Michael Burry Speaks

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human. Hey there, it's Michael Lewis. Did you know that you can listen to the Big Short Companion series on the Against the Rules podcast on Amazon Music, along with your other favorite podcasts? To start listening, just download the Amazon Music app, search for Against the Rules, and click Follow to keep up with new episodes. You could also ask Alexa. Alexa, play Against the Rules on Amazon Music. For Amazon Music Unlimited members, Audible is now included in your membership. And you can also listen to the Big Short audiobook in the app. So you have your podcasts, your audiobooks, and your music all in one place. Pushkin. I'm Lydia Jean-Cott. 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 Berry, 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 Berry is. Michael Berry 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've 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 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 so 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. And 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 going to have Michael Burry? There's something also nice about subjects who don't just, who aren't promiscuous, who don't just talk to everybody. Because that makes you feel special or? It makes you feel special. It makes the audience feel special, and the reader feels special. 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, it was, it was how to do it in a way where if the madness just kept going and going, you weren't going to 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. Um, what he did was basically invent or have Wall Street firms invent for him the credit default swap on subprime mortgage bonds, which is essentially an insurance policy on bonds backed by some prime loans. So if the loans go bad and the bonds go go bad, you get paid off on this insurance policy. Think of it like I get to buy insurance on your house and if it 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, murder. Yes. Yes, exactly. Uh, but, 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 Barry 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. Um, is there anything else you wanted to say related to Michael Barry? I would say that the one other thing that's interesting about him is that he's so let me into his life. He just doesn't really do that. Usually it created a, uh, an intimacy. Like I just really got to know him and really enjoyed like just hearing what he had to say. Like I just learned stuff from him, even when he doesn't make money on whatever about he'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 Barry is coming up. It really is a very fun listen. I still remember you handing me your emails and like you had like thousands of you, 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 have done conference calls with my investors and then maybe they wouldn't have been recorded. And 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 that the irresponsibilities in the subprime mortgage market, but you actually had a theory about the timing of it when it was all going to come unraveled. And the problem with these positions, like with, oh, there's a lot of insanity in 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 is the once in a century opportunity to actually say, I know when this is going to happen. Right. You know, I've compared this to the 1990s bubble. And the reality is there was no telling when that would end. Right. In most situations like this, you there's no good way to time it. And shorting it is just a high risk endeavor. Well, we're going to 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 with you for a day. But you, you were remarkably chill about the whole thing. And I don't think I've ever felt like I 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, 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, I haven't done one, I think, since, uh, 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 didn't feel it put 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, there's one, but, and it's not really true. It happens every 10 years. But, but this was this, that opportunity was very unique. And I've basically told everybody I can. You know, it's ever since 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 it this was not expensive. Nobody thought this could happen. Right. I'd 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 I was. 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 the big 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. Do 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. And I didn't feel at the time I had goodwill 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. Nobody wanted to invest with him. And even when we made the money, it was who 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. I know you didn't expect it, but this sort of like at some point when there was cooling off and they looked at they looked at their winnings, I would have thought someone would have called and said, you know, sorry, I got so angry at you for doing this trade. No, nobody did. OK. And I didn't expect it. It's Wall Street. When did you reopen 2013? And since then, how have you done? 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. Yeah. I didn't want to be above the SEC threshold for registering for 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 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 are the only people I wanted to deal. Right. And so it was just was a small operation. And I kept trying to keep it small. And 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 a 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 and it's wrong. Every day they they they they're all wrong. We're going to take a quick break. And when we return, I asked Michael Burry about why he placed bets recently against two large tech stocks. Talent here and in video. Hey, there, it's Michael Lewis. Did you know that you can listen to the Big Short Companion series on the Against the Rules podcast on Amazon music, along with your other favorite podcasts? To start listening, just download the Amazon music app, search for against the rules and click follow to keep up with new episodes. You could also ask Alexa, Alexa, play against the rules on Amazon music. For Amazon music, unlimited members, audible is now included in your membership. And you can also listen to Big Short audio book in the app. So you have your podcasts, your audio books and your music all in one place. 