What Matt Levine and Taylor Swift Have in Common
It's not what you think. Okay it is what you think.
This summer I went to see Taylor Swift. By myself. I went because a friend said it was a once in a generation show.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
“I was taking to my uncle, who is in his seventies,” she said. “And he said that someone who speaks to a whole generation like this only comes around once every 30 years or so. He doesn’t listen to her music, but he compared her to the role that Bruce Springsteen played in his life.”
The next evening I wandered down to Soldier Field on foot, and waited until 15 minutes after showtime to see if ticket prices would drop. They never did. The first ticket I bought never came through. I called the SeatGeek agent, and asked him if he was talking to a lot of Swifties in tears who were having issues with their tickets. Because after spending that much money and not getting in, I wanted to cry, too.
“Yep,” he said. He got me a new one right away. I was impressed.
And then I saw the show.
Never experienced anything like it. I spent at least an hour during the performance just wandering around in a state of awe, observing the rapture of her fans, processing the breadth and the quality of her life’s work to date. The volume of music, the sheer audacity of the three plus hour set-list, the comprehensive album by album approach, her evolution across the eras: my mind was blown. I am a lifelong Swiftie now, and am following the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance closely on Daily Mail.
It’s got me thinking about people who are like Taylor Swift—uniquely superlative, producing prodigious amounts of work, and at the peak of their powers—except in other genres.
You know who came to mind?
Matt Levine. Wait. Who?
Taylor Swift has 95 million followers on Twitter. Matt Levine has 298 thousand. So he’s not quite as well known. But—like Taylor—within his corner of the universe, he is a cult figure.
He writes a free newsletter for Bloomberg called “Money Stuff.” It is described on the sign-up page as:
A newsletter about Wall Street, finance and other stuff.
I would describe it this way:
Lucid, surprisingly entertaining, and sometimes sardonic writing on otherwise inaccessible topics, approached with a beginner’s mind, like finance, business and markets, done with humor, insight, and an understated acerbic quality that makes me want to devour everything he writes.
Do you remember when Bill Simmons was at his peak? And he did stuff like find an analogy between The Wire and the NBA playoffs, with this masterpiece? Or when he drew a through line from the departure of Nomar and Pedro from the Red Sox to a scene from the Miami Vice pilot?
After his departure from Boston, I wrote a column comparing the finality of the trade to the finality of a divorce -- how the bitterness gives way to sadness and despair, how you end up losing hope, how you can't remember why you were ever together in the first place. And I think that analogy still stands. Just like in the years following a divorce when everything calms down, most of that animosity has washed away; I would like to believe that most Red Sox fans regard Nomar's recent good fortune the same way someone would feel happy for an ex-spouse. After all, there was something there, right? It's like the famous scene in the pilot episode of "Miami Vice" -- not the crappy movie that's about to be released, the actual TV show -- when Crockett and Tubbs are driving 700 mph as Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight" plays in the background, chasing after a drug dealer before he hops on a plane to the Bahamas. In the middle of this chaos, Crockett pulls over at a phone booth just to call his wife and ask her, "Caroline, what we had together … it was real, wasn't it?"
Instead of saying something like, "What the hell are you talking about?" or "Oh, no, you've been drinking again," his ex-wife pauses for a second, purses her lips and simply says, "Yeah, you bet it was."
And Sonny hangs up and hops back in his Ferrari as Tubbs looks at him with one of those "Wait, what the hell just happened?" looks.
Now THAT was a great scene.
Simmons found a way to make cross-genre analogies the way Lin-Manuel mixed up hip-hop, American history, and Broadway. Humans love analogies. Some say making good analogies is one of the core ingredients in leadership. They illuminate things more brightly, make you think, and they bring a smile.
And that Miami Vice pilot scene is indeed unreal. Just watch.
Could we have navigated the roller coaster of the Red Sox breaking the curse without Bill Simmons, aka the Sports Guy, narrating it, and walking us through every step of that miraculous comeback?
No.
And so when it comes to the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown, crypto corruption and SBF, Elon buying Twitter, and meme stocks—Matt Levine plays a similar role: a river guide, whose writing is riveting, witty and perspicacious.
Here’s Matt Levine in one of last week’s newsletter on Twitter’s creditors unloading it’s debt at 85 cents on the dollar:
Around the deal’s closing there was talk of banks getting bids at 50 cents on the dollar, so 85 would be pretty good? One purpose of installing Linda Yaccarino as the chief executive officer of Twitter (now called X) is that she can have basically normal conversations with investors as the banks try to sell the debt; investors will say things like “how’s business?” and she will say things like “oh good, good, advertisers coming back, really good.” As opposed to sending Elon Musk to those meetings and having him get bored and start trouble. “How’s business,” investors would ask, and he’d be like “you know what I’ve decided that debt isn’t real” and you’d never get 85 cents on the dollar.
Here’s Matt in the same newsletter on Sam Bankman-Fried (SVF). This is long:
“I don’t think SBF knowingly stole customer money,” said Michael Lewis on 60 Minutes, and “he believes he is innocent.” If Lewis is correct then that will probably help him testify: If you’re going to be subjected to withering cross-examination about the crimes you did, it helps if you believe that you are innocent.
Is Lewis right? I think so! But that is, I think, the normal state for a scammer.[4] Financial scams are in their essence about self-deception; you can’t be a great scammer without being at least somewhat deluded yourself.[5] Classically financial scams work along these lines:
There is a financial business that takes money from investors, customers, creditors, etc., and promises to give it back, usually with some return.
The person running the business has at least some discretion over what he does with the investors’ money. (Practical discretion — he has the password to the bank account — if not actual legal discretion.)
He makes bets with that money, with the intention of (1) getting back at least enough money to pay back his investors (and any promised return) and (2) keeping any extra winnings for himself.
He convinces himself this is fine. He can’t lose! He’s so good at making bets, and these bets are so safe, and anyway the clients would want him to do them, and also really aren’t they disclosed in the fine print of the clients’ account agreements?
The popular imagination of scammers, and of Bankman-Fried, is that they steeple their fingers and cackle and say “now to steal some customer money to buy mansions.” But why would that make sense? If you are Bankman-Fried and you are knowingly stealing customer money to buy Bahamas condos, and then everything collapses, why stay in the condos to get arrested? Also if you are knowingly stealing money then of course everything will collapse. Stealing money with a getaway plan? Sure, right, that happens. Stealing money and sticking around? Weird choice.
No, the way to end up in this situation is to steal money while thinking that it’s fine, that you’re not stealing it at all, that you’ll make it all back and then some, that what you are doing with the money (crypto altcoin arbitrage, buying politicians, buying publicity for crypto and your exchange) is necessary and profitable and not even a risk, that any losses are temporary blips.
The normal way to become a big-time scammer is to combine an unusual appetite for (indeed, blindness to) risk with an unusual self-confidence. And to add an unusually act-utilitarian mindset, in which you are unconcerned with doing things the right way or following the proper procedures, because you care only about the end result.
Does that remind you of anyone? Sam Bankman-Fried’s whole personality was utilitarianism and risk-taking.[6] He learned early on to take every positive-expected-value bet, and from the start he seems to have deluded himself about what bets had positive expected value. The early history of his crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, involved him losing a bunch of investor money, saying “ehh there’s like an 80% chance we get it back,” concluding he could lie to customers about the lost money, and then in fact getting it back and feeling vindicated. He had the most perfect imaginable training for running a big financial scam.
A general theory of scammers.
In Taylor Swift and Matt Levine we trust.
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