Bonus: An Evening with Michael Lewis, From "Liar’s Poker" to Today

27:50He says, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a professor at the university. And I thought, oh, s***. Like, my whole movie is different. I don't know what the movie is, but this is not. And I thought, oh, my interest just went, kum. And then he started to tell me, he says, if you looked at us a little bit, you'd find my dad was kind of famous. Robert Marks was the name. And Robert Marks had been brought to Princeton without a PhD to help Princeton. He had devised a mechanism for stress testing. He was stress testing fighter planes for the Navy and the Air Force before they built them.

28:28He'd take the design, build a little model, and he had this complicated way of just testing whether or not this design was going to actually work in practice. And Princeton had brought him in to test little nuclear reactors they wanted to build to see if it was going to crack. And Robert Mark one day was teaching an engineering class at Princeton when an undergraduate walks in from an art history class and says, this device you have, could you use it to like figure out what's holding Gothic cathedrals up? Because they just told us that no one understands how the roofs of Gothic cathedrals don't collapse.

29:02There's no records left by the builders. They're built over a century. No one knows what's decorative, what's actually holding the weight. And he said, yeah. And he became famous because he became the guy who figured out how they built the Gothic cathedrals and what was keeping them up, what was keeping the roof up. So that's Robert. That's the dad. Chris is telling me this in the first 15 minutes I'm talking to him. He says, so that was my dad. He said, I had a problem with my dad's life. It was the Vietnam War. I got kind of radicalized. I thought, I saw, it wasn't Princeton kids who were fighting and dying, and that really bothered me.

29:35And he said, he started throwing words around the house like bourgeois. And pretty soon he said, I'm not, he could have gone to Harvard or Princeton. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go join the working class. So he breaks with his dad. Big break. He goes on the road. Works in an auto factory, works in a UPS plant, and finally ends up with several fellow radicals in a coal mine in West Virginia. The other three radicals all quit at the end of the first day. It's that brutal. He finds it interesting. Why he finds it interesting is still a bit of a mystery, but he stays in the mine for a year and almost dies twice.

30:13He sees how dangerous it is. He crawls out of the mine, goes and gets an undergraduate and a Ph.D. at Penn State in rock engineering and begins the process of figuring out. There's all this data that the U.S. government has collected. They've observed the problem. It's a bit like the CDC does with the disease. that they've observed the problem without actually trying to stop the problem. So they have all this data on when roofs fell and what the conditions were. He starts to study it. And over a career, a really, really interesting career, figures out how to stop this from happening and stops it from happening.

30:52So he's telling me this on the phone. And he doesn't give me all the details of his work. And I stop him and I say, oh, so you rebelled against your dad and then you just went and had your dad's career. He figured out what was keeping up the rules of Gothic cathedrals, and you figured out how to keep the rules of coal mines up. And, I mean, this is someone I've just started talking to on the phone. He gets outraged. It's like, bulls**t. You know, like, I'm calling, you know, and I had nothing to do, what I did had nothing to do with my father's career. We have nothing in common. Completely different thing.

31:24If that's your theory, like, go away kind of thing. And I said, it just seems a natural observation, right? Right? So, two things. When I went and spent a lot of time with him, we rolled around West Virginia. He took me into coal mines. And he doesn't mention until, like, the third day that, oh, you know, it was funny. Were you reconciled? How did you reconcile with your dad? And I asked him, because they had become reconciled before his dad died. and he said it was gradual. He said, but there was this moment. He said, the National Cathedral, the federal government thought the National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down.

32:04This was in the year 2000. One of the towers was subsiding faster than the other and they didn't know why. So they called his dad to test, to see how the load was moving through the National Cathedral and the dad figured out that his stuff didn't work because whatever was going on, it wasn't above ground, it was below ground. So he called his son. And his son had the stuff to go figure out what was going on below ground. And together they wrote a paper about how the National Cathedral, what was going to happen, and we didn't have to worry about it falling down. But they studied it together and put everybody's minds to rest.

32:39Now, when you have that to navigate to in a story, you've got a story. I mean, it's just like that. And so Art Allen had the yellowing newspaper. Christopher Marks had the dad. I met, but I got to say, I've met lots of people in, like, the storm center and the National Weather Service who lost loved ones to tornadoes or that this instrument, the federal government, is filled with all this purpose. All these things that, it's where the problems of the private sector doesn't want to deal with go. You know, it's like there's no money to be made in it, but we've decided as a society we want to address it.

33:21That's what we use to address it. Who is attracted to these problems? People who have a particular interest in this problem for whatever reason. And that quality, like caring about the problem, it's outside yourself. I'm going to fix the problem, tends to come from a deep place. And that's where literature comes from. You know, it's the motives of the characters are in our government. These are rich and interesting people with rich and interesting backstories. And, you know, every time you kind of start scratching at one, you get at this. So let's address that a bit because I want to discuss your process a little bit, which I'm fascinated by.

34:04you once said to Malcolm Gladwell at the 92nd Street Y the subjects choose me I don't go looking for books the stories wander into my life and they get to the point where they can't not be written the stories kind of find me a relationship develops between me and the story I have no choice that's true so expound on that a bit you want the three minute or the five minute version whatever you're comfortable with All right. I mean, this goes back to who I am. I mean, I'm basically, I grew up in New Orleans, was raised to be a decorative object. I was raised - What does that mean? Not useful. Okay.

34:47Like nobody around me did anything useful and no one planned to. And hence you end up on Wall Street. No. Yeah, well, that's funny. But there's a certain charm you acquire on the streets of New Orleans that are very useful when you're trying to sell a bond. But yes, a lot of New Orleans make their way to Wall Street. They do quite well on Wall Street. You get the gift of gab kind of thing. But you learn to tell a story, which is very valuable in the financial markets and also very valuable to writers. But I'm basically lazy. Like, that is true. You know, it's core in me. Like, the working part of me has been added on somehow.

