Michael Lewis, GOING INFINITE: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
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[1:03]So excited to bring you this episode with Michael Lewis about his latest book Going Infinite,
[1:10]The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.
[1:12]This is extremely timely because Sam Bankman Fried is on trial right now about this book,
[1:21]about what he did, and you're just going to have to listen to this episode.
[1:24]There's stuff that Michael Lewis told me that he hadn't told anyone before, and I am just
[1:29]so excited to bring this to you.
[1:30]This is his second time on the podcast, and I will be releasing, you'll see there's
[1:35]a visual component to it, so I'm going to release that on social as well.
[1:40]Anyway, here's more about Michael Lewis.
[1:42]Going Infinite, The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.
[1:44]Michael Lewis has published many New York Times best-selling books on various subjects.
[1:48]His most recent books, Aside from Going Infinite, Are the Premonition, The Fifth Risk,
[1:52]The Undoing Project, Flash Boys, The Big Short, and The Blind Side.
[1:56]Before that, he wrote Moneyball, a book ostensibly about baseball, but also about the way
[2:00]markets value people.
[2:02]Both of his books about sports became movies nominated for Academy Awards, as did his book
[2:06]about the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short.
[2:09]His other works include Boomerang, The New New Thing about Silicon Valley during the Internet
[2:13]boom, Coach about the transformative powers of his own high school baseball coach,
[2:18]Losers about the 1996 presidential campaign, and Liars Poker, a Wall Street story based
[2:24]in part on his own experience working as a bond salesman for Solomon Brothers.
[2:28]Mr. Lewis is a columnist for Bloomberg View and a contributing writer to Audible.
[2:32]His articles have also appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, The New
[2:35]Yorker, Gourmet, Slate, Sports Illustrated, Foreign Affairs and Poetry Magazine.
[2:40]He has served as editor and columnist for the British Weekly The Spectator and a senior
[2:45]editor and campaign correspondent for the New Republic.
[2:47]He has filmed and narrated short pieces for ABC TV's Nightline, created and presented
[2:52]a four-part documentary on the social consequences of the Internet for the British Broadcasting
[2:56]Corporation and recorded stories for the American public radio show This American Life.
[3:02]Mr. Lewis grew up in New Orleans and remains deeply interested and involved in the city.
[3:06]He holds a bachelor's degree in art history from Princeton and a master's degree in economics
[3:10]from the London School of Economics.
[3:12]He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, Tabitha Soren and their children.
[3:16]In 2009, he published home game, an accidental guide to fatherhood about his attempts to raise
[3:21]them.
[3:22]Enjoy the episode.
[3:23]Welcome, Michael.
[3:24]Thank you so much for coming back on Momstone.
[3:25]I have time to read books to discuss your latest book, Going Infinite, The Rise and Fall
[3:30]of a New Tycoon.
[3:31]It's a pleasure to be here again.
[3:33]I have to say, I know that we had pushed the time a smidge because of your appearance
[3:37]on CBS this morning and I was at my doctorate this morning trying to download the app
[3:42]so I could watch you and I watched CBS on my phone for like an hour, but it didn't work.
[3:47]I don't know what happened.
[3:48]Maybe I watched an old show.
[3:49]Anyway, I tried.
[3:51]Well, I mean, you didn't miss anything.
[3:55]I mean, I really actually love those hosts.
[3:57]They're great.
[3:58]But the six-minute format for this story is really hard.
[4:03]60 minutes did almost half an hour last night and that just started to scratch the
[4:09]surface.
[4:10]I mean, what they left on the cutting room floor?
[4:12]Can I give you an example?
[4:13]Yes.
[4:14]All right.
[4:15]So you're holding the book.
[4:16]The jacket off the book and look on the inside of the jacket.
[4:20]You'll find one of many little puzzles in the back.
[4:22]Oh, my gosh.
[4:23]I'm so mad at myself that I didn't notice that.
[4:26]All right.
[4:27]So what you're looking at is something that both the bankruptcy people who are running
[4:31]the FTX bankruptcy and the book is about San Benjamin Fried and FTX and the collapse
[4:37]of this crypto exchange.
