He tries to make the point that due to history and circumstance America is particularly vulnerable to wacky cults (including religion) compared to other countries so I think his position is that it’s even worse here than elsewhere in human history
Clovis attacking an IBCK episode before I’ve listened to it is like when your weed guy would insist he’s got the best stuff he’s smoked in years. It’s probably whatever but it’s nice to get the tone set.
Excited to listen to this one.
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I thought it was a solid example of how business journalism works: give some reporter all the access they want and constantly blow smoke up their ass and they will seriously report nonsense like “My mega-brain is too smart for chess or Shakespeare or reading in general.”
Why write the book of you can’t be bothered to give a more skeptical look than everyone else in the media who thinks he’s a genius?
It’s not everyone in the media, it’s everyone. He was widely loved in crypto, the media, politics, among progressives, effective altruism crowd. Everyone. He was a widely loved rockstar. There was zero reasons for Lewis to think anything other than he was writing a book about an eccentric genius.
Everyone with perfect information now acting like they are so much smarter is the absolute worst kind of criticism.
I hate listen now only. Glad to help set the tone. 
I didn’t know who SBF was until after the trouble started so I’m certainly biased from only hearing of him as a freak and a weird dude from people with the benefit of hindsight.
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I actually agree with clovis8 in the broader perspective, I don’t find These Books Will Kill You to be particularly engaging, in spite of me liking both hosts.
That being said this episode is pretty funny.
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He was for sure a freak and weird dude.
Part of my hatred of the pod is how much I loved the two hosts on their other pods.
Only at the 12 minute mark but episode is great so far. They make a great point about doubting exactly how much Michael Lewis was paying attention if he didnt notice a 10 person polycule in the Bahamas with all the access he had.
And the idea Sam was doing constant EV calcs on his commitments as opposed to being an flake who doesn’t value others time. Which is, if you think about it, some very cult member logic in the face of some obvious behavior.
I don’t think Michael Lewis is a dummy, it’s just the whole industry of business reporting is broken. It creates incentives for everyone to be credulous, folks like Elon or Elizabeth Holmes or SBF shouldn’t be able to routinely fool crack reporters. If I tell a sports reporter I have a 120 MPH fastball he’s going to ask to see it but Elon pitches maddeningly dumb shit like Hyperloop and they’re all like “Yeah, seems legit.”
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This is one of the few books they’ve done where I kinda feel a bit weird about laughing at jokes about it without having read it.
From this one and the episode Behind The Bastards did Lewis comes off as a pretty big dummy for buying into SBF’s bullshit and not recognizing he at the very least shouldn’t be running a massive company.
Without having read the book myself I can’t know to what extent Lewis does come off as sycophantic. I can see myself reading the book and thinking that element was exaggerated and Lewis comes off much better. Or maybe its even dumber. Haven’t read it and have no interest in doing so. Never gonna know.
With books like The Game or Rich Dad, Poor Dad its funny and I don’t have any guilt over accepting Peter or Michael’s interpretation.
Oh boy, how much did you lose?
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Hehe zero. Never used his service.
Crazy thing about it is it looks like nobody is going to lose anything. They have enough to pay everyone back. Might be first massive fraud ever where that would be true.
I listened to the Going Infinite episode when hiking tonight and thought it was OK, but I haven’t read the book. I’m kind of curious to read it now. The soundbites they had from Michael Lewis being interviewed were pretty bad, though. I thought they had a good point when they said that being like “people got paid back so it turns out the money was all there!” is like if I borrowed 100K off you, spent it on cocaine, then you won a civil judgement against me and compelled me to sell my house to pay you back. Being like “see I had the money” does not make sense there. FTX was supposedly a multi-billion dollar company, so the fact that if you liquidate it there was enough to get customer funds back doesn’t mean that the money didn’t go anywhere.
I guess I need to read the book.
Of course Lewis doesn’t think this either. The soundbites were chosen to make him look dumb. If you listen to the many full interviews he has done on the topic he obviously recognizes this.
I think the book is bottom tier Lewis but mostly because the subject is kinda boring not because Lewis is all of a sudden some moron he is made out to be on this pod.
I have a friend who read Going Infinite and liked it and he mostly read it to laugh at the FTX weirdos, so I don’t think he was biased. I probably have to read it myself. I do kind of cringe at Hobbes talking about crypto since he Has Opinions but also admittedly has no idea how any of it works. I don’t mind if people are massive crypto skeptics if they actually understand it (I am basically a crypto skeptic myself).
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I am a crypto skeptic too. SBF clearly benefited tons by luck and the fact that he perfectly fit the “eccentric weirdo tech genius” stereotype. I think a certain group assumed weirdness was positively correlated with genius.
The crypto skeptic stuff is largely tangential to whether SBF committed fraud or not imo.
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