35:30But the deep me, I would just sit around and scratch myself for the rest of my life. You've written 14 books. How is that lazy? So this is, I'm not lying. I'm telling you the truth. You're just going to have to figure out. You've got to make sense of it. Okay. My father, my father, this is God's truth. My father, from the age of about seven to the age of when I was 18, had me persuaded that there was Latin, we had a coat of arms, Lewis, and there was always a Latin under it. He persuaded me that what that Latin said, which you translated, was do as little as possible, and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task.

36:17My father raised me to be lazy. You know, I mean, he was like, don't sweat it, you're working too hard. This is the environment I was raised in, and I took to it. But you didn't. But I did. Every book you've written, you embed yourself in unfamiliar places. It's also true. No, it's true. I'm curious. I got that, too. I'm actually curious. I see something, and I want to know about it. And it happens a lot. It just happens a lot. And so with pleasure, I pursue a curiosity. I ask, why are the Oakland A's winning baseball games with no money? Like, how is that possible? That's a beginning. That's a curiosity.

37:02And so I go to the trouble. But most people have that thought and go, who knows? And they divide. You spend weeks and weeks and years. So it is true that I do the work. It is true that I eventually do the work, but I do from a place of deep laziness. It's deep. It's like that it is I get curious. I start to get involved. I realize oh my god this is look at this story and it is it is got to it really does have to rise to the level in my mind that this story is so important and it's delusional like is any story that important but it's the story is so important that I have an obligation to do it so now I now I have to do it because I have an obligation I make myself feel that way and when I feel that way, then I'm off.

37:54Then I forget about the laziness and I do the work. So you have this incredible knack of finding yourself in the right place at the right time before everybody else figures out what's happening. So this is an incredibly lucky thing. Okay, so I'll give you that. This one's lucky. Liars Poker, you're there early in the rise of Wall Street. I was working. Okay, you're working. Moneyballed. No one had any idea what was going on with Sabermetrics and how this scrappy little broke team was able to put together a competitive run. Going infinite, you embed with FTX and Sam Bankman Freed. That was kind of cool.

38:31That was a year before. All right, but you know - That was also - I didn't know that was happening. You didn't know that was happening. And then the whole undoing project with Danny Kahneman, who just coincidentally lived down the street from you. You have this ridiculous knack to finding yourself at the head of a wave that's about to crash over society. I mean, once or twice is dumb luck. How do you do it six times in a row? That's not exactly luck. I think it is. I mean, you know, you and I... So he's just published a book too, How Not to Invest. It's really good. And you say 18 different ways in the course of this book how skeptical you are of the ability to predict the future sure I am too I think everybody wants you to predict the future and you just shouldn't do it because it's just you know you can't who knows what you're always skating to where the pucks gonna be explain that it's maybe I think the puck is just coming to where I happen to be that it that so so I don't think I really think it Sam Bankman Freed lands on my front porch after someone asked me to just interview him and evaluate him I didn't go looking for him.

39:46He walked up and I said, this is interesting. I'm going to follow, I'm just going to follow him around. This, I had this nagging sense that I'd left all this gold in the mine. I still feel that way. There's gold in that mine still. And I left the gold in the mine. Let's go back there and get it and bring some friends and they can have some of the gold too. And I mean, I had no idea that Trump was going to do what he's done to the government. None. I did have a sense that he didn't care about it, that he was going to just completely try to gut it. I had no sense. So in every case, I know how much accident there was.

40:25I will say, if I were trying to make the case that I know something that other people don't, or there's something about me that leads to being a little ahead of the curve, I'd only say that the closest thing to the best way to predict the future is just pay attention to the present. that you pay closer attention to the present than other people are. You see the future is there. And so it is, I do pay attention to the present. I observe. And I also, so this gets back to the laziness. That when you're lazy, it's not necessarily a bad thing to be a little lazy. Amos Tversky, Amos Tversky, my character in The Undoing Project, had a great line, which I tell every kid who asks for advice.

41:11I just repeat it. He says, people waste years of their lives not being willing to waste hours of their lives. That people get so worked up about being busy, moving their career up, they don't let things in. They're like always achieving. And if you just back away and let the world come into you, that's a helpful approach to a writer. Also, if you're a little lazy, like you would rather basically not be doing anything, it takes a level of interest to move you. I know a lot of writers who just go, they can always find something to write about because they feel like they have to be writing, so they just force it.

41:53Before I sit down and bother to put a word on the page, I've had to get so excited about it to offset the natural tendency not to do anything. And so it's like the material is leaping over higher hurdles to get to the place with me that I want to write about it. So maybe that has something to do with this. Can I float a theory to you? Sure. I think it's going to be bull****, but you can do it. Well, Malcolm Gladwell's grand unified theory of Michael Lewis books is biblical allegories. Right. That's bull****. Yeah, that is bull****. Right. Daniel and the Lion's Den is Liar's Poker, The Blind Side is Good Samaritan, David and Goliath Moneyball.

42:35Like, you're not doing biblical allegories. No, no. I mean, you can, the truth is you can find almost any, you can map almost any story onto the Bible. Right. Right. But here's what's not bull**** is every Michael Lewis book features a character and the arch type Michael Lewis character, They're quirky outsiders pushing against the grain because they've discovered some interesting insight or truth or previously unknown thing that is against the consensus. And then they apply that to their field and either they make a lot of money shorting stocks or they save fat guys who've fallen off of cruise ships.

43:19Those are the same characters, but every... Who's that character in Liars Poker? You. You think that's me? Well, you show flashes of you. It was your first book, so we'll cut you a little slack. But in fact, let's talk about Liars Poker. Yeah. So we did a podcast on the 30th anniversary. You had to go reread it, not just reread the book, but read it out loud for the audio version. Yeah. I hadn't reread it since I wrote it. So first, what was that experience like? Awful. I mean, I don't know if you've ever gone back, but I was 26 when I wrote that. And I'd never written anything. I mean, I'd written letters to my mother and a few articles in The Economist.

