Interview with Author Michael Lewis

now on book TV we're live with best-selling author Michael Lewis mr. Lewis has written many books including liars poker Moneyball the big short and most recently the undoing project a friendship that changed our minds Michael Lewis you are the author of more than a dozen best-selling books what makes a good story in your mind what do you look for so there's no formula I don't I don't actually think that with the question you just asked me I've never really asked myself exactly what leads me to want to write a book because they're a pain in the neck to do I mean you really have to have a level of passion about it if that that's it's it's finding usually what it is if I look back on it it's finding a sub person an interesting person in an interesting situation that will allow me to explore some interesting ideas and that's it and what almost always happens and is that I've got lots of little projects bubbling or magazine pieces or things I'm investigating and something becomes so interesting it consumes me and I get to the point in my head where I think wow it is such a good story I have an obligation to tell it and that's the point when it's a book but I feel like I just have to do this because if I don't do it it won't get done and it really should be done because this story should be told but in terms of like you asked me to go to a like a class of journalism school students and give them a formula for how to write a good story I wouldn't know how to begin when did you decide that you wanted to be an author because you were making money on Wall Street working for Salomon Brothers yes so my career path it's a kind of there should be something on the bottom of the TV screen that says do not try this in your own home because they really didn't I don't think you can they're actually just kind of graphed from the model on under a literary career I was an art history major in college and thought was I would I first wanted to do I thought was being art historian I kind of stumbled out of college without any particular direction and landed with that by accident on Wall Street so I got that job on Wall Street that became the first book liars poker really very accidentally without a great deal of intention by that would have was while I was working on my Princeton thesis which was effectively a book maybe a 50,000 word book I became engrossed with the with the writing of it I never written for school newspapers I never conceived of myself as a writer I was a reader but you know I write because I just like to read but I didn't have anybody telling me oh you're a born writer just reverse when I finished my Princeton thesis and I handed it in to my professor and he came back to with the grade and we had a kind of a defense of the thesis I had gotten to that point very vain about how it was written and I wanted him to look for anywhere for him to said wow this is really nicely written he hadn't said it so I said in the course of this exchange I said what'd you think of the writing and he said put it this way never try to make a living at it hey but I tried I mean when I got out of college I thought I really want to write I'll enjoy I want to write books so I started kind of willy-nilly submitting things to magazines and it was a haphazard process and things started to get published and one thing led to another the advice I would give someone that the practical thing that happened to me that was really very useful for my career was doing something other than right I mean it was hugely useful given my subsequent career that I spent two-and-a-half years at a Wall Street firm because I had something to write about I mean gave me material that was just I wouldn't you wouldn't get in a normal journalistic life to be in in and the inside of something like that so that that that put kind of attached engines to my ambition to have that to have that as the first to write about and we have a lot to talk about but I want to see what you're currently working on what are your upcoming projects well at any given time I have if you were coming my office you would see row on a bench of folders of like might want to do this and so they're there dozens of things there which in various states of neglect the thing that's got me kind of jazz right now I I mean it's gonna sound boring but I'm writing about federal government and what I when Trump was elected I watched the transition with Paul fascination they were bits and pieces in the newspaper about how essentially the Obama administration administration's are by law required to prepare for the transition we have this very weird Enterprise called the federal government with two million employees and it but a a political a boss level of four thousand who role in often not knowing very much and they have to quickly cram and figure out what's going on in these places like the Treasury Department of the Department of Energy or the Department of Agriculture and sometimes the people who roll in know a lot about it and been there before and summers they know nothing but a case the point of them from the point of view of the outgoing administration of preparing for this is to educate the people who come in about how this one of these enterprises work and the Obama administration had gone to because they were so grateful to the Bush administration for how they had prepared for the transition in no wait during a time of crisis Obama had directed his government to pay attention to this in a big way and he they had prepared across the government maybe the best course ever created and how the federal government works from agency to agency briefing books and people smart people waiting to teach and the Trump the administration largely just didn't show up for it I mean in some it's in some departments really didn't show up for it and I thought well that was a missed opportunity that's crazy I mean even if they disapprove of everything Obama stood for you could still learn awful lot from the outgoing people about how this enterprise works and the truth is the amount of overlap between the two administrations is much greater than the political noise would have you believe a lot of what our government does is not ideological so I wouldn't to go get the briefings I cuz her calling up career civil servants and former Obama people and saying look can you give me the talk with the briefing book that you were going to give whoever was supposed to show up from the Trump administration so I can figure out what they how it works because I don't know and what they might not know that might kill us and I picked almost arbitrarily I started with the Energy Department because it has always been mysterious to me I wonder what the hell they did in there and turns out they like a lot of the department's is kind of miss named they're really kind of the Department of nuclear weapons and neglect of that was very frightening and I wrote about it in Vanity Fair a couple of months ago in the new one the second one which I picked as a kind of test case I said to myself well the energy department ever'body want to read about that because a nuclear weapons is really it is it is seems alarming that a new administration would come in and be so haphazard about about the new foot nuclear stockpile let's pick a department that seems so sleepy nothing could go wrong so I picked the part of Agriculture I don't really know what goes on in there and spent several months going and getting those briefings it was riveting to me the kinds of people that who were there the things they had to say the range of activities this place did so I wrote about that I'm gonna keep doing it and move around the government keep doing it and we're exactly where it leads I don't know but I've you know as I suggested my answer your first question what you you kind of I grow I kind of feel an excitement about the material and I feel the excitement about this material if you take your book money ball for example that's a book about algorithms and algorithms but it became a really interesting story about people and personalities and America's pastime so how do you weave all of that together well first how does it start it doesn't start big I don't look at and say oh there's a book here it starts really like with this thing I'm doing now very small that it was an observation I was sitting here watching my local baseball team the Oakland A's oh and I would money was really starting to happen in baseball free agent salaries were starting to really go through the roof and I I looked at and I thought what's odd you know used to be all these people on this field work I mean they weren't paid the same but they were they were close to each other and now we have a left fielder who's getting paid 150 grand and the right fielder is being paid six million dollars and I wondered just how ticked off the left fielder was when I feel they're dropped up a fly ball okay I thought maybe there was kind of class resentment going on it so I watched it watching the money on the field for a while and then realized that no no the story is not that or it's not only that it's it's how much money the team has that the team has this team my team is a poor team it has a fourth the the payroll of the New York Yankees and yet its winning as many games as the New York Yankees how does that happen yeah market the team with the most money we just buy the best players and win all the games how come that's not happening so it starts with a question I go see the management to ask him about it their answer is so riveting it takes about a month to figure out that this is this isn't a magazine piece or a little article that this is a book in into this stew is tossed the really interesting character of Billy Beane planned but played by Brad Pitt in the movie but who who I realized at some point can be the engine for the narrative and there is a question of like how you put it together in a way that the reader will keep turning the pages I at the Pat the bottom of it that that in an odd way is the easy part once I start writing its figuring out what the story is about and in that case what I thought the story was about was not baseball I mean baseball was gonna be what we were gonna be reading about and think we were gonna read but underneath it the fact that a market of any people at any labor market could be so inefficient much less the market for baseball players I thought well that's incredible that you have these forget the baseball players these corporate employees who are doing what they do on the job with millions of people watching them do their job if statistics attached it wasn't the people were counting things they were doing their statistics attached to a lot of what they did on the field if those people can be so Mis valued that you can build a juggernaut of a baseball team out of the Miss value undervalued parts who can't it was so it was about the way markets miss value people and that was at the bottom of it right once I had that energy like that's an important story that transcends the the immediate subject matter just a matter of like laying out the things that interest me and try to figure out how they line up but when did you get to that point was there like an aha moment like this is going to be the story yes yes I can tell you exactly and I can't always answer that question so with every book put in the case of Moneyball it was funny I was I grow I just kind of try to figure out how this operation ran and I started with a with the front office and of course they were explaining to me that you know strategies and players are miss value because people are treated using their intuition as opposed to better statistical analysis which we're doing and I one point said to the front office the the Billy Beane I said you know what would have players thinking that cuz his level but it's kind of odd your team actually when you start to look at it they don't look like most teams you've got a leadoff hitter who's slow you got a first baseman who's never played first base that kind of thing and he said well the player is we don't tell the players anything like all the stuff you've been asking me about we don't tell them because it just confuses them don't so don't you go tell him but I thought this is this is a start of a conversation with the players in there in the middle of a science experiment they're kind of a lab rat you could talk to the lab rats so I still wasn't thinking as a book I was thinking at that point thing I had a long magazine piece I thought the penny hadn't dropped for me and I went to go so I went to go systematically get to know the players and I really just moved down the clubhouse the lockers in the first time I was in there after a game it was a night game in the Oakland Coliseum and I was waiting for my player to come back food agreed to meet me after the game come back from the showers I was kind of looking around and all the players were coming back from the showers so they're all naked it was the first time I'd really seen the Oakland A's naked and it was a really unpleasant sight I mean it was just like a baseball uniform like these suits they cover up a lot a lot of body fat where he shouldn't have been there like misshapen parts and I thought I had to thought if you line those naked bodies up against a wall and asked anybody what they did for a living no one would guess they were professional athletes you know no book TV interviewers maybe but not not professional athletes and I read when I realized just how they didn't look right really didn't look right I mentioned this the next day to Paul DePodesta who was Billy being second and come in and he said that's you know that's a funny thing you say that because we talked about that he said when a player looks wrong is when the one of the reasons it's one of the reasons the market missed values them we see a player and he looks like a famous baseball he looks like someone who's played before or he looks like a an idea of an athlete the market will get that he's a good player because they see him and they say oh that's a player but if he's short or fat or has two club feet one of their players had two club feet they just say something's off about him and the markets put off and he said we're he said we're essentially in the business of finding people who have defects and the more obvious and glaring the defect the better it is in a way because the defect will distract the baseball experts from seeing the real value of what that person is doing on a baseball field and that's when I thought oh my god how they look in baseball is having an effect on how they're valued how could that be and that's when I started thinking oh this is a story about markets and how screwed up they can get when they're valuing people and it was about not just baseball players you know women in the workplace you look like a woman and you're thought to be less valuable I that you know that it's just there's a lot of there there it applies to a lot of things it's about the way we stereotype when we look at people and how that affects the value of the people who are being stereotyped and how staff if that comes becomes self reinforcing so then I had I thought this is a universal subject and then it was just really just a question of how on earth you know how I lay it out but at that point I had a book and Billy Beane would say if you had him sitting here I tricked him into writing a book about him and he's right because at that point we're kind of six weeks into a relationship and I'm saying us a little magazine maybe for the knee piece for the New York Times magazine he was fine with that and when I rolled in after six weeks and said you know I think this might be a book he you could see is you know just his expression change he did not want a book written about him but it was too late he spent so much time with me he kind of thought I mean I can't quite get out of this now and so but that's how it happened to zero to seven four eight eighty two hundred for those in the eastern or central time zones and to zero to seven four eight 8201 three hours the first Sunday of the month in depth and our guest is Michael Lewis he'll get to your calls in just a moment you mentioned Billy Beane this is from 2011 let's watch the journey for me started when I stopped playing and worked under Sandy Alderson and he threw a pamphlet at me by a gentleman named Eric Walker and I read that and that was my Eureka moment and then I sort of went back and found all the bill Chainz stuff I could read the Bill James abstracts and read all those and and it just made more sense for me and once once I had access to that once once I had sort of seen that it was really no turning back for myself but as far as the you know the last 10 years when I really starts for me I think when Michael Lewis walked in our office and we were just trying to survive as a business trying to find a way to compete in a very challenging situation and I don't think we ever sort of envisioned that the organization itself would you know be put out front in something like this with sports analytics so it's a bit surreal your reaction well I told you he didn't yeah I'll tell you gets even funnier because he got he kind of got tricked into the book getting written about him not that was a bad thing and even when the book was done you know I understand that they were what they were doing was different I had to go I couldn't just spend my time with him I had to go see other baseball organizations and see what they were doing so I had a point of comparison even though much of that material virtually all that material would just end up on the cutting room floor so I wouldn't spend time with the Toronto Blue Jays and the Boston Red Sox and that I was down with the Texas Rangers and I went up and saw the Seattle Mariners and talked to various people affiliated with the organizations and realize yeah yeah this is really different so Billy Beane saw me doing all this he thought well well maybe it's not just about us you know he's writing about baseball and I don't I tend not to clue in my subjects too much about what I'm doing I don't want them become too self-conscious so he gets the book and reads it basically what a reader could read it was too late for him to Demi to change anything and he calls me and he's just horribly upset but well he's not shouting at me exactly but he's kind of shouting at me and I and I said I was thinking oh yeah and if I felt sneak about it I thought it's not totally in his interest for me to write this book because they're doing things that other people aren't doing and they're gaining a market advantage and if I if I expose it to the world the other teams will start doing any he'll lose is edge and I thought that was what he was upset about so I kind of I said so what are you upset about he says you have me saying and I can't say the word on TV and expletive you have me cursing all the time and I said what I said you do curse all the time and he says you don't understand my mother is gonna be really upset because my mother's gonna read this book and she's gonna be upset I said you I said your mother I said you know I thought I was relieved I thought if that's all you're worried about I thought you were worried I said to him that I've exposed your secrets to the other major league baseball teams and they're gonna steal women you're no longer gonna be able to win baseball games with less money and there's this long pause on the other end of the line he says you don't really think anybody in baseball is gonna read your book he said nobody's gonna read your book so then