Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)

20:27There was the invention of mortgage bonds. When did those get invented? Late 70s, early 80s. But the market was exploding. And Solomon Brothers had historically been this place. It was kind of a sleepy backwater. but they were really shrewd, traders of bonds. And bonds were always thought to be like, that's not where the money is. Stocks are where the money is. And all of a sudden, bonds were where the money was. And what happened in that place was the best story on Wall Street. An atomic bomb of money went off. In a crazy place that, although when I got to it, had become a public corporation.

20:56They had sold stock in themselves. They had pretty recently been just a private partnership. And the behavior in the place was like the behavior you would have in a private men's club where nobody was ever going to see would happen there. And it was literally every third day, some stripper would come in, take off all her clothes on the desk. Yeah. These are throwing spitballs at each other. I mean, everyone's acting like they're 13, right? Food fight, yes. Buying too much food just to show off. The material was fantastic. Yeah. Yes. What about Coke? How much were you seeing Coke? I need a little more Coke in this story.

21:28Is it Coke or Quaaludes? I hesitate. That's to come off the Coke. Because I'm pretty naive about drugs. Oh, you are. Alcohol's great. I never really need anything more. But we would agree it was all fueled by coke it was fueled by almost like a gambling addiction but that's what you saw it's this compulsive behavior people were betting money for the firm and when they weren't betting money for the firm they were betting with each other on anything they could bet on liar's poker dice one thing after another horses sports it was just constant gambling and i got my problems but that's not one of them i don't care about it but it was fun to watch and fun to describe they let in all kinds of characters it wasn't cookie cutter people Former Navy fighter pilots and former professional athletes and people had just come off the street and shouted their way into a job.

22:11It was hustlers. That's an energetic vibe. Very energetic. In some ways, I love that part of the place. Yeah, I bet it would be intoxicating just to be involved in it. It was. It was also intoxicating because I was, by their standards, kind of an intellectual. I had gone to Princeton. I had a master's. I thought all the time about things. Yeah, you knew about art. Yeah, that kind of stuff. Triggering stuff. And so there was a training class for six months where it was not like teachers from out of the place. It was the actual traders paraded through and you could ask them anything. And I was the guy who always had his hand in the air and was grilling them, trying to understand what they did.

22:48I got to master the subject because they let me do it. It's a moment I don't have anymore. I know what goes on Wall Street a little bit. But at the time, I felt like I knew more about what was going on Wall Street than anybody. And so much of the stuff is brand new. Everything's always been digitized. That's right. The young person is learning it and the old people don't know it. It was absolutely thrilling for about a year and a half. And then I hit some cliff. All of a sudden, there wasn't that much to learn. And what I was supposed to be doing is selling people stuff they shouldn't buy. And you're surrounded by toxic human beings who are in a nosedive.

23:19Yes. I remember just going home at night and staring at the ceiling thinking, I can't believe I just did that. You did a bad, bad thing. And I was rewarded for it. I was successful. I was in the loan office and my clients were people who were managing billions of dollars. It wasn't widows and orphans, but my job was to get them to do stuff they probably shouldn't do. Or sometimes they should do it, but mostly not. And in a funny way, this is a little crude. It was to get them to take the other side of bets that our own traders were making. So these were not good bets. That's what's fucking wild is you learn about how all these banks work.

23:49They're playing every single side of it. They used to be. With some tiny margin. Yes, that's right. It's like in your podcast, the guy who figured out on a New York Knicks versus Lakers game, And the odds in New York are going to be different because they're biased by loving the Knicks. And then the Lakers bettors are going to be biased. So the spread in those two places, there's something to be made there. There's like a point off. Yeah, that's right. You bet the Knicks in Los Angeles and the Lakers in New York. And you're going to win. Or at least you're not going to lose. Get different point spreads in different places.

24:16Yeah. I got to a point where I was faking it. And when I started to fake it, I started to do less work at work and started to write more articles about what was going on at work. And I got in trouble. I was wondering the fallout. Because it's nonfiction. and you're using everyone's names. This is what happened. I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page saying everybody on Wall Street was overpaid. Oh. While you were there. While I was there. I just jumped. At the bottom of it, it said my name, and I was an associate at Salomon Brothers in London. Oh, my. This is how delusional a 24-year-old is, though.

24:49I remember thinking, it's so cool. Everybody's going to think it's so cool. He has an article. He's so brave. I was thinking, I'd come in, the boss would go, man, you have an article in the Wall Street Journal. Oh. No. That's not what they said. You thought everyone had your same primary desire, which is to be a published writer. I get to work. The guy who's the husband of the woman, the guy who hired me, who ran the whole Solomon Brothers, is waiting for me at my desk. I really liked him. And he looked so sad. And kind of gray. And he said, Michael, what have you done? He said, I've been up all night.

25:18And I said, why? And he said, why? Because you love my article so much. And he said, no, we had an emergency board member meeting. Because of the article. And I said, oh. Very oddly, there were a bunch of reasons that they didn't want to fire me. It would have looked horrible if they fired you. You'd be like a whistleblower. No, that wasn't it at all. What was it? I had stumbled into the second or third most profitable client the firm had, who I didn't do anything useful for. They were just amused that I was there. And I would tell them the things I was going to write. The guy said, I don't need any advice from people like you.

25:55If you just tell me what you're saying, that will be useful enough. and I'll funnel a lot of my business through you. It was Jacob Rothschild. Wow. The Rothschild. The Rothschild, the guys who ran his money. And they became so big that I was just a money machine. All I was was not offensive to them. I wasn't trying to sell them things they shouldn't buy. And they were going to buy something they'd call or sell something. And they let us make money off them. They were really pretty funny because I was 24. They refused to talk to anybody else in the firm. Oh, I love this move. So extremely important people, including the CEO, would come to London and want to meet them because, my God, they're now the second biggest client of the firm.

26:28And they would say, no, thank you. We just want to talk to Michael. Wow. This is awesome. So in a way, they made me possible. They protected me. So the guy wasn't going to fire him. His name is Charlie McFay. Great guy. He says, we've got to find a way this doesn't ever happen again. You can't write. He said, it's what I love to do. And I'm going to keep doing it. And he goes, could you find another name? Oh. And I said, that's not a problem. And I don't know why it popped into my head. I said, what if I use my mother's maiden name? Diana Bleeker Monroe. So I wrote some things under the name of Diana Bleeker.

26:58Oh, interesting, because now we've changed genders. I wonder what that does to the reception. That's what he said. He said, this is perfect, because none of these people around here are going to think a girl's a guy. Yeah. Right, right. Exact quote. He said, no one will think about it. It never would say Solomon. It would just say Diana Bleeker is whatever. Now, The New Republic then was a pretty hot magazine. Michael Kinsley was an editor of Genius. Michael Kinsley, who published some of my first pieces, some of them under the name of Diana Bleeker, He refused to just let it sit at that. So he would put at the bottom of the article, Diana Bleeker is a suit.

27:30One day I got home and I got a landline call. I pick up the phone and the actor Chevy Chase, his dad was named Ned Chase. And Ned Chase was a prominent nonfiction editor at Simon & Schuster. Oh, wow. He said who he was. I can't remember if he told me that Chevy was his son. He did. Yeah. I just guarantee that he didn't do that. He definitely did. He might have. And he said, I just figured out you're Diana Bleeker. He said, and you really need to write a book. And at that point, I thought, you'll pay me to write a book? I'm out of here. It had to be a pay cut, though. Oh, well, a huge pay cut. I wasn't even thinking that.

28:05As long as I can live on it. So I remember this. It would have been like September of 1987 because I realized at that point I got to stay till January because my bonus will hit my bank account in January. So I got to fake this until January. Once a month, I would fly back to New York to bring clients to the Chicago Exchange or to go hobnob with the people on the New York trading floor. And I had with me a notepad out when the stock market crash of October 1987 happened. And I was just wandering the Solomon Brothers trading floor, writing what ended up being a chapter in the book. And I was already thinking, I got a book in this.

28:40Yeah. Funny that nobody is like, Michael, what are you writing? So that happened right before that. And then I told them I was leaving in January of 88. And the book appears in the fall of 89. There's one other funny little footnote. They were charming in their way. They were rude, crude, socially unacceptable, misogynist. But if any one of these guys was sitting here, you would like them. Yeah, of course. You would say, Michael, you're an asshole for having sold them out. That's a real guy. You shouldn't have done that. They were not phony, slick investment bankers. They were like street hustlers.

29:10Yeah. And I was very fond of them. Not all of them were that way, but a lot of them were that way. So you've seen this chick has just written a book about Facebook called Careless People. It's just come out and Facebook has sued her. And she's not even allowed to go on television to talk about her book. And she signed some sort of non-disparagement agreement when she was leaving Facebook. So she can never talk about it now. And they have to pull the books to the shelves. Because people like you have made everyone else wise. Something like that. So I didn't sign anything. And not only had I not signed anything, I told them I'm quitting to go write a book.

29:41And I'm going to write a book about Wall Street. Why not tell them, right? I love them. And some big shots brought me into a room and asked me, what are they paying you? And I said, I think it's like$40 ,000 advance. They had just given me a$160 ,000 bonus. And that was like, for them, chump change. It's like, next year it's going to be$400 ,000. Oh, my God. They brought me in a room, and the tone was they were troubled. They were really worried about my mental health. They thought I was screwing up my life by leaving what they thought was a sure fortune to go write a book. Who was going to read a book?

30:13Yeah, yeah. They cared about my well-being. I'm going to regret saying this because it'll come back to haunt me. I have said it a few times. I don't think I've ever said it publicly. One of the guys, and he was extremely senior in the firm, said, Michael, we think you could run the firm one day. Oh, my God. And I remember thinking, you're out of your fucking mind. I can hardly show up. I can't brag myself to work. Then I run the firm one day. But they thought highly enough of me in that moment. They just cared. Well, how intriguing you must have been to them, too. Oh, my God. I don't know. I think so because you all seemingly have the same goal, which is like, let's make a bunch of fucking money and let's make it for our clients.

30:48And to see someone have gotten to the place they're all desiring to be and to leave is just very intriguing. Well, it was weird. This is Bradley from your podcast. To go be a Rhodes Scholar, that's so intriguing. Instead of going to the Knicks right away, David Robinson, instead of going right to the Spurs, goes into the Navy. Joins the Navy, yeah. Roger Staubach does the same thing for the Cowboys. Some people go on Mormon missions. Fucking Tillman. Yeah, people do that kind of thing. It's far more noble than anything I did to go and fight for your country. Yeah, yeah. But to be wired so that you're insisting on living your life instead of the life the world wants you to live.

