"I get in trouble when I say things like this" - Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried

Pushkin. On the tenth of November twenty twenty two, Sam Bankwin Freed tweeted that he had eft UP. As we explored in our last episode, that was something of an understatement. FTX, the digital currency exchange platform where individuals could trade cryptocurrencies and store their funds for safekeeping, imploded when it emerged that Sam bankmin Freed had been diverting funds into his crypto hedge fund Alamedia Research fraud. Yes, but as an effective altruist, he was doing it for a good cause, wasn't he. In his own misguided way, he thought he was just following the teachings of Will mccaskell, the founder of the Effective Altruism movement, and that can't be bad, can it. If you've not listened to that episode yet,

please do before listening to this special Cautionary conversation with Michael Lewis, the man who had a ringside seat for the spectacular fall of the cryptocurrency vunderkind. Michael, Welcome to Cautionary Tales.

Tim. Good to see you again.

It's great to see you. I think the last time we saw each other, I was trying to teach you how to play an obscure German board game.

Then that's exactly right. I can't even remember what book led you to get interested. Maybe the Big Short. I think it was The Big Short. But the FtM were like, oh no, you can't just talk to Michael Lewis about his book. You have to talk to Michael Lewis about his book while you teach him a weird German board game.

I thought it was actually ingenius because I try to do this with subjects, and especially if you only have a short time with them. You're so much better off doing something with someone than just talking to them, if you're trying to kind of get some insight into how they tick. The best job interview I ever had it was to lead teenage girls through Europe when I was twenty two years old. I went to the tour agency and the guy who ran the tour agency said, God, I forgot you had an interview. This day. We're supposed to move the furniture from this office down the hall of the other office. Could you just help me do that, and then if we have time left over, we'll talk.

And I spent an hour moving furniture with this guy and I left. He said, I'll call you about the interview later and I left bewildered. Yeah, like a week later he said, you have the job. And two months later I'm in a hotel room with my fellow leader in like Bruges, and I said, you know, this was odd. I was never interviewed, and I explained what happened. He said, I moved that furniture too back the other way, and it was a really smart way to kind of figure out whether someone was collaborative, whether they could pick up stuff quickly, how they interacted with people. So I took it as a sign you were a clever journalist when you did this.

Yeah, well, or I have a clever editor. But yeah, Michael, I'm already feeling bad that I haven't brought a board game this time. But I'm sure we'll be fine. I'm sure we'll be fine. We are going to talk about the time you spent with Sam Bankmanfried, what you made of him, what you made of the influence of the defective altruism had on him. And we're also going to be answering listener questions, and we'll be talking about your new book Who Is Government. Before all of that, here is the caution details thing. The most remarkable thing about Going Infinite is that when you started working on it, you had no idea that you were going to be covering the fraud of the century. You were just intrigued by Sam bankman Fried And this book turned into a

very different book during the course of writing it. And it feels like this is not the first time you've been in the right place at the right time. I'm curious how how always hey that you find your subjects.

You know, I stumbled into this. I had no idea that there was like fraud going on. So I was asked to evaluate him by an investor who was doing a deal with him, and it was a friend, and I said sure, I had no idea who he was. He turns up in my doorstep in Berkeley, and we spent a couple of hours together, and in a couple of hours I realized I had this character who was one he thought about the world in a very unusual way, in a very persuasive way. But two he would possibly give me access to several places I wanted access. One was Jane Street in the world of high frequency trading, because he'd spent three years at Jane Street and he'd hired a bunch of people out of there, and they're notoriously opaque and won't talk to journalists. So I thought, ah,

maybe I get to Jane Street throw him money in politics, because he was handing out money left right and centered to American politicians and the crypto world, which he was very skeptical of, and so he wasn't a religionist, so he wasn't defensive about it. So I remember just saying to him, I don't know where this is going to end up. Could I just hang out watch? You know?

He was the world's richest person under the age of thirty according to Forest Magazine. It wasn't the big brain wave on my part. It was kind of surprising he let me do it, especially in view of what was going to happen. So I just follow my nose. Yeah, And my nose isn't like, oh, what's going to be the next big story. My nose is more what's not dull, and sometimes that works out, you know, sometimes that ends up being what you should be paying attention to. So as you.

Hung out with Sam Magmunfred Moore, you must have become aware of this whole effective altruism thing seemed to play a huge role in his life and how he thought.