[4:38]He's going on trial tomorrow.
[4:40]Neither I think.
[4:41]I'm pretty sure.
[4:43]The prosecutors, I mean, the bankruptcy people told me there's no organism.
[4:46]Chart for this organization.
[4:48]We don't even know the names of the many of the employees because they kept no records.
[4:52]And I'm presuming the prosecutors don't know about this either.
[4:55]But what you have in your hand is the one known organization chart for FTX and it was created
[5:03]on the slide, unbeknownst even to the CEO by San Benjamin Fried's personal therapist
[5:09]and corporate psychiatrist to FTX who was in the Bahamas and he had a hundred employees
[5:15]who were reporting, who were coming to him because they weren't happy about one thing
[5:18]or the other.
[5:19]And he realized he could not counsel them unless he knew what the organization looked like.
[5:24]So he started to pick their brains about who reported to who and who was where and there
[5:28]was who had what title and you've got 453 people there laid out beautifully by the corporate
[5:35]shrink.
[5:36]And this is all to my point that that thing is probably admissible as evidence in the
[5:42]trial.
[5:44]It's probably useful to everybody, including the readers of the book and 60 minutes
[5:49]who I unveiled it to didn't even have space in a half hour piece to get to it and it
[5:53]just ended up on the cutting room floor.
[5:55]Oh my gosh.
[5:56]So you were the first person on air to reveal this thing.
[6:01]It's just amazing how it kind of dents the story.
[6:05]So anyway, please dab a little time and you and sorry, if I jump to head here a little
[6:09]bit.
[6:10]No, I'm too late.
[6:11]I'm going to go look at that thing because I am a great pains to print it on the, it's
[6:16]like, I think it is like, you know, the family trees and Tolstoy novels or the kings
[6:20]and Shakespeare's plays.
[6:22]That's what it is.
[6:23]That's what you're looking at.
[6:24]Oh my gosh.
[6:25]Did you think about putting it somewhere else?
[6:28]It was always all the inside.
[6:30]It wasn't my idea.
[6:31]It was a publisher's idea.
[6:32]It was a brilliant idea.
[6:33]Because my main character, Sam Agman Frieden, as a child, he has no connection to other
[6:38]human beings except for one instance and that's when he starts designing puzzles for
[6:43]other people's to solve like puzzle hunts on the Stanford campus.
[6:47]He is relationship with the people around him.
[6:51]He's most comfortable with this.
[6:52]He creates the puzzle and you try to solve it.
[6:54]And I wanted the reader to have some feel of solving a puzzle as they're going through
[6:59]a book.
[7:00]The puzzle is here.
[7:01]Yeah.
[7:02]This sort of puts you in the mood.
[7:03]Wow.
[7:04]It's sort of fluffer.
[7:05]Well, I'm impressed and delighted because this is the coolest thing I've seen on a
[7:09]Jack and Cover.
[7:10]I love it.
[7:11]Yeah.
[7:12]I love it.
[7:13]And I love it that when you're reading the book, they're half a dozen or eight other
[7:19]really important characters beside Sam who are kind of drawn.
[7:24]And you can find them there and figure out where they're situated.
[7:27]And even the little people who kind of come and go, you can find them there.
[7:31]And I'm kind of tickled because they're 453 or whatever people who work at FTX, many
[7:35]of whom nobody knows their names.
[7:37]And now they're all laid out.
[7:38]Oh, my God.
[7:39]They can show their grandchildren.
[7:40]Yeah.
[7:41]Here it is.
[7:42]I'm a psychiatrist.
[7:43]His name is George Learner.
[7:45]I came to a dorm, he's a curious character.
[7:49]The psychiatrist is off basically hiding in Vietnam because he don't have anything to
[7:52]with the trial.
[7:53]And he gave it only to me and did not let anybody else know that he created it.
[7:58]So the CEO, Sam, does not know that thing exists.
[8:02]I never told him.
[8:03]Oh, my gosh.
[8:04]Wow.
[8:05]I'm sorry.
[8:06]I'm sorry.
[8:07]It's amazing.
[8:08]I'm too excited.