31:23And that sounds like, oh, of course you live your life. But actually, there are all these incentives to do stuff that you really don't particularly want to do. You just get on an exit and you're on that road. And it takes a great deal of effort to exit it. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

31:51This is a byproduct of first being raised with incredible privilege, so I don't fear starvation. So that's a necessary condition there. But it's also a byproduct of being from New Orleans and being raised in a pretty happy, very kind of family-oriented environment where you didn't get measured by your success. Except in sports. But nobody knew what anybody else's dad did for a living. Yeah. Or care. That's unique. A value system was a little different. But I knew what happiness felt like. I also think New Orleans, New Orleanians, whatever you call them, I think they also value personality more than other places.

32:25What is really rewarded is openness to other people. Openness to casual social interaction. Being entertaining is highly valued. But it isn't highly valued in a very self-conscious way. It's just appreciated and encouraged. Yeah, yeah. To be a character is cool. Yeah. Okay, so the book comes out. It's very successful. It is one of the seminal works from that time. It goes right to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Wow. And I'm nobody. And I'm 28. All of a sudden, I have a career. People are telling me I'm a born writer, which comes as news to anybody who ever taught me. Yeah, you should send that to the professor.

32:57Or the English teachers throughout time. It was like, I'll always have problems. And so it is a curious situation to be in. So my one follow-up question, because now that is 30, however many years. That was 1989. 36 years in the rearview mirror. And I imagine you have a similar dissonance that Oliver Stone has where Wall Street, although supposed to be a cautionary tale, was very inspiring to a lot of people to actually get into Wall Street. How do you take the fact that many people read Liar's Poker as a how-to? They want more tips. So this was a great lesson to me about how people read books.

33:33they read the book they want to read. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a letter after I wrote The Big Short from a very intelligent, very serious, very upset Oxford Dom, a philosophy. I saved it. I don't remember his name. Saying, you were responsible once for diverting all this young talent to Wall Street. I thought you might have learned your lesson, but you've now done it again with The Big Short and you really ought to take responsibility for what your readers do with your books. And I'm not unsympathetic to the criticism. Maybe I should take more responsibility for the consequences of the books.

34:07However, if I do that, the books are going to suck. Also, the person who wants to read The Big Short and get that message is in search of that message and will find it somewhere. And I just talked about this the other day. It's like J.D. Salinger cannot take responsibility for two assassins holding his book. I'm sorry that those people felt inclined. John Lennon's assassin was reading the book at the scene of the crime. There's been a suspicious amount of people that have found the inspiration to assassinate people. Now, I read that book as one of my favorites. I certainly didn't get that message.

34:37No. Yes, Bill Gates' favorite book. He started Microsoft. But it's not on, J.D.'s. He can't fucking decide how people are going to. And it isn't that every young person who read the book said, no, I want to go work on Wall Street. Because I've had plain people say, I read it and I hear what you thought it might have done and did that for me. It demystified it for me. And I thought, I don't really need to go do that. I'm going to go do what I'm going to go do. So I had plenty of people say that, but I've had more people say it's why I went to Wall Street. Wow. But those people would have found some other reason to go to Wall Street.

35:03I do think there's an appeal to it. I get it. It's like if you're a young dude, it's the closest you can get to have a career that is playing a video game. You chase points, more points. You're in a constant state of dopamine and reward center being triggered and all the addiction things. I get it. People who want to live at 11, that's the spot for you. Yeah. You get to play a video game with a stripper on your desk. Yes. Yes, while eating too much guacamole that you've ordered. No, that's right. Yeah, yeah. I think there's this other thing. Books have dog whistles. And sometimes you don't realize what the dog whistle is until you say, oh my God, look at all these dogs running because of the book.

35:36And the dog whistle for this book was, I persuade the reader, because it's true, that I don't know anything. Art history major, yeah, I studied economics, but that doesn't teach you how to make money on Wall Street. I get to Wall Street, yeah, I learn intellectually how these markets work, but I know nothing I say to you is going to cause you to go get rich. And if I knew something, I'd go to our trader and tell him to do it and make money for the firm. There's almost no way that what I'm saying has actual financial value. And yet the world is paying me a fortune for it. There are lots of young men sitting at American universities who think, I don't know anything.

36:11And no one's ever going to pay me to do anything because I don't know anything. But look, he doesn't know anything. Yeah. And they paid him a fortune. This is the place for me that I'm just like Hollywood. Yeah. There's a lot. I'm just like him. I identify with you. And wow, it pays to be that. And so that happened a lot. I do want to talk for a second about Big Short because I have the enormous pleasure, and I want to thank you to your face, to getting an issue of Vanity Fair, where you started writing in 2009, and reading the article that led to that book. Or maybe that was an excerpt. It's Portfolio Magazine.

36:48Is that what it was? It was a Conde Nast magazine, but the big short starts when an editor portfolio calls me and says, you want to revisit? And I said, nobody will talk to me. I am just toxic. If anybody sees me on a trading floor, anybody who brought me in is going to get fired. Who's the guy who rattled the automotive industry with the safety glass? Ralph Nader? Yes! You're like the Ralph Nader of finance. I just thought I'm toxic. But however, I sensed that the things that had gone wrong in these big Wall Street firms had their origins in my experience at Salomon Brothers and that this was kind of the end of a story that I had written the beginning of.

37:26Yeah. And then I started just trying, calling some of the guys who had lost all the money for the Wall Street firms. And they were individual traders who had lost like$10 billion. Oh, my. For me, it was unthinkable because the place I left, the Wall Street firm had such an informational advantage in the market. They seemed to just win every time. And I thought that was going to happen forever. that somehow the Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, had become the dumb money at the table. I thought that's the story. Well, AIG the most. AIG too. They were selling the credit default swaps.

37:56They were selling, all these people were selling insurance. And I just want to say to people really quick, a credit default swap, it basically is in concept. I own a million shares of General Motors. I want to make sure I have a little insurance in case it ever goes out of business that I don't get wiped out. So that's a credit default swap. But you actually don't have to own a million dollars of stock. This is the fucking major hiccup in the premise of this product. So I can say, I want to insure 10 million shares of Berkshire Hathaway and then launch some scandal. I could buy fire insurance on your house.

38:25Now, what incentive does that create? That you want my house to burn down. I want your house to burn down. Yeah, that's an insane product. There is a wonderful New Yorker writer named Casey Sepp who wrote a book about Harper Lee. And in this book, she creates the book that Harper Lee was trying to create when she got blocked. And it's about a minister in the South who bought life insurance policies on other people and then murdered them. Of course. Yes, yes. We see this on Dateline every week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And made a huge living doing this. You should not be able to buy insurance policies on things you don't own.

38:59Exactly. Or lives that aren't yours. That's right. However, Wall Street creates this product where you can buy insurance policies on securities you don't own. And they're astronomical, people should know. So it's like the factor of I can insure a million dollars worth of stock I don't own for very little amount of money. The returns were astronomical. It's pennies on the dollar. I can buy a billion dollars insurance for a few million dollars on these bonds that are never going to go bad. And Lehman Brothers, which people own credit default swaps on Lehman Brothers, started as a rumor that took down the firm.

39:31That's right. So they create all these incentives to destroy all these companies. But it dovetails nicely into the fact that you started when mortgage-backed bonds happened because now we have all these mortgage bundles that were being sold all over the place. And you buy a shirt or something even if you didn't own the things. And so I wander back into Wall Street for Portfolio Magazine, and I start calling some of these traders, and they want to talk to me. That's when I thought, Christ, I might be able to do this because I can get that side of the story. And it turned out they wanted to talk to me because Liars Poker was why they were on Wall Street.

39:59Wow. And it was like after about 10 days, it was like I created the financial crisis with this book. Stories need structure. And there were two aha moments. One is, oh, they were the dumb money. Who's the smart money? Michael Burry? Yeah. That's among the most interesting stories I've ever read. It's such an amazing personal story encased in this kind of world event. But the notion that you have a man who has a wandering eye or a lazy eye and believes that's why he's a glass eye, even better. And that's why he's not social. And that's why he explains all of his awkwardness with all of his relationships through this glass eye.

40:34And then he's a fucking surgeon. Training to be. A neurologist. And then starts trading. And he's the only person willing to sit down and read the actual loan applications. And then wins and has a son who clearly is autistic. Then takes the test. And as he's saying, my son does not have autism. And he's getting 100%. I mean, what a fucking story. There was this cliche on Wall Street when I was there. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. and he was actually the one-eyed man who was in the land of the blind. And there's this other thing about him. It wasn't until the movie came out that I understood it.

41:06Christian Bale plays him in the movie. Christian Bale nailed him so unbelievably exactly on the screen. And I had the thought, I could not have described to Christian Bale what he needed to do to play that role. How did that happen? So Christian Bale finally confessed to me what he'd done. Michael Berry said, Christian Bale called me up and said he wanted to spend the day with me and it was the weirdest day I've ever had in my life. But Christian Bale came and studied him for a day. He was you on the trading floor. That's right. And asked for his clothes at the end of the day. So Michael Bale shipped him his clothes, so he wore his clothes.

41:38But Christian Bale figured out that all the weird mannerisms, he said it all came from him breathing in the wrong places in sentences. If you try this, if you do this, all of a sudden you're herky-jerky in all kinds of odd ways. And he's told Adam McKay, the director, as long as I'm breathing in the wrong place, I will reproduce this guy's physical. He is the best living actor. I'll be on record saying he's impossibly good. There's something about when someone is really good at what they do, there's a simplicity to it. Everything slows down for them. When he said that, I actually thought, first, I'm ashamed that I spent a year with Michael Berry, and I did not notice that.

42:17You wouldn't have been able to pinpoint that. It was his breathing that was wild. I didn't pay to notice things, and I never noticed that. But yes, it's true. And then I thought, when I go write about people, I'm going to try to spend a little time pretending I'm Christian Bale and asking myself, if I'm Christian Bale, how do I play him? If I had to be him, what are the physicalities? Even funnier as a protocol is you call the subject and you go, I want to do a piece on you. But first I'm going to sit and act for Christian Bale for a couple hours and then I'm going to meet with Christian and then I'm going to come talk to you.

