Pushkin.

I'm Lidia Jean Kott, I'm Michael Lewis.

And, surprise!

We're here for an extra episode of The Big Short companion series.

One we weren't expecting.

That's right.

Yeah, because we got the hedge fund manager Michael Burry to be on the podcast.

We didn't really “get” him to be on the podcast.

It's funny what happened.

Well, first we should say who Michael Burry is.

Michael Burry is one of the three main characters in both the book and the movie of The Big Short, and he was a really important character to me.

And in the movie he's played by Christian Bale.

And in the movie, he's played by Christian Bale.

He doesn't do interviews.

And we asked him to be on the podcast earlier, and he said no.

So yeah, so what happened?

First he said, “You know, I'd like to help.” And then he said, “I don't, I wouldn't like to help.” And then what happened was, his trading activity got released to the public, which it does.

He has to file a 13F form with the SEC saying what his positions are, and although it's not a perfect picture of what he's doing, it did say that he had put on big short positions against Palantir and Nvidia.

So he was betting against the AI bubble.

All he did was file what his positions were.

He didn't go on — he doesn't do media, he doesn't do interviews.

And it exploded!

Like, it was on Twitter, on CNBC.

People were both attacking him and praising him.

His reasoning for not coming on the podcast was he wanted to lay low — and he was trending on Twitter for 48 hours.

So it was like, what's the point?

He can't lay low.

And, as he tells us, he says, like,“This only happens to me.” But, I was really glad to have him on, because I felt like we were missing somebody.

Yeah.

No, same.

And also, because people were asking, like, I was getting messages being like, “Are you guys gonna have Michael Burry?”

There's something also nice about subjects who don't just, who aren't, um, promiscuous, who just, who don't just talk to everybody.

Because it makes you feel special —

It makes you feel special.

It makes you, it makes the audience feel special.

And the reader feel special.

It's like nobody else has this story.

And one thing I wanted you to explain is, he was one of the first people, one of the early people, right?

— to bet on the subprime mortgage crisis.

And when he was trying to do it, there weren't any financial instruments to do that, right?

You had to, you know, it was — it was how to do it in a way where, if the madness just kept going and going, you weren't gonna be bankrupt quickly.

So you could have done things like bet against mortgage companies in the stock market.

You could have shorted their stock.

But you know that's a, it's a bet that's hard to hold for a long time.

And so you have to, your timing has to be exquisite.

What he did was basically invent, or have Wall Street firms invent for him, was the credit default swap on subprime mortgage bonds, which is essentially an insurance policy on bonds backed by subprime loans.

So if the loans go bad, and the bonds go bad, you get paid off on this insurance policy.

Think of it like, I get to buy insurance on your house, fire insurance — and if it burns down, I get paid.

So there's something a little goofy about it.

I mean, it used to be, very oddly, it used to be that I could go buy life insurance on you.

And if you died.

I got paid a bunch of money.

This obviously creates a very bad incentive.

Murder!

Murderers.

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

But you can do this in the financial markets.

You can buy insurance policies on other people's bonds and if it, if they — the bonds — go bad, you get paid.

You couldn't, when Michael Berry started to think about this situation, you couldn't buy an insurance policy on a subprime mortgage bond.

So he had to go help Wall Street create it for him, and then all the other characters in the story are then using that thing he creates to make the same bet.

Anything else you wanted to say related to Michael Burry?

I would say that the one other thing that's interesting about him is that he so let me into his life.

He just doesn't really do that, usually.

It created an intimacy.

I just really got to know him.

And really enjoyed, like, just hearing what he had to say.

I just learned stuff from him.

Even when he doesn't make money on whatever everybody's making, it's really interesting to hear what he's thinking, and just like, have that as part of the furniture in your mind.

Michael Lewis's conversation with Michael Berry is coming up.

It really is a very fun listen.

I still remember you handing me your emails.

And like, you had thousands of — you had communicated with the world your whole trading life for years through email.

And so it was a real-time account of your thoughts, of Wall Street's response to your thoughts, of how the market moved.

It was unbelievably valuable.

It was so different from, like, everybody reminiscing.

Do you remember that?

I remember that.

And those emails, I think, were the main reason I didn't get sued by my investors.

Because if I had been a skilled orator or somebody who loved giving conference calls, I would've done conference calls with my investors.

And then, maybe they wouldn't, they would have been recorded.

But here I had emails with everybody on everything, and so it was very clear where we stood with everybody.

You were like for me, you know —people came to the right answer in different ways, and you came to the right answer in such a satisfying way.

