Upon taking a walk with crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, writer Michael Lewis had a sense that there might be a story here. In the intervening two years, that story has taken a series of twists and turns, resulting in Lewis’ new book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.
At the top, we walk through the latest events in Bankman-Fried’s Manhattan trial (7:27), the subject at the center of this winding story (12:06), and why Lewis was first interested in observing him (17:50). Then, he unpacks Bankman-Fried’s belief in effective altruism (20:00), his probabilistic approach to trading (23:50), and how his Stanford law professor parents shaped his thinking (27:36).
On the back-half, we discuss the ten-day period of FTX’s collapse (38:00), the scene in the Bahamas as Bankman-Fried filed for bankruptcy (47:10), and why Lewis felt a kinship with Sam’s parents in that moment (50:32). To close, Michael reflects on his own journalistic tendencies (55:10) and how he managed to write this book in the aftermath of great personal tragedy (1:06:50).
For thoughts, reflections, and guest suggestions, drop me a line at sf@talkeasypod.com.
Pushkin.
This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show. Today we are joined by writer and podcaster Michael Lewis. He's the host of Against the Rules and the author of several best selling books, including Liars, Poker, Moneyball, and The Big Short. His latest is called Going Infinite, The Rise and Fall of a New Time. The tycoon in question is Sam Bankman Freed, the FTX crypto mogul, who was once listed by Forbes as the richest person in the world under thirty. That was until the cryptocurrency exchange collapse last fall, when several billions from customers and investors were lent to Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency trading firm co founded by Bankman Freed. Sam now stands trial in a Manhattan federal court where he's been accused of orchestrating a scheme to siphon money from FTX into various political contributions, real estate purchases, charitable donations, and venture investments. He currently faces seven criminal counts, including wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. But at each twist and turn in Sam's improbable story, there's only one person that really had a front row seat to the action Michael Lewis. Since the publication of Going Infinite in early October, the book has received a wide array of reviews. The Guardian, for one, marveled at Lewis's ability to quote, pace, structure, and humanize a story about something as dense and unfriendly as crypto. However, as Michael and I discussed at the top, others have been less charitable, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic, each of which have suggested in one way or another that Lewis grew too close to his subject that he failed to demonstrate quote a healthy helping of skepticism, as one Calmness wrote. But in my view, the book, much like the subject at its center, is a bit more complicated than those descriptions, and so this week I wanted to sit with Lewis to discuss the thornier elements of Going Infinite, along with the whirlwind press tour he's been on as bankman Freed remains on trial. We also discuss Sam's belief in effective altruism and all the ways in which he planned to use his money for the greater good. And then, finally, in the last act, Michael reflects on his own journalistic philosophies and how he managed to write this book in the aftermath of great personal tragedy. That's all coming up next with our guest and fellow Pushkin podcaster Michael Lewis.
I hope you're intruct.
Michael Lewis, Welcome back to the show.
Sam's good to see you.
How are you feeling anything interesting happening in your life?
Well? Yes, as a matter of fact, I'm having an experience I've had versions of before where book comes out and it just kind of goes nuts. It upsets some people.
A lot of people.
Yeah, very angry. Yeah, a lot of people very angry.
Why are they so mad at you?
So let me just back up a little bit. I've had people angry with me before. The first I don't know, six weeks of Moneyball was miserable, and it was miserable because the people are right out of the gate, were people who were wedded to the old way of doing things, and it was an insult to the old way of doing things.
And as a Cubs fan, I was insulted.
Yeah, people were insulted. I'm trying to get my mind around the anger this time because it's a little it's a little less clear. It's not universal, highly concentrated in the United States, which is a little odd because you know, the book is about Sam Bekman freedom FTX, and the vast majority of the losses are outside of the United States. The people who you would think would be angry because they lost money are in Turkey, in China and India, and the outrage is here. I mean even so, I just came back from touring in Ireland. In England and the feeling near there is curiosity and a desire to understand.
Well, those are the guiding principles of this podcast. Yes, we're the last interview you're doing on your press tour, which I know you have not been overjoyed to do, in part because the subject of your book is currently on trial and has just announced that he will be testifying later this week. Sam Bankman Fried is the founder of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange. He plans to defend himself against claims that he orchestrated a sweeping scheme to steal as much as ten billion dollars in deposits from fts customers. He's pleaded not guilty to seven charges of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. If convicted, he would face what amounts to a life sentence. Now, you spent the better part of the last two years with Sam and his colleagues and his family, first as a fly on the wall, then as a kind of sounding board before we dive in. Are you surprised that Sam has elected to testify? And more importantly, do you think it's a good idea?
Not surprised, because he's been adamant all along, and then he would do.
It if he got the medication required, If.
He got the medication required for ADHD right, And he's been adamant all along about his feeling of his own innocence, has maintained all along the gap between his perception of this event and the prosecutor's perception. So there was never like there was never in the air ideal. It was never, oh, let's talk to them about maybe five years in jail. It was I think I'm innocent, and they think I should go to jail for life. So I knew that he wanted to tell his story from the witness stand. Is it a good idea? Every lawyer in the world would tell you no.
And it's including maybe his own father possibly who's an attorney.
The parents long ago learned that anything they try to tell him backfires, so that they wouldn't be so unwise as to give their advice because he just does the opposite. And the reason why it's a bad idea is interesting. It isn't that like he can make it worse, because it's already as bad as it really as he can get. I mean, every lawyer in the world will also tell you that the jury is likely to convict, so you kind of think, well, why not. It's kind of a hail Mary. But if the judge takes offense at his testimony, if the judge thinks he purchases himself in the court in his courtroom, the judge has a great latitude as the sentencing, and the judge might just layer on some more years because of whatever Sam says on the stand. And I know he's been told that, so he's running that risk. And I have no idea. I haven't had any contact with him since he was put in jail, so I don't know what he's going to say.
Have you tried to have contact with him.
I floated the idea of going in to visit. I had a few more questions. I wanted to put to him, and everybody agreed it was a bad idea for him to let me in because the prosecutors were already agitated about my presence in his life.
Now you've said that the prosecution has one story, the defense has another story, which we're about to hear, which we're about to hear for the first time. You've said that you have the best story. Why do you think that is?
