Judging Sam: Going Infinite – Jacob Weisberg interviews Michael Lewis

Judging Sam: Going Infinite – Jacob Weisberg interviews Michael Lewis

Author: Pushkin Industries October 2, 2023 Duration: 33:05

For the past year and a half, journalist Michael Lewis has been following crypto entrepreneur and former CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried. The resulting book, "Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon", is out October 3. When Michael started his reporting, SBF was heralded as a wunderkind, a genius, a crypto innovator, a major philanthropist and political donor. Now, Sam Bankman-Fried is standing trial on multiple charges, including wire fraud, securities fraud, and misusing billions of dollars of customer funds. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. Michael was there – with unprecedented access – to see it all happen. In this episode, Pushkin's Jacob Weisberg interviews Michael about how he chose Sam as his book subject, what he thought the book was going to be about, and when he sensed things were going to come crashing down for Sam and FTX.

This conversation was recorded on September 13.

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Fifteen years have passed since Michael Lewis published his defining work, Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion. In that time, the story of the 2008 financial crisis, first told in his best-selling book and later in an Oscar-winning film, has only grown more relevant. This audio companion, produced by Pushkin Industries, is not a simple retrospective. Instead, Lewis, joined by co-host Lidia Jean Kott, uses the anniversary as a starting point for a deeper investigation. They examine the enduring legacy of that seismic event-how its lessons were absorbed, ignored, or misunderstood in the worlds of business, culture, and even sports. Listeners are brought directly into conversations that feel both urgent and reflective, including Lewis catching up with the film's director, Adam McKay, and revisiting the real-life individuals whose stories fueled the original narrative. The result is a podcast that functions as a vital, living appendix to a modern classic, asking what we truly learned and how the rules of the game have-or haven't-changed since the house of cards came tumbling down. It’s an essential listen for anyone who wonders how the past continues to shape our present.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion
Podcast Episodes
Live with Nicolle Wallace [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:53
Recently, Michael Lewis spoke with Nicolle Wallace, host of the podcast The Best People, at Symphony Space in New York. They discussed what it was like re-visiting the Big Short 15 years on. And we hear the actor Zach Gr…
Michael Burry Speaks [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:44
Of all the characters in The Big Short, fund manager Michael Burry (depicted by Christian Bale in the movie version) seemed the least likely to grant Michael Lewis a follow-up interview. Burry was one of the first to see…
How the Financial Crisis Broke Politics [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:19
To wrap up our series on The Big Short, Michael Lewis speaks with two people who represent two very different responses to the financial crisis of 2008: US Senator Elizabeth Warren, an expert in bankruptcy law who became…
How the Financial Crisis Broke Wall Street [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:25
To make sense of Wall Street’s hangover from the crash described in The Big Short, Michael Lewis calls up Matt Levine. Levine is author of the Money Stuff newsletter for Bloomberg Opinion and co-host of a podcast by the…
Lessons of the Great Depression [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 38:49
Andrew Ross Sorkin writes the business and policy newsletter DealBook for the New York Times and is co-anchor of Squawk Box on CNBC. He also has a historical bent, and has a new book out about the causes and consequences…
Lender of Last Resort [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:48
When Michael Lewis wrote The Big Short, there was an extra character in the story: The Federal Reserve System, the central bank of the US, which bought up bad debt on the balance sheets of big Wall Street banks and tradi…
The FrontPoint Boys [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 26:28
The Big Short is centered around the story of investment advisors who noticed something was seriously wrong with the subprime housing market starting in the early 2000s. Why did the traders at FrontPoint Partners and oth…
The Short Sellers [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 26:18
Michael Lewis speaks with Greg Lippmann, formerly a bond trader at Deutsche Bank, made famous when he was portrayed by Ryan Gosling in the movie version of The Big Short. And Lewis catches up with Steve Eisman, the Wall…
Michael Lewis Interviews His Producer [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 25:42
Against the Rules producer Lidia Jean Kott is the host of a new podcast series called The Chinatown Sting. It’s about a group of unlikely suspects at the center of a massive drug bust that took place in 1980s New York. R…
Adam McKay is Still Angry About 2008 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:02
When Adam McKay decided to make a movie based on The Big Short, he was mainly known for his comedies. But he managed to get a bevy of star actors — among them Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell and Margot Robbie — to…