[8:09]I'm too excited about my own jacket cover.
[8:12]I don't.
[8:13]It's unseemly in an author.
[8:14]It's not at all.
[8:15]It's totally expected and wonderful.
[8:18]By the way, even just the fact that the company has a psychiatrist, you should just, that
[8:22]is like the flag red flag waving at all, like what kind of company.
[8:26]It sounded like the two of you and Sam were, you know, the only ones left standing at
[8:30]the end.
[8:31]So that's not only did the company have a psychiatrist and not only was he the personal
[8:36]therapist, the CEO, he was the personal set therapist to the CEO's girlfriend who ran
[8:44]the side of the company that collapsed and who wasn't speaking to the CEO.
[8:49]So the therapist in a funny way was the only line of communication between the two most
[8:55]important people in this drama.
[8:57]It's great.
[8:58]I mean, you know, I often have gotten been handed material that are just kind of God's
[9:01]gifts to nonfiction narrative writers.
[9:04]I've been in my career unbelievably lucky in the stuff I've kind of wandered into.
[9:11]And the feeling that I love to have is I'm only limited by my powers.
[9:17]Like it's not the material that's stopping me from doing something great.
[9:20]It's me.
[9:21]That's it.
[9:23]And I had that feeling with this one.
[9:25]I've had it before, but I had it in spades with this one.
[9:28]It was like, oh, like Shakespeare would have, this material was worthy of Shakespeare that
[9:34]Shakespeare would have done things with it that I have not imagined.
[9:38]But you could see in the material just the world and it just kept on giving little things
[9:44]like that.
[9:45]Anyway.
[9:46]So I see like I've started this thing by Marlani, I will shut up and you can now, you
[9:51]can now interrogate me.
[9:52]I don't want to interrogate you.
[9:53]I want to just have a regular conversation.
[9:55]Okay.
[9:56]I don't think interrogation is fun for either person.
[9:58]I don't know.
[9:59]I think conversation.
[10:00]is a lot more fun. I mean, personally, and you also get more out of people.
[10:06]Yeah, I mean, if they're not defensive, yeah, that's right. Yeah. I found it really interesting
[10:12]how you started the book with a really deep dive into Sam's childhood and what he's like.
[10:18]And I don't know. You never referenced if you felt like he was on the spectrum or if there was
[10:23]any sort of diagnosis, but you did a very clear picture of somebody who relied on things like
[10:30]who didn't really care about other people's feelings essentially and kind of beat to his own
[10:35]drummer. And even though he was so brilliant in some ways, just like lacked the ability or desire
[10:41]to like read facial expressions or things like that that other people kind of take for granted.
[10:46]And then you set it up for how his life kind of unfolds by us getting to know what he was like
[10:53]in his relationship with friends. And just some of the deficits in his personality that
[10:58]end up becoming hugely significant later when he's trying to interact with the company. So
[11:03]when you were doing this deep dive into childhood, like were you surprised? Is this what you expected
[11:08]him to be like? And I know there wasn't that much information as everybody was like, he doesn't
[11:12]even remember. So what was that like? So the first thing I said, let me just amend something you just said.
[11:18]Okay, Amanda. He never had trouble reading other people's expressions. He had no expressions
[11:25]that he had to learn with mirror when he was kind of in college, how to how to smile, how to
[11:32]read how to respond with facial expressions so that other people could read him. The problem was
[11:36]always other people's ability to read him. His ability to signal other people is interest or
[11:42]disinterest or whatever. And so the first thing about his childhood that was instantly striking,
[11:49]and this is after I had spent months kind of roaming around his company, I started to go,
[11:53]I started to wonder like, what was this person like when he was 10 years old? And I said,
[11:58]do you just give me a list of everybody who knew you and could say something about you before
[12:02]the age 18? He said, there were his parents and nobody else. And I said, how, you know, how could
[12:07]that be? You went to school with people for all those years. You had someone write you college
[12:13]references presumably. You must have had some interaction. And he said slim pickets. So I did a
[12:21]a couple things with him. I actually made him drive around the scenes of his childhood with
[12:25]went to his old schools. We went to his home to over and just to see if they're triggered any
[12:30]associations. Pretty much zip. But eventually elicited one person who he had formed an attachment
[12:37]to of sorts. And it was a person with whom he competed in a game called Magic the Gathering.
