Good evening, Compound Nation. Special event Monday night. We have an author with us, one of our favorite authors writing about the investment markets and finance. Everyone say hello to Scott Patterson. Scott is, we have your official bio. Can I read right off here? Is it accurate? All right.

I want to make sure. All right. Scott has been a reporter for more than two decades, mostly at the Wall Street Journal in New York City, Washington, D.C. and London. His 2010 New York Times bestseller, The Quants, was about the rise of mathematical traders and their near destruction of the financial system. His second book, Dark Fools, about high frequency trading. Of course, Michael and I have talked about both of those books on the show before and were big fans of both of them.

And so excited about Scott's new book called Chaos Kings, how Wall Street traders make billions in the new age of crisis. Scott Patterson, welcome to the Compound. We're so happy to have you tonight. How are things? Thanks for having me. Good. Good. You book is coming out tomorrow morning? Yes, it's out tomorrow. Okay. Trying to try to do this in my day job at the journal at the same time. I had a scare that we were going to run a page one story. I've been working on for months tonight.

Okay, but it got really late. Thankfully. So Scott is the book being released on every blockchain or just the Bitcoin one. Yeah, yeah, just the big. There's the only way to read it. Hey, do you sleep the night before you have like a big article coming out or a big book coming out? Like, like, are you not want to say nervous, but like, is there a lot of excitement that keeps you up? What's that like? I think after the second bottle of wine, then I'm there. So. It can be. It can be.

Troubled for hacking. For sure. It's just a thing we have to live with as journalists. The book is it's a little different because I've all the work has been done months and months ago. And it's, you know, done and dusted. So I'm just looking for people reading it and hearing what they think. Absolutely. Well, this is what the book looks like. You will probably see it online in a bookstore at an airport, et cetera. But this is like it's a manageable size.

And it's a story that I've never really heard before.

Everyone, of course, is familiar with Nassim Talib,

and everyone is familiar with the term Black Swan.

But tell us in your words, what is the story that this book

tells and why is it important for investors and traders

to read it and understand what's in here?

Yeah, so the birth of the idea of this book

occurred to me in early 2020 when we all remember

what was going down then.

We had COVID, but we also had this incredible market collapse

where the Dow was going down 2,000 points a day.

Then it would go up 2,000 points.

It was this insane period.

We had the entire financial markets

around the world were freezing up.

And then reports came out that this hedge fund

called Universe had posted a return of more than 4,000%

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