you people do read the book and it kind of goes the thing goes crazy and his life just blew up and to his credit he could so easily have said Michael Lewis does not know what he's talking about we gave him a few interviews yes but he got it all wrong he could so easily have just thrown me under the bus and he didn't do it he got back up and he fought back on my behalf so then flash forward a few months and a movie studio wants to buy the book to turn into a movie well I've had this up at that point to that point this was 2004 or 3 and I had a lot of movie studios buy a lot of things I've written and nothing had ever been made into a movie and what they do is they send you some money for an option for your thing and it's great free money they never make the movie they say they're gonna make anything never make it so Billy calls me and he says yeah I believe who called me so what he says some movie studio that wants to buy my life rights because they're gonna make it in a movie he's laughing like this is preposterous that's just not gonna happen and I said well would you say said I said no I don't want a movie I didn't want a book I don't wanna movie and I said no see you're thinking about it all the wrong way they just give you money they don't ever make anything they just buy all the stuff they give you money and you could just pick the money and put a drawer and they'll never make it and I listed all the things I mean from liars poker on dozen magazine pieces but they had bought and the amounts that I didn't pay for these things and he's listening he goes wow it's could deal I mean if I just sign it they'll give me the money and so he signs it sends it back in and every 18 months for six years he would get another check and it called me and say this is fantastic they just send you money and they never make the movie then one day it calls me he says you bastard he said Brad Pitt just called he's on the way to my house and my my my wife is putting on a makeup and the babysitter's wearing a dress and he said you said this wasn't gonna happen and I was as shocked as anybody I mean who could make a movie off baseball statistics I was a shock but this thing you know I in these relationships I have with my subjects like Billy Beane I really am the chicken at the ham and eggs breakfast and he's the pig that the subject is you know I'm interested there they're committed and and I can kind of move on with my life but a book and a movie exploding in a person's life the way that it did with Billy Beane it's amazing the grace with which he's handled it because it is not all pleasant it's and it's even if it is pleasant in being stroked which way this way it's it's odd and distorting and he's handled it very very well well another book that became a movie blindside is it true that your wife said you would be an idiot if you didn't write the book yes I mean that's so that you know I you may have already gathered in order to write a story I need to tell myself a story about why I'm writing the story and that I have an obligation to it I'm the only one who can tell this story because I have some privileged position in relationship to it and the blindside and it helps if it helps if it connects up to things you've done before not you never wanna do the same thing but if it least rhymes with something you've done before you say well yeah I can see why I would be the one who would write a book like that so it wasn't totally preposterous that I write a book even though it's about baseball if it's about how markets work because liars poker was about markets the new thing was about markets it was you know it was a it was a thematic connection but the blindside I mean that that the accident involved there since we have three hours I can tell you these stories at this length uh-huh you but you shut me up if I'm going on too long we can go longer but the the since anyone's listened to me this leg but anyway so we have two hours and 35 minutes person so so I had decided that I wanted to write a piece it was a quixotic exercise about the teacher who had most influenced me in my life who happened to been my bae a high school baseball coach a great man named billy Fitzgerald and I wanted to persuade the New York Times magazine to put Billy Fitzgerald on his cover and talk and and and just get at how someone gets into the the head of a kid so powerfully and with such permanence that the things he said to me then I hear now when I especially when I'm in trouble when I'm gonna pinch and I need strength I should point out that led to the book coach I did the book coach a little book coach and that's right so I was I was thinking about that as a story and I thought well you know I shouldn't just go with my experience I at least brought it out I ought to go see if other people how other people as adults who played for Billy Fitzgerald feel about him and I was in Memphis anyway and I thought you know Sean - he lives here I had not seen him since high school we we had been in the same class though from age from kindergarten through 12th grade when we both got out he said the only awards academic awards you and I got I remember turning to you we're the only awards we got whether where they gave you for being there for 13 years and so I call him and he picks me up at the airport and it's kind of funny the first thing he says to me when I get in the car he says he goes so who writes your books and I said I said I write my books he goes you don't write books yeah I know your names on them and you go out and promote them but who actually writes them and I said no Sean I sit down and write my books and he goes you're a dumbass like me in the back of the English class there's no way you write books took me forever to persuade him that I was actually the pen in the operation and not just a front man for a book selling operation so he takes me to his house and he's made he was a poor boy growing up and he's made a huge success of himself and it's this mansion on the outskirts of Memphis Tennessee and introduces me to his family and in his living room is a six-foot five-inch 350 pound black kid who basically isn't introduced to me or explained in any way and on the way back to the airport I said so who's who's a kid and he said well the an he that's Michael Oher he came to our school leann saw him in shorts and a t-shirt in the going home off on the bus stop in the snow and pulled over and basically one thing led to another she realized he was homeless basically homeless that he couldn't he was not functioning in school anyway so she took him in and Sean and I now back in touch and I start to hear the story of what's going on in their house and it's clearly Pygmalion or my fair lady except with a modern twist they are Sean and his wife rich white evangelical Christian Republicans and they are trying to turn Michael Orion to one too and I watch and with some success all of a sudden he starts to become under her regime he starts to succeed in school he starts to kind of like come out of a shell of it Sean had been a really gifted athlete he was drafted by the New Jersey Nets maybe the New York nets at the time but he would to be a play in the NBA that you might have been drafted by the Cincinnati Reds - he was that good of athlete it played maybe could have played professional baseball but Shawn had that and Shawn is a fixer like he knows how to fix things and he looked at Michael and he said I can train him up Michael thought himself as a basketball player but the shape is not a basketball player shape Shaw said I could train him up so some junior college will warn him some junior college coach is gonna want him and that's going to be his ticket into college that the coach is going to get him into a school and so pause for a sec because of Moneyball France sports franchises start to get in touch with me we want to talk about analytics and intellectual how you intellectualize their sport and I became friends with a guy in the front office at the San Francisco 49ers football team and he and I started talking about what's the what are the interesting questions about money in the sport and he said well the interesting question is how you it's not how much money you have because everybody basically has the same payroll it's more it's more how the money is distributed across the field and I said you have any data on what's happened to that since free agency happened you know back you know it was a time when everybody got paid whatever they got paid by the organization but then free idea to market emerged what does the market say is the valuable position and he brought out this data and it was riveting because what we all would expect the quarterback is the highest-paid player on the field but he used to be before in the olden days like a running back I'm more a more high profile player was the second highest paid and what had happened because the free agency is this guy called the left tackle who guards the quarterbacks Blind Side became the second highest paid player in the NFL and no one knew their names but they were thought to be a very peculiar physical type they're basically elephants who were ballerinas they were huge they had especially big hands because they could grab but the defenders coming in and especially long arms they were incredibly agile and quick so I had that kind of kind of learning about that one day Sean - it calls me up he said you never believe what just happened I said what he said Nick Saban who was the coach he's now the coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide but he than the coach the LSU Tigers and he was a kind of acquaintance of Shawn's had come through the school and seen Michael Oher on a basketball court and said to Shawn that's a future NFL left tackle but I didn't seen him in a football field at that point Michael Oher had not at he'd been in uniform on the football team they had a bent him on the bench because when he was a sophomore because he would be they thought he was a defensive player and he didn't really when I hit anybody and seemed like disoriented on the field and well at this point I've started to turn to my wife and say she heard my wife Tabitha had heard some of the story and much of stories quite moving I mean LeAnn to e shows Michael or his bed and he he stares that it and says you know I've never had a bed you know in my life this is a new thing for me and that's in the movie that's in the movie I mean these sorts of things were happening but I thought that's not my kind of story kind of naft to go and get your high school or a kid you grew up with and make up a main character of a book seems like it's cheating in some way Sean came out to visit because he was the color commentator of the Memphis Grizzlies at the time just for fun and they were playing the Golden State Warriors he stayed with us we went to dinner he started telling Tabitha stories she was in tears and I had said her you know there is a book here but it's not my book it's a book some other kind of person would write and we got in the car she said you're idiot if you don't make this the next book that the the the inherit drama in the story will carry it and I realized at some point that there was a way to organize it that I could harmonize with my own writing past and it was that the if you asked the question how does Michael Oher go from being a homeless illiterate foraging street kid who's likely to be dead or in jail in years he's in a very bad neighbor in Memphis and his projected future when he's 15 is not pretty how does he go from my least valued invisible people in in his age to one of the most valued we did all of a sudden he's a future NFL left tackle which in fact he became well in all in two years oh well he's not left technically NFL nobody volunteers yes how does that happen well one of the things is the forces in the NFL football that led the particular things he could do to become very very very valuable and another thing is is a mother so I'm gonna write a story around this kid this kid kind of at the center of it but not in it and about these forces and what got me jazzed about it was I thought I mean it was related to the Moneyball story I thought we think when we think of inner city poor America we think oh well the athletes get out right maybe this is because they do get out some their their talents are so conspicuous they get spotted as basketball players or football players and the truth is that even something as conspicuous as a future NFL of tackle would have been missed but for the accident of the TUI family and some other people but nevertheless he it was it took some accidents if that kid can be missed who can't be what talents are in there you know what future concert pianist is not being trained well it's such a waste so that's what motivate finally motivate you write the story but if my wife had not said to me you can do this I don't think got a try now I got I got going on in my writing career I've gotten less concerned about whether I can explain why I'm the one who should write this if I feel strongly enough about I think I kind of do it now but back then I and I'm just anxious about whether I was the one who could do this and your wife Tabitha Soren our audience may know who she is I'm sure they do you know most people know who she is but more quickly than they know who I am so she was the face of MTV for a stretch when I met her she was that she was on air at MTV she's now a photographer and art photographer you can go to her website and see her photograph she's really really really good and I've watched her have a second act which is hard to do when she was on TV it's funny I don't know if you're this way but she she she didn't ever really have the ambition to be on TV she wanted to be she started her life behind the camera as a kind of producer she was interested in being behind the camera and the talent one day didn't show up and really the guy ran places and you go do it you get on camera and the person who didn't show up was gone and she just took the job so that's how she ended up on TV but I think her heart is really on the other side of things how did you meet well that's funny story I was covering for the New Republic in a very peculiar way the 1996 presidential campaign and it was dole versus Clinton and it was a basically dull and macmaine candidates we're not saying anything interesting and but I noticed that there was a really interesting story that was kind of on the side of the campaign it was all the people who are running for president are never gonna win and you most of them whose names you'll never know I mean it's amazing how many people in this country think they're running for president I mean you know this probably someone in your neighborhood you secretly thinks they're running for president but they're always there with all these minor characters candidates Pat Buchanan is a pretty well-known when Alan Keyes or Maury Taylor who had this passionate following far more passionate than the following of the major candidates who we're never gonna win and I thought I can use them to tell a travel story a political travel story about America so I was on the road just constantly and the primary ends and there's a little bit of an intermission and I'm looking for material and I think I'm gonna start picking up some of these trends I I've spotted while I've been on the road and one of them was adrift in youth youth politics an MTV with Ed something called the choose or lose bus I think they actually owned it but they were affiliated with it in some way registering young people that were around the country this bus registering young people to vote so I called nice said can get on the bus just to see what you're doing and the publicist unbeknownst to me and MTV went to Tabitha who was going to be on the other end of the bus where the bus was going that I was on Seattle we were going from Portland to Seattle she went to Tabitha and she said Michael Lewis called and demanded in an interview with you which I had not done I knew she was but not really and then they came to me and said would you like to interview Tabitha Soren why not so we met in her attitude she was tits when she showed up for this interview because the interview ended up being it was it was dinner she said I'll have dinner with him I'm flying in I've got an event the next morning he's not allowed to tag along at the event I've seen him what he does to people in the pages of the New Republic and I don't want it done to me and so I will I'll have dinner with him and then tell him he can't come any day any more than that so she flew in and we had dinner and I was allowed to come along the next day and and the next so that was nineteen thousand 1996 we were married in the fall of 97 and we have now three kids who were floating around the world more to talk about with our guest Michael Lewis here on c-span two's book TV in depth let's get to your phone calls George from New York City go ahead please yes hi in your book I'm doing project you write about Richard Tyler when you say but he wasn't at least when he came upon Danny and a Moses theory anybody's idea of a future Nobel Prize haha how did you guess a year before he actually got the Nobel Prize that he would get it well should I give some background here so it's about the most my most recent book which I published it's in this last December by the way why the title the undoing project the undoing product so the book is about this collaboration between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman who himself won the Nobel Prize in Economics which was quite a trick because he wasn't an economist and didn't actually know all that much about economics but the work they did in psychology has so infected economics that economics caning the prize couldn't ignore him the there's a general Rianne sir to your question and that was when I thought about what these two guys had done and what they'd done was attack the idea of rational man in various ways they showed the way the mind the human mind even in a calm state was susceptible to making the cognitive era - - - making masseur Tain's and that these mistakes were meaningful and would lead to things like medical diagnosis and bad investments in the markets and bad decisions about which baseball players to employ if you were a baseball general manager they were I thought their undoing essentially a false and conceited view of man but the phrase itself came off of Amos Tversky died in 1996 but I had access to his papers and in his file drawer he had he had a folder that was labeled the undoing project and this was particularly poignant because these two guys Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman had a collaboration that was more than just an intellectual collaboration it was a love affair it there was no sex but sex was almost beside the point it was like a passionate love affair and the undoing project was the what Amos called the project that he and Danny were working on when they busted up and they busted up because Danny thought Amos wasn't interested in the ideas and the project was they were at that moment trying to untangle the rules of the human imagination and the mere idea that the imagination of Bayes rules and is not just this a free-floating undefined undefined bull thing is a breathtakingly interesting idea and they weren't attacking it in a breathtakingly interesting way Danny had it had come with the original idea he thought Amos wasn't interested in his ideas but Amos secretly was scribbling away in this folder that he called the undoing project and it's tragic that there was this miscommunication