Because not only did you see the irresponsibilities in the subprime mortgage market, but you actually had a theory about the timing of it when it was all gonna come unraveled.

And the problem with these positions, like with, “Oh, there's a lot of insanity and X or Y,” is that, yeah, you can be right, but you can be wrong for long enough that the market just takes you out of your positions

I think that's right.

This is why this is The Big Short.

Because the once in a century opportunity to actually say,“I know when this is gonna happen.” You know, I've compared this to the 1990s bubble, and the reality is there was no telling when that would end.

In most situations like this, you, there's no good way to time it.

And shorting it is just a high-risk endeavor.

We're gonna get to today, but I wanted to revisit The Big Short just a little bit, and I'm curious what effect it had on your life.

I mean, there was the trade, there was the book, and then there was the movie.

You did let Christian Bale come and hang out with you for a day.

But you were remarkably chill about the whole thing, and I don't think I've ever felt like I've really recapped with you, like what effect this thing had on you, if any.

I think, I didn't know.

You're right.

I mean, I'm on the autism spectrum, so I'm pretty good in my own head, and I'm pretty good at blocking out stuff.

And so even this movie, I saw it at the premiere.

I haven't watched it since.

The book, I read it when it came out, and I haven't read it since

That's how I felt about it.

We just I just move on and so kind of took it as it came.

I went to the premiere because my whole my family wanted to go to the premiere.

And I, you know — as you know, I don't do interviews because I don't feel I'm good at this.

And so I, you know, haven't done one, I think since — like I haven't talked to anybody since, I think, the 60 Minutes interview.

About the Big Short?

About this, in an interview format.

And now it's the 10th anniversary of the film, 15th anniversary of the book.

And, yeah, I can't believe it's been that long.

But you know, I just kind of go on and do my thing, and it doesn't really affect me too much.

You never, you didn't feel it puts you in the position of “oracle”?

That all of a sudden people are expecting you to predict the next thing?

It was, as we mentioned, it is a very unique circumstance.

It was a once in a century type trade.

People say one, you know, once in a century, flood, once in a century, this one, and it's not really true, it happens every ten years.

But this was that opportunity was very unique.

And I've basically told everybody I can it ever since that that that's not going to happen again anytime soon.

What made it unique?

Well, I was basically permitted to buy insurance on these bonds that were incredibly illiquid.

And I was permitted to basically buy insurance, and then trade and profit off them without actually having the insured item.

And this was not expensive.

Nobody thought this could happen.

I had put on a lot of my position by late 2005, and I got a call from Goldman Sachs saying, “What are you doing?

You're the only person we know.

You're not a mortgage fund, you're not hedging, you're doing something different.” It's not something that people were generally aware of.

And so I could kind of walk in and basically pull the caper off.

There are three things I want to talk about at the back end of your story in The Big Short, and then I want to move on to the present.

But the first is, you have this terrific win.

Your investors make a lot of money.

And you end up closing your fund.

Can you remind me why you closed your fund?

My investors were generally mad at me, and they were generally mad at me even when things went well.

I didn't feel at the time I had good will with anybody.

I didn't, there was only one investor.

I shouldn't say his name, but love him.

He is the only guy that invested with me late.

That last year and a half or so, nobody came to me.

Nobody wanted to invest with me.

And even when we made the money, it was,“Whew, we don't want to go through that again.” Did anybody ever call after the book, after the movie, after they got their money back — and a lot more — did anybody ever call you to apologize?

No.

No, no, no.

It's kind of an amazing — I didn't, I didn't expect it either.

It's kind of an amazing —

I didn't, I didn't expect it either.

I know you didn't expect it, but sort of like, at some point when there was cooling off, and they looked at their winnings, I would've thought someone would've called and said,“You know, sorry, I got so angry at you for doing this trade.”

No, nobody did, and I didn't expect it.

It's Wall Street.

When did you reopen?

2013.

And since then, how have you done?

All right.

I think, it's all been the same since, so I remember when I opened again, I didn't want investors I didn't know.

I didn't want to be above the SEC threshold for registering as an investment advisor.

I wanted to keep it small.

So I just went to people I knew, and some of my own money, and we created a fund.

It was probably a situation where if I wanted to, I could have raised billions, but I didn't.

That wasn't my intention.

You didn't want to relive the experience you'd already had.

I didn't want to deal with Wall Street.

I didn't want to deal with those kinds of investors.

I knew who my good investors were from the prior time, and those were the only people I wanted to deal with.

