Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell at the 2022 New Orleans Book Festival

[Music] michael uh you and i have done this many many times um to the point where i don't even think we should pretend that this is that we should just think of this as an ongoing conversation and just start in the middle um pick up where we left off you just whispered to me you wanted to well she just i mean i think we have to honor sean tuie because he was going to be another high school classmate who was the main one of the main characters in the blind side and he was supposed to be in your chair and the amazing thing about that is sean tuey confessed to me that he thinks in his whole life he never read a book and i but he was yet he had the balls to come and do this and you were so much more qualified but i wanted i wanted to just i just i i wanted to just sort of pile on myself here um to what and add to what um what teaches said um the blind side starts when i fly down to memphis to uh i was given a talk about something else and i was thinking about writing something about my high school baseball coach and i thought i ought to get in touch with old teammates just to see what they thought of it but sean was an old teammate and i so i call him he says i'll pick you up at the airport and um and he he led me into the blindside story but the first thing he says when he picks me up at the airport we get in the car he's like deadpan dead serious he says um so who writes your books and i i said sean she like i write my books he goes no no i know you're like the author and and that that your name's on the book and you were you're really good on tv he said he like he was he went on about how he admired my promotional abilities like the bill he thought i handled the business end of things i was out there selling it he said but then he says like but who puts the words on the page and and i said sean i put the words on the page he goes no you don't he said he said you're a dumb just like me who sat in the back of dr francis's english class and got c's and and he like i mean it took it really took him forever he had had in his head oh michael has got this career as an author but he's got some trolls and like in the back who do the words for him yeah and he goes out and he gets to be the author and and that was his his notion of because he could not conceive that the person he knew from age 5 to 17 and went to school with had ended up with this like writing career and i think you know t is not just making it up i think that if you nobody saw this coming not even me maybe maybe the last author that sean tuey picked up at the airport was james patterson it was a legitimate question but does anyone by the way help you with your does anybody help me with my words no i'm now i'm not since i am impersonating sean tui yeah um where do those words come from no no no no no no not from asking but do you have like you never use do you use researchers i once hired a researcher because my daughter has needed a softball coach and the softball coach who of my dreams could not could not take the job as a softball coach unless you had a proper job in addition to it so i said how would you like to be a book my research assistant and then we sat and stared at each other for the next three years because i couldn't think of anything for her to do and it was the problem i have with like any of that kind of help is that the it's in doing the sort of stuff a research assistant would do that i figure out what the book is in the first place exactly right so like what are they going to do in fact their people fact check it after all that stuff after the fact and there's of course i haven't i'm i've had the same book editor since liar's poker i mean since my my book i wrote when i was 27 years old he's still in my life but he is in his late monet stage of editing where like he kind of sees the words and and but he's great it's like he sees the big picture but but then the words are kind of my words and you're kind of stuck with my words yeah well this is actually you know a lot about this all of us do this when we think about professions other than our own which is we understand the general shape of the profession but we don't understand how time is allocated within it so people who aren't doctors think that what doctors do is see patients but in fact what doctors do is answer lots of emails and do paperwork or they do see patients but it's like it's not this much seeing patients and this much paperwork it's this much paperwork and computer and this writers people who aren't writers think that writers do this much time writing and this much time preparing for writing it's the opposite yeah no i get i mean i know there are people you and i i don't know we're probably exceptions but there are people who get up and write every day because they have to write you know and um and who and who and this is mainly novelist i think you can do this um i can go months without putting serious words on the page so much of i find so much of what i do is figuring out what needs to be said uh like and what's worth saying and finding characters and just gathering the stuff the actual writing of it is i mean i don't want to say it's the easy part but it's kind of the easy part uh that it's not that's once you're there and you have it all uh that it's it's just really not that hard um you can but but so yes you're right uh that if you looked if you had a camera on my life and probably your life it would be very disappointing right we aren't sitting there in a fugue state all by ourselves in a garrett thinking thoughts yeah you're probably doing that more than i am you have more thoughts though no i don't but yeah but it's it's but i mean tell me how much time do you spend actually sitting down putting words on paper versus everything else uh not a lot not a lot it's but it's all about the it's when you you know you talk to