Michael Burry Speaks | Michael Lewis

I'm Lydia Dean 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 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 3 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'd asked him to be on the podcast earlier, and he said no. 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.

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 doesn't do media, he doesn't do interviews, and it exploded. It was on Twitter, on CNBC. People were both attacking him and praising him.

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

Yeah.

So it was like, “What's the point?” He can't lay low.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And as he tells us, he says, “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. I was getting messages saying, “Are you guys going to have Michael Burry?”

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

Because it makes you feel special, or...?

It makes you feel special. It makes the audience feel special, and the reader feel special.

Yeah.

It's like—

Yeah.

—nobody else has this story.

1. Inventing The Big Short

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

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. You could have done things like bet against mortgage companies in the stock market. You could have shorted their stock. But that's a bet that's hard to hold for a long time, so your timing has to be exquisite.

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 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. 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, exactly. But you can do this in the financial markets. You can buy insurance policies on other people's bonds, and if the bonds go bad, you get paid.

When Michael Burry started to think about this situation, you couldn't buy an insurance policy on a subprime mortgage bond, so he had to help Wall Street create it for him. And then all the other characters in the story are using that thing he creates to make the same bet.

Is there anything else you wanted to say related to Michael Burry?

I would say the one other thing that's interesting about him is that he let me into his life. He just doesn't usually do that. It created an intimacy. I just really got to know him and really enjoyed hearing what he had to say.

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

Michael Lewis' conversation with Michael Burry is coming up. It really is a very fun listen.

I still remember you handing me your emails. You had thousands of pages. 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 everybody reminiscing. Do you remember that?

I remember that, and I think those emails were the main reason I didn't get sued by my investors. 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. But here I had emails with everybody on everything, and so it was very clear where we stood with everybody.

For me, 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 going to come unraveled.

The problem with these positions, like, “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: the once-in-a-century opportunity to actually say, “I know when this is going to happen.”

Right.

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, there's no good way to time it, and shorting it is just a high-risk endeavor.

2. Living With The Big Short

Well, we're going to get to today, but I want to revisit The Big Short just a little bit. 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 were remarkably chill about the whole thing, and I don't think I've ever felt like I've really recapped with you what effect this thing had on you, if any.

I think I didn't know. You're right. 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 move on, and so I took it as it came. I went to the premiere because my whole family wanted to go to the premiere. And, as you know, I don't do interviews because I don't feel I'm good at this, and so I haven't done one, I think, since the 60 Minutes interview.

About The Big Short.

About this, in an interview format. Now it's the 10th anniversary of the film, 15th anniversary of the book, and I can't believe it's been that long. But I just 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, a very unique circumstance. It was a once-in-a-century type of trade. People say “once-in-a-century flood,” “once-in-a-century this,” “once-in-a-century that,” but it's not really true. It happens every 10 years.

Right.

But this opportunity was very unique, and I've basically told everybody I can ever since that this isn't going to happen again anytime soon.

What made it unique?

I was basically permitted to buy insurance on these bonds that were incredibly illiquid, and I was permitted to buy insurance and then trade and profit off them without actually having the insured item. This was not expensive. Nobody thought this could happen.

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 to be doing this. You're not a mortgage buyer; you're not hedging. You're doing something different.”

It wasn't something that people were generally aware of, and I was, so I could walk in and basically pull the caper off.

There are 3 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 that 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 that I had goodwill with anybody. There was only one investor—I shouldn't say his name, but I love him. He is the only guy who invested with me late. For that last year and a half or so, nobody came to me. Nobody wanted to invest with me.

Even when we made the money, it was, “Ooh, we don't want to go through that again.”

Huh.

No. No, nobody did.

It's kind of amazing—

I did—I didn't expect it either.

I know you didn't expect it, but at some point, when things had cooled off and 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.

Okay.

And I didn't expect it. It's Wall Street.

When did you reopen?

2013.

And since then, how have you done?

3. Rebuilding The Small Fund

Done all right. I think it's all been the same since. 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 as an investment adviser. I wanted to keep it small. So I just went to people I knew, along with 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.

Well, 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.

Right.

And so it was just a small operation. I kept trying to keep it small, and I didn't really market it. I didn't market it at all other than to that first group. What happens with that is that some of those people who 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 that every now and then, there's some explosion on Twitter about you.

And it's wrong. They're all wrong.

4. The Filings Get It Wrong

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

So let's talk about this. 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 U.S. securities traded in the U.S. that are stocks. They get to see stocks, and they get an incredibly bastardized version of what options are.

Okay. And 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 strike 50, way out of the money. It's like a $200 stock now, but I think it's worth $30 or less. So I buy them way out of the money, 2 years out.

You're betting that Palantir's going to drop by a lot.

A lot in 2 years.

But over a long period of time.

Right. And the press—I'm working out, and I see on CNBC that 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—

Yeah.

—and they multiply it out by the current stock price. So I had an option that was actually worth less than $2, and it was being priced as if I owned the $200 stock. It was 2 orders of magnitude off.