44:03And I mean, it was just... I was really raw. But still, there are flashes of the future Michael Lewis, the writer, throughout... Hey, listen, first of all, for a first-time book, it was great. But you know what's funny? And you were 26, so you could cut yourself some slack. There were some things I noticed. One is there was just general infelicity, but I noticed that whenever I thought I was being funny, I wasn't funny. And whenever I didn't, I was. Like, oh, that's funny, but I didn't know it was funny. It was embarrassing. I thought there were lines that were clearly designed to get people to laugh, and then I shouldn't have been doing it.

44:42And there were structures. So it was... But I feel finally towards it. It launched my career. I'm going back I'm still stuck on your theory but let me just point out that you wrote that book while you were working full time at Solomon Brothers you were doing this nights and weekends at least that's when you started sketching this, this wasn't Michael Lewis the full time writer so when you look back at that you got to give yourself a little hey not bad for a first effort it's fine, it's not bad for a first book I agree, it's not bad for a first book But when I think about your description of my books...

45:22The quirky outsider. The line that's right. I think of it this way. Because Billy Bean's not quirky. Billy Bean's like the coolest guy in the room when he walks into a room. Yes, he's got... We're all quirky. Underneath, we all have little things going on that are... We're all above average. We're all a little neurotic. We all have stuff. Your characters have a lot of stuff. Sometimes they have a lot of stuff. But what I think of, I think of it more as I get excited by someone who could teach me. And all my characters are teaching me something about the world. And now the kind of person who's teaching you something about the world often is someone who has been challenging the world.

46:06So that's true, too. They're often in kind of conflict with the world. But what's attracting me to them, I never think, oh, quirky, great. I never think that. Brad Katsuyama is not quirky. He's a nice Canadian boy. Flash boys. Flash boys. He is the least quirky person who ever carried a book. He is normal. He's like as normal as they get. And there's some stuff there. What there is, is nice Canadian boy collides with Wall Street and is upset when he sees what's going on. And figures out a way around it. And figures out, yes. He's the least quirky of all your characters. But let's stick with Moneyball.

46:49How did you gain access to the A's? How did they grant you keys to the kingdom? This often happens too, that you have a question, and the question is equally interesting to the subject. So I called Billy Bean, went and go see him. I said, look, it doesn't make any sense. You're spending one-fifth what the Yankees are spending. How can you be competing? If this market is efficient, the Yankees should be buying all the best baseball players, and you would just lose all the time. And he said, no one has asked me that question. It's what I think about all the time. He's just covered by sports writers.

47:18And the baseball writers at the time paid no attention to the financial disparities. They weren't thinking of the money on the field. And that's all they thought about, was the front office, was the money on the field. So he was interested in the question in the first place. And also, I didn't tell him I was writing a book. I told him I thought, I didn't know what I was going to write. Maybe a little magazine piece, maybe nothing. And it got more and more interesting. and I disguised how interesting I was. And when I divulged two months into it that I was thinking about writing a book, it was too late.

47:47He couldn't get rid of me. I knew too much. But there was, and I had found ways to insinuate myself into their lives. I mean, this is like, how do you make yourself, how you get them to let you hang around, that's the important thing. You've got to hang around. You've got to be kind of in the, you know, just, they forget you're there. kind of hang around. So that was the trick there. You know when that book, have I told you when that book became a book? No. Like when I came home at late at night and I said, wrote my publisher and said, this is going to freak you out, but I'm going to write a sports book.

48:24I was in the locker room of the Oakland A's interviewing, telling the players. I was interviewing the players one by one and telling them why they were playing first base or why they were the leadoff hitter. They had no idea. No idea. The Ace front office regarded it as a science experiment, and they were the lab rats, and it just confused their lab rats if you told them what the experiment was. And they told me, like, don't talk to them about it. They just won't handle it well. But the players were really interested. So I was welcome in the clubhouse, and they were coming out of the showers. I was waiting for my guy to talk to them.

49:02And for the first time I saw the Oakland A's naked and it was such a disgusting sight. It was like, it was just, I mean... Not ripped professional athletes. It was like they had cankles and they were all fat. They look like a beer league team. And I had the thought, which I relayed to the front office. It was like if you line those naked bodies up against a wall and asked anybody what they did for a living, nobody would guess professional athlete. They would guess like Wall Street guys. They could be Wall Street guys. They could be accountants. They could be flight attendants. They could be not professional athletes.

49:42And the front office said, it's funny you say that because we are aware of how unattractive they are without their clothes on. They said that we get excited when they are unattractive without their clothes on. And they don't look right. because the market, we are evaluating them blind. It's just we're looking for performance statistics. And when we find the player whose statistics are promising, but they look wrong, we know why the market's misvaluing them. They're misvaluing them because of the way they look. And I remember it blew my mind. I remember driving home and thinking, oh, my God. This is when you have a duty to write it.

50:26Like, never mind baseball. Just think of this as a corporation. And they got these employees. They've been doing the same thing for 100 years. Millions of people are watching them. Stats attached to every move they make on the job. If those people can be misvalued because of the way they look, who can't be? Everybody can't be. So this is a universal story. It's that feeling. Like, this is a universal story. And so I got very excited, and I wrote my publisher note and said, sorry, here it comes. I'm going to be writing a book called Moneyball. and now the flip side of this is none of my subjects ever know what I'm doing they really don't they know I'm hanging around but they they I mean like Oakland they saw me I spent a week with the Blue Jays I spent days with the Rangers I spent days with the Marriott I spent time with the Red Sox and I had to do that to know that they were special like I know that nobody else was doing this.