[12:42]It's a, it's a, it's a delightfully complex strategic card game. And this person,
[12:50]the name was Matt Nass. Went on to be a builder of games, a creator of Sam's favorite video game
[12:56]called Storybook Brawl. It's Matt, Matt clearly, as I got to know him, his chief quality, the important
[13:03]attribute that he had that allowed him to even be in Sam's life was he made zero emotional demands
[13:10]it was just they just sat and played. And even now when they're together, they just never
[13:13]still say anything. It's there's no. So it was, I was dealing with a character who was given
[13:20]it. He grew up with two parents who were socially very outgoing on professors at the Stanford law
[13:26]school center of a kind of social world at Stanford widely loved it admired by their colleagues hosts
[13:32]of parties all the time. In spite of all this, he was really isolated. And, and went through his
[13:38]childhood feeling basically not understood by anybody. And with his childhood a bit like a martian
[13:44]that, you know, he was learning that his parents were unusual people. They were, I guess, you'd
[13:50]loosely describe them as utilitarian. They didn't have a, they weren't religious. They weren't
[13:54]tribal in any real way. They didn't go to football games. They were, but they had this view that
[14:00]they lived their lives to maximize the benefits of the pleasure and minimize the suffering of
[14:05]others. They didn't think that right. And he, he sort of absorbs this from them. But they don't
[14:11]really, they don't put him through, they realized we had a quite young age that he's so different.
[14:16]That there's no point trying to parent him like a, like a normal child. His mother said that
[14:21]she when he was little, she took him to amusement park. And like they're, they're going to the
[14:25]rides. And she incenses this, they're going from ride to ride, but he's looking at her like he's not
[14:30]expressing himself in any way. And if she looks down and he says, mom, are you having fun yet?
[14:38]I said, she said, I was busted. It was sort of like he wasn't there. I was here for me, not him.
[14:42]He didn't want to be there. And then she also said that she wrote these very complicated,
[14:47]kind of journal articles about, about law and philosophy. And she ran one of these by him when he
[14:53]was like a kid, like 11 years old. And he started asking her questions that she said were more
[14:59]pointed and better questions than her peers did when she was peer reviewed. And she just,
[15:04]they just throw up their hands and said, we don't know what to do with us. And I can tell you that
[15:08]their colleagues, their friends, I always thought that the parents were both a little very afraid
[15:14]for Sam that he knows was going to happen to him in the world. And a little afraid of him
[15:19]because he was so detached. And so that's the challenge. I mean, but I mean, it makes it sound
[15:24]or grimmer than it was because when he talks about it, like what the world looked like through his
[15:30]eyes, when he's eight, it's quite funny. Like in eight years, he says that when he was eight,
[15:36]he's at school. And the kids are talking about Santa Claus. It's December. It's December.
[15:41]And his friend is the kid in the class in Henry. And Henry says that Santa's bringing him some
[15:47]presents. And it dawns on Sam that the kids actually believe that Santa exists. And he had heard
[15:55]of Santa. It was like a thing. It was like Bugs Bunny, you know, his character, our cartoon character.
[16:01]It had never dawned on you because don't ever told him that kids are believe that Santa is real.
[16:07]And he wouldn't basically lock himself in the room and thought about this for 24 hours,
[16:11]saying it blew his mind. What does it say about human beings? He says he knows the whole story
[16:14]now that there are these elves in the North Pole. And this guy gets on a sled and he drops presents
[16:20]down chimneys. And it obviously, obviously preposterous, like no way this actually happens,
[16:27]but everybody believes it. And he says he just like screwed up his whole view of humanity started
[16:34]to shift. And he has the similar sort of response when he finds out that even grownups believe in God,
[16:39]like he thinks how could anybody do that? And so which you said in the character, and this
[16:43]continues on into adulthood when he starts colliding with things like the financial system.
