Preet Bharara:

Hey folks, Preet here. Here’s a reminder, we have an exciting new podcast, a history podcast starring brilliant and accomplished historians, Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman. The show launches on Tuesday, June 1st. It’s called Now & Then. Subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts. Heather and Joanne will host a special live event at 6:00 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, May 27th. RSVP at cafe.com/live or head to CAFE’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Matt Levine:

Would you want climate change to be regulated by the interests of Exxon shareholders? Would you say when earth warms and the sea levels rise the victims there are Exxon shareholders? It’s just kind of a weird approach.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Matt Levine. He’s a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, where he writes Money Stuff, a daily free financial newsletter. With over 150,000 subscribers, Levine’s newsletter has developed a cult following that extends far beyond Wall Street. It’s famous for being witty and accessible while also delivering on substance. That’s partly due to Levine’s background. He was a high school Latin teacher, a corporate lawyer, and an investment banker before becoming a financial writer. Today, Levine and I discuss his path to journalism, the saga of Elon Musk and cryptocurrencies, and why Levine often quips everything is securities fraud. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Anne Henning, who asks what is to be made of Trump’s attorney’s memorandum in support of defendant’s motion to dismiss in the Swalwell V Trump case in the D.C. District Court? He argues that Trump is immune and that his speech is protected by the First Amendment. Are these arguments sufficient to cause the dismissal? Does Swalwell have any chance at winning this case?

Preet Bharara:

So those are good questions. They obviously relate to a lawsuit brought by a member of Congress, Eric Swalwell and others, against Donald Trump and others in connection with the January 6th insurrection. It seeks to utilize in a similar way to another suit brought by Congressman Bennie Thompson, a law that was meant to target the KKK in years past. So it’s an interesting lawsuit. I think legal experts are not of the mind that it is a slam dunk by any means at all.

Preet Bharara:

And you’re right. Donald Trump’s defense lawyers have made two core arguments. With respect to the motion to dismiss that was just filed this week in the D.C. District Court, there’s a bit of legal analysis that is sane, but there’s also a bit of legal rhetoric and political rhetoric that is not so much. There’s a lot of, as you might imagine, I have this vision of Donald Trump dictating sentences and words and phrases to his lawyers demanding that they be included like he did with White House counsel when they sent letters back to Congress, back in the day. There’s a considerable amount of irrelevant whataboutism. He attacks Maxine Waters and other members of Congress in ways that really don’t have anything to do with the central claims of this suit.

Preet Bharara:

But his lawyers do make two claims that unlike in other circumstances that we’ve seen are not frivolous. First, they articulate a First Amendment argument that Donald Trump on January 6th essentially said things that private citizens and public citizens are allowed to utter. And it’s in the form of political speech, it was about the election and the lawsuit is an infringement of that speech. So on the First Amendment point, that’s really the question at the heart of the case. Was Donald Trump engaging in ordinary political speech or was he engaging in incitement?

Preet Bharara:

For example, if Donald Trump had said things like, “I want you to march to the Capitol, and I want you to break into the building, and I want you to break windows, and I want you to threaten people, and I want you to chant, “Hang Mike Pence,” and I want you to go through the offices of the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, and do all these other things, and stop the certification of the vote, then I think it would be a clear case that the First Amendment would not protect Donald Trump.

Preet Bharara:

He didn’t say those things, but in the arguments of Eric Swalwell and others, he effectively did that by telling people to march to the Capitol, by encouraging them by using inflammatory language, and by making it clear that the thing he wanted, though he didn’t say it in so many words, the thing he wanted was the stopping of the certification. So we’ll see how the judge rules on that, but it’s not a frivolous argument on the First Amendment ground.

Preet Bharara:

Second, Donald Trump argues that he has absolute immunity. Now in many contexts, his lawyers have erroneously argued that he has absolute immunity from compulsory process from Congress and from civil suits and from all sorts of other things. What essentially they’re arguing here is that Donald Trump like many public officials, if he was acting within the scope of his duty as President of the United States discharging his obligations, engaging in normal conduct that a president engages in, well, then he shouldn’t be held liable for things he did in that context. That again is not a frivolous argument. It’s a real argument, but it doesn’t always win and it depends on what the judge will find constitutes the ordinary conduct of a president, and whether or not this conduct was within the scope of those duties.

Preet Bharara:

We have an example where the president’s arguments have not yet fully prevailed. You’ll remember that there’s a back and forth between Donald Trump and a woman named E. Jean Carol who has accused Donald Trump of a sexual assault. Donald Trump during his presidency, attacked her, dismissed her or called her liar. She then filed a defamation suit against Donald Trump. And one of the arguments Trump and his lawyers made in that case, you guessed it, the president is absolutely immune because he was acting within the scope of his duties. And that’s being litigated right now because a judge found, “No, those statements you made denigrating E. Jean Carol were not part of your presidential duties.” So we’ll wait and see what happens with the judge here. I think it’s important to see what the response of Eric Swalwell and his lawyers are and we’ll come back to it then.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in a tweet from Twitter user Curious Bystander who writes Manhattan DA, Cy Vance has convened a grand jury to hear evidence and weigh charges against Donald Trump. Is this significant, Counselor? Thanks for calling me counselor.

Preet Bharara:

So this is the huge question that has been swirling around this week and everyone on television and the newspapers and on social media and everywhere else is wondering how momentous a thing this is. I’m not one to scream from the rooftops every time a subpoena is issued or some action is taken, but I do think this is quite significant. As a matter of course, grand juries will have been involved in things like this. Subpoenas were issued for Trump documents and Trump financial information already. Those are called grand jury subpoenas. So in a formal way, there has been a grand jury involved for some time. And you would expect that over the course of doing a complicated investigation, there may have been times when you require a grand jury to hear testimony and lock in people’s testimony, et cetera.

Preet Bharara:

What’s different about this is the specificity of the reporting in The Washington Post. And again, sometimes reports are wrong, but this seems pretty corroborated and solid. And the specific reporting is that there’s a special extended grand jury that will be in service for at least six months and can be extended if necessary upon the order of a court, where they meet three times a week to hear specific testimony relating to the complicated case involving Donald Trump, his organization, and other people in his orbit. That strikes me as more significant than sort of random incidental use of the grand jury.