Because I had context for it all, Because I interviewed all these people when things were good up until November of last year. Everyone in the world wanted to be aligned with Sam Begman freed. After November, everybody wanted to The last thing they wanted was to have anything to do with him or be aligned in any way. And so I saw that. I saw both. I saw the states of mind of the participants, which have now been I think a little distorted on the witness stand and distorted by social pressure. So I had just had a text for it all. Also, there's all kinds of stuff that isn't admissible in a courtroom. It would be important for someone who's just curious about what happened, but that is irrelevant to the legal proceedings. A couple of examples the whole effective altruism angle, like what these people lived in eight and breathes for and they really did all of them. That's not come up in the courtroom. You kind of need to know that, you know, the kind of the spirit in the air and the weirdness of the whole thing. Another example the fact that it's looking increasingly like all the customers are going to get their money back. The bankruptcy people have said that they're eight point six billion dollars in customer deposits that are missing, that they found seven point three and they're sitting on at least one one private investment that seems to be worth several billion dollars. That's not admissible in the courtroom. It's sort of like when you tell someone over dinner that, oh, by the way, there's likely to be close to full recovery. Their jaws are on the floor. What do you mean, I thought he stole all the money? Well, he put the money in the wrong place and used it for his own purposes when he should have and he put people at risk that he shouldn't have put at risk, which is a crime, which is all of course. So it's like the courtroom has a very narrow purpose, and my purpose is just much broader.
If we had had dinner in October of twenty twenty two, at that point, FDx had ten million account holders, to whom it owed eight point seven billion dollars. It had generated a billion dollars in twenty twenty one, it was likely to do the same in twenty twenty two, even despite crypto prices crashing. It was on the surface a booming business, with venture capitalists suggesting that Sam could be the first trillionaire. So if we were to have that dinner, how would you explain the book you were writing at the time.
It's funny you asked this question because I had that dinner at the very beginning of November with a friend who was a film director. It wasn't a dinner, it was a cup coffee. But I really like his storytelling, Chops like, I really kind of He's a good sounding board. And the point of the conversation was, I don't know if I have a book, and so I've been sitting with this guy for a year. Let me just tell you this material, and let me tell you why I haven't decided whether I'm going to write it. Or not, and I sort of laid out what I knew about Sam Bankman Freed. I laid out it was effectively the first six chapters of the book.
So how did you do that?
In conversation, I said, here's this character, born without a full complement of human feeling, born without empathy, born without ability to feel pleasure, who lives a completely isolated childhood, isolated beyond belief, given that he's being raised by two Stanford law professors on the Stanford campus who were quite social people themselves and had a brother, and had a brother who regarded him as a tenant in the house because he didn't have anything to do with each other. This person sort of compensates for what he lacks by taking what he can do and imposing it on the world. What he can do is math calculations. He can think quantitatively, analytically, and so he kind of turns life into this math problem and would seem to not fit anywhere in the world until he collides with Wall Street Wall Street and its modern incarnation, high frequency trading, And when he collides with that, he finds what he thinks is special about himself. It's a particular kind of problem solving. It isn't exactly math. It's making decisions, aren't calculations in semi chaotic environments, environments where there isn't you can't get to a right answer. You can just get to a better answer. It's not playing chess. It's playing chess on a clock where you have to make a move every five seconds and the rules change, like the rules change every five minutes, so the pieces the queen's become pawns or whatever. So you're dealing with this kind of chaotic environment. But where it does help to have a quantitative, analytical kind of aptitude, and it happens to be Those are the kind of tests they put him through. His Jane Street is his high frequency trading for him in order to before they hire him, and he's exceptional at it, and this defines him. And what I'm telling the film Rector is I'm so interested in this character because he goes from being having no place in the world to sitting at the center of the world. He goes from being nobody to being, you know, the richest person in the world under thirty and he's an octopus with his tentacles everywhere.
At that point, what did the center look like.
The center is bizarre because of where he is is the Bahamas. He's in a jungle hut you know that with and in a fancy condominium that he sleeps in. But the office is this nondescript hout in the middle of the jungle in the southern part of the main island of the Bahamas. But what does it look like? It looks like the fanciest, most celebrity drenched dinner party you've ever been to. You name the famous person in there there and the person who you don't recognize, Sam Bankman Freed in shorts and a T shirt and droopy white sox with his hair all over the place is the center of attention. Everybody's around, hanging on every word, and he's just starting to have in luance every which way. And so the question is like, what is this telling us about the world? That was always what interested me about him. So I'm telling the film director this story. It takes me an hour to get through it, and he says, this is interesting. He says, you have a problem that this story does not have a third act. You don't know where it's going, so you don't have an ending. So it's not a movie, he said. He said, but you're a good enough writer. You can fool the reader into thinking you have an ending, and you probably it's also interesting. You should probably just write it. Three days later, FTX falls apart and he writes and says, can I direct the movie? It's like, this is incredible.
You mentioned in court that they have not brought in effective altruism, which is sort of his entire mode of operation is based on. That. Is that what initially brought you into the story, that made you interested in him.
It was one of the things that made me interested in him. I had this long standing curiosity about effective altruism. I didn't know the name, but back in I would it had been. It had been about the time Sam was starting on Wall Street twenty twelve, thirteen fourteen. I started to hear from friends about this guy they'd hired. It wasn't Sam, some other person who had come to work at some Wall Street firm, not because he wanted to get rich, or rather not because he wanted to get rich for himself, because he wanted to make money to give it all away. And I thought it was such a seditious idea when I first heard it, and kind of a fun idea. I thought this like might be the one thing that could sink Wall Street is that everybody there was actually there just to give the money away. So I had taken a slight interest in it long ago without knowing what it was, and that when I finally meet this dude who actually has done this in such a big way, it's one of the things that interests me.
So you two go on a hike that first meeting.
A walk, A walk, a two hour walk, A two hour walk.
Yeah, we don't want to overemphasize his athletic prowess, yes or mine? You used to play baseball? Come on, come on, so tell me when you replay that converse now, can you still recall what exactly pushed you over the edge to say I need to spend the next couple of years of my life with him.
