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Podcast Notes: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 106: Michael Lewis: Donald Trump, Sam Bankman-Fried, and the Future of the USA
Episode Overview In this episode of *The Rest Is Politics*, hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart interview bestselling author Michael Lewis, known for his works such as *Moneyball* and *The Big Short*. The discussion revolves around influential figures and events in American society, particularly focusing on Donald Trump and Sam Bankman-Fried.
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Key Themes and Discussions
- Michael Lewis's Background
- Upbringing: Lewis grew up in New Orleans with parents deeply involved in civic organizations, fostering a strong sense of community and social responsibility.
- Education: He attended Princeton University and later the London School of Economics, where he discovered his talent for writing.
- The Role of Luck and Meritocracy
- Personal Success: Lewis emphasizes the importance of luck in success narratives, challenging the idea of meritocracy and how it often overlooks systemic advantages.
- Cultural Impact: He discusses how this lack of recognition leads to a selfish mindset among the privileged, further dividing societal classes.
- Donald Trump and Government Function
- The Fifth Risk: Lewis's book examines the risks associated with Trump's administration, particularly the neglect of crucial government functions after he took office.
- Absence of Leadership: Trump’s dismissal of established systems led to a lack of preparedness in critical areas such as nuclear management.
- Sam Bankman-Fried
- Character Study: Lewis portrays Bankman-Fried as a complex and unconventional figure whose unique perspective allowed for innovative thinking but also led to catastrophic decisions.
- Neurodivergence: The discussion touches on how Bankman-Fried's neurodivergence may have shaped his approach to both business and social interactions.
- Cultural and Political Observations
- Emergence of Silicon Valley Influence: The conversation explores the power dynamics between Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C., emphasizing how technology and finance shape contemporary politics.
- Political Attitudes: Lewis argues that many supporters of Trump resonate with his embodiment of anger and defiance, rather than expecting him to solve their problems.
- Future of Governance and Sports Gambling
- Government Efficiency: The potential appointment of high-profile tech figures (like Elon Musk) to government roles raises questions about the proper management of governance.
- Cultural Shifts in Sports Betting: Lewis is currently focused on the implications of legalized sports gambling, viewing it as a critical reflection of societal values and economic disparities.
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Key Takeaways
- Michael Lewis provides a unique lens on contemporary issues, connecting his insights on individual narratives to broader societal dynamics.
- The discussion illustrates the complexities of political allegiance and the impact of cultural narratives on public perception.
- The conversation highlights the intersection of personal stories, societal structures, and the political landscape, emphasizing the importance of understanding these relationships in the quest for effective leadership and governance.
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Conclusion This episode of *The Rest Is Politics* delves into the intricate connections between personal backgrounds and larger societal narratives, providing listeners with a thought-provoking perspective on the forces shaping modern America. The insights shared by Michael Lewis challenge conventional understandings of success and governance, making this discussion valuable for anyone interested in the dynamics of politics and society.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics. is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American innovation. And Doug. Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu, is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.
1:05Excludes Massachusetts. Well, I was down on my last dollar, then I started saving, cause the bank said fiscal restraint is what you're craving. So I put my earnings in a high yield account, let the savings compound and the interest mount. I'm optimizing cash flow, putting debt in check. Now time is my friend and I'm a pain in the neck. And we've got a little cash to rebuild the old deck. Boring money moves make kind of lame songs, but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865.
1:43Welcome to The Restless Polities Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And with us today, we have Michael Lewis. And Michael Lewis is, I hope most listeners, very familiar with somebody who's really, I think, caught the late 20th, early 21st century through a series of astonishing books, which showed Silicon Valley in The New New Thing in his latest book, Sam Bankman freed cryptocurrency. cryptocurrency, but he's also brought the world of sports, calculation management to life. He's brought the world that led to the 2008 financial crisis to life. So he is a kind of, I would say, for me anyway, at least a kind of guru of our age, but he's also done some extraordinary stuff in politics.
2:25He's written about Donald Trump. So in every way, I think a perfect guest for the podcast. And I feel you're my perfect hosts. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Do you promise that's the first time you've ever said that? It's the first time I've ever said that. Okay, good. Excellent. That's good. So listen, what we like to do to kick off is just give guests a chance to tell us where they came from. All right. Childhood, parents. How much you want? A couple of minutes, it's good. That's all. Mom, dad, siblings, education, just zip through. All right, I'll zip through. So I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana.
2:57I was the child of New Orleans aristocrats. So we had carnival organizations and we were kings and queens. I was raised to be king. I learned how to sit on thrones and wave scepters and greet subjects. And one of the defining moments of my childhood was my father would tell me that the Latin phrase on our coat of arms, when translated, said, do as little as possible and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task. And I was to... You haven't taken that to heart through your life. I was to live by those words. And so I was raised to be a decorative object and lead a life of leisure.
3:37And I'm not too pretty and I'm working pretty hard. So I didn't fulfill my destiny. So was it a comfortable upbringing? Yeah, it was an untroubled upbringing. It was New Orleans in the late 60s and 70s. I think it's informed my work because it was, well, it was a storytelling culture, oral storytelling culture. It wasn't a literary culture. but it was so different from the rest of the United States. Someone once said that if you want to understand New Orleans, you have to stop thinking of it as the southernmost city in North America and start thinking of it as the northernmost city in South America.
4:10And there's a real truth to that. It's this absence of a success culture. It's this absence of an interest in what you do for a living and this stress that's placed on family ties and location and what school you went to. It was a happy place. I mean, a very happy place. I don't know if you, have you ever been? Yeah, I've been to North America.
4:58The tube train, shaking hands and introducing himself to him, because that's what his mom and dad had taught him to do as a young man. That's Crocodile Dundee. That is Crocodile Dundee. Was your upbringing political? Not at all. You couldn't avoid it. Race is in the air, of course, but much more complicated way than you might imagine. Just the structure of the city was a very checkerboard city, so there were black and white neighbors, were cheek by jowl. And when you come out of an all-white school, you would be on the streets playing with black kids. And so it was natural to have black friends at a very early age, which wasn't true anywhere else in the country.