between these two people after the question he asked me a question so in so the bridge from Kahneman and Tversky from Amy and Amos and Danny into economics is Richard Thaler it's the main bridge there on the bridges but he fail or is an economist who sees these psychological insights these people have had about how people how the mind works belong in economics and he won the Nobel Prize a month ago I mean are you gonna get it in December I guess for his work it wasn't that hard when I wrote that line in the book it wasn't that hard to guess that Richard Thaler was likely one day to win the Nobel Prize you know there are dozen people who every year their names are kind of bandied about and he was one of them and the thing that was so interesting about him personally and why he makes this little you mean is important in the intellectual history but he was a guy who who wasn't good at school I mean you think of people who were professional economists you think they're all straight-a students in high school and good at math and all that he wasn't he had a very interesting he came in his own profession in an odd way and there was a point in his career where he was completely willing to give up economics he thought he didn't belong in the profession and in part because the profession it was had an idea of human beings he thought was absurd so he was in a funny way he was predisposed to to exploiting these psychological insights ok so so in the book page 206 amos says it's amazing how dull history books are given how much of what's in them must be invented yes so one of the insights that drop out of condiment diversities work is you know we're pattern we're pattern seeking creatures that we will we will see patterns even when they that they are they don't really exist no real pattern and Amos gave a talk to a group of historians early in there in the 70s room while they were early in their collaboration he was showing the way people will after an event we've a narrative that makes it seem like it was inevitable this event they Crump being elected president historians will come along and show all why that was bound to happen when they could never have predicted it happening that in fact what they're doing after the fact is imposing a false sense of certainty on how how the world moves that they're that they're making it they're making life seem much events seem much more inevitable than they actually are and that this almost is woven into the the profession of historian and that in fact the truth of life is their reality as Amos predicts point it's a cloud of possibilities and they're there many alternative realities that might have happened and there was nothing there that life is not as deterministic as all that he put it much better much better put in the book because I put use his words rather than mine but the person who watched him give this talk to historians in 1975 said the historians why I mean that they were ashen face when they walked out because they were aware he was showing them their work condiment overseas work and they were aware that they were susceptible to the same sorts of mental errors and imposing a false sense of like a kind of cleaning up the past in order to make it a neat story that we all do as we move through life if someone were to write a book about Michael Lewis which author would would you want to write the story is it does it have to be a little living author no you know it would be a very dull book I mean this is the truth about just generally about writers lives there's probably like an inverse relationship between how interesting the life is and how interesting the work is that when you see a writer start to have a really colorful interesting life the work is probably not going to be that good I mean if he becomes a character and I'm not really so there's not much material so I work I you know on the one hand tempted to say I wish it on some writer I hate because it would be punishment he's gonna have to go figure out how to make this interesting and it's not but someone who would kind of get me I would be fun to be written about George Plimpton he had been fun he'd be fun to have someone it's someone someone like that who who approaches the act of writing as entertainment as for himself that there's a an aspect of fun to what he's doing it certainly wouldn't be some ponderous intellectual that would be a mistake that would be a big mistake it would be some some really high-level competent journalist has a tight that's what I'd picked but but this is I mean this isn't gonna happen I promise you we'll go to Michael next in Newark New Jersey thank you for waiting Mike no problem hey Mike I'm a huge fan I just want to know if you've ever considered writing about like public education or I think if you spent a year in a public school in an inner city I think there'd be a lot of stories there Thanks I'm thinking about writing about the Department of Education right now that might lead me there but but so the answer the short answer is no I mean that I did and it's partly because I don't pick my subjects that way I don't think oh here's a sphere here's an area I must enter health care or public education and I mean it really is more accidental something curious if I I read something in the newspaper of something really curious that it happened inside some school and it might lead me to a person in a school and that might lead to a book but that hasn't that hasn't happened something I'm not interested though the my middle child is in a giant public school I work you know when I'm home I I'm I'm derelict of duty right now this fall I was meant to be a front desk volunteer at the public school and it is the most entertaining job and high-stress job in the world at you this I've been asked four thousand questions I don't know the answers to any of them when people come in because it's just this chaotic place there's clearly like material in that world it's such it's such a like vital place but I I just hadn't you know I I haven't I haven't stumble upon the way in Chris from Humble Texas your next good afternoon you good good afternoon I am live I live right outside Houston I'm a long-suffering Astros fan and I'm a very happy camper today and probably for the next month or so and I loved Moneyball I just want to tell you that it was a awesome book and it changed not only my thinking about baseball but business in general so very very well done here's my question I'm not a in depth huge baseball fan but I understand that the Houston Astros management has taken an approach that has been described as tanking the team in order to improve its prospects for a future run at a championship to me that sounds a little odd and kind of not right and I'd like to get Michael Lewis's comments on that thank you very much Chris thank you and congratulations on the Astros so there's a moral dimension in a strategic dimension to that question strategically the Philip Sam hinkie at the Philadelphia 76ers is did this and then ended up losing his job because the management couldn't stomach what he told them he was going to do in the first place is like accumulate high draft picks by not intentionally losing but not really trying to win and if you because you the worse you do the higher up you are roughly in the in the draft you have access to elite talent year after year if you lose year after year and you can build I mean I think the 76ers are showing it you can tank your way through a really good team baseball it's a little trickier I mean I haven't actually thought about this I'm just talking about as well you know I'm not like the world's authority on this I saw a headline about this the other day Astros tanked their way to the World Series and I was aware back when they were losing those games year after year in the hands of really good management that that was probably thinking we're gonna get the first pick of the draft for several years running and that's going to make a big difference I'm sure that strategically that's but it's it's harder with baseball because it's harder to identify the best talent the the best amateur talent that it's that the best amateur talent in basketball is a little more obvious and just because you get the first pick in the draft doesn't mean you're gonna draft the right person with it and there's many many many examples of first it first picks in the draft who themselves have tanked either because they've gotten hurt or because they just weren't as good as everybody thought they were so as a strategy you know it's a little trickier in baseball in this and I don't think that's just what they did I mean it was a combination of stuff they did and it is a sophisticated that houston astros front of office is a sophisticated intellectual operation I mean this an event happen in baseball a couple years ago that passed without that much commentary at least not as much commentary as I thought Jeff Luna who runs the Astros had come from the Cardinals and after you've been at the Astros someone at the Cardinals hacked into the Astros computers and the FBI got involved and there was talk about someone's gonna go to jail I lost track of the story but I thought is it an amazing thing that we actually have management information intellectual property in a baseball front office that's worth hacking that if you go back 20 years you can hack it you know you're gonna there's nothing you could have had that would've been worth having so that that they were there doing things there and that clearly the other team people in baseball find interesting and if they just lost they wouldn't know that wouldn't have been a strategy to win now morally how do I feel about teams like the 76ers maybe not trying so hard not the players on the court but the management that assembles the talent assembles talent with a view to the fourth year from now rather than this season duh you know it's a little distasteful but it doesn't bother me that much and it's kind of a deal with the fan base like will the fan base put up with it where the customers put up with it for long enough to build the team and if you really if it's really the main strategic option for becoming an NBA champion it's kind of hard to blame them I mean I think that if I'd own the Philadelphia 76ers and Sam hinkie had walked in and said we're gonna tank for three years and then we got a shot at winning the championship but if we don't do that I promise you you're never gonna win I don't think I said guess what they said go try it and I'd hoped I'd had the guts not to fire him at the end of it liars poker came out in 1989 and I think in the book you talk about your own dad buying stocks and trying to figure out huh well you're laughing so you know the story that it who was making the money by selling the stocks to you and your family got is that that's not in liars poker I may have mentioned this at some point there's a funny moment my father still brings up from time to time when he was trying to teach me about the stock market and I was I don't know when I was 12 13 years old he came home with a because my father was very interested in the stock market with a little black book leather book where you listed your investments and kept track of them and he explained to me what a stock was and that he'd bought me 20 shares in a company called chart house which was a restaurant company I think he picked it because that was a good company but he also thought I you know something I relate to like they own some restaurants in New Orleans and I would could follow it and in the ledger it says like say it's ten dollars a share it says 20 shares ten dollars a share and this is down below paid two hundred and thirty dollars I said well ten times xx two hundred what's the 230 why don't we take 230 he says well the other thirty is the Commission to the broker and I said what's the broker he says oh he's the one who who you call and you tell him you want to buy he's want to play gets the places the order I said and I said something like I mean all you do all he does is take your phone call and then call somebody and say buy that and for that he's pitch arching that and my father said yeah and I said where where does he live I want to go egg his house I was so outraged so I think it my first my first brush with Wall Street I had some of the same instincts I preserved to this day which is that charging too much for their services well along those lines you say in the book page 287 of liars poker that as my new year's resolution I'd stop selling people things that I didn't think they should buy for Lent I'd given up my New Year's resolution you're taking me back to my youth but it was one of the one of the threads that runs through the financial books liars poker the big short flash boys is how screwed up the incentives are in the financial world so a stockbroker back in the day and still to this day to some extent has an incentive to just have you trade that's how he makes money and in fact you're much better off not trading that lunch so it's an incentive to do give bad advice now in what I mean if doctors had the incentive well they do sometimes have the incentive to prescribe medication that you shouldn't take or give you an operation you don't need now doctors you know have a code of ethics and they try to stop themselves from that but even doctors are susceptible when there's a financial incentive to do things that they probably shouldn't do and and when you're dealing we're not with someone else's heart but just their wallet it's even easier to give in to the bad incentives and the bad incentives I had when I felt I felt them immediately when I sat down and was you know I was I guess my job was bond salesman at Salomon Brothers but in fact I was just my job is to sell whatever they had and it wasn't just bonds it was to and it was just sell the stuff that we made the most money on and you got the most kudos and the phone calls from the guys at the top of the firm and promises and bonuses if you sold the stuff that no one else could sell and that stuff isn't good stuff that's you know they're more money the firm made off of what you sold the probably the worse it was for the person you were selling it to so you do all kinds of deals with yourself you you know you fool yourself about like oh this isn't that bad we're gonna make it work and other people don't see the value in it and blah blah blah but it you know I the first six months into the job I can remember the pit in my stomach I was what 24 years old staring at the ceiling at night I was living in London not being out of sleep because I felt just like bothered by the situation I was in I got over it everybody I was taught I wasn't talking to widows and orphans I was talking to that my customers were professional money managers I mean they're people who were running hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars and they should have known better than to listen to me and I wasn't telling anybody thinking that things that I thought would actually lose the money but I was aware that there's like this it's very grey and and and I think you know it still is were you making money was the firm making money personally yeah I mean it seems like pennies compared to what they get paid now but to me it was a fortune the first year when I was 24 are you gonna I think it was all in about $90,000 the second year it was 250 or so and they were caps on what they'd pay you they had a device for making sure we didn't get too uppity and asked for too much money they said of your second year out that's the most you can get paid but there was a track I mean I was told that if I stayed it would kind of be double the next year and double the next year you know that I can make that kind of money and $250,000 when I'm what was I had 25 or 26 it seemed like it I mean it was a fortune so yeah I was I was making I was making money the firm however this is how your mind gets screwed up when you're in that world I had something I knew how much money the stuff I was doing roughly was making for the firm and it was tens of millions of dollars and so I can remember feeling kind of cheated when they were paying me what they're paying me and that's why I thought I get out of here though my mind is going the wrong way here you know because of what they're paying me was trivial but it was a fun relationship I mean I they it was in many ways that world the financial world when I was in it was just a lot more fun place to be I mean it was outrageous in other ways but the fact that I could be there on that trading floor sitting at the felt like the center of the financial it was the center of the financial universe and my job was at the center of the center and be writing magazine articles while I'm there that are about what I'm seeing albeit under a pseudonym but known to my superiors that were highly cynical about what was a southern name Diana Bleecker my mother's my mother's maiden name is Diana Bleeker Munro I wrote under Diana Bleeker and that one or two of appeared in the New Republic and they would be all they were all over the Salomon Brothers trading floor people didn't most people didn't know it was me but the management it was me and that they kind of just let it happen I mean it was a charm to that and when I left when I left I realized I can make a living as a writer there was enough attention being paid to when I was writing and people wanted it was a book contract and I left him the 250 grand I was getting paid I left that for $40,000 book contract and it felt like the best deal I ever made but when I explained to the bosses who were my bosses where I was fond of that I was gonna quit to go be a writer I was gonna write this book about Wall Street there you would think well their response would be red alert hit the button Michael Lewis doesn't get out of here you know sign this non-disclosure agreement don't write a book about us instead it was they set heaven with me like it sat down with a crazy person and said don't do this you're gonna get rich here don't ruin your future by going and trying to be a writer they were so genuinely concerned about my mental health that they not about some book that there was charm in that and if you try to do that now you know you're a goldman sachs right now and you've rolled out the door after two and a half years it said i'ma go write a book I mean you wouldn't get home so what did John gut friend think of the book he didn't like it the book had met with a and who was he it's John ran I ran Salomon Brothers while I was there and he's he's not died recently but he the book met with an odd reaction in the firm it was it was banned from the trading floor but everybody brought it in anyway and ran it under the desk I was getting calls from friends I mean I had friends then I was just like could being constantly informed of what was going on the people the upper management was vastly irritated with me I caused them no end of trouble the rank-and-file mostly thought this is really funny and it didn't bother them at all and most because most of the people at that point and become so cynical about the management that they didn't feel any particular corporate loyalty so it wasn't that it wasn't regarded as the act of betrayal it might otherwise have been there the place had had lost a kind of whatever corporate identity it had attacked attachment the greater good there was much less of that than you might suspect and so but good friend himself I mean we hadn't we had many comrades would call in later years I had lunch with him he would call me from time to time he at the end he got he fit he found it amusing he