[16:49]He's looking at it almost like a Martian. Like he has none of the received notions, and he's just
[16:54]thinking for himself about it. And when you do that, life looks comical. Yes. And so his childhood,
[17:01]as sad as it is, when you think about it in a certain way, is funny when you listen to it through
[17:08]his eyes. Yeah. And then maybe another way to put it is, it is sad, but he's not sad.
[17:14]Yeah. You know, that you don't feel sad when you're listening to him talk about it. You feel
[17:19]well, do you feel curious? Like this is a very interesting Martian. Right. So then it can't be sad.
[17:25]I mean, if he doesn't think it's sad, then it was for him. It was fine. Yes. I think that's right.
[17:29]Yeah. Like, I just love that it doesn't make any sense. Most a lot of the things we believe,
[17:37]but it's true. I'm like, you know, recently I had to tell my kids that the tooth fairy didn't,
[17:42]and I made the huge mistake of doing this. You monster. You told me to.
[17:46]On the way to like, on a huge trip, we were taking like all the way to like Massachusetts or
[17:51]something at the beginning of the trip. It was so it was a really bad parenting move. But anyway,
[17:55]I don't know how it came up, but they kept begging me to tell them, and I was like,
[17:58]okay, fine. No, it's not real. And I'm like, how, like, how what the tooth fairy be getting in our
[18:02]apartment anyway? Do you know? Like, like, they're so sorry kids. Why would they believe that security?
[18:08]Right? I'm like, what? Sam, the doorman is letting up the tooth fairy and like,
[18:14]and who breaks into a place to leave stuff rather than take it. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Nobody
[18:19]way. If you bother to break in, it's not going to leave you money. They're going to take something from
[18:23]you. Yeah. Exactly. And how does he know where everybody is? Because they, as that too, they're
[18:27]like, well, sometimes like once I was in Mexico, and I'm like, yeah, how would you know? How would
[18:31]the tooth fairy know? Anyway, it is, it is crazy what we can believe. Yeah, I did ask that. I
[18:37]didn't ask that about too fair. I think the tooth fairy might have been one too many things for him to
[18:41]internalize when he was a kid. Yeah. Maybe he'd ever had to deal with the tooth fairy. I should have
[18:45]asked him. Yeah. Next time. But you know, but he did say that there was, you did write that there was
[18:52]only the one time that he got upset. And that was when he got very depressed because he was so
[18:56]bored. Oh, that's interesting. Since you pulled that out, his mother came home when he was like in
[19:02]the sixth grade and found crying his bedroom and that was she never that never happened. She didn't have
[19:06]to get that kind of emotional response. And you just said, I'm so bored. And what had happened was
[19:12]in retrospect, he'd been put in a kind of average public school and never identified as having
[19:17]any particular intellectual gifts. He'd been a kind of average student. I mean, good enough, but not
[19:22]and the truth was he just wasn't paying. He was so bored by what was coming out of people's
[19:27]mouths. It is mine was elsewhere always. And he had demonstrated that point clear at some clear
[19:33]mathematical ability. So they, with some other parents, muscled the school into creating a
[19:40]sophisticated math program for the kids. That was just extra layered on like at six in the
[19:43]morning or seven in the morning. And he woke up. He was just wildly interested in it. It changed
[19:50]it changed his life. Then all of a sudden he found something. And that at that point, he was identified
[19:55]as kind of gifted, kind of smarter than most kids.
[20:00]And at that point, you kind of excelled from that point,
[20:03]on kind of excelled in school.
[20:04]Even while being kind of can't take us about it.
[20:08]I mean, he always had piano problem with math at science,
[20:13]but when you got him in the humanities,
[20:16]he said, as he said, the minute English class
[20:19]ceased to be about can you read a book?
[20:22]To what is your subjective view of this book?
[20:25]He thought it was all preposterous.
[20:26]Like why is one opinion better than another opinion?
[20:29]OK, you like it, you don't like it.
[20:30]But like, some involved interpretation of this thing,
[20:33]why is that one more valid than the other?
[20:36]And he does things that are, I mean, again, funny.
[20:39]Outrageous for a kid, making arguments
[20:42]to his high school English teacher
[20:43]that Shakespeare isn't a good writer.