5:28But kind of political in the sense of are we Democrats or are we Republicans or do we hate Nixon or all that stuff never came up. Never came up. Are you political? I've always kind of thought I care less about your politics than how you express them and hold them. I like it when they're held kind of a little bit lightly or loosely and that your mind is sort of open to a conversation. So you probably did hate Nixon then. Well, you know. No, but it was to the extent we were anything. My parents were very consequential people. Give you an idea how consequential. My mother, who was to the naked eye when I was a little kid, a housewife and mother of the 1960s and 70s vintage.
6:09The New Orleans Times-Picayune, the local newspaper, a few years ago did a series on the 300th anniversary of New Orleans, the 300 most important people who'd ever been there. And my mother was one of them. Why? Because she has run every civic organization and it's all about social change with her. She's political with a little P and liberal. Would never say it though. And what have her great causes been? What sort of things has she been working on? Education. Public education has been a big one. The broad thrust of her work is transferring money from rich white people to poor black people. Right.
6:42Good. And my father ran the oldest law firm in the city, but he did it with his left hand. and it left him with all kinds of time to run kind of other sorts of civic organizations. So the most curious one was, after the Civil War, the federal government basically took the finances of the city away from the politicians and created something called the Board of Liquidation. It was seven city elders who managed all the city's finances, decided whether it could borrow, whether it could tax. It's incredible this thing exists. He ran that for 30 years. So they were those sort of people. And if you met them, you would think two really interesting filigreed personalities with lots of different interests.
7:23My father's a big collector of African sculpture, for example. Michael, I've got a little sort of sense of this life you're describing. In fact, actually, I went to see young kings and queens being crowned in Mobile, Alabama. So I sense this. It's a description of quite a sort of old-fashioned, almost European lifestyle happening in the United States. But you then chose to write about the kind of rawest edge of hyper-modern American capitalist culture from Silicon Valley right the way through to Salomon Brothers bond trades. Tell us a little bit about how you made that decision and the extent to which that more sort of leisurely aristocratic European upbringing gave you a slightly different angle from other American writers thinking about that side of the United States.
8:07So I was never self-consciously setting out to write about the rawest side of American capitalism. And I was never actually setting out to be a writer. It didn't even occur to me. You're not going to believe this, but it's true. It didn't occur to me that I might write well until I was a senior in college. I went to Princeton. To get out of Princeton, I was required to write a thesis. And the thesis was effectively a book, 60 ,000 words or whatever it was. And it was the first time I was ever really immersed in a subject where I had to master something that kind of originally, and I was absolutely transported by it.
8:38I'd been a kind of indifferent student up to that point in my life. I got into Princeton, I think, because my father went to Princeton. No teacher ever identified me as special in any way. And so I set out after I got out of Princeton, not knowing what I wanted to do for a living, because I was raised as a decorative object to like, oh, I want to do that. I want to see if I can do that, which was insane. I mean, and what I did was I bought a book. I remember the book, it was called The Writer's market and a list of the 8 ,000 publications in the United States you could submit articles to along with the editor's address.
9:09And I would kind of randomly submit ideas. And people started writing me back. They didn't publish them for a few years. That's how I started. The only one that took me up was a sex magazine. Oh, what were you writing about? What was the subject? Sex. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. And that was my first writing. And it went quite well. Do people know this about you? Yeah. Oh, they do. Okay. We didn't just make news. I thought he just made news. No, no, it became a deal when he became Tony Blair's communications director. The Sun newspaper ran a big sort of front page. Boris Johnson, when he attacks him, really gets into the fact that Alistair was a pornographer.
9:45Was it good? They bought it. Does it hold up? They bought it. I'd never look at it again. Oh, I'm sure others do. Often, often. You're reread better than most writers, I'm sure. Back to you. Okay, sorry. Okay. So you know who published my first piece? The Economist. I came over here to do... No byline. No byline. I came over here to do graduate school. I followed a girlfriend to the London School of Economics and did a master's in economics there. But I was still willy-nilly up, you know, sending things in. And there was an advertisement for the Richard Casement internship in the science pages.
10:19Now, I was an art history major at Princeton. I got through Princeton the science requirement by taking a course called Physics for Poets. And I flunked it, actually. I have an F on my Princeton transcript. But I saw this and I thought, it's science and technology. This was 1985. I had this brief brush with the British medical system back then. It was like something out of the 19th century. So my father - This is the NHS, the envy of the world. So I went back home for Christmas. And my father happened to also run the leading medical clinic in New Orleans at the time. He was subbing in as the head of that with his right hand.
10:55And so I went in there and I said, what's the newest gadget you have? And they had this breast cancer detection device. I knew you wouldn't have it. I mean, you hardly had, I mean, you had nothing. And so I wrote a piece about it, God's truth, and sent it into The Economist. And I got a call saying I had been shortlisted for this internship. Now, I didn't know what shortlist meant. I just thought, sounds good. And then would I come in for an interview? So I get to The Economist. But you have to fly back to London. Well, I came back anyway. To see the girlfriend. Well, I was going to school. I had gone home for Christmas.
11:30I came back for it. So I come back and I go into this interview and you must know Matt Ridley. So Matt Ridley is my interviewer. And he starts asking me what my understanding of background in science is. And I say, well, physics for poets, and that's it. And he said, the short list consists of three people. It's you and two people who are doing their PhDs in physics, one at Cambridge and one at Oxford. And he looks at me and he says, you're a fraud. He says, you don't belong here. You don't know anything. He says, but you're a very good fraud. And that's what a journalist is. He said, I'm not giving you this internship, but we're going to publish this piece, and you can write for all the other sections of The Economist.
12:07So I did that for the year and a half. I was at the LSE, the back year and a half. I wrote all kinds of pieces for The Economist, and that gave me my start. In preparation for this, I watched a speech you gave to the students at Princeton in 2012, graduation. And the main thesis that I detected from what you're saying is that life is basically about luck. That people underestimate the role of chance and luck in life. That's it. It isn't that it's just luck. It's that people, especially successful people, especially the kind of kids who are graduating from Princeton, build their narrative, leaving the chance out.
