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Hello and welcome to Money Talks from Slate Money. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios and this is the show where we talk to the most interesting and insightful people that we can find about anything money related. And we have a very special guest this week, the one and only
James Frey. Welcome, James. Thank you for having me. James, introduce yourself. You have many, what are they called, arrows to your quiver. I've done a lot of weird shit. I started out in Hollywood. I got my first movie made in 1996. Which you starred in. No. David Schwimmer starred in it. It was called Kissing a Fool, released by Universal Pictures. Worked in Hollywood for a few years, and I started writing books.
I've written five books, all global bestsellers. You have a knack for writing stuff that people want to read. I have a knack for writing things that half the people want to read and half the people fucking hate. It's kind of a unique place to sit. You can't hate it unless you've read it, though.
Oh, that's not true. That's not true. No. So I wrote books. I sold a bunch of them. Then I started a business that was sort of modeled after a Renaissance art studio, the way Da Vinci or Michelangelo or Raphael or contemporary versions like
Andy Warhol or Murakami, where I came up with the ideas for books, movies, television shows, and video games. I had a whole staff of people who executed them. Over about six years, we published 240 books. We had 40 New York Times bestsellers. We had 15 number ones. We had a number one global movie, TV show, and video game. What was the number one global movie? I am number four with Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg.
Action alien movie. Aliens good. I love aliens. And then I sold that business to a French private equity company and I was the global chief content officer for the world's largest influencer network for five years. Then I was the CEO of a video game company. So, wow. So you were like in charge of influencers? No, I was in charge of what flowed through the pipes at that network and
any content that they needed external production to handle and any content that we made with them. So we did huge amounts of sponsored content. We made movies, we made TV shows, video games, and we would have influencers like our largest influencer in 2017 had 45 million subs, which back then was a lot. So we made a TV show with them.
And now you're back to writing books. Yeah. I left the CEO of the video game company about two years ago and I'm writing books again. So obviously you need to plug your new book. What's it called? My new book is called Next to Heaven. It's a sort of dirty murder mystery set in the richest town in the United States where I have lived for the last 12 years.
which you have renamed New Bethlehem. It is called New Bethlehem, Connecticut in the book. It is based on a town called New Canaan, Connecticut. You can tell by the existence of the glass house by Philip Johnson. Yeah, the glass house is there, as is the greatest collection of mid-century modern houses in the world. It's a cool, weird...
hyper real place to live especially as somebody who sort of has my history and does what I do I spend my time with a lot of the richest people in the world I'm very much not one of them yeah I feel like you're pretty rich everybody always thinks I'm a lot more rich than I am um
I will say as a writer and as a dude who makes shit, whatever that is, whatever medium or platform I'm working on, you never make as much money as people think. And a lot of that money disappears real quick. You have to pay to make the thing. You have to pay your agents. You have to pay your lawyers. If I had to estimate, I'm on like the lower end of the 1%. I'm definitely within the 1%, but I'm on the low side of it. But you live among them. Yeah.
I live among them, absolutely, and have for most of my life. And so you have taken these observations of the very rich. And one of the things we talk about quite a lot on this show is the way in which wealth is sort of
fractal and also aspirational. And so however rich you are, you are always spending most of your life looking at people who are richer than you and comparing yourself to people who are richer than you. And so even if you are in the 1%, you're not like...
happy that you're richer than 99%. You're always like, wow, I just don't have the private jet. I mean, that's absolutely a very fucking real phenomenon that I find fascinating. If you look at the cover of the book, it's an open mouth with a golden house on the tongue. And I did that
Because I think of money as a drug. I think of money as the most powerful, most addictive, most destructive, most damaging drug on the fucking planet.
it. And I will say, though, I've been very fortunate in my career and my life, and I have a little bit of dough. I don't really aspire to it that way. And I never have done what I do for financial reasons. You don't grow up saying, oh, I'm going to be a writer, thinking you'll ever have any dough. But I don't want or need really more than I have. So again, I sit in this position with
I live in a town of 17,000 people that has multi-double-digit billionaires in it. And so I observe and I hang out and I watch and I listen. And it's a fascinating sort of place to be, especially at this time in the world's history and in the country's history. I think about the accumulation of wealth that I've witnessed amongst extremely close friends of mine over really since probably about 2012. And it's astonishing how fucking rich people are.
And you are, and this latest book is just the first of a series of like rich people books. Is that the plan? Yeah. I'm going to write five rich people books.