[20:46]But statistically based arguments.
[20:47]The point is that, like, OK, you say this, dude,
[20:50]he's the greatest writer in the history of English time.
[20:52]In England, when he was the population of literate English
[20:58]people in England, he was born was miniscule
[21:01]in relation to the population of the planet
[21:03]that has been literate in English.
[21:04]What's the likelihood, the statistical likelihood,
[21:07]that the greatest writer came out of that tiny population?
[21:09]He said, he said, he said, but he's audacious
[21:13]in his, this is what I found audacious about his childhood.
[21:18]He's audacious in one being such a Martian,
[21:21]but insisting on his Martian views,
[21:24]even when everyone around him would disagree with it.
[21:27]But he didn't mind.
[21:29]He got, I think he got so used to being isolated and comfortable
[21:32]with it.
[21:33]There wasn't anything to take away from it.
[21:35]Like, I'm already alone.
[21:36]Like, you know, I could take away your friendship.
[21:38]I don't have it.
[21:39]You know, I could take away your tribe.
[21:40]I don't have a tribe.
[21:41]Yeah.
[21:42]So he was always sitting there alone.
[21:44]And it left him in a curious relation
[21:47]to the rest of the world.
[21:48]Well, then you have fast forward to today.
[21:50]And, you know, I didn't mean to say all that.
[21:52]Please blow it up the world.
[21:53]Yes.
[21:55]That's true.
[21:56]So I mean, it's a, it's a long and torturous journey
[22:00]to where we get to today.
[22:01]But I want to say, let me say, I want to say something
[22:04]about the story I've just read.
[22:05]I found that the books, my books, when they're the most alive,
[22:09]they leave a hole for the reader to walk into
[22:12]and an exercise some role in the story.
[22:15]They leave some space for the readers for like a book club.
[22:18]A book club of eight people will come.
[22:21]If I, my book is good, we'll come together
[22:22]and they will have radically different views about the book.
[22:25]They, about what it means, about what they think about it.
[22:27]They don't want to think the same thing.
[22:29]I didn't muscle them all into some space.
[22:31]And this story presented me with a wonderful hole to create.
[22:35]This young man is not 31 is going on trial tomorrow.
[22:40]Yeah. In the southern district of Manhattan,
[22:42]he stands to spend the rest of his life in jail
[22:44]if he's convicted.
[22:45]He probably won't, but maybe, I mean,
[22:47]that sentence could be as long as 120 years.
[22:49]Oh my gosh.
[22:50]Or having, well, we'll get to what it is.
[22:52]But, but for having defrauded the customers
[22:56]of his crypto exchange.
[22:57]And in that courtroom, there are going to be two stories
[23:00]that are told.
[23:01]The defense is going to tell one story
[23:02]and the prosecutor is going to tell another story.
[23:05]They're going to be unbelievably selective about the facts,
[23:08]unbelievably selective about who they led on the witness stand,
[23:11]both sides are going to leave out lots and lots
[23:13]of interesting things.
[23:15]Neither story is going to be exactly true.
[23:17]I was in this very privileged position
[23:20]of having watched this thing for a year on the way up
[23:22]before anybody had any sense there was any wrong with it.
[23:25]And then having established relations
[23:27]with all the principles so that I was able to also interrogate
[23:30]them afterwards, which neither of the lawyers could do.
[23:34]One side can talk to Sam and the other side
[23:36]can talk to everybody else.
[23:38]And craft a story that is got to be a better story
[23:42]than either the stories that are going to be told
[23:44]in the courtroom.
[23:46]And I'm presenting it to the reader.
[23:49]As if the reader is a juror.
[23:51]Like I'm leaving it to you to decide both how to think about it,
[23:55]like whether you think he's guilty or innocent.
[23:58]But whatever you think about that,
[24:01]how you feel about that.
[24:02]And as a writing exercise, it was totally fun to do this.
[24:07]Like it was really interesting exercise to do this.
[24:11]And then I had, right at the beginning,
[24:13]I thought like what I have is I have an unusual access
[24:18]to information, what unique access to information.
[24:22]I have a unique access to the story.