12:38And it's all about them being great. It's sort of like when you start with the understanding, it's all about them being great. And they've passed through all these filters. They think I got into Princeton. I got the A. They forget who their parents were, that Princeton exists, that they don't have to go to war for their country. They were born with the genes they have, whatever it is, that they're American. All this fortune in their lives. And the absence of that awareness leads people to a very selfish place. And the presence of the awareness leads people to a grateful place and a broader sense of their relationship to the world.
13:13This is quite important because Michael Sandel writes about this and he says one of the fundamental problems in our culture, Britain, US, is the idea of meritocracy. You know, meritocracy sounds great if you say it quickly, you know, work hard, play by the rules, you do well. You coined that phrase, you people. Right, absolutely. But of course, it's originally coined by Lord Young and he sees a problem in it, right? Because he sees, and this is what Sandel's returned to, the possibility that actually what happens if you're not doing well? Does that mean somehow you didn't work hard, you didn't play by the rules, you're a lesser person, right?
13:46So I think there's this sense that chance matters, different forms of privilege. I mean, there's straightforward forms of privilege like you and I have. But there's maybe other forms of privilege that other people who don't come from as wealthy backgrounds have, which they're less aware of. That might be genetic inheritance, might be their health. But this matters politically because we've created societies which are kind of ruthlessly, particularly in the U.S., about rewarding people and then making them feel they deserve what they've got and that people at the bottom of the pile somehow don't deserve it.
14:14Right. That feeling runs right through American politics right now. One of the ways it expresses itself is in the attitude towards American government. I mean, the government is one of the things it can do is help make things a little less unfair. And there's such hostility to that idea right now, that that's what the government's supposed to be doing. Because it's already fair, if people would say. It's fair, I got mine. You didn't get yours, and there's something wrong with you as a result. You wonder why the people who are on the unlucky end feel angry. You know, not only are they unlucky, but they're on the receiving end of that attitude.
14:46And can I use this as a transition into your book on Donald Trump? It's your show. Thank you. And you're so happy to be here. And I'm so happy to be here that you don't have to ask my permission for anything. Ask for forgiveness. It's called the fifth risk. I'll ask for forgiveness at the end. Tell us a little bit about what you discovered about Donald Trump, his personality, his management style as you worked on that book. I didn't write a book about Donald Trump. It's a book on a kind of absence of Donald Trump in the middle of the American government. So this was, talk about God's gift to journalists.
15:16Donald Trump is God's gift to journalists. He is. God's gift to fraudsters. Well, that's true. But my approach to Donald Trump is to try to not get too angry about him and try to figure out how to put him to use. Because if you don't put him to use, he'll put you to use. So what he does when he gets elected president, the day after, he fires the 600-person transition team that's supposed to go in and figure out what the federal government does. This, you would think, would be particularly useful for someone who has no idea what the federal government does, someone who has no experience. And it is a team that's been pretty carefully put together by Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey.
15:54The Obama administration, by law, was required to prepare transitions. And Obama himself was very grateful to Bush for how he had prepared. So he went over the top with it. It was like 1 ,000 people working for six months. And it isn't just the White House. It's all the departments of government that nobody thinks much about that is running not only our society, but in some ways the world. and Trump fires the mechanism for receiving the news of what's going on in, say, the Department of Energy. And so I saw this and I thought, my God, I'll just go get the briefings. Our president is not going to know, but I will know, and I'll teach our readers.
16:29Talk us through the title, The Fifth Risk. Well, if you don't interrupt me. Oh. Oh, now you're sitting by. I was on my way. No, you're on your way there. I was all by myself going to do that. Oh, no. I've ruined it now. No, no, you didn't ruin it. He just threw me off my stride. You slowed it down. It just slowed me down. So I picked the Department of Energy randomly to go into because Trump had appointed a fellow named Rick Perry to run it. And Rick Perry, who had been governor of Texas and run for president, said he was going to eliminate the Department of Energy when he was a presidential candidate.
17:03And now he's the head of it. So he didn't know what was in it. And what's in it, among other things, is the nuclear weapons. It manages the nuclear stockpile. He didn't even know that much. So I go into the Department of Energy, I start asking, what's the risks of having these people in charge? Like, what are the five things you're most worried about? And they were, you know, nuclear accident, for example, would have been one of them. But the person who, the risk manager inside the Department of Energy started listing them and he got to five. And the fifth risk was something that sounded incredibly boring.
17:39He said, and he said, it's project management. And I said, well, what the hell? What is that? And he said, this government at any given time has got so many sensitive projects that in a long term, he gave me an example, the Hanford Waste Nuclear Cleanup. It's 600 square miles in western Washington state where the plutonium was generated for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. And there is leaching through the soil a bazillion gallons of toxic waste headed towards the Columbia River that will poison the Pacific Northwest if it gets there. And you go to this place and you're in Soylent Green.
18:16You're in the strangest other world. Everybody's in hazmat suits. And it's a$50 billion, 50-year project. And if you screw it up because you have a president who's paying no attention to it for four years, a lot of people are going to be very ill or die. That kind of thing. And so I thought that's the fifth risk and I'm going to highlight that because that's the thing that's the sort of not vivid, not sharp, slow moving problems that government boringly deals with is maybe what's at most at risk with Donald Trump as president. I read it when it came out, and I remember there was stuff about all the different bits of government, jobs that weren't being filled, stuff about, you know, nuclear waste that was just kind of, who cares about that, and some of the big planning stuff, who cares about that.
19:02And the project management side of government, so, you know, we've got big, big, big infrastructure problems in the UK right now. But I just wondered, when Project 2025 came out, I wondered whether what you were talking about was related to that, because it seemed to me like it's a deliberate... Response. ...destructive approach to the actual institutions of government. Yes. So is that... Was Trump just warming up and they are seized on that, or is this part of some dastardly long-term plan? Trump himself doesn't care about anything but Trump. Right. Trump doesn't care about the government. Trump has no philosophy of government.