You're exactly right. It kind of blew my mind. I'd never heard of this, the idea that he had gone to Wall Street with absolutely no interest in money, and his parents would both professor law professors at Stanford. They're like non materialist people. They don't care about stuff, they don't care about money. You know, in another generation, he'd have been like a high school physics teacher or maybe a college professor. He was not the social type who goes to Wall Street. And he'd forced himself into it because he had discovered, before he'd discovered Wall Street, this movement called effective altruism that just resonated with him.

Yeah, it was seduced into it by the philosophers.

And they proselytize and they actually will, mcgaskill told me. He says, you know, it turned out that the ideal market for these ideas were nerdy math science people at American universities, people who were attracted to this kind of quantitative solution of how to lead your life maximize the number of lives you save.

I mean, just as an asside I've been writing a column about the Trump administration's decision to cut foreign aid. And it's slightly controversial exactly how much foreign aid they've cut, exactly what they're cutting, and the conflicting statements, but plausibly sensible independent analysts reckon that decision is going to kill a million people a year yep. And it's mostly people with HIV, although were there a few other things that have some vaccinations, as tuberculosis. But you have HIV, you have very effective medication. As long as you take the medication, you'll find the moment you stop taking the medication, the virus starts to come back, and pretty soon you're going to die. And I'm writing about this, and somehow I

can't quite get as outraged about those million people as if they were being rounded up and executed for being a legal immigrants, or if they'd started some war that was likely to kill a million people. It just feels different somehow. It is dead right.

Part of the reason it feels different is it's a number, right, especially the bigger than number. It just becomes a number. You would feel much more raged if you saw just a single child die.

Yeah.

We don't respond to the data. We respond to anecdote.

Yeah, unless you're Sam Bgmund Freed and unless you're Sam Bakman Freed, which is one to the data. You know, there's a jumble of my previous books.

That are sort of popping into my head when he starts talking this way. One is Moneyball Oakland A has succeeded because they ignored the anecdote and look to the data. And two was the Ndoing Project. Yeah, Economy and Taversky were all about the way our minds mislead us when we trust our intuitive sense of things rather than the data.

It was interesting that this was wholly persuasive to this kind of person and not just Sam Bagmfree, but there was a whole crowd. I mean it was cult like. As McCaskill said. They tend to be on kind of on the spectrum. They tended to be male, they tend to be math or physics. They tend to be socially awkward.

There were people who for whom emotion was a weak guide to action. Whatever you or I feel that leads us to do things, they didn't feel so much, but they could talk themselves into using logic and numbers as a guide to action in the way that emotion is a guide to action for us.

Are the numbers a better guide to action than emotions.

Depends on what you're doing. Yeah, I mean, let's go back to the moneyball case. Most of the time in baseball, the statistics information that you are way better off than guided by than your nose. Every now and then that's not true. But most of the time in life you don't really have the numbers, like how you're going to decide who you're gonna marry, or where you're gonna live, or even where you're gonna go to college, or even where you're gonna have dinner tonight. How do you reduce that to a statistical problem. We are kind of forced by the dearth of statistical information to constantly rely on our intuitive judgment, and so that it leaves us kind of sleepy to the possibility that there is some statistical

information that could inform our judgment. Often when there is, though yes, I think it is better, Connomin and Traversky showed just it's amazing how even when you're looking at people we would all think of that as experts doctors that algorithms outperform the experts when rendering diagnoses. That kind of thing.

One of the things that struck me exploring The story for Cause Details was when effective altruism took this what seems to be a little bit of a weird turn. So on the one hand, you you've got the people who are like, Okay, I've got one thousand dollars and i want to save the maximum number of lives. They crunch the numbers and they go, yeah, it's probably bed nets impregnated with anti mosquit typesticides. If you give it, you give out a lot of bed nets, you could save a life for whatever one thousand dollars, three thousand dollars.

So it's cheap. It's cheap, and that's better than maybe spending the money on vaccinations, even though vaccinations are good and vaccinations are better than spending the money on work to improve governance. And improve governance is better than giving it to a donkey sanctuary because all of the donkeys are living in luxury. They're all fine. So that all makes sense up to that point. You go the effective altruisms at on it. I'm with this is great. I'm with them too, so I feel the same way. I'm with them too. I've makes it.

They just make me at that point, they just make me feel guilty for how I'm living my life.

And then they start having these conversations like, well, you know, there could be a lot of people in the world in the future. The future could go on for a very long time. We could be talking about trillions of people. We could be talking about intergalactic ciations or human civilization lasting a million years. But maybe AI ruins all that.