So they'll be set in among some of the richest places in the country. You're doing like the White Lotus thing. You're just moving from one rich place to another rich place. Kinda. I love White Lotus. I'm moving from New Canaan, Connecticut to Tribeca, from Tribeca to East Hampton, New York. Wow. You're really like moving around dozens of miles. Those are the richest places in the fucking country. Then I'm going to Bel Air, Beverly Hills, California. And then I'm going to
Redwood City, Hillsborough, California. Five books, five murders, and a lot of sort of poking fun at and satirizing extreme, extreme wealth that exists in the country. So as someone with a knack for selling lots of books and as someone who understands the sort of perennial fascination of wealth, which is surely like one of the reasons why wealth itself is like the main character in this book and in these books,
To what degree is it necessary in this genre to scorn wealth and kind of show the dirty underside of it and make it seem a little bit seedy and nasty? I mean, I think for a storyteller, it's important to have conflict. Like in my book, not all the rich people are terrible. Some of them certainly fucking are, but not all of them. I would say pretty much all of them. Most of them?
Teddy, the PE guy, he has a good heart. He's a generous man. You know, so like one out of six. Part of it is to just make fun of it. You know, I think about literary history and books that I love. And I think about the way Tom Wolfe handled the 60s and 70s. And he both sort of documented and made fun of and glorified certain subcultures within the United States. The subculture I'm doing that to is extreme wealth.
I will say though, like I know plenty of great rich people. I know plenty of fucking terrible ones. The one thing that all of them have in common, which you brought up earlier was that there's never enough. There's never enough money. I know people with, you know, three digit billions. There aren't that many people with three digit billions. There aren't. I know a couple of them. And,
And they just, even they just always want more, which to take one at random, the man who bought the Washington post from the owners of slate, Mr. Jeff Bezos. Yeah. Everyone kind of said, well, you've got the Washington post. Now you have all the money you will ever be able to spend or need. So you get to use this and speak truth to power, but no, he is wanting more and he is doing what he needs to do in Washington in order to make sure that he gets what
even richer and doesn't get even poorer. And this is having negative repercussions on his newspaper toy. I mean, I think we live in this era where social media functions in specific ways. The media functions in specific ways. And people have accumulated so much that there are almost like
unnamed mental health issues. You could call Bezos or Musk or Trump or any of them some form of narcissism, and it undoubtedly is. But I think there's almost something else. What is it that once you reach the point, and every billionaire has reached that point many times over, once you reach the point that you will never be able to spend all of the money that you have...
What is it that makes you want more? I think part of it is some sort of mental illness similar to addiction. What makes a crackhead or an alcoholic want more and more? Because some switch has been turned in them and because something from their childhood has created some desperate need for other people to both admire, fear, and approve and admire of these people. I think it's like some new form of mental illness.
But I talk to a few friends of mine regularly who like who either have hundreds of millions or low billions of dollars who have worked in finance or real estate in New York City for a long time. And I'm always like, they're stressed. They're miserable. Their job is hard. I'm like, why the fuck do you do it, man? And they'll be like, what else am I going to do?
And then they'll say, I want this new house. Or they see their peers. They've all grown up. A lot of these wealthy people have grown up together. And so they see their buddy who's made $600 million. And this guy's only made $300. And like, they feel shitty. It's this drive where there can never be enough. There's this saying on Wall Street that the best thing you can be in life is the grandchild of a Goldman Sachs partner. Like,
If you're the partner, you're miserable because you're just working the whole time. If you're the kid of a Goldman Sachs partner, then you're also miserable because you never see your parents and they're a fucked up person because they work at Goldman Sachs. And because the direct descendants are always expected to do as well, right?
But once you become the grand kid, then you have a parent who's a little bit more present and who's used to the money and you could just get to enjoy the life of a rich person without all of the stress involved with having to make it. Yeah. I also think that's bullshit. Like I know a lot of people who come from old family money, like a mint.
fortunes, American robber baron fortunes, European royal fortunes. And they're not happier than most people I know because a lot of times the money takes away purpose and takes away drive and takes away ambition and takes away focus. And, you know, you want the happy combination of both. You want the money and the ambition. You want to be like, I don't know, Julia Louis-Dreyfus or someone like that has all of the money, but also has the ambition and wants to do good stuff.
I've listened to a few episodes of your show, and there was one a couple back where they were talking about the myth of American hard work. And in America, we have been brainwashed to think the most important thing in our fucking lives is work and money. And...
It's been hundreds of years of driving that message home and through sort of cultural propaganda where it's constantly reinforced in the United States. If you're not rich, you're no good. You're not working hard enough. If you're not rich, there's something wrong with you.
And it has created this sort of sickness in our society. Yeah, it's created this weird phenomenon where the vast majority of Americans approve of tax cuts for the very rich, not because they are very rich, but because they are convinced they are going to be very rich and that therefore they will be able to take advantage of that.
of that. Yeah. You don't see that in any other country. Somehow these wealthy people are special or different and deserve a different set of rules and deserve to have all of this incredible money. My experience is there are some people who are just extraordinarily good at what they do and have made a lot of money. There are a lot of people who inherited it. And there were a lot of people who were just lucky to be in the right place at the right fucking time.
