'Who is Government' with Michael Lewis

29:45You've disagreed with that description before. Has this book changed your mind? Because it's even the chapters you didn't write are still Michael Lewis characters. All right. So I want you to, all right, I'm going to push back again. These writers who did this with me are some of my favorite writers on the planet. And they are all excellent. So let me just name them so the people know. It's Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks, Kamau Bell, Casey Sepp, Sarah Val, and John Lanchester. So John Lanchester, English writer, and they all have, they were, I picked them one because they're all fun, Two, because they're all able to kind of go in and find stories that other people don't see.

30:26And three, their voices are so different from each other. I thought they'd find very different things. John Lanchester, he doesn't find a person. He finds the consumer price index. The whole chapter about, I just found riveting about what the United States does to count things. And that the United States government is like the greatest counting mechanism in the world. And that it's the one democracy where counting was built into the constitution. You couldn't distribute power unless you had a census to count where the population was. And he says, as example, and how complicated this is and how much expertise is deployed within the government to do well, he explains over many pages how the consumer price index is put together.

31:10So right there, there you go. There is something that is not a Michael Lewis character. That's the exception that proves the rule. And I'm going to put this right back at you. Exceptions don't prove rules, just so you know. Exceptions, that expression means it tests the rule. Okay, so - And so I just tested your rule. So you gave me the one - I'm going to test it again. You gave me the one chapter that wasn't a Michael Lewis character. So the conversation we just had about Christopher Mark and the coal mines. Oh my God, how is he not a total Michael Lewis? Oh, of course. All right, sure. Next chapter.

31:46And you didn't write this. I think this was Casey Seff's chapter. about Ronald Walters and the National Cemetery Administration? This is a little bit of a cheat because Casey asked me if I had anything left on the cut. She said, do you have anything on the cutting room floor from the Fifth Risk? And I had all this stuff on the cutting room floor because there was so much stuff. And I said, you know, there is this dude who wouldn't take my calls. Like I couldn't get him. Really? Oh, yeah. No, it was like they didn't want to. And I, of course, was going through communications as officials and they never respond properly.

32:20But his name was Ron Walters. And what I knew was this, that they're inside the Veterans Administration. There's something called, there's a function, management of the national cemeteries where we bury our war dead. We bury our veterans. It is a sacred duty of the society. And that this, like all the functions of the, all the different agencies, this place has its customer satisfaction measured by survey. And that when Ron Walter came into the job of running the national cemeteries, it had very mediocre customer satisfaction. I don't know why. I don't know what was going on. I don't know anything in the story.

33:01Casey wrote the story. But that over a couple of decades, he took the place from being kind of mediocre to having the highest customer satisfaction of any institution in America, private or public. That includes Costco, Walmart, FedEx. He somehow figured out the problem and no one knew he was. He didn't advertise himself. If he had done this in business, he'd be like on the cover of business magazines and giving lectures for money on the lecture circuit. But he was just this faceless bureaucrat who had figure something out and i said to casey go right i'd write about him and for whatever reason he took her call and she and she she she walks us through his story um first of all that that chapter made me cry number one yeah it's incredibly touching and it makes you proud to be an american it really i know that's corny but it really does but all right so that's achieved let let me that's So the next one is by Dave Eggers.

34:07Dave Eggers. And he goes and finds the people in NASA who are looking for little green men in deep outer space. Oh, searchers. Yeah. All right. So maybe not little green men. They're looking for life in outer space. Well, and the fascinating thing is we're going to clearly find the first line I highlighted. In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we'll find evidence of life on another planet. I'm willing to say this because I'm not a scientist and I don't work in media relations for NASA. what he's talking initially about is not intelligent Star Trek, Star Wars life. But hey, there's hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen everywhere.

34:42Those are the fundamental building blocks. And we'll find some bacteria somewhere. You know what they're going to find? They're going to find the Peltzman effect. They're going to find somewhere way out there. Someone will have discovered the Peltzman effect. But yeah, so Dave. So Dave is working with these characters. I thought Dave, I told Dave this just the other day, that Dave, when he announced he was doing NASA and these people who were doing this incredibly cool work at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, Geraldine Brooks, another of the writers said, Dave is way too talented to do this.

35:22This is such an easy thing to make interesting. He needs to pick something that's harder to write about. She thought he was cheating. that it was just like, of course, everybody's going to love to read about this. And Geraldine said to him, said to me to say to him, if he does that, I'm going to find the most repulsive government worker to write about. I'm going to go into the IRS, the most hated, loathed branch of the government. And I'm going to write about the IRS. So she did that in response to Dave's piece. And she does do that. So that I wouldn't, I mean, Dave has more, those characters are not characters I would have naturally sought out.