51:19And so from their point of view, it was like, what's he doing? So when Billy Bean got the book, and my subjects only get the book when everybody else gets the book. I don't want them bothering me. And he got the book. He was furious. He was angry. Because you let out the secret? Two things. One was, since when am I the main character? Could have told me. It's that kind of things. Like, I'm not, I was not, I didn't sign up for this kind of thing. But, but second thing he says, I thought he was going to be pissed off because I had revealed their secrets. That's what I was worried. I was worried that was the betrayal.

52:00He says, he's on the phone. He's like incoherent. And I said, what is bothering you? And he said, you have me saying all the time. And I said, you do say all the time. What am I supposed to do there? And he said, you don't understand my mother's going to be so upset. And I said, your mom, you know, like, really? I was like, a sigh of relief. If that's what we're worried about here, low-level problem. And it turned out not to be a low-level problem. She was furious. She is still furious, and she's angry at me. She's still angry at me. I swear to God, she's angry about it. But I said to Billy, I said, I started laughing.

52:40I started to say, like, if I was so worried you were going to be angry with me for stitching together this narrative that revealed all your secrets. I found out as much as I could. And I put as much of it in the book as I could. And it's going to blow your competitive advantage. I thought that's what you were angry about. And there's this pause on the other end of the line. And he says, you don't think anybody in baseball is going to read your book. He says, it's like, they're always going to read your book. They don't know how to read. He said, we've been doing this for years. Nobody's asked a question.

53:11And he was kind of right. He was right about that. It was too narrow. He was right that nobody ever reads a book who thinks they know what they're doing and changes their mind. Like no GM at the time was going to say, oh, I learned something from this book. Or oh, we've been doing it the wrong way. Well, didn't the GM of the Red Sox eventually come? No. While I was working on the book, John Henry had just bought the Red Sox. The hedge fund manager. And he was saying, he actually said, what do I got to do to prevent you from writing this book? Because he said, we're about to do this here. And he wanted to hire Billy.

53:44And I became, it was kind of fun. I remember doing this on pay phones in the airport. I became, they weren't allowed to negotiate. Right. So they negotiated through me. So I helped organize Billy's contract with the Red Sox. And Billy was going to go. And then changed his mind last minute. And Theo Epstein becomes the GM of the Red Sox. See, Theo was trying to hire Billy, too. He was part of the group inside. But the rest is history, and Theo leads the Red Sox to victory, and Billy Bean is written out of that story. But the Red Sox were about to do it. New owner, like new owner who had background in finance.

54:21So he gets this. He gets statistics and data and all that. What happened was other owners read the book. Like the head of Goldman Sachs at the time, I know talked to the owner of the Mets and said, you're being ripped off by your own management. They don't know what they're doing. At the ownership level, they started to change things. That was how the change happened. It would have happened anyway. What would have happened if I hadn't written the book is the Red Sox would have done this. They would have won the World Series using sabermetrics or statistics. They would have gotten total credit for revolutionizing the sport and Billy Bean would have been a footnote.

54:58That's what would have happened. Of all your books that became a movie, that's probably my favorite film version. Is it? What was that process like watching? Do you just essentially sign the papers and that's it? Or did they retain you for script consulting or anything like that? So what happens is, for sure, the movie people would rather the author be dead. There's no question. All you can do from their point of view is cause trouble. like complain or give advice. And I was aware of this quite early. Like I know they don't care what I think. It was really clear they didn't care, but they were trying to pretend like they sort of cared.

55:41And this was blindside actually was the first one. And I thought, but they wouldn't leave me alone. Like I couldn't just say, here, really, just give me the money, I'll give you the book, and whatever you do, no, whatever you do. See at the opening. Yeah, see at the opening, and just make it don't suck. and it's on you if it does because it's not my movie, it's your movie. And they refuse to accept that blunt relationship. I think because they don't believe that I actually think that. And so what happens is they pretend to be interested. They don't know you're lazy. They don't know I'm lazy. I really, they pretend to be interested in what I think.

56:19I have to pretend to believe they're interested in what I think. We have this false interaction where I give them advice and they ignore it all. and but out of this some really lovely friendships have sprung like it's a social relationship so I'm friends with all the directors who've made the movies really friends and some of the actors are still in my life and like Jonah Hill will just call me up out of the blue and say I got a problem I'm going to just talk this through and that kind of thing and that's been great can I tell you a story about the Moneyball movie? sure the Moneyball movie was this sort of so you guys want to hear a story about Moneyball right so the Moneyball movie so Billy being in addition to being pissed off at me because I had him saying all the time he was he was put I really admire the guy he was put in a really difficult position the book puts him in opposition to his industry he knows something everybody else doesn't all the other GMs hate him all of a sudden when he's he didn't deserve this but he instead of instead of throwing me under the bus he just fought.

57:25He said, there's nothing in the book that's not true. So you want to fight about it? Come fight. And he's brave. He's basically a very brave person. However, it was so unpleasant, the book, among the most, maybe the most unpleasant publication in that all of baseball was angry, really angry. And he said, he called me one day, he says, like, Sony Pictures is trying to buy my life rights to make a movie. And he says, I just want to tell you I'm not doing this. I didn't want the book. I don't want a movie. I don't need this. And I said, Billy, you don't understand. They never make the movie. They just give you money for your rights.

58:04That I've sold, I don't know, a dozen magazine articles, five books. Money just comes out of Hollywood and they never make anything. Because they hadn't made anything at that point. And when I gave him the list of like the amounts I'd raked in from Hollywood for doing absolutely nothing, he sort of said, like, this is free? I said, yeah, it's free. And so he took a bunch of money for his life rights. It was an option that renewed every 18 months. And every 18 months he'd call me. He goes, you're a genius. Like, this is unbelievable. You're right. They're not going to make this movie. It goes on for years, you know, like seven years.