42:47It's a very unconventional approach I have to writing, but you will be sitting with Christian Bale. I'm with this assistant. Spent a couple hours with you just to tell me how to describe you. The movie's so good. Were you so happy with it? Yes. More than happy. I was shocked he pulled it off. I thought it was undoable. I didn't see how you made it. People buy stuff all the time they're never going to make. I thought, this is one of those. It's incredible. Yeah. But he had to get really creative. And he nailed it. And it's got real relevance now. I think that event, the financial crisis, speaks to this moment in our politics right now.

43:16The anger it created, and it was a justifiable anger. All of a sudden, we go from a society where everybody is at least willing to at least pretend to believe that it's capitalism and we're all living by the same rules. It's fair, but it's harsh. Then all of a sudden, no, these rich people are not playing by the same rules. If I fail, I fail. If they fail, the government comes in and not only bails them out, but enables them to keep paying themselves huge sums of money. When what they did caused enormous harm to me, they should at least be out of business. Down to if you were on a line making SUVs for General Motors that hit you.

43:51It just really knew no boundaries, that crisis. It radicalized a lot of people. Yeah. And it's funny because you can read about savings and loans scandal milking right after you wrote Liars Poker. And you kind of think, okay, we identified this thing we must be aware of. But then it resurfaces in 2008 and you go, okay. And what you really have to admit is this impulse is never going anywhere. It'll be whack-a-mole for eternity. This is the nature of people. I think that's right. And it'll have different shapes over your lifetime, but you're going to witness these things every 15, 20 years. And that's kind of the reality on this planet.

44:25That's my cynical takeaway. But if you think about what came out of that event, the Tea Party, which morphs into Trump. Tea Party even into QAnon. Yeah. And Bitcoin, which is a reaction to the mistrust of the institutions and the governments. I remember when I was reporting the book, one of the obstacles I faced was that the smart people had been on the right side. and it often tried to do the right thing. They didn't just make the bet, or in one case, before they made the bet, they went to the Wall Street Journal, they went to the FBI, they went to the SEC, and nobody wanted to hear about it.

44:56They made the bet sort of more in sorrow than in greed, but they were terrified that the society's gonna wake up and it's gonna have to turn on someone and they're gonna turn on me because I made all this money out of it. And getting the subjects comfortable with me coming in and talking to them to write about them in a way that was gonna make them very prominent made them very nervous. Yeah, you're shining a light. Wait, somehow this guy made a billion dollars during this? Like the two guys. Those two guys were the most sensitive. Yeah, I bet. They seemed like such sweethearts. Two young guys in the garage in Berkeley.

45:26Yes. Now, what wasn't in the book, it was the one time in my career I regret allowing a subject to tell me, we'll tell you everything, but there's one thing you have to keep out. Nobody's ever done it to me before, but I thought in this case, I should do it. It was worth it. His father was the vice chairman of Lehman Brothers. He and his father had this argument while they were making the bet because the father had funded the firm. Like the father would say, Lehman Brothers would never do such things. And Lehman Brothers would never be in this position. And the son's saying, no, your firm's actually corrupt.

45:55It got very heated. If you were ever going to turn this into a different kind of drama, that father-son thing, it killed me. I couldn't use it. Yeah. That would be very frustrating to be telling this whole story and to be leaving out such a compelling part of it. I hate the feeling that I haven't told the reader everything I think is important. It was the one time I felt this is kind of important. The reader should know this. But that was the only time. I have moments like that in my life. I remember I stopped blurbing books like 20 years ago because someone I had a social connection with asked me to blurb the book.

46:24I didn't like the book. I could not do it. So I was lying on the back of the book. I said, I'm just never doing this again. So I'm never going to do this again either. If I can't include all of it, it was worth it, but uncomfortable. We cut stuff in here that any guest wants cut. and our feeling is generally more just like, oh, what a bummer. That's a really good spot, and they're too nervous about this. How often does that happen? One in five, one in ten. There are very few times, but there have been times that I've pushed back. There's a reason why this is important to keep in. Yeah, most often it's heartbreaking because they're worried about the reaction, and it's so clear that the reaction would be very positive and supportive, and it's just like you don't see that this is actually great.

47:07It's never like, oh, damn, we don't have a juicy thing. It's just like, oh, man, you don't know that this is actually quite endearing about you. So this is very funny you say this because universally, when I write a book, the main characters are a little upset with me because I don't give anybody any editorial control. And they read it when it comes out. And they call. We have a conversation. They don't feel betrayed exactly. That's not right. They feel like I have exposed them. They feel very vulnerable. They feel naked. And they're upset that they're naked. And then what happens is people appreciate them.

47:39Yes. And their best friend calls and says, that's you. And they realize my best friend knows that's me and still loves me. And so everything's okay. And then they forget that they were ever naked. And then they forget they're ever upset. I don't write books about people I don't feel some sympathy for. This is not a hostile act. Yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you're saying. People don't know how other people see them and they think they're managing the situation and they aren't. I know that you are seeing me right now in some way slightly different than I would see myself if I was sitting there describing myself.

48:11And it would make me uncomfortable to know what you were saying. Of course. But it's okay. As we say in AA, it's none of your business. Like what he thinks of me is actually none of your business. Okay. Would you agree that, I guess it's five seasons, not four, but this season of your podcast, Against the Rules. So we took on sports gambling as a way to talk about the society, really. But it's a really interesting situation. And it's an awkward thing to take on because everybody who might take it on is being paid by the sports gambling companies. There's not a lot of honest stuff about it. Right.

48:42And I've had friends who gamble on sports or who are friends with the people who own DraftKings and FanDuel or whatever, whose opinion about the industry has changed because of the podcast. So that I've noticed. And I was just at this past weekend, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It's like the Moneyball Conference. And it's 3 ,000 nerds in a room. and a lot of GMs of sports teams, and it's been overrun already by DraftKings and FanDuel. And so there are all these people from DraftKings and FanDuel, and it felt like I was the stink bomb in the room. They didn't have any panels on the subject, but it's clear that this is an uncomfortable...

49:18It's kind of like exposing CTE. Or smoking and cancer. People get pissed off because there's a lot of money at stake already. Oh, yeah. Those two companies are$30,$40 billion companies. It is sinister what we're doing to young men right now. It's not just with sports gambling. We're creating young male anger at a fantastic rate. If you were going to set out to create as much young male anger as you could, we're doing a great job. Let's take away manual labor jobs. Let's take away the trades. Let's stop sending them to college. Let's get that suicide rate up. Let's tell them they're evil from the minute they walk in the classroom when they're in first grade.

49:50And then let's create an industry that preys on young male overconfidence. And testosterone and rites of passage and acts of bravery. Yes. and that has, with unbelievable precision, the ability to identify people who don't know what they're doing and get them to do as much of it as possible. Yes. At the same time, they can, with great precision, identify the very, very, very few people who actually know what they're doing when they're betting on sports and kick them out of the casino. Yes! It's diabolical. Those algorithms, they can go, oh, this guy's too good of a gambler. He actually is making edge bets, the bets that have positive expected value.

50:26He knows something about golfers. that we don't know, we can't take the bet. And he's gone. So you just say you can't do this? Yeah. We got a pro gambler who knew what he was doing to give us his bets to place, and we participated a little bit so it was illegal, and we got booted out of everywhere in a matter of four or five bets. Even where we'd lost money, because they could identify that the bet, even though the bet lost, it was a smart bet. That's like a bar that's only letting alcoholics in. You gotta prove you're an alcoholic first. And then anyone who can manage their drinking, you get the fuck out of here.

50:55That's exactly right. If you're just gonna drink water, we don't want you. Yeah, we want fucking addicts in here. How can this be legal? Well, let's go through it. Can we start? I was really fascinated with Dan Juan. He's a great character. So Dan Juan started studying fans, which no one had really ever studied. And I think the reigning opinion of people who attended sporting events was a certain type of person. And through his studies, he found out, well, you know, you'd be surprised to find out that fans, they donate more money. They're more politically active. They have higher GPAs. They're not the group you think they are.

51:23No, they're socially engaged, but they are not rational. Right. So now we get into that kind of Danny Kahneman take on these guys, which is what happens to someone's thinking when they're a fan? I mean, it's motivated reasoning. You will systematically think your team is going to do better than you should think or your favorite players. You got one half your brain in a really irrational space already because you are a fan. Well, I like when he puts it so simply like just the original proposition is come spend two hours with us. There's a 50 percent chance that you're going to be very upset at the end of this.

51:55And it costs a lot of money. You see the bias right there. Any rational person would be like, no, those are terrible odds if I'm going to spend a bunch of money. When you introduce gambling into this mind, it's already a mind that thinks it knows things it doesn't know. He gets into the superstitions. Yeah. And I myself just did this. I went to a Detroit Lions game, the one they lost in the playoffs. And I hadn't been to a game all year. And I went and it was like a big deal. And they lost. And I'm like, it's because I hugged the coach. He didn't want to hug me. Why did I have to hug that fucking guy?

52:21Because he's on TV. I had this whole story. I'm like, oh, Detroit hates my guts. I'm kind of buying it. It's funny what gets studied by academics and what doesn't. And as he points out, the fan was just sitting there waiting to be studied. It's such an important character in American life. But pinheads like me generally don't like sports. People were just turning a blind eye to it because they thought it was not worthy of attention. And for our podcast, it's worthy of attention just to establish the brain space in which this gambling industry is going to enter. Because they are targeting fans.

52:51That's why it's very important to understand right out of the gates that a fan is doing some irrational thinking. So most people who bet are a fan of the thing. That's surprising to me already. I would assume most people who get into sports betting aren't fans. So they could be sort of objective. There are some who do that. Then they're kicked off. Overwhelmingly, they are fans. Wow. Yes. So what happened in this country is that back in 1992, Senator Bill Bradley, former New York Knick, had passed a federal law that forbid states from legalizing sports gambling that didn't have it already. And that grandfathered in Nevada, for example.

53:27Maybe Atlantic City? No, they didn't. Oh, they didn't have a sports book there. Then what happens is because Atlantic City is not grandfathered, they don't have it. New Jersey gets upset they can't do it. And Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, launches what seems to be a quixotic and futile lawsuit to try to overturn Bradley's law. It succeeds in 2018. In 2018, the Supreme Court says this law is unconstitutional. It's up to the states. Any state that wants to legalize sports betting can. Since then, 38 states have legalized it, which create all kinds of weird natural experiments like Alabama doesn't, Mississippi does, and suicide rates go up in Mississippi and savings rates go down in Mississippi.