someone you realize oh that person has just written that section for me right yes you know what it's going to look like but it's finding the kind of and the order of things i was watching that movie um uh i watched the movie gentlemen's agreement which is just a which i thought was a movie about this anti-semitism it's actually a movie about hollywood writers trying to glamorize their profession and that it's all and the bulk of the movie is the our hero struggling to write a magazine article and you know ripping the pages out of his typewriter screwing them up and throwing them at the wall that's the good third of the movie it's just like did any people actually do that not good people yeah um but uh wait michael uh so i do have some questions um that relates um we're in new orleans and i am i was thinking about you because you know i did this i do this for my sins this newsletter and i did this i imagined that i was going to take it if if one were to take a tour of the south and do you know memphis atlanta birmingham new orleans what 10 books would you read in preparation so for each city i gave a list a book and i ad readers suggest and for new orleans the question was what would the classic new orleans book be and i answered well you know the obvious ones but then i said and then the real one i want is the hasn't been written yet it's them it's the book michael lewis writes about new orleans did you say that did in public yeah huh pressure's on what is the michael blewest book about new orleans i've avoided it i mean i haven't really thought i haven't i thought i came down i first thought the only thing i've meaningful i've ever written about this place was a long magazine piece um about katrina oh which i about to bring up which was so brilliant and so informed by the fact that you were from new orleans that i wanted more so did i but i didn't have it and uh i came down and i i thought i gathered string we moved the family down here for six months and gathered string and it's all the string is all in a box and maybe one day but um you know it's such it was such a peculiar childhood that you don't realize is peculiar until you get out of here and i think that like this place has informed my writing in so many ways um not least of which it's it i mean i think that all the books are it's a person with an odd view of the world coming into a circumstance that nobody recognizes is odd and the reason i have the odd view of the world is i grew up here you know not not the southernmost city in north america but the northernmost city in south america and and uh and over and over uh it's i'm reminded of of how strange this place was but i haven't so i've not spoken to my publisher about writing a book about this place but the but coming here during katrina i did think i did think like the materials the material is pretty good um right so so we right so right now i'm about to use some i was i was i do a podcast for his company i'm a wholly owned subsidiary of malcolm gladwell and jacob uh it's called against the rules it's been a total joy to do it reaches a completely different audience than the books it works different muscles and this season the idea and the idea of the podcast is every season we take a character an authority figure in american life who's whose status is volatile and examine what's happened to that character and why and the first season was about referees in american life the second season's about coaches and the third is about experts and i was sitting around table with two producers the other day and they were saying they're saying you know it would be really nice to be like in the past two seasons you've had things that are kind of personal stories uh and they work real well for the year is there any like expertise you developed when you were a kid that um that we might like that might be a way in and i started thinking about like what i actually learned as a child and how different that was from what people in other places might have learned like the kind of things i didn't learn anything practical uh i didn't learn how to really do anything that you could you could it was a vendable skill i learned the difference between a like a second cousin once removed in a first custom twice removed you know like nobody in america knows the difference between those two things but everybody in new orleans knows but and i thought well there was a moment i actually had a funny experience where something i learned that was so that i really did learn here um like was of interest to the world and they said well what was it i said well when i was when i was 15 years old i was the king of squires i was a king of a mardi gras organization and um for a period of like i don't know six weeks after baseball practice i go over to the house of this little old lady near our school who was who whose job was to train royalty these people still exist in in new orleans that then and mardi gras kings and queens go to them to learn how to comport themselves to learn how to sit on a throne there is a way to sit on a throne to know how to learn how to greet subjects to learn how to wave a scepter things like that and walk around regally right i was learning how to do this it was taught me with a completely straight face and the one the woman who was who was teaching me explained to me that she learned all this stuff in eastern europe where she trained actual royalty but there were no there you know they were they were all gone so she had to come here because this is the last place where you found you know enough of a customer base yes so you have to know who your customers are that's right one of the principles of the modern economy so flash forward uh whatever it is 21 years 20 years and i'm a friend of mine who edits one of the newspapers in britain has asked me to come over and cover one of their elections and um and i get there i land he says uh i want you i want you to come to dinner