bought boxes of the books and he when people came to his office he'd sign a copy for them and give him a little copy he told me at one point I was my biggest customer so in the end there was some reconciliation and I I actually I grew very fond of him but he did not like the book and the title might be pretty obvious but how did you come up with liars poker was the game they played they got the people who play the highest stakes for the highest stakes of the firm and I thought it captured them the level a level of a mendacity but mendacity has a game and and it was a gambling environment and it just gave you them that feel it didn't it I just pop into my head I still have a folder that has called my title folder I do it with every book and I never our title when I'm working on a tile pops in my head I write it down in the folder I don't know what I have to live with it for a bit so there'll be dozens and dozens of possible titles and I go look at that and I can remember that I what I did is I took like six of the titles I thought all I thought they were all bad including liars poker sent them to my editor Starling Lawrence at Norton he's still my editor but it was my first book and no idea what I was doing and he circle eyes poker said that's the title so he picked it I picked it Tim in San Rafael California you are next go ahead hi Michael Lewis you are my absolute favorite author I live in San Rafael across the bay from you and this shows you the power of c-span letting me let me get in touch with you my I have been watching lately the news that all the climate change disasters all of the Hurricanes from the southeast and Houston and Puerto Rico and the devastating fires that we've had here in the Bay Area and it brought back to me a very vivid story about the insurance industry and how they don't pay claims even though you have a solid contract with them and it brought back memories of a a very big story that I know about it between the insurance industries and the government and so forth and I wondered how does a person get a story to you how does a person get a chance to at least tell you the idea of a story or something that actually happened over a period of 20 years and gets you to think about it or get you to suggest someone that might be able to bring those issues out into the open for the public 10 thanks for the call thanks for the call so uh you know it's funny lots of people know my next book my next book is I I mean it may be the most common thing that people do is come up and say you need to write a book about X the problem with that is that what they really should be doing is that there feels very strongly about whatever this X is but I don't have any particular feeling about it at all and I always wonder why don't you write a book about X since you care so much about it so I I'm only once in my career had someone tell me you should write a story about X and it actually ended up being true and I did write a story about X we can come back to that mostly I for whatever reason need to discover my own stories and and that so I don't like I don't have like a website I stay off of social media entirely as the I try to hide my phone number um but but the I do read letters people write when they say you really should write a story about X and that really is probably the best way to get is send a letter to my publisher and my publisher forwards it and I'll read it but I wouldn't encourage him I'd do it because I mean their likelihood that I'm gonna actually pick change my life for two years because of the story you want me to tell is it's kind of it slow and I'm not that good so the next question is aren't you need the story told I can understand that feeling where do you go I'm not the obvious best person because I'm not sitting in the middle of a media enterprise the obvious best person would be I don't know it's out there the San Francisco Chronicle or some journalistic enterprise might might be a good place to go to every now and then someone will come to me and say you need to write a story about X and I'll think no I don't need to write that story but I do know a writer who writes that kind of story you might be good for that but I can't I don't know if anybody's that that's ever led anywhere good so this is a long way of saying I'm a frustrating person to deal with if what you hope to get out of me is a book about subject you want me to write about but that story about X that you did write about with lies it flash boys and flash boys is about a genuine attempt I think the most meaningful genuine attempt in my lifetime to reform Wall Street from within by a group of people mainly immigrants but who are now Americans who who saw just how distorted it unfair the stock market had become and had the big stock markets had abdicated their responsibilities to provide a to be up to be an umpire to provide a fair place for little guys and big guys to come together to trade and set about creating an exchange to prevent high-frequency traders from taking advantage of everybody else when I first heard this story I was working on the Big Short and it was Danny Moses who's one of the characters in the big short said to me a this Canadian guy from the Royal Bank of Canada strolled into our office and we've been having problems with our stock market market orders he explained what was going on that's your if your next book you're not gonna believe it you're not gonna believe this guy that he's been this guy at that point Brad katsu I mean it spent several years essentially with a team of people engaged in this forensic investigation of how the stock market actually worked and he presented some of this to these guys and they said this is your story and I went yeah yeah yeah yeah let's give this give back to the Big Short and I wrote and I wrote the big short I read a newspaper article a couple of years on about a Russian guy who had worked at Goldman Sachs and been arrested when he walked out the door of Goldman Sachs for stealing proprietary high-frequency stock market trading code that he had written or helped to write but Coleman regarded it as their property and he had taken some flash drive and the FBI was on him right away and I got interested I thought hmm isn't that interesting then the back end of the financial crisis the only one who gets from from goldman sachs who gets arrested as the person goldman sachs what's arrested and then there was this bit in the news accounts where it said this high frequency trading code the reason he had to be arrested and held without bail was this code if it fell into the wrong hands could it was some hyperbolic language used by the prosecutors but in the wrong hands that could like disrupt global financial markets or and I thought Goldman Sachs is in the right hands you know I thought it you or you're presuming it's been in the right hands if they can beat that there's code that can do this so I needed I realize I needed to know what high-frequency trading was and I remember Danny Moses saying there was this guy who had explained among other things high-frequency trading so I called him up and I said who is this guy and I went which I should have done in the first place and sat and listened to some lectures from these guys who had been investigating the stock market and my jaw was on the floor not a lot why didn't I listen in the first place it were in there so flashboards becomes about because of that conversation but i can't think of another book that does let's get back to your phone calls Jim West Palm Beach Florida you're next hi Michael big fan red liars poker red thick short saw the movies Blind Side here's my question I was wondering if you could give us your comment on the current state of the market and the way that Federal Reserve the New York Fed the BIS the world central bank's where some of them are now buying stocks and they also have this low historic interest rate environment which is sort of an enabler of the government running huge deficits l and that how this is you know this low interest rates are really hurting savers you know your normal saver and then also lastly just you know right now we have a record amount of margin debt and it's put our stock market into record territory by a lot of different metrics but it seems like no one cares until the yield curve inverts anyway I just appreciate your thoughts on this so I suspect my thoughts on this they're not as interesting as your thoughts on this I think you're probably paying closer attention to this than I am I would just say broadly that you look at the markets now we're still living in the world of the financial crisis I mean that would fit with central banks which the central max is still trying to back their way out of what they had to get what they felt they had to go to in response to the financial crisis which was the pump huge amounts of liquidity into the end of the markets do things like buy hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities and they're finding it hard hard to get you know when you want you lower interest rates to zero or basically zero coming back the other way is hard I wonder if you know a stock market yeah I've never like thought much about my opinion opinions of the stock market or anybody else's I have know why the stock market does what the stock market does is a mystery to me and I think that like there was a conventional wisdom if Donald Trump was an elected president the next thing was going to happen is the stock market was going to collapse and the standard collapse for about a moment and then it's done what it's done the the the callers right that one of the unfortunate side effects of the monetary policy that was required to numb the pain of the financial crisis is that savers are hurt and I and probably one of the unfortunate side effects is that people if there's not a normal return on on savings people go looking for risk that maybe they shouldn't take so well let me have you respond this is from last year on CNBC about flash boys you said it in the book that's when I knew the markets were rigged and it's disgusting that you're trying to parse your words now do you okay you can say that you are quoted that way in the book but what okay let's walk through exactly do you say do you believe it or not cuz you said it let me walk you through an example so yes or no question do you believe it or not I believe the markets are rigged okay so there you go and I also think that you're a part of the rig so if you want to do this let's do this I think the word high-frequency traders should be eliminated from the industry vocabulary you used it 20 times in the book this computerized trading about his book there's computer out you hit what you're quoting computerized trading and computerized scalping people can trade with computers they will till the end of time people use computers to scalp they've always looked at game to markets you cannot scalp trades you cannot scalp orders that are on I yet Michael Lewis's you watch that from August of last year CNBC wasn't August of last year it was it was well before that it was the book came out in 2000 maybe 14 mm-hmm to think about that but this is right when the book came out that was a yeah so that was that was a great moment so that's Brad Katsuyama who's the main character of flash boys who's reluctant to go after the guy who is the who runs the bats exchange which was seems to have been created for the benefit of high-frequency bats is better alternative trading systems it's yes but it's a great it's a great acronym it is bats it's set up on the other side right on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel and and stock market orders from Manhattan go through optical fiber through the Lincoln Tunnel and they get there first and high-frequency traders is when Brad katsuyama starts to discover there's something wrong in the market what he finds out is happening is that high-frequency traders are putting small orders on this exchange and are able to detect the orders coming through that market and race to other exchanges in New Jersey like the New York Stock Exchange that are further away and front-run the orders so what type of timeframe how many seconds are in a seconds they're talking about a second Lesly microseconds I mean you know yeah I mean we're talking about the the the you can't it's very hard to conceive of the units of time that are meaningful in the stock market units of time we're talking about the speed of light right the speed of light from from from the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel to Malwa New Jersey I mean that's pretty fast and people were at the time I don't know if they're still doing this the exchanges were selling the right to position your trading machine next to the server which was actually the stock market and the closer you there in these buildings people are fighting to get their computer next to the exchange computer so they could get a faster view of the market than everybody else so everybody wasn't seeing is it wasn't isn't seeing the market at the same time everybody sees the high frequency traders are able to cobble together a faster picture of the market than the official picture of the market anyway that exchange you just showed on television that was on CNBC there's several interesting things about it the guy who was looking to fight with Brad Katsuyama lost his job soon thereafter it was reported because of lies he had told on-air the New York Attorney General got in touch with bats and said you can't misrepresent your business Brad cops got me asked him some questions and he and they said he misrepresented what they were actually doing so he's gone the exchange you know it looks it ended up being I was there but not there I was in a remote location but they had me in a little box and I was kind of supposed to be participating in this conversation and just end up being a fight between the two of them and a guy from bats was informed that this was gonna happen in advance we don't neither Brad nor I knew he was going to be there until we showed up so I think what they thought was going to happen is that Brad would be humiliated instead he humiliated the guy the great moment I remember from this though was that night I went to dinner with two guys who ran at the time Goldman Sachs's equity department and they had seen how rotten the market had gotten and made a tactical decision that they were going to support Brad kotse amin building this new exchange because they didn't want to be associated with what was going to happen if anybody ever found out what how the stock market they were gonna they do they joined the forces of good so this is why I'm having dinner with them and they said that when that show aired which the CNBC producer I don't know if it's true or not but later told me was the most watched episode on CNBC till then to my wife I bragged to her and she said congratulations you're the tallest but nevertheless she's the the these guys said the trading floor at Goldman stopped now Goldman owns probably I don't they still do but they own a stake in the bats exchange they did not own a stake in Brad katsu Yama's exchange because Brad wanted to keep it clean he wanted to nobody with any particular interest to own my stake in the business you know what the broker is doing his business they were very been very happy to so while it's going on this old Goldman partner like guy from the old days is standing there watching it and he turns to the head of the stock market department he says that angry guy talking about the guy from bet he goes is it true we got like a 50 million dollar stake in that company my friend says yeah he says the little guy I mean Brad cuts him he says true we don't know what any of that market yes yep he goes we're screwed we're screwed everybody was watching it thought that was a watershed moment I thought that that one day when this story is told honestly from 50 years from now people will go back and say that was a big moment in the history of Wall Street I really think that and I think his a world that's been built to combat Brad katsuyama people itical campaign was essentially organized against the book and against him regulators are being bought and sold every day by by the financial industry to try to preserve the rents that are being extracted by high-frequency traders I think they're gonna win I and I don't quite how their profit in a profitable exchange now but I think they're gonna win and we're gonna say that was important moment because because the regulatory apparatus has proven itself unable to give us mind around it can't can't it just can't control Wall Street they can't control Wall Street because you know at some level when the regulator is being paid 150th of the with the person they're regulating is being paid the incentives or get all screwed up the regular just wants to go work for the person they're regulating but reform can happen with entrepreneurship people who can come in and say and blow the whistle and say you don't investors you don't wanna be ripped off maybe you know maybe it's not a lot of money you're being ripped off but you doesn't have to be this way let's organize come to us a little bit an honest business and I think if he shows that that's possible that it will happen in other markets and you're right that was from April of 2014 so let me go from that to I think these are probably two of your shortest books coach lessons in the game of life and home game an accidental guide to fatherhood yep yes the question why'd you write them what did you learn different different in each case so the home game is essentially a journal I kept structure journal the first six months after every each of my three children were born and what prompted it was I was having and even when our first child was born Quinn she's now 18 I was having wholly inappropriate responses to the situation I didn't understand why I didn't feel instantly attached to this creature why I didn't feel what a father knew father was supposed to feel and I would talk to my wife about this and she says she wants you either go to therapy or write a write it down kind of so I started write it down and I confessed to my friend the journalist Jacob Weisberg the kinds of things I was thinking and feeling and he would say I don't have nerve to say that but I'm thinking and feeling the same things he just had kids and so he said maybe you should write BNE he said basically maybe you should be the one who gets in trouble by saying all this stuff and so I started to write a little big I just essentially started publish bits of the journal in the online magazine slate that Jake Jacob edited and it became eventually became that and I tell you that when people come up to me - when people come up to me want to have the warmest conversations about the stuff I've written those are the two books they want to talk about that it's either it's either dad's who said thank God thank God I thought I was going insane and I read it now yet or moms who come up and say I thought my husband was the biggest jerk you made me you gave me great relief - no there was one who was even bigger did you feel differently though after your subsequent kids I but I am such a involved and in love dad that all that seems like a distant memory and if I hadn't written down idol ID and say that it was great right from the beginning but it was not great right from the beginning it was horrible the so I'm really really glad I preserve and preserved it so I did I feel different with subsequent kids know the first six or eight months I found just hellish every time and and it was but it