19:36None of that. But Trump has attracted people who will fill in the gaps. And there's a wing of, I guess it's the Republican Party. It was a libertarian wing, the Heritage Foundation people, who have been supplying Trump with how he's supposed to think about the federal government. And it's the deep state. It's the swamp. It's the, we're going to clean it all out. And in particular, we are going to politicize it so that the people who are cleaning up the waste in Western Washington are now presidential appointees, and I can fire them at will if they don't hire the companies that I want them to hire.
20:06He's talking about turning 50 ,000 civil servants into presidential appointees, which would be so damaging. It's beyond. So there is a conversation going on. My book does speak to that Project 2025. It's rooted in a kind of ignorance. Like the people who write, oh, we're going to eliminate the Department of Energy. They have no sense of what they're doing inside the Department of Energy. They start with a premise that government workers are wasteful, corrupt, left-wing, the enemy, and then worry about the rest later. So in response to this, I have this project I'm doing right now. It's in the Washington Post.
20:40It's called Who is Government? And I hired six writers to, along with me, parachute into the federal government. One English, John Lanchester, the London Review book writer novelist, did a wonderful piece. Just to kind of show what the government does. And it's exploded. There are two things going on at the same time in the country. There is this absolutely bonkers, numb nuts idea about government, that it's the enemy of the people and it's unnecessary and et cetera coming out of the Trump camp. But there's this growing awareness outside of the Trump camp that this thing, it's precious. It's the only tool for dealing with all sorts of existential risk.
21:16So who's winning the argument? The argument, interesting, has not found its way into the presidential campaign because the Democrats don't have the nerve to fight it, to make it. there's enough of a kind of residue of the Reagan sort of like, it's not a popular argument to make. I think it is, but they haven't realized it. So the argument's not happening on the stage during the presidential debate. That's not happening. But underneath that, like just in the conversation, in the letters, pages of the newspapers, in the way people respond when I go on shows to talk about it, I think my side's winning it.
21:50There's something interesting, I think, culturally here about the personalities of people who think in this drain the swamp way. Our equivalent here, who was my boss, was a woman called Liz Truss, who was briefly our prime minister. And I remember she very much, when I was working with her, actually in the Department for the Environment, she was very much, this is ridiculous. Let's cut this by 25%. Let's get rid of the civil servants. This is all a waste of time. And that was combined with a real lack of curiosity about what the staff were doing. She didn't really want to spend time visiting the national parks, go to the environment agencies, stand on a flood bank, get into the business of it.
22:27And I just want to pretentiously see whether there's something about the modern age or contemporary culture which encourages that strange detachment of reality and enables this kind of radicalism. That's a good question. I've never put that to myself. In my country, part of it's coming from some spitballing here. I hadn't thought about it. So can I take it all back if it's just wrong? I now live in a country where inequality is greater than it's been forever, basically. Put it this way. The people at the very top control resources they have not controlled in a century and a bit. Where the money is made often in stuff that's not obviously socially useful, especially in finance.
23:06Where it's like, would we have been better off if you didn't just exist? Possibly, even though you have$30 billion. dollars. And that kind of person and the culture that forms around that kind of person is instinctively hostile to givers, to mission-driven, socially conscious people, because it makes them look bad. It's like, it's embarrassing when the guy who works inside the Department of Energy cleaning up nuclear waste actually seemed to have a more useful life than the billionaire who's done not much for his country. And so that this is my way of trying to explain why there is this failure to recognize the selfless service of people who are in the civil service.
23:46I think it's threatening to the culture as it is right now. This will hit the road, particularly because Elon Musk is now being lined up by Donald Trump to run the Department of Government Efficiency. You keep seeing him on Twitter with Doge written underneath him. And that's bringing together two of the things. They want us to laugh. Two of the things that you've researched. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm playing right into their hands, aren't I? Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm just going to be so frustrating to you. I'm not going to give you what you need. So two things that you've written about and thought about.
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24:17Silicon Valley and the administration of government coming together in this figure of Elon Musk. I mean, you looked at another related figure, actually, in your latest book, which we'll get on to, which is Sam Bankman Free. But I just wonder whether we can use this as a way of bringing out the themes of those three books and bring them together. As Elon Musk turns up in the Department of Government of Fisheries, if he does, is that not somehow those three books are yours combined? And what does that mean about our age? I feel I've just been posed a question on an Oxford exam and I wasn't prepared.
24:48But what does it mean? You're at an economist interview. It's kind of insane to put Elon Musk in charge of an organization right now. Now, there may have been a time in his life where he was suited to managing other people, but he can't manage anything now. He's got a group of people underneath him at Tesla who do things for him, I assume, and at SpaceX. There's probably a story there that someone's going to dig out about how one day they did it in spite of him rather than because of him kind of thing. He's completely self-absorbed. He seems to spend all his life on Twitter. It's destructive rather than constructive.
25:17It's dishonest over and over. It's just lie after lie after lie. He's preening. He's all the things that a bad manager is. The idea that that person is going to go into this largely selfless enterprise called government and manage it, that's nuts. The kind of person who could, and it isn't that government wouldn't benefit from some input from the private sector. Running government is different from running business. It's dumb to say we're going to turn this into a business. You can't do it because you don't have the same incentives. But you can learn from the management techniques in private business.
25:48The kind of person who's going to do that is like the quiet, excellent manager of some company who doesn't pay himself too much and who is extremely aware of the value of the person six levels down from himself. That's the kind of person who's going to go in and be useful. So when Donald Trump says, I'm going to make Elon Musk the head of government efficiency, who does that play to? It plays to all the people who know absolutely nothing about anything, about Elon Musk, about the government. is people who are kind of moving through life with a very, very superficial understanding of the world around them.