Preet Bharara:

And it’s just another sign, another tea leaf if you will that Cy Vance and the top leadership in that office have a belief at least that there’s a substantial likelihood they will bring a charge, certainly against people high up in the Trump orbit. And my view, my prediction is likely against Donald Trump itself. And I don’t say that lightly. I have not gone running around blindly predicting that Donald Trump would be indicted on massive charges from multiple offices over the last number of years, but I have always kept an eye on this case because it has seemed that that office is serious, that that office is getting substantial information and there’s some signs that there will be a charge.

Preet Bharara:

And among them is a combination of factors. One, the hiring of an outside forensic accounting firm that was reported some time ago. Another sign, the hiring of a preeminent criminal lawyer, both on the defense side more recently, but also a high up official in my former office, the Southern District of New York, Mark Pomerantz, who is now on the team within the DA’s office in Manhattan working, I believe exclusively on this case. That’s not a thing you do unless you’re serious and you also think you want to have continuity going into the future.

Preet Bharara:

Another factor is the announcement by New York Attorney General, Tish James, that what had been a civil investigation of the Trump organization has been converted into a criminal investigation. That to me means that someone somewhere along the way has found evidence that’s credible, that leads them to believe that the misconduct that is in question that they’re looking at was not a matter of mistake or negligence or recklessness or accident, but that there was criminal intent on the part of one or more people. And to make an announcement like that in the context of all the swirling expectations about Donald Trump and his potential criminal exposure, I think is significant. I don’t think you do that and raise expectations unless you think that there will be some real life consequence, like the kind we’ve been discussing.

Preet Bharara:

And on top of all of that, her office has joined forces with Cy Vance’s office, going so far as to cross designate two lawyers in her office as special assistant district attorneys to work on the criminal case that Cy Vance has been working on. I think each of those individually is significant. You put them together and I think it’s highly significant.

Preet Bharara:

Then I want to make a non-legal point to further answer the question of whether or not there might be charges of the type that people are hyperventilating about and that is Cy Vance. I’ve known Cy Vance for a long time and I think he’s a sober-minded, careful lawyer and he doesn’t do things unless he’s got a good reason for doing them. I know he’s faced criticism in the past with respect to how he’s conducted some cases, but I think if he was ever going to be careful and meticulous in a case, this is it. He has overseen significant cases, I’ve overseen significant cases. There have been many significant cases in recent history in America and going back, of course. No case in the history of the country will be like this one if there is in fact a criminal charge against a former President of the United States. So you don’t undertake any of this lightly, you don’t put out any of these kinds of signals lightly.

Preet Bharara:

A highly relevant fact about Cy Vance, which most of you know by now is that he is not running for reelection. So he is not running on the ground that I’m going to go after Donald Trump. He’s never said that. And I’m going to persist until I convict Donald Trump, he’s never said that and he won’t have the ability to do so. At most, he may oversee the filing of a charge. And I think given how I led my office and how I think Cy Vance thinks about these things and how much investment he and his team and the new people have put into this investigation, that he’s going to want to be the one making the decision to charge or not to charge before he leaves office, which is at the end of the year.

Preet Bharara:

He’s not going to want to leave this to his successor because in some ways I think that would be a shirking of responsibility. I don’t think he’d want to do that. And it’s a bit unfair for a newly elected district attorney to walk into office next January and have to decide what to do about the case. I really do believe Cy Vance thinks the decision is for him and given the signals, that he’ll be in a position to make such a decision before he leaves office. And, he’s a human being who will be thinking about the legacy he leaves behind. Some cases went very well for him, some cases did not go perfectly for him. That’s true of any prosecutor who has been in office for a long period of time. And on this, potentially the most momentous case in many ways in the history of the country, I just have the feeling that he wouldn’t be making all these moves, unless he had a pretty clear idea that there would be a charge.

Preet Bharara:

Now, it’s also possible that the grand jury has been convened for the purposes of putting in testimony and developing charges and an indictment against Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump organization. And then the plan is to squeeze him, prosecute him and hope he flips, or some other members of Trump’s organization or his associates. All of those things are possible, but the more days go by and the more signals that are out there, I’m just giving my frank, unproven assessment of where I think things are going.

Preet Bharara:

And by the way, I’ve seen some smart people do some political analysis about what the fallout would be if Donald Trump gets charged by the Manhattan district attorney. Some people are suggesting that makes it all but certain that Donald Trump will in fact announce that he’s running for president in 2024, because it has the value of making him more relevant, allowing him to run against the charges, call everything a witch hunt like he’s done before, claim it’s partisan and political and Democrats are out to get him and it failed before and will fail again, and also helps to drown out some of the coverage that would necessarily attend a prosecution like this.

Preet Bharara:

Stay tuned, there’s more coming up after this.

Preet Bharara:

My guest this week is Matt Levine. He’s a financial writer at Bloomberg Opinion. Each day, Levine publishes Money Stuff, a widely read, free newsletter. A lawyer and former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Levine has firsthand experience in the complicated world of high finance. And now as a writer, he makes sense of it for the rest of us. Today, Levine shares his insights into the culture of Wall Street, securities fraud class action suits, and the unique appeal of cryptocurrencies.

Preet Bharara:

Matt Levine, welcome to the show.

Matt Levine:

Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

It’s been a long time and we’ve wanted you on for a while. We have a lot to talk about. Easy first question. Is it fair to say that you are a financial columnist at Bloomberg Opinion?

Matt Levine:

That’s correct.

Preet Bharara:

You did not begin as a financial columnist or even as a journalist.

Matt Levine:

No, I began as a high school Latin teacher.

Preet Bharara:

A high school Latin teacher. And then you went to law school.

Matt Levine:

Then I went to law school like a lot of Latinists.

Preet Bharara:

Like a lot of Latinists. Did that help you? Did the Latin help you? Res ipsa loquitur, you knew that before anyone else?

Matt Levine:

You have like 10 items of vocabulary. It’s not as helpful as you think. But the sitting around and parsing complicated texts is pretty useful, but the vocabulary is so so.

Preet Bharara:

So you went to went to law school, then you went to a law firm after clerking. You went to a very esteemed law firm called Wachtell, Lipton.

Matt Levine:

I did.

Preet Bharara:

And then you quit that to become an investment banker. Why’d you do that?

Matt Levine:

It was 2007, so that means two things. One, Wachtell was incredibly busy and I was working incredibly hard. And two, there was just the sense in 2007, that if you were a corporate lawyer, you’re an M&A lawyer, the ultimate goal is to go be in finance. I didn’t really know what “in finance” meant, but basically someone I knew who had left Wachtell even quicker than I had called me up and said, “Hey, do you want a job at Goldman?” And I said, “Is it better than this job?” And he said, “It’s a little better than that job”

Preet Bharara:

It’s a little better?