was more than it wasn't just that it was that it wasn't just that it was bad it was how it was bad it was how it was the positive things I wasn't experiencing as well as the negative things I was I was experiencing and it was just different you know this sometimes is where a piece of writing comes from where you feel like what you're feeling and thinking is just different from what everybody is saying there's an opportunity in that and I so I sent I smell a literary opportunity I also thought this is really I mean I confess this and that I think my wife thought this is if I turn this this experience into literary material I'm more likely to spend more time with the kids because at least their literary material and so but then subsequently what happened is you know I just got you know once your which what I found is a father is the act of taking care where love comes from the love of the child it's you know just it's not you're exactly wired for it at least I wasn't wired for the same way my wife was wired for it but taking care of something teaches you it creates the feeling of love so you you in the taking care of them you get to a different place but takes a little while now what's they could you start talking it was a completely different thing once you could start interacting with them like that it was a completely different thing and I'm all over their lives now I'm going to coach him in everything and they know I mean just I mean I'm very involved now and I don't think of I think I'm followed it's just like a joy but I didn't at first and your wife she keeps you in check in what way probably the answer to that question is generally globally yes but but specifically with regards to children when she probably kept me in check in the very beginning and now it's just we're both both very involved parents so it's just uh it's not a not exactly a division of labor anymore it's we're both hands on except what I'm on c-span for three hours I should be parenting right now and we have another hour and a half so bob is next from Overland Park Kansas I told you it would go faster go ahead Bob Michael I am very impressed with your body of work I have a series of questions one of the things that you first brought up that drew my attention is the commodification of humans and their marketplace value I think that's really interesting but then you know piggybacking on this is that trading issue there is this thing that has been put forth as a concept of the Robin Hood Tax which would be essentially a sales tax on that trading and that's an interesting concept in terms of what would that be able to do in terms of being able to put some kind of a check and balance on that Zab trading commodification of stock transactions at the speed of light so tax high-frequency trading people have suggested that and as much pleasure as it would give me because they've irritated me know in the high-frequency trading industry I think their public presentation is false I know when you tell you never know with the end the unintended consequences of the tax I worry about and there's better ways to attack the problem and it's it's at the level of incentives every one of these Wall Street books I've written incentives are in there and do not allow exchanges to pay pay brokers to send them orders in a certain form you know that get rid of that do not allow exchanges the stock needs to sell privileged access to information you know you they can say oh yeah everybody can buy it but not everybody can spend you know a million dollars a year on technology needed to assemble a faster picture of the stock market if you just stop those things which you could get is the benefits of high frequency trading and there are some without so many of the costs so much of the pollution it's not that we want to go back to a time where training was much slower and run by humans that's not the point the point the point is that they've been these great gains to stock market investors like to everybody else from technology and Wall Street has managed to claw back some of these gains in the form of rents in a way that they really shouldn't have well go to Rupert in Rancho Cucamonga California go ahead please yes I wanted to Michael the question what motivates him in his writing but then Inc I kind of on he answered the question by telling us he's a great storyteller but I what I wanted to find also Michael though as he said he lowed to the fact that some friend of it said that he didn't think he would have been a great writer and yet it's such fantastic stories I think that you are you're basically a great storyteller so what motivated you to be such a great storyteller Thank You Rupert well this is an interesting question why people write I mean I think there's a welter of motives right people some people right for money some people right for political because if they have some political position they want to get across politically political with a with a little P some people right because they like attention and I think that probably all those motives play a part in my life that I can't deny that it would be harder to do it if no one paid me to do it or that it would be harder to do it if nobody paid any attention to it and I would be harder to do it if in some cases I didn't have an overt actually political interest in the story I was telling but I think actually underneath all that is the fact that just gives me pleasure that the doing of it gives me pleasure when I'm sitting there I've been told I were I write with headphones on I listen to a track of music over and over it drowns out everything and it's silly but that's how I write I've had people tell me that when they're in the room with me and I'm I'm doing that I'm laughing all the time at my own jokes it's just sad but true but in any case it's giving me pleasure so that's how I got into the first place I that when I was working on my senior thesis and then writing magazine articles that no one was ever gonna read sense of time just went away I just really like doing it so do you have an office do you have a place where you write yes i I have I live in Berkeley California and I have a little redwood cabin it's 50 yards from our house I walk down to the cabin and I work there it's more confusing that because I have I mean more disorganized than that because I have little kids still so I usually what I do is I get up in the morning I Drive my 10 year old son Walker to school and then I go right but I don't you know novelists often have the story where they have to write 500 words every day or they have a they have a rule they make themselves write a certain amount every day I don't I've been I write only one out of three days a year on average that much of a lot of my time is figuring out what I want to write about and learning about it I mean I'm a nonfiction writer and even novelists have to do some research but I'd have to do a lot of work to figure out define the the part of real life I I want to carve out into a story and figure out how to carve it we're gonna Shankar in Rye New York with a Michael Lewis Michael I've always found you to be the most sensible adult in the room whenever I read you and I want to ask your advice but what to tell my young son who really enjoys his job in a big investment bank but it's dreading the prospect of hearing about his bonus numbers in a couple of weeks time and it's really spoiling everything that he feels about the job because he's right tell him busy because he's afraid it's not gonna be as high as he wants yes yes that is part of the bonus system isn't it yes well I mean the if he actually likes the job apart from whatever the bonus is boy he really is making himself unnecessarily miserable there are a whole class of people who do it mostly for the money and that's a shame so he's already ahead of the game so you can tell him he's already out of the game because he actually likes his job if he wants to put it in perspective you could send him a list of what like the average pay for the four coal miners or you give him a list of other jobs that are very unpleasant that that where you get paid a lot less than he will get be paid I think that you know if I had a child who somehow wanted one tough in a Wall Street firm highly unlikely but it could happen and that child said to me god it really sucks because I'm gonna get I'm only gonna get a 150 thousand dollars instead of 4 million or whatever it is I would say here's a ticket into the woods go spend a couple of weeks walking around the woods and thinking about what's with your priorities in life it you're doing so much better than everybody if you let this you know if if you let this make you miserable you let anything that make you miserable I wouldn't let it I I would I would tell him it's not acceptable to too to let a Wall Street firm have that kind of power over his happiness before we take a break one more call Troy from Bethel Missouri go ahead yes gentlemen thank you I'll be real quick got a two-parter here Michael I was wondering in regard to the film adaptation Moneyball if you felt the portrayal of art Howe was accurate and and then has nothing to do with Philip Seymour Hoffman I thought he was fine and then also when you were researching Michael Oher at the University of Mississippi did you come in contact with Patrick Willis of course as you know later went on to the San Francisco 49ers and will probably be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame but Patrick Willis had a really tough upbringing - have a good day thank you Thank You Troy so while I can take the second one first I don't think this for actually this is our last question before a break so art how quickly there was one significant difference between the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman may he rest in peace and art how and that was the resentment that art Howe felt about the general manager taking over a lot of what they manager used to do and treating the manager is essentially a middle manager who's supposed to just execute the strategies dictated by the front office that's simmered and was handled in a very passive-aggressive way in real life in the movie they dramatized it by having him really get in the face of Billy Beane and then fight with him and so that that didn't happen and so that was that kind of like willingness to actually fight with his his bosses he didn't have in flesh Patrick Willis so Patrick Willis it was a really interesting character he might when Michael Oher got to the University of Mississippi he and he was maybe a year or two behind Patrick and Michael I can remember I had answers yes I met Patrick Willis I had actually had lunch with him and the TUI family because there was an instant connection because Patrick had adopted by a white family as a in a at a pretty young age and the tui family I think saw in him someone who might connect with Michael and make and smooth his transition in Ole Miss but what I really remember about Patrick Willis is that he had been on the bench I think his freshman year and he was I mean it's time this guy was an unbelievably gifted linebacker and I was up in the press box at the Ole Miss vaught-hemingway Stadium whoever is called in in Oxford Mississippi sitting with Scouts from NFL scouts and I was sitting with them it was like someone from the Giants and some from the Browns they were just there and watched LSU play Holness and I was there because I was working on this book and I wanted to talk to them about what they thought about Michael was he really he was on the field was it that really looked like an NFL left tackle to them I was just kind of kicking tires and an LSU running back comes through a hole on like an Ole Miss three yard line look like he's gonna score and out of nowhere appears Patrick Willis gets him lifts him up on his shoulder jackknife is him into the ground and it's running back way like 240 pounds and everybody will play stomach oh my god what was that and act of such violence that you couldn't and I turn to the guy from the Giants I said do you know who that guy is and he said we got our eyes on him he's he's obviously covering a lot of ground on the field but nobody knows who he is yet and so I can remember it was kind of a moment he was being discovered and it was interesting cuz you think guy is an all-pro linebacker he must have been all-pro linebacker all along in his life but in fact the year before he'd been on the bench and then he comes off feeling just wreaks havoc on a football field so I remember Patrick Wells finally very very sweet guy who you would not believe had the capacity for violence that he that he displayed on a football field let me just ask about you your dad was a lawyer your mom a community organizer that's uh that makes my mom sound dollar than she is my mom I would say an activist my dad yes and call him a lawyer he was a lawyer but weary what he did is he ran a law firm well my father was a really gifted administrator who didn't particularly like being a lawyer but he liked running a law firm he ran a law firm he did a lot of other things they both people who between them I think they ran every civic organization in New Orleans at one point or another and my mother is still very active he's on the boards of various charter school she helped create a couple of charter schools after Katrina and she's out the door every morning at 6:00 in the morning and busy all over the city so my fault is mostly retired and your great grandfather grandfather well my great Korean front great my great grandfather is this story so I'm so we're in getting the family the the short story is my Lewis ancestor was sent his name was Joshua Lewis it was my great great great great great grandfather was sent by Thomas Jefferson to New Orleans in 1803 to receive the purchase from the French and he became the Louisiana Purchase and he became the first Chief Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court when it was just the territory and wrote the first legal opinions for Louis 1:1 I mean I never went to law school but people lawyers down there will know this and n stayed his son was a mayor of New Orleans John Lewis and if the family never left that on that side and my mother signed the family that my father's side of the family refers to as the arriviste of the carpetbaggers I think showed up in the 1830s well my family has been in New Orleans both sides and most people are still all there since since then and has been woven into the fabric of the city in lots of different ways our guest is author Michael Lewis on c-span twos in depth here on book TV we're gonna take a short break show you some of the books that have become best-selling movies and we'll be back with more of your phone calls here on c-span 2 we continue on c-span twos in-depth with Michael Lewis are we setting our record the longest interview you've ever done surpassed it by about an hour already you better keep me there day well let's talk about two of your older books first of all the new new thing which came out in 1999 and next in 2001 yep so this is again related to my wife she died I'd met Tabitha since we were on this buy a lot biographical journey are you gonna write a book about your wife yeah maybe at some point I should write so she got a fellowship at Stanford and it would have so this was 97 to 97 98 calendar year you were just married just we were get where she got it before we were married and we got married during the fellowship and I follow her out there I don't have any particular reason for being in Palo Alto California never been and the internet bubble is happening I mean it just around me or just story after story after story so I start to kind of poke around that and I mean it was clearly a one of these world historic events that I happened to be sitting in the middle of and I thought how do you do it as a story you know how do you do it as a you know who's the who's the person who sits in the middle of this thing and at the time the person was the guy named Jim Clark who had he was part of the Silicon Valley old guard in some ways he'd started a company called Silicon Graphics and made one small fortune that way but he was behind the the creation of Netscape which was launching the web and when I met him I mean that's a funny story because it when it occurred to me I was watching the things around me I was writing about various internet phenomenon that at the center of it all was this unnatural willingness to just plow under everything you've just done that it was that Silicon Valley was just this machine for for plowing under the old and replacing it with the new and people don't naturally usually do that companies don't naturally do that that you have to create an ethic you have to create a an expectation that that's going to happen forward to happen and Clark even though he was then probably in his 50s he was not he was not a young Silicon Valley person was a legendary for being like just plowing under his own life his businesses he was just always kind of moving forward and I can remember there was a coffee shop across the street from the Stanford campus and I can remember sitting there I was noodling on this place I was thinking you know I got to write a story about Jim Clark they are to see if I can locate this in a human being if it was phenomenon this unsettledness feeling that you feel out here and it tells you about the time I didn't have a cell phone I was very late to get a cell phone and I wished some part of me still wishes I never had one but nevertheless I went up the payphone in the back of the coffee shop and there was a there was a payphone and there was also a phone book and I went in the phone book and I found Clark in the phone book I stuck in a quarter and I called Jim Clark and I got a housekeeper and she said Oh Jim's in the office but you can call him there this is a billionaire and I so I called the next number he picks up the phone and I said I'm Michael Lewis I wrote this he says all right we think he's our red liars poker or something and I said I'm just down at this coffee shop he said just get and I was on a bike he says he's get on your bike and come on over and he was at that time his office was a pretty depressing room on top of a Jenny Craig weight loss center and what the what he was doing when I got there was trying to program write the program for a giant sail boat for a yacht it would enable him to sail the boat across the Atlantic from his desk without it was just like a challenge you it was gonna be a fully automated boat that that he could control remotely and I'd have thought and I started talking to my that I just want to spend more time with this guy and that led to the ninu thing and then the new new thing led to some articles on the back end and the new thing which got glued together and next so what that there in the writers life their books and their book like objects and the books or books that are conceived as a whole thing and the book like objects are coach a magazine piece that it goes it ends up between hardcovers or or a home game is a series of journals published in Slate we should you know are pasted together and what was Netscape what was Netscape yeah it was the first browser and the I met you think back to that time the browser was what people thought was going to be valuable and it wasn't that long ago no at the end if you go back to the end of the new new thing Jim Clark who was regarded by everybody at the time and the visionary in Silicon Valley who is kind of seems to always have his finger on what's about to happen the end of the book he decides he's getting out of this racket