58:36And then one day he calls me up and says, you ****. He said, Brad Pitt just called me. And he says he's coming over to the house. He says, my wife is putting on makeup and the babysitter is going home to get a dress. and it was like, he said, you said this wouldn't happen. I remember he was like, you said this wouldn't happen. And I said, I don't know what to tell you. Like, I'm a little shocked this is happening. So flash forward, I don't know, a year, six months, they're shooting in the Oakland Coliseum. And I've gone to the set a couple of times. This was the cool thing. I brought my kids because they had 8 ,000 extras in the Oakland Coliseum and they'd gotten body doubles for the 2002 Kansas City Royals and Oakland A's.

59:20So like Barry Zito looked more like Barry Zito than Barry Zito. And they're replaying this game. And they're moving the 8 ,000 people around the Coliseum and make it look like it's full. It's a great drama. Before I go over to see this, they call me and say, Sony calls me and says, Billy Bean is refusing to have anything to do with anybody. Like he's not visited the set. He let Brad Pitt come to his house once. And that was it. and that he's like, everybody's worried. He's just angry about this. Could you get him down? His office is at the stadium. Could he just walk down and shake a couple of hands and make everybody feel good?

59:58And so I called him. I said, Billy, like, it's not that big a deal. Just come on over. And he said, are you going to be there? I said, yeah. He says, okay, then I'll come. I'll come and just spend 10 minutes. I don't want them to think I'm into it, though. So it's like, okay, they know you're not into it. Come on over, shake some hands. So we get there. I'm there on the field. And he comes walking out, and this young male production assistant comes running out of left field. And he's got the headgear, and he's got a notepad. And he comes running up to Billy and says, Mr. Bean, Mr. Bean, you've been my hero ever since I read your book.

1:00:33I just want to tell you how you changed my life. And Billy's like, it's not my book. He wrote the book. He points to me. He goes, no, this is your book. The guy is so, it's like weird. He says, will you just please sign my book? And Billy says, all right, I'll sign your book. And so he opens the notepad, and there were two Billy Beans in the major leagues at the same time. And they both played in the same outfield on the Tigers and I think the Twins. I mean, it's weird. They were both there on the field at the same time. And the other Billy Bean was gay, and he came out of the closet and wrote a memoir.

1:01:04And it was called, like, hitting from the other side of the plate. And so this guy has the gay Billy Beans memoir. And Billy, the straight Billy Bean, he's like, there's nothing good is happening right now. He's like, what do I say? What do I do? I'm not, you don't say I'm not gay. You don't say, there's nothing you can do in this situation. And I look over and in the A's dugout, Brad Pitt's rolling around. He set the whole thing up. And he had Sony Pictures call me to talk Billy to coming to the field so he could He had thought of this joke so he could play this joke on Billy B. And it worked.

1:01:49It really worked. So that is a great story.

1:01:57Before we open this up for questions, I want to ask one or two more questions, including another story you told about name confusion when you had spent some time in Israel with Danny Kahneman. Oh, that's funny. And you, similar story, you go to... But nearly as good a story. So Danny Kahneman, the great Israeli psychologist, he was one of the main characters of The Undoing Project. One of the two main characters. Yeah, one of the two main characters. And he and Amos both had done a lot of work with the Israeli military. He had moneyballed Israeli troops to determine who should be an officer. He devised these metrics so he could measure it rather than just do it by an interview.

1:02:44So he was there very early. The reason I even wrote that book is I came back to that book after moneyball because when moneyball comes out, Richard Thaler, economist, Cass Sunstein, his writing partner, reviewed it and said, Michael Lewis has written a really interesting story, but he doesn't know what it's about. and they said it's a case study in the work of Takanaman and Tversky. That's how I even heard that these guys existed. Anyway, I go to Israel. We're going to the military base where Danny did that money-balling work for the Israeli army. And we get there, and they are 400 of the best-looking young women I've ever seen just waiting for us, like waiting in a mob behind the gates when we come through.

1:03:27And they look at us, and they just kind of like melt away. At first I thought, wow, Danny's got it going on. I mean, it's like, they're here for Danny. And it turns out there's an Israeli underwear model named Michael Lewis. And he's got like unbelievable abs. And so they'd seen Danny Kahneman's coming with Michael Lewis, and they thought it was the underwear model. Unbelievable. So there's a question I've been wanting to ask you for a while, and I just never get to it, so I'm going to force it. early. I know you have all these stories that are half told and all these things that are future projects.

1:04:07I'm always curious if there was a loose thread in a story that you said, I really want to pull that and see what happens in some of the books you've published, but you haven't gotten to. What do you mean? What characters, what lines of thought that you kind of briefly go over and sort of say in the back of your head, gee, I should really circle back to that. That looks really interesting, but just haven't gotten around to from any of your books. Because I know you have dozens and dozens of things that you've started new. You have all your research and folders and stuff. Right. You mean, what do I have on the back burner that might go on to the front burner?

1:04:48Well, that's another question. It's what kind of loose thread has been out and about from some of the books you've written that you just... Are you thinking something? No, nothing in particular. This was literally a Twitter question. I said, give me some questions. This was the only one that I thought was half decent. I thought you were asking me. I was wrong. No, no, no. It's funny because I don't... No, I have books that... They're books that I started and stopped because they didn't work. There's a book that got away that would have been shot at a masterpiece, but the subject tossed me out because I made the mistake of writing something in a magazine about him before I wrote the book.

1:05:27What was that? George Soros. It was 1990 and Soros was interested in me for a bunch of reasons.

1:05:38Soros had somebody he really admired as a money manager. He was Soros' Soros. His name was Nils Taub. He ran Jacob Rothschild's Money in London. and he was, he was, he's the smartest person I've ever met in the financial markets, about the financial markets. He had just that, he had, you know, Soros has those jungle instincts. He had them times two and older guy. He took me under his wing when I was at Solomon brothers. I cold called him and I said, basically, I know you're, I know that there's no reason you want to talk to me. I've just arrived. I'm 24. I said, I'm a new guy here. Um, can I take you out to breakfast?