Matt Levine:

And we talked very specifically about the hours and he convinced me accurately that I would work fewer hours, and so I left Wachtell for Goldman thinking, “I’m going to Goldman, it’s got to be better for whatever I want to end up doing in finance,” even though I had no idea what that was.

Preet Bharara:

Was it a pay increase or no?

Matt Levine:

No, it was my first year. I was on a guarantee that was basically matching my Wachtell salary and then after that it was the free market of investment banking. But unfortunately, I came in in 2007, where I was on a guarantee that was not great because 2007 was a great year.

Preet Bharara:

Something happened in 2008? Did something happen?

Matt Levine:

And then in 2008, everything collapsed and it was years before I made as much money as I would have made at Wachtell.

Preet Bharara:

But you persisted for another three years or so at Goldman?

Matt Levine:

Yeah. I think my last year at Goldman maybe, or my second last year I made more than I would’ve made at Wachtell, something like that, I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

But decent wage, fair to say?

Matt Levine:

It was fine and the hours were better.

Preet Bharara:

So the buildup of all of this, which I’ve done inelegantly is to get to the point when you decide having gone to law school, worked at a law firm, been an investment banker at Goldman, you leave that too, to become a financial writer. And I read somewhere to the tune of $50,000 a year. Steep pay cut, is that right?

Matt Levine:

It was a little more than that. I think I’ve probably said it was about a 90% … It was less than a 90% pay cut.

Preet Bharara:

So why does a guy like you who did really well and was presumably on a good career path take an 80 to 90% pay cut?

Matt Levine:

Well, one reason is that I didn’t want to be an investment banker anymore. I came in and I was doing a lot of structuring and negotiating, deal documents and in the weeds of building derivatives and that was fun. But increasingly, as you get more senior in any line of business at a bank, your job is getting on planes and flying around to shake hands with clients and that was less my skillset and less what I was interested in. And also, I was just bad at it, and so-

Preet Bharara:

Were you bad at the flying or the shaking hands?

Matt Levine:

Both. I was not good at making small talk with clients. And I also really didn’t like flying, which is really debilitating. So I didn’t really like that and I had always sort of vaguely imagined myself as a writer. I was a classics major in college, I had a fondness for the humanities and I had vaguely imagined myself a writer without ever doing anything about it really. And I was in a position where I had saved up some money from working in law and banking for a while. I didn’t really have a lot of responsibilities and it felt like a time to take a risk on something that if it didn’t work out, I would do it for a year and live off savings and then go back and get a real job. But it felt a little bit like a last chance to take a big risk like that in my career, and so I took it.

Preet Bharara:

Is there anything interesting about the fact that one could infer from your changing careers a second time and taking a huge pay cut that you personally don’t care about money as much as many other people do and you write about money. I mean, your newsletter which is very popular and excellent is called Money Stuff. Is there anything interesting there or not?

Matt Levine:

Now as a suburban father I care a lot about money.

Preet Bharara:

But back then?

Matt Levine:

No. I think there’s something to that, right? I write about the financial industry and the characters are all making a lot of money and I do feel a little bit like I have some distance on that. And it’s weird, it’s weird to talk to your friends in finance and your paths have diverged a little bit, but-

Preet Bharara:

When you go to dinner, do you have to pay?

Matt Levine:

It’s better now because my career has done okay since I left. Banking isn’t what it used to be. A lot of my friends in finance are not there anymore. It’s not 2007 anymore.

Preet Bharara:

The richest people, do you have a view on whether or not they’re motivated a lot by money or about something else? I mean, people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, what is it? Are they really motivated by money?

Matt Levine:

No. A lot of the very richest people, there’s some sort of competitive drive that I don’t really have even access to, but it’s about being the best or being number one and money is sometimes a scorecard for that, but not always. But even where I worked in banking, people made a lot of money and it was a sort of well-paid area of the world, but it always felt like people’s primary interest was … I was building corporate equity derivatives and people really were intellectually engaged with that niche, nerdy work. People were interested in tax law and derivative structuring and came to work every day because they were motivated by intrinsic intellectual interest. And I think that that’s true of a lot of fields where people make a lot of money.

Matt Levine:

It’s not necessarily purity of heart and they build derivatives for fun and give away all the money, but I don’t think that you can get far in a lot of these industries if your only interest is, or if your primary motivation is money. But it’s also, there are cultural elements that conspire to make you more motivated by money because that’s the thing that the banks can give you, and so you do end up measuring your worth a little bit by your bonus or whatever.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll talk a little bit more about this in a little bit, but just since we’re on the subject, what do you make of the people who break the law, cheat in various ways, who already have a lot of money, but do that to make a little bit more money? Are their motivations money or are they also motivated by competitive spirit?

Matt Levine:

I think there are a range of things. I don’t want to ascribe one-

Preet Bharara:

Generalize, right?

Matt Levine:

Yeah. I don’t want to generalize too much because from my perspective, some number of the people who break the law are operating in ambiguous areas where they believe that they are doing something that is accepted.

Preet Bharara:

I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about the people who knew what they were doing. I’m talking about the people who knew.

Matt Levine:

You and I may disagree on the sort of prevalence of different categories. I don’t know, clearly some number of people are like they need to win every deal, they need to win every situation and they will push as hard as they can in every situation and sometimes that will get them in trouble. I think a lot of the classic financial criminals, they’re motivated by pride and the case of you have one bad month and you don’t want to tell your investors, so you fudge the returns, then you sort of snowball from there because you can never make it back and so you keep fudging more and more. I think that’s a fairly common story. Yeah, I don’t know, I’m sure there are some people who are like, “I need to make one more payment on my yacht,” but I don’t know that that’s a particularly common category.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk about your writing a little bit? And before we get to some of the substance, you’re noted for your writing style. It’s very readable and here’s how it was described in a New York Times profile. Not so common for a columnist for one media organization to get a profile in another media outlet. Quote, “In financial news, a medium not known for cultivating eccentric or literary voices, there’s no other writer quite like Mr. Levine, a former Goldman Sachs banker whose deadpan style mixes technical elucidation and wit.” End quote. That’s pretty good.

Matt Levine:

Yeah, that’s nice.

Preet Bharara:

Do you agree with that characterization?