of the internet bubble because he says it's just become a bubble it's no law it's gotten so crazy the stock market valuations are so crazy he wants to get his money out because even he is scared and the deal that kind of triggers that oh my god this is insane is the someone comes to him and says you can own a big piece of this company called Google that is a it's a search engine but you got to pay twenty five million dollars for it he said that's ridiculous I could be twenty five million dollars for whatever person I mean that would be worth I don't know many tens of billions of dollars now he thought that Google was preposterous and get it so he gets out the valuation of Google was preposterous but let me just if I was saying about next because we have an hour it's a chance for me to talk about the books and nobody asked me about it and I got interested when the bubble burst Clark was right in a way you know the bubble burst stock market you know the internet stock market collapsed things that were worth hundreds of millions of dollars were worth zero the next day that kind of thing but I always thought when I was writing about this event that the internet that the financial consequences of the Internet were trivial compared to the social consequences and that as a certain the noise in 2001 was ah see it was off it was all fraud it's all phony the Internet's not that big a deal it was a lot of that and I thought no actually we want to do is Trace with the social consequence this that it may be true that the Internet is not an engine for corporate profits that may be true but it is an engine for social change and so I wrote these long essays essays reported pieces about things that had happened on the internet that gave you a glimpse into a very odd future so if one for example one of them was about a kid in New Jersey named Jonathan Lebed who at age thirteen or fourteen he was a kid from a very modest family like middle lower middle class family whose grandmother hadn't maybe given him 100 bucks or 500 bucks at one at some point and he gotten online and opened a brokerage account somehow dummied up the documents in order to seem like a grown-up and on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog right no no no he's your kid and he had turned he had turned the grubstake from his grandfather and I think seven or eight hundred thousand dollars in trading profits and was doing things like going to the local local Mercedes dealer even though he couldn't drive picking out a car handing over fifty thousand dollars in cash and say just hold it for me until I get my driver's license it was outrageous what was going Andy and the SCC had followed his activity because what he was doing is finding tiny little penny stock companies and then pying the stock and then promoting them on internet boards like riding rowdy advertisements for them because he thought that that's what you do in the stock market because he saw that's what Merrill Lynch was doing you know you know pets.com so he thought that's just how it worked with the SEC came down on him for stock market manipulation so there's a whole other story about how the internet enabled this phenomena and it was a way to get it what other phenomena might enable it his dad got involved how much did he end up keeping you know he kept almost all of it the he kept if he if he paid a fine it was trivial so he kept almost all of it do you know what he's doing today I hadn't heard from him in some years which is odd most of my subjects I'm in pretty close touch with I mean you know I'll hear from them once a month or every couple of months then I could tell you where they are last I heard from him like sent me invitation maybe it's a party down in might hit a house on Miami Beach and was having like Dwayne Wade and LeBron James over you know it's up we're not exactly that but it was that kind of like glamour event and so he had gotten himself in I don't know what but he had decided in his head when I got into his life a bit because I wrote this piece about him and I was trying to coax him into going to college and he thought College was a waste of time he was gonna go make money without having good go to college and I assume that's what he's been doing but I don't know well go to Ron joining us from Orford New Hampshire you're on book TV good afternoon alright thank you for taking my call certainly Michael hi hi I wanted to get your comment on the Uniting amendment have a have you heard of the Uniting amendment no I want to explain yes it's the crowd-sourced constitutional amendment for last few years people have been going on a website and trying to write a new constitutional amendment addresses a whole bunch of things excuse me including like term limits for Congress and legalizing pot and you know get rid of discrimination against sexual orientation sexual identity and all the stuff that Congress won't do but the people actually want and one of the things that it does that I want to ask you about was the tax system it creates a sip stacks that taxes all transactions with no exemptions or deductions and when you do that the you know the total transactions in the United States total over 1200 trillion dollars per year and when you tax that if you tax less than one percent like a half half a percent it comes out over six trillion dollars Ron thanks for the call any thoughts on that so that's what's that Adam Sandler movie where maybe Billy Madison we're he's in a debate in school and he gets up in front of the whole school and he says what he has to say and then the principal says thank you very much we're all a little stoop for having heard that whatever I would say you would say thank you very much we're all a little stupid or for having her that I don't know I don't know what I don't know B I don't always talk about so I mean it's a but it sounds like a really interesting constitutional emitted but let me tie it into what you wrote about in some of your books the role of social media the role of the internet in politics because there is a direct connection we certainly saw that in 2016 with Donald Trump and Twitter sure yeah I my heart sinks when you ask questions like that because I'm not a thinker you know there are essays to be written on this subject I really am a storyteller and I have not I mean well we all see that the Internet's having these weird effects in politics but do I have anything to add to that well from next in 2001 you set euro the following people who bothered to imagine how the internet might change democracy usually assume it will take power away from politicians and give it to the people yeah I write that in 2001 h2o you know I have this odd thing I don't read any of my books ever so I don't I don't remember most of what I write I haven't I don't remember what I wrote so I said that that's the conventional wisdom at the time that was a conventional wisdom did I challenge it and I had the decency to say maybe it's not true it's had it's had obviously perverse effects it's opened up I mean it's opened up the political marketplace right I mean it's been a part of the among the forces that corrode the authority of the party system so without the internet you don't get Trump anything like Trump and Trump without the internet Trump can't communicate the way he communicates you don't get Twitter so it's it is it did feel I think it's probably true to say it's broadly democratizing but there's no question it can be used for autocratic ends and we shall see if it is going back to our first hour this is from Marcia grace she sent an email since Michael has studied the briefing book in the Department of Energy what did the rest of us need to know about nuclear energy no it's funny the the way I went into the department is you like the way I went into the part of Agriculture was with a very these these enterprises are so vast to get a get the and getting them across in ten or fifteen thousand words is a huge challenge and so I went in with a particular angle and the angle was what's the risk like what is the risk of of a White House that is disengaged from actual and managing the government day-to-day it didn't bother to get the memo and understand what the department did that it's running the Devon largely hasn't staffed up the government in a lot of ways like what could go wrong so in the department energy on that and I met so the story about the department energy starts with a fellow named John MacWilliams who was the first-ever chief risk officer inside the department and he'd come from a very successful investment career he made his fortune in private equity investing in things like nuclear power and he was brought in in the first place to help the department assess the risks that was running in the investment portfolio because they do make their loans and subsidized loans and grants it makes too long but to technology that may pay off 100 years from now they do long term kind of scientific research and long term investing in technologies but he had morphed into this other thing this other job of just looking at the whole department like what what's the risk here and nuclear nuclear energy was not on the list of things like the future of nuclear energy was a footnote in what concern him and so what concerned me in the piece he was much more concerned that say the Iran deal then ran nuclear deal would fall apart because the White House wouldn't understand that it had been negotiated by people who actually know how you make a nuclear bomb and so actually have made sure that the Iranian government won't be able to do it because of this agreement and that they won't actually get to that because they never got briefed on that the so so in any event there is there's a story to tell about nuclear energy that I don't know very much about but it's an interesting story because when I was a kid that was what was supposed to be the energy of the future and what happened to that I mean something you know it would happen that I think was we overreacted to some to like Three Mile Island or we and that that public policy took some odd wrong turn that it would have been a very smart way to go to invest in nuclear power and we did and we and we didn't go there for complicated political reasons that would require a long piece to explain its a piece I haven't written you had brought up the president a couple of times so so finish this sentence the state of American politics today is what from your standpoint alright if it's a word it's chaos and disturbing it would be another word that I would come to mind the the notion that there's no such thing as the truth or there no such thing as facts you can assemble your own version of reality with your own news feeds and your own your own pundits and ignore evidence to the contrary and that you can have an electorate it's so polarized that it sees the world that can't imagine how the other side sees the world the way it does except to ridicule the other side it makes you fear for democracy the the the absence of a Walter Cronkite like source of news that where everybody kind of agrees yeah that's more or less what you know that's more or less right are we more or less trust that we're all participating in the same reality seem to be like a necessary ingredient to the democracy so I think Trump is an existential threat i I do I think and I don't know how it's gonna play out I predicted my last book the undoing project my most recent book one of the big takeaways is people are predicting things turn and run as fast as possible the other direction because most of the things that they say are predictable or not predicting what's going to happen in the political life of America it's don't bother the all kinds of we don't know the things that are gonna happen they're gonna drive the future but it does seem like a very volatile uncertain time what drew me in the first place to writing the series in Vanity Fair that eventually may become a book wasn't just our alarmed I was that the new administration had had just ignored this wonderful course in federal government that was that was there for the taking but that the whole approach to governing seemed to be increasing ever so slightly it's in some cases none ever so slightly in other cases catastrophic risks the risks of various catastrophes happening and I that that's what so what's on my mind now is how we get through this alive that's what's on my mind now I live on the west coast we're bear baiting the North Korean government like who knows if it when he's gonna you know decide it's fun to shoot a missile at us or put one on a boat and floated into Los Angeles Harbor I mean I think all kinds of very very serious risks John MacWilliams and Department Energy his first concern and this was back in February before North Korea was on anybody's radar really was North Korea and he said this he said the reason the Department energy is is worried about North Korea and you wouldn't think why we why within the department energy be involved in North Korea at all is that they run the National Labs the national science labs that evaluate what the North Koreans are doing when they're firing these missiles seemingly willy-nilly into the ocean and they realized some time ago that there was a method to the madness and they were radically improving their missile technology in ways that were making it was making jumps that no one expected them to make now I haven't followed that closely but I think part of story is they managed to get some Ukrainian scientists in to help them build missiles but they acquired intellectual property it may have made them much more lethal so I think we're sitting in a world where nuclear war went from something that I didn't think very much about a couple of years ago I mean I'm aware that there's a risk to being a real risk and less dramatic dysfunction like the steady corrosion of the federal workforce because people just dump on it all the time and don't appreciate what it does and think that it's all waste and inefficiency and corruption the corrosion to the society that emerges from that approach to managing it you may not see it as dramatically as you see a nuclear explosion but you will you will see it you know it will have devastating effects so so I'm trying to be hopeful I mean I'm naturally an optimist Amos Tversky the character in the undoing project has a wonderful line because he's paired together with this great pessimist Danny Kahneman is like the world's greatest pestis he's a or he's wandering around looking for what's going to go wrong all the time and Amos says at one point pessimism is just stupid because if you're pessimist you live the thing twice the bad thing twice first-first when you're imagining the bad thing happening and then when it actually happens so you don't want to wander around in that cloud of despair because a nuclear bomb is going to go off in San Francisco because what good does that do I so I and I don't I almost consciously adopt a strategy of optimism but you know the strategy is challenged daily right now it is we're talking with Michael loose 14 books I account know it's funny these this the counter is in the literary world I don't get cuz I don't even know how many books I've written and and because I think I'm not as all exactly books I mean you might list on that book I think I edited an anthology of other people's writing for charity I did was I remember the title of it so but I didn't write anything so the actual books we're conceived his books and from beginning in and handed in his books are liars poker the new new thing Moneyball The Blind Side the big short the undoing project in a flash boys those so those are the books and with that we'll go to Sandra joining us from Santa Rosa California go ahead please hi Michael boy what a how interesting to listen to what you've just been talking about my gosh I've just decided that you should be have a weekly our program so you're hiring me by the week free you'd be so sick of me trust me everything else is just sound bites and nobody knows anything we don't get in-depth information that we need from from you and I I read the Department of Energy article and it was so revealing and I felt like I was on the inside and but we don't know anything I knew it was bad but I didn't know how bad it was till I read that article and one of your other well your book that I like the that I got the most out of was boomerang then the way you expressed yourself is as a way that you know we really need to hear and most of us don't are too busy watching not me but stupid programs on television instead of becoming educated about what's going on in the world and what you just said for the last but your last last five minutes about the state of the world it's it's pretty horrifying and I just want to commend you for doing something to help us to be more informed to stay on the line because you brought up the book boomerang which we haven't talked about yet no it was about what so you were gonna keep her on though yeah so cut her off no I'm not she's in Santa Rosa that what she says and rest on the line okay okay so so boomerang it is a book I mean their covers it's between covers and it's but it but it was written in the first place as a series of magazine pieces and the the idea was the question the thing that interested me was on the back end of the financial crisis you know I had written the American story and written the story of what had happened in the big short to us here but this was a global crisis and it was experienced by different societies in different ways not this it was the same root cause which was indiscriminate lending it was it was profligate lending it was like people handing out money to people to do what they wanted with it without thinking too much about what that was so the lenders ceased to be a brake on on on the process of when the in the financial game and so in Iceland for example this population the size of Peoria built three of the world's biggest banks in a matter of a decade I mean which is and and developed a whole rationalization about why Iceland for years had been for its whole history had been had been prevented from achieving its ultimate destiny of being the capital of global finance that they were and how I landed president was running around giving speeches saying how Icelanders if the Viking the Viking mentality is the mentality one needs in finance and we were in now the world can see we are naturally gifted finance ears so they had that delusion till it all came crashing down the Greeks wanted to bloat their already bloated public sector with the money so what people did with the money I thought of it this way it's like entire sire societies were put we were left alone in a dark room with a huge sack of money and they were allowed to do whatever they wanted with it and you could see the perversions in the society by what they did with the money now there's not in this increasingly one world culture where you know you can buy the same stuff in New York as you can in London as you can in Tokyo there are not many opportunities for distinctive travel journalism where where you can get at aspects of the society that are peculiar about the society through some lens and this was an opportunity to get was peculiar about Iceland and Greece and Ireland and Germany through the lens of money and so that's so there are stories about countries experiences of the financial crisis and the material was unbelievable I mean Iceland the Iceland thing I hate to go on about this too much because she's gonna ask a question but you know the population one hundred and fifty thousand two hundred