I didn't say I need to spend the next couple of years of my life with him. I said to him at the end of two hours, this is so strange. Can I just come watch? I just want to be an observer in your life for a while and see what there is to do here, and the things that struck me as strange or interesting won the sums of money Forbes was either had just we was about to declare him worth twenty two and a half billion dollars. He was a child of two liberal law professors at Stanford. Clearly, in most other moments in human history, he would have been at best like a physics professor. He wasn't interested in money the way Wall Street people normally are, so that it was a different vibe about the money. It was like more ambitious in what I'm going to use it to do. The fact, he was quite open about how he was meddling in politics. He was The newspapers had him as Biden's second biggest donor. He said, no, I'm actually only the seventh. But still it's going to get very big. He was talking about a billion dollars into the next presidential election site. I thought, that's just wild. He said something that was really interesting to me. He said, there's not enough money in politics, and I thought, I have always had the opposite view, and I thought, but his point was, when you see what the stakes are, and you see that the rules have changed to allow rich people to do basically whatever they want to do, it's amazing that rich people aren't doing even more that that was a very interesting kind of take on the whole thing, and if he was going to follow through on this, he was going to be a big deal in the elections. But by that point, the crypto markets had gone from being worth you know, cryptos as a as an asset class, gone from being worth zero in two thousand and eight to two trillion dollars, and I had taken I was thinking, I wonder what the social consequences of that kind of instant wealth creation is. Like, You've got people walking around two trillion dollars in their pocket who didn't have anything before, and here was this walking example of it that crypto had yielded it for him in a matter of eighteen months, twenty two billion dollars. I was kind of thinking, like, maybe he's a way to get it that, like the social consequences, So I just went and loitered for a year.
So as you're loitering, he begins to explain that this effect of altruism, in part comes from Will mccaskell. This earn to give philosophy should you do good or make money and pay other people to do good? That anyone basically with the ability to go to wall Street has something like a moral obligation to do so. But when it comes to Sam, he described himself in one exchange with a colleague as quote, not really having a soul. In the end, there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. You yourself said that he does not have the full complement of human feelings. He does not have empathy. So if everything in his life is fake, do you believe his interest and effective altruism.
Is fake his reasons not fake? Isn't explain that, Well, he's not attracted to effective altruism because he's got an emotional attachment to other people. I mean, the mistake people make is, oh, you're an effective altress because you really cared deeply about other people, like individual other people.
Saying he cares about mind.
Cares about math and humanity is like that seemed abstractly to be something he should be servicing, and the math is this is the best way to do that. Peter Singer would be the oldest living sort of exponent of this. That you have the idea that you have. The Singer idea is that you have you have a duty not just to the people around you, but to people you don't even know. The argument is you have an obligation to give if sort of the cost to you is less than the benefit to others, it's a hard way to live.
Did you buy that way of living?
I admired the spirit of it. I admired the idea of expanding your circle of empathy or caring about people. To get someone to buy in that into that argument, don't go be a doctor in Africa, but instead go be a banker and pay to have ten doctors go to Africa. It really helps if they don't actually get any emotional benefit to physically helping other people, you know, there's no feeling there to start with, they just buy the argument. But once you're in this argument and the argument is about, and this is what these philosophers that are at Oxford eventually do. They morph the movement away from helping living people on the planet now to maximizing the lives you say, for all eternity. And so this is the real weirdness to the movement that Sam buys into, and that actually the movement buys into is when it flips to existential risk. And Sam, if you when I meet him. He's on the practical end of the spectrum of the people in this conversation because he's thinking, yeah, there's this list of risks. Let's asteroid strikes or climate change or AI for example, pandemic or pandemic prevention, and or Donald Trump's democracy or actually the actually Donald Trump is on his list. There is a kind of like ven diagram. It's the risks in one circle, but the tractability of them in another circle. Like some of these things, you don't know what to do about them. I mean, what do you give money to just to prevent AI from right now? It's very hard to know. But when we were on that walk, one of the things that did interest me was, I just come out of writing the Premonition, it was appalling to me the governments weren't being more aggressive on the subject of especially building a better a kind of better prediction, a model for disease. There is every reason why we should be building essentially a national weather service for disease. And the lack of real energy behind that movement, not that it doesn't exist, it's just sort of lack of energy was shocking to me. And it was really interesting to me that a private citizen was talking about generating the wealth he needed in order to do such a thing, So that partly interested me too.
So if that describes like the principled approach to his work, I want people to understand how he views life probabilistically. And to do that, I thought we'd read from a chapter of your book entitled how to Think about Bob?
Who do you want me to do it? You want to do it? You talk easier than I do, so you know, look, all right, that's funny you pick this passage because I think it's like an important passage.
It is against the rules for me to read your book.
Okay, do you.
Want to set up any context for this or does it?
So I'll do some content. I'll do a little context so that this is the this is the foreshadowing of the collapse that's going to happen. Four years later, Sam has just started a crypto trading hedge fund with nothing but a bunch of effective altrusts. Within two months, they're at each other's throats, and half the effect of altrus think Sam is either so catastrophically disorganized and chaotic or possibly criminal that they up and quit, and the immediate subject of conversation is some money that's been missing, just like not like stolen, but like lost, like you lost your keys.
And this is not money lost at FTX.
No, this is alimeter research before FTX.
This is another project.
This is back in twenty eighteen, and the money is in the form of a crypto tooken called ripple, and so I'll start with that. Sam is arguing, we don't need to worry about the ripple, it'll turn up. His colleagues are arguing, that's four million dollars of other people's money we should worry about it.
Sounds awfully familiar to yes, the reframe we've been hearing lately.
This is exactly right. The missing Ripple reminded him of a favorite thought experiment. You have a close friend, Bob, he explained, he being Sam. He's great, you love him. Bob is at a house party where someone gets murdered. No one knows who the murderer is. There are twenty people there. None are criminals. But Bob is less likely in your mind than anyone else to have killed someone. But you can't say that there's zero chance Bob killed someone. Someone got killed, no one knows who did it. You now think there's like a one percent chance Bob did it. How do you see Bob now? What is Bob to you? And there's no updating, there's no new information about Bob. One answer was that you should never go near Bob again. There might be a ninety nine percent chance that Bob is the saint you always thought him to be, but if you're wrong, you're dead. Treating Bob's character as a matter of probability felt problematic. Bob was either a cold blooded killer or he wasn't. Whatever probability you assigned before you found out the truth about Bob would appear after the fact unfair and even absurd. There doesn't exist a guess you can make that is overwhelmingly likely to be roughly correct, said Sam. Bob is either completely blameless or far more guilty, and yet assigning a probability to Bob's character was, in Sam's view, the only way to think about him, or indeed any uncertain situation. It's not good enough to say Bob's not the kind of guy I want to be around. So what is the probability at which you say, Okay, I'm going to just stay away from Bob. Until this was resolved, said Sam. It's sort of mind bending. There's no way to deal with Bob right now. That's just.