26:20And that's the Republican Party right now, right? Just on that, so to most Europeans, we find it really, really, really hard to work out how anyone who is actually not big on luck, struggling in life in the States, is looking to Donald Trump as some kind of savior, especially given the fact that they've had four years of him as president already. So try and just help me understand what those people... Why does anybody like Donald Trump? Is that the question? Yeah, kind of. But why does anybody see him as the person who's going to address their concerns when, as you said earlier, all he cares about is himself?
26:54Why can you see that? I see that. Rory sees that. But so many people actually see the opposite. They see him as a savior. A thousand op-ed writers have tried to answer that question, right? I mean, this is like a question that... You're way cleverer than they are. I just don't do op-eds. But I can give you my take. My take is that they don't actually think that he's going to solve their problems. They've given up on their problems being solved. And what they want is their anger to be stoked. They want to feel that someone feels something like they feel. And very oddly, and this is why I think Trump is just like personally critical to this movement.
27:25If that bullet had taken out Trump, I think they would not be someone who stepped in and replaced him. And the movement would move on just the way it is. So what has he got that nobody else has got? A genuine anger. a genuine kind of psychopathic anger at the world that comes from a chip on his shoulder but from the way he was raised by his dad from being kind of a second or third tier new york real estate guy who was looked down upon by the first tier ones by the culture of new york in which he was raised which sort of rewarded this sort this but you've also got to have talent surely you've got to have talent to be able to the fact that he doesn't the fact that he doesn't have talent sort of makes it easier for people to relate to him i think what you see as deficiencies I think probably are great strengths with his audience.
28:07So he's sincere in some way. Even when he's faking it, he's sincere. At some deep level, he feels all that awfulness. And they like it. I think that they like that. Let's take a break.
28:23Your latest book, Going Infinite, is about Sam Bankman-Fried. And Sam Bankman-Fried, as most listeners will know, was the 29-year-old billionaire who then built this incredible cryptocurrency machine, which went astonishingly bankrupt. And at the moment, it exploded. He had Tony Blair and Bill Clinton appearing on stages. He had great football stars being paid$50 million a year. He was shuffling around in his cargo pants. And in its fall, ending up with him going to prison, people who invested in the exchange, ordinary people lost quite a lot of money. tell us a little bit about this man i mean because to me and i maybe to alistair seems pretty appalling and unattractive but to some extent you quite like him yeah i did i liked him but i better qualify that because he's in jail well no that's not why i still like him even though he's in jail okay uh he's a wonderful character it's just when you're moving through space with him you know things are going to happen that are going to work out for you on the page i knew i I was with Ignatius Riley, Don Quixote.
29:26I was with a character of that caliber. These things just happen. And you just know that they're going to happen. So you don't have to worry about it being boring. Do you know who he's in jail with right now? Puff Daddy. P. Diddy, or whatever he's called now, Sean Combs, is his cellmate. Of course he is. Because that just happens to Sam Bankman-Fried over and over and over. Will he know who he is? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Will he care about him? Will he be interested in him? Oh, yeah. I might tell you what's appealing about him, because what's not appealing is so much more obvious now. But at the time, you've got to remember, a lot of people were charmed by him.
29:54Tony Blair, Bill Clinton. Yeah. And Tom Brady, our famous quarterback. And of course, it's easy to be charmed by someone who is dripping$100 bills off him wherever he walks. But it wasn't just that. There's a phrase that I did not hear until I came over here on the hardback book tour for this. Neurodivergent. Is that not a thing in America? It's becoming a bit more of a thing. So we're ahead of you. You're ahead of us here in being actually sensitive to it in some way that nobody in the States, I mean, people talk about specific neurodivergencies, autism. But the idea that you might think about a person differently because their brain is wired oddly, that hasn't taken hold in quite the way you might imagine.
30:32and Sam Bagnon-Fry was diagnosed with autism during his trial for the first time. So that was a plea for sympathy, but I don't think that's what he is. I think it's something that has not been identified, that I think that one day we're going to understand the brain and people are going to come back and say, that brain was that. And there's something about that brain, his brain, that when it moves through the world, it just makes the world more interesting. He thinks about things differently. When he comes into any situation, he doesn't do what I do. Like if I have to learn about, oh, I don't know, how to advertise a cryptocurrency firm.
31:04I've got a new cryptocurrency exchange. How am I going to promote it? How am I going to make it famous? I'd find whoever the smart marketing people were. I'd call them up and say, what do I do? And I'd probably listen to them. He thinks I'm going to learn this from first principles. Nobody knows. He thinks I'm not going to listen to anybody or I'll listen, but I'll say it's all stupid. And so over and over, he comes at things where there is a body of knowledge, the law, how to defend oneself during a criminal trial and says the experts don't know what they're doing, dreams up his own response.
31:33And in that response are five pearls of wisdom and five absolutely idiotic things. He's a wholly original character. So I realized I had a character. But let me just back up, Sippy, but one thing you said, because it's very important in just how I feel about him, that people actually, in fact, are getting their money back. It looked at the time of the implosion of FTX. people would have told you, even the people running the bankruptcy who were being a little disingenuous, that there's nothing there, that he vaporized$11 billion of customer deposits. Turns out there's 16 billion plus there and that people are getting like 20 % interest on their deposits back if their claims are going to be met.
32:13So it's not that he didn't create a lot of harm. A lot of people were disrupted by this, but it isn't true that everybody just lost their money. I listened to your book. You did? Yeah. Did I read it? I think you read the introduction. Okay. Did you read the whole thing? I can't remember. I did, but I don't know if I did over here. Okay. Well, anyway, Fiona, my partner and I, we listened to it on a long drive through France. And I remember thinking the whole time, why did Sam Bankman-Fried let this guy in so close? Because I had no sense of you having to go through any sort of process. So how did he let you do that?