Matt Levine:

I hope that I mix whatever that was, but I do think that there’s more. One motivation that I had for going into financial writing is that I worked on an investment bank and I was surrounded by clever, funny, witty people who sent great, funny, thoughtful emails, and it did feel like there is an appetite for adventurous writing about finance and felt like that appetite was not fully being met. So my original conception of my audience was the people I worked with at my bank. I was like, “These people are smart and they like a good joke.” So it didn’t feel weird to me at all that you would try to write in a stylish way for a financial audience.

Preet Bharara:

Right. But you do a lot of explaining and I wonder, not all of your readers are sophisticated, how do you balance between explanation and also sophistication?

Matt Levine:

That’s evolved over time. When I started, I left from Goldman for Dealbreaker, which is an independent financial blog that’s mostly read by a financial audience. And I thought of my audience initially as being the first year analysts on my desk, people who sort of know the basics of finance and you don’t have to spell out what DCF stands for or whatever, but people who don’t necessarily know the technical details of everything and where you can explain more complicated details in a way that will open their eyes and make them excited.

Matt Levine:

But over time it’s shifted and now I write for a more general audience. And one thing that I think about is what I’m going for is to explain something at a high enough level of economic intuition and generality that a person who does it for a living every day will not say, “Oh, this is over simplified,” or, “This is wrong,” but will say, “Oh, I had never thought about it that way, but that does capture the essence of it.” You don’t always achieve that, but the idea of explaining, not the mechanical details of how trade works, but what the trade is about at some fundamental level.

Matt Levine:

When I was at a bank, I worked on this weird derivatives desk where we built these weird trades that were complicated and you’d come in and you’d learn how the trades worked by reading documents and seeing the pitch book and whatever, and you’d sort of have a handle on what the trade was. And then like two years into your job, you’d be like, “Oh. Oh, I understand what’s happening here. I understand the real, why this is a product and why people like it and why we like it.”

Matt Levine:

And those things are not part of the surface explanation, or even the detailed explanation to the point where we talked to lawyers who documented these trades every day and who understood the mechanics really well, but didn’t always understand the deep economic intuition behind them. That’s not exactly what I’m doing, but that’s kind of like the feeling that I’m going for is to explain to people in the financial world what they’re doing at a level that is more general than they think about it in a day-to-day basis.

Preet Bharara:

I know you were sort of half kidding, but is there any bad aspect to the dynamic in which even the people involved in the financial products don’t fully understand every aspect of them?

Matt Levine:

Maybe, but I don’t really mean it in a bad way. I mean that you don’t really build an intuition for how these products fit into the sort of overall strategy of your corporate clients or the overall balance sheet of the bank, or the overall how derivatives work without doing it for a long time and seeing it from a lot of angles. At some trivial level yeah, it’d be nice if I could tell you some stories about derivatives and I won’t because of who you are. But I didn’t mean-

Preet Bharara:

Who I was. I don’t have the same-

Matt Levine:

Yeah, you don’t have any subpoena power.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t have podcast subpoena power and there’s no podcast jail.

Matt Levine:

But yeah, there’s some level at which very bright people with interesting agendas dream up complicated products, and then they’re sold by people who didn’t dream them up and sometimes it gets either those people or the customers in trouble.

Preet Bharara:

Someone once called you, quote, “the least offensive person in finance,” end quote. What do you make of that answer?

Matt Levine:

I don’t think that’s true.

Preet Bharara:

Are you offended at being called the least offensive person?

Matt Levine:

No, it’s nice. It’s nice.

Preet Bharara:

Who are you more offensive than?

Matt Levine:

I think that there’s a external view that it’s like evil bros and there’s a monolithic culture of fleece vests and cocaine, and it’s not.

Preet Bharara:

What is it, fleece vests and cocaine?

Matt Levine:

Fleece vests and cocaine.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a good picture.

Matt Levine:

Again, I worked with a lot of people at Goldman and some of them were like that and were like oh yeah, this is the bro that people have in mind when they think about finance, but a lot of them were not and the people I worked with were not and were fun and quirky and interesting people. I was definitely more offensive than some of them. I could think of some people who are really nice people and I’m okay, I’m average.

Preet Bharara:

What happens on days that you’re really not sure what to write about because you do this every day? How does that work? Is it just a muscle?

Matt Levine:

It’s terror, but it’s also like … It’s helpful to do it every day because when you do a bad one you’re like, “Well, try again tomorrow.”

Preet Bharara:

Do you have any cheating strategies for when you’re not feeling it or you’re a little under the weather or nothing interesting is popping into your head?

Matt Levine:

I really don’t. I really don’t. I honestly wish I did, but I really don’t. You were joking-

Preet Bharara:

I’m asking because I write once a week for people who subscribe to our Insider podcast and I find sometimes once a week difficult.

Matt Levine:

Yeah. Well, let me say two things to that. One is that before we started, you were joking about how everything is … you were asking me if everything was securities fraud.

Preet Bharara:

Right. We’re going to get to that.

Matt Levine:

And to the extent I have any cheats, it’s like I have like a dozen sort of shticks that are like lenses on the world almost, and so one is that everything is securities fraud. And so we can talk about the substance of that, but I’m bored of saying it, but there’s a news story almost every day that can be tied to the notion that everything is securities fraud, that everything bad that happens at a public company can be re-described as securities fraud. And so I have like a dozen of those where they’re like shticks, where in particular day, I might not have anything interesting to say about them, but there’s a story where I can go through the greatest hits again.

Matt Levine:

But the other thing I want to say is that I’ve on occasion in the past had weekly or biweekly columns and I’ve found that much, much, much harder than what I do now.

Preet Bharara:

Why is that?

Matt Levine:

Some of it I think different writers have just different metabolisms and I have a daily writing metabolism. But also, it’s really, really, really helpful to be able to say, “If today’s sucks, I try again tomorrow,” whereas at a lower frequency, there’s more weight put on everything.

Preet Bharara:

I get that.

Matt Levine:

So when I write, I write a daily column and it has like three or four or five unrelated, sometimes related, but generally unrelated items in it. And so I’m writing, whatever that is, 20 things a week and the need for any one of them to be really good is very low. And so I find, one, that’s just psychologically helpful where I can be like, “Well, if this particular section of this day sucks, then there’s like 20 others.”

Matt Levine:

But then also, it just frees you up to take a little bit more risk and be a little bit more experimental and write about weirder things so that you can stretch into some weirder topic because you’re like, “Well, and I’ll also write about everything being securities fraud in the next topic.” So it’s like there’s a sort of safety net to do weirder things. Often the ones that I write as weird throw aways are the ones that are better. So to the extent I have a trick, it’s just writing too much and panicking a lot.