54:04You can see the effects of it. Yeah, bankruptcy. All that stuff. My own personal story, I got to have dinner one time with Ted Olson. So did I. And I find him to be one of the most impressive people I've ever had a dinner with. And what's so interesting to me about Ted Olson is he was the lawyer that argued in front of Supreme Court that Citizens United, is that what it was called? So he has this one thing on his record that us on the left would fucking hate, which he made corporations humans. And at the restaurant, the busboy comes over, starts crying, and says, thank you so much. I got to marry the love of my life because of you.

54:37And then he's on the other side and gets rid of Doma. You're like, fucking, here's a complicated life for you. And so brilliant. And he's the lawyer Chris Christie hires to argue the Supreme Court case. Oh, wow. Right? I mean, this is the reality of life. Well, he's just a good lawyer. But he cared deeply about Doma. He felt like that was a huge violation. But did he care about Doma or did he care about winning a hard case? He truly said this is an injustice and believed that. And it was a liberty issue. and he believes in liberty. And sometimes liberty falls on your side and liberty falls on the other side.

55:10Yeah, that's true. You make a very good point in asking that question because I had dinner with him too and we interviewed him. I really, really liked him. He's damn likable. He's from the South. He died. He died? He died three months ago. Oh, I didn't know that. And he died right after I had dinner with him, like two weeks after I had dinner with him. But I asked him, I was just curious, you're the most famous constitutional. Most successful. Argued the most cases before the Supreme Court. What's the strategy here? You're not just taking anything that comes in the door. And he would say that one is, I don't want to argue something I don't myself believe.

55:38But also, if I think this is a non-starter, it's a waste of time. So he's also picking cases. He's looking at the Supreme Court. He has the Supreme Court wired. He knows what they think about things. He's picking the things that he thinks are going to succeed. And he had an odd premonition that sports gambling would work. One element of this that I heard in the podcast, which is fascinating, is someone comparing some definition is, is this a game of luck or a game of skill? Because tournaments are not illegal. The reason we have two huge corporations in the middle of this business that are not Las Vegas casinos, DraftKings and FanDuel, preceding the legalization of sports gambling, there was a fight to legalize fantasy sports.

56:16And they were two fantasy sports companies. And fantasy sports looks a lot like gambling. You're entering competitions and you buy in and you win money. And they went state to state, these two companies, with very shrewd lobbyists and persuaded a lot of states that this was not gambling because it was a game of skill. But poker's a game of skill, and it's gambling. Yes, so it's blackjack. It's a slippery slope, and where they had success was especially where there weren't Native American tribes to oppose them. We'll get to California, but that has a lot to do with California, right? California and Florida are both places where the tribes are very powerful, and they had the right to have gambling on the reservation.

56:50They didn't want anybody doing anything like gambling off the reservation. That's right. And anyone who lives in California, every time these props come up, you see these are very heavily funded. Because you have casinos on one side, and you have the tribes on the other. You see more of those commercials than anything else. That's right. Okay, so the Supreme Court says states can't. And the states are starved of revenue, and they're looking for new sources of revenue. They want to believe. And FanDuel and DraftKings lead the charge and legalize sports gambling in lots of places with state regulation.

57:16But if you interview the state regulators, they basically say they're running circles around us. The state regulator in Ohio was very funny. We interviewed him. He said, my teenage son is getting pizza boxes with free sports bets attached to it from these companies, and I'm the regulator. Yes. And now I got to go, okay, no more on pizza boxes. They're guacamole. With your Uber ride, you get a free sports bet. And so they're enticing young people. I bet it's not a lot on the salads. The quinoa bowl probably doesn't have free. That's probably right. So I live in a state, California, where sports betting has not been legalized.

57:51Nevertheless, the vast majority of the boys in my son's high school class are betting on sports. So they are both underage and in a state where it's illegal. He was like, yeah, I can do this. Here's the app. You find ways to get around the restrictions and you just do it. So we actually did an episode where I gave him$5 ,000 and put a GoPro on his head, basically, or a wire on him and said, let's go see how smart you are. And we're going to learn why you shouldn't be doing this. I inoculated him. It was like handing him a box of cigarettes and saying, you got to smoke the whole box or a fifth of whiskey.

58:19You don't get to get up until you finish it. Yeah. And it was really interesting to see him figure out what was going on. For me, it's obvious, right? I was on Wall Street. I know a lot of people in that world. I know that if DraftKings or FanDuel trying to get me to do something, I shouldn't do it. Yes, you enter life as I do, which is you're in Las Vegas and you see they've built a glass pyramid in the desert. And you must go, I guess the people gambling don't win, right? You just acknowledge the reality of there's systems at play that are much more complicated than I could ever be as an individual.

58:50And I have to acknowledge that enormous asymmetric. It's true in all markets. If you're going to teach a trader, someone who's going to trade anything, one thing, you teach them the idea of adverse selection. That if someone is finding you to trade with you, it's quite likely that person knows something you don't know. Or to expand on this, if there's a market price for something, there's all this information in that market price. And a bet, like a money line or a point spread, is a market price on a sporting event. Unless you know something that the market doesn't know. And you better know why you know something the market doesn't know because the market knows a lot.

59:26You are a disadvantage that the market knows stuff you don't know. So the person on the other side of the bet likely knows something you don't know. That's your baseline. So there are, I know them, professional sports gamblers who know that golfer A is better on this kind of course than the market knows and is going to overperform at this tournament because this kind of course suits him. or fraternity brother knows that his fraternity brother who's on the basketball team has just agreed to miss the first free throw in the basketball game this weekend. There is inside information that is useful.

59:58If you have that, go for it. I mean, it's not advice. You're endorsing it. I'm endorsing it. If you have to gamble. If you have to gamble, try to know something. Yeah, you should know something. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:00:21Once this happens and the Supreme Court allows this, you go to Vegas and you talk to some veteran bookmakers. What has the impact of this been on Vegas? And what are the people in Vegas saying? Vegas was not ready for the change. FanDuel and DraftKings has this huge advantage over the Las Vegas casinos who have sports books. Their business model was more like a tech company. The FanDuel and DraftKings is more like a social media company. They knew everything about the behavior of their fantasy players. They knew what their weaknesses were, what vices they could be encouraged to indulge in, who would make what kind of bet.

1:00:56And the fantasy sports companies knew everything. That was their business model, knowing about their customers. That's a new idea for Las Vegas. I mean, they know the high rollers. They know it in a very general way. But they don't know how to take someone who is engaged in two-legged parlays and turn them into someone who will make even worse three-legged parlay bets. It is nefarious. Yeah. It's just straight nefarious. It's like payday loan type shit. Imagine Prohibition ends in the 1930s, And there's a liquor company that actually has incredibly detailed information on how to get addicts to drink.

1:01:31They have your whole history pre-provision. Yeah, that's right. They have every drink you ever had. This guy can't say no to rye. That's right. And they show up on your doorstep. And give it to you for free. And start to get you going again. Yeah. Jesus. Get you off that wagon. That liquor company has this huge advantage. And that's the advantage that Van Dool and DraftKings have. What about the mules and the runners? Once I found my character, the professional sports gambler, Rufus Peabody is his name. He's among the smartest sports gamblers on the planet. He's been making a very good living out of it for 15 years.

1:02:02What is a very good living? Millions of dollars a year. Stop. Millions of dollars. Oh, I thought you said billions. No, no, no. I was like, oh my. And he works his ass off. He really does have edges in the marketplace and it's not easy. But part of his problem is that in the old world, the Vegas casinos would take his bets. In the new world, FanDuel and DraftKings won't. They figure out he knows what he's doing and they don't want the bets. So to get his bets down, he has to hire networks of people like his mother. They're professional people. Well, he's got to trust them. He has to trust them and they have to be smart at disguising the bets.

1:02:34So that if you're actually a professional mule, you're actually placing these bets for Rufus. You do things like make stupid bets occasionally so that they don't detect. You got to trick the algorithm. This is wild. You live in New York, you bet on the Knicks. You do that for a little bit so that they classify you as done better. And then you come in a bunch of smart bets. So our producer in the podcast, Lydia Jean Cott, who, one, doesn't know the difference between basketball and football. And two, is such a nervous nelly around money and risk. Would never go into a casino. That's too scary kind of thing.

1:03:05Rufus gave Lydia Jean$100 ,000,$150 ,000, I can't remember, lots of dollars to place bets with. And she was running. This is hilarious. Her bank shut off her credit cards because they thought someone had stolen them because there was all this money coming through the bank account. She has been banned from, I think, every sports book in the country and has been told, you're never welcome here again. The funny moment was there was one sports book, MGM. So one of the Vegas sports books took her first bets, the smart bets. The bets actually lost. So she lost a bunch of money right away on golf, like tens of thousands of dollars.

1:03:39They thought, oh, dumb high roller. They misidentified her. They weren't good at figuring out those bets were smart. They wanted to make her VIP. They got in touch with her, and they gave her free tickets to Charlie XCX. And she calls, and she says, this has been the most miserable experience of my life. I don't want to be doing this. When can I stop? Cortisol levels are through the roof. Now I can go see Charlie at Madison Square Garden. And she was so excited. But she made the mistake of continuing to place bets. And the day of the concert, they called and said, we're taking away the tickets.

1:04:08They took away? Those bastards. Those bastards. Oh, my God. Those bastards. Broke her heart. I should have bought her tickets. Well, I was just going to say, you're wealthy. You should have bought her. It's so funny. I should have bought her tickets, but I was thinking, this is such a great end to the story. I just want to leave it at that. That's crazy. They can do that? I want to hear her tears. You have your priorities straight. How does the VIP status work on these online things, and how is that turbocharging the addiction? If you get to be a VIP, you have a problem. I was talking to a bunch of people who manage large sums of money for, like, university endowments and pension funds and all the rest.

1:04:41people who are giving money to Wall Street people to invest for them. And they asked me, if you were interviewing a Wall Street investor to decide whether to trust them with your money, what question would you ask? And I said, I'd ask, have you ever been a VIP at a sports book? Because if you're a VIP at a sports book, you're exactly the kind of person who should not be investing money. They have identified you are bad with money. You are going to be a long-term cash cow for them. You make a lot of stupid bets. And yeah, we'll all frame it as I can afford to lose this. It's just fun for me. It's recreational for me to lose a million bucks.