three hundred thousand went three hundred people I think it is the men generally the men were the breadwinners that all related all these 300 thousand people one way or no they're all kind of cousins and the men the chief source of of wealth was fishing that's what they did they fished they also had sheep they have that cheap energy but the energy it was it was a thermal energy geothermal energy and you could only a use heat a be there so they for complicated reasons they did also smelt aluminum in Iceland but but the fishing was the big thing so the men were fishermen and this story happened over and over fisherman goes to his wife and says you know Bjorn says I can trade financial I can trade for an exchange at the at the new bank instead of fishing and you make twice as much money and you don't get wet and it's not cold it's not miserable and we're that we're actually naturally good at trading foreign and foreign currency the wife says you sure about that like why would you know anything about trading foreign currencies and you say no everybody's getting rich doing this dock the boat we're not going to fish instead we're gonna try it we're gonna like whippin and drive them on trading desk I know I'm sorry I interviewed exactly this person so this isn't an exaggeration and then it turns out that that what they're creating is a financial calamity of global epic proportions like these banks are catastrophic it all comes crumbling down I go in right after it collapses the only financial viable investment advisory business in the country when I arrived is a woman who is set up you know come to me and I'll help you figure out how to invest your money business the premises I promise no man will ever be allowed to advise you or get his hands on your money but mistrust of men it was like it was meant all-male overconfidence it was the moment where like the husband has said no I know where I'm going I know where I'm going and the white and all of a sudden you know there are three states away from where they're supposed to be in the wife says let's look at a map and the country had just elected not only the first female prime minister but the first lesbian prime minister they didn't even want their little head of state sleeping with a man that it was this empty the hostility to them towards the male financial overconfident impulse was at its global peak and so it gave that's what I was writing about there and it was different things in different places anyway we probably just cost you like ten dollars in a phone bill but what Sandra thanks for way with the question please continue well wonderful at one time you said that you were going to write about California and I think the pension issue that has become such a huge problem we don't have money to spend on important things because of the amount of money just being spent on pensions yup like a hundred million in Sonoma County alone oh my god yes not a year is it I don't know it's horrific anyway so that was what I when I was wondering about well so I did write about it and it's a big at the end of boomerang is a there's a one chapter coming back home to California and I didn't I don't think it was a particularly edifying chapter I did but it it did get at the attempts of a brave brave politicians to deal with Chuck Reed was the mayor of San Jose who was in a war with his Police Department fire department because he was trying to make to cut their pensions it's a huge issue it's an issue I might find some way to go write about because really the finances are out of control I mean that what we pay we calaf how california is spending its money I mean it's make a lot of its being masked just by economic success that the tax revenues are strong and someone's over but the combination of really bad deals the state cut with public employees and a legal obligation they therefore have just to to to pay for these pensions with low investment returns because interest rates a bit low for so long I mean this is a if this is a slow moving iceberg of a problem but a slow moving catastrophe in the making it's not just it's not and it's not just in California that all these pension calculations are based on you know returns of 8% or some assumed investment return that that the pensions of themselves are not earning so eventually you're going to have shortfalls and we'll have some messy political reckoning among your favorite books confederacy of dunces what's this all about explain the book I haven't read it so it's a novelist the novel that was written by a man named John Kennedy Toole who's my homeboy his we grew up not very far from where I grew up in New Orleans who killed himself before the novel was published he had gotten it as far as Knopf the publisher being interested in it and going back and forth with letters and then I don't know what I don't know what happened but he killed himself and it's the funniest it's one of the two or three funniest books I've ever read it's a it's the book if anybody asked me can you give me the book that describes New Orleans it's the book I give them it's the book I give them because Ignatius Reilly the character at the center of it since Don Quixote yeah it's the best subject it's the best character since Don Quixote that he's that and it's a wholly original character and wholly of the place so it's just one of those books I read and they're tears streaming down my face I haven't read it in a decade or so but I've read it it's one of the few books I've read more than once so how is it published after he killed himself what happened was this he he embedded in the novel a very funny portrait of his own mother who was a little lunatic that charming New Orleans lunatic and very expressive out there a woman and after he died she was convinced her son had written a work of genius and she ran around bothering people to read the book and she cornered the novelist Walker Percy famous local novelist he wasn't exactly from New Orleans but he was from the south and lived across the lake from New Orleans after one of his classes at law he was teaching I think it Lola University and hand him this you know dirty manuscript in a brown paper bag and said my dead son wrote this please read it and get it published and of course he says it in his introduction to the book he says this is just what you want you know the mother of a dead child who's written a work of genius and now it's in my hands and he said he started reading this thing thinking he was going to read he gave it give it two or three pages so he could decently say I'm sorry this is no good or I'm sorry I don't see how it would ever be published and he says he turned the pages he did it with just growing wonderment he couldn't believe how good it was so he got it to a publisher I can't remember who publish at first it might have been Knopf I not sure about that anyway and he gets it published and it wins it's either the Pulitzer or the National Book Award the same year Walker Percy's novel is up for the hook it winds over Walker Percy's null but it is in this culture unlike in English culture it is really hard to pull off a comic novel that is recce it will be recognized as literature in the same way it's harder to have a comedy that's a movie taken seriously than it is something that makes you cry ahead and and so the Oscar always goes to the portentous drama as opposed to the really clever comedy he pulled off a book it's work of literature that everybody sees is a work of literature that this is one of the funniest things I've ever read so anyway takes me every when I read it you know there's a catharsis in having something explained to you that you didn't quite realize needed explaining and one of the things I needed explained to me as a result of my upbringing in New Orleans is what's so peculiar about this place it's so different from everywhere else I go you know I know it I feel it I've experienced it but I've put words to it and he not only puts words to it he's creates characters that embody it and you just go oh this is home sua vadia calls Rachel and Gastonia North Carolina you are on the air with Michael Lewis hi Michael hi I wa I watched you on c-span at the National Book Festival and I tivo'd it and I played that you know view over and over when I get so damn depressed second I believe you gave an interview and I don't know where an undoing project that said you said I gathered that if you make decisions just using your gut you're gonna get nothing or worse if it's we have a president who does that are we screwed the short answer is yes so the the point you know and this is the source of the Moneyball story that their point in the undoing project one of their many points and one of their insights is that is that you can show how people who were just going by their gut will get to wrong systematically wrong answers it's not that it gots always wrong it's that if you have a choice between gut decisions gut based decisions and data-driven decisions where the data is really good and caring which you need to make the decision go with the data because the gut will mislead you because your your mind misleads you with it in various ways your point is very well taken that we went from a president in Obama who extremely aware of the limitations of his own mind even though he was a very smart person he was very aware that the job of president is a decision-making job and we can construct our environment so that we are less likely to make mistakes but we're still going to make mistakes but but nevertheless we can we could try to guard against them a bit by encouraging input from people who might not otherwise feel comfortable speaking up by acknowledging that that first impulse I feel might be foolish by recognizing there's a whole literature on decision making here Obama had read something someone's it's it has been demonstrated that the mere act of making decisions arose your power of decision-making so when you go into like Sam's Club or Costco and try to shop and you're assaulted by these all these implicit decisions you're after an hour you're exhausted you know that you give people lots of choice and then get their ability to make choices is corroded so he did things Obama did things like got rid of all his clothes but is blue and his grey suits but so he didn't really have to decide what he wore and he had someone else decide what he's gonna eat he tried to clean the environment to make it as likely as possible that he was gonna make good decisions then we got from that just someone who just thinks he knows everything and and who is is flying by the seat of his pants all the time and who plays on our praise whether he's doing it consciously or not I do not know but as Danny and Amos this kind of a diversity of would point out that we as human beings will long for certainty that in our leaders we punish intelligent uncertainty that if we don't want our president to get up and say well there's only a 98% chance we're gonna get nuked or there's only uh there's only a 75% chance the economy is gonna get better we don't want probable we want we should want probabilistic thinkers expressing themselves clearly but we don't we want people to stand up and say this is what we're gonna do this happen and I know and every con man who've ever ever walked the earth knows this that certainty is the seeming seeming certain anyone has ever sold stocks on Wall Street knows that what you do is seem totally certain about about the thing that you're proposing that that will that that will sway your audience so so we have a president who is very happy to seem very very certain about things that are inherently uncertain and that it all worries me it all worries me I know I'm not supposed to be partisan but yeah but I think we're in a very disturbing moment we will go to Berkeley California there we go my home Kerli you are next hey how are you guys doing Steve big big fan of c-span mr. Luis big fan of your books and so forth look you guys have covered a lot of ground it's been very interesting I could go a lot of different places but I think I need to start in defense of the gut for just a second if I could okay first of all simplest when I guess is didn't Billy Beane use his gut to decide that that guy from Cleveland who was using the numbers that everybody told him wasn't ever going to work didn't Billy Beane users got to make that decision so it will believe that for another time but I did also just want to ask you about because look what you were saying the the cogent analysis you were making about why data is better than just thinking something without challenging it you know that's pretty obvious and you did a very good job of explaining that and people you know I mean there's always those behavioral economics issues where you know you'll go into a class where people will end up doing a auction for a $20 bill I saw this on Frontline and the guy ended up paying $22 for a $20 bill or something I mean the excitement of the moment is the essence of a of an auction situation and of making markets for that matter but I did just also want to bring up just for a second black Scholes which I know you probably know what I'm talking about and I mean those guys used numbers analysis of the best kind for a long time to thus come up with a situation that thus led to where it was early thank you what would you like me to do I'll do I'm at your mercy you own me at three hours but would you like how would you like me to go how would you like to respond to curly I mean he said a lot of interesting things which I'm agree with him I mean I the there was lots of that that he's absolutely right implicit in what he was saying is that there are times when you just don't have any choice but to go with your gut so but but being aware that that's what you're doing and being aware of the the kinds of mistakes the nature of the mistakes got the gut decisions lead to will help you go with your gut in a better way I would say in the case of Billy being hiring a person who could do statistics to apply statistical analysis to baseball players so that's exactly a gut decision it's more you know he knew what kind of person he needed and there weren't a lot of people like it available someone who was both trained in statistics and also in the world of baseball so he already knew what he was looking for there but the the if he were really gonna go after me and I mean he was being kind not you know in Moneyball there is a pet there passages where Billy Beane himself the high priest of using analytics to evaluate baseball players and strategies just says screw it I think this I don't care what the numbers think so he did this with a player who all of his and because he thought the player was either doing drugs or was having us he was detecting a social effect the player was gonna have that Billy in theory would say doesn't matter but in fact he had a sense it didn't matter so there it is more cut you know being in a leadership position of an organization I don't think you can actually lead just by numbers if for no other reason then people won't listen to numbers people need a story so it is more complicated than that we're just going to leave everything to an algorithm absolutely true I agree with that now he went on he had more than one point how about we just leave it at that so we move on to other fact the books by Michael Lewis beginning with liars poker rising through the wreckage on Wall Street back in 1989 the money culture in 1991 Pacific rift The Adventures of the fault line the fault zone between the u.s. and Japan losers the road to every place but the White House in 1997 the new new thing is Silicon Valley story which came out in 1999 next the future just happened in 2001 Moneyball the art of winning an unfair game followed by coach lessons on the game of life and then of course The Blind Side which came out in 2006 your ninth book home game an accidental guide to fatherhood the big short inside the doomsday machine from 2010 boomerang travels in the new third world from 2011 flash boys at Wall Street revolt in your recent book the undoing project a friendship that changed our minds what was the easiest what was the most difficult book of all the liars poker was the easiest I mean because I didn't know what I didn't know how hard it was supposed to be and you know in all these books I've got a character who I'm making swing on the page but in that one the character was me it had I was my material for large parts of that book not all of it but it and I was I mean unjustifiably amused by myself so it was just were you laughing when you oh my god I mean I was I remember just a laughing till tears came down my face while I was writing the thing so that was the easiest it came out of me very fast and you know I when I think about like judging when I think it judge my books I've said this to people that I judge them like you people judges judge Olympic dives it's not just the it's not just the quality of the execution is the degree of difficulty so liars poker had a very easy degree of difficulty it wasn't a hard book to write the material was in my lap I happened into it I'd lived it the hardest to write you know after that it gets tricky but you know probably the big short in that the basically because you have to explain if you're going to understand what happened in the financial crisis you really do have to explain to collateralized debt obligation and no one can explain a collateralized debt obligation nobody I mean all you can do I you know all you can do is give the reader at best the illusion they understand a collateralized debt obligation which is different so the complexity of what happened it was a it it was really difficult to weave that in and not lose a reader that that that was so if you said which one you had to rewrite one of them and take it on again which would you greg art is the most difficult to do probably be the big short Suzanne from Williamsburg Virginia thank you for waiting you're next thank you so much it's been a great three hours almost please tell me you haven't been watching for three hours I know it's pretty hard to believe but oh my god I started my Michael Lewis journey with liars poker so I had to wait you know how to go through the whole thing anyway the reason I'm calling is I have a little story that I thought you might enjoy I was living in Manhattan in the early early 80s and my roommate at the time was dating John Merriweather of long-term capital management yep well before it was long-term capital management well before the infamous bet that he made that you wrote about and while my roommate was cooking dinner John and I used to sit in the living room and play numbers games we used to try to guess figure out the least amount of guesses we could we could figure out the number that was in each other's heads and in in hindsight I thought you were ruining a day I also wonder whether that was the very beginning of John's rise and downfall is that simple game in the living it was abetting culture that you know it you notice and it's I'd love to hear more about about that do you think people are born that way or is it just something that they acquire by acquaintance or whatever Suzanne thank you thank you that's funny so John Meriwether was my boss at Salomon Brothers I mean he I worked for the sales arm of his desk and his desk was of historic interest because what they did they were the proprietary trading arm of Salomon Brothers and if you've gone back a decade earlier none of the partnerships on Wall Street had this kind of operation in that scope they were making bet these enormous bets with the firm of money it