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. OK. And how is it how is it bastardized? Because say I buy 50,000 put options on Palantir. And that's 50,000 times a hundred. And so I'm short strike 50 way out of the money. It's like it's $200 stock now, 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 Ponte is going to 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 ten million dollars. 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 they multiply it out by the current stock price. Yeah. So we're so I have a I have a actually was less than two dollars option. And it was being priced as if I own the 200. So it was two orders of magnitude off. Right. And that happens also with index. So 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's shorting. And there'd be these explosions and it's just wrong. It's notional. But it'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 had on your life. This is an effect the big short had on your life. And compliance and my compliance since the financial crisis, everything changed and 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 me, 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. Yeah. 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 is in trouble with that. So so I got off Twitter. But you got back on. I got back on recently because we deregistered. I don't run that pool of money anymore. I think I'm just going to run my own money and you're just your money now. So mostly 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 2000. But the structure of industry, the industry's change. 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 autism spectrum. I felt though that I had an edge there. I could I'm kind of sit outside of all these human psychies and like and figure things out and it worked well. Today, it's all passive money and it's a lot. It's over 50 percent passive money. There's index index funds. Less than 10 percent of money, some say is actively managed by managers who actually thinking about the stocks and in any kind of way. That's long term. And so the problem is 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 is just going to come down. And it would 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. 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 position. So you're still in the position. So I want to talk about this position. I found it again. I was watching it from a distance. But tell me what I missed. Someone, CNBC or whoever, gets a hold of your 13F. On this 13F, it says Palantir positions is especially big. It looks big because it looks big because they're the put options. 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. Right. And then the next thing I do, I see Alex Karp, who runs Palantir, 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 sellers 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 just wouldn't want to be in your shoes. Like, you didn't you just you just made a trade. But he's provoked me. I want to understand your trade. It's a bet that Palantir goes way, way down. Way, way down in two years. What do you understand about their business that the market doesn't? Ha, 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 learn it, right? And Palantir 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 revenue is government contracts? It's fallen off a lot. It was it was almost it was a majority. And now it's like more. OK, because it during this the AI build out, they 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. Yeah. And so there's this scramble. And now they're not the only one. I keep saying they're the only ones, but IBM has does basically the same thing. Their business is actually bigger than Palantir's. 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 Palantir valuation on that business, even though it is growing fast, too. It's growing about as fast as Palantir or was. And so let me put it this way. There are, I think, five billionaires that came out of Palantir because they own Palantir stock and the revenue was four billion or less, basically four billion. So the billionaires to revenue ratio was greater than one. And I've never seen that before. It was that what attracted your attention in the first place. Well, it that was a that's a cute little. Yeah, it is. Well, 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 stock based compensation basically would always 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. Then what they do is they buy that back. And the company would like you to just give them credit for. And what Wall Street generally does is they take the earnings per share and then they add back the 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 our company is 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 Palantir, historically, they don't make anything. So I basically looked at the company and said, you're you're worth this much and you really don't make anything if it's tiny, a little bit of revenue. And you have all these billionaires. You had an argument back in 2008 for when the subprime mortgage bond market was going to start to unravel when people are going to start to default. Do you have a timing argument for now with with Palantir? Well, I think this is the this is the AI, the AI consulting thing. So Palantir 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. Nvidia was a good computer graphics chip company. Nvidia was a computer graphics chip. I actually knew the CFO. We talked in 2015 or 16. I went along the stock and I and I can 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 20 to 90 at the time, which is like 40 cents now after the splits. Nvidia was lucky. They got lucky once with the crypto mining because crypto mining needed GPU GPUs were the they weren't custom for G for crypto mine. 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, Palantir was not an AI company. Basically, when chat GPD came out, they basically put an AI cover on their applications that were that they were selling and then selling all this 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 10th of 2000. Cisco grew 55 percent that year, revenues in 2000, and it grew 17 percent in 2001 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 depreciation 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 we're ramping up for capital expenditure. And what's happened is we've gotten into this part of a phase where if you announce a dollar of CapEx on AI, your market capital go up $3 for every dollar you had. Oracle, we saw that with Oracle. Giant company was up 40 percent, like incredible. Larry Ellison was briefly the richest man because they announced this massive multi hundred billions of 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 of the shale revolution relative to GDP. We're at the level near the level of the dot com, where when the dot com the Nasdaq peaked. So