clear aesthetic and a clear, like, you know, slovenly genius.

[Robert Evans]

Thing that he's like, it's strategic and that's interesting, right? The fact that Sam is standing on the shoulders of giants of Steve Jobs unwashed shoulders like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie and whatever when he dresses like.

[Jamie Loftus]

Genocide hoodie that he wears.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, yeah. Lewis describes it as like everything in Sam's appearance felt less like a decision than a decision not to make a decision. And no, what everyone says at FTX is like, he was obsessed with like, his hair. When they were spending, trying to build their $200 million or whatever new headquarters. His 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

Like, which is also based on the. What we were just listening to, what the, like, logo to that podcast is, is the shape of his hair. Everyone's playing into it. It's.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's wild. Anyway, Jamie, that's my episode. Do you think we should fire Michael Lewis into the sun?

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, I was, I was thinking earlier, I am very, very curious because, you know, I think it's like a waste of time to ask, like, will Michael Lewis have another opportunity to course correct his career? Of course he will. Of course he will.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. He's gonna write 70 more books.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, what I'm curious about is, like, where he goes from here. I feel like it's pretty telling if you've been conned to this 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 as fact. And I do wonder, like, if that's the position you're in and you will absolutely write another book because you're unkillable financially. Like, I wonder which direction he's going to go in. Is he going to be hyper cautious? Is he going to play it safe? Is he going to be self reflective at all? Or is he going to double down on the falling for it kind of stuff. I, I, I genuinely don't know because I just, like, it's very hard to discern what kind of person, like, it seems like he's certainly, you know, like, high in his own supply and is like, well, you know, of course anyone could have fallen for it, but he is sort of conceding to the fact that he fell for it. I just am curious what happens to someone from there.

[Robert Evans]

My suspicion, and maybe I'll be wrong about this. I think we'll know pretty soon. I think he's gonna do another Sam. I specifically think he's going to second Sam. Yeah, A second Sam has hit the Michael Lewis bibliography. And it's going to be Sam Altman. Like, he's going to do a Sam Altman, the open AI guy who just got fired from his job. He's going to do a book on Sam Altman. I suspect.

[Jamie Loftus]

You'Re probably right. You're probably. Because then he'll be like, and I would know. I, I can see through Sam's now. Having been conned by one. I certainly won't be conned by Sam.

[Robert Evans]

Me once, Sam on you, Sam. Me twice. Won't get Sam again. You know, I just like George Bush.

[Jamie Loftus]

Sam. Sam of Sammy.

[Robert Evans]

Wow.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

No, that, that's my guess as to where this goes, is Sam Altman.

[Jamie Loftus]

What? Why is Michael Lewis being presented with a second Sam? Doesn't seem fair.

[Robert Evans]

Second Sam is at that. Well, I've already done that joke once, and it worked. And, and it all. It always works, Jamie. It always works. Yeah. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, I don't feel well. You know, I, I've, I, I, I would say, say that this is like, in the top 20 percentile of bastards episodes. I've come out feeling like, you know, I don't feel that bad. I usually feel, like, really dire. I feel pretty good.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's in forever jail.

[Robert Evans]

He is in forever jail, right?

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Speaking of forever jail, Jamie, talent is like a jail that locks you into, for example, making a weekly podcast. And I am happy that you, you and I are about to be cellmates.

[Jamie Loftus]

We are. I'm so excited.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

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.

[Robert Evans]

But Jamie Loftus Weekly is coming to the Cool Zone Network. You are going to be the cool hand Luke of our podcast Prison.

[Sophie]

You're welcome.

[Jamie Loftus]

God, I would love to be the cool hand Luke of the podcast Prison. I gotta get some new outfits.

[Robert Evans]

Gotta get Some new outfits. Gotta. No, that's not the one. Is that the one where he throws a baseball at the wall? Or is that the Great Escape? I feel like that was cool.

[Jamie Loftus]

Hate look at my look in a long time.

[Robert Evans]

Neither have I. Not since I was, like, seven. So I don't know.

[Jamie Loftus]

Wow, you saw Cool Head look when you were seven?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, my mom loved that movie.

[Jamie Loftus]

Nice.

[Robert Evans]

My mom had very strict rules on, like, what I could watch as movies as a kid, unless it was a movie she liked, which is why I was in first grade when we watched Alien, so.

[Jamie Loftus]

Ooh, that explains so much about you to me, too. Like, you saw it when you were so excited.

[Robert Evans]

Excited that all the men die and the woman didn't. But, like, yeah, she wanted me to see that movie at a very young age.

[Jamie Loftus]

What a legacy. Truly.

[Robert Evans]

What a legacy. The sentence because men are stupid was uttered two or three times during that.

[Jamie Loftus]

Movie, which does unpack a lot of the plot, intended or not. My mom would let me watch soap operas very young, and I would be like, what do they mean when they say making love? And she would say, what do you think? I don't know. I'm seven.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, you haven't. You have not equipped me to answer that question, Mother.

[Jamie Loftus]

Well, yes. Weekly podcast coming soon. Early next year. What's it about? You guess, but don't contact me about it, because you're wrong.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. A second Jamie has hit the cool zone. I mean, you've done more than two podcasts. This joke never worked, but whatever.

[Jamie Loftus]

First Jamie has hit the cool zone. Weekly.

[Robert Evans]

That's right, Jamie. What.

[Sophie]

What podcast is this of ours? Oh, God.

[Robert Evans]

How many?

[Jamie Loftus]

How many?

[Robert Evans]

This is.

[Sophie]

This will be. What?

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, it's impossible to say.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's impossible to say when I think it's like six. Yeah, I think it's like six. We've entered the half dozen range. It's getting dangerous.

[Sophie]

That's so cool for us.

[Jamie Loftus]

I know. We're forever wives. Sam Bankman, Fried forever chill. Forever jail. Us forever wives.

[Robert Evans]

So, Jamie, anything else you wanted to plug before we ride on out of here like Michael?

[Jamie Loftus]

Hi.

[Sophie]

Raw Dog, bitches.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, it's the holidays. Are you looking for something to get for your loved or hated one? I won't know. Buy a copy of Raw Dog. It's my book about hot dogs. And if you don't like hot dogs, the title's funny. And I think that's. You know, about 60% of the purchases I've gotten have been off that alone, so you should buy Raw dogs and.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, buy raw dog and. No, I'm not going to make a raw dog joke. That's just going to get me in trouble anyway. Buy a Cooler Zone Media subscription and you won't have to hear ads. Or don't buy a Cooler Zone Media subscription and continue to listen to ads. It's I don't care. Live your life. I'm not your fucking dad.

[Jamie Loftus]

If you really want to hear the advertisers that Robert's disparaging, I personally, I think it's more fun to imagine it. So you should get a Cooler Zone Media subscription.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, once everyone's on Cooler Zone Media, then we can finally get that sweet Lockheed Martin subscription that I or whatever ad deal that I've been wanting to have.

[Jamie Loftus]

And then Robert can finally live inside a grenade like it's always been his dream.

[Robert Evans]

That's been my dream. That's been my dream. Jamie. Yeah. All right, we're done.

[Jamie Loftus]

We did it.

[Sophie]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behind the Bastards.

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[Jamie Loftus]

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