The next line is my favorite, which I'll do okay. Life's uncertainties often made a mockery of a probabilistic approach, but in Sam's view, there was really no other approach to take. A lot of things are like Bob, said Sam. I thought that the ripple was like Bob would either get it back or not. I like how you were mouthing your own words as I was reading that.
Sorry about that. Yeah, I laugh at my own jokes too, so I'm sorry about that. The punchline in this is that over the ripple, the ten effective altrus is quit and then they find the ripple, confirming in the minds of the other people who stayed behind, a group that includes the current witnesses in the trial and the shots seeing Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, that Sam was kind of right all along.
So he is redeemed in some way. But what do you think that story in terms of foreshadowing, What do you think that story tells us about his way of moving through the world, about his psychology that.
He doesn't have firm principles. Everything is shifting odds.
Which could be a problem when running a company. Yes, what you're saying is reminded me of a passage of a piece of writing that actually comes from Sam's mother, Barbara. She wrote an essay. We haven't really talked about Sam's parents much, but they both were Stanford law professors. By all accounts, upstanding, downful people, accomplished in their respective fields. But she wrote an essay in twenty twelve in The Boston Review titled Beyond Blame.
Have you read this?
I've heard it.
I want to read a little bit from it. The piece is about the philosophy of personal responsibility and how it is ruined criminal justice and economic policy, and how it's time to move past blame, which is exactly, by the way, when I did something wrong as a child, that exactly how my mom would render how we should move forward, which I don't think we should really blame. My mom was also an attorney, so she writes in the piece, the reality is that we are all at best compromised agents, whether by biology, social circumstance, or brute luck. Tellingly, the more information people have about the context of the crime, the person who committed it and the circumstances he or she came from. The more nuanced are their views of moral responsibility.
What do you think of that?
What do you think of that?
Now? What do you think of that?
No, what do you think of that?
Well? I think it's interesting that the second part of it is just a statement of fact. I think I think it is true that the more you know about the circumstances of any crime, the more you know about the person, the more complicated your response is to it. And that we also live in a society that isn't terribly interested in that, that we jail people at a rate that's unseen anywhere out in the world, right to punish. I think that's an interesting point of view, and I think I think she's that observation is not wrong. Is it a useful way to parent your child that, I don't know, like teaching them that you we're not gonna blame you for anything. I don't parent my child that way.
I guess what I'm getting at. Early in this conversation, you said Sam's parents had long given up trying to teach him anything. It seems to me that maybe they didn't get a lot of things through but they seem to have crafted part of his guiding principles.
So this is true. It's also interesting how he and his brother view this because he and his brother emerged from this household self conscious utilitarians consequentialists. You move through life evaluating your decisions, evaluating your actions, evaluating other people based on their consequences rather than their intent. And the principle you are gunning for is the greatest good for the greatest number. So when you see something like the famous trolley problem where you're on a trolley and the trolley's rolling down the track and it's about to roll over four people, but you can pull a switch and send it on a side rail that kills only one person, doesn't even occur to you not to pull the switch. They don't have a problem with that kind of thing. It's like you're evaluating actions based on their consequences. You were trying to maximize good and minimize bad. The brut but I was going to say, is that this isn't from Sam, this is from his brother. Because I pushed on, I pushed on both of them. I said, it is kind of amazing that you two both think you've come to your own principles all by yourself, but they happened to be kind of close to your parents' principles. They extended their parents' principles like their parents were not fond of effective altruism, very hostile to it in fact. But Gabe, Sam's brother, said, this looks like, oh, our parents influenced us, and surely they must have in some way, but in real time, it felt like we came to these ideas ourselves. So it's funny how they interpreted this. The point isn't that Sam wasn't influenced by his parents. The point was Sam resisted the eye idea that he was influenced by his parents at the same time he was influenced by his parents.
Is that because he thinks anyone over the age of forty five is meaningless and useless.
Yes. I think it's because he had vanity about his own mind, and part of the vanity was everything that happened into it in it was his doing. It was very hard to get him to point to influences. He sort of liked the idea that he was thinking everything up by himself. From first.
Principles were bright back with writer Michael.
Lewis Hey everyman.
This is Sam. As you may have noticed, the past six months in Hollywood, they haven't been going that great. The actors and the writers went on strike against the AMPTP. The writers have recently reached deal, but the actors have yet to do so. Obviously, for a show like ours that has on writers, actors, filmmakers, this has proven to be a challenging time. I'll just be honest with you. It's been difficult to make a show about culture when culture has basically been put on pause for the most part, and yet myself, along with our incredible, incredible team, have continued to make new episodes just about every Sunday. We've done this with authors like Zadi Smith and WashU, musicians like Leave and Ludwig Gorenson, who created the score for Oppenheimer. We had on st Higham, We had on reporters like Sam Sanders and Matt Bellanie. We did an episode about the border with Beto O'Rourke and my father. We had a conversation with screenwriter Alex O'Keefe at the height of the strike about the conditions of being a modern screenwriter, the state of Hollywood, and really so much more. Through this turbulent, precarious time, we have continued to find stories that I think are worth telling and worth sharing with you. And so if any of those episodes, or if any of the episodes that I did not mention, have meant something to you, if the show has meant something to you, I would really appreciate if you shared the program on social media or with a friend, with a family member, anyone that you'd think would be interested in the kind of researched, thoughtful and honest conversations that we try to have here each in every Sunday. You can share and tag us at talk easypod across social media. If you want to drop us a line, you can reach me at SF at talk easypod dot com. That's SF at talk easypod dot com. This year, we'll be starting our newsletter, which we are very excited to do and put out, but until then, sharing the show or reviewing it on the platform that you're listening to this right now. I know every podcaster talks about it, but it really does help us continue doing the work we so love to do here each and every week. And with that, I hope you enjoy the rest of this conversation with Michael Lewis coming back. Why don't we talk about some of his doing? Because from November two to November twelfth of twenty twenty two, FTX goes from having seemingly limitless potential to being on its last legs, being bankrupt. I was being generous. Now that we're are a year removed from that ten day catastrophe, how do you understand what happened?