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You know how you always want to know about everyone else's money? On the podcast What We Spend, guests will, for one week, tell us everything they spend their money on. My son slammed six dollars for the blueberries in five minutes. And everything that makes them feel. I want to own a house. I want to have a child. But this morning I really wanted a coffee. Because at the end of the day, money is always about more than your balance. Listen to and follow What We Spend, an Odyssey original podcast. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
So let me ask you about this genre of books about rich people. And specifically, the big publishing sensation of 2025 is the Facebook tell-all memoir, Careless People, the title of which, of course, is taken from The Great Gatsby. And The Great Gatsby is arguably the first and best rich person novel. For sure. And the idea that the Buchanans and Jay Gatsby...
The way that the rich are painted in The Great Gatsby is precisely as careless people, that their wealth allows them destructive carelessness. This is a theme that you see throughout many rich people novels, including your own. Is it sort of inescapable? The destruction wrought by the uber wealthy? I would say like specifically the careless destruction, the way that they do it without even wanting to do it or caring about whether they do it. Yeah.
I mean, we can use Musk as an easy example right now. That's a guy who lives in a world where there is no accountability for him. He can do, he can say, he can hurt, he can do anything he wants in this world. And it's only because of his money. It's not because he deserves it or because he's earned it or because he's a better person than anybody else. And there is this feeling among people
financial journalists like myself that he is a off the spectrum in those terms and that most CEOs and most rich people don't have that degree of de facto impunity. I would disagree with that. Most people do have that level of de facto impunity. They just don't ever need to exercise it. In my own
Town, I see kids who get in trouble for things if they lived in Norwalk, Connecticut or Stanford or Bridgeport, Connecticut. It would be a very different situation for them if their skin was a different color. And I don't say this as some like raging liberal. My politics are very moderate.
But there are different rules for rich people, and there is not accountability. You look at the easy example is how long does a cocaine dealer with three grams of blow in his pocket go to prison versus somebody who's engaging in insider trading and has made $3 billion for it? The kid with coke in his pocket is going away for much longer.
And money allows you to buy a world where there are no rules. And it certainly allows you to buy drugs. One of the things that we see a lot of in this book is cocaine and other illegal drugs. Again, this is something we see quite a lot of in rich people novels more generally. Is that reflective of what you see in New Canaan? Or is that like because you need to make a sexy book?
No, that's definitely reflective of what I see, not just in Connecticut, but in wealthy places everywhere. I don't just hide out in Connecticut. I sort of, for a bunch of years, I was bi-coastal. And I saw it everywhere. There's a huge amount of drugs, drinking. There's a huge amount of sort of frivolity, just spending money on absurd things. Last summer, I went to the birthday party of a two-year-old who is the daughter of a billionaire.
Oh, wow. And I couldn't believe the party. There were rides. There were makeup artists. There were carnival games. I don't know who catered it, but it was extraordinary. And I sort of jokingly asked the guy who was throwing the party. I was like, how much you fucking spend on this thing, man? He was like, just under a mil. And I was like, fucking why? He was like.
why not? What else am I going to do? You know, this was a person who had probably three or $4 billion and it was just like, what else am I going to do? Yeah. I mean, a million dollars is what your random stock portfolio goes up every five minutes. Right. It's what I pay, you know, it's parking downstairs, right? If you have that much money, is it not rational to say, I want a million dollar birthday party for my two-year-old. And so to be like, well, there's zero opportunity cost by spending a million dollars on my two-year-old. I lose $1
zero access to anything else I might ever want to buy or go or do or be. So is there any reason not to? Is that not just a completely rational place to be? It is a completely rational place, but it's also an absurd place. The two-year-old won't remember it. We're just at a point in society where I don't think it can continue.
I ended up writing this book because I was actually writing another book about the downfall of the United States. It was called 477, which is the year Rome fell for good. And it was about what I call the ongoing collapse of the United States. I have a friend who works for Bridgewater. The massive Connecticut hedge fund. He has an education in the classics, specifically a PhD on the fall of empires. Why empires fall.
And at Bridgewater, he trades on a fund called the Doom Fund. And he says empires all fall for the same reasons, whether it's a business empire or a national empire or a military empire. Those reasons are debt, national debt or the debt of the company.
Political or organizational polarization, where the people running the business or the country can no longer speak to each other in reasonable and honest ways. And the last one, which is the greatest determinant of a revolution, is disparity of wealth between citizens. The example we always use is France.
And yet, you know, I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but wealth inequality in the United States since the pandemic has been going down rough. But anyway, I want to go back to the rich people and just finish by asking you one thing about guilt. I feel like there's a strain of people who maybe could or should or do feel a bit guilty about having this much money and this much access to wealth and waste.
