The Nobel Winners Who Almost Crashed the Economy | From Business History

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, Business, Sports

4.4 • 9.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Here's a special episode from Business History (which even mentions Liar's Poker!). Business History is a show about, you guessed it, the history of business and what we can learn from founders and companies.

John Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage — the trick of buying an asset cheap in one place and quickly selling it for a profit in another.

When he parted ways with Salomon Brothers, Meriwether took his "nerds" to set up a hedge fund. They prospered — making themselves and their clients rich. Two employees even picked up a Nobel Prize. But Long Term Capital Management operated in the real world — where projections and charts and formulas can't protect you from political chaos and economic turmoil.

Find more episodes of Business History on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	150 years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us, and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them.
0:07.8	This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be, and how we got to this present moment.
0:15.9	Listen to First America, anywhere you get your podcasts, Pushkin Plus subscribers can hear ad-free episodes early before they're released to the public.
0:24.9	Your support helps independent teams like ours continue to make the shows that you enjoy.
0:29.6	Head to the First America Show on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm slash plus to sign up.
0:42.4	Thank you. FM slash plus to sign up. Pushkin.
0:43.6	Too quick?
0:44.3	No, it was perfect.
0:45.5	Pushkit.
0:45.8	Stop.
0:46.5	You got it. You're going to take me back to the 1990s, baby, and then the 70s, and then the 90s.
1:05.9	Okay.
1:06.9	Robert Smith, this is a story about some of the smartest people in the world, incredibly successful in their fields.
1:12.5	They decide to come together, start a new thing, and they are so successful.
1:17.0	They make billions of dollars.
1:19.0	They win the Nobel Prize as they're making billions of dollars.
1:22.7	And then the next year, they get destroyed.
1:27.1	And in fact, they get destroyed so hard that they almost take the global economy down with them.
1:31.7	I'm Jacob Goldstein.
1:32.7	I'm Robert Smith, and this is business history.
1:34.6	I'm sure not the history of business.
1:36.3	Today on the show, the story of long-term capital management.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 24 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Pushkin Industries, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Pushkin Industries and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.