So this is my best guest. I mean this is also taking some stuff that came up in the trial. You start with a person who is vain about his risk management abilities, thinks he's maybe like God's gift to managing financial risk. You couple it with a character who has almost psychological need for a chaotic environment. So I think in the very beginning they create FTX, they don't do the first thing you would do is segregate the customer's funds from your funds. They didn't do this in the original hedge fund all. But I'll jumble together with Sam's money with the investors' money. So you haven't you already have a problem right from the beginning. That's real clear that like the customer's money is available to out Talameda if it wants to use it. Flash forward to June of twenty twenty two. I think in May of twenty twenty two. Certainly, in like April twenty twenty two, if all the customers of FTX had showed up and said we want our dollars and bitcoin and whatever back, I think they would have gotten them back. There was the money was there. The prosecutor seemed to not be pushing this point, but a combination of crypto collapsing and crypto lenders who lent money to Alameda asking for their loans back caused Sam with Caroline to make a decision to pay lenders back their money and use the depositors' money in their place. That seems to be what happened. That's what Caroline says happened. Do you believe that, Yes, we know they did that. The question is how involved he was, how where he was of what that implied for the deposits, and how much risk he was putting the customers at all that, how much money he thought was inside of Alameda. There are questions about that, but the fact is they did that, which was a weird decision because the wealth, all their wealth was tied up at FTX. If they had just said to the lenders, sorry, Ristiff, and you and al if you want to, if you want to, you want to force the issue, Alimta will go bankrupt. They'd just still had their crypto exchange. It would have taken a blow, but it would have survived. You know, all of Sam's you know, all the twenty two billion is his stake. All of Caroline's wealth is a stake in FTX. So it was a really strange decision. So we're going to dep intot why they might have made that decision. Even though it's so strange. He's tied up with Sam's vanity about how he's perceived as a risk manager. That if he's seen as, oh, he's not the idiot who blew up a hedge fund, he couldn't stand that narrative. So then what happens from June to November. This is where it gets messy. I like that.
You think this is where it gets messed Well, this is.
Where it gets really messy into sort of trying to recreate what happened, right, Caroline would say, did say that from that moment on she lived in this state of existential dread until finally the depositors asked for their money back, and they're exposed and the whole thing collapses. Nashad, who is also a party to this. Dashad Singh, who was sort of number two or number three at FTX, says he doesn't even didn't even realize there was a hole in Alameda until September.
An eight point seven billion dollar hole.
Maybe bigger than that, but in the end, right now it's an eight point six billion dollar hole. But there were supposed to be the gross numbers were They were supposed to be sixteen billion dollars of customer deposits on FTX, and they weren't there. They were all over the place. Some were there, but most were like all over the place where it gets weird to be And like, what hasn't been explained in the trial is if Caroline is in this state of existential dread for five months, why when it blows up, does she not know where the money is that they have. This is a bizarre thing. So the couple of days it's all blowing up. Other people, not sam Other people who are in the room are struck by banks calling them up and saying, hey, do you know that we have three hundred million dollars a year of your dollars? Do you want it back? And they don't know that they a bank has the dollars.
Yeah.
And John Ray, the bankruptcy guy who's been running it, has said the same thing to me. He said, this has been like an easter egg hunt. There's money all over the place. There's money and in crypto exchanges in age are their money in banks that they didn't have records of. If you are terrified in June of not having the money to pay customers back, wouldn't you actually gather up all this money or at least have a list of where it was. It's hard to explain why they made no effort until it all blows up to a sort of account for what they had and what they didn't have. It's messy what's going on from June to November, because they don't do the things you would think you would do if you were panicked or worried. They Also the other thing's odd is in that period you would think if they're all that worried about this, they would stop spending money, and they don't stop spending money, and they don't raise money, and makes me wonder just how worried she was?
You spent the good part of Sam's house rest with him? Is that right.
I didn't go live at his house, but I saw I was able to id ahol passed.
They didn't like pullot a cop for you or something like that.
I didn't plot a cot, but they did. And when you went, you had to notify the authorities and they met you outside the door and they took away your cell phone. But I went. Every other week I go down and spend six or seven hours with him.
So obviously you're asking him questions like how did this happen? Where do you think the money is. You've said recently in a Time magazine interview that Sam is not a serial liar, but that he is a serial withholder. Yes, explain the difference.
If I'm talking to you, I say, Sam, where were you born? And you say, ah, I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but actually you were born in Portland, Oregon. That's one kind of thing if I say Sam, where you were born, and you kind of change the subject and I never get to the answer of why you where you were born? He's very good. He was very good at that. There's a footnote in the book and the you know it's in the text of the book, but it's that try to deliver the reader an example of just this thing he does. I asked him, all right, one of the mechanisms for the money getting from FTX into Alameda, from this exchange into your private edge fund, was that Alameda alone didn't have its risks managed by FTX, the risk engine that stopped other people from losing money on FTX, which switched off for Alameda. If I had asked you directly back in the day before things went bad, is Alameda subjected to the risk engine? What would you have said? And he says, I would have either made a word salad, or I would have answered a different question. That's him being weirdly honest about being weirdly dishonest if you asked him the right question, and this happened to him before, when things were good, people would ask him questions and he'd get himself in trouble because if the question was exactly right, he tended to answer it. It was almost a mechanical kind of thing. But if you asked him, oh, I don't know, do you have conflicts of interest between Alameda and FTX, he would answer a question about how the kind of conflicts of interest that exist on US stock exchanges between the stock exchanges and high frequency traders, kind of thing you would answer a slightly different question.
Do you think you asked them in retrospect the wrong set of questions?
No, I mean he gave me answers like the one he gave me about how I wouldn't have given you the answer, So you know I got it. And and in the book, you know I was really careful to keep myself out of the inquisition of Sam Bankman Freed. I let other people do it, and in particular did it is his chief operating officer. And I think she asked all the right questions too, she just didn't get the answers she got. I thought we had more money.