1:05:13In this pool of VIPs are lots of people who can't afford to lose the money. And they don't make the distinction. One of our sports gamblers want to see how badly the big sports books would behave. He started to behave like an addict and would say things like, I just need another line of credit that my wife doesn't see. Let me in in the game. And they would say things like, you can't put this in writing. Just tell me over the phone and we'll get you the line of credit. I would say that But if you manage to get yourself designated a VIP, it's an embarrassment. It's not a compliment. Oh, boy. I want to thank California publicly.

1:05:44And I want to acknowledge my own stupidity as a fan. So I see this Jake Paul fight with Mike Tyson. I grew up watching Mike Tyson knock guys out. I know the one thing that doesn't decline as you get older as a boxer is your knockout punch. We watched George Foreman drop Michael Moore very late age. And I'm like, this kid's never fought. So I see that Mike Tyson knocking him out plays three to one. I'm like, I have to make this bet. I sign on to one of these sites. I can't even remember which. Go to places bet. You can't. And I'm like, I can't. It's because I'm in California. But I didn't even know that.

1:06:15Oh. So I'm pissed. Then I go away to Hawaii that weekend. I can't make a bet in Hawaii. I don't know what to do. You have a real problem with gambling in Hawaii. It's one of the couple states that have moral objections. Good for them. So I go down there and I've got to take some side bets with human beings. I end up getting$300 on the table. And of course, he loses and he doesn't knock out Jake Paul. I was like, thank God, California, to take my bet. I was like, I think I was willing to go like 10 grand on it. And he goes, I'm a fan of Mike Tyson. I don't even think about the fact that, okay, Jake Paul's the one with the career that's building.

1:06:46He knows something I don't know about this fight. I just get rid of all my rational thinking. And now I just want to thank California for not taking my bet. Do you think the fight was rigged? What I think is that there are a couple of slow motion exchanges that are impossible for me to believe. because Tyson does his bob. He's done this a thousand times. This is muscle memory. As soon as he ducks and misses that, you're getting the right uppercut and you see him start to throw it and then he doesn't throw it. Oh. Now, I'm not going to say publicly I don't want to get sued, but I'm saying that doesn't make any fucking sense to me.

1:07:22This is a guy that's thrown that exact move hundreds of times with crazy outcome and he just stops and he's in the middle of the movement and he stops and I'm like, that doesn't look right. Do you think if you said what you were maybe about to say that you would get sued? It's just your opinion. I don't think you could get sued. I wonder if I say Jake Paul fixed that fight. In your opinion. Yeah, what's the difference? When you say your opinion, it's still slander, isn't it? No. I have no information. Let's try it. Let's give it a whirl. I don't know if that's the way to get your legal advice.

1:07:54I think if you say allegedly, you just say allegedly after everything. All I'm saying is I witnessed some of the fight that does not make sense to me. Do you have an opinion on it? I don't. Do you watch it? No. I'm not a huge boxing guy. Okay, great. I don't like seeing people get hit. I remember when I was a kid, I went to a camp where you were forced to box. And I remember the first fight I got in and I wailed on some kid. I hated it. Like, I just stopped. I don't want to beat him up. And then the second fight, someone got in and wailed on me. And I thought, I like this even less. Exactly. So where is the fun?

1:08:25You're like, there's a lose-lose. Where is the fun here? Okay, so how is California? I guess we're six, seven years into this experiment. You already mentioned Alabama and Mississippi, but is California experiencing less of some of the fallout from this as other places? I don't know. The tribes have succeeded in preventing gambling from being legalized. But as I say, my son, 17 years old, and he's on the apps and he's gambling. Well, just paint me a little bit of a picture of how bad it is, and then I want to go into what you taught your son and what we can maybe advise other people that are listening to adhere to.

1:08:54Young men who take to sports gambling become addicts at a rate of about 8%. Charlie Baker, former governor of Massachusetts, is a new head of the NCAA. When he became head of the NCAA, he went and did a kind of listening tour of colleges because he wanted to see what was going on in sports on campuses. And he thought he was going to find one thing and he found another. He found an epidemic of athletes being harassed by their fellow students, gamblers. And the harassment was like death threats. You miss this free throw or you're dead. or just tell me now something that I know that I can bet on.

1:09:27It was so bad that he did a survey and found that 60 % of the boys on college campuses were sports gambling. I think that is probably missing what is an even bigger story, which is I don't think there's a high school in America where there isn't basically a sports gambling ring. It's part of being a boy. It's just becoming what you do. Of course, for most people, it's not going to have much effect and it'll be fine. 92%. But yeah, but it's a machine for creating lots and lots of addicts. And it's a particularly cruel addiction. We interviewed someone with a gambling addiction. Yeah, the famous chef.

1:10:03And what was illuminating to me as an addict was I've never done an eight ball of Coke, felt like shit, and thought, oh, I could do another eight ball of Coke and that would get me out of this. It has the most unique trap, this addiction, which is like there's the illusion of getting even and then exiting. So everyone has a fairy tale. Just want to fucking get even and then I'll stop. There's no getting even in Coke. Thank God. Because maybe I'd still be trapped there. It leads you to oblivion. It leads you to the end. It leads you to ruin. And I kind of thought one way that reform is going to happen, it's going to be some high profile person's child.

1:10:42Yeah, we're going to wait till then. Because that's happened in England. I don't want to tell you who it is, but I do know a person who's very prominent there, whose son is just not committed suicide, but close, who's bankrupted himself, and the dad realizing this is outrageous and is going to work politically to constrain the gambling industry. In the UK and Australia, there are things to learn from them. They're way ahead of us. And they're much less prone to making stupid bets. It's interesting. We are uniquely stupid. We're not inoculated. It's like smallpox just hit us. Yes. And I might be wrong about this.

1:11:11Maybe this is all just going to go away and this new vice will be assimilated into the culture and we'll all be fine. But I do think it's more likely that we're going to be living with an epidemic. It's silent. You don't see it. With drug addicts, you see them. This, just someone on his phone doing stuff. You've got a casino in your pocket. So I think we're going to wake up and go, what have we done here to a half generation of young men? The question is like, what do you do then? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have a child. What do you do? It's a question I think a lot of parents ask themselves about a lot of things.

1:11:40How do I protect my child from this thing? He's out there in a predatory environment. It's essentially a predatory business. As was the mortgage thing. As was the mortgage thing. But my child was not going to buy credit to false swaps. No, but just, I remember my initial reaction to the 08 meltdown was like, all these people that couldn't afford these houses went and bought these fucking houses because they believed it was going to go up 20 % a year. And I blamed them. And then I learned how they were approached to refinance, how they were encouraged to buy a house outside of the thing. I go, oh, no, no, this was a calculated, coordinated effort to get all these people.

1:12:11They abused vulnerable people, as they always do. That's right. I actually do think that if you have a boy, that you need to have not just the sex talk. You have to have the gambling talk. So, yeah, what did you do with your son? Walker, who is a senior in high school. And a Texas Ranger. Famously a Texas Ranger. More in Oakland, eh? But I said first, you hear this thing sports gambling? He goes, yeah, we're all doing it. He was not yet, but all of his friends were. He was circling. I went and taught his English class, and there were like 30 kids there. And he asked during the class, you raise your hand if you're gambling on sports.

1:12:44All but one of the boys did. None of the girls. So, but he said, you're like, yeah, I'm tempted. I think I know some things here, especially with hoops. He's a hoops player. He knows about the Golden State Warriors. So I said, here, I'm going to give you$5 ,000. And you're going to wear a wire. And we're going to just follow you. I'm going to stay out of it. I'm not going to parent you. The producers may a little bit. but you're going to just explain why you're doing what you're doing and you can keep the winnings. What I thought was going to happen is he was going to vaporize the$5 ,000 and it was going to be humiliating.

1:13:12And the humiliation would be the antidote. He would learn how little he knew and that the things he thought he knew he didn't know and how complicated this market was and how this market was trying to get him to do stuff he shouldn't do. Yeah. That's not what happened. Oh, no. He drank the fifth of whiskey. He was like, that's great. Let's do this again tomorrow. He made a million dollars. He didn't throw up. He didn't get hung over. I don't want to ruin the episode for the listener. The episode, it turned out so beautifully. What actually did happen, he got the lesson and he got the money. And how that happened, I would rather people just listen to the episode.

1:13:43Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I am good. Well, I'm really delighted you took this on. Yeah. But now you do have a book coming out. I do. Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service. What is this about? I got really interested in the federal government during Trump 1. I thought it was just comic material. Trump had fired his whole transition team the day after the election, 500 and something people. There were a thousand people inside the Obama administration who had spent six months preparing sort of a course on how the federal government works for whoever won. And Trump said the course is irrelevant.

1:14:12He literally said, I can learn everything I need to know in two hours. That's quite a feat. Very smart man. Beautiful mind. He's a beautiful mind. But I thought this is comic material. I'll go get the briefings. Starting with how the nuclear weapons are run. The people who were going to give that briefing, they couldn't give me all the classified stuff, but they were kind of grateful. It was like, we worked so hard. We didn't get to do it. Could someone just hear this? But the reception, it was called The Fifth Risk, to that book was so positive that I thought, I might want to do more of this if it proves useful.

1:14:41Another thing that happened was, at the very end of the book, I did one deep dive into the life of a single civil servant, and the story was literature. The material was so good, I thought I should have done more of that. So a year and a bit ago, I was on a hiking trail with the then opinion editor of the Washington Post, David Chipley. And I said, you know what we should do? I can't do it. It's too complicated an institution. The government is huge. It's massive. There are 2.3 million employees. I said, let me go hire six writers I love, people who just, I know, make everything fun on the page.

1:15:11I, along with the six of them, will parachute into the government. Everybody can find their story. And you can run it as a series running into the election just to remind everybody what these people do. And the series was called Who is Government? The pieces were so good and things you just wouldn't expect. I'll give you one that's not mine. Casey Sepp, New Yorker writer, found a character in the Veterans Administration named Ron Walters. No one's ever heard of him. No one would have ever heard of him. Who took over the National Cemeteries 20 years ago. And the National Cemeteries is where we bury our veterans.