32:45So I've had a number of people do this with me. It isn't unusual in my life. I can't write a book unless someone lets me in, but why did he let me in? Yeah. Because he showed no interest in you whatsoever. No. He's never asked me a single question about myself or what I, every time then he'll ask me what I think of something and then he ignores it. Like, should I testify in my defense at my own trial? No, you shouldn't. No, never mind. You know, it's that kind of thing. That happened a dozen times. I was the dumb old guy. So I met him accidentally. I met him because a friend asked me to vet him, a friend who was doing a business deal with him.
33:16And I took him on a hike in the Berkeley Hills and came back down from the hike and I told my friend, sure, do business with him, what could go wrong? But at the end of two hours, I said, I said to him, I just want to be along for the ride. I just want to see what happens. Something's going to happen. And this is before the customer's deposits were always in the wrong place. He always had his$11 billion of customer deposits that were meant to be on the FTX cryptocurrency exchange inside his own private hedge fund. But when I met him, they were still there. You know, there was liquid in there. There was an optics problem, but there wouldn't have been a really serious legal problem, I don't think.
33:49I was there as the problem developed. But having said that, I think he would have let me in anyway. And I tell you why. There are two reasons. His colleagues asked him, and I know they did, why the hell are you letting him just like loiter in our offices in the Bahamas? Why do I have to be interviewed by Michael Lewis? Which they all did. They come in kind of grudgingly. They say, Sam has to say, I have to tell you the truth. Why that? Sam's answer would have been, Michael Lewis writes books that get read by Washington regulators. And we want to be regulated by Washington. that Michael Lewis will make us seem acceptable to the Washington regulatory crowd.
34:22So he did have a reason. That would have been the tactical reason. Maybe that's true. Like, I don't know if that would have helped him or hurt him or whatever. But assuming that the fraud had never been exposed. I think the real reason, Sam Bankman-Fried lived a very isolated childhood. Basically, there's nobody you can talk to who can tell you what he was like before the age of 18, apart from one kid and his parents, but not even his brother, who said Sam was like a tenant in the house. He lived alone in his head. He read my book Moneyball when he was 12 years old and became obsessed with the idea that his brain, the way it worked, would be perfectly suited to running baseball teams.
35:03And his father told me it was like, he woke up, he's like, there was something that everybody else did that was normal, baseball. For a while in his life, he wanted to be a future baseball manager. and then that dream faded and he went on with his life. Somehow he thought I was the sort of person who might understand him because I'd written a book that gave him a place at the table. I think that helped. I'm going to ask another difficult, pretentious question as my last question. This is one of these Oxbridge essay questions. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of a common sense for you. I'm still sort of trying to get at a common theme running through all your different books.
35:36Maybe there isn't one. No, I think there is one. I think there is one, but I think it's maybe not one that... I'm aware of. Well, exactly. That's right. You just wrote them. Exactly. You only wrote them. Rory knows more than you do about your books. Much more. Much more. Much more. Exactly. You only wrote them. I've skimmed them. You didn't go to Princeton. I don't know. I don't know anything. So my hypothesis is... Kind of idiot savant over here. Exactly. You are Sam Bankman-Fried, basically. That's my view on it. You don't fully understand yourself any more than Sam Bankman-Fried understands himself.
36:04Probably true. That it tells us something very interesting about our culture that these people who you might call neurodivergent or unusual like Sam Bankman-Fried or detached in the way that you described the relationship with the Trump administration, that there's something very odd about a kind of severing from reality. and the fact that so many of the great kind of titans and heroes of our age, Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, etc., are people who a previous generation, I don't know, your great-grandfather's generation, would have thought were a little bit uncivilized, out of touch with reality.
36:39He would have thought they had a screw loose, right? Like they were oddballs and probably would be charmed by their oddballness. We would keep them in the basement where they belonged. Right. So what is it that has now made them the masters of our world? Technology. Without technological change. That's the necessary ingredient, right? Might not be sufficient. It's absolutely true. So Sam Beckman-Fried, I mean, one of the things that attracted me to him was the different worlds that he was moving through and that he had moved through Wall Street and spent three years at Jane Street as a high-frequency trader, which is opaque to the world.
37:11Nobody even knows what they do in there. And then he would - Did you understand? That was the bit of the book where I got a bit lost. Did you understand? You were listening to it instead of reading it. That's why. If you'd read it, you'd been fine. Would I? Yes. You sure about that? Yeah, because it was a little too complicated for the year. Okay. but not too complicated for the eye. You did understand what they were doing, these guys? And you would have understood if you read it. But it's using the speed of light, the speed of computer transactions, to be the first to spot and exploit inefficiencies in the markets.
37:38But they all thought he was weird? Even there, they thought he was weird. And they were weird. So that kind of people who were with his colleagues, the collection of people, were kind of these hairless, muscle-less math and physics people from MIT and Stanford, who even when I wouldn't have been admitted to the Wall Street I worked at, a previous Wall Street would have forced them to pass through some social filter. They would have had to have some social ability because they were interacting with human beings. And the way Wall Street has developed, all you have to do is be able to interact with the machine.
38:12And if you're incapable of interacting with other human beings, they can work around that if you have a gift of working with the machine. And these are the masters of the universe now on Wall Street. You don't know their names. It's not Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Barclays Bank or any of these places anymore. It's Jane Street and Jump Trading and Citadel and Hudson River Trading. And what they're paid would shock you. Sometimes it hits the papers that, oh, the average trader got paid$5 million or$6 million this year. But the people at the top of these firms are the richest people in the United States.
38:42Ken Griffin, for example. and it's a curious and disturbing thing that's happened in the financial markets. In an odd way, Wall Street has become less equal and these are the people at the very top. But they are not, as you say, the social creatures of even my generation on Wall Street. And so what enables them? Well, if you only have to talk to the machine, you aren't required to have the same sort of social skills. If you have to be able to talk like the machine or understand the machine, you may not have those social skills. It's an accident if you're able to also function with human beings.
39:16You probably, if you have the skills to do that job, you spent much of your childhood in front of a machine and not playing games or doing the other things that socialize people. So, I mean, I think that's kind of what's going on. Just take the book that made, you know, your first real success story was Liar's Poker. Yeah. That was Wall Street back then. And it was written in the city of London. I was based here. Was it influenced by the city of London? Well, I worked in the city of London. I worked for a Wall Street U.S. firm, Solomon Brothers. Oh, were you here? I was here. Right. I was here.