And so it was a, it just was a small operation, and I kept trying to keep it small.

I didn't really market it.

I didn't market it at all, other than just that first group.

And what happens with that is that, some of those people that were with me in 2000, individual doctors or whatever, they get old.

They actually pass away.

Ultimately, it just became something — there was a natural attrition in the pool, and so it kept us small.

I have not paid that close attention.

All I see is every now and then there's some explosion on Twitter about you.

And it's wrong.

They, they, they, they, they're all wrong!

We're gonna take a quick break and when we return, I asked Michael Burry about why he placed bets recently against two large tech stocks, Palantir and Nvidia.

So let's talk about this.

Explain to me you have this very small operation with just a handful of investors.

What are the filing requirements?

What do you have to hand in so that people can see what you're doing.

They get to see US securities traded in the US that are stocks.

They get to see stocks, and they get an incredibly bastardized version of options.

How is it bastardized?

Because, say I buy 50,000 put options on Palantir, and that's 50,000 times 100.

And so I'm short at strike-50, way out of the money.

It's like a, it's $200 stock now.

I struck, but I think it's worth 30 or less.

So I buy them way out of the money, two years out.

You're betting that Palintir is gonna drop by a lot

A lot.

In two years.

But over a long period of time.

Right.

And the press — I'm working out, and I see on CNBC, I have a billion dollar short position against Palantir.

It's $10 million.

I saw this too.

I couldn't believe it.

So what they do is, they take the underlying shares under those options contracts and they multiply it out by the current stock price.

So I have a, I have — actually it was less than $2 option —and it was being priced as if I own the $200.

So it was two orders of magnitude off!

And that happens also with index.

So I would take hedges on my portfolio, and people would say, “Oh my gosh, he's shorting a billion and a half of the S&P 500, or he is shorting — there'd be these explosions and, and it's just wrong.

It's notional.

What's interesting is that they don't do this for anybody else.

So maybe you should give more interviews.

I asked you, what effect the big short hat on your life?

This is an effect the big short hat on your life.

In my compliance since the financial crisis, everything changed in compliance.

We have a compliance officer inside the firm, and he just keeps saying, “Don't talk to anybody.

Don't talk to anybody.

Don't respond to anybody.

Don't respond to anybody.” And so I think since the movie came out, and this really started happening, there was a frustration building in me to want to say something, and I couldn't.

And so when COVID came about, I had some strong feelings on that.

So I went on Twitter, but I was only allowed to talk about things that weren't stocks.

And so that's fine.

I mean, but I had to talk about social things, and I got in trouble with that, because everybody gets in trouble with that.

So I got off Twitter.

But you got back on.

I got back on recently because, um, we deregistered.

I don't run that pool of money anymore.

I'm just gonna run my own money.

Gotcha.

So it’s your own money now.

Mostly yeah.

Why did you decide to do that?

I think that we're in a bad situation in the stock market.

I think the stock market could be in for a number of bad years, and I think it could be a longer bear market, more akin to two thousand.

But the structure of industry, the industry has changed.

Back then, it was hedge funds, mutual funds, separate accounts, businesses.

But there were people running pools of money and thinking about stocks and investing in stocks, and so I felt I didn't know I was on the autom the spectrum.

I felt though I had an edge there I could.

I'm kind of sit outside of all these human psyches and like and figure things out, and it worked well.

Today it's all passive money and it's a lot.

It's over fifty percent passive money.

Index funds - Less than 10 percent of money, some say, is actively managed by managers who are actually thinking about the stocks in any kind of way that's long term.

And so the problem in the United States, I think, when the market goes down, it's not like in 2000 where there was this other bunch of stocks that were being ignored, and they'll come up even if the Nasdaq crashes.

Now, I think the whole thing's just gonna come down.

And you, it will be very hard to be in a long stocks in the United States and protect yourself.

And so that's why I decided to get out of it.

Because the fund had to be long in some way.

Well, I didn't want to go through that with investors again, I see, and that makes sense.

Of course, I closed the fund and I got I put on all the positions for myself right away the same.

Well, I didn't want to go through that with investors again, I see, and that makes sense.

So you're still in the position So I wanna talk about this position.

I found it again, I was watching it from a distance, but what I — tell me what I missed.

Someone, CNBC or whoever, gets a hold of your 13F.

On this 13F, it says the Palantir position.

Is especially big.

It looks big, because it looks big, because they're, the put options.

Just, they're way, way out of the money.

They're, they were struck at 50.

So OK, you had to release this information about your fund.