Is that okay? No, I don't. Nobody ever feels guilty about it. They all think they deserve it. And, you know, deserve is a subjective word. I don't hear a lot of people bemoaning the fact that they're unbelievably rich. If anything, it's celebrating the fact that they're so rich, that they're so fantastic and so smart and so capable and that
They do the wealth. The wealth is the proof of their nobility, especially in America where the class and wealth are basically the same thing. Yeah. And so you were asking, do I see drugs? Do I believe in accountability for the wealth? I see things you can, you can imagine getting on a plane and a guy will have cocaine in his pocket and bring two of his sugar babies and I'll get a call. Hey, you want to go to Miami? Hey, you want to go to Vegas? And I'll go meet people and hop on their planes and go do these ridiculous things.
Do you ever feel guilty about that? Like the private jet lifestyle? I mean, I don't have a jet. I will never be able to afford a jet. But you've flown on enough that you can feel guilty about flying on them.
I gotta say, I don't ever feel guilty. It's fucking crazy, right? Like, if you've ever flown on a private jet, whether it was a small one or a really big one, it's a great experience. You walk onto a plane that's small, where they have great food, where there's usually at least one, often two people who are there just to make you happy.
It's fucking great. The sort of accoutrements of the rich are extraordinary. They live in extraordinary places. They have extraordinary art on their walls. They drive beautiful cars. They eat great food. The children go to the best schools, have tutors upon tutors.
It doesn't suck, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. I think of, again, wealth in America. People are obsessed with more and more. What can I buy? What house can I have? The people I know who experience that or who live in that world experience
it doesn't make them happy. It doesn't bring them joy. It doesn't bring them peace. It doesn't bring them contentment. And so when I write about them, I'm poking fun at them, but I'm also writing about them because I think we're in extraordinary times where we're seeing like the amount of wealth being accumulated is unlike anything that's
Do they broadly see what you see? Like when you have this conversation with them, do they kind of nod along and say, yeah, you're absolutely right? Or are they blind to it? Probably a little of both. There's some part of them that can acknowledge this, but then there's some other greater part of them that's like, well...
I'm not that person. I'm not the terrible rich person. I didn't commit murder. I didn't commit murder. I didn't engage in insider trading. I didn't. Is insider trading bad? Yeah, I think it's bad because if America truly wants to live up to its ideals, there should be a level playing field. And we talk all the time here and other places about rules and laws and everything.
and morality and integrity. And none of that exists in insider trading. I'm, you know, I wrote a lot about insider trading in this book. Not a lot, but a fair amount. And I know people who actively engage in it and will say so privately.
And their view of it is everybody else is willing to pay for the information to make money. So why shouldn't I? I'm just playing the fucking game as it is played. And it's sort of like a Lance Armstrong thing or frankly, a James Fry thing. And if you're cheating and you get caught, expect to eat some shit, except that rich people don't eat shit. If they're cheating and they get caught, they just sort of
You know, we were talking about the million dollars for a birthday party. When you think about the sums people make and the crimes they commit in the course of making that money, and then the accountability they face when they get caught, of course it's fucking worth it. But that doesn't mean it's right, and that doesn't mean that it's good. What did you...
feel, what did you think when Martha Stewart wound up going to prison for, well, she technically did not go to prison for insider trading. She went to prison for lying about it. Yeah. I don't personally think she probably should have gone to jail, especially it was like, it was such a minor horseshit thing. She made like, she was a billionaire who I think made $12,000 on that trade.
There are people who are making billions of dollars on illegal trades, and I don't think that should be the case. I don't think people who have money should be able to break the law to make more of it. And whether insider trading is good or bad is something I guess you could debate for a long time.
But there is one thing that isn't debatable, which is it's still against the fucking law. Oh, people will debate that. James, I can tell you, you may or may not be surprised to hear that there is no actual law against insider trading. Congress has never passed a law saying thou shalt not insider trade. That's because then they'd all go to fucking jail, right? That's one of the big things. You look at wealth in America, population.
Politics used to be something you went into to try to make the world a better place, try to make the country a better place. Back in the halcyon past when everything was glorious. No, I don't think there was ever some healthy, perfect past. But I do think there have been a lot of honorable people who have gone into politics and have made a big difference both in the country and the world. Now people go into politics to get fucking rich. That's it.
On which note, I think we have to tie this up. It's a good place to end it. James Fry, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it. It's cool to be here. And many thanks also to Jessamyn, Molly, and Shana Roth for producing.
Your book is available in all good bookstores now. It is called... Next to Heaven. If you want a funny, dirty... Lots of sex. Lots of, yeah, mysterious book about how the uber, uber, uber, uber, uber wealthy live, give it a read. I guarantee you'll laugh. I guarantee you'll be turned on. And I guarantee you'll walk away and think, those motherfuckers.
Perfect. Thanks to Shana Roth and Jessamyn Molly for producing. And we'll be back on Saturday with a regular Slate Money.
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