So maybe if we have a workshop about AI safety, maybe there's only a one in a billion chance that it will do anything. But if it does something, it could save a trillion lives. So a one and a billion chance of saving a trillion lives, that's a thousand lives. Right, that's really good, and so it's totally worth spending fifty thousand dollars on our AI workshop. At which point you start like, where did it go wrong? Or are they right?

Am I wrong? So I exactly say a feeling it jumped the shark Around twenty and twelve and Toby Ord writes this book about existential risk where he's putting numbers on the likelihood of various events wiping out humanity, and it's AI and pandemics and meteor strikes and nuclear war and so on and so forth. Very hard to put numbers on that, but of course you can't do the calculations about the numbers, so they just accept roughly good numbers, and it's just not at all clear to me the numbers are okay at all. The math become much shakier.

That's one thing that happens. The number has become much bigger. You're not just talking about saving lives in Africa right now, You're talking about all future humanity and infinite people. And so the sums of money required to address these problems also becomes much much bigger. One thousand dollars will be useful in Africa right now. One thousand dollars right now to prevent AI from eating us all one day is nothing.

Sam Begun Freed sits down and does a back of the envelope calculation. He thinks he needs at least, you know, one hundred billion dollars to make a dent in this or that problem. So all of a sudden, it gets very grandiose, and it's completely even if they were never entirely interested in the emotional residence of saving the life of a small child in Africa today, there was at least some emotional content there, and all of a sudden it vanishes. It's purely an abstract math problem. And then, of course, as you just said, what can't you justify when the numbers are that big, the number of people you're going to save that big, what can't you justify doing to attack the problem? It seems perfectly rational to

do whatever you need to do to make one hundred billion dollars to eliminate or at least defray this existential risk.

Yeah, this is the end of the world. We're talking about the end of human civilization. You just be able to cut some coolness at that point.

So what you're doing, also, if you think about it, is you're puffing yourself up. You're a superhero. Now you're now going to save humanity. You may only be increasing the odds that humanity is saved by a few percentile, but nevertheless you're in the realm of saving humanity. So it creates a grandiosity to the whole thing.

And well, as I understand it, the sound bragmue of people have said it, if I'm giving myself a five percent chance of saving the world, that I'm five percent of Superman.

Right there we go. So this is how he was thinking when I first met him, and I thought it was bonkers, but I thought it was interesting. It's not wrong, you know, it's not obviously wrong. It's probably obviously right that there are these extinction level events that could happen. The question is, like, is it barkers think you could do much about them? There's something that goes on when you're doing things that have such a remote probability of having any effect. It's very different from buying a bed net and saving a kid. The degree of uncertainly gets so high. And so when you look at how what happen to the EA movement around Sam. They had their arguments about this, but the people who move with Sam

all bought into you know, we're saving humanity, and they left behind a collection of original EA's who sort of disapproved and who continued to, you know, buy bed nets for kids in Africa.

Do you think it is fair to blame effective altruism for what Sam Maguinfree did and you know, the fraud and him going to prison and all of that. To what extent can you track it all back to.

Effective Can we assign fractional blame?

I think that's totally in the spirit.

Of the heart. Let's in the spirit of Sam Bankman Freed, let's do a little shares of blame. So I would say, the little sliver of blame that effective algorism gets is in how it was sold to the Sam Bankman Freeds of the world. You are this nerd with a high sense of your own self importance, but it hasn't been appreciated by the world who is coming of age in a world where very weirdly, you can get rich very quickly because your particular gifts are all of a sudden in demand at Jane Street and Hudson River Trading and Citadel and all these quantitative trading shops and also tech firms.

So all of a sudden, you're the most monetizable twenty two year old on the planet, maybe a professional athlete. And if you unleash your money making skills for the good of this movement, you're a superhero. They're given a kind of license to behave in unorthodox ways.

Maybe it never could to will that somebody would, Oh, well, I guess I could commit a massive fraud and as long as I saved the planet, that's fine. I mean, possibly never oc could to the philosophers that anybody would think to do that.

It's possible. That's a funny thing you say that. I think that's possible. So I think if Sam Beginfree is a creature of anything. Effect of altruism is really important, but so is Jane Street. The high frequency trading world, they live to game systems. You're in there to figure out how to game markets, and people who are really good at playing the game are the people who win.

And Sam was really good at playing the game. Obviously you're not supposed to break the law, but it puts you in a certain frame of mind when all you're doing is gaming markets day after day after day, you're looking for little edges, and if I were assign another slipper of blame, kind of the grown up world of finance.