too that someone i want you to meet and he gave me an address that wasn't his house he said just show up here at this time no no further instruction so i show up at this house and knock on the door and princess diana opens the door and it's yes and it's just her and uh and she's on the outs with charles and it's a little flat that's down the road from kensington yeah wherever she wherever she was supposed to be were you married at the time no and um and and so she opens the door and you know my jaw was on the floor i i was just stupid right i was just struck dumb i said i i know who you are and and uh and she leads me into the house and we're having just gonna have a drink together before a dinner party actually does show up and she goes out the back door and they were like kabitsing but what are you going to say right to princess diana and there's a and so i said you and i have something in common and she said what i said well they're actually both royalty i you you're about to lose that status but i i was i was i was king of squires and and i i and i and i explained to her i explained to her um that um that they taught me how to do stuff and she got she like brightened up she goes they haven't taught me how to do anything and and i and i and so i said well you know like what did they teach you and i said well this and that and they taught me how to wave a scepter and she said you know how to wave a scepter and i said yes and so she said would you teach me and so uh we walked around she put her hand on my hand and we walked around it was a pretty big living room and i we found a couple of forks and i showed her the way you led with your elbow and then the falls with the wrist and the way you need to follow with your eyes and the whole thing and she was like completely into it so this is the whole point of this story in addition to eating out five minutes i don't think sure needs a point is is you know when i when i was asked by my podcast producers what did you learn in new orleans and become an expert in that we might be like you know like that different and get us back to new orleans that's kind of thing i learned you know that was it that's what i had that's all i had was that kind of thing uh and every now and then you pull it out of your back pocket and it works but most of the time it was a kind of a it was a different and sort of impractical childhood there's nothing wrong with that no no there's nothing wrong with that um no there's everything right with that i mean i would argue that i felt this i feel it less and less as i live outside new orleans for longer and i become kind of more assimilated into the rest of the in the normal american society but but i can remember thinking when i left here and i went to princeton um it wasn't it wasn't at princeton it was really when i was on the cusp when i had to leave princeton and find something to do with myself in the world and i was watching michael i was watching the way the world was you know once you're out of school and especially it was new york but then everybody wanted to go to work on wall street and everybody's kind of grabbing and getting and worried about their careers and and in this i came from a place where you really weren't defined by what you did for a living you really weren't defined you were defined by who your mama was and what neighborhood you grew up in and what school you went to and it was it was a it was genuinely a place that that turned on family values and there was not a whole lot of talk about worldly success now partly because there wasn't a lot of worldly success but partly because it was just you know it was it was a stagnant stagnant it was somewhere between a stagnant in a stable place um and i tell this often my father who's sitting in the front row uh i mean this this will give you an idea of the spirit and i've told you this before that in which i grew up that up to the age of about 17 he would every now and then say to me he'd make he'd recite the lewis family motto for me and he's telling me it was on the coat of arms which is preposterous when you hear what the lewis family motto is because has like three words of latin in it whatever they are and um he said the and the point of the story is that i believed him that i thought this was true uh he said the lewis family motto is do as little as possible and that unwillingly wait for it for it for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task yeah i don't know where he pulled that out of uh i still don't know where he got it from but but i thought that's those were the words we live by you know uh and uh but we were so happy you know and there was there was just like i the childhood was so happy so all of a sudden i'm thrust into a world that's not new orleans and i'm and it was you know broadly financial success america new york and um it's very successful people are making a lot of money and they're so unhappy you know they're so miserable my most miserable college classmates knew they wanted to go to wall street the day they set foot on the campus it was and i was like what's something's wrong here all those people going up to study economics they had no interest in economics so they'd go to work on wall street and have miserable lives rich successful successful miserable lies so right from the start i have a view of that world that is um a little different that it's i think it's screwed up uh like why is this why is this success um and that there's no question that that leads to liars poker i mean there's no question that that leads in particular to a kind of armor that i had about that they never persuaded me this was important uh even though they let me in they made me a successful person for a few years and they were going to give me a lot of money i never i could never really buy in because it seemed so cocky miserable they they screwed up and let in a happy person and the result was the most scathing indictment that's exactly right that seems like they will never make that mistake again so and and they will no so they'll know them that's there's some real truth to that that and they couldn't understand i mean i've told you the story of i've told you we've i've therefore i don't have any stories left to tell you that i haven't told you but but i could remember the bewilderment of the wall street people when i was wanting to write wanting to publish stuff um you know i get to i'd been writing some magazine pieces before i got there couldn't make a living at it i get this job they can pay me a lot of money it was kind of cool and maybe you'd write about it one day i was to say i was i was always kind of one foot in one foot out however through very flukishly very flukishly i was like crazy successful for the first 18 months it was it and i could explain why that happened but it had very little to do with me knowing anything but they thought i knew what i was doing and i didn't know what i was doing but the but it was generating many many tens of millions of dollars for the firm uh and so i was sort of protected and so i didn't think oh anybody's gonna fire me they couldn't fire me i was too profitable so i started writing stuff that in retrospect was reckless you know i wrote um i wrote a piece in the wall street journal op-ed page arguing that investment bankers were overpaid and on the bottom it said michael lewis is an associate at solomon brothers in london and and and when i would when i arrived at work uh the next day the head of the whole company international was there ashen faced waiting for me and saying like i mean i felt bad he looked so bad he said we've spent we've been up all night with the board of directors trying to figure out what to do about this because it's being reprinted all over the country in newspapers and you can't say that we're overpaid and i said well we are overpaid and he said yeah but you can't say it and uh and and he says and and it was like what can you do to stop wait wait stop for a second old are you at this point 24. you're 24. you're at a job in wall street is this your first real job out of college real job out of college i was a there's the depends on how you count them but i was a stock boy at the wildenstein art gallery and i wore a suit to work uh for six months and i got tired of that and then i worked as a cabinet makers apprentice for four months and then i led rich teenage girls american girls through europe for three months and then yeah except for that so this is first one is you're making a handsome amount of money yeah um and your first impulse at 24 making a lot of money is to turn on the institution and to suggest that actually you and not just you or you could have written an article saying i'm overpaid yeah no no no no no no we're all overpaid you you're like samson you're going to take you're going to take down everyone but i wasn't even thinking i was thinking how do i get an article on the wall street journal and and i i wasn't even thinking that oh trash could have some effect it was like this is an interesting point to make we're overpaid and uh and how why are we overpaid and so that i laid that out and i thought i mean my state of mind was such that i kind of thought when i walked into work the next day they'd all be saying my god you got an article in the wall street journal that's so great nobody said that nobody said that they said instead they said and said you got to stop writing and i said i'm not going to stop writing and so he said okay can you write under another name so i wrote under my mother's maiden name uh for a long stretch my mother's maiden name was diana bleecker monroe and i was diana bleaker and that's that mollified them that that they they actually said no one will ever guess that a woman is a man around here uh that they don't think like that and uh but but but when i finally kind of said to them i'm out of here uh i'm gonna go i'm gonna go write a book about wall street i told them um their response was not uh you can't write about this or you don't write about us or we're afraid or none of that they actually didn't care um the bosses who were seeing me out the door they were worried about my mental health they said they took me in a room and said we're just worried about you you're going to make a half a million dollars next year and a million dollars a year after that you might run the firm one day they said i said you're out of your mind you know no no i don't know what i'm doing you know you just don't know i don't know what i'm doing and i really like doing that and they they couldn't they couldn't understand where i was coming from like they and where i was coming from was here that's why they couldn't understand it i was like i remembered a happy place that wasn't like this and uh and so that you know that whatever it was about this childhood was still with me and that and protected me because otherwise i don't believe what they were saying about me and about the importance of this and i would have money would have become a substitute for something else and i'd just i'd just live my life there uh that's that's what would have happened did you um recently with us um re-released larry smoker as an audiobook which meant that you both had to go back and read it again am i right are you like me do you never do you reread your old books or don't you don't reread them i don't i haven't yet i can't no can i i can't uh but you would have had to you know it's an odd thing that you can't though right because right before you finish the book you're rereading it obsessively you're rereading it you're dreaming about you're thinking about it you're going back in line editing it you're you're doing but the minute it's in print i completely lose interest in it like to the point where book tours are painful for me i just don't want to talk about it and uh and so i never i mean i i had to so it's funny i had to have flipped through it uh before i went on like the paperback book tour yeah and i remember this because i was going on the paper on the paperback book tour for liars poker i had to fly back from london to new york and i had the book on my lap i thought i got to remember what i read because i could be on tv talking about it and uh a kind of an oil man type from texas comes and sits next to me looks down and says you reading that book and before i could stop him he said i read that book it sucked cynical bastard and and and and and and and i remember thinking i i i i i spent eight hours trying to avoid him figuring out who i am uh but so i must i remember flipping through within but just flipping through it just so i didn't forget anecdotes and um but never since so what happened was um jacob weisberg you're who's gonna be up here in a couple of hours um and i've been talking talking about doing what you you you've been doing which is an audio book with pushkin which is actually a produced audiobook which isn't just someone reading it that it's more interesting than that and you've gone so far as to you know you're you're the voices of your characters are in the book and i think that's i don't think i'll ever get quite there i don't like i don't like recording when i'm interviewing i like it puts makes the characters i just they're not michael they make tape recorders that are this big i know i know put it there and it makes people self-conscious it makes people and a lot of times i'm moving through space with them i'm doing things with them because that's how i get to know them and it's just it's just hard it just makes it a much less natural interaction um anyway so so what are we going to do we're like if we're going to do one of these books what are we going to do and the rights to liars poker were reverted to me um and i thought well why don't we do this we'll see if we'll start with with something that's and so the other part of this the other piece of this is my daughter quinn who's a junior at harvard uh had told me that friends of hers had been made to read the book by by people they'd interned with on wall street uh because it was like still relevant somehow on wall street and that was curious to me because i thought how could that be you know it's just it's changed so much so the combination i thought well let's see what's in here and what three months ago we recorded it and we released it a few weeks ago it and the experience was not what i expected it was the i mean there's a reason you don't read your book wait wait so let's break it down you you're re you're re rereading it for the first time in how many years 33 years thirty years so walk me through your reactions to the rediscovery of your own work very similar to the experience i had yesterday when i went back to the isidore newman school where i was for 13 years and talked to students and i was walking the halls of the newman school all of a sudden i had these place associations that memories that i just had not didn't even know i had every corner of the place there's some story i opened the book and i started reading in like two paragraphs and i thought i remember what i was reading when i wrote that and i was imitating it and i could because it didn't sound quite like me it was i was reading the education of henry adams and i was reading the education of henry adams because i was i thought in preparation of writing this brutally frank memoir and i don't know i've never written a book i've never written anything along with a couple thousand words i started to read other supposedly brutally frank memoirs confessions russo the education i know i had a stack of them and so i started i had this odd experience as i was reading the first couple of chapters the introduction actually the first chapter i wrote last so it wasn't the first chapter it was like when you get to chapter two on i could see like oh now i'm henry adams oh now i'm george orwell oh now i'm mark twain oh now i'm tom wolf you know and so i could i was hearing the voices of the writers whose books i was reading and i was imitating uh not plagiarizing just like their voices are in my head doesn't that book doesn't feel like a michael lewis book to you it gets more as you get into it there's there came a moment where i didn't think oh someone else and i also thought oh this is less objectionable and i know exactly where the moment was and it was mid chapter six and um what's happening in that what is happening is interesting it's the first time i'm ripping off a customer for solomon brothers and i'm morally i'm outraged i'm in this situation i don't know that i'm ripping them off but i'm ripping them off and it's it's really funny that this the the story the guy loses his job uh because of something i put him into but i was so absorbed with my own experience i forgot about how i was supposed to write it and i just told it um and i was getting what i was what was happening is i was sending in chapters to the publisher two at a time and the response was so enthusiastic i was starting well maybe i can do this you know i mean what was actually the backdrop of this what was so odd was what i'd sold the publishers was actually a history of wall street where i appeared at the end for a few pages it was i mean it the book ended up being something completely different than than what i intended thank god and and i thought at some point i sat down and i and i thought well actually my experience is pretty i'm gonna try that um but i had one hand on other writers you know i had one i was not i had no sense that i had no sense i could just be myself uh and what happened as i was writing it is i got a gathering confidence in just being myself which since that book has never left me you know it's just that at some point at some point i don't know so think about how different you are now from when you were when you started writing but here i am a sweaty mess in the beginning reading all these other writers trying to figure out how you do this stuff borrowing their voices when i write a book now i don't re i avoid reading things i don't want anything in my head i don't want anything interfering i read the stuff that i have to read for the book but i'm not anything that might actually kind of influence how i i don't read anything uh and so i was getting to the point middle of the book where i was i was learning how to write a book as i was writing a book which is not something you should do you should know how to write a book before you start writing the book but and i could see the moment where oh that's me yes here we are and off we went something you said uh i wanted to follow up on you said at the time you were writing laurie spoke with 33 years ago you would have said that you were writing a book that was an angry book about well an indictment of wall street does it read to you today like an indictment of wall street no it's a really funny book about wall street but funny and i'm i know so here's the here's here's a here's a here's a central truth about what we do um you think you wrote the book you wrote until the readers read your book and they tell you the book you wrote yeah you write the words and the readers decide what they mean uh and to the extent you try to if you try to muscle around muscle them around too much you just lose them so you have no influence that actually it's a mark of a good book that you leave a whole for the reader to walk into and exercise some judgment about what the book is is and that you get radically different responses to a book is a not a bad sign it's a very good sign all that's true about the book about the moral consequences of of my life it it does not speak well you know that i thought if you'd ask me going in what's the purpose of what you're doing aside from you want to be a writer and you want to have written a book or whatever um i had this thing that had eaten at me since i was at princeton and and again it comes back to this place that this idea that you were supposed to sacrifice the best in you for some idea of success was really offensive to me i had friends who had real passions when they were undergraduates a roommate who was just born to be an oceanographer spent his summers in woods hole talked about nothing but what was under water and junior he is about goldman sachs and he's supposed to go work at goldman sachs and just makes a beeline for wall street and spends his career as a money manager and you know didn't care one way or another about what he did it was it was i watched people make that mistake and i thought if i just demystify this for people and show how silly it kind of is that that my my roommate will read this and he'll just go be an oceanographer i think i don't need to do this this is not important work this is a little it's a little silly you're not adding a whole lot of value to the world here yeah you can make money um instead what happened was uh i mean it happened right away like four months after liar's poker was published i had a thousand letters and i mean a thousand letters from college students saying dear mr lewis i read your book about how to get ahead on wall street and i'm more enthusiastic than ever about it and thank you for writing it and and can um can you give me any more tips that aren't in the book uh it's also true that people this culture especially the english don't do this but we do it turn almost every book into a how-to book that this is that people just don't have a read that they want to find the lessons in the book and so the lessons in the book was how to get ahead on wall street so that has um that surprised me uh but subsequently i've seen the same those sorts of things happen with other books where people just read them in a completely different way than i thought they were also the the the youthful now keep in mind i think iris poker is absolutely brilliant but the miss the youthful mistake you made was in thinking that in showing the kind of superficiality and pointlessness of wall street you were doing them a disservice but in fact that's what they needed to be more appealing it was what kids thought was that wall street makes you a lot of money but it's deadly boring and yeah and what you said no actually it's kind of fun it's like crazy and nutty and they're like wow you mean i can both make money and continue to be a frat boy yes and it'll all work out that's what you were telling them yeah you know that when does the movie wall street come out around that time because the movie was might of course and the one what's the one that leo dicaprio did really from wall street will football that came out much later yeah that's right but they're all you know there are three points on the continuum because all of those i'm not saying those two movies are doing a much more grandiose and absurd version of the same thing which is they're pretending that what being a well uh uh an investment of wall street is is all of this hijinks and in fact like there's a scene you know this the famous scene where leo dicaprio is there with matthew mcconaughey and matthew mcconaughey he's doing the chess pounding it's like it's just they're having three martinis in the middle today this is not hats no no that's not what never happened no no so anyway it did have this odd effect and and read it but reading it over so the first the first thought was wow uh i i can't believe i got away with this like that this book worked um i was so i was cringing it was what i was reading i was taking a pen to it and julia barton our editor had to kind of stop me from changing the book uh because i would have changed quite a bit about the book so that was the the first reaction to it was that um the second reaction to it was how much funnier i was when i didn't think i was being funny than when i thought i was being funny when i thought i was being funny it wasn't very funny like i had no sense i know as i was writing it i was just vastly amused by myself i was laughing the whole time and and the the parts where i thought i was most amused by myself were not the parts that most amused the reader the the the next thought i had was how much material how i where i'd i could see places where i'd actually screwed up the story and the the truth about it the whole thing is the material was so good it was idiot-proof that i had such good material that it was i could make a lot of mistakes and get away with it yeah uh it was and and you i just saw the mistakes as i went through it um the genius it has let's be clear one of the greatest titles all you know my theory of great titles all great titles follow book titles follow one simple rule which is there must be a puzzling and pleasing contradiction between the two two word titles or three words there must be between the two nouns in the title there must be a pleasing and puzzling contradiction silent spring perfect unsafe at any speed well make any sense liar's poker poker is a game in which we lie so what does a game of liars look like when it's played by liars wow what does that mean so fantastic you've already thought more about my title than i thought about it ever uh and that when we one of the things we did befo when i was starting to record the book is i went and went into our storage facility i've all i did when i when i do a bar i toss everything into a box toss the box into the attic when it's done and so that i didn't know what was in the liar's poker box and i opened the liar's poker box and at the top was the manila folder which just said title ideas on it and it was you know it had a lot of stuff in it but on the it all they were all written out on the front that before it was liar's poker it was almost bonds of passion you literally so if you'd so that you literally wouldn't be on no i i know i know so there were there were there were like 50 really bad titles before that when we became yeah so that that happens yeah that happens um anyway are we what are we doing here i thought we let some other people well we have one minute and 48 seconds left so uh you could give us one more story we can ask one question let's take a question audience one question from the audience the pressure's really high it's because we only have room for one does anyone want to step up all right oh so we do a little wait so we got a min i got a minute so i say this that of all the books i've written the one where if you'd put a camera on me while i was writing it where i looked most like a writer in a movie it was the premonition i i've never felt so much like just a conduit like just the thing the story just flowed through me and i think there was a i can't tell you very much about the book in a minute but i can tell you about the backstory of the book a bit um so it's it's so supposedly about the pandemic it's actually not about the pandemic it's about everything leading up to the pandemic it's sort of like through three characters we are seeing the glitches in our system that lead to the response that we have and i stumped i had in mind before i wrote the book before the before the pandemic i had this idea that i was going to just my next book i was just going to start with a character and let the story worry about itself and see just a character that i was so found so compelling that that we would follow that character anywhere and i and a character in a situation and i actually had the character and the situation and then the pandemic happens so i had that in the back of my mind going into the pandemic i'd also written a book called the fifth risk which is all about the risk mechanism management's of the federal government how we had sort of neglected it for generations and what would happen if something bad happened so that's the kind of ingredients that are going into this uh and i found i think three of the best characters that i've ever had and certainly the the woman at the center of the book is maybe the best character i've ever written um and if it it's um and so what i discovered was actually that's the joy that's where i get the joy writing about the characters uh it was just it was just the most it sounds weird because we were in the middle of this grim period but that the nine months i was working on it the six months i was riding it easily the most joyful six months i've ever had as a writer and i think you re i think it comes off the page it's like a fun book about the pandemic and uh right would you wait i shouldn't say anything we let's do it can we we got people coming after us is the problem i think yeah can we do one more question no yeah can't we got to cut it off what are we going to say though you can wrap it up here oh i should wrap it up yeah well no i was going to ask you um uh whether uh you if you were writing a book about the pandemic today how different does it look um it's such a dreary subject the pandemic itself but the stuff leading up to the pandemic is so interesting so i don't think i would write a book about the pandemic um so i don't know i didn't i didn't even thought about it i knew i was i knew i was going to do this the trick was i was going to tell everybody it was a book about the pandemic and it wasn't uh but the the so i don't i don't know i don't know i mean it's still a failed response you go about analyzing the failed response maybe in a slightly different way yeah um michael i think we have to i'm i'm people are looking at me with daggers in their eyes um so uh i want to thank you for thank you for being part of our continuing conversation like i said this is probably our seventh or [Applause]

Channel: New Orleans Book Festival

Views: 29,483

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Id: HCpnPUYHMu4

Length: 44min 26sec (2666 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022