Uh huh.
That's a state of mind thing. It's kind of hard to the point, isn't that it's true. The point is it's hard to falsify.
And the book you described Zame Packet. He was a colleague of Sam's, right though.
He was kind of the original crypto great there who'd been in the crypto markets for a long time and who was kind of the face of FTX to old crypto people.
Well, in the book. You said that he doesn't care much about why Sam Dibbity did, but how he asked why had neither he nor anyone else he knew seen this coming? And I think this is a question that through this book tour of yours, you have been asked repeatedly you spent all this time with him? You are, of course, Michael lewis known for shrewd observations. Humanistic portraits generally have a good sense of people and why they do things. Did you really not see any of it coming? Or was it more advantageous for a potential book to not see it coming?
It's certainly the latter is certainly true, but I'm not sure it's an either or a question. It's completely true that just watching and not kind of udge them too strongly was very helpful to generating the literary material for a book. That's true. But let me just point out that one hundred and twenty of the world's leading venture capitalists gave him money. I didn't give him money.
Didn't you put two thousand dollars in ftxus only.
To see if it were and actually put most of it in Swiss francs.
But those venture capitalists did not write Moneyball or the Big Short or liars Pope there I interview Obama, so gone.
The whole place was so chaotic, so comically chaotic, that the absence of lists of employees, the absence of an organization chart, no titles matched what the person was doing, just and all the people unhappy because Sam wouldn't manage anybody, because he didn't believe in managing anybody, because he thought everybody should just manage themselves. All that stuff. So it was bound to lead to something. It was a very volatile situation, something bad, probably bad. But the actual thing that happened did not make a lot of sense. It did not, like make a lot of sense for them to put this goal mine. They had FTX in peril for the sake of Sam's vanity trading fund, and leave Sam out of it for a minute. The other principles. If you said, oh, is the FTX depositors' money inside of Alamede instead a thing nobody said. By the way, zero people said that, I would have said, nobody would allow that. Nishad and Gary and Carolyn, they just wouldn't let that happen because all their wealth is tied up with FTX. They just wouldn't let it happen. It was such an idiot crime to do that, to set up the place in the first place, so that the money that's supposed to be an FTX is actually in Alameda. I did not see that coming. I did think something was going to happen that was going to give me the ending to the book.
It all came tumbling down between November two and November twelfth. As I said, you did not get back down to the Bahamas until November ninth. Right at what point in that week did you realize you had a third act?
Immediately? I had childcare reasons. While I couldn't get down to the Bahamas on November the third or fourth, but I should have. But I got down there entire the day he signed the bankruptcy papers.
Can you set that same for us?
It was wild. The whole book is wild, like the whole stories wild. But this was the Friday of the disastrous week. Virtually all the employees have already fled, fled so fast that they've left all their possessions in their condominiums. All the food is on the shelf, all their possessions at worker that's still at work. They've just run to the airport and basically run home to their parents' basements. And I get there still there is Natalie Tien, and Natalie was the important character of the book. She was Sam started out as Sam's scheduler and PR person. She ran PR for them. She knew she was the one person knew where Sam was at any given moment. So she picks me up at the airport in the Bahamas, and she has, at that point, for the first time since I've known her, no idea where Sam is. That she doesn't care anymore. She's like the whole place is blown up. She's furious with Sam. On the way there, I said, could we stop at the FTX offices because she passed them anyway. And she was really nervous about doing this because she had one of the last remaining FTX cars that had all been repossessed or dumped at the airport, and she was afraid someone was going to see her with it and they would take away her car and she wouldn't have anybody to get out. But I talked to her into going to the FTX offices. And it is these collection of huts in the jungle. There's no one at the guard booth. We drive around the guard booth, and in the distance is Sam walking circles around the office buildings, all by himself, and he's obviously not bathed or shaved in days. He's in an agitated state of mind. He sees us, walks over, gets in the car like we're an uber, and almost the first thing he says is, you know what's weird to think about Saturday? Saturday? Everything was normal, he said, about six days earlier, everything was normal, and now his empire lay in ruins. And from then I really just squatted as best I could in the Bahamas until he was extradited.
When you saw Sam there in the parking lot, you said on sixty minutes that if I were a better person, I would have been deeply distressed by all of this. What do you mean by that? A better person?
If I were chiefly worried about his suffering or the suffering of those around them, I would have gone there in my head it would have been like, oh, this is all so sad, and this does happen to me. It's just how I'm wired. I was just interested, like so interested, and I was also aware that this answers the question of where this story went and it made sense of an awful lot of what had come before, an awful lot like things that were kind of like pieces of the puzzle, and I couldn't figure out how they all fit together. They started to fit together, like the mini collapse that had happened back in twenty eighteen. It all sort of like resonated in a different way. So my mind is racing with the story. I didn't del chiefly worried about the people around me. I felt chiefly worried about my reader.
And even as a father, what do you mean, even as a faulther, Well, you're a father, and I imagine you see a young kid whose life is falling apart, whose lives he's ruined, many many people's lives he's ruined.
There was a little hard. It's still a little hard to know what's going to happen there. The people whose lives he ruined, or rather he caused a lot of damage.
To, were colleagues.
His colleagues, They all have their money on the exchange. Their reputations are in tatters. His parents, his parents, that's painful. His parents were painful for me.
Why was that?
Because I was watching parents lose a child and I had lost a child. You know, I know what that feel like. I mean, it's a different way to lose a child, but I know that that was something that that's still something that's hard for me is watching them process this event is a moment. It's not in the book. And maybe this is partly why I maybe maybe our partlet left it out because it was just it just it seemed like too raw for them. The day he was put in jail and the Bahamas and he was put in a prison, it's like, it's like it makes our prisons look pretty cush, it's like ranked the top ten worst prisons in the world. Or the day after they went to visit and I went with them. As we're getting in the car, his mother said to me, tell me something that will make me feel better. And I said. The first thing I said was, well, in a month, he's probably going to be home under house arrest in Stanford at your house. And she said, that doesn't make me feel better. She actually said try again, And I said, you will be amazed how adaptable you are. You'll be amazed how your mind can adjust to a situation that you find right now unimaginably painful. And she said, that makes me feel better now, So why do I mention this moment? I didn't think of that as material. I was actually connecting to them just as a person, as a human.