1:15:41And when he took it over, they had kind of mediocre customer satisfaction. The families of the people who were burying their dead had mixed feelings about how the operation was run. There's now at the University of Michigan that measures consumer satisfaction across our society. Like it's not just private companies, but also government agencies. And so you can find out how the Department of Agriculture is doing, but you can also find out how Amazon and FedEx is doing. Ron Walters turned this enterprise into the enterprise with the highest customer satisfaction in the entire country. And you think about why do we have a country?

1:16:16What are the things the country does? Mostly we're better off in a country because it helps keep us safe. but it preserves certain values. And if we don't honor our war dead, it's ugly. And that this man has come in and honored the war dead. It's quite moving. And not asked for a dollar more than like his civil service pay and not asked for anybody to write an article about him. He was very wary. It's story after story like this. And the idea of some know nothing rolling in with a chainsaw and saying you're all waste, fraud, and abuse. when some of these people are the best among us. And have dedicated 20 years of their life to making this thing.

1:16:55It's obscene. So it turns out that the book is very timely. I wrote the last piece of it after the election, but all of it mostly was written last June. And it's Dave Eggers and Kamau Bell and John Lanchester and Casey Sepp and Sarah Vowell. You've seen The Incredibles. She was the voice of Violet in The Incredibles. She's a wonderful historian too. And Geraldine Brooks, the Australian novelist. Really gifted writers. each piece is so different from the next. So it'll be fun. It's a way to have a conversation about this. Yeah. Okay, great. So listen to Against the Rules, but then also get Who is Government?

1:17:26The Untold Story of Public Service. Michael Lewis, you're very, very charming and interesting. I love being with you guys. I've really enjoyed having you. I really enjoyed it. Hi there, this is Hermi and Hermi. And if you like that, you're going to love the fact check of Miss Monica. I am launching a competing religion to Quakerism. Oh, to Quakerism. And I'm using spices too. Dax, why don't you at least do herbs? I'm going to use spices too to confuse people. Okay, and what are your spices? Shining. Prancing. Okay. Intriguing. That's bad. Captivating. Okay. Energizing. Oh, my God. Sprinkling. Could also be sparkling.

1:18:17Okay. These are all— This is like an extrovert's religion. Yeah, this isn't—this is about—this is so outward. This is great. And it's so performative. Shining, prancing, intriguing, captivating. This is a way of life. Intriguing is not good. Yeah. Well, if you're using it specifically in the SLA way— Yeah, that's what it is. No, things that are intriguing aren't inherently—it's just been used in that. Things that are intriguing, but you're saying these as verbs. But you can be intriguing in many ways other than romantic or sexual. Okay. Mine's also easier to memorize, right? Because you probably already have mine memorized, and you probably don't off the top of your dome have the original spices memorized.

1:18:58I think I do. Stewardship, service. Okay, you're just kind of making a mess of it now. Okay. What? That's true. But you got to go S-P-I-C-E. Well, no, I don't. Okay. God, you and your rules. Service. Service. Stewardship. Community. Peace. Oh, good job. What's E and I? Integrity. Integrity was I. There was. Yes. How many have I done? You need one more. You need an E. Equity. Equality. I did it. Good job. Now yours, shining, prancing, spit takes. No, no, that was Pete. What? Okay. Shining, prancing, intriguing, celebration. Captivating. Oh, captivating. Egg on your face. Energizing. Energizing.

1:19:56And sparkles. Sprinkling. Oh, sprinkling. Okay, so mine's not easier to remember. Okay. Okay, well, that's cool. Well, at your cult, you're going to have that. Okay. Do you want to talk about, because you were waiting patiently for me to listen to the Malcolm Gladwell episode called Rogan Intervention? Joe Rogan Intervention. It's on, it's revisionist history. Uh-huh. And the new season's great so far. There's also a couple of really good episodes about George Floyd. Oh, and RFK or whatever. Yeah. There's an episode before the Joe Rogan intervention about that called the RFK Jr. problem. Oh. That leads sort of into the Joe Rogan intervention.

1:20:42And God, that Malcolm Gladwell. What a gift he has. He's so good. What an incredible episode. I thought, yes. Okay, so the episode is, starts off kind of calling out Joe Rogan a little bit about his interview with RFK Jr. and not really, and like the difference between an interview and a conversation. It really just deep dives into what is a good interview. Versus a conversation between friends, yeah. Interviewing is a real skill. It is different from conversation. And it is like, yeah, they play a clip where Malcolm's being interviewed by Michael Gervais and Malcolm starts crying, talking about his dad.

1:21:28Yeah. But what led there was so nothing. Like it was very simple. It was, and I was like, yeah, it's complicated and it's simple. Getting like real emotion out of someone. So there's this string of back and forth where RFK. RFK Jr. He claims that the Spanish flu, he's got three whammies in a row. Spanish flu, that people didn't die from the virus. that in fact they died from this bacterial infection. And that... Fauci signs off on it. That Fauci agrees with him, this conclusion. And then that what the Spanish flu really was, was a backfiring of a vaccine. And so, yeah, Joe's like, he is skeptical at first.

1:22:17He's like, you know, according to what and what's the documentation? And he finds the article from Fauci. Then there's some like, you know, know, at least Malcolm's conclusion is that neither of them really understood the difference between a primary and a secondary cause of death. So, you know, what's he to do if he doesn't know that? Right. Right. Like an average person could misread that conclusion. And then when he gets into the vaccine thing, now he's just, you know, now you're in this weird position where this guy's saying there are articles, but you don't have them. and I just wonder, I was trying to just, I was trying to delineate how ours is different.

1:22:56I guess really the only difference is the people we have on are truly experts in the field they're talking about. But likewise, we can only push back so much because it's not our field. Well, right. But I guess if we're going to have someone controversial on, which we don't do that often, actually. But if we do, like before we had Andrew on, there was a conversation we had that was like, if we're going to have him on, we're going to have to have all the conversations and push back. So to me, it's that. It's like you can't have someone like that on who's extremely controversial and says all kinds of stuff and not be prepared to really push back.

1:23:44Challenge. the statement that that was a vaccine that killed 100 million people? Right. Yeah, of course, I'm in bed. Like that's one of the few issues I'm pretty vocal about, you know, very pro-vaccine. Although I have a little bit I've had. I understood people who didn't want the COVID vaccine more than maybe someone who's so pro-vaccine that I am was. I understand it's your body and you ultimately get to decide what you put in your body. That part, that piece of it, I totally get. But I was, I got more, I want to hear your conclusions because I, and maybe this is a bad habit of mine. I keep trying to zoom out and figure out what's really going on.

1:24:24You know, like that's my great curiosity. You've got like two intelligent people. Who? Joe and RFK. They're not dum-dums, either of them. They're both intelligent people. And then you wonder, why is it does that story appeal to them? That there's like, there's been a conspiracy. It's vaccines. That's the Spanish flu is really vaccines. Why are two intelligent people drawn to that conclusion? Well, I don't know if Joe is. I don't know if that's his conclusion. Yeah, I don't know either. He seemed skeptical in his defense while he was hearing it. Yeah, I don't know what he thinks. But RFK Jr. must believe it.

1:25:05I mean, I don't— Oh, yeah, he's sincere about it. Yeah, so— So then I just, I try to figure out what's going on under it and even broader, why is it so appealing to people? Like a vast, you know, like a very large amount of people are drawn to that. And my conclusion is, I think if you feel very left out and excluded, that like there's this group of people in the country that are living this great life. and you feel excluded by that. It's almost like you feel like they have some secret shit. Like they have some secret. Why are they succeeding at this level and enjoying all of this prosperity and opportunity?

1:25:53And I'm not, they're not more valuable than me. They're not smarter than me. There must be some kind of conspiracy just in general. You know what I'm saying? Like there's some, there must be something dirty going on that all these people have all this shit and then all these other people don't. But it's not, those aren't the, it's not poor people who are anti-vaccine. In fact, it's mostly very, very privileged people who are anti-vaccine. Well, that is what's weird. But, well, there's two, I think there's two really big buckets. There's the Whole Foods, super liberal, probably elite group. and then there was the fuck no that's got trackers in it that's um you know Biden trying to control me that that's the like the anti Bill Gates faction so I think there is two really big factions yeah but I I tend to think the people who I mean it just in my experience people who are the most vocal and leading the charge are not poor people when you have so much privilege and access to the Brazil nut that might have, that's, you know,$14 per nut that might have this special benefit.

1:27:09Like they want to go that route and then that's natural and all of these things. But I, I think most people believe doctors, they like believe the system, right? That doctors pretty much know what they're doing, that when the baby is born, it needs these things and they're just going to go do these things. And they don't have to question every single thing that comes in, also because they don't have time or energy to question it. They're living their lives. Well, yeah. I think the last time I'd looked, like 83 % of the country had gotten at least the first round of the vaccine for COVID. So despite whatever you were hearing in the pushback, the vast, vast majority of the people did.

1:27:54So yeah, I agree. Most people just do. Most people are vaccinated. Thank God the most, you know. But I'm, I get just curious why that thing that sounds pretty far-fetched to me doesn't sound far-fetched to an intelligent person. And I guess my conclusion is if you already think the system's rigged, like if you're already suspicious that there's some kind of weird unfairness happening, I have to imagine you're more open to that. Yeah. If your kind of baseline assumption is like something crooked's going on. I know, but I don't think that's the majority of those people. I really don't. I mean, definitely not RFK.

1:28:40He's a Kennedy. But he's the black sheep Kennedy. Like, that's how I set him in that category. It's like the other Kennedys had a much different trajectory than him. Trajectory, but not, he was privileged. Oh, fully. And like, Mary Cheryl Hines. But even like a privileged person could feel like the least privileged among the, I don't know. Yeah, but that to me is like so kind of part of, I guess, sort of this bigger thing, right? Like, you're, it's so, you're so privileged and insular that you think you have it bad. Yeah. Like, look, and then it's also, look, if he's just a random person on earth, I don't care, right?

1:29:19Yeah. But he's in charge. Well, now. Yeah. Yeah. Not at the time of that conversation. I think when he had RFK Jr. on, I think was during the election. I don't know. I don't know. Do we know? Rob, can you check? June 2024. June 2024. He was running for president at that time. Right. Right. Oh, God. Yes, exactly. He was a nominee. Okay. Yeah. And so he's saying like, this is my platform. Yeah, yeah. And then there's a bigger, then there's a really fun, and I wonder where we both land on it. There's the bigger issue of like this spectrum between journalists and comedians with podcasts. And then their obligations as such, right?