39:46I stayed from the London School of Economics. They hired me here. But that book, to me... You didn't notice the British irony? No. You didn't? No, I didn't. I thought it was laced with British irony. Southern Charming. Maybe if I listened to it, I would have. But audiobooks weren't such a big thing back then. But what links that, I think, to the big short, which was really about how the crash happened, is the kind of relentless greed and the total lack of concern for the inequality that they help cause. And that hasn't changed even after you rightly calling out the people who caused the crash.
40:20It hasn't changed. If anything, it's worse. When you began your sentence saying total lack of concern for, I thought you were going to say for like their customers or for the people, the people they were doing business with. That as well. I think there was actually a total absence of awareness of the social consequences of actions. I don't think that the people who were doing trading on Wall Street when I was there or during the financial crisis were thinking, oh, we're going to exacerbate social inequality. I think they were just in their little bubbles. There are other connections though. I mean, the other connections are that the liar's poker world, where I joined Wall Street in the late 80s, is when Wall Street is becoming the Wall Street we've come to know and love.
40:57It's opaque because it's complicated. No one love, that's irony. That's irony. That's British. That's a British thing. Yeah, we know that. Okay. Thank you. I'm glad you picked that up, though. Americans aren't as good at irony as we are. Clearly not. It's a sign of a decadent culture that you're good at irony. And we're right behind you. We're moments behind you. But every time I see someone successfully pull off irony in America, I think we're doomed. We're going the wrong direction. I want some of that Midwest earnestness back. It's all about timing. That's true, too. Timing, yeah. The way you get timing and irony is by being a little bit detached from the environment you're in, the conversation, not being all in.
41:36That detachment, sign of decadence. Okay. Yeah. It's not the Spartan like all. Decadent. Yeah. Productivity growth. So we've gone off a sidetrack here. Yeah. It's a good one. I like it. I mean, this is putting the financial world very crudely. But technology hit the financial system and the complexity that it enabled effectively made the financial world opaque to people outside, even very intelligent people outside. It makes it hard to regulate, makes it hard to understand. And so diabolical things can happen that way. You don't need closed doors and smoke-filled rooms anymore because the technology just masks everything.
42:13If you have people of this level of wealth, it does, I'm afraid, in America, I think equate almost automatically to political power. Yep, it does. They own politics. They do. Donald Trump is backed by the people who run some of these firms. And yet Kamala Harris is earning more money for the campaign than he is because they've got to play the game as well with the people who cause and drive and don't care about inequality. Right, right. My last question. Is this the last question then I get to go? Do you want to go now? No. You don't have to have the last question. Or is it just going to be Rory and me?
42:42Your last question. I'll give you the honest answer, Michael, is that we've only got the studio booked until 12 o 'clock. My last question is, I think the real hero of all your books, and I say this partly because I know him quite well, is actually a genuine hero, and that was Billy Bean in Moneyball. I love Billy Bean. I do too. Yeah. Did you prefer to be with him, real nice guy, real smart, or with these kind of oddball people in the money world? Sam Bankman-Fried is an easier literary character. My problem with Sam Bankman and Freed was I didn't know how the story ended. I had enough material for three books.
43:15He was walking literary material. Billy is not. Billy is deep literary material, but he doesn't want to divulge it. Billy does not want to seem anything but normal, happy, invulnerable. And to get Billy to the vulnerability, and there is some vulnerability there, to get him to the place where he can kind of describe who he is, is so hard that as a literary character, I prefer Sam Bankman and Freed. As a person to just be friends with, I mean, Sam Beckman-Fried is, I don't know if he's capable of friendship. I never felt that there would ever be that relationship. With Billy, when I'm working on Moneyball, he was just a subject.
43:50After the book came out, we become friends, and it's a very natural friendship. He's an easy person to be friends with. My final obvious thing. What are you interested in now? What excites you? What intrigues you about the world? This is going to disappoint you, but I'll tell you. Is it sex? Are you doing a pornography book? That market has been so captured by Alistair. I'd follow in the footsteps of giants. I just couldn't. I mean, why would I even try? Everybody needs to go read his stuff again. Just everybody needs to go read it. But the - It's almost half a century old. If Donald Trump is elected president, I will almost certainly go into the U.S.
44:27government and write a book about the consequences for the government. So that's in the back of my mind. I have several - Sorry, please tell me that doesn't mean you're hoping for that to happen. No, no, no, I'm not. No, of course not. I'm not. But I am an opportunist. But there are several characters who are living kind of rent-free in my mind right now. And they're all in sport. I'm just waiting to see what happens with that. I have my own podcast. Can I mention it? It's called Against the Rules. We know. And it's scripted. It's not like this. It's not a bullshit podcast where you just come out and talk.
44:58You actually, I do some work here and, and, and - I read three of your books in the last two weeks. I read them all, I've got three of them. You listen to them. You listen to them. That was ages ago. In a kind of the half-assed way, apparently. Double speed. Yes. You sound really weird, double speed. So anyway, this season is just dropping and the subject, it sounds like, why are you wasting 10 episodes on this subject? But it's sports gambling. And it's come to America. It's been legalized in the last five years. And the effects, both the effects it's having on the culture and what it's telling you about the culture is fascinating.
45:35So that's what I'm doing right now. I'm scripting podcast episodes about sports gambling. And you all are ahead of us on this. You led the way. So more broadly, the sports gambling markets here and in the United States are this front that's opened up between people who think statistically, you know, know what the expected value of trades are, all that kind of stuff, and people who don't. And there's an incredible exploitation of people who are just not analytical people that's going on. And it's going to breed even more anger and resentment and all the rest. That's what I'm doing right now. Well, can I say, we actually talked about this on the podcast this week.