It was obvious to anybody who walked into the FTX that there was a basic conflict of interest. He had this private trading firm that he'd started first out of which grew this public crypto exchange, and that his private trading from traded on the crypto exchange and was in a little hut next door to it in the Bahamas.

So some blame there, but of course also blame to Sam. What isn't in Sam that leads him to do this. You know, he danced his way out of lots of problems before. I think he thought he was smart, so smart that he could kind of figure this out. And in fairness to him, I think he was overwhelmed. If you'd seen their business, your first reaction would be this is pure chaos. There's no organization chart. No one knows who the job actually is of The corporate psychiatrist is the person who knows the most about the business because he's the only one everybody talks to. You know, it's like one thing like that after another. What it didn't feel like and still doesn't feel like to me, And I get in trouble when I say things like this

is malice. What he wasn't and isn't is like this natural crook. He doesn't have cruelty in him. Oddly, he doesn't have a lot of dishonesty in him. He has some, but up to the moment that it's discovered that he has the money in the wrong place, that he's taking used as customers' money to do all kinds of things he didn't have permission to do. There's not really a trace in Sam Bankman's Freed's life of criminal behavior or corrupt behavior. Didn't cheat on tests, didn't cheat a golf, never played golf. You know, you go back to his childhood, there's no sign of anything like this, and so it's not like this is who he is. It makes it even a weirder event.

Do you think he was a kind personal? Is a kind person?

Yes, I mean, you know, qualify it. But he paved very well to the little people around him who helped him. He would get worked up and scream every now and then. But I think because he was on the receiving end of it when he was a kid a lot. I think he was highly sensitive to suffering. I think suffering bothered him. And he was also highly averse to conflict, Like he was really uncomfortable getting in a conflict. He'd going high rather than fight. Every now and then he get upset and everybody around him get scared. But it was very private. It was like watching a little volcano go off. So yeah, I think he's basically clan person.

And to this day, I'm still in touch with him. He writes a prison diary and he sends it to me. He's pretty careful about his interactions with other people. He's in no conflict. People kind of like him because he kind of watches out for them a bit. I mean, we did it was really wrong, but when you know this personality, it's even stranger.

He did it interesting, very interesting. Well, Michael, stay with us. I'm going to give you questions from our loyal listeners, particularly on the subjects of kindness and altruism, and we shall hear them after the break. We're back. I'm talking to Michael Lewis, the author of Going Infinite, The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, which tells the story of Sam Bankmin Freed, the world's most infamous effective altruists.

And Michael, we've asked our listeners to send in their questions about altruism. Are you going for answering a few?

Sure?

So here's one from I think from Nocum Apologies if I've mispronounced your name, that they write as an admirer of mister Lewis's books since Liar's Poker. When I heard he was answering questions about altruism, I had to ask this. According to the latest data I could find, the most important cause for effective altruists, after poverty and health, is AI risk. There are real challenges to the adoption of AI, but to put it so high on the list of causes to donate to seems misguided at best. Can you explain how AI overtook such obvious harms as global warming or the public benefits of the spread of free markets, free speech, or democracy as the greatest good and effective altruists can do all the best, No, com This is.

One of those really great questions I probably can't answer satisfactorily, but it is a great question. I think in the minds of Sam bagman Freedom and the people around him, they thought of these existential risks in two ways. How salient are they? How likely are they they cause problems to actually happen? And how tractable are they? What can we actually do about this? And in Sam bankman Fried's mind when he did that calculation, it wasn't AI that bubbled to the surface. It was pandemics. He threw much more money into pandemic prevention than AI. Even though he thought AI was the greater risk. He couldn't figure out what to do about it.

Would this had been pre COVID When he was throwing money into pandemic prevention, it.

Was pre COVID. When he was thinking about it and when he started to have real money we were in the thick of COVID. It was like, if a really even more deadly one comes along, how can we be better defending ourselves against it or detecting it and preventing in the first place. That kind of thing the one move he made in AI prevention other than funding people with small sums of money who had interesting ideas, but he bought a big chunk of anthropic which was the kind of Salonda refuse for open AI. People who thought that open AI wasn't paying enough attention to the risks and that fine enough end up being worth many, many billions of dollars to his creditors. So why were they so alive to AI as an existential risk? Because your

question is right, it's not obvious. It's not obvious to me.

Let me flip it around and say, why are they not worried about climate change as an existential risk? For example?

The answer to that is they think that climate change, no matter how bad it gets, they'll still be human beings alive.