Being, as a father who just lost their daughter.
Right, And I was in a different emotional space than I am in almost all the time when I'm thinking about some piece of writing. There was like a famous Joan Didion moment line. It's probably apocryphal where and I can't remember even what book it was from. Someone asked her how she felt when she walked into a room and she saw a five year old girl with a cocaine in her hands, and it was acid. I was an acid. Heyne Ashbury, you know this then?
Do you know what she said?
You tell me it was gold? It was gold. And when I'm wandering around the world thinking about how to write about something, I am filtering it that way. I'm thinking, like, what's the meaning of this, Like what's the story of this? I'm not thinking. I'm not thinking I am responsible for it. I'm an observer. So I didn't feel responsible for Sam.
Right.
I was aware of how much damn it she'd caused in other people's lives, so if anything, I was, you know, like massively irritated with Sam for that if I thought about it, But mainly I was just watching it for like how is this going to play out?
But in that moment with his mother, you said that you were not in your traditional journalistic state. You were in a different emotional state.
I wasn't writing that down right, and I knew almost instinctively, I would not write about that. I'm talking about it, but I knew in that it wasn't like, oh, this isn't exactly material, because I had watched the relationship and I'd seen how far he kept them from what he was doing. Not everything like the mother received. He gave money to the mother's political causes, and his dad was involved in a lot of philanthropic efforts, but at the core of the operation, they were kept far from it, like they couldn't get on his schedule. Natalie, who kept his schedule, said, one of the biggest embarrassments for me is that the mom and dad would call up and say they want fifteen minutes with Sam, and Sam will say, you know, you know, dodge that for two weeks, and so they'd been kept at this kind of distance from the thing that had happened, and they'd been led to believe this thing about their child, that he was the richest person in the world in under thirty, that he was a miraculous human being who was going to save us all from pandemics, all that stuff, and that it was all ripped away so fast, and that they were staring right away pretty realistically at the situation that this is going to end very, very badly for him. So it was hard not to feel something for them.
You know, when you got in the car with Sam and he said, it's so strange. Everything last Saturday was so normal, you know. In prep for this, I went back and I thought, when did you and I first talk? I found the date. It was May thirteenth of twenty twenty one.
It was eight days before Dixie died.
And of course this book is dedicated to her, and she was just on my mind, on my mind and reading this that you've had to hold that while writing this book, that you have held it while writing this book. How the hell have you done? All that?
She helped me? So this is this is what she enters this book in a very curious way. There's an opening to another book I wrote called Home game, which is a collection of basically notes on fatherhood, and it's she's the opening, and she's a little kid, and she's standing up to some bullies that are trying to bully her older sister. Unbelievable act of bravery. And she was that way all the time. I mean to a fault, had this nerve in the face of what she perceived as injustice or attacks from bad people, or she's a fighter. The one thing I had to worry about writing this book was there was a mob waiting for it. I knew that if I wrote it, wrote what I thought and what I thought to be true, that lots of people are going to be angry about it. And I thought, I'm going to do this the way Dixie would do it. I'm just gonna say fuck it. And so it helped knowing that her spirit was there. There's another answer to this question too, And the other answer to the question is how could I not throw myself into work when Dixie died very shortly after, like days after, it was so traumatic, I realized that, like I got a sheet of paper out and I said, draw a line on the sheat of paper. On one side, put the things that make you feel worse on the other side, make the things that put the things that make you feel better, and just do the things on the left side and don't do the things on the right side. Like it's so bad that you have to sort of service yourself in order to survive. And one of the things that made me feel better was working, loving and working, like forcing the relationships with people I love, like making sure I'm expanding the circle of love. All that that, Like Dixie's loss was a loss of love and finding love and in thing on love was really important. But work, for whatever reason, it's probably because I love my work. It was it was became even more necessary. So yeah, I was grateful that a story walked into my life, even if it took me a while to figure out what it was. You are right, Yeah, all right, she was brave. I try to. I've sort of one of the things that I intend to do going forward is live as bravely as possible. And it's sort of to honor her.
I want to play a clip for us. It's from that conversation we had, okay, and it's about the future ambition, what you pass down to your kids, how you hope they moved through the world, how you move through the world, basically a lot of what we've been talking about in this back and forth. And I wonder just where it lands with you now.
I mean, to this day, when I go to New Orleans, I'm you know, yeah, I'm a but I'm Tom and Diana Lewis's son and uh and and thus interpreted by my bye and and I could spend weeks in New Orleans trying to get someone to take me seriously without without succeeding. So that's just a different attitude towards life. And I loved it. I growing up, I just I didn't have I mean, I eventually sort of developed ambition, but it I didn't. It wasn't there all the time. Like one of the things that I mean is different from my child my life and my children's lives is they have forced upon them enormous anxiety to like you're supposed to achieve. And no one even no one ever suggested that to me that I was supposed to achieve something.
Do you think you've forced it on them?
I've tried not to, you know, It's it is an unfortunate byproduct of being a successful author. Like my books are out there and I'm on TV and all that crap. Uh, that they see me as a success, and it probably they eternalize it as well. I have to be a success too, so in that sense maybe I do. But I try to explain to them that that the success should just be thought of as like whatever, it's a byproduct of doing something I really love doing, and that the goal is to move through life in a way that you don't you don't miss the thing that you really love to do, that you don't walk away from it by mistake, that you that you're alive to it when it walks in the front door. And we shall see if I've succeeded in getting that message across. That doesn't sound like bad advice, I don't. I don't disapprove of that person. My youngest walker is sixteen years old, and I try to live that with him. I mean I try. I try to explain, like the trick to happiness is finding the things you like to do in doing them and not trying to be famous or be rich or any of that. And it's funny, I sometimes find myself talking to like a deaf eared boy, like he just doesn't believe, he doesn't believe in me. He's easy for you to say. It's basically his attitude towards at all. Soon we're gonna do kids. I'm gonna tell you fun can't tell you a funny story to end on. I don't know if we're about to end. But before I walked on the out of the door on the book tour, word had gotten out in his school or whatever that I had actually been living in Sam bankmin Free's life for the last eighteen months, and I had this book that was going to come out, and that was incredible. How did I know? You know all that stuff? And we were sitting on a sofa. We were talking about his homework, his history homework. We're talking about this kind of weirdly appropriately the same the Salem witch trials, and talking about mobs. And when we were finished, he was it was late at night, and he was kind of tired, and he gets tired all of a sudden, He's eight years old all over again. And he looks up. He says, Dad, are you a genius? And I said no, no, no, no, not a genius. He said, would anybody say you're a genius? And I said, only some stupid people like nobody would say, I'm really Sam a genius. And he said it is like this relief that came over his face, and he said, that's what I thought, because you never say anything that that's that intelligent. I thought some of the good has happened here.