Right.

And that happens also with indexes. 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...” There would be these explosions, 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 had on your life. This is an effect The Big Short had on your life.

And 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.” 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. 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. That's fine, but I had to talk about social things.

Right.

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 we deregistered. I don't run that pool of money anymore. I'm just going to run my own money.

Got you. So it's just your 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 2000. But the structure of 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 autism spectrum, but I felt that I had an edge there. I could kind of sit outside of all these human psyches and figure things out, and it worked well.

Today it's all passive money, and it's a lot. It's over 50% passive money.

Index funds.

Less than 10% 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 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 would come up even if the Nasdaq crashed.

Now I think the whole thing's just going to come down, and it will be very hard to be 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, of course, I closed the fund and put on all the positions for myself right away—the same positions.

So you're still in the position. So I want to talk about this position. I was watching it from a distance, but tell me what I missed. Someone at CNBC or whoever gets ahold of your 13F. On this 13F, it says your Palantir position is especially big. It looks big because the put options are way, way out of the money. They were struck at $50.

So 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 had this position, and it gets released.

Right.

And then the next thing I know, I see Alex Karp, who runs Palantir, going after you for owning puts on his stock, and I don't think—I mean, during the financial crisis, you'll remember that the head of Morgan Stanley at the time, John Mack, blamed short sellers for what was happening to him. And they banned short-selling of the stocks, I think, very briefly.

Right.

But it's always a really bad sign when people start going after the short sellers. It's—

In the United States, yes.

In the United States. I was thinking, Oh, my God, I just wouldn't want to be in your shoes. You didn't do anything. 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 2 years.

What do you understand about their business that the market doesn't?

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 after you bought the software, just to install it and learn it, right? And Palantir had this reputation in government. Government contracts are 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 a majority, and now it's more even, because during this AI build-out, they've basically marketed themselves to corporations.

Well, corporations have come to them. The C-suites of every public corporation have board members and CEOs who feel under the gun to AI something.

Yeah. Yep.

And so there's this scramble. And now they're not the only ones. They keep saying they're the only ones, but IBM does basically the same thing.

Uh-huh.

Their business is actually bigger than Palantir's, and they are not really all government. Government contracts are not generally that profitable. 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, 5 billionaires who came out of Palantir because they own Palantir stock, and the revenue was basically $4 billion. So the billionaires-to-revenue ratio was greater than 1, and I'd never seen that before.

Was that what attracted your attention in the first place?

Well, that was a cute little thing.

Yeah. It's cute. I was like—

I was like—

Yeah.

Wow. How do they get 5 billionaires out of that group? And so, out of a company that has $4 billion of revenue, stock-based compensation basically eats up 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 it.

What Wall Street generally does is they take the earnings per share, and then they add back the stock-based compensation because it's noncash, and they add it back to the earnings. And I think, actually, the way GAAP accounts for stock-based compensation skews low versus what it actually costs. The real cost—you can look at how much companies are buying back to offset that dilution, and you can just take that amount and deduct it from cash flow. And so—

Yeah.

If you do that with Palantir, 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 with its tiny 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 were going to start to default. Do you have a timing argument for now with Palantir?

Well, I think this is the AI consulting thing. Palantir and NVIDIA are the 2 luckiest companies on the planet. Neither produced a product for AI.

No, I know.

But they're the 2 poster children for AI.

Yes. NVIDIA was a computer graphics chip company.

NVIDIA was a computer graphics chip company. I actually knew the CFO. We talked in 2015 or 2016. I went long the stock, and I think I said, "Hey, you're doing a great job. I love how you're buying back stock." Her kids were on my kids' basketball team. I think I bought the stock like a year or 2 later. The stock 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 GPUs. GPUs were the thing that was there that could be used; they weren't custom for crypto mining. And then AI came along, and it's the same deal. About a year and a half to 2 years ago, Palantir was not an AI company. Basically, when ChatGPT came out, they put an AI cover on their applications that they were selling and then selling all this consulting on, and they called it AI. But that's what every company is doing now.

5. The AI Bubble Builds

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 fiber needed routers, and routers needed fiber, and it just blew up.

The market peaked on March 10, 2000. Cisco grew 55% that year in revenues, and it grew 17% 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 look at net investment, which is capital expenditures less depreciation, over time, and put it against nominal GDP to compare it across eras. You get these nice mounds of investment manias.

Hmm.

What you see in every prior one was that the relevant stock market peak was before you were even halfway done with the capital expenditures. In the majority of cases, the capital expenditures hadn't even peaked yet. And so right now we're ramping up for capital expenditures, and what's happened is we've gotten into this part of the phase where, if you announce a dollar of CapEx on AI, your market capitalization goes up $3 for every dollar you have. We saw that with Oracle.

Yeah.

A giant company was up 40%—incredible. Larry Ellison was briefly the richest man.

Yep.

Because they announced this massive, multihundred-billion-dollar spending plan 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 near the level of the dot-com bubble, when the NASDAQ peaked.