35:58They are characters. So as he puts it, he was like, he has no scientific aptitude. He stopped doing math and science when he was like seven years old. He's a poet at heart. So he finds it riveting when scientists can make comprehensible to him complicated stuff they're doing. And he had found these people and they could explain in a way he could explain how they were doing, what they were doing. And it is riveting. But it's also very Michael Lewis. These are quirky. You know, these are very quirky characters. All right. I'm a pushback. All right. But before you push back, you just brought up Geraldine Brooks and the cyber sleuth in the IRS.

36:37Here's a guy who's an accountant teaching classes in Brazilian jujitsu and like like becoming a ninth level black. Like that is not your run of the mill. I need your papers to get your taxes filed. No, he's had. He works in the cybercrime division of the IRS and has collected billions of dollars for the government, busting up cybercrime rings. Jared Koopman is named. And here's a kicker for you. His unit, which is like a huge profit maker. I mean, they cost nothing and they generate billions, has been gutted by Doge. In any case, but this is before it was gutted. Geraldine found this dude. I don't know how she found him, actually.

37:20She just went off. She said, I'm going in the IRS and I'm coming out with a story. And so she went into the IRS and found him and, and call me, you know, it's funny. She did call me. So this is not pushing back on you. When she was done with the story, she had to go back to a novel she was writing kind of thing. And she said, this is such your kind of story. She said, there's, there's all this stuff behind it. You really need to look into it. Like it might be a book for you. So she had the thought she'd run into a story that I might have written. And that might be true there. But here's what I'm going to, let me just say this.

37:56Maybe I'm so jazzed by our federal government because when you walk into these places, they're all these really curious characters doing really curious things and you haven't heard of them and you might not think they're important until you do. And they are characters in the best sense, they don't think of themselves as characters. They just like, they are who they are. And they can be kind of shockingly interesting without realizing how interesting they are. And that the stuff they're doing is breathtakingly important, like existential risk level of importance. So yes, I'm interested in that.

38:34And they're all over the government. And I think that if you said you have to spend the rest of your career wandering this institution, writing about these people, I could pull it off. I could use it as a launch pad for every other book I ever wrote if I had to. You mentioned Doge. One of the things that comes up in the book, in her chapter, is these guys that are literally saving tens of billions of dollars in cyber fraud, their pay tops out at like$130 ,000, something crazy. Any one of them could go to a Wall Street bank and 10x their salary. Stop and think about how insane that is. We got to cut those jobs.

39:15And then you fire them. And not only that, you insult them before you fire them. Give me a list of the five things you did last week. It's obscene what's going on right now. And that would be a place where you would dramatize some of the obscenity. Yeah. So I don't think there's a character in the book that couldn't be paid a whole lot more money outside of the federal government. And this is another thing. I think this is between the lines of the book, but all these people are much more interested in mission than money. And this is hard for Wall Street people to get their minds around sometimes, but I don't think entirely.

39:49There are a lot of Wall Street people who really get the joy of mission. And these are people who are taking pay cuts because they want to do this thing. And nobody says this in any of the chapters, but I think all of the chapters say this, all these people have found the secret to a meaningful life. None of these people on their deathbeds are going to look up and say, wow, I wish I'd gone to Goldman. I wish I'd made a whole lot of money. They all feel like they did what they were supposed to do. That's kind of cool. There is this thing going on, how to lead your life, right through it, right through the whole book.

40:29There's a moment when I'm talking to Chris Mark, who, I mean, one of the reasons I find it hard to report Chris Mark, the coal mine guy, is that, you know, he won't stay in the Ritz. He'll stay in the Hampton Inn. So I got to stay in the Hampton Inn. You know, he wants to sit in the back of the plane. So I got to sit in the back of the plane. And so, you know, it's like that I have, you know, a standard of comfort I've gotten used to that he finds like immoral, maybe too strong a word, but like unnecessary. And at one point he said to me, and I put it in the book because he has decided to live a life that's materially modest, but spiritually rich.

41:07He said to me, we taught our kids there are two ways to be rich. One is to make a lot of money and the other is to not need very much. And I just thought, wow, it's interesting. Say what you will about the luxury quality of the Hampton Inn, it ain't a coal mine. And he spends a year or two working in a coal mine. Wait, I'm above ground on clean sheets with air conditioning and heat? Sign me up. And a Peloton now. I couldn't believe it. There's a Peloton in there. By the way, when I first saw this title, I picked up the book and I'm like, huh, I wonder if Michael is going to get a little partisan.