[24:23]If I just tell the story and leave it to the reader,
[24:26]the reader ends up in the jury box.
[24:28]And I just find that I find the idea that really cool.
[24:31]And that it's on to coming on top of the actual trial
[24:34]where it's an interesting exercise.
[24:36]I mean, you couldn't have gotten better timing
[24:38]for a book release.
[24:39]Well, the time is not accidental.
[24:41]I mean, I knew I could have it finished by like Midaugust
[24:44]and the publisher could decide when to bring it out.
[24:46]And I start writing in January,
[24:48]usually it takes me about six months to write a book.
[24:50]The timing was like the timing.
[24:52]It was questioned when if they were going to move up the trial
[24:54]and postpone the trial.
[24:55]It was kind of odd that they,
[24:57]I kind of thought they were going to postpone it.
[24:58]But they did.
[24:59]And well, this is the funny thing they did.
[25:01]There was supposed to, trial was originally
[25:02]supposed to start today, October 7th.
[25:04]And the judge for some personal reasons
[25:06]moved it to tomorrow, which is exactly the pub date.
[25:08]I'm sorry.
[25:09]So maybe he wants it on the pub date.
[25:11]So maybe no matter where we brought the book out,
[25:14]he was going to put his trial on top of it.
[25:17]This guy, he's shameless.
[25:19]This judge just trying to maximize my book sales.
[25:25]Well, I have to say what you did so well,
[25:28]what you always do, of course.
[25:29]But it's really just give us a portrait of someone
[25:33]who maybe we don't feel like we understand completely
[25:37]or who if we interacted with or if I was, you know,
[25:40]and a winter on that zoo,
[25:42]I would have been offended by or, you know,
[25:44]but you really like explain it so much so that even his,
[25:49]the PR woman I can't remember her name was that I can't hold
[25:52]anything against him.
[25:53]This is just him, which is, I felt the same way.
[25:55]I didn't say, I did not have a conversation with him
[25:58]when he wasn't also shuffling a decker cards
[26:00]and playing a video game.
[26:01]And he had this, it wasn't that he didn't mean it to be rude.
[26:05]Honestly, didn't mean it to be rude.
[26:07]It was almost medically necessary.
[26:09]Is it what it felt like?
[26:10]It felt like being angry for someone
[26:13]or being in a wheelchair that it felt that way.
[26:16]It felt is mind for better or worse, needs to be preoccupied.
[26:22]It needs to be occupied in two places at once.
[26:25]It needs some other reality to be in,
[26:27]in addition to this reality in order to function
[26:30]in this reality.
[26:31]And he himself possibly wrongly, but he himself thought that.
[26:35]He himself thought, I'm much better
[26:37]when there are two things going on at once rather than one thing.
[26:39]Now, there's always research that shows
[26:41]multitasking does not work.
[26:43]And the origins of this research, this is odd.
[26:47]This isn't even in the book,
[26:48]but the origins of this work research
[26:51]that begins on the Stanford campus
[26:53]with a professor, a genius of a professor named Cliff Niles
[26:56]who is the father of Matt Niles.
[26:59]Sam's childhood, yes way.
[27:02]And I left that, I don't know,
[27:03]I just never came into the story, but yes,
[27:05]that research and Sam is like,
[27:08]maybe a textbook case about of why that's true.
[27:12]He seems so highly functioning when he's got half
[27:15]his mind on the problem,
[27:17]but you'll wonder if it actually had his whole mind
[27:20]on the problem if maybe $10 billion
[27:22]wouldn't have ended up in the wrong place.
[27:24]And so it's a, the multitasking, it seems,
[27:28]it comes across at first blush as annoying.
[27:31]Like why are you shuffling cards while we're playing?
[27:34]And you realize he just can't help it, like you just have.
[27:37]And if you just let him make him feel comfortable,
[27:39]you make it a signal for him that you don't mind,
[27:42]you get the best of him.
[27:43]You know, if you show irritation,
[27:47]he realizes that it's this is something wrong.
[27:51]So he was, you know, I watched him on a lot of television shows
[27:54]playing video games, you know, who does that?