Preet Bharara:

Do you want to know what my writing metabolism is?

Matt Levine:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Annual. It’s annual.

Matt Levine:

Yeah, no, a lot of people have annual. If mine were annual, I’d be a law professor right now, right? I mean, that’s the sort of [crosstalk 00:32:05]-

Preet Bharara:

A lot of footnotes. You like footnotes.

Matt Levine:

Yeah, no, right. I would be a good law professor if I could write one thing a year, but I can’t.

Preet Bharara:

All right. So let’s talk about this thing that you’ve alluded to a few times, your thesis that everything is securities fraud. And by that it’s obviously not just a shtick, it’s a critique and a relevant one, the gist of which is, and you’ll explain it much, much better than I obviously then we’ll go through some examples, is that things that happen to publicly traded companies can be transformed into securities fraud by plaintiff’s lawyers and plaintiffs in class action lawsuits and otherwise, because they will allege that the representations made by the company turned out not to be true.

Preet Bharara:

And even general representations, like we have ethics and we have a compliance program and we put the customer first, at some point when the company doesn’t do a great thing and does a bad thing, and it could be not just something related to the bottom line, which is what you think about normally, but a plane crash or a Me Too incident or some other such thing, shareholders will sue and say it’s securities fraud. Why is that bad?

Matt Levine:

The thing that probably bothers me most about it is at a very macro level what it says about societal priorities, which is that … And by the way, the way you described it, I think is essentially accurate, but I would just add that it’s not just plaintiff’s lawyers, it’s mainly plaintiff’s lawyers and plaintiff’s lawyers are where this is sharpest and strangest. But it’s also the SEC does some amount of transforming environmental harms, like there’s conflict diamonds rules, which are about disclosure. But then if you get conflict diamonds, probably your disclosure is wrong, and so you end up getting in trouble for securities fraud and-

Preet Bharara:

But some of the silly examples you give of things that happen at companies and you’re very sarcastic and smart and clever about it, the SEC doesn’t do that stuff.

Matt Levine:

No, I agree. The SEC is sort of closer to home. But the SEC and also politicians do look to expand the scope of securities law to cover things that are not first order of securities things. So they look to solve climate change or conflict diamonds or whatever through securities law. And the thing that I find weirdest about the whole complex, both plaintiff’s lawyers and politicians is what it says about societal priorities, where … The Me Too cases are a great example.

Matt Levine:

There’s a jewelry company that had a big settlement, that was sued for allowing a pattern of sexual harassment and discrimination against its female employees. And that case is dragging on and ongoing and they’re fighting it hard, but they also paid a lot of money to shareholders over that case because it’s easier for the shareholders to bring that case. The shareholder case was just you didn’t tell us about all the sexual harassment you were doing. And so it ends up being that the shareholders get compensated for the sexual harassment, whereas the victims of it don’t.

Matt Levine:

And those are pretty common cases where what you have is a prioritizing of the alleged harm to shareholders. And it’s sort of obvious, right? You can just point to something that wasn’t disclosed, you can point to the stock going down and you can say, “Well, the shareholders were harmed.” And the rules are mechanical and you have therefore this rich ecosystem of securities plaintiff’s lawyers who know that they can bring these cases and get paid. And so they do and they settle for pennies on the dollar of very large claims. And so the securities lawyers get money, the shareholders shuffle money around between them because the shareholders are both receiving and paying the damages.

Preet Bharara:

Right. It’s kind of weird, right?

Matt Levine:

It’s really weird. But then that’s the way we address sexual harassment harms, that’s the way we address environmental harms by public companies is by these securities lawsuits. And it’s just weird to think if you were designing a society from scratch, would you want climate change to be regulated by the interests of Exxon shareholders? Would you say when earth warms and the sea levels rise the victims there are Exxon shareholders? It’s just a weird approach and surely it doesn’t get the incentives exactly right when you think about it in that way.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting when I mentioned plaintiff’s lawyers. When I was in private practice, I did some civil defense work with respect to class action securities lawsuits like lot of associates in a lot of law firms do if you’re in the litigation department. Do you think some amount of blame should be laid at the feet of a legal system in which it’s not hard enough to certify a class, it’s not hard enough to transform these events into securities fraud claims? And you mentioned politicians, politicians are not monolithic. There’re a lot of politicians who have been trying to stop these lawsuits for a long time, many of them Republicans, but what do you think the solution is here if it’s in need of one?

Matt Levine:

There’s a case in the Supreme Court-

Preet Bharara:

A Goldman Sachs case.

Matt Levine:

A Goldman Sachs case. Disclosure, I worked there, I was never involved in the case. But there’s a case at the Supreme Court about this, about Goldman said we have a code of ethics and we put the client first, the very sort of generic stuff. And they then did some stuff in 2007 that arguably did not put the client first, which we don’t need to discuss in any great detail because probably everyone knows. And they got sued by shareholders over that because the stock did go down after the financial crisis. Somehow that is still being litigated and the Supreme Court is going to consider whether those very generic statements can constitute securities fraud. And presumably they’re taking the case suggests that they have some interest in constraining this, and I don’t know exactly what the constraint will look like.

Matt Levine:

I do think that one point of my critique is I don’t think it’s bad to try to prevent companies from allowing sexual harassment or polluting or whatever, right? I think that the thing that is happening here is that it is easier and more lucrative to channel some of these complaints into securities fraud cases and a sort of sensible solution would be to, one, channel them out of those cases, and two, channel them into something else. And so when I talk about politicians, one thing in particular that I’m thinking of is the New York State attorney general, and other states either doing or suggesting this, suing ExxonMobil for not properly disclosing the impact of climate change on its business, which is what I alluded to saying the victims of climate change, the victims of global warming are Exxon shareholders, which seems strange.

Matt Levine:

But part of why she’s doing that is because it is difficult for politicians otherwise to address climate change because there’s a lot of effort to prevent that. There are two political sides there and it’s difficult for laws to be passed or for substantive lawsuits over climate change emissions to go forward. And so this non-substantive corollary approach by going through securities fraud is a way to accomplish things that people think should be accomplished and that are hard to accomplish directly.

Matt Levine:

And I think in a lot of cases, it would probably be better for there to be a way to address these things directly, but it is made difficult by our politics and our democratic process and a lot of other facts of the political situation. I’m in the luxurious place of just saying, “This is weird.” I’m not sure that we’d be better off if I could wave a magic wand and get rid of all of these-

Preet Bharara:

Well, I was going to ask that. What would be the Matt Levine bill?