1:30:02Yeah. Like a journalist has a whole code of ethics and vetting sources and all this kind of stuff. Yes. And there's tons of conspiracy theory podcasts. You know, there's nuts. No one gives a shit. What people are really worried about is that he has a huge audience. Yes, of course. Yeah. So it's just interesting. It's like that's a very relevant variable and how upset someone is that there's just a comedian talking about conspiracy theories. But he's not a—his podcast isn't a comedy podcast. He's a comedian. No, yeah, I'm just saying he's a comedian. He's not a journalist. Correct. He's not a politician or a doctor.

1:30:39But his show is a show where ideas are explored. It's not, you know, a laugh riot. I mean, I'm sure there are funny episodes or whatever, but it is there to explore ideas. Maybe he thinks he is being responsible with it. Well, I assume he does because I think he's a principled guy with integrity. And he just happens those. So I believe the experts we have on and he believes the experts he has on. Well, I don't know, though. And then, you don't know. We wouldn't have him on to come talk about anti-germ theory. Yeah, because I don't believe in him. But I don't think, I don't know that Joe Rogan does.

1:31:20I think he is like, come talk about your thing. Let's just shoot this shit. Let's talk about it. But then he himself isn't equipped to really have that conversation with this person who's powerful. You know, in the episode before when they're talking about RFK, you know, he doesn't believe in Louis Pasteur's germ theory. He doesn't believe that. He believes in the opposite thing. And so does Woody Harrelson. Like, there—and so, yes, it's not—to me, it's like— See, I think it'd be easy and convenient if he could write the people off as dumb, but I don't think you can do that. So then the question is, how do smart people have the courage to go against 99.9 % of biologists who think a certainty?

1:32:09I don't think it's courage. I think it is a long time of not having your feet on the ground. that you're able to explore all these different options for life and the world and the way it works and who's in charge and who's not in charge. I do think it's like checking yourself on how quote normal your life is in comparison. I think most of these peoples aren't. Yeah. I just think there's a baseline distrust of systems. The government, health care, doctors, universities, like all of these institutions. It didn't used to be. It's becoming more and more. Yeah, it's hard to know chicken or the egg where there are that many people and now there's just an outlet.

1:32:58I don't know. You know, I don't know. Well, we do know because measles is back now. It wasn't. You know, people are now, these things are coming back that were gone. Yeah. There's that whole episode about the rotavirus and the vaccine for that, which they've like, you know, RFK and them have said is bad. And it is like single-handedly saved millions of infants from diarrhea, dying of diarrhea. Than any other vaccine. It's so reckless. It is. It's just reckless. But anyways, I remain really curious. Like, what is why? Yeah. As a smart person, how do they look at that? Look at like the tens of millions of kids just in India that have been saved from the rotovacs.

1:33:47Yeah. I want to like understand how that gets shoved aside in your 13 cases of maybe not even verifiable. Exactly. You know, side effects takes charge over tens of millions of people. I know. And there's got to be something interesting there. There also might be a part of a lot of humans that want to be the except, you know, it's almost like the opposite side of the coin to like exceptionalism. Like I'm different from everyone else. Well, that's what I'm saying. It is a kind of a display of courage. You know, it is. I am not afraid to go against the grain and to march to the beat of my own drum and all these other, you know.

1:34:37individual tropes that we love. Great episode. Most importantly, no matter how you fall on it, I think, like my headline of that episode to you, my original feedback was, Malcolm's genius for the way he unravels a story is so proprietary and unique and stimulating. Yeah. It's just so... He's such a good storyteller. The way he flips, it's like he flips channels back and forth to different stories and then the way he weaves them ultimately together is so impressive. Great show. Revisionist history. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:35:30Okay. Let's see here. We talk art. Art with Michael. Let's talk about some art. We're going to do from Wikipedia. Let's talk about art, baby. The list of most expensive paintings. Okay, according to Wikipedia. The Salvador Mundi is the most expensive,$450 million, adjusted$577. But this is the one that he talks about that a lot of people say, a lot of people discredit. Oh, really? Yeah. That's a very unimpressive painting to me. It's da Vinci. I mean, we love da Vinci, but I'm not impressed. That doesn't save$570 million to me. $1 ,500, though. That's when it was painted? Yeah. $1 ,500. Yeah, attribution is pretty disputed.

1:36:24Then we have interchange. The Mona Lisa, obviously, we just need to say it's never been sold. Yeah, these are paintings sold. Yeah, that would be billions of dollars. Probably, yeah, I assume. um yes interchange is a cooning okay i like that's more my speed monica yeah it's nice it's nice it was 300 million adjusted 398 um that was sold by the david geffen foundation it's still blows my mind there's objects that are worth a half a billion dollars i know well there are cars i think the most expensive car is about 75 million for a Ferrari GTO. The third is a Cezanne, the card players. That was 250 adjusted, 349.

1:37:14I like it. It's like two cowboys. I like that one. Yeah, they're about to shoot each other. How do we know? That's my story. I don't think so. I think they're playing cards. One of them's always cheating. There's always a cheat in these cowboy card games. Why are they cowboys? Well, the guy's got a cowboy hat on the left, right? It's like an Abe Lincoln hat. It's kind of a mix between a stovepipe and a cowboy hat. Stove top stuffing? Okay, then we have... Stove for a stove top stuffing. Paul Gaugan called... Gaugan. Is it Gaugan? Yeah. Okay, Gaugan. Nafé Fá 'ipiopó translates to when will you marry?

1:37:55Okay, I like that one. I like her dress. 210, adjusted 279. Her feet are a little mangled like mine. Right. She has a lot of time. Have I told you this, that I'm now describing my foot as a comb over? What? Because the long toe has now moved over to fill the gap of the baby toe. Oh, wow. So it looks like Trump's hair now. Yeah. Oh, my God. A fucking comb over on my feet. Oh, wow. That may come up on Kimmel tonight, but it happened here first. We tend to talk about my feet a lot. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, you're doing Kimmel tonight, and I'm going to Beyonce tonight. What a night. Star-studded night.

1:38:34What a night. Jackson Pollock is next. Number 17A. I think that's Jackson Pollock. Incorrect. Number 17A, 200 million, adjusted 265. Oh, 200 mil? Mm-hmm. Okay. I'm allowed to say Pollock. Did you know that? Because I'm 12.5 % Pollock. Okay. Because my kids are 25 % Polak. It's like the Natalie. Then no. Then we have a Gustav Klimt. Washerschlagen too. That's a hundred. What a name, Washerschlagen. Oh, wow. This is like. That's a fever dream. Women, naked women. Two naked women. I see butt cheeks. But they have long hair. Yeah. This is cool. Flowers in between them. They're like maybe on a. Oh, there's like four women in that photo or in that painting.

1:39:30Where's the other two? You can see if you look at the faces, top, middle, then to the right, we've got two broads. And then on the bottom, we've got a broad. Wow, yeah. This guy was having a hell of an afternoon. This was fun. Well, I want this one because I like art of women. You do. That's your niche. So I wonder if I can buy it. It was sold for$183.8 million, adjusted to$248. So I just got to save up. Quarter bill. Mark Rothko is next. Number six, violet green and red. Now this is pretty much just squares. Yeah, good for him for being so successful with the squares. I do like it, though. It's pleasing.

1:40:12I do, too. I do, too. Beats the hell out of that Da Vinci. Salador Mundine. Oh, my God. Dump of a painting. I mean, it isn't worth 500 bucks. You're me today. I don't even trust the providence of that. Well, we don't. People don't. Count me in that group. Next is a Rembrandt pendant portraits of Merton Suelman and Upjinkup. All the people in these Rembrandt photos look like they have syphilis. Like their faces are red and weird. Like, look at her nose is red as hell. What do you mean? You're the least observant person I know. I love this. You can't see her red. It's not about not, I'm staring at it.

1:40:57I don't see it as bright red like a clown nose. Oh, I do. It's like it's going to fall off. And then the guy on the left, he's like, he's suspiciously rosy cheek too. He's pink, but that's very like, that's very close to real life skin. I think all these people were like, they had all kinds of parasites and people looked terrible back then. Don't you think? Max, pink. You can wash your face or brush your teeth. Yeah, but white people's skin. Is disgusting. No, is pink. Your skin is pink. I don't have blotches of blood on my face like this chick. She does. What are you talking about? Look at her nose.

1:41:33Her nose is just shaded. No, no. She's got like a huge sore on her nose. What? All these people look like they have scabies or. Oh, my. You're like so. Is this because you're nervous about Kimmel? You're being so. I'm latching out at these people from the past. Oh, my God. You're right. Oh, geez. I'm impressed you admitted that. Yeah, she has a fucking—this woman will be dead within the month. No, no. She's dying of something. First off, you're overreacting. Is it that she was blowing her nose so much? See? This is why you shouldn't blow your nose a lot. She's not. She does have a red—this area of her nose, this nostril is red.

1:42:16She blew her nose. She had a cold. No, she has a real, like a bubonic plague. Black death is on her nose. You know what? Tell me. And this chap on the left, he's like 18. He's going to die within the month as well. Oh, my God. You need to stop. These people are long gone, Monica. You are not being respectful of the dead or the living. No, or the painted. Also, don't fuck sheep. If you're in the audience. What? What? That's how humans got syphilis. Fucking sheep. This sounds like RFK. No, look that up. Are you sure? Yeah. Rob, can you look it up? I can't type that into my browser. I think the reason I couldn't see it at first, we're looking, for people who are listening, we are looking on the big TV screen at these pictures and I'm not wearing my glasses.

1:43:10Right. And I think that makes me a better person. I know. I really do. We have a history of this. Then I zoomed. We were watching an interview with somebody one time, and their tongue was so big. And you thought I was a bad person for observing that their tongue didn't fit in their mouth. I thought it was a little. I didn't say like. You guys were being mean. Listen, I didn't say like the person was a jerk or anything. It was just like, wow, they really have to wrestle their tongue. And you made some jokes. What were the jokes? I don't remember any jokes. Yeah, about this person's tongue being very big.