And you're saying this because the book tour you've been on has been a lot of people saying the same thing.
The reactions of the book have been have been so volatile. I mean, Twitter is one thing, but the reactions I have gotten to the book have been as all over the place I've had all over the place reactions before, but more all over the place than usual extremes in every direction.
So your son prepared you, Yeah.
He did. The family life prepared you. Right. You may think you're interesting, but they don't.
That advice you gave in that clip for your kids, if it walks in through the door, like to be alive enough to hold it, to take it on. It seems to me that you have done that again and again and again, and you've done it with this new book. I guess I want to know when you started this book, you had that question, what is this story tell us about the world? What does Sam tell us about the world. Do you have an answer to that?
Well, there's something Sam says that's I think recurs throughout the story and recurs throughout the response to the collapse of FDx. People see what they're looking for, they don't see what they're not looking for, and when someone really unusual walks into the room, they have a hard time placing him. The other thing I'd say is that runs right through the book is how unsettling and revealing it is when you have a character who's devoid of feeling, when there's no when you try to strip life of emotional content, and you kind of try to denature it and reduce it to a math problem the way like an AI would how much you lose, what you gain and what you lose. It's a incredible character study of that particular character trait.
When we're done here, you're going to have a meeting that you're going to do a book event, and then you're going to go to New York City to see Sam testify. Is that right correct? How do you think this is going to play out?
You know it's it's the sentencing is curious, it's not clear the judge is a hanging judge. He's a tough sentencer and the judge doesn't like him. But the judge has enormous latitude as to the sentence, so it's not clear exactly what the sentence will be. It isn't even if he's convicted of all the charges. The most the judge can sentence him too is one hundred and twenty years, But he could say you're also free to go. He could say anything. I don't know what the judge is going to do, how I think it plays out. I don't know how much more there is to play out. And it's pretty clear he's going to be convicted.
Do you want him to be punished.
He needs to be punished in some way. I don't think he's just going to escape punishment. It seems a waste to stick them away in jail for a life. I don't know. I feel a mixture of like, yeah, he did things, he did things he shouldn't have done. He broke the law almost certainly, and when people do that, they are punished. There's a part of me that, even as I think that, I also feel kind of sympathy for the situation. When I first met him and I started to watch him move through the world. I thought, there's a place for this person that there would never have been in earlier in other times on Wall Street, in society. This instant child billionaire is this new character and willingness to accept as an authority a person who generates vast amounts of wealth for himself very quickly, without knowing very much about who this person is, and allow them to start exercising influence over the culture in all kinds of ways that you might not if you knew who this person was. And it's partly a byproduct of a collapse in trust in institutions, governments, all the rest is sort of looking to this person to do what our institution should do, so putting in a position of authority that really probably no individuals should be.
In my last question, because we had to go. The thing that you have I think cemented over the years is a trust between you and the readers. I think that's why people keep coming back to you as readers. It's probably why people keep agreeing to be subjects in your books. And I'm curious because when Dixie passed, you said I didn't know if I wanted to write again. I suppose as we leave, I wondered, now, two and a half years since she left us, how do you feel about writing in this moment?
I just loved it. I mean I took such joy and pleasure. I shouldn't have joy than I should have taken in writing the story. I've had this feeling several times and would that I have it several times again. I felt I was limited only by my abilities. I thought that the world had generated once again this material that was so good I could only screw it up, and having that gives me enormous pleasure, the same pleasure like whatever that happy place is I'm in when I'm writing, it's there, and so I feel great about it. My worry when I think about writing now is that I force it, like that I go force the need to go write a book, rather than sit back and let it walk in the door. This walked in the door, and I think other ones will. But I think I want to be careful to make sure that I only write the books that feel like they really need to be written, because that's the joy. That's the joy, it's the pleasure of that.
Michael Lewis, thank you for sitting and congratulations on the book. Thank you, Sam that was Michael Lewis. He's the author of the new book Going in Evident, The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. The trial of Sam Bankman Freed is set to resume tomorrow, Monday the thirtieth, in a Manhattan federal court. Upon initially taking the stand this past Friday, Bankman Freed acknowledged that mistakes were made while running FTX quote. There were significant oversights, he said to a crowded courtroom filled with his parents, Barbara Freed and Joseph Bankman, reporters, students, and of course, our guest today, Michael Lewis. According to The New York Times, Bankman Freed's testimony could end as soon as Tuesday, Closing statements could happen on Wednesday, and the jury could begin deliberation as early as Thursday. If charged with the seven counts of conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering, Bankman Freed, at the age of thirty one, could be sentenced to a life in prison. And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening. I want to give a special thanks this week to Elizabeth Riley, the publishing team at w W Norton, Lydia, Gene Kott, and of course, our guest and fellow Pushkin podcaster Michael Lewis. To order his new book, Going Infinite, The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, be sure to visit our website at talk easypod dot com. There you'll also find other episodes with great writers including Zadi Smith, fran Leebowitz, David Sedaris, Min Jin Lee, and Hilton Nows. To hear those and more Pushkin podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at talk easypod. If you want to join our mailing list, drop me a line at SF at talk easy z pond dot com. That's SF at talk easypond dot com. You can also purchase one of our mugs at Come and Cream or Navy, or our vinyl record with fran Leewitz at talk easypond dot com slash shop Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jenixi Bravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Today's talk was edited by Caitlin Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Chenoy. Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gaberzak, Ian Jones and Ethan Seneca. Photographs today are by Julius chu House. I want to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, Johnsnars, Kerrie Brody, Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Jordan McMillan, Cura Posey, Tara Machado, Jason Gambrell, Justine Lang, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with another episode All that Happened, Stay safe, sen So long MHM