you felt two year 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 health care stocks, they're really out of favor. If you own something that has been gone up a lot, you've done really, really well in it. It's on a it's shooting straight up and and you know, it's think it's kind of overvalued. You should I think that's something you should sell. I want to ask you one weird question, more question about the stock market and that is you owned Berkshire Hathaway and Berkshire 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 Buffett that bought it. One, right to Google is the value investors favorite in that group. It's the one that everybody said, well, it's cheaper than all the others. It's got it's got relative value and it is Google. But I know that since I got chat, GPT and 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 85 percent of searches they get that are not. Nobody's going to buy 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 cost tens of dollars just for my inquiry. Inquiry, one one inquiry, Google had had those searches down to infinitismal fractions of a set. 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 telecommunications revolution. If you were alive in the 80s and then you're alive in the 2000, it's nothing the same. It's it changed everybody's life in a dramatic way. And still, AOL just disconnected its last dial up just like a year ago or earlier this year. I mean, the penetration was very slow in the United States. It was pretty lightning fast in places like in Singapore, Seoul, these one city countries type thing or dense urban areas. But it was it was a long time by the financial crisis. But even after the financial crisis, 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 wanted 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 LLMs. Most people are getting what they want out of right now on the on the free level. And they're massively penetrating. Right. What more are they going to do for the average person? Not that much. The money is going to be 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 LLM and they won't ever have to because it could be so that this is going to be commoditized. So I think you're getting a sense of how Michael Berry's mind works. When we come back from the break, I finally find out why he decided to talk to me for the big short. Hey, there's Michael Lewis. Did you know that you can listen to the Big Short Companion series on the Against the Rules podcast on Amazon Music, along with your other favorite podcasts? To start listening, just download the Amazon Music app, search for Against the Rules and click follow to keep up with new episodes. You could also ask Alexa, Alexa, play against the rules on Amazon Music. For Amazon Music Unlimited members, Audible is now included in your membership. And you can also listen to Big Short Audio Book in the app. So you have your podcasts, your audio books and your music all in one place. 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 triggers a debt crisis in this country? Like, 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 has the reserve currency. Obviously, Trump is bullying around the world right now. So the 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 that 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 debt'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 when Trump starts running the Fed, it might become the end of the Fed. Because if he's running the Fed, then everybody's going to hate it, not just me. So we'll see. I think the Fed has done a lot of damage over the last hundred years, or since its inception in 1914. 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 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 rates, be 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 already is monetizing Treasury debt whenever. I mean, they're almost the same department already. Your institutional pessimism. Does it lead you like, I don't know, Bitcoin or gold or one of these refuges that I think that Bitcoin at 100,000 is the most ridiculous thing. That same people are sitting on TV talking about Bitcoin. They're just casually. It's 100,000. So now it's 98,000. 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 money? Do you have gold? I've had gold since two thousand five. I'm going to let you go. But the last question I have, did you, I never asked you this question. You let me into your kitchen in a really 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 hedgehog manager just shorted your house. You approach me. Actually, I got a call from a friend. You talked to, I think, one of my friends in New York and he called me and he said, I just talked with Michael Lewis. Congratulations, you're going to be one of the heroes in his new book. And that was when I really realized, oh, this is going to go OK. 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 you don't mind having views that just would embarrass people who are less sure of themselves to articulate. Well, being on the spectrum, I just moved back into my own head and moved 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 woods some. And it'll 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, I miss you, too. Thank you, Michael. Against the Rules, the Big Short Companion is hosted by Michael Lewis. It's produced by me, Lydia Jean-Cott and Catherine Girardot. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our theme was composed by Nick Bertel and our engineer is Hans Dale Shee. Special thanks to Nicole Optenbosch, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela Lawrence and the rest of the Pushkin audiobooks team. Against the Rules is the production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to listen, add free and learn about other exclusive offerings. Don't forget to sign up for a Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin.fm/plus or on our Apple Show page. And you can get the Big Short now at pushkin.fm/audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hey, there, it's Michael Lewis. Did you know that you can listen to the Big Short Companion series on the Against the Rules podcast on Amazon Music, along with your other favorite podcasts? To start listening, just download the Amazon Music app, search for Against the Rules and click "Follow" to keep up with new episodes. You could also ask Alexa, "Alexa, play Against the Rules on the Big Short Companion ." You could also ask Alexa, "Alexa, play Against the Rules on Amazon Music." For Amazon Music Unlimited members, Audible is now included in your membership. And you can also listen to the Big Short audiobook in the app. So you have your podcasts, your audiobooks and your music all in one place.