1:43:44I was just observing. Wow, this is a whale of a... You think you could ever observe something and not make a joke about it? I'm not sure. Yeah. There's no scientific evidence to support the claim that syphilis originated from sheep. Thank you so much for looking back. I guess I am RFK. It likely was brought to Europe by Columbus's crew. Columbus, they were sheep fuckers. It does say that. Yeah, that part's true. This is how conspiracies start. Well, no, but you're kind of like this could all seem like pageantry so that we could demonstrate were above that because you just pushed back. Then we looked it up.

1:44:20Then turns out I'm wrong. Yeah. It's not from fucking sheep. Continue on. Okay. Anyway, I just think it's best if none of us were glasses. Okay. I think that's all for the paintings. Okay, great. There's a lot of money out there. Okay. First cousin once removed. Someone who's related to you as a first cousin but is in a different generation. Specifically, they are the child of your first cousin or your parent's first cousin. Think of it as a first cousin who was a generation removed from you. So that's a tricky one for me because I have Mandy and Kelly who would be, they'd fall under this category.

1:44:51I thought they were your cousins. They are, but they're my dad's cousin's children. But here's what makes it tricky. I'm going to tell you why it's complicated. There's only two bloodlines. Because my grandpa's brother married my grandma's sister and had Mandy and Kelly's mom. Oh. So they're like double first cousins, I think is what they called themselves. And so because of that proximity, I'm actually not, I'm like, it's same blood level as would be if it were my brother, you know. Huh. But they were your dad's cousin's kids. Yeah. Your first cousin once removed is supposed to be your dad's cousin's.

1:45:35But that's interesting, the two bloodlines thing, isn't it? Yeah, that is. Yeah. Okay, who is Jacob Rothschild? Big business guy. Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, fourth Baron Rothschild, was a British hereditary peer investment banker and member of the Rothschild banking family. Rothschild is a hard one. I can see you trying to not bring it up over there. Rothschild? Rothschild? Rothschild. I was thinking, I wasn't trying to not bring it up. I was just thinking about that the Rothschilds are the center of many, many age-old conspiracies. And then I was thinking, oh, this is related to what I was saying earlier.

1:46:15Because I think when people acquire great wealth, they amass great wealth, all of a sudden they're somehow running the world and they're cheating, you know? So like the Rothschilds are the center of all this. That book I read, Behold the Pell Horse. They're crucial players in the Illuminati theory. Like they themselves believe it or people believe it about them? People think the Rothschilds have run the world order. Rothschilds. Rothschild. See? Johns Hopkins. It is a Johns Hopkins situation. It is a regular old Johns Hopkins right here. Okay. The book Careless People is by Sarah Wynn William.

1:46:57Are people from New Orleans called New Orleanians? Yes. assassinations due to J.D. Salinger's book. Oh, here we go. Many murder cases throughout its time. Mark David Chapman, who had an obsession with the book, murdered John Lennon. Also, John Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Gut shot. Was thought to be obsessed with the books as well. There are many other people whose murders or attempted murders are thought to be connected to the catcher in the rye, such as Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of JFK and Robert John Bardo, the man who killed Rebecca Schaefer. It says Holden Caulfield might have some criminal potential as well, having similar traits of killers.

1:47:36Yeah, that's my favorite book. Because you're a killer. Because I like to kill people. And I do think it captures very well a feeling of not fitting in or feeling different. Different in a way that's going to prevent you from integrating the way everyone else seems to be integrating. Yeah. I love that book too. That's on the ladder to that. Yeah. It's a slippery slope to incel. Like a soft landing is punk rock music, but you could follow it further. Yeah. I think a lot of these people in basements who are, what are they called? Incels? Yeah. I said incels, but something else. Basement dwellers?

1:48:19No. Rat people? Chosen. Chodes? No, it's called. Jesus. God. Just go on Kimmel already Get this over with It's called something Like abstinent Like not chosen abstinence But something like that Celibate? No What if I became an incel Because I started doing research Involuntary celibates? Yeah That's it I think Involuntary celibacy To think is just where the term incel comes from That's like the long term. Oh, that's what it comes from. I never knew that. It's an acronym-ish. It's actually a portmanteau. It's what? A portmanteau. That's what it means when you take two parts of two words and put them together.

1:49:10A portmanteau. Yeah, you ever heard that? Oh, my God. A portmanteau. A Natalie Portmanteau. That's like if Natalie Portman had a Fu Manchu, you would call it Natalie Portmanteau. Portman, too. Heterosexual men who blame women in society for their lack of romantic success. That's not going to get it done, boys. I wouldn't say it's the best route. No, no. Yeah. I mean, could you make yourself any less appealing? I know. That's the irony of the whole thing. I know. It's the double-edged sword that people can come together on the internet and find each other in a great way. And then they can find each other in a terrible way.

1:49:50Because these dudes, there were always dudes that couldn't get laid in their basement. Yeah. In their mom's basement. But they were mainly watching TV. Right, but they couldn't, like, commiserate and feel bad for themselves and become victims. Those other guys who were in the basement just watching TV, now they seem hot. Yeah, just the lazy guys. Yeah. Do you think sex robots will cure this? No. Like, if all these incels get a really good sex robot, will they not be so hostile anymore? No, because they still want the power over women. Like, they don't want women to be more powerful than them. And so the sex robot isn't going to fix that.

1:50:32Well, the sex robot won't be more powerful than them. They'll be in charge. I know, but they'll still be real women in the world. Yeah. I just wonder if it's like if you video game it, they'll be distracted with that. I mean, they can masturbate. It's not like— They want to move their hips and hump. That's— That's a primal desire to do a humping. They do on the couch. They just hump their couch. Yeah, I'm watching a show where the woman just masturbated by humping a big pillow. Yeah. And I just got kind of envious of female anatomy. Sure. I understand. Because I couldn't hump a pillow to completion.

1:51:06I bet there is something you could put it in and get off. Yeah, a pillow's everywhere. Like, you check into a hotel room, and if you can just hump a pillow, that's great. But why do you think that's better than jacking yourself up? Because it's somebody else. Because you're not, exactly. Yeah. You're not providing the friction. I see. There's no like dual signals going on. Like you're trying to ignore your hand. Yeah. I'm surprised they haven't invented like a mechanical hand. They have. Okay, yeah. I think it's called a flashlight. Oh, a flashlight. Yeah, that's a. I've thought about. Oh, yeah, that's a thing.

1:51:41I've thought about it. And you know what has prevented me from ever trying one? The cleanup. Ew. That's disgusting. I don't want to deal with a machine that I'm humping. Also, don't you have to hold the flashlight? Presumably, yeah. I think the hand, like... Just a mannequin hand? Yeah, you can, like, connect it to the wall. Oh, with, like, a suction cup? No, like, it's plug-in, but it's a long cord. So if you're in bed, you don't have to touch it. I tried to hump numerous times the toilet paper roll, which was always a, it never worked, but it always called to me because it was a circle. Okay.

1:52:21All right. I don't think I want to know anymore. Okay. You've got a boundary. Yeah. Casey Sepp's book on Harper Lee, Furious Hours, Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Okay. The Tiger Lady, he mentioned this Tiger Lady. He said Tiger Lady or Lion Lady who got all that plastic surgery. Do you remember her? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It was Tiger Lady. Jocelyn Wildenstein. I wonder how much money that costs. Well, she had a high-profile divorce from billionaire art dealer. Ding, ding, ding. Oh, my God. And businessman Alec Wildenstein. Cat-like facial appearance. Oh, she passed away in December.

1:53:03She went through all nine lives? Wow. She has two children. Oh, okay. Now I'm sorry.

1:53:14That was a pretty good one. Okay, let's see if it says here. Oh, my God. Her yearly telephone bill was$60 ,000 and food and wine costs$547 ,000. This is in the, like, settlement, divorce settlement? I guess. She received$2.5 billion in the divorce settlement. Oh, my Lord. Yeah. That's outrageous. Yeah. She could own almost all those paintings. But then she went bankrupt. She went bankrupt? How the fuck did she lose 2.5 bill? Well, she had a lot of... Well, that's not in surgery. Well, some of it was... Maybe a mill. Yeah. Oh, three apartments in Trump Tower were repossessed in 2020. Oh, my God.

1:54:00She ran through$2.5 billion. I don't know why I'm surprised a woman who turned herself into a cat also wasn't great with money, but it still shocks me to lose that much money. Yeah, she was Swiss. I'm glad she's Swiss. They need something. You never hear anything bad about the Swiss. They're always been neutral. They've got great chocolate and scheme, great banking. Yeah. We need something on them, and this is a start. It's true. Oh, okay. Did Ted Olson argue the most cases in front of the Supreme Court? So there's like a list of from lone dissent of U.S. Supreme Court top advocates. Number one is Lawrence G.

1:54:42Wallace, 157 arguments. Whoa. Yeah. Then there's number two is an unknown advocate. Okay. Wants to go by unknown. What a match. Three is Edwin Needler, 143. Four, Michael Dreeben, 106. five Paul Clement I've heard that name 92 six Carter Phillips 86 seven Irwin Griswold 83 I'll just Ted is 13 on this list okay I my claim wasn't that he had argued the most but I thought he was maybe the most victorious but I bet these some of those names are from like people in the 1800s that were there every other day back when it was in the basement it was kind of a joke kangaroo court I don't know That's mean again I was Do you ever read like this?

1:55:37Like you're Stevie Wonder playing the piano No He said he passed I know That really bummed me out I know I feel very lucky that I had a dinner with him I felt really kind of weird in that moment You did Because I knew that was new Like you were finding out Yeah And I always had this fantasy We would interview him someday Because I really, really enjoyed the dinner I had with him. Yeah. So I felt, I felt like, What'd you feel? Like I should feel stupid? Okay. We've been at this for a while. Okay. You don't know how you felt. I will, no, I just felt like, what if you cried? Like, what if you like got really, needed to take a break?

1:56:22And that would have been fine, of course, but. No. Yeah. Not if I need to take a break. We have a guest. We can't invite guests on it. And then I go, I need to take a break. Well, if you find out that I die in the middle of an interview, I hope you take a break. That'll mean I have witnessed you get killed in the middle of the interview. You're never not in the interview. Or have a heart attack. Okay. I will have to take a break, yeah, to start chest compressions. Or what if an email comes in with my AIDS test? Oh, boy. We're going to get in hot, hot water this episode. Un-airable. Cut it. Dump it.

1:57:02Dump it. All right. All right. That's it. Love you. Love you.