1:06:16and something about the interaction caused him to say, sure, you can take me out to breakfast. And we went out to breakfast and he said, you're not going to try to, as long as you don't try to tell me anything, sell me anything, pretend you know something, I'll do my business through you. And for the next two years, over the next two years, he became the second biggest customer at Salomon Brothers and I didn't ever have to do anything. I just picked up the phone. And I would describe to him like what I'm seeing on the trading floor. I'd describe what I was seeing in the markets, But I never said you should do this because it would have been folly.

1:06:47And he appreciated that. And he told Soros about me when I left to write Liars Poker. And so Soros was very receptive to me. And he took me on a private trip. You know, when the Berlin Wall fell, he built all these institutes for democracy around Eastern Europe. He took me on a private trip through these places. And there was a book to do about both his fear about the threats to democracy, which seem very prescient right now. and like this isn't forever. These places, they have to learn democracy and we have to help them and what he was doing in the financial markets and he was going to let me write about both and like an idiot, I wrote because I was at the New Republic.

1:07:28I wrote for the New Republic a piece about the trip and it was not rude about him. It was what I thought of him but I did make fun of his writing. Like all the theories, he has all these theories about how markets work. reflexivity yeah all that this intellectualizing which is it's he is a jungle animal and it's like he layers on top of it a complicated explanation and he was so vain about his philosophy that he was really irritated when someone didn't take it seriously and that was it didn't want to see me again and that was the that was the one huge one i'll never make that a mistake again it was gold the material and no one else was going to get it and no one did no one wrote the book the book never got written.

1:08:10And that book could have been a very valuable book. But I have that. I have those kind of things. I don't have, and I have, I think I'm not going to talk about what they are, but I think I know what the next two books are. I think I know what I'm about to go do. But I don't have anything, I don't have anything where I think, oh, oh, I wished I'd written, if I wanted to do it, I'd go do it, you know. I have, I sold Moneyball as two books. I thought the second book was going to be about the kids they drafted that year using algorithms. And I spent two years in the minor leagues chasing around after these guys.

1:08:44No go. Two years. I was in uniform as a Midland rockhound in Midland, Texas and kept shagging fly balls before the game. Like I put a no go. It's just all notes under my office. Yeah, no go. So you know I always come with like four hours worth of questions. But what I'd like to do. How many did we not get to? Oh, three quarters? But it doesn't matter. I want to bring the house lights up. You never expect me to talk so much. No, my job is to give you a nudge and get out of the way. Okay. So I think I mostly accomplished what I wanted to. Yep. Why don't we bring up the house lights? They're up. And let's see if there are any questions from the audience.

1:09:27One back here? I'm not going to... Just say your name and... It's hard to see you. And where you're from. Because Michael's from California. we'll give him a Long Island geography lesson. Go ahead. Hi, Mr. Lewis. My name's Andrew Minicucci, huge fan of yours. All your books and your podcast Against the Rules as well. I'm from just up the street, so very, very convenient commute. I have a question for you related to losers. The Road to Any Place but the White House, one of your, I believe, criminally underrated books. Can you expand upon your relationship with John McCain as well as what you think he means to American politics?

1:10:12What a question. Great question. I never get asked about John McCain. But if you ask me what the most influential thing I ever wrote was, I might say the first thing I wrote about John McCain. I met John McCain, so I was assigned to cover the 96th presidential campaign for the New Republic. I was learning my craft. I'd written Liar's Poker, but I had not, I mean, I'd never written for a school newspaper. No English teacher ever thought I was worth more than a C. You know, I was just like, there was no, I had no background for this. And the New Republic at the time was filled with the most talented collection of writers I've ever seen in one place, and editors.

1:10:54And the editor at the time was Andrew Sullivan, and Andrew shipped me off to just go do what I would do on the road. And I got in a car and I never got out of it. I was all over the country for the next nine months. And it quickly became clear that the 96 presidential campaign was the most boring presidential campaign in human history. And around Bob Dole and Bill Clinton were armies of communications people who were going to make sure you never saw anything interesting. And so I just started writing about what was interesting rather than what I was supposed to write about. And I started to pick up characters who resonated with me and in small groups of voters.

1:11:33So I flipped it. I made minor characters the main characters and put Dole and Clinton in the background. And it really worked as a series in the New Republic. And then it brought out as a book. But in the course of this, I was in a terminal in Spartanburg, South Carolina at 11 o 'clock at night, told the Dole campaign was going to land to pick me up. And the question was why would they do that and why they would do that was McCain was in the same terminal. and I recognized him vaguely. It was just the two of us and they came over to said hi and we started talking and He was at that time Disgraced he was part of the one of the Keating five he'd been involved in the in the savings and loan scandal He had barely won his reelection And he he taught he was just different than any politician.

1:12:20I met he was like real and I just started getting interested in him and then I learned his story about how he had been in and he'd been held in prison, and his limbs had been broken during the Vietnam War, and that they were torturing him. This was the amazing thing. The Vietnamese were torturing John McCain to get him to accept early release. They were trying to let him go because his father was an admiral, and they thought they could undermine the morale of the American troops if they started letting the fancy people's kids out of prisoner of war camp. And so he got beat up over and over because he refused to go home before the people who had been captured before him.

1:13:03Now, so the piece that created, I found it by just, I was just hanging with him because I was interested in him. I didn't know where he was going to lead. He didn't really belong in a book about the 96th presidential campaign, except he was Dole's most popular surrogate. But that was, that's the one side. He let slip that he has this relationship. and it came out very naturally. This guy, I was coming over to his office. This other guy was coming over to his office named David Ifshin. And David Ifshin was a Vietnam War protester who went with Jane Fonda to Hanoi and piped anti-war propaganda into John McCain's cell.

1:13:42And Ifshin had later in life, things had changed since that time and McCain had been celebrated for his war heroism and Ifshin had become kind of blacklisted by American politics because of his involvement. even though McCain kind of admired his conviction. And McCain saw, Ifshin ends up going to work for Clinton, and then someone came out with a story about how Ifshin had done this with Jane Fonda, and Clinton was about to kind of release him, and McCain got involved and told Clinton, like, you keep him on, and I'm going to get up and give a speech about this guy on the Senate floor about he's my friend.

1:14:21They'd developed a relationship. And so I wrote the story about this relationship between the war protester and the war hero. And it was 3 ,000 words in the New Republic, which ends up in this book, Losers. And McCain, at that moment, was sort of like untouchable by the journalist. Nobody was paying him much attention, and he was a little disgraced. Overnight, everybody wanted to write the same story. And he got his relationship to the rest of the world, to the media in Washington, just changed. We became friends, and he let me in on this process. He was like, that piece changed my life. And it made it possible for him to go become the candidate he became.

1:15:01It was amazing watching what a little piece of journalism can do. And it was a very moving story. The wrinkle to it was when I wrote the story, Ifshin was dying. He was dying of cancer. He was on his deathbed. So Ifshin was telling me about what John McCain had done for him from his deathbed. and it was just powerful and so I don't know what to say about this except that I found in spending time with him that even in politics you could find these pockets of authenticity and if you respected them that they generated a different kind of response than most political writing and I also found that like if you found what was good in someone in the political process The readership wanted to hear it.

1:15:50They were so used to the kind of distance, the critical distance, which ends up being kind of antiseptic. You don't ever really know the person. And McCain, he wasn't really running for anything at the time. He certainly wasn't a presidential candidate. I could let the reader get close to him, and the reader really enjoyed that. And when he ran for president, he almost knocked off Bush the first time. They started out really well. But that campaign, he called me before and he said, I want you to come with me. Just be with me wherever. You don't have to write about it if you don't want to write about it.

1:16:24But I want you to watch. I want to see you watch this process up close, like in the middle of a campaign. And I said, how close can I get? He said, you have the other bedroom in my place in Washington. We'll actually live together. You just go wherever you. And we just had our first child. And I could not go to my wife and say, guess what? I'm going off of John McCain for the next year. And he, being old school, being a man of his generation, did not understand it. It was like, what? It's a kid? You know, he's a military guy, too. Like, they would breed and then go off on a ship for the next five years.

1:16:58And so he was just bewildered by the fact that I was not going to ride shotgun on his first presidential campaign because I had had this child. And that ended up being kind of the end. I mean, at that point, I became a little more distant friend. But it would have been fun to watch it. For sure. Let's get another question. I saw you today on Nicole Wallace's program. Can you believe I got here? Yes. I couldn't believe. I was wondering if it would be canceled. Yeah. But you said one thing that had me fascinated. You said that most people don't know what government does. And you said nobody knows what the Department of Commerce does.

1:17:41What does it do?

1:17:46Well, there's a book called The Fifth Risk, and there's a chapter in that book by me that explains it. But when you ask people who don't know, they kind of say commerce, business. Business, of course. So 80 % of the budget is the National Oceanographic Administration. NOAA. NOAA. And 75 % of that budget is the Weather Service. So weather prediction is at the center of the Department of Commerce, which is a little odd. But, I mean, the names... One of our problems in explaining our federal government is the names of the places don't actually describe the places. Energy, commerce... Agriculture should be Department of Rural.

1:18:26It's rural. It keeps rural America afloat. Commerce should be the Department of Weather. That would be good. I didn't really oppose this idea of turning the Department of Defense into the Department of War. That's a little more on the nose. but wasn't it the Department of War way back when? Energy is the Department of Science and Technology that's what it is, it's amazing what is in the energy, all the national labs in the fifth risk you tell the story that they want to privatize the Commerce Department all the energy reporting and then once you do that where are you getting the data for all these people saying, well I get the weather on my app, we don't need this AccuWeather, but AccuWeather gets it from the National Weather Service.

1:19:09Right, that's right. So it was, they, the Accu, what they, Trump tried to do the first time around is give the Department of Commerce to the AccuWeather CEO and let him have his way with it. And what would have happened was he would have, he would have created preferential access probably to his own. So his own app would have gotten more. And you also describe in the book how much more accurate weather forecasting is getting, tornado warning. So it's like, this is the thing about government. It's like when it does something right, people just, it's like, it's the way you treat your parents. When they're good parents, you don't even notice.

1:19:44They get no credit. It's when they screw up that you notice. And that's the relationship we have with our government. We're like a 14-year-old boy, and our government is our mother. That's sort of how mature our relationship is. But the natural weather, what they have done, if you go back and talk to a weatherman who's been doing it for 50 years, He'd kind of say, like, you know, what I used to do is, like, wake up in the morning, go outside, and say, sunny. It could be sunny for a while. You know, that they could do almost nothing, you know, out a day or two kind of thing. These accurate forecasts out seven days, you know, being able to figure out which way a hurricane's going, getting better tornado prediction.

1:20:22All this stuff is huge achievement with huge effects. Like, it really makes all our lives. And it has a big effect on commerce, too, right, on business. Your plane, did you remember when you were flying as a kid and the plane was just always bumping around? It's not doing that nearly as much. It's because the airlines have better data from the National Weather Service about what's going on up with the currents. So that happens, and nobody says, wow, cool, they did that. It's all taken for granted. Now, the dystopia is, like, it gets privatized, and Barry gets the premium gold or platinum or whatever it is, tornado forecast, and I get the silver forecast.

1:21:09So I'm in my house when it comes through, and you aren't. You know, it becomes, I mean, a real matter of equity if we're getting different. I mean, it seems like that should be a public good. It makes plenty of sense. Balcony, let's get a question up top. Here we are. Fire away. Hi. So first of all, you talked about the 96 campaign. And just so you know, I listened to some of your podcasts from that as well. You were on This American Life as well. I don't know if you remember that. Back in 90s? Oh, so that's funny. Ira Glass was just starting This American Life when I was doing that. And he called and said, could you just, I mean, this was back when they were pretty low budget.

1:21:55I would just go, as an episode, go read the New Republic stuff. So I'm, like, four or five of these things are early episodes of This American Life. And he became a good, close friend through that. But, yes, so I've never listened to them, but I remember reading. Yeah, you did a phenomenal job. You should listen to them again and maybe compile them. They were great. You talked about, besides from McCain, that story you relayed, you did something about you did a lot about Dole and you also did something about I don't know, some other guy in business who... It was a proto-Trump. His name was Maury Taylor.

1:22:31And he was the businessman who was running to make government... Put up his own money. He spent$7 million getting 7 ,000 votes in New Hampshire and Iowa. And he was in many ways the most reasonable candidate. He was like when you gave everybody what he stood for, everybody kind of agreed and then they saw him and freaked because he did none of the artifice of the politician. But he was great fun. I remember him. Well, so this is another moment. The New Republic for a moment thought, what the hell is he doing? He's turning Maury Taylor into the main character of our 96th presidential campaign coverage.

1:23:01And I did. He was the main character of that story. But I went out with him just to see what the hell was going on. He was in Iowa and he had three huge RVs with speakers on the front. and he'd blare Bruce Springsteen as he went into town. And he had kegs of beer on the back. And he'd throw a party in every town. But the morning I was with him, he rolls into the biggest public school in Iowa. I can't remember where it was, Ames or somewhere. And they've rolled out, they've made all the students go to the auditorium. It's huge. To hear the presidential candidate. And Maury's been a presidential candidate for about, at that point, like four weeks.

1:23:43And before that, he was at the same time CEO of Titan Tire and Wheel, a Midwestern tire company, and had no experience or knowledge of politics. He didn't know anything, except he knew about life. He was like a great dad, but he didn't know anything. And so he gets up. I don't know what they're expecting, but it's sort of like the civics lesson for the day. And there are a thousand kids out there, and they're all asleep because it's 8 in the morning. and he comes bursting through the doors and he looks up and he said, the first thing he goes is like, kid in the pink hair. In my day, we used to get rid of the weirdos.

1:24:19And the kid goes, oh, you know, and they're all alert. And he goes, and then he says, I want someone here to tell me what the most important thing in life is. And you could see all the teachers getting a little uncomfortable, but they're hoping he's going to say, you know, love, family, country, something. And they're guessing these things and they're guessing what they think a presidential candidate would say. And he's, nah, nah, that's not the, you guys don't know anything. And he reaches into his pocket and he pulls out a huge wad of$100 bills. Money, this is the most important thing in life.

1:24:51And you can see all the teachers going, oh my God. And he had me. At that moment, he had me. I said, wherever this guy goes, I want to see what happens. $7 million for$7 ,000. Yeah, and he still bothers me. I mean, he still calls me all the time to tell me why I need to love Trump He loves Trump. To tell me why I'm wrong. Like this thing drives him crazy. It's like government doesn't do anything good. You know, he's like, he's that kind of Republican. Well, you know, there are a lot of people who have that sort of philosophy ingrained in them since, you know, Reagan. What makes this book so interesting is how you're not taking a partisan side left or right.

1:25:36No. You're not talking politics. It's here are the people who do the people's business with your taxpayer dollars. I love the story about the guy who is the tax collector. There's a line in the book that stuns me. There's 6 million people who are entitled to the earned tax credit that don't apply. and then there's something like 25 ,000 people who've made more than a million dollars that haven't filed their taxes since 2017, how come we're not trying to help the people who are owed this credit and collect from the people who can't be bothered to pay taxes? That doesn't seem partisan. That just seems administratively competent.

1:26:23That's right. No, the whole point, If you'd asked me what the point of the thing was when we started, it was just, I know they're great stories, and I'm going to use these writers to demonstrate it isn't me. It's like these stories are there, and they should be told. That was it. After the fact, there is a purpose to it. And the purpose is, you can have your prejudice about the government. You can hold the stereotype of the lazy, indolent, nine-to-five, doesn't care about anything, milking you, waste, fraud, abuse, deep state, whatever it is you think. But you're not allowed to have it without knowing this.

1:27:01If you want to read these stories and still think that, okay. But you've got to hear these stories. And if you hear these stories, some part of you will think, I shouldn't really think that. That's dumb. It's more complicated than that. Sure, there are problems with the government. Sure are the things that need to be fixed. And a lot of it is like the way we administer the situation we put them in. But there are unbelievable people here. They are in many ways the best among us. They're there to serve. And they found some purpose. And in that purpose, they found a purpose in life. They've learned how to lead their lives in a very meaningful way.

1:27:34And for us to go after them as if they're enemies, it's very damning about us. And that's kind of what we're trying to get across.

1:27:47it's it's 905 is that is that a spot where we should that's where we say let's wrap it up thank you so much everybody let's hear it thank you so michael lewis that was my conversation with michael lewis we went out to dinner afterwards uh he had an early morning tv hits and we literally had dinner at 9 30 10 15 he had to run back to the hotel but oh my goodness that was just so much fun. And you can imagine just sitting down with him to dinner afterwards. It's just every bit as magical as you would imagine. Every time he comes into town and I have an opportunity to sit down and interview him, I jump at it.

1:28:28I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I do. Special thanks to the folks at the Main Street Theater in Port Washington, especially Karen for allowing me to put this together. It was really a great time.