You weren't advertising it to the world in any unusual way.

You weren't going out and talking trash about Palantir.

You just, this position gets released.

And then the next thing, I see Alex Karp, who runs Palantir, going after you for owning puts on his stock.

You weren't advertising it to the world in any unusual way.

You weren't going out and talking trash about Palenteer.

You just this position gets released, right, and then the next thing I do, I see Alex Karp, who runs Palenteer, like going after you for owning puts on his stock.

And I don't think.

I mean during the.

Financial crisis, you will remember that the head of Morgan Stanley at the time, John Max, he blamed short sellars for what was happening to him and they banned short selling of the stocks very I think, briefly.

Right, but it's always a really.

Bad sign when people start going after the short sellers.

It's in the United States, in the United States, and.

I was thinking, oh my god, I guess wouldn't want to be in your shoes like you didn't you just made a trade.

But he's provoked me.

I want to understand your trade.

It's about that pollunteer goes way way.

Down, way way down in two years.

What do you understand about their business as the market doesn't huh.

So my belief is that this is a company that had a set of applications that were very expensive to install because you had to hire their consultants, like after you bought the software just to install it, and learning right and Pounteer had this reputation in government government contracts is a nasty business, and I think they figured out how to do it and get some contracts.

How much of their revenues government contracts.

It's fallen off a lot.

It was it was almost it was a majority, and now it's like more even because it during this the AI build out, they've basically marketed themselves to corporations.

Well, corporations have come to them.

C suites of every public corporation have board members CEOs who feel under the gun to AI something.

And so there's this scramble and now they're not the only one.

They keep saying they're the only ones.

But IBM has does basically the same thing.

Their business is actually bigger than Pallenteers, and they are not really All government government contracts are not generally that profitable, and so you know, IBM's got a really good business inside it, but it doesn't get the credit for a Pallenteer valuation on that business, even though it is growing fast too.

It's growing bout as fast as Pollenteer or was.

And so let me put it this way, there are I think five billionaires that came out to Pollunteer because they own volunteer stock and the revenue was four billion or let basically four billion, so the billionaires to revenue ratio is greater than one.

And I've never seen that book.

Is that what attracted your attention in the first place?

Well, it that was a that's a cute little thing.

Was Wow, there's how do they get five billionaires out of that group?

And so out of a company that has four billion of revenue and actually, uh stock based compensation basically to weighs almost all their income.

They have to pay their people who are doing all this consulting so much in stock that they just use stock based compensation.

And then what they do is they buy that back.

And the company would like you to just give them credit for what Wall Street generally does is they take the earnings per share and then they add back to stock based compensation because it's non cash, and they add it back to the earnings.

And I think actually the way Gap accounts for stock based compensation is skews low versus what it actually costs the real cost.

You can look at the how much are companies buying back to offset that dilution, and you can just take that amount and deduct it from cash flow.

And so if you do that with Palenteer, historically they don't make anything.

So I basically looked at the company and said, you're worth this much and you really don't make anything of its tiny a little bit of revenue, and you have all these billionaires.

You had an argument back in two thousand and eight for when the subprime mortgage bond market was going to start to unravel, when people are going to start a default.

Do you have a timing argument for now with Palenteer?

Well, I think this is the AI, the AI consulting thing.

So Pallenteer and Nvidia are the two luckiest companies on the planet.

Neither produced a product for AI.

No I know, but they're the two poster children for AI.

Yes, in Video was a good computer graphics chip company.

In Video was a computer graphics chip.

I actually knew the CFO.

We talked in twenty fifteen or sixteen.

I went long the stock and I and I said, hey, you're doing a great job.

I love how you're buying back stock.

Her kids was on my kids basketball team.

I think I bought the stock like a year or two later.

The stock was up to like it went from twenty to ninety at the time, which is like forty cents now after the splits in video was lucky.

They got lucky once with the crypto mining because crypto mining needed GPUs were the They weren't customed for cryptal mind.

They were just the thing that was there that could be used.

And then AI came along, and it's the same deal about a year and a half ago.

A year and a half to two years ago, Pound Chair was not an AI company.

Basically, when chat GPD came out, they basically put an AI cover on their applications that were they were selling and then all the consulting on and they call it AI.

But that's what every company is doing now.

But is there a timing argument for AI?

Then?

Yeah, So this gets to what does this bubble look like?

This bubble looks an awful lot like the dot com bubble, which is not really a dot com bubble.

It was a data transmission bubble.