41:46This is one of those things that could really red state, blue state. But there's none of that. This is all about you pay taxes and here's what the government does to serve you, whether you're the family of a deceased veteran or relying on weather forecasts or stopping cybercrime or on and on it goes. These are really broad, nonpartisan topics. Did it ever enter your mind? Oh, someone's going to accuse me. Oh, that punk Berkeley writer is really a libtard and we really don't care what he has to say. Did that ever enter your mind as you were putting this together? Of course. I mean, it was top of mind in a way.

42:31I mean, because it has happened already and it will happen. It is a feature of our society right now that everything gets quickly politicized and you're either in tribe A or tribe B. You're either an Ole Miss rebel or an Alabama Crimson Tide player. You're on one team or the other. The people need to see you that way, especially the people who are most absorbed with the politics. And if you write anything that challenges the assumptions, prejudices, bigotry of one side or the other, they're going to try to dismiss it by just saying you're a member of the other tribe. So you just can't do anything about that.

43:16except try to come at the material pure of heart and open a mind. You know, it's like, these are stories that are true stories. You can maintain your prejudice and bigotry and whatever you think of federal workers, you know, if you want to preserve that stereotype in your head, fine. But you've got to acknowledge the truth of the stories. Like, okay, all federal workers are wasteful. Where do you put Chris Mark then? He just, he just, he's saving thousands of lives in of working class men, basically. What do you do with that? So what do you do with this and that and the other thing? I mean, there's so many of these stories.

43:52So the FDA, so on and on it goes. So it's almost, I'd say it's, I think this is true, that to the extent you succeed in really threatening either side's prejudices, you're going to elicit a violent reaction. And so I expected the book, given the current moment where Elon Musk and Doge is trying to basically fire all these people, that it would elicit a violent reaction. And I've stayed off social media. I don't know exactly how much of the violent reaction has happened, but I've gotten whispers of it. And it's funny. It's funny to find myself, I do live in Berkeley and people love to bring that up when they're trying to classify me.

44:36But in Berkeley, I'd be a Republican. I mean, I mean, that's not hard. Where are you originally from? I grew up in New Orleans. I'm like a kid who played sports and didn't think about politics and voted for Reagan once. And John McCain was a close friend. And it's like, the idea that I'm like, oh, firmly, this lefty person is insane. It's just insane. And it's a tell for me when people try to shove me into that box, because it means they're not dealing with the story. and it happens from the other side the blind side there's the whole the crazy left it took has taken the blind side story is like oh michael's like a racist who's told the white savior story no seriously i've read all about that listen no it's amazing how many times have you and i this got to be like our eighth tenth interview i have lost track when i'm prepping stuff and i have my research assistant go out hey find me something i haven't we haven't talked about in these previous eight conversations well you know the pushback to the blind side is the whole story is fake and and here's the litigation and here's the depositions and i'm like yeah i'm sorry i'm i'm not buying into this this is this is clearly someone has a grudge yeah but so but but i mean the new york times ran a cover story like a year yeah it's like trying to trying to I don't know exactly what it was trying to do, but between the lines was trying to say, like, the story, now looking back on it, we can say the story was false in some way.

46:12No one who was there at the time disapproved of the story. When the book came out, Michael Orr himself loved the book. Everybody around him said this great true story. It got reinterpreted at High Woke. uh it got reinterpreted as uh a condescending story about a young black boy which is not what it was you're by the way being generous to the people who have changed your friend malcolm gladwell would clearly call it revisionist history yeah um because oh we're gonna we're gonna rethink this in light of current mores yeah and but that's all flipped again so it's it's i I mean, it's going to make a come.

46:54There was a revolution, a counter-revolution, and a counter-counter-revolution. But my point is that I have had my work filtered through people's bizarre, perverted political prisms. And it certainly happened last book, going infinite. It gets distorted. My views get misrepresented to the extent I have views. That mostly it's not an expression of view. It's a telling of a story that I'm doing. And I've had it from both sides. And it's not pleasant from either side. And this one, it was really clear where the blowback's going to come is from the right. Now, it's funny. I have a little suspicion.

47:36I feel a little uncomfortable at preaching to the converted at cheap applause. I'm now finding myself on stages with this book. And of course, the audience is all kind of on its side. The audience is all often liberal people, federal workers. And, you know, I have them at hello. And I don't particularly like that. I mean, it's better than having them hate you. But I want people to just like the story, like judge it by the quality of the thing, rather than judge it by whether it confirms your prejudices. And that's and it's just increasingly this is something that's changed in my life, my literary career, in my life.