[27:57]I can barely hold it together all when I'm all there.
[28:00]You know, it's like bundle of nerves
[28:02]and you're worried where you're gonna make an ass
[28:04]of yourself and you're playing a video game?
[28:06]That was just normal for me.
[28:08]Do you believe in this 30 under 30 curse?
[28:10]Have you heard about this?
[28:11]Like there's a, there's a, like two of the people
[28:15]have been in prison or arrested, died.
[28:18]And that like if you're on this list,
[28:20]I think it's the Forbes for, whatever the one
[28:22]you were talking about, the fortune.
[28:24]He was on the Forbes, he was on the Forbes actual
[28:27]just main list of this.
[28:28]Yeah.
[28:29]And maybe they was also the richest person
[28:31]in the world under a 30.
[28:32]Yeah.
[28:33]No, this is the, I think the four.
[28:35]Yeah, there's another one.
[28:36]It's like 30 most influential people under 30
[28:38]or whatever.
[28:39]Yeah.
[28:39]And they're all,
[28:40]it's happening to all of them.
[28:42]Maybe to make older people feel better.
[28:43]I don't know.
[28:45]Yeah, I, I mean, I'm sure that if we sat and thought
[28:49]for two seconds, we could dream up theories about this.
[28:52]But I mean, this was his story.
[28:55]People who, people who think of it,
[28:56]this is a story of like simple fraud, miss the joys
[28:59]of the story and the interest of the story.
[29:02]He actually was worth 22 and a half billion dollars.
[29:05]It wasn't just like, oh, he stole some money
[29:07]and it seemed like he was worth 22 now.
[29:09]He was actually worth 22 and a half billion dollars.
[29:11]Having started with basically zero at eight years earlier
[29:16]or seven years earlier with the ambition
[29:19]to make as much money as he could to give it away.
[29:21]How many people, I mean, just think about how odd that,
[29:25]I mean, when you start, when you start to make money
[29:28]in order to give it away already
[29:30]and an un-promising beginning in a sense, right?
[29:33]Like you're just gonna get tired of it your day.
[29:35]Yeah, but to actually have it happen.
[29:37]And in fact, when he really goes from zero to 22 and a half
[29:41]in about 22 months, that the speed with which this money
[29:45]gets made, it's head spinning.
[29:47]So if the 30 and the 30 has a thing,
[29:51]it's what may be going on there is just the leaps
[29:57]that are happening in people's lives so fast
[29:59]at that rate.
[30:00]which like didn't really happen in human history like this.
[30:03]The Forbes said it's the fastest anybody's ever made
[30:05]this kind of money as far as they know ever.
[30:07]That's gotta be disorienting, right?
[30:10]I like this theory.
[30:11]Yep.
[30:12]Anyway, that's one thought.
[30:13]That is one thought.
[30:14]I have so many more questions.
[30:15]But now like we're out of time already.
[30:17]But that's our, we know what a bore are people.
[30:19]We just want to learn a piece of them.
[30:20]So now they will be enticed to find the whole rest
[30:23]of the story, which I intentionally sort of left out
[30:26]some of the more financial concepts
[30:28]because I was getting to the second half and I was like, okay.
[30:31]I'm talking about the first half, which I can speak about
[30:34]more clearly.
[30:36]And we left out the whole love affair,
[30:37]which is a natural one.
[30:38]And yeah, it's of course.
[30:39]Oh my gosh.
[30:40]Wow. Well, so much more in there, so much more in there.
[30:42]Congratulations.
[30:43]This is so exciting.
[30:45]Thank you for showing me the insight.
[30:46]I'm going to post about it tomorrow.
[30:48]Anyway, congratulations.
[30:49]It's always so fun.
[30:50]Good to see you again.
[30:51]You too.
[30:52]All right.
[30:53]Bye bye.
[30:55]Thanks for listening to this episode of Mom.
[30:57]Just don't have time to read books.
[30:58]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens
[31:02]and at moms don't have time to read books.
[31:04]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com
[31:06]and sign up for my virtual book club
[31:08]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[31:10]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[31:12]in fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[31:14]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[31:16]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.