Matt Levine:

I think this is possibly a second best world, where if Matt Levine were dictator I would maybe address some of the problems substantively. But in the real world, it might be too controversial to address those problems through the American democratic process and addressing them indirectly through the SEC might be better than the existing alternatives.

Preet Bharara:

I’m not sure what you mean by that. In what way would you ask for the SEC to figure out a way to make it a higher threshold to convert non-financial events into securities fraud?

Matt Levine:

I just think in practice if you bring an EPA administrator nominee before Congress and that person says we’re going to ban greenhouse, we’re going to get net zero, make some aggressive statement about climate change, I think that’ll be hard to … There’ll be a lot of lawsuits, there’ll be lot of administrative procedure act objections, there’ll be a lot of opposition to confirmation. The political process is built around stasis on climate change regulation, whereas, an SEC chair nominee can be like, “Yeah, we’re going to require better disclosure of climate change and possibly accomplish some amount of substantive regulation through disclosure regulation that might be hard for the direct regulator to do.”

Matt Levine:

Some of it’ll be like I think it’s real weird that the main deterrent to companies allowing sexual harassment really might be securities fraud cases. I think that’s real weird and says weird things about our social priorities, but I also think that possibly better to have that weird deterrent than no deterrent, right?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, what’s also interesting is I’m not sure that every actor in the process, and I don’t want to denigrate anybody, but not every actor in the process is thinking about it in terms of necessarily social values, social good, social justice-

Matt Levine:

I think none of them are [crosstalk 00:42:00] my job.

Preet Bharara:

There are people who are thinking about it as a theory by which you can enrich yourself. As you point out, look, the entire concept of class action is interesting, much studied by lawyers and legal academics, but it is not worthwhile for a lawyer to take on a case of any of these things becoming securities fraud, in your phrase, unless you can represent a class because any particular shareholder is out just a tiny bit of money, but you aggregate those among many, many people, well, now you’ve got a case and now you’ve got the potential for some legal income, right?

Matt Levine:

Yeah. Also, it’s really easy to aggregate them because what happened to a shareholder is identical to what happened to every shareholder, whereas when you have these sexual harassment or sex discrimination class action cases, there will often be real substantive questions about class certification because if a company tolerates a lot of sexual harassment, what happens to each victim is different, right? And so you can have a real problem with finding a representative class, whereas with shareholders it’s so easy, there’s nothing there, the stock just went down, so everyone who had the stock lost money.

Preet Bharara:

My interview with Matt Levine continues after this.

Preet Bharara:

You know what’s weirder than what we’ve been discussing, weirder than the idea that everything is securities fraud? Cryptocurrency. Can we talk about-

Matt Levine:

Is it? I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

Well, to me it is. To me it is. Cryptocurrency has many attributes that people like, among them as I see it that it’s digital, it’s the future, people will say it’s cutting edge, it’s decentralized, that it’s not associated with any government. Those are among the benefits that people tout with respect to crypto.

Preet Bharara:

And here’s a quote from you which also showcases your writing style that is unique, “Just imagine traveling 10 years back in time and trying to explain this to someone, just imagine what an idiot you’d feel like.” And this is in a column about Dogecoin. Quote, “There’s going to be this online currency that people think is a form of digital gold. And then there’s going to be a different online currency that is a parody of the first one based on a meme about a talking Shiba Inu and that one will have a market capitalization bigger than 80% of the company’s in the S&P 500 and its value will fluctuate based on things like who is hosting Saturday Night Live and whether people tweet a hashtag about it on the pot-joke holiday.” And it goes on in that vein. So isn’t it fair for me to say this is weird?

Matt Levine:

Yeah, Dogecoin is real weird.

Preet Bharara:

Can you explain what Dogecoin is for folks?

Matt Levine:

Yeah. So Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and when Bitcoin started, some time after Bitcoin became popular and valuable, people realized that it came from nowhere and so they could do their own thing, they could recreate it. You could do a fork of the Bitcoin tote where you just copied the open source code for Bitcoin and changed the name. And so people did that and there are things called Litecoin and a bunch of other take-offs. And this became such a meme and a joke that someone did it and called it Dogecoin and put the picture of Doge, the weird talking Shiba Inu on it and they were like, “Ha, ha, ha, buy my cryptocurrency which is called Dogecoin.” And that was a joke and now it’s worth 60 billion dollars or something.

Preet Bharara:

Is there anything inherently bad about a joke becoming something that’s worth tens of billions of dollars?

Matt Levine:

It makes me somehow tired, but no, I guess not.

Preet Bharara:

It gives you something to write about at least.

Matt Levine:

It does. So here’s my thinking on this. When you talk to Bitcoin evangelists, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin-

Preet Bharara:

Can we just pause right there? Why are there evangelists?

Matt Levine:

Because it’s a trillion dollar asset class that people bought when it was smaller.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know, you worked at Goldman.

Matt Levine:

It’s in their interest to be evangelists, right?

Preet Bharara:

But is there something beyond the money? Is cryptocurrency a borderline ideology as opposed to just currency?

Matt Levine:

Yeah. It’s fitting with the libertarian ethos of … There are a lot of reasons to like Bitcoin and they don’t all have to do with a anti-regulatory libertarianism, but if you’re a strong evangelist, it’s often because you think that Bitcoin is helpful for freedom, that it allows you to escape censorship or repression or something like that. I find it less understandable, but there are also hard money cranks who get into Bitcoin because they think that the fed is inflating away the value of the dollar and Bitcoin will never do that to you. So that’s a form of like religious fervor for Bitcoin. But I think the main one is a libertarian one.

Matt Levine:

I try not to be too dismissive of that because I think that it is easier to be unimpressed by that in the United States where you’re like Bitcoin is for buying drugs. But I think in other countries, Bitcoin is a way to hide your money from a repressive government or a catastrophically mismanaged government, and so I think there’s something to be said for the libertarian evangelist case for Bitcoin. But that’s why they’re evangelists, because some number of people think that the government shouldn’t know how much money they have or how they spend it and that Bitcoin uniquely solves that problem.

Preet Bharara:

Does the evangelism or the ideology have some effect on the volatility of the value?

Matt Levine:

Maybe. I don’t know. I think a portion of the volatility … Well. So yes. So one thing is you can have a simple model of Bitcoin goes up when mainstream investors and buyers and holders adapted. And so if Bitcoin is an alternative store of value that a lot of investors want, then it’s worth trillions and trillions of dollars and so it’s price will go up because 10% of your retirement fund will end up in Bitcoin, right?