was so big that by 1989 1990 more than a hundred percent of the firm's profits were coming from seven or eight people overseen by John Mary with us so think about that is an eight thousand person firm everybody else is losing money they're making you know making it up so the whole enterprise ended up organizing itself around John Merriweather his desk and what bets it was making these were huge Gamble's and they didn't I mean they it was true that he was gambling in the beginning with the big edges in the marketplace that the marketplace in the eighties got much more complicated options and futures were invented and traded everywhere there are lots of actual miss pricings of securities that have enabled people who were smart with the numbers to make arbitrage profits freak you know and my abs are in you know in in response to your abs your question about is it is the culture is it a gambling culture is an era it was very much a gambling culture and it felt like when you walked on into the trading floor that you were in a place a bit like people who were predisposed to alcohol alcoholism in a bar people who are predisposed to gambling addition letting were naturally attracted to that place and there was just kind of encouraged and the in defense of the place it was pretty shrewd about distinguishing the smart gamblers from the dumb gamblers and giving the money to the smart gamblers to to play with but you didn't do what John Meriwether did for a living unless you really like to gamble that most people couldn't sleep at night with the bets they the kind of bets they made now in the end he's so successful that he becomes almost too big for his own firm and they go and create long-term capital management and they make bets that end up be catastrophic and almost bring down the global financial system but you only get to that place and are allowed to make those kind of bets if you've been unbelievably successful for a long time Tess Sandra Bullock captured Lian 2 in the movie Blind Side so Sandra Bullock captures LeAnn to me so well that when Sean to Ely and to his husband saw the movie for the first time you go he went he said oh my god I could just handle one there two of them and it was it was shocking to me and it's the first time I've ever seen one of my characters end up on a screen so so I was even more impressed than maybe I even should have been I subsequently saw that Brad Pitt captures Billy Beane in all kinds of interesting ways Christian Bale captures Michael burry in all kinds of interesting ways Steve Carell captures Steve Eisman in all kinds of I mean and these acts have been true these acts of imitation their impressions they do back up and say you know the movie business it seems like a kind of a nonsense business since Hollywood and celebrity but underneath that in Los Angeles there is a trade and the crab craftsman with unbelievable skill and talent and these actors and the directors and the writers the good ones aren't are so talented that when you're actually you can't quite believe when you see it can't take one little story sure absolutely I mean this is I love Sandra Bullock she's just the best I think and she did an unbelievable job but the actor who scared me the most with his powers was Christian Bale and he scared me because Michael burry who is a aspera Asperger's syndrome he has no connection much social to the outside world he's the first to really see what's going on in the subprime mortgage market he's the only one who has a argument about when the markets going to turn and why and a very it's an it's based on having studied the loans that were made that shouldn't have been made anyway he's in person he's got he's a little quirky I mean not wildly quirky but quirky and I'd heard the Christian Bale had gone and spent one day with him that was it he called Michael burry second I very politely can I come to spend the day and just be with you came in in the morning watched him talk to him they very natural conversation but Michael berry said to me what was I that was odd for me he was out he said it was odd for me because he didn't get to go the bathroom he'd get to eat he sat in my office for 12 hours and I was exhausted at the end of it said Michael Berg well Christian Bale is on the screen but becomes Michael burry and he he's wearing the clothes that Michael burry was wearing when I met him because he went into Michael Berry's clothes closet and took him and I corner Christian Bale to say you spent one day with him I spent a year you know studying this person and I could not have done an impression I mean you're doing all kinds of things I don't know what it is you get him across so how did you I mean how did you do that and he didn't want to talk about it you know it's like actors don't like magicians don't want to tell their magic tricks then finally I bothered him so much he said okay here's what I mean this is the thing it was obvious right well he goes it was obvious right away he breathes funny I said what he said when he talks he takes breaths in odd places in a sentence and from that all these mannerisms emerge and I saw that right away and so it was obvious and so I just said to the director when I was playing him living he should get my breathing right and if I get the breathing right everything else will follow well let's watch this some 2012 UCLA commencement address back into degrees in Spain we called them the pigs for a reason I can explain it in one sentence when the entitled elect themselves the party accelerates the brutal hangover is inevitable my career after you sailing arced in such a manner that I found myself right in the middle of the financial meltdown profiting from it because I had predicted it I have been a Chicken Little or a cassandra to some especially in government I'm one lucky sob in truth I was just trying to figure it all out so it's funny you know another funny thing about my go berry breeze coming back to me now watching him is so he was he trained to be a doctor that's what he was going to be but he was more interested in the stock market and he comes right and says to me I said why did you stop being a doctor he said I thought about you know I thought I asked myself he said do I care about people not really if you don't feel that way it was a really honest kind of like self assessment like I shouldn't be a doctor I don't care that much about people and I find him unbelievably lovable I mean I really love the guy I was just he's just a very good person very interesting person has his own peculiar take on the world that happened to fit with that moment in history but the portrayal of him that doesn't completely capture it because he's on a stage and he's reading a thing but if you're sitting at his desk I mean it was incredible what this guy did with him and anyway I don't know a you sweet this starts with Sandra Bullock in the game no no we're gonna go back to Leon to e this is from 2010 we'll watch it and get your reaction actually one Sunday after church we were at North Oxford Baptist it's true story and we had played the day before and he had run the football right lots more times he ran left and I'm thinking what's wrong with him short school bus picked him up he needs to be running laugh and so we're coming out of church and here comes Houston down the parking lot and not break to the left and Shawn it's like mrs. grabbing me I knew he he goes Leanne and that's that you know like and I said and I kind of step in front of Houston's car and he rolled the window down he got how you doing today miss - he I said not real good actually coach he goes what what's the problem and I so I'm just trying to figure out I said my son was a preseason consensus all-american left tackle really talented really seems to know football and I said you ran the ball right like 50 times yesterday and like left ten times I said I'm not understanding this I said hey guys well I asked her oz we didn't high student I said well you need to go back and watch the film I said because you did and I said so you watch it and get back to me I said run the ball left that's her if she's the best she's the best it's very funny so she's not talking there's a scene in the movie where she's going and marching up to the high school coach and telling him what to do she's talking about in that clip the Ole Miss football coach so she's assaulting the college football coach at that point the last I've seen I've seen her a couple times in the last year I've been down in Memphis and they're too close friends now but it was it's the funniest thing she has seats at the Memphis Grizzlies basketball game and then are on the court for the season tickets and she has her seats right next to the opposing teams so it she's that from here to there to the opposing teams players and she spends the whole game teaching them how to behave don't you use language like that don't you it's like itchy and they all they all miss to it yes miss tewi they're all just listened to but she is yeah she's forcing nature now interesting thing about movies and people real-life people when I admit well when I spent I when I met Lee and when I when I reengage was Sean and I'm starting to think of writing the story about Michael or as a book she was very wary for a bunch of reasons she really didn't know she didn't think any good would come out of it and but she didn't like the idea of being on stage she was nervous about her up I know she was she was she wasn't shy in her own world she was a force but she didn't have any sense of herself as a character and she has acquired a sense of herself as a character and I parlor reason a Sandra Bullock showed or what a character she was by doing it on screen so the the I'm glad no one has tried to make a movie about me because I think it would be very hard especially if it was done well to go through your life with such a vivid impression of yourself having been seen by millions and you've seen and not have it affect you in some way we'll go to Katherine in California you're next go ahead please what part of the state of your from Rancho Santa Margarita welcome to the conversation thank you very much and thank you again for c-span and for book TV or my love weekend love every weekend for many many years well thank you for watching thanks and Michael Lewis for three hours here how far in is our hours and 50 minutes to go I want to agree with Sandra from Santa Rosa first off but I had two short questions one of which is I was listening to your conversation I was struck by what you said about not being a thinker and I think you are a thinker and I don't want to disturb yourself in it yeah I'm wondering if you think of yourself as a conscience of the culture perhaps of Wall Street first and that of Silicon Valley but more broadly of the culture itself I do and again I don't want to disturb your self image which is obviously so creative but I think that's what you are and I really really appreciate it so Mike that would be one question do you think that but just ignore it if you think it might love you because this might be a silly PostScript to the whole thing because it's a wonderful conversation again I appreciate it but in your list of authors there are no women and I'm just wondering if you are inspired by women if you've read them or if and if you do read them why are they not on your list of inspiration or maybe it's just a short list that's my question and I'll go with hear your answer offline Thank You Katherine we're watching a book TV so the list is just 5 books right mm-hmm so it's kind of unrepresentative sample in some ways and the so but and the broader answer is yes I do read books by women and when I was when I go back to like the beginning I don't I don't read anybody now you know this is gonna sound horrible but nobody inspires me anymore as a writer and what happens as you do this if you do this for a long time and I think it's because you spent so much time tearing up your own prose that you read so critically I now read so much more critically and with less pleasure than when I was 20 years old that writers can't get inside me in the same way they could it's them it's the the thing I like least about what I do that having turned it into a career it's slightly deadens my interest in the book in in changes my interest in reading in a way that is not all good so when that list you have for me I'm pretty sure are all books all they got inside me when I was 20 years old mm-hmm Rebecca West got inside me when I was 20 years old she'd had been in the next five black lamb grey Falcon the I mean I she was just I discovered this seemingly playing style British writer she was one or well was another where they had it by this the sheer clarity of their prose generated this power and made me think that's the way to go is to be as clear as possible don't use fancy words when a little word will do don't use couple when a simple sentence will do don't disguise the fact you have nothing to say by trying to say it in a fancy way have something to say and so so back in those days when I was capable of being inspired she she's on the list but not many other people are on the list but she was on the list and so anyway she's gonna say so if there's one writer in all of time that you would want to meet who would it be what do I get you have to do a little better than that what do I get to do with him do I get to spend some days with them or are we gonna having a dinner or are we gonna you get to spend dinner with him this dinner it's an evening with a writer so that's the Dare you know I don't think I want to have dinner with George Orwell but I might want to go spend a couple of weeks with him I don't think I think it would be take a while to get through to him in any meaningful way maybe Dickens Mark Twain Dickens are Mark Twain for dinner Mark Twain I feel I've read so much about and he's so mansoni over and I then I feel like I might get a lot more out of Dickens because it would be fresher but maybe one of those two writers um we'll go to Stephen in Decatur Illinois go ahead oh good day to you I have a short attention span so I'm listening to you because I see in your eyes your pursuit of the truth and I i heard you earlier that it gasps so why you right and I think you I think I see that you right because you're you're so you have that the truth is like gold it doesn't run in a straight line it leaves in some waves and so when you find it you have to let people know and you're a writer I'm not a writer and so you discover the truth and you know the difference between fool's gold the truth constructed for your assumptions and the actual crude and I find you excited I see it in your eyes you have the truth fever you know and could just be my colored contacts I guess you might come in contact lenses it is true what you say this the that when you find a truth that seems like an interesting truth it is really energizing as a writer and that you add however I'm not by Nature maybe I'm just proving this in this three hour you know marathon but preachy it's not kind of my style I don't think get back get back to the previous caller is pointing I don't think of myself as anybody's conscience I can all right can't hardly function as my own and I think oddly with books you're you're dancing with the reader you're having a relationship with the reader that the reader controls it or if it's going to be any good the reader has to have some control over you can't yank them around to your truth because if they'll feel it they'll feel you know they're being maneuver they're being they're being told what to think about the story they're reading all good stories have like a reader sized hole that the reader walks into and exercises discretion over and so the byproduct of this is that one of the frustrations if you're if you're hoping for your books to deliver a truth to a reader does it often they come away with a completely different truth has nothing to do with your truth they read it in a completely in a way you don't you had no idea the I keep coming back to why I write and this is that that the pleasure I get up doing it I that I hope the reader is getting the pleasure the same same kind of plot or same caliber pleasure at reading it as I got creating it I think of myself is just trying to create some pleasure and interest in people's lives and beyond that I don't feel like I had that much control over what's gonna happen you answer why you write but this is from Elizabeth in New Jersey she wants to know how much time do you spend researching writing and how much time does Michael Lewis spend just thinking well we've already established that I don't think so the the the typical book said like what do you need what's the pattern I mean it's not they're not all exactly the same but roughly what will happen a book will take me two years and in in 18 months of it we'll be gathering the string for the book gathering the material in six months we'll be writing and when I'm writing I'll write six seven eight hours a day there are 18 months I'll be writing of the writing character sketches writing notes writing down ideas organizing the structure of the thing but I'm not really writing so my writing like it's sporadic I write when I write I read a lot and I write very fast and I revise and revise revise but it's it's a it's immersive there was a second part to the question I was thinking what's the seventh time you spend just thinking and I just thinking the process of writing in general so there is the in my my upbringing my father used to say when I was I when I was a kid that we had the Lewis family had a motto and he said it's actually inscribed on the Lewis family coat of arms and Latin I just believed him it was not true but he told me he had me believing this until I was 22 years old he said the Lewis family motto his do as little as possible and that unwillingly for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task I mentioned this because think the idea that what I'm not doing or what I'm doing when I'm not writing is something difficult like thinking is a false idea I spent a lot of my life kind of just farting around I mean this like enjoying my life and not Nair and I can't say I read someplace at Bill Gates has a think week or I think two weeks where he just goes away to think winning is running Microsoft and I thought how would you do that i'ma go sit and think I don't know how that works the way thinking works for me is associated and reactive and I have to just be doing something and there may be a thought occurs but I didn't try to have it and I never until I'm in actually engaged in writing a book do I sit down am i systematically kind of I guess thinking it's so for me is like a my writing life it's probably my third to a half of the hours of my life awaking hours of my life and then there's the parenting and just living and friends and figuring out how I'm going to give my life meaning otherwise with the rest of it and somewhere in there I thought or two might occur but you'd be very disappointed I'll sell them Michael Lewis we are out of time it's a miracle we thank you very much for your time I appreciate you being with us and another book or two in you oh yeah yeah my kids will stars of lies but yes I have plenty of things that the world keeps giving me material Michael Lewis thank you so much thank you

Channel: Washington Watch

Views: 40,829

Rating: 4.788969 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Lewis, Moneyball, The Big Short, Liar’s Poker, The Undoing Project, brad pitt

Id: prW1KNJ8EtY

Length: 172min 7sec (10327 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017