So you felt 2-year puts—

So—

Two-year puts were enough.

I thought 2 years would be enough, yes. I think 2 years would be enough. If you're going to buy something now, buy health care stocks; they're really out of favor. If you own something that has gone up a lot, you've done really, really well in it, it's shooting straight up, and you think it's kind of overvalued, I think that's something you should sell.

I want to ask you one weird question about the stock market, and that is: You own Berkshire Hathaway, and Berkshire Hathaway just announced—it was just 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 Buffett bought it, for 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 relative value," and it is Google. But I know that since I got ChatGPT and Claude, I don't use Google.

Right.

And Google Search, the magic thing about Google Search was how little it cost.

Yeah.

Because most requests were not monetizable. For the 85% of the searches they get where nobody's going to buy anything, it's not product-related; it's history. What did Columbus really do? 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 1 inquiry. Google had gotten those searches down to infinitesimal fractions of a cent.

Yeah.

So that business is the golden goose, and it's really basically all their cash flow. The other thing about LLMs is that you can look back to the dot-com boom. That was an amazing telecommunications revolution. If you were alive in the '80s and then you were alive in 2000, it's nothing the same. It changed everybody's life in a dramatic way.

And still, AOL disconnected its last dial-up service 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 Singapore and Seoul—these one-city-country-type things—or very dense urban areas. But it was a long time. Even by the financial crisis, and even after the financial crisis, there were a lot of people in the United States who were not online or were on dial-up and not really doing it.

So back then, as that connectivity came up, there were a lot of things people wanted to sell. People wanted to sell goods online. They wanted to do that. Amazon grew on it. They wanted to socialize online. They wanted to do these things. With LLMs, most people are getting what they want out of them right now at the free level, and they're massively penetrated.

Right.

What more are they going to do for the average person? Not that much. The money's going to be in the developer space, and there's a lot of money in that space. But this idea that a very small percentage of people want to pay for their LLM—and they won't ever have to, because this is going to be commoditized—

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

All right, I'm going to let you go in a minute, but are there a couple of other things I want to ask you about? I just want to pick your brain on them.

What triggers a debt crisis in this country? Do you pay—are you paying much attention to our government’s finances, and how do you feel about them? Where do you think it’s headed?

So predicting this stuff is the problem. I always kind of put it in terms of waiting for Castro to die. It’s not a strategy. 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. Betting that they can’t find a way is not something I’d want to do anytime soon.

I do think it’s ridiculous. We have $4.5 trillion in taxes from individuals. We have about $400 billion from corporations. You could double the taxes on corporations—that’s $400 billion. What does that do for you? We have $1 trillion in interest payments on our debt every year. 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 debt’s just gonna keep growing and growing and growing, but you wouldn’t wanna bet when it breaks?

No, you can’t—

Yeah, you can’t—

Because it’s the United States.

How do you feel about Fed independence? Do you care?

I think I have a kind of sick view on this: I think 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. We’ll see.

I think the Fed has done a lot of damage over the last 100 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…” Why are they gonna drop rates? There’s no reason to drop rates now. Inflation’s starting to come up a little bit. The economy is muddling along.

But our neutral rate is not 1% or 0%, or where Trump wants it. Our neutral rate is probably around 4%, or it’s probably around where we are now. 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 gonna just drop rates? Be careful what you wish for. You might drop rates, and because of the debt situation, the curve can steepen.

Did you just say you wanna 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 U.S. Treasury could have a department that just makes these decisions. The Fed is already monetizing Treasury debt, whatever it is. I mean, they’re almost the same department already.

Does your institutional pessimism lead you to Bitcoin or gold or one of these refuges that people—

I think that Bitcoin at $100,000 is the most ridiculous thing. The same people are sitting on TV talking about Bitcoin. They’re just casually saying, “It’s $100,000. It’s down. 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 underground.

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

I’ve had gold since 2005.

Okay. All right. I’m gonna let you go, but the last question I have: I never asked you this question. You let me into your kitchen. 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 gonna write about me because you’re a great author. I knew you from Moneyball and The Blind Side, but when you deal with Wall Street, you tend to be fairly critical. And so I’m a big hedge fund manager who just shorted your house, so 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 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 didn’t do anything wrong, and I wanted you to know that.

Yeah. 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, just different from what other people are thinking. And you don’t mind holding them. You don’t mind having views that would embarrass people who are less sure of themselves to articulate.

Well, being on the spectrum, I’ll just move back into my own head and move along.

It was great seeing you. I’m sorry you’re not out here more. If you were out here, I wish you’d just let me know, because I’m down in your old neck of the woods some. 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.

All right. Take care.

Thank you, Michael.

Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion is hosted by Michael Lewis. It's produced by me, Ludiji Kot, and Katherine Girardo. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our theme was composed by Nick Bertel, and our engineer is Hansdale Shi. Special thanks to Nicole Opton Bosch, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela Lawrence, and the rest of the Pushkin Audiobooks team. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to listen ad-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.