Matt Levine:

These are not the only reasons for it to go up or down, but these are reasons. Bitcoin goes down when some regulator is like, “This is for crooks and drug dealers and we’re going to ban it.” So one reason that Bitcoin has been crashing recently is that Chinese authorities have been making noises about cracking down on crypto miners and on crypto exchanges in part for concerns about its environmental effect, but in part for the reason that lots of governments don’t like it, which is that it seems often to be a tool of crooks and drug dealers and money launderers.

Preet Bharara:

Right. But as you pointed out, it’s not just China’s regulatory crackdown potentially. There’s the existence of this other nation state-

Matt Levine:

Elon Musk.

Preet Bharara:

Elon Musk. You got ahead of my joke.

Matt Levine:

Sorry to steal your joke there.

Preet Bharara:

Who as you write, quote, “Musk has the ability to make Bitcoin go up or down whenever he wants with his tweets with no limits on that power.” That’s not good, is it? Or is it okay?

Matt Levine:

I’m a little bit joking there, a tiny bit.

Preet Bharara:

Is that securities fraud?

Matt Levine:

Is that securities fraud? Probably. People keep asking me that and I probably speculate on it a little. I think the main answer-

Preet Bharara:

Well, your answer is clear, it’s always yes.

Matt Levine:

Well, sure. I think the main answer is that Bitcoin is not a security. So to the extent he is manipulating the price of Bitcoin, he is not manipulating the price of a security, although the CFTC may have some interest in the price of Bitcoin. There’s a secondary question of is he doing something that is somehow relevant to the price of Tesla stock in a way that could be securities fraud and I will stay away from that one. But if Tesla’s stock went down, is someone going to sue him over this? Sure, of course. The fact is his tweeting about Bitcoin doesn’t seem to having that much effect on Tesla’s stock, which is the only thing that is preventing me from talking more about that question.

Matt Levine:

So I’m being a little tongue in cheek in saying that he can make it go up or down any time he wants. It has been true in recent weeks that he’s had a lot of tweets and the price of Bitcoin has moved materially after each one of those tweets in the direction suggested by the tweets. So he’ll be like, “Bitcoin is bad for the environment,” and it goes down.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s talk about the parody of Bitcoin, which we talked about a couple of minutes ago, Dogecoin.

Matt Levine:

Yes, he can also move that one. Those are the two.

Preet Bharara:

Those are the two. And he goes on SNL and makes some jokes, the value goes down 40%, also not good, or maybe it’s fine.

Matt Levine:

It’s fine in the sense of why do you care? Dogecoin is a joke.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m not getting into it. I’m not getting into Dogecoin.

Matt Levine:

I think if you’re buying Dogecoin, it’s to speculate on what Elon Musk will say on Saturday Night Live. So the fact that it went down after Saturday Night Live, it’s neither good nor bad, it’s people are getting what they wanted, which is a bet on that.

Preet Bharara:

But we talked about these evangelist and the association of these things-

Matt Levine:

They’re not a lot of Dogecoin evangelists. There are some, but …

Preet Bharara:

Well, won’t there be more depending on its value?

Matt Levine:

Maybe.

Preet Bharara:

At what point is there a conflict between something being about liberty and being about comedy?

Matt Levine:

Yeah. I mean, to be clear, I think that Bitcoin has a lot of seriousness to it, and I think a lot people believe deeply in Bitcoin, and Dogecoin mostly doesn’t, right? Dogecoin is mostly a joke. These are not organized phenomena. These are very distributed, just a bunch of people coordinating around a thing. And so some of the people, different people involved in these large distributive communities have different motivations. And you see in Bitcoin there are people who are evangelical about the libertarian aspects of it and about overthrowing the regular fiat financial system, and there are other people who are like Fidelity or just giant asset managers who are like, “If this is the thing that goes up, we’re going to buy it for our clients because we want it to go up.”

Preet Bharara:

It’s purely pragmatic. It’s very pragmatic.

Matt Levine:

Yeah. And with Dogecoin you have a small minority of people who are like, “No, no, even though this was a joke, by accident it’s become the future of money.” And there were a couple of those people, but then mostly people are like, “No, this is fun. It might go up and it’s a good joke and it’s got a Shiba Inu.” But they’re all diverse communities. People have different motivations. It’s like anything in markets, you can [crosstalk 00:52:24]-

Preet Bharara:

There’s always the opportunistic class no matter what when something goes up or something goes down, right?

Matt Levine:

Yeah, that’s true. But it’s just like anything in markets, you can tell some narrative or why a thing is going up or down or what holders of the thing believe, but that will only be approximately true on average and there’ll be a lot of people who believe different things and are doing it for different reasons and have different motivations and the market price is the aggregate of all those things rather than one particular narrative.

Preet Bharara:

One final bit about Elon Musk and Bitcoin. He announced not long ago, just some weeks ago that customers could buy Teslas with Bitcoin. Some people thought that was a little bit strange and within a very short period of time he suspended that plan to accept payments with Bitcoin citing concerns that other people have cited as well about the massive carbon footprint associated with the mining of Bitcoin. What do you make of A, the flip flop, and B, the legitimacy of the environmental critique of cryptocurrency?

Matt Levine:

If you follow Elon Musk, he says a lot of stuff on Twitter that is official policy of Tesla for a short period until someone changes his mind about it. Everything is securities fraud. He did get in trouble with the SEC for securities fraud when he tweeted that he was going to take Tesla private at 420 dollars a share, and that was just an impulse and he didn’t actually do it. So him having a policy of we’re going to accept Bitcoin for Teslas, that sounded …

Matt Levine:

I don’t know why he changed his mind because the environmental stuff has been pretty salient for years and years and years and so it’s not like it could have been a surprise to him that Bitcoin uses electricity. But someone could have sat with him and been like, “Hey, we should accept Bitcoins for Teslas,” and he was like, “Cool.” And then someone else could have been like, “This is really bad for the environment and your whole shtick or path of your shtick as being an environmentalist,” and convinced him that that was probably not a good idea. I’m not sure I would look for more consistency or more deep explanations than that.

Preet Bharara:

What about more importantly the substantive environmental critique?

Matt Levine:

Yeah, Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. It’s a strange system to have money that is based on a lot of people burning a lot of coal to confirm redundant copies of a transaction measure. So I think there are some answers to that critique. One is that a lot of the energy being used to mine Bitcoin is renewable or is stranded or something, so that-

Preet Bharara:

But a lot of it is not. A lot of it is not.