46:09And don't go down the road we've gone down. By you both degenerate gamblers? No, but I'll tell you, there's plenty of them. And you just want to piss up. One of the worst things we did as a government was liberalise the government. Yeah, it's a mistake. Terrible. Michael, thank you. This has been a real pleasure. Thank you for coming. Hope I didn't bore you. That was great. All right. Good to talk to you at least another 10 minutes. All right.
46:34So, Alistair, thank you for that. Do you think in Britain you could be quite so unapologetic about his sort of upper class decorative background that he referred to right at the beginning? Well, no, but he does it in a nice kind of quite self-deprecating kind of way. He's got an amazing brain, hasn't he? And his books are - They're beautifully done. Yeah. And he's, you know, I don't know whether we're giving away state secrets here, but he's clearly very, very interested in this whole sort of new world of sports betting. And by the way, in preparation, I sent an email to Billy Bean, you know, the baseball guy who was the subject of Muddy Ball, which is, you know, the book really made him as kind of well known as he is really, and was made into a kind of Brad Pitt movie and all that stuff.
47:21So I know Billy Bean quite well, and I sent him an email saying, oh, we're interviewing Michael Lewis on the podcast, what's he like? And, you know, normally when you have a relationship between a subject of an author and the author is never 100 % sort of, you know, there's always a bit of attention going on there. He actually was away and he took a couple of days to reply, so we'd already seen him. And he said, I hope I'm not too late. He is one of the smartest and nicest guys I've ever known. I think it's one of the tricks, isn't it, of Michael Lewis, is that to be a great sort of biographer, and part of these books are partly biography, one of the great things is to love your subjects.
47:57And he does seem to really love his subjects. The only time it's gone wrong, I think, is with Sam Bankman-Fried, because that was a book where he was given the most perfect gift. He decided to really investigate and became very, very close to this guy who who ended up exploding his crypto thing and going to jail. And weirdly, we ended up in a situation in which he doesn't quite finish the book properly. I mean, you read that book thinking, wow, he's going to get this villain all the way to the end and expose him. But actually, in a sense, Michael Lewis is so affectionate towards Sam Bankfree, likes his subject so much that he can't quite bring himself to do what he needs to do at the end of that book, which is bring you up to prison.
48:36Because his publishers must have thought, what a gift. This guy decided to profile very positively this man who then became this incredible morality tale. I remember talking to the publishers about that Sam Bankman-Fried book, and they just thought, my goodness, this guy's lucky, and my goodness, this is brilliant, because he's become the best friends with a man who has just become the world's number one supervillain, who's blown up the cryptocurrency exchange, stolen all this money, and has now gone to jail, where he's now sharing a jail cell, I think, with P. Diddy. They're actually in the same cell, right?
49:09I think that was a bit of a scoop, you know. Extraordinary, extraordinary revelation. But Michael Lewis, oddly, his super skill of being so affectionate and warmly disposable to Sam Bagnudkir means at the end of that book, there's no real moral judgment. He's not really able to bring himself to turn his hero into a villain. He can't quite get that. No, but still an amazing read. And the other thing I've found fascinating was that, and this again, I think goes back to his personality and how he gets on with people, and that's how he gets into people, that Sam Bagnudkir never sort of asked him what he was doing.
49:39Lewis said, what's the plan here? What are you trying to get out of this? Just sort of had it along. And all these other people working for Sam Bankman-Fried kept saying, why am I having to talk to Michael Lewis about what we do? But we read his books, partly not Moneyball, but the books on Wall Street, on the financial crisis on Sam Bankman-Fried, partly because we're completely horrified by what these mad American bankers, capitalist traders are doing to destroy the global economy. I mean, these are like monstrous human beings. And it's true also for the stuff around the emergency preparedness with Trump book.
50:14But that isn't really actually what's going on in Michael Lewis's head. One of the reasons he's so good at is he's got genuine affection and interest in these people I see as sort of supervillains. He actually quite enjoys it. I mean, he was a trader himself. There's part of his personality that quite a bit like you, quite likes the rogue. He quite enjoys spending his time with these sort of Alan Clark-ish figures. And that's probably, I think, one of the reasons they open up to him. I think it's unfair, the way that just because I had this bizarre relationship with Alan Clark, you think I love all rogues.
50:44I actually don't like rogues. And I certainly don't like greedy, financial, money-grabbing, Sam Vankman-freed, Elon Musk types. No, but listen, he's an amazing researcher. But the real strength that he has, I think, is this ability to kind of get on with anybody. I thought, you know, this was the first time we'd met him. and I sort of felt at the end of an hour, whatever it was, and then if you, you know, we stop and we do our little chat and what have you, but then he's sort of hanging around, he wants to talk about this, he wants to talk about that, he's just a very nice guy. And he's got immense sort of empathetic social skills and, you know, he sent me an email saying he'd love to have dinner with you and me when he's next in town.
51:25And I mean, so he creates, fosters relationships, But I think he's also got this very beady eye for our culture, our civilization, the kind of 21st century, which is why I think his decision now to focus on sport betting, political betting is also very smart because that's right at the heart of the kind of moral, ethical, personal issues of our whole time. Yeah. And he was saying to us, when we were talking to him privately after, he was saying it's already having an impact upon American culture, American society. And I think we're seeing it in the way it's playing out in this presidential election.
52:03I mean, all this stuff about polymarket and the betting markets and where the money's all moving, it's all becoming a part of the sort of, you know, the fakeness of American democracy, which is really, really alarming. No, he's a very smart guy. And I was, I kind of didn't want to like him because, you know, every airport in the world you go into, you say, you go in and you say, where's my fucking book? And there's Michael Lewis. Why is he always here? But no, he deserves it. He's a very, very good guy and a very good writer. And Billy Bean was right. Well, thanks for doing that. See you soon.
52:35Bye. Bye.
From the publisher
What do Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington DC all have in common? Why has Donald Trump made the impact he has in the US? What was Sam Bankman-Fried really like to work alongside?
Rory and Alastair are joined by the writer of Moneyball and The Big Short to answer all these questions and more.
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