It was a huge build out of fiber, and a huge fiber needed routers, and routers needed fiber and it just blew up.

So the market peak was in March tenth of two thousand.

Cisco grew fifty five percent that year revenues in two thousand and it grew seventeen percent in two thousand and one because the investment continued.

It actually peaked for about a year after the top in the market.

And so what you can do is you can look at net investment, which is capital expenditures less appreciation over time, and you can put it against GDP to kind of a nominal GDP to compare it across eras, and you get these nice mounds of investment manias.

And what you see in every prior one was the relevant stock market peak was before you were even halfway done with the capital expenditure.

In the majority cases, the capital expenditure hadn't even peaked yet.

And so right now we're ramping up for capital expenditure.

And what's happened is we've gotten into this part of the phase where if you announce a dollar of cap X on AI, your market capital go up three dollars for every dollar you have.

Oracle we saw that with Oracle.

Giant Company was up forty like incredible.

Larry Olson was briefly the richest man because they announced it's massive multi hundred billions of dollars of basically spending that they would have to well, they announced bookings, but they would have to spend.

They're still building it out.

Where are we then, I can't say, because it hasn't happened fully yet.

We are at levels of prior peaks.

We're at the level the shale revolution relative to GP.

We're at the level near the level the dot com where when the dot com stock the NASDAC peaked.

So you felt two year puts were enough.

I thought two years would be enough.

Yes, I think two years would be enough.

I think you know, if you're going to buy something now by healthcare stocks, they're really out of favor.

If your own something that has been gone up a lot, you've done really really well in it, it's shooting straight up, and you know it's I think it's kind of overvalued, you should I think that's a something you should sell.

I want to ask you one weird question more question about the stock market, and that is you own Berkshire Hathaway and berksh Hathaway just.

Announced that we just was revealed that it bought a big chunk of Google stock.

Did that disappoint you or do you see how they're thinking, we don't know that that is buffet that bought it one two.

Google is the value investor's favorite in that group.

It's the one that everybody said, well, it's cheaper than all the others, it's got its relative value, and it is Google.

But I know that since I got Chat GPT in claude, I don't use Google right, and Google Search.

The magic thing about Google Search was how little it cost because most requests were not monetizable.

So for the eighty five percent of searches they get that are not, nobody's gonna buy it even looking to buy anything, or think it's not product related.

It's it's history.

You know what did Columbus really do?

You know?

It's not monetizable, and so they better not lose a lot of money on that AI changes.

That AI is expensive.

I run queries regularly that I know costs tens of dollars just for my inquiry one inquiry.

Google had had those searches down to infinitismal fractions of a cent.

So that business is the golden goose and it's really basically all their cash flow.

So the other thing about llms is that look back to the dot com boom.

That was an amazing telecommunication revolution.

If you were alive in the eighties and then you're alive in the two thousand, it's nothing the same.

It changed everybody's life in a dramatic way.

And still AOL Justice connected its last dial up just like a year ago of this earlier this year.

I mean, the penetration was very slow in the United States.

It was pretty lightning fast in places like in Singapore, sold these one city countries type thing or urban areas.

But it was it was a long time by the financial crisis.

But even after the financial custis there was a lot of people in the United States who were not online or were on you know, we're in not really doing it.

So back then, as that connectivity came up, there was a lot of things people want to sell.

People wanted to sell goods online, they wanted Amazon grew on that.

They wanted to socialize online.

They want to do these things with lms.

Most people are getting what they want out of them right now on the free level, and they're massively penetrating.

What more are they going to do for the average person?

Not that much.

The money is going to be in the in the developer space, and there's a lot of money in that space.

But this idea that I mean, a very small percentage of people want to pay for their LM and they won't ever have to because they're going to be so that this is going to be commoditized.

So I think you're getting a sense of how Michael Berry's works.

When we come back from the break, I finally find out why he decided to talk to me for the big short.

All right, So I'm going to let.

You go in a minute, But there are a couple of other things I want to ask you about because I just want to pick your brain on them.

What trigger is a debt crisis in this country?

Like you, are you paying much attention to our government's finances and how do you feel about them?

And where do you think it's headed.

So predicting this stuff is the problem.

I always kind of put it in terms of, you know, waiting for Castro to die.

It's not a strategy.

The people live a long time.

Countries are very powerful and they can do a lot.

The United States is the reserve has the reserve currency.

Obviously, Trump is bullying around the world right now, so there United States is still a very primary country and betting that they can't find a way is not something I'd want to do anytime soon.

I do think it's ridiculous.