Matt Levine:

Yeah, a lot of it is not. I think on balance the environmental critique is serious and correct, but I do think that there is the clever answer to that is that Bitcoin has … The half joking phrase is that Bitcoin is a battery. The idea is that you can mine Bitcoin anywhere, anytime, and so you will be incentivized to do it in places where electricity is abundant and cheap and perhaps even clean, although not necessarily. So a lot of stranded energy assets where hydroelectric power in Northern Sweden where there are not a lot of homes being air conditioned can be used to mine bitcoins, and so it perhaps incentivizes the development of cleaner and cheaper power. But I think on balance, a lot of Bitcoin is mined in China using dirty coal plants, and so it’s a real concern.

Preet Bharara:

I think the Wall Street Journal reported recently that some coal plants are coming back online having been taken offline solely for this purpose.

Matt Levine:

Yeah. I think there is this counterintuitive actually it encourages the development of cheap electricity case. I think the main case that Bitcoin people would make is that Bitcoin is good for the world, it promotes human flourishing and liberty and whatever, and therefore we can spend a certain amount of power on it. I think a lot of people who are not committed Bitcoiners say, “Well, wouldn’t it be better to use less power?”

Matt Levine:

And so you see in the crypto world a movement towards trying to find a way to provide security for crypto networks that doesn’t involve so much electricity usage. And Ethereum, which is the number two cryptocurrency, has for years been planning to move to a proof of stake blockchain where it uses a lot less power to confirm transactions. I think yesterday there was another article about how that’s happening imminently. So I think that in the broad world of cryptocurrency there are efforts made to reduce power consumption, but the core Bitcoin blockchain is committed to proof of work energy intensive usage.

Preet Bharara:

Final question. Do you think anything that we said here today constitutes securities fraud?

Matt Levine:

I don’t think either of us works at a public company, right? So I think that’d be hard.

Preet Bharara:

We don’t.

Matt Levine:

I think it’d be hard.

Preet Bharara:

All right good.

Matt Levine:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

That’s what keeps me happy.

Matt Levine:

I do my best to stay out of prison.

Preet Bharara:

You’ve done pretty well so far. Matt Levine, thank you so much for joining us.

Matt Levine:

Thank you for having me. It was fun.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Matt Levine continues for members of the CAFE Insider Community. To try out the membership free for two weeks, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:

I want to end the show this week on an optimistic note because things are reopening, things are getting better, and there’s something in particular that I think has been bringing lots of people joy recently, something that’s been missing a lot over the last 15 months. I know a lot of you have started to enjoy real life things again, getting together with family, meeting friends you haven’t seen, kids are seeing their grandparents and that’s great. But there’s also a public aspect to all of this, which is the reopening of public venues where lots of people get together, not just small gatherings in your back yard or in your dining room.

Preet Bharara:

The good news is as of today in my home state of New York, more than 52% of residents have had at least one dose of the vaccine, that’s over 10.4 million people. In the country at large, it’s about the same. Roughly half of the entire US population has also received at least one dose. Beginning on May 19th, New York State lifted almost all restrictions, no longer requiring vaccinated people to mask up outside and socially distance. And we’ve lifted the outdoor food and beverage curfew and public schools will fully reopen in the fall. That’s quite a change from recent times and it feels surreal taking off a mask when you’ve been wearing it every day, even outside, even when you’re several feet away from people. It felt funny the first, but I’ll tell you’ve gotten used to it.

Preet Bharara:

One thing that’s coming back is sports. Well, not just sports, but fans in large numbers being able to attend their favorite sports events. The Knicks-Hawks NBA playoff game on Sunday brought 15,000 fans to Madison Square Garden, 90% of whom were vaccinated. And I think it’s fair to say the sound of the cheering crowd and the energy coming out of the arena was overwhelming to a lot of folks. There was also quite a crowd at the PGA Championship over the past weekend. And baseball fans, they’re getting in on the action too.

Preet Bharara:

You may not realize it, but Yankee Stadium and Citi Field in New York are also mass vaccination sites and they’re offering a voucher for a free ticket to anyone who gets vaccinated there on game days as a way to encourage people to get the vaccine. Last Friday at Yankee Stadium, it was the first home game with a section specifically for vaccinated folks and it was a pretty good game and special to me because my 18 year old son at the last minute got a ticket to go with friends to watch the game. It was not a full house, they’re still working on that, but there were over 10,000 fans in attendance and the Yankees beat the Chicago White Sox two to one in a pretty memorable finish. My son got to see one the most rare events in all of baseball and perhaps even in all of sports.

Speaker 1:

Runners lead. Pitch. Hit on the ground to third. Step on third, go to second. There’s two. Back to first. It’s a triple play! A triple play!

Preet Bharara:

And to end the game, Yankee second baseman, Gleyber Torres, ended the ninth inning and the game with a walk off single.

Speaker 1:

Hits short. It’ll be a base hit to left field. Judge rounds third, they’re waving him home. Here’s the throw. Here’s the play. Yankees win two to one.

Preet Bharara:

That was a pretty happy kid who came home that evening. We’re still not there. There’s much to look forward to on the horizon, like the full reopening of Broadway theaters in September. And all this is contingent on people doing their part, continuing to get vaccinated so we can get that number up to 70% and higher. There’s a lot of things that we’ve missed over the last year, year and a half. The roar of the crowd, do you miss it at concerts and at ball games? I know I do.

Preet Bharara:

Speaking about the return to gathering in large groups among strangers, people you don’t know, for a common event like sports got writer, Charlie Warzel, who has the newsletter Galaxy Brain to reflect in this way. Quote, “I spent the pandemic missing and mourning gathering in public on a personal and physical level. It wasn’t just the socialization I told myself, I missed feeding off the energy of different rooms and spaces. I missed being around other people in an ambient fashion, eavesdropping on their conversations, ignoring them, talking over them, whatever. I simply needed the energy of others. But what the return of sports has made my realize is how much I rely on crowds that I’m not a part of in order to feel less alone. This might sound sad, but I don’t see it that way, quite the opposite really.” End quote. I know how he feels and one of the things I’m looking forward to the most on a personal level is having live Stay Tuned shows. We’re hoping to have one in the fall. Stay tuned for that.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Matt Levine. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me, @PreetBharara, with the hashtag #AskPreet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to staytuned@cafe.com.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE Studios and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Your host is Preet Bharara. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The senior producer is Adam Waller. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The CAFE team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Jennifer Korn, Chris Boylan and Sean Walsh. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.