Yeah, and they're probably right, Yeah, I mean, it's not going to turn the earth into venus right, it could make things really uncomfortable. We could really regret we didn't do more earlier. But the idea that it ends the human race seems unlikely.

Yea.

So they're looking for things that will actually, like end it, absolutely end human civilization, and there, I guess you're looking at nuclear weapons and AI are more plausible.

Maybe that's right. AI had the capacity to do the job completely in a way even pandemic wouldn't. I don't even think nuclear weapons are that plausible. So they could play out a scenario where they were no longer people because of AI.

It throws a light on this the difference between a long term, effective altruist and the rest of us. The rest of us would go, hey, if there was a nuclear war and ninety nine percent of the human race was killed and the rest of us were reduced to the Stone Age and had to build from scratch, that sounds incredibly bad. Whereas for an effective altruist, they're like, well, if you think really long term, yeah, and on a two million year time horizon, that's right. It's not the worst thing.

It just shows you where you can go when you're untethered from normal human feeling and convention. That's the real thing about the effect of altrus is that at bottom, it's a status movement. It's a group of people who feel underappreciated, slightly ostracized, who know in some ways they're smarter than their peers. Essentially, the starting point is everybody else is stupid, they don't know, and it takes them to weird places.

Let me throw in a thought from listener, Matt. I'm going to paraphrase, but it's relevant, I think to what you're just saying, Michael. So, Matt conjures up the idea that people who eat meat are in a way very good for pigs and chickens and cows, in.

The same way that people who want ducks are very good for ducks because you created the need for these animals to exist. Yeah.

You know, if a Martian came down and looked and said, you know, what are the dominant species on Earth, then there's a good case that some of the dominant species are the species that humans eat. And the reason they're dominant there are so many of them have taken over all these different ecosystems is because that's what the humans want. Anyway, he draws a parallel between that perspective and effective altruism.

Is it too harsh to think of effective altruists as benign butchers ready to sacrifice real people today for the sake of a notional gain to humankind over eons. So there's no end to the suffering you can tolerate today as long as your maximized using the quantity of humanity in the long run.

I'd be willing to play this game with him, Except the effect of altruismselves do not acknowledge they were willing to inflict suffering on people today. They just thought they were shifting their attention from people to day to people in the future. They were shifting their neglect, if you want to think about it the other way. So they weren't actively thinking of themselves as inflicting suffering on present humans, although Sam did. Although Sam did, although the logic of their argument would lead them to do it if necessary.

Yes, interesting question for Victor. Victor asks why is no one talking about why we need altruism in the first place? What are we doing wrong as societies that some people are left behind and there's a need for altruism. I suppose this gets to the idea of if you had a benign government, or if you had the right rules or the invisible hand of Adam Smith. But if we somehow organize society better, no one would have to be kind or altruistic, because all these problems would be.

So this fair question too. Without human sympathy, let's not call it altruism, Let's just call it kind of a basic sympathy for our fellow creatures. Without that, why would you bother to organize society in a kinder way? Like that is what's at the bottom of attempts to organize society so that you don't need it. It's a funny situation in a way, because when I think of altruism, they kind of selflessness. Every time you scratch the surface, if you find some human motive for what they're doing, selfish might be too strong, but it's not exactly selfless.

So when you ask this question, my mind goes in a completely different direction, and my mind goes in the direction of do we actually even have altruism? Is there such a thing? I think it's more complicated than that. The minute you were sitting in a room with Sam bankman Fried and is effective altruists at FTX, you realize they were engaged in a kind of competition with other effective altruists. Who's going to be the biggest deal in the effective altruism community. It's like who's going to save the most future lives. They never put it quite so crudely, but it was in the air. Maybe that's good jolly.

You've got these kind of killer competitive instincts. And it could be people kidding each other with machetes, or it could be Wall Street traders trying to make the most money. The beauty of early sam Bekman Freed and his crowd was so we have this machine called Wall Street. It is gotten better and better at extracting rents. The people who are the peak predators on Wall Street now are the high frequency traders, the Citadel's, the Jane Streets, the jump trading, the Hudson River trading virtue, all these places generating more money for individuals than have ever been generated on Wall Street before. And all of a sudden, the kind of person who's good at that has this religion about giving the money away. I thought, for a brief

moment there was this kind of robin Hood thing that might go on. And in fact, Jane Street, which is the leader of the pack. Jane Street started to worry that too many of the people that they were recruiting were effective altress. And the problem with the effective altress is they couldn't control them in the way you control a normal person who just wants a fourth house and a third yacht. They didn't have the same materialist needs.

They were doing it for this kind of quasi religious reason, and it made them much harder to manage. But I thought, what a great problem. Wouldn't it be cool if instead of like reforming Wall Street because we'll never do it, that it's sort of weirdly reformed itself. Because the kind of person who got into the position of making the most money felt like it was his religion to give it away. That would have been cool.

Yeah, No, it would have been would have been so a quick question from our listener Richard, which I think is tied to that point. It's an exequat question really. He says, if you give money to charity, should you tell everybody about it?

Well?

Should you just do it? Should you just do it quietly? Well, one hand, you should do it quietly because it's undignified and it's not about you, It's about the charity. But on the other hand, if you tell your friends you're giving money to charity, then maybe that will encourage them to give as well.

That's an interesting way to put it. I don't think people who put their names on buildings are doing it because they want to encourage other people to put their names on buildings. It's self advertisement. Yeah. I was raised to be very quiet about this sort of thing, that you give money if you always listed as anonymous. I've had organizations ask we put our name on it, and I said, and when they want that, I let them do it. My answer to the etiquee question is let the recipient decide whether they want your name on it or not, what's better for the recipient, and do whatever is better for them.

Thank you, Michael, brilliant answers. Hold on with us, and let's talk about your new book, Who Is Government. After the break, we're back. I'm here with my fellow Pushkin podcaster, the brilliant writer Michael Lewis. Michael, you very kindly agreed to come on the podcast and talk about Sam Bankmnfreed and talk about going infinite. And then I got a message saying, oh, by the way, Michael has a new book out. You should probably ask him some questions about that.

I have to admit my heart sank a little bit. I thought, I don't really have time to read another book in preparation for this podcast. And of course, the moment I opened the first page, I was immediately drawn in and I loved the book. So congratulations, But tell us about who is government?

So I wrote a book about a set in the first Trump administration called The Fifth Risk, where I wandered around the administration, the executive branch, and got essentially an education from the various departments that Trump himself refused to get. So how the Agriculture Department worked, how the Energy Department worked, what went on inside these places. And the longer I spent there, the more taken I was with the actual characters in government. Whatever the stereotype of the bureaucrat is in the American mind, they violated it. There were these breathtakingly devoted public servants who were experts and all kinds of arcane and in some cases spintanely frightening fields who were doing the work that kept the society together. And

I thought, you know, there really was a project coming back and just doing profiles of these people. And it wasn't so much because I saw Doge coming. I'm surprised Doge came. It was more that I thought just generally the conversation around American government had gotten so dumb because people didn't really appreciate what the government did and who the people were who did it. So I recruited six writers, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Casey Sepp, Camal Bell, and Sarah Val none of them really conventional journalists Comal Bell's a stand up comedian, Dave and Geraldine mostly novelists, same as John, and just dropped them into the government, said look, find a story, and I did two of them.

And the idea was just like inoculate the American public against these really stupid critiques of their government. I mean, these things ran one by one each week in the eight weeks running up to the election, and then we put them together the book because they got so much attention. The thing that really got me was actually the quality of the material. Like the first story is about a guy named Chris Mark who figured out how to prevent the roofs of coal mines falling in on the heads of coal miners, and you think, well, that's an arcane problem, and how big a deal could that be? Fifty thousand American coal miners killed by roof falls in the last century, and who knows how many more around the world, And

there was just an imperfect science and how to keep the roof of a coal miner up, and how this person comes to his expertise, why he does it, how he does it is literate. It was just like this stuff of novels. You find that over and over again in the Government.

The story about Christopher Market. We don't want too many spoilers. But his father is kind of, among other things, an expert in why Gothic cathedrals don't fool.

Down, and he rebels against the father.

Yeah, they don't get on a tour, they don't get on He leaves home and.

Refuses to get a college education. He goes and joins the working class and then essentially reprises his father's career underground. And when I tell him that, he gets angry at me. No, it has nothing to do with my father. Yes, my father figured out how the roofs of Gothic cathedrals don't fall down, but that has nothing to do with how the roofs of coal mines don't fall down.

Yeah, And of course it's it's the same problem.

It's the same basically, some little differences, but from any kind of perspective outside of his own, it's the same problem. And so that there were these psychological portraits to draw that were just fun. I don't know how you think about what you do. I think about what I do is like goal mining. I'm a prospector. I wander around, you know, the mountains of California, kicking up dirt under my feet, looking for a place where I can sink my pick and maybe find some gold. And it's kind of random when I find it. There's not a great science to the finding of the gold. You get good at sort of analyzing the landscape. You got a sense of this might be and where it might not be.

But it's still a lot of luck involved. I felt that with the fifth risk, I found this unbelievably rich vein of ore. I can only scoop out a fraction of it because there was so much of it. And I was working with my hands, and I had a bucket on my back, and there was all this stuff left behind, and I thought it would all be gone by the time I came back to it. And in fact, it's like noem would bother to go find the mind.

No one's interested.

There's this line by Geraldine Brooks, one of the writers in Who Is Government. She's profiling a guy who is a jiu jitsu instructor, tennis coach, fights terrorists and pedophiles, but it is a qualified accountant and works for the in non revenue service. And she says, you know, if this was a novel, this would be malpractice, right, you can't just make this sort of stuff up. But because it happens to be true and this guy is a real person, I'm actually allowed to have him as a character in this story.

And it tells you something. This person who is like the profit center of the United States government because he's busting up cyber crime rings and raking in their bitcoin and sticking it in the treasury. He's generated billions with his team, billions of dollars of free money for the government. And the Trump administration has disabled him. They've fired half his unit and he can't do what he did as before.

Then our population isn't just completely outraged by this is incredible to me, but they wouldn't know to be outraged unless you knew the story. And you only know the story if you read Geraldine's piece because it's not in the news.

Otherwise it's astonishing and he busted Peter followings, there's one point where somebody from Hamas's tweets and says, oh, what you can donate to the revolutionary cause. He's send your bitcoin to this address, and he redirects it basically hacks their bank account. I have to say the details of exactly how this happened to lost on me, but anybody who donated bitcoin it ended up going to victims of state sponsored terrorism, right and anybody who clicked on the Hamas logo got directed to Rick Castley singing never going to give you up. So who says the Buroucuts don't have a sense of humor, Oh no, they do. That they don't have, by and large is a sense of themselves as characters. This was the thing that all.

The writers came away thinking, they like, I'd find this person who had done this unbelievable thing, and I'd say I want to talk to you about it, and he goes, well, it wasn't really me. It was the team that you really have to talk to my bosses. It was very little ego. I guess what it is. These jobs self select for people who really like doing big, important things but don't care much about credit or money. It's hard to believe that such people still exist in American life.

Everybody else seems to be looking for fame and fortune. These are still like the opposite of reality TV stars. They got interested in a problem. They've worried the problem to death for thirty years, has had enormous consequences, and they don't expect anybody to pay attention.

I need. You get nervous when people do, or at least the bureaucracy around them gets nervous.

Well, that's right. That's really actually an important point because that was the other thing all the writers noticed. And this is maybe by way a way to explain why there's this inefficiency and information about this, is that the bureaucracy has gotten so used to all attention being bad attention.

So journalist shows up and says, I'd just like to know what you're doing and why you're doing.

It, and they assume this is going to end with this like a congressional hearing and me getting fired and humiliated and prevented from doing anything for.

The rest of my life, whereas in fact, it's like, no, no, I just want to know what you're doing, because it's amazing what you're doing, and I want to tell everyone what you're doing that's right in a good way.

They themselves are that not as wary because they aren't doing anything bad. It's the political people above them are worried that this story will somehow make the White House look bad, and they can't imagine how it would make the White House look good.

Yeah, and there is a story to be told. I think also about how the poor reputation of government bureaucracy just makes their life harder, irrespective of the politics itself. I think you profile the woman who studies rare diseases.

Yes, so she doesn't really study rare diseases. She's had a bunch of them stone And let me just tell you how I found her, because that sort of explains how what a role is in the world. So back when I was working on my COVID book The Premonition, one of the characters was a researcher named Joe Derriesi who's like he was a superhero in BioResearch and Joe he was working on COVID, but at the same time he had discovered what he thought might be a treatment for a rare brain eating amiba called balamuthia. I'd never heard of this thing. Nobody had ever heard of this thing.

It did, wasn't It was discovered in like the nineteen nineties in the San Diego Zoo.

But subsequently now I'm now having nine minutes about it. So thank you for telling me it's.

Time should be you should yeah, because there's some tens of thousands of cases each year in the United States of people dying of unidentified encephalitis. It's like something's going on in their brain and they never figure it out. They die it's just encephalitis. There was a woman whose brain was being eaten by something they couldn't figure out what rolls into the UCSF emergency room. Joe gets involved.

Eventually she dies. He gets involved too late, but he's able to identify the bug that's in her brain, and it's this Ballamuthia Mandrillis. It's called it's a brain eating a meba. He then, very cleverly he says, well, like, what could you do to treat this in his lab, he has as his graduate students bombard balamuthia with every drug that's been approved either in Europe or the United States, and find that one drug, a UTI drug used in Europe called nitroxylene, kills the Baalamuthia clearly doesn't kill people.

People are taking it for UTIs, so like, why not try this and lo and behold even though it's rare. Pretty shortly thereafter, someone else rolls into the emergency room has the same symptoms. They find he has ballamuthi in his brain. They give him the nitroxylene and he survives.

Yeah.

I say to him, I said, man, that's great. Now everybody will know there's at least something you could treat it with. And he says, Nope, doesn't work that way, he said, may we'll be able to publish a scientific paper. Maybe doctors will notice it. But there's every possibility that if you roll into a hospital with Ballymouthie anywhere else in America, that they won't even know we did this work.

There's two problems, right, So one problem is you didn't run a round the most trial, so you can't be sure. Maybe it was a flu.

Correct.

It's still interesting that you had a theory, and you gave him the drug and he got better. So maybe, But then your second problem is, you know, how do you tell people that maybe yes.

But with these rare diseases, you're never going to have a randomized trial. And when they're fatal, if you roll in Tim with Ballymouthie in your brain, would you rather them throw some nitroxyline in you or not? If they don't, we know what's going to happen if they don't, So your brain is going to get eaten. That's bad, so it why not? And the other side of this is that because it's a rare disease, the pharmaceutical industry has no interest in it. It's like there's no money in it. No, none of people going to have this happen to them.

By the way, the way you apparently get is by ingesting dirt, So be careful with dirt when your garden. Don't put your hands to your mouth anyway. So Joe says to me, this is a natural place for government to intervene, to at least collate, because people like me are doing this stuff all the time. And there's a woman in the Food and Drug Administration named Heatherstone who is kind of all by herself, basically decided to tackle this problem. She's created an app that try to gather every instance of a rare disease being treated around the world, how it was treated in what the outcome was. There's hope for people who have rare diseases. But the government does not have the energy anymore to get behind Heatherstone's creation.

They're unwilling to really promote it. She's a woman on her own to go into medical conferences trying to persuade doctors to plug in their rare disease treatment their cases into her app. It's going nowhere. What happens? The story in the end is about girl and six year old girl in Arkansas who rolls in and takes them forever to find that she's got balimuthia. But she has ballymuthia the completely screwed up way in which her life is saved.

The little girl in Arkansas parents google around and find that Heatherstone has been thanked by JODORESI for helping me get his hands on nitroxylene, and they get personally in touch with her, and she makes sure that they get the drug and her life is saved. But at the very same time, just like forty miles from Jodoresi's office in California, another little girl got Ballymuthia, never heard of the cure and died. And it's sort of like a parable of good and bad government, Like, do you what kind of government do you want to have? A government that has emboldened and strengthened to actually follow through on this really good idea of how to deal with an intractable problem, or a government that actually has kind of

lost its spirit and its energy because she created the app cure idea. It's called it should be useful, it should be something people pay attention. It should be something that the government throws its credibility behind. But then you know, the government has less credibility. And it's a story of the frustrating of the impulses of people who previously might have done really great things in the government. So it's a sad story. It's a sad story masquerading as a happy story, but a kind of amazing story.

It's absolutely amazing.

There's this thing that kind of springs from between the lines of the whole book. These people feel like people who have figured out the way to lead a meaningful life, and this brings us back to effective altruism. One of the keys to a meaningful life is to find ways outside of yourself, find ways to live for things other than yourself. You know, Sam Begman Freed groped towards this in his own weird way. But these people put their finger on it right away. There are problems I can solve and it will help others. And never mind how much I'm paid or whether I'm acknowledged for it. And I'm not wired to do that. I need more attention than I should. But they are and we should be disgrateful for them instead of heaping scorn and derision upon them.

I've been talking to Michael Lewis. Michael is the author of Going Infinite and a new book with co authors, Who Is Government. Michael has been great to talk to you.

Thank you. I always find Tim and.

You can listen to Michael's podcast Against the Rules wherever you get your podcasts. As for me, I will be back next week with another Cautionary Tale. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales has written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright Alice Fines and Ryan Dinney. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sounders are and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Bend A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, messaam Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have

been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardore Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us and if you want to hear the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus

"I get in trouble when I say things like this" - Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried

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