I mean, we have what four and a half trillion in taxes from individuals.

We have about four hundred billion from corporations.

I mean, you could double the taxes on corporations.

That's four hundred billion.

What does that do for you?

We have a trillion dollars in interest payments on our debt every year, so you know when you get that trillion, that interest expense is getting up there.

And then you have all the entitlements.

We do not have the social cushion that a lot of other developed countries have, but we can't really afford doing much more than we're doing.

So you think the death's just going to keep growing and growing and growing.

But you wouldn't want to bet when it breaks.

No, you can't because it's the United States.

How do you feel about FED independence?

Do you care?

I think I have a different I have a kind of a sick view on this.

I think that Trump, when Trump starts running the FED, it might become the end of the FED.

Because if he's running the FED, then everybody's gonna hate it, not just me, So we'll see.

I think the FED is U has done a lot of damage over the last one hundred years, or since it's inception in nineteen fourteen.

And I feel we don't need the FED.

We don't need it unless the FED is going to say, look like, why are they going to drop rates?

There's no reason to drop rates now.

Inflation is starting to come up a little bit.

The economy is muddling along.

But our neutral rate is not one percent or zero percent or where Trump wants it.

Our neutral rate is probably around four percent, or is probably around where we are now.

And think about when you drop rates, you kill all the savers, all the fixed dunks on income people.

They suffered for so long, they're actually finally getting a rhythm to their lives.

Again, none of this is costless.

And you think you're going to just drop careful what you wish for, you might drop rates.

And because of the debt situation that you know the curve can steepen.

Did you just say you want to get rid of the FED?

Yeah?

I think the FED doesn't do anything very helpful.

I think it's the easiest job in the world.

What do you replace it with?

I think the US Treasury could have a department that just makes these decisions.

I mean the Fed alreadys, monetizing treasury debt whatever.

I mean, they're almost the same department already.

Your institutional pessimism, does it lead you to like, I don't know bitcoin or gold or one of these refuges that.

I think that bitcoin at one hundred thousand is the most ridiculous thing.

That same people are sitting on TV talking about bitcoin.

They're just casually it's one hundred thousand, it's down now, it's ninety eight thousand.

It's not worth anything.

Everybody's accepted it.

It's the tulip bulb of our time.

It's worse than a tulip bulb because this has enabled so much criminal activity to go deep under under.

So where do you hide with your Do you have gold?

I've had gold since two thousand and five.

Guys, I'm gonna let you go back to the last question I have.

Did you I never asked you this question.

You let me into your kitchen in a really uh you made yourself very vulnerable, and you let me tell your story.

Do you regret it?

When you showed up?

I knew you from Liar's Poker, and I didn't know what you were going to write about me because you're you're a great author.

I knew you from I knew you from Moneyball and Blindside, but when you deal with Wall Street, you tend to be very fairly critical.

And so I'm a big hedgehop manager just shorted your house.

You approached me.

Actually, I got a call from a friend you talk to think, one of my friends in New York, and he called me and he said, I just talk with Michael Lewis.

Congratulations, You're gonna be one of the heroes in his new book.

And that was when I really realized, oh, this is gonna go okay.

So in a way, I was giving you all that stuff defensively.

I didn't want you having a I wanted to make sure you had everything full disclosure, because I thought I was I didn't do anything wrong, and I wanted you to know.

That, yeah, you know.

And your appeal to me was you were.

And are a fantastic teacher, like a really good explainer.

Of your own thoughts.

And your own thoughts can sometimes be peculiar, like just different than what other people are thinking, and you don't mind holding them, you know, you don't mind having views that just would embarrass people who were less sure of themselves to articulate.

Well being on the spectrum.

I just moved back into my own head and along.

So it was great seeing you.

I'm sorry you're not out here more, and if you were out here, I wish you just let me know because I'm I am down in your old neck of the wood sum and it'd be fun to go grab dinner.

We're still out there a lot, so I'll look forward to seeing you all right, Miss you, Yeah, miss you too, Hey, thank you, Michael.

Against the Rules The Big Short Companion is hosted by Michael Lewis.

It's produced by Me Ludy, Jane Kott, and Catherine Girodeau.

Our editor is Julia Barton.

Our theme was composed by Nick Burtel, and our engineer is Hans Dale.

She Special thanks to Nicole opten Bosch, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela Lawrence and the rest of the Pushkin Audiobooks team.

Against the Rules is the production of Pushkin Industries.

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And you can get the big short now at pushkin dot fm, slash Audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold