Other People's Money: Michael Lewis in conversation with Ira Glass at Hot Docs Podcast Festival 2022

so michael hello there it's you you're you seem even bigger than before i heard that speech you're a giant we're both giants we're both giants um we should we should say where we are i'm talking to you uh from new york city where i'm in the this american life office this is my actual office michael where are you i'm in my actual office in in which is a little redwood cabin in berkeley california um and let's just jump in and uh and let's talk about your new podcast show other people's money this thing rolls out in february and in it you go back to your very first book liars poker you wrote the book in 1989 and just like okay just just like why are you going back to this book how'd this happen like what are you thinking it was i wasn't really thinking in the beginning what happened was i was watching what pushkin was doing with malcolm's audiobooks malcolm gladwell's audiobooks and and and in fact had kind of wondered since i started this whole podcast thing why my audiobooks were as um old-fashioned as it it hadn't really changed over time there was no there was no attempt to do anything but take it and read it oh wait i think you're talking about how malcolm did uh obama mafia where basically he did an audiobook where it's a fully produced podcast basically put out as an audio book like also also his audi he's he started to take his audio books and and make them more podcasty and um and it just seemed to me it's that that the people jacob weisberg who runs pushkin is a good friend and we've just been talking about this like where's the opportunity to take one of my books whatever the next one i write and and we'll we'll produce it in a different way than the audiobooks have been produced up till now and but the problem is i have to write a book and and meanwhile i uh the audio rights to liars poker became available and liars poker we never really i mean this shows you how much the world has changed there was never a proper audiobook of it i i read an abridged version that went out in books on tape you know there were these cassettes and i don't know i think i read like 60 of it or something but it was never no one ever came up to me and said i heard the book you know it just didn't didn't happen right and and the book still has this market i mean that that we sell lots of copies every year and when what actually triggered in the end is when my eldest child quinn who's in she's a junior in college called and said two of my friends today said they just came back from wall street internships and they were made to read liars poker as a like you know what's going on on wall street i thought well that's bizarre i mean i know a thing sells but it's amazing to me things got this currency so i never reread it i never reread the thing i i mean i know you hadn't gone back to it since the late eighties when you're right i wrote it i finished it in whatever 1988 at 80 it public came out in 89 i read a little bits and pieces when i was on book tour but as a rule i don't go back and reread the stuff and i really didn't i never picked up and read it and so i thought why don't we just do this and i didn't set up no idea we're doing like a podcast thing alongside of it that was never the plan you're just going to read the audiobook in a different way and you're going to get different sounds you're going to get a feel an audio feel with it um at the same time you got the book and i started reading it and i had such a violent reaction to it that i started to i thought we got to do something with the violent reaction just spell that out what was the violent reaction what was happening as you were reading it from the very first paragraph i read the first paragraph and i said oh my god that first this doesn't sound exactly like me it sounds it sounds like it i know who it sounds like it sounds like henry adams in the education of henry adams because that's what i was reading when i wrote this thing you gotta remember i said what i was 27 i never i mean i written a few magazine pieces but i had never written anything and this was like now i'm going to write a book and i didn't know how to write a book and in fact i had sold a book to the publisher that was entirely different from the book i wrote i saw this kind of history of wall street it wasn't a memoir of my experiences on wall street which sounds bizarre i know but i sat down i thought the history of wall street's boring but but like my experience is that it's kind of cool maybe and we should say like liars poker basically is the story of how you and your 20s go to work for this firm that's in the middle of this thriving market and in fact like exploding market and you just describe what it's like there and then you explain kind of the rise and fall of this entire portion of wall street yes and the the sub narrative maybe actually the narrative is trying to explain why on earth anyone was paying me hundreds of thousands of dollars to give financial advice to people when i had no idea what i was doing that this and the idea was like at the time i thought you know gotta get down this down on paper when i started to write because no one's gonna believe this happened on wall street like this is so crazy it's not going to could ever never get crazier so it was like a it was like a message in the bottle to someone who's going to read it a hundred years from now to learn about that crazy period in the 1980s in wall street but when i started to read it for pushkin you know i hadn't looked at it since whatever 30 something years i thought oh it's not quite what i thought it was it was i had i had a a visceral and not entirely positive reaction to my younger son you're embarrassed you i was i felt it's a bit like if anyone had taken kind of crude home movies of your worst adolescent years and then show them to the world it i thought a little bit like that there's just stuff here i know i'm so oversensitive and i mean this so so um i that was the first reaction and then there were a lot of other reactions that led to oh you know like there's actually a show in this and there was and if i had not had constraints like the constraint was i didn't have time to do like 20 episodes of a podcast on wall street we did five episodes because i was watching this new podcast you did five episodes of the of the podcast attached to coming off the the side of the liar's poker book just thoughts things i wanted to one of them with you like what it's like to go back and and look at your younger self um that so that rip ran right through it was like oh my younger self isn't quite who i thought he was and in not ways that are good ways and yeah and so that was that was like that's the beginning uh but then i've asked you i've asked you like uh to bring a passage so to this interview yes no you asked me to go look and see could i find like a paragraph that um that that caused me especially to cringe and the answer was so i've got something here i i was going to read just the first paragraph of the book but but it's it's um it wasn't that wasn't the problem wasn't just like at the level of the sentence it was worse than that i'm gonna read look i'll read the first paragraph of the book just because it'll give people an idea of the book and then i'll tell you what i was thinking after reading the first paragraph for the book i was a bond salesman on wall street and in london working beside traders at solomon brothers put me i believe at the epicenter of one of those events that helped to define an age traitors are masters of the quick killing and a lot of the killings in the past 10 years or so have been quick and solomon brothers was indisputably the king of traitors what i've tried to do here without as it were leaving my seat on the solomon trading floor so it was that when i hit as it were yeah other than that i have to say the sentences were pretty good as it were i thought that i don't say as it were uh yeah let's do a strive and explain the events and the attitudes that characterize the era the story occasionally tails away from me but it nonetheless is my story throughout the money i did not make and the lies i did not tell i still understand in a personal way because of my position and i thought hmm my position the lies i didn't tell the kind of grand delinquent kind of there's a grandness to it there's a very this is against a big historical backdrop and that's when i realized oh that's not me i don't use that word and i don't use that expression who is that oh yes henry adams it was henry adams telling us about a simple man in a simple era and i remember that i was grasping for precedent when i started the book like who's told in a in us who's confessed uh in a way that's been persuasive and i grabbed that and i grabbed rousseau's convention confessions and there were a couple others and i was reading those and this is something i don't know about you but i mean i needed a hand i was insecure i needed to have my hand on something when i wrote and now now i have the opposite i i i can't read things when i'm writing because it messes me up i just need to be in my own little space so really like you you'll accidentally echo the voice of whatever you're writing if you i especially if it's too good i worry that it's just going to get in the way yeah but then i thought no i can't be me me doesn't work like who's going to read a book by me uh it was well it might read a book by henry adams or rousseau or one of these other people so that's that was the begin i had that sense kind of through the first 100 pages and and then layered onto that and you may relate to this was the sense of some ham-handedness in the actual storytelling like ah that goes on way too long that really needs more breath more air more oxygen um that character i was i choked off characters like that person should have been a big character uh not not a flick of the pin uh that i should have done more with that person it was like missed opportunities like i just started seeing things but you could see i mean this was where it got really weird you could see as you read me learning how to write a book it got better and it got better and it got better uh so i was i was actually learning on the job in a way no one should ever do so i have to say like like i i relate to this very much like when i listen to anything that i did in in my 20s it's just it's just terrible and often when i'm like talking to student journalists i'll play them clips i've brought one here and and uh is this one like and and yeah and like and and you've said like how you were imitating like these other writers what i sound like i sound like somebody trying to be an npr reporter and failing could we play clip 1 please some analysts say sorghum is representative of a much larger problem in the world economy as poor rural areas become linked to national and international markets investors farmers and big companies choose understandably to produce the foods that will make the most money in the national and international economy first of all the point i'm making i'm taking so many words to say is just like people want to make stuff want to make money and then like when you underline every other word at random like it's just like it's just it's it's terrible like at the level of performance at the level of just everything about it is is awful how do you does it embarrass you to hear it or do you think are you charmed by how far you've come no it still embarrasses me the same way were you embarrassed yeah yeah like i still don't i don't feel like that's somebody else that's somebody recognize as myself i i remember being that person for sure it's a similar problem though right it's a um you're trying to sound like someone else because you don't trust that sounding like you is going to work now think about what that means for anybody who's like listening to this who's thinking about trying to create something who's young especially but somebody's not done it before if ira glass doesn't trust his own voice when he's young who can like you know it's like your voice is like it's made you and i argue that in a different kind of way my voice has made me on the page it's not but it's a voice yeah it's a voice that's like overwhelms everything and that you couldn't hear that or you couldn't let that you couldn't tap that or even think it was there in the beginning it's kind of amazing it's like i didn't i don't think i was talented enough like i don't think i had it's not like there was like some inner me that was like trying to get out like i really just didn't know how to write i didn't know how to express myself in writing let me put it this way if i had you in a bar when you at the same time you're making that that sorghum piece yeah and i'd ask you to just like i just we just having a conversation i was asking about your experiences down in mexico reporting this organ piece right would i have found you as tedious and monotonal as you were in your actual piece or what i thought no actually it's ira it's this ira right you didn't get yourself across well it's interesting you say that because like often when we have like a like a young producer who's not experienced at expressing themselves in their writing like they'll have a draft of a script and and i or the other producers are just saying okay this isn't working but just tell me just tell me what happened and then they tell us and we just basically type out verbatim what they say when they just tell us and then we're like okay that's your script so there's a lesson in this uh one of my favorite writers and one of my mentors when i was starting out was tom wolf and and he starts his career i mean it's part myth story no no no i know this story he goes and reports about about custom car making in in los angeles it's bigger and more dramatic and everything than he ever imagined he owes esquire magazine a piece about it but he can't get the words out and the editor says just write it to me as well just put your notes in a letter to me we'll have someone else write it and he writes dear byron and then he writes it as a letter and they just print the letter uh this is something what's going on in liars poker that bothers me in the beginning is that i'm not just writing the letter then i'm i'm writing i'm like i'm trying to do i'm i've put something between me and the reader that's wholly unnecessary and yeah and it's you know it's hard it's hard to resist it you know you sit down and it's on it's a kind of a little bit of an unnatural act writing for an audience uh um and you kind of got to forget the audience is there to do it well i find um that you kind of have to you have to just kind of like tell them here it is i'm telling you um and and so that that i wasn't doing that got really kind of unsettled me when i was reading and it made me think oh my god this thing sold a million copies it worked in spite of that it tells you how good the material was uh that did you mean the basic story that you're telling yeah no you look like what happened what you witness is crazy like the stuff you witnessed in liars poker it's it's amazing that you're there to witness it and you do pick out the characters like characters who are really um exciting to read about and uh and you capture them too like we we see that people go through stuff so that part is there before we move on to that let me the character but let me ask you if you had a version of this in your career where okay yes you're still not hourglass you're still not full you're not full-throated you you're not being yourself you're there's this thing between you and what you're in your audience and your ability to communicate it um but did you ever have a story that was so good that it didn't matter it kind of didn't it really worked you got it kind of was it did real well it was famous people listened to it in spite of the fact you hadn't actually kind of found your voice i mean there were little things at the beginning that i did that i would edit my own self out of and you would hear a cascade of other people's voices like for a long time um the most famous thing i did was when i was an all things considered producer i did a story about misunderstood song lyrics which now i got some people have written about i feel like it's very old thing but like but like we're we're beep and basically i had people on tape just saying oh i always thought it was there is a bathroom on the right and then you hear like the the real lyric from you know credence you know just like um i thought it was like never leave your pizza burn in but it's never be your beast of burden and like and you know you and just like and the way that the thing is structured um uh like he's very much just following the tape and getting out of the way of the thing and the basic idea is so simple and just kind of funny and uh i've heard that piece i love that piece and you're right it's not fully you there though right you're right but like but like there were things like most of my early career i would do pieces where i would edit myself out and have no narration and like and could and would just follow the tape and they did have that they did have a lot of the feeling of the work i make now right yeah yeah as an aside uh like last month i got asked to to ask paul mccartney a question for his book tour he asked a few authors to like submit questions to him yeah and i asked him did you ever write a song that you thought it was about one thing but your audience completely misinterpreted and or reinterpreted as something as being something entirely different and he said that's never really happened what happened all the time is people didn't understand the lyrics and he said like living is easy with nice clothes [Laughter] and sometimes sometimes i liked what they thought it was better than when i wrote like living is easy with nice clothes that's very funny um so in the podcast that you're doing you you like you talk to me and others and you talk about people's early work versus their later work is that the that's the idea no no no that's not what happens so what happens is while i'm reading this book i'm having a variety of reactions which become thoughts about what we could about we really should be episodes in a in some in a podcast um and they weren't all they weren't all about just the work they were it was like oh this wall street bears a connection to today's wall street in some ways and in other ways not like what's changed and what happened what sort of relevant why is my why are my daughters friends being made to read this before they go work for some high frequency trading firm like you know what's going on there so there's one of our episodes is about that it's sort of like raw just uh that's interesting just like what what is it in this book that it hasn't date hasn't dated what ha i mean things the things that have data are kind of remarkable like they're no people on wall street anymore it's like or nobody talks to each other they're like you know in cubicles it's all tech it's all the tr everything is not a trade there's not a trading floor there's nothing like there's nothing for people shouting and throwing phones and no nobody shouts it basically doesn't exist um there are people in the jobs but they're extensions of machines and it's all very quiet and docile and sterile and so this whole you know the idea of like a bunch of guys shoving mexican food in their in their mouths with one hand while they're cheering a stripper on the trading floor with the other and making trades into you know a hoot and holler with the uh that that's just gone uh so that's that's changed but a lot hasn't changed and in fact in fact you can sort of see where i didn't appreciate this at the time that they were like these mega trends that were that were kicking into gear it would kind of start it's like tracking the mississippi to its source they were happening right there right around me you know the author is oblivious to it but in fact the world will detect that this was not this was a this was a moment in financial history so this all getting very so very complicated that we don't understand you know wall street anymore because it's gotten so it has gotten so intellectual the people the people on solomon brothers trading floor when i arrived some of them didn't have high school diplomas and nobody went you know the whole thing about going to harvard and yale that was just happening uh that wall street went it went from taking it actually kind of being a machine that could take people from all backgrounds and turn them into you know rich traders or successful uh that that changed now now it's sort of like wall street recruits from the physics department mit and that was just starting then and you could see it starting and you could see the culture changing so so you could also see um the sort the other people's money thing that the wall street i walk into is a wall street that still has somewhere in the back of its brain it's it's our money it's partners money now solomon brothers have just ceased to be a partnership become a corporation so but all the other ones goldman sachs and morgan stanley they were still partnerships so that like if they blew up if they made some big bets on subprime mortgages or whatever that went bad you know the partners lost their houses so they didn't do that kind of thing it was sort of like oh this is it's it was the the risk-taking environment was changing and that's sort of present in the book and this other business because it's rapid tech change is like the other thing it's like rapid technological change is just starting to happen and there's something weird socially sociologically that happens and there when when tech is changing all the time as it still is on wall street someone made this point back in the dot-com bubble that when when the internet went boom it had this social effect to empower kids young really young people yeah it was they likened it to like what happens in immigrant families that family moves from mexico to the united states yeah in the year the parents are still struggling to understand english and the kids are running circles around that it's like everybody becomes an immigrant family in in a really rapid tech change environment and uh and that was happening there so and it's ha it's still happening young people get ahead very quickly on wall street that was just starting when i started so that all of a sudden you know 24 year old me understands really understands really critical complicated stuff that we're doing that i that our ceo really doesn't understand and i i just have to try to explain it to him and he doesn't get it you know that happens in the book that kind of stuff so that all that is kind of like huh oh we moved in the world we're into a world where there's no there's no adult supervision it's like the kids are in charge uh and so that's cool so all that's in the series well that's in one show uh so that's yeah yeah oh sorry i went on i went on a little bit there that's okay that's okay that's okay but so the the other thing i really wanted to do when i was reading it was there all these anonymous characters i mean i actually would call people and say hey you're in my book what do you wanna i won't use your name because it'll ruin your career what do you what do you wanna be called and and they would give me there like one guy said i wanna be dash rip rock why he was he had a reason i didn't know why but i just thought that's a really good name i'll call you dash rip rock there was a human piranha there was like also yeah so i thought i wonder where these people are so i i i we have the episode where we go back and we go talk to all these people who are in my book who and and and they reveal who they are uh and talk about their careers so it's just it was just like as you're reading it you start thinking there's stuff i want to know more about uh what why why not do this as a podcast series and one of the things was i wonder if other people feel the way i feel when they go back and look at their early stuff and i happened to bump into you while we're doing it he's perfect so we do an episode with you so so one of the things that that i thought would be interesting to talk to you about in this in this context is like we're talking to a bunch of people who make podcasts and and it's it's been very interesting to me that like you and malcolm gladwell who figured out a way to do narrative journalism in magazine length and book length on the page that you both got kind of fascinated with doing it as audio and then really got very serious about it like both of you and and like i'm wondering like okay so you've been doing podcasting now for a couple of years and like you and i would be like when you were on this american life generally we would just either have you read your own magazine pieces in the early days of the show maybe we'll play one of those before we go but and then like there was one where i produced you which was really fun for me where i basically served as your producer and we went out and did a story that was a guess yeah but i feel like but i feel like now like you've really been a podcaster for a few years now and i'm wondering like are there things that you've come to understand about making a story as audio now that you didn't understand back when you started like like are there things that you've really learned about it yes uh i think i mean this is but this is like this is like me trying to explain how paint works to rubens i mean this is crazy no that's good but you know what i mean i'm curious like what's like so i'll tell you what i'm the i'm the newcomer to your world yeah i'll tell you my take on it so first place just like the audiobook elias poker it was kind of i kind of walked into it sideways i wasn't it was um the the reason i started against the rules in the beginning was first jacob weisberg said it's easy you don't have to do much work that was a total lie oh my god i know it was a total and um so i will say like it it totally me up the fact that like every person who i admire has their own goddamn podcast the fact that like remnick would have his like is like doing a podcast in addition to like editing the new yorker obama like he's got some spare time so he does a podcast like like why do they have to do their job and then my job also but okay keep going yeah it's not like jon hamm in the new apple commercial is that true of apple tv why is everybody on here why is everybody on here where am i uh it's for me i needed palette cleansers between books i have this view that after a book the last thing i should do is write another book that i should pretend at least that i'm never going to write another book that i've never written a book that way it's new again and i only do it if the book if the idea for the book is so good i have to do it i don't do it because i'm supposed to write another book again because so i have to have something else to do so wait so then for so so and then for generally like how many years are there before you like come on to the next book is it like six months is it a year it varies i mean really varies um i'd say in the last 15 years it's been a year but okay um but in any case and what i used to do as palette cleansers or i don't know strength and conditioning in the off season think of it that is that way yeah i'd write film scripts uh and i get paid to do it i'm i'm like the world's greatest failure as a screenwriter i've been paid over and over and over to write things that have never been on the air and they've gotten very close but never happened so the things that are movies of your books you didn't write any of those screenplays at any point i also have maybe the quixotic view that i'm the worst person to adapt one of my books because to do it it really is a different thing it's a different form yeah i mean it's basically a short story a screenplay it's really compressed you have to break all the stuff you you have to sort of like go argue against all the decisions you creative decisions you made and i don't know that's so interesting yeah i totally see that yeah because it's so short yeah it's short and you're so you're leaving a lot on the floor and i just think i'm my judgment will be poor in in with my own work so i say to them i say no no you do it i don't do it but um so so i i had this kind of like strength and conditioning program it would be film scripts or mag it's a little magazine pieces or columns whatever it was was different from a long long enough and and so i thought oh well maybe the podcast will a podcast at least get made you know and that will be that will be a better strengthening program instead of you know i'm stopping my season as a baseball player and instead of instead of running i'm going to swim in the off season and so and and it turned out so and it wasn't just oh not writing books the film script writing film scripts really disciplining like i really do think it's strength and conditioning it really forces you to think differently about a story and to visualize right um so i understand that like you really have to make very tight choices like there's a precision to it that like yeah like i've like i've worked on like i've made a bunch of films too yeah and you have to have a sense of what the audience is seeing right and you don't what you don't necessarily do when you're writing a book but you should think about that you should think about that because it's part of what's being activated in their brain uh well with this so all of a sudden it's this it's the ear like all right you're writing for the ear and i didn't know you know i everything i knew about what i was doing i learned from you you know one you know the one time i did it with you or i didn't we did a few we did a few things but i learned a lot working with you but that was as it i don't have any experience of this and i found first some things surprised me one was how how the medium rewards emotion much more so than print it is such an emotional medium that that anytime you have it's all the same you know funny and sad is the same thing it's two sides of the same coin it's an emotional state versus a non-emotional state yeah you get is such payoff with the podcast in having people in an emotional state yeah in the book books you really can get they live people can live very happily in a cooler state and you can get across their advantages you can get across really complicated stuff in a book in a way that's harder to do in a podcast harder to explain a collateralized debt obligation in a podcast can be done but i've done it we've done it but yeah it's it's hard it's hard it's harder um but to get people to laugh and cry easier and um and that you should be pay really attention to the emotional content of the of the material but also so also this how these people how people sound you know you know you are saying the most basic things here and it's really funny to hear you say it i guess i know maybe it sounds stupid to you but it's no it doesn't it's like it's it's all so important like but like for me like one of the things that's so different in writing an article writing for print is that you're not structuring around the quotes whereas when you're broadcasting both radio and tv in doing narrative documentaries you're constantly having to jump from quote to quote to quote and you structure around the quotes and i wonder if like that has been a thing i don't do that no i tell a story i tell a story and i remember something that i've never structured around the quotes i just think when the podcast don't you i mean if you looked at the script of course you're seeing narration quote narration quote whatever yeah but it isn't laid out like that i don't think of it that way i think of i'm telling a story in there what do we have in here that people said that i can that's going to be that goes here but i don't start with like the quote you don't okay no wow um so that it isn't and it isn't um no i think about them i do think a lot about them what emotions are getting across and how people are going to feel listening to it uh so that's that um but describing people so so this you probably disagree with this but um like in print you gotta i when i introduce a new character in a book that's going to be a big character i i need to make that person bring that person a lot alive to the life for the reader they don't have anything but with this you have their voice and the voice sometimes you sometimes can step on your own toes by trying to tell the audience you know they look like this or they are like this the voice just does it can do all at all for you i mean i i mean i give you examples but that nobody's heard it so because for the next season i was just thinking about this i've got these characters i don't need to tell them anything about this person because the voice just just doesn't uh yeah and so that that but the thing i wonder if you're going to disagree with and i i fight my producers about this a little bit um that there's this thing about having scenes you know here i am outside the the nba replay center in secaucus new jersey and walking down and i'm walking in knock knock knock hi michael welcome to the nba replay center that that is i find that stuff awful i'm i'm leaving that kind of these generated oh here we are in there or in this and it's all this natural sound i've found to my taste it's control it's kind of contrived and yeah occasionally you have some you're wandering around in a natural that's fine but i've i've kind of completely moved away from that that kind of thing i have to say like like like i see the utility of those kinds of things because it's visual right you put the people you put the audience in a visual space they can see you in the space but we don't do those very much on this american life because we also find them kind of corny and we also find corny the thing that so many podcasts do that like radio lab did first and then the daily does almost every episode where they begin the whole thing with the the interviewer and the interviewee going like is this thing on can you hear me can you hear me like you know like that thing like where did you go you know dude were they were they when you hear them like establish the connection which i was just like oh my god like i understand why you do it it makes them into human beings it brings them on on the stage as characters but oh my god what a cliche you know yeah and and like no like we we like you like like we very much are moving the story forward we're like we're we're putting things out where we're thinking like what's the beat of the story what has to happen first and second and third and so we rarely do that kind of like oh we're standing here and whatever but we do look for scenes for us a good scene is where people are interacting and something unpredictable is happening between them like we don't do that unpredictable yes yeah yeah that makes sense what's something that that you are better at as a podcaster now than you were two years ago when you started um much better much better at anticipating um the audience's tedium that much better realizing how the where the attention span is when you're listening to something that um i so that my first drafts are they just much less needs to be cut out of it uh so i then i i over i would in the beginning i just i i would i gave the the listener more credit than he or she deserved what they put up with and um so so much more kind of ruthlessly efficient in the in in laying the thing out and writing about it um also um i mean it it's a it's a funny medium it this it sounds like it's going to sound like almost like um contradictory but on the one hand sometimes i think when i'm writing the very best story is really streamlined really tight a couple of a really simple structure and yes that's true it really is true it's true in anything but it's true especially in this it's like that you just you're making it easier on a listener when it's a really simple structure but it really is a medium that tolerates endless aggression and jumping from one thing to the other without any warning you can really do do stuff with with when you're talking to someone it's very harder to do on the page and i've gotten so i've got i think i've gotten better at knowing at both at the streamlining and in like using the aggressive powers of the thing um but i don't i'm not under no illusion that like i've learned what i need to know i'm still learning i mean i'm in the middle of the third season now and i'm still learning and it's totally fun let me ask you that question like what are you better at are you still getting better or is it all kind of o home there's nothing else to learn it's more like i go through little like fads in my own work of like what i'm making or how i'm making it um like like lately i've been really enjoying this super simple do one interview like little one interview story um you know we just like the the easiest kind of story to make you know where where interview somebody who tells you a story which has a plot and asks them a bunch of questions that lead to some thought or feeling or something about it and then just like could just cut it together in like the cleanest nicest way at the end of the year i was doing a thing in the opens of our shows where each opening i was just experimenting in the form of the open so instead of just telling one anecdote i would tell two or three and jump from place to place just because it was amusing to do um yeah like i don't like we're turning out so much product do you know what i mean like like when you're turning out like 26 or 30 hours of stuff in your editing like and i'm the final editor on most of it you really are rubens you have this big studio and you've got all these other people painting the pootie yeah yeah so so like but the thing like i just want to talk back to it like one of the things that and it's funny like i yeah what am i getting better at i've gotten better as an interviewer uh like over the years for sure um and like it used to be i would have to edit out a lot of my own questions because i could just hear myself searching and fumbling in a way that i don't quite as much now but that took forever there's a thing that you were saying about like that you can digress more i feel like i have to say like i feel like in the same way that learning the pacing of a podcast is a thing you have to kind of like learn by doing i also think learning how much you can digress and then honestly like some of the most bitter fights we get into as as editors on our show are can you digress from the story for this long or can you go this much more and i remember like there was a story that i did about uh this guy gary gallman and uh and he's basically telling the story about how he was a really big kid in high school and so he was encouraged to play football but he didn't want to play football he didn't want to hit anybody he doesn't like sports or he liked sports but he didn't like that you know and um everybody starts playing football and there comes a point where it just is going terribly for him and then he has this digression where he talks about how he would sleep with his blankie he's away at college and he would sleep with his blankie and he mentioned in passing that he still sleeps with it and then i was just like wait what like you're how old and he's like a 37 47 year old man i was like wait and then i was just like we'd head down a long road that for me was the essence of like why even do a radio show if you can't pause on this thing you have this functional grown man a successful comedian like really super smart guy who still sleeps with his blankie at night and then like among my staff there was such division about like you're weaving the story what does this have to do with anything i just feel like if we can't spend like a good two minutes on this blanky thing like why why are we even doing great like wait what's the fun of what's the fun of it you know what i mean and like but like honestly it really was one of those arguments that you get into editorially where like they're on one side and i'm on the other and like some people are my side and there's no oh we can do it halfway you either do it or you don't do it you know you two thing i did two thoughts of what you just said one is um a like a stuffed bunny would have been totally acceptable but a blankie i mean really but no one is one is the there's a part of the the audio making process is much more it's collaborative and more interactive than than than writing a book yeah i have editors at the publishing house but they aren't they don't we don't do the any version of like a table read and and i've taken me forever to get used to the idea of eight people sitting around a table listening to my rough draft and thinking of all the bad things they can say about it it's very unpleasant right very unpleasant and i did it with you all in that often like right where you are yeah it was one of the most unpleasant experiences that i've had because i thought i mean really it was a really that ended up being a really good piece i'm sorry that was yeah yeah and it was i just i was really good and yeah the material was really good this isn't bragging it's just like we had great you know i agree the underlying story just was inherently good all we had to do was get out of the way of the quality of the thing we were trying to document and we would be fine but when you're sitting around a table with a bunch of producers they don't say oh wow that's interesting or wow i love that part or oh that's so funny or i was i was entertained they go right to what bothers them and so you i had to get used to the negativity uh and just and learn how to kind of and when people and it's interesting when you i think this is just a general rule for people when you're taking editorial advice of any sort when people hearing something for the first time that you worked very hard and you figured out that thought you figured out the best way to tell it but maybe you haven't usually very often when they have a problem they're probably kind of right that there's a pro there's some problem like there is a problem but they they may not have actually identified these or the right or the right solution or the right solution that they're just signaling to you uh you watch you know a third of the way in i didn't like that and i don't know what they don't really know why they didn't like it uh yeah and so learning how to like interpret that room full of purse people has been that has been an experience for me it's like i just put when i'm we're doing it i just put a note i say got figure out what happened there they don't know what happened there but they think they know what happened there but that's not what happened there and um it's everyone and they're right there it's not always wrong but but the main thing is to when you to hear criticism in a more in a little bit vaguer way then it's usually delivered like there's just something not quite working here is what you should hear not this character doesn't work because x y or z um oh i see i i i like people to be more excited like my team we all work with each other so much i feel like there's such a short hand to it where somebody would be like you know like this party gets a little slow it goes this goes this quote goes on for two sentences too long you know like this character is boring kill this character um yeah yeah no i encourage i encourage precise criticism it's just i you got to hear it for what it is which is there's just a problem here uh and that may that proc the actual words in the criticism may not be what the problem is yeah yeah true true do people go to the trouble uh in your edits to to start with praise because because we as a staff we know that like oh at least say a thing or two at the beginning that's praise and then the producers were also editing each other we're like yeah blah blah blah okay just get to it you know you should just say praise and hear it yeah so the answer to that is not really uh not really uh they really could man it takes the hard russian winters it's the meanest yeah something else that you that i was going to say is probably not worth saying because i forgot what it is okay okay all right so we have questions from the people who are listening let me just look at these if you go into the chat michael and the zoom i think you'll see them too because if there's one that you feel excited to answer um uh yes here it is it says michael do you see this in the chat ira that's all i got so that's all you got oh people are sending them directly to me okay so here we go um is there a particular story in each of your careers that you think of as a hinge point the moment when something clicked and as michael put it you discovered your voice do you have that michael you go first i mean i did i did have one story and it's funny i talk about it sometimes and play it sometimes with people and it's a it's about the uh the 75th anniversary of the oreo cookie that when i wrote it i thought oh at last i know what i'm doing but now when i listen to it i think oh you didn't know what you were doing um so there was there was that like and so and then there have been other stories along the way where i've thought like oh wait wait that was it i finally like that's it that one like there's a story that i did about a man who picks up dead animals on the street where the way the tape works it's really a series of very quick scenes and very simple writing and it's really funny like the oreo story has one funny moment and i remember thinking that's the first time that i've ever been able to get a funny moment into like a piece of reporting i was doing and and that was a real turning point for me um i've i could think of two after why is poker is this flukish launch to a career i sit down not knowing what i'm doing finish not really knowing what i'm doing sell a gazillion books and i'm kind of on my way um and that so that is obviously like maybe the biggest moment of my career but but i can i have there are a couple moments where i thought i'm hitting a new note and um the one that comes to mind was a night i spent almost all night at a desk in the new republic offices i was covering the presidential campaign in 1996 and quickly decided that the campaign was too boring to be to justify any space in the new republic at least the main bob dole and bill clinton were and it was the outcome was predetermined it was like it was it was a horrible story of a campaign but there are these wonderful characters who were running for president who weren't getting very much attention and um and that these characters you know at any given time it's amazing how many people are running for president you think you know all of them there are hundreds of people people you know are secretly running for president uh but and but i had this raft of characters in the republican primary who were wonderful characters um and two things happened in that while i was on the road covering that one was like bold decision to make maury taylor the main character of new the new republic's campaign coverage and when i started writing him he just sang and i realized and they're going to let me and and i re i realized that it just sang on the page and they're going to let me do it so it was like i'm off the leash i was off the leash in just a way i'd never quite been before like not doing what i was supposed to do and it was working but the moment i remember was maury taylor was i should say like a businessman of some sort of tire company and key titan tire and wheel yeah and then he was running for president not doing very well okay so i keep going with you seven million dollars getting 7 000 votes in iowa and new hampshire however everyone in both those states loved him more than any politician that ever met because he'd roll into their town with kegs of beer and bruce springsteen blaring from his rv and throw a party and his and his political views were actually probably more in line with most americans than any of the other candidates anyway um uh but but that was it wasn't maury taylor it was it was when the primary was over and the general and between the department and the general it talked about sleepy time there was really nothing to do and so i just started saying i just started following the characters who interested me even if it wasn't exactly related to the campaign and john mccain was one of those characters he was a surrogate for bob dole so i had an excuse to hang with him and john mccain at that moment was um in in politically not in a great place he was the k he was a member he had been scandalized in the savings and loan scandal people weren't paying much attention to him he looked like he was kind of dead in the water and i gotta say i fell in love with a guy i thought he was just a it was a riveting character at the time and i wrote this thing it was a kind of two-hander uh a relationship between john mccain and a vietnam war protester who named david ishen who had actually um gone to hanoi and piped uh anti-american propaganda into john mccain's cell when john mccain was i was a prisoner yeah as you say so so for anybody who doesn't know much about drama came right he was a prisoner of war in vietnam and yeah keep going and senator from arizona and they had this really moving post-war relationship where they reconciled and john mccain stood up on the senate floor to to speak on behalf of the bravery of this man this other man and this man david ishen was dying of cancer when when uh i stumbled into this story and i wrote it in a night and it came out and i thought i was i remember i remember a tear i tear i got very emotional about the story but it was told in a very controlled way but when people were at it it just exploded in their brains and i don't want to i may get grief for claiming this but i'ma say it anyway it was remarkably effect it had on john mccain's career turn that story had the most incredible effect it's maybe that you know in the top three or four most influential things i've ever written and it was just a little piece but it was sort of i remember this piece though and i have to say i've never forgotten it whenever i would see him in the years and years after when he ran for president just everything that happened his fights with trump that story that you tell about him and if shin is so beautiful and i just want to say to people listening you could probably google this michael lewis john mccain there aren't going to be that many stories like that and you can read it and it's short and it's really really memorable yeah and and i think the thing it did for me sort of kind of like turning point was are here i'm with a bunch of smarty pants at the new republic everybody knows more about politics than i do i don't know anything you know i'm just like i'm i'm stumbling around doing reportage and i just wrote i wrote something that meant a lot to me in this space it was a little on the side of the conversation it wasn't in the middle of any conversation it has this explosive effect and it kind of taught me like it doesn't much matter what everybody's talking about figure out what you care about and and when you find something you really care about and you put it and you you if there's there's if you can bottle it it's incredibly powerful and no matter what the subject right so it was yeah i was off turf in a funny way and um off my turf and and that that was a it was a big moment for me um yeah i sort of shove everybody in a direction in a really surprising way with a little piece of writing because because it's a the story is so powerful which later you end up doing and i have to say this this corresponds to something that we often say like when i'm talking to young audio journalists is like and they say like what's what's your advice my advice is like run at the thing that is most interesting to you find the thing that's most compelling to you there's all these dutiful things that we think we should be making stories about but just like run at the thing that that that like is just magnetic to you yeah and that's that's where your best work will be but we only have time i think for one other sorry did you want to say no look i'll shut up um i guess uh we've got a bunch of questions here um one of the people writes um my old documentary teacher used the term cinematic language is there anything when adapting from print to audio that simply cannot be turned into a radio story that's a really good question yeah um i thought so too it's a really good question i can think of things that would work less well as radio stories um it um and you got the constraint that you need the tape so when i think about oh could you do moneyball as a radio story well yeah but you'd have to have you gotta be walking around and get all that stuff on tape there's cert there are things that are really hard to get on tape and i could never gotten liars poker on tape you know they i was like i was already being like a spy that's right that's exactly right um but the most recent book the premonition like so much of it is just built out of interviews right like couldn't you have just done those interviews on tape could that have worked on tape so we took the first chapter and when i realized that the first chapter was just charity dean my main character and me and those are the only two voices and i had her perform her quotes her line what the audiobook or we did it for um it was kind of like an audio excerpt that push can put out wow wait and does it how does she perform can she perform herself in a credible way let her read it you know i said i and you know we coached her a little bit it was more like don't don't perform just say it the way you would say it so when she says uh the last line in the chapter is something like men like that always underestimate me they think my spirit animal is a bunny but it's a dragon and and i remember exactly what she how she sounded she was furious when she said it and i you know i i wanted her to sound the way she sounded when she said it so she we got her in that headspace and she did it um and it really worked it may and it worked so well i think yeah this could totally have been done as a and you know i and i think there's a reason why um it is the most character driven of all the books i've written and that's saying something i went in saying i'm gonna find the characters and i'm worried about what the story is later and um and audio really does reward character and and it's so i the characters would have really pulled you through an audio version um they're very distinctive voices actually actual voices so that could have been great so something some of these they're things that i really think what wouldn't wouldn't work which works less well is like the long parts of the big short where i'm trying to explain well you did it trying to explain how the what's going on in this very complicated financial sector yeah yeah i would i just wouldn't want to do that with audio there's also certain things in the premonition where you're explaining the kind of interactions that everybody's having with the cdc that if they were if it was a podcast it would just be like long long stretches of narration like a lot goes down but it's not a lot that goes down with quotes right and and so people could i mean if you had the right interviewees they could just tell you the stories and clearly somebody did tell you the stories right yes but like to make the tape land in the right way it's funny like like the premonition is so it's like it's like it's just dense with one anecdote after another after another like even interview even when you're introducing charity there's like seven amazing anecdotes that you can tell just to like establish her character before before the plot even starts before even like yeah i thought i had to because no one knows who she is yeah it was the problem it was um you know you do this everybody has this problem william goldman has this great thing in adventures in the screen trade about how he when he wrote butch cassidy and the sundance kid he had this problem uh that nobody had ever heard of robert redford and uh and and put paul newman's playing it with him and how do you establish like this character he had did he had to set it he had to generate an incredible anecdote right at the beginning of that where it's it's robert redford not paul newman who's the star just to get the audience's mind around who this character was oh wow and uh and so charity dean presented that problem in addition the stories are unbelievable so you don't you kind of it's hard to resist them but i needed to see this this is a very badass public health officer whatever you think a public health officer is you don't know this is here here's a badass public elbows and i just need so i needed to do that so people would follow her as a main character in a book can i say one thing it like in response to the person's question like like i've i've over the years like really adopted a lot of work and tried to adapt a lot of work from print into audio and certain things like i am i produce co-producers we will run at and and we fail and generally like there's just a certain pace that you need events to happen in an audio story and uh and and you really have to be mindful of pacing and like there are certain writers who are wonderful writers who who a bunch of us on staff really love who we've tried to like edit down their work and for radio and it just doesn't work you also i find like you can't have something that's too contemplative for too long because read out loud you just don't stay with it you actually do need forward motion which i guess i'm saying the same thing twice the other thing is you need the language to be more spoken if somebody's language isn't conversational enough it can sound it can just be it can just be hard it can just be harder to listen to like there's just some basic building blocks and and then like one of the things like when i was when i was first i could get mp i first started putting david sedaris onto the radio when i was at npr and i basically had heard him read in clubs he wasn't a published writer and uh and so he would read in these little clubs in chicago um these short stories and excerpts from his diaries and stuff and it observed some fake diaries and um and from the first time i heard him read i remember where i was at a club called lower links on clark street down in the basement i was like oh that guy would be perfect for the radio because this stuff is really funny it's really surprising and also like every 45 seconds or a minute and a quarter the anecdote would end or he would have some new thought and the way that radio public radio is paced the unit of a new thought is 45 seconds [Laughter] like and and and and and and if you think about it like if you listen to all things consider the morning edition just like even on the newscast in the newscast when they throw to a reporter for one of the little short like basically to write like a couple of sentences of script and then a piece of tape from somebody a couple sentences of script come out to do a little news spot it's 40 45 seconds 35 and like and weirdly when at the top of our show at the top of this american life we i consciously write so that the ideas happen so you get something comes to completion every 45 seconds or a minute and then i slow you down like basically like then the quotes can start to get longer and longer but for the first two or three minutes because we're on a public radio station i make it as quick as the public radio station goes and and and so so sedaris from the very beginning like he naturally was writing an anecdotes that that landed every like 45 seconds to minute to minute and a quarter and i was like like really like i didn't ask him to read anything on the radio for two or three years but from the very first time i heard about i was like oh that moves at radio speed i wonder if he's stumbled upon some universal truth like so the rule of three or the law of seven like it's something that maybe human beings actually process ideas for about 45 seconds and then they then they tune out uh i i wonder if radio knows something maybe maybe maybe um okay so uh why don't we take tomato we can take another question we can play the clip of you on this american life from the right here you know that that's that's like the very beginning of your show right i mean it's like the first few episodes yeah yeah okay so this is the so let's let's play that um this is me and then me introducing michael from 1996. so uh surely this is something that most people have not heard lately um and honestly our audience was so smart very few people heard at the time so let's play clip number four please act three campaign diaries throughout this year we've been bringing you the reportage of michael lewis he's publishing his campaign diaries in the new republic regular listeners to our program or regular readers of his know that at some point during this election year michael lewis became mesmerized with a presidential candidate by the name of maury taylor maritela ran in the republican primaries he shows up in in this installment you're about to hear and he goes by the nickname the grizz soon enough i find the parking lot it lies directly behind a small cluster of protesters a half mile or so from the convention center it consists of maybe four acres of concrete at the back of which is a stage over the stage is an american flag and in front of the flag is a huge banner it reads titan america's newest tire company that's maury's company on the stage are five large black men playing loud instruments each of whom wears a bandana that says the grizz that's mori at the front of the stage with a cigar jutting straight out from his mouth gyrating slightly to the funk is mori [Music] when i decided to make this guy the main character of the new republic's coverage there was a moment there was a moment and the moment was in the high school in ames iowa and i was just like seeing who he was you know who is this guy he says come along i'm going to go talk to the high school so he rolls into this high school and all the teachers have got presidential candidate is coming to visit us like they don't know who's a real one who's not a real one the auditorium is filled with kids you know rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and all their teachers maury gets up and kind of and and he he says chrissy screams at him wake up you you wake up you numbness i know i know you didn't sleep get enough sleep last night i know you're not thinking about class you're okay and he goes he goes all right we're gonna have a little quiz here he says he says what's the most important thing in life and like a kid raises their hand this is like integrity no that's not it or or a love no not love and like they offer like three or four things that a presidential candidate might agree is the most important thing in life and then whereas you guys never gonna figure it out he reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a lot of hundred dollar bills he says money this is the most important and the teacher the teachers were like what are we doing and the kids are like yeah and i'm i have tears coming down my face i'm laughing so hard and trying to scr scribble what he's what he's saying it's like what not to tell the kids he's like a character he's like a villain in a batman movie except he was so lovable and uh well and then you moved towards that just like you said you was like that seems like that's going to be fun to write about exactly right when i have tears coming down my face because it's so funny i write about it right you know that that's exactly right well that is a perfect place for us to end our conversation we're supposed to end by 7 15 my time so why don't we cut it off there your podcast again your new podcast mr lewis is called uh other people's money and uh and it begins uh wherever you get your podcasts at the beginning of february early february uh lovely to chat with you as always good to see you ara good to see you too okay bye-bye bye

Channel: Hot Docs

Views: 4,450

Keywords: Ira Glass, Podcast, Michael Lewis, Podcasting, This American Life, Hot Docs, Hot Docs Podcast Festival, Podcast Festival, Writing, Non fiction, Pushkin, Audio, Malcolm Gladwell, Audio series, how to write

Id: TgmzidW8uaw

Length: 66min 0sec (3960 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 03 2022