48:19it's getting harder and harder to, to pierce people's prejudices that they're so, they come in so armored with some opinion. That's very half-baked that they have possibly even uttered themselves on social media so that they've, they've sort of like they're anchored in it and they don't want to, they don't want to even think about anything different than what they've said. And so you're, you've got this, you've got an army of kind of prejudice readers that you, that you have to deal with it. It's just louder than it's ever been. And it makes it hard to get the story told. This is Caroline Hyde.

48:54And I'm Ed Ludlow, inviting you to join us for Bloomberg Tech, a daily podcast focusing exclusively on technology, innovation, and the future of business. Every weekday, we bring you the top headlines from the world's biggest tech companies. From finance to defense, AI to entertainment, and from startups to the magnificent seven. We highlight the latest stories of the people and companies pushing the tech sector to new frontiers and the politics that shape global tech markets. We do this all every weekday, then bring you the most important conversations and analysis in our podcast. Search for Bloomberg Tech on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or anywhere else you listen.

49:31Join us every afternoon on your commute home and stay ahead of the tech news cycle. That's the Bloomberg Tech Podcast. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York. And I'm Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. Subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts.

50:09you write the last one, and then the middle six are the six writers you mentioned. I don't really think of you as an editor. I think of you as a writer. What was that like having not only to edit this, but edit friends? What I did was talk them into doing it. I recruited them, and I talked to them about what stories that they might write. But after that, I left everything to David Shipley, who was - Oh, sure. I know David. And, and who's former Bloomberg editor. And so, so I didn't have to do any of the line. I didn't touch anybody's pieces. I kept, I kept a great distance from that. And most of them didn't need that.

50:53A couple, a couple did. I do, I have often engaged with other writers and having them bounce their stories off me and talk about how they might do it. So that that's easy for me and fun. And all these writers were kind of spoiled for choice. It wasn't like throwing up their hands and saying, what am I going to write about? I don't have a story. It was more, should I do A or B or C? So that, that part was really fun. I can't tell you how easy this thing was. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's surprising. I thought when I involved, I was a little trepidatious about involving other writers because they're all neurotic, you know, they never know what they're, you know, it's hurting cats.

51:29You never know what they're going to do, what they're going to show or, and everybody hit their marks and were kind of, nobody was trouble. They were all, they all did what they were supposed to do. And, and, and I did, you know, that was the other thing, you know, the moment, the gut check moment for me was I got them all riled up. Are they going to be these great stories? Go do it. And then I realized, oh, I got to write something and finding my, I thought, oh, it's going to be tough for me to like rise to this occasion again. And I found, I think these are two of the more interesting long form narrative stories I have ever written.

52:07And they are. And that's saying something. It is saying. I mean, I've had some great material. I think the material I'm only as good as my material. Right. I can't make I can't put in what God left out. Agree to disagree. No, it's true, though. It's true. If you I really if I have boring, really bad material, it wouldn't be very good. But this case, the ingredients were there for excellent meals. and uh and it just they turned out beautifully i'm just really proud of them you know and i love that feeling of like i don't know how this is gonna when you start i'm intrigued by this i don't know where it's gonna go and then when you're done it's like oh this turned out better like i thought this was a good idea and hey this turned out even better than i expected it really is a lovely sensation as a writer it is a it is a completely lovely sensation and the whole book when i look back on it it feels like the whole group was in a flow state that the whole group everybody nobody over nobody overthought it people just went and did what they did they played their best game and um and i did too and so it was it was really gratifying and it's had the response to it i mean of course now with what's going on but you know most of them appeared in the washington post over running up to the election.

53:23And the response was just, I remember the letter after the first one, the woman who edits the comment section said, I've never seen anything like this. Really? Yes. I mean, it was just exploded. And this is all before Trump's elected. And now the things all together in one piece, in one place in the, you know, there's this deconstruction of the government going on, it sits in the middle of the conversation. I mean, it's like that the world is smiling upon this work. There's no question. There is no question. It could not possibly be more timely. I know I only have you for a limited amount of time.

54:04There's two questions I have to ask. One sports related. And the obvious question I always feel like I have to ask you is, hey what's the because you recall the dinner with a bunch of people talking about um sbf so i gotta ask you what's the next michael lewis story that's going to be told what story haven't you told what subject haven't you touched that you're eager to attack well i kind of have a rule and the rule is i don't i don't really like to talk about it i know that it takes the energy out of it. Oh, really? That's why I thought you just didn't want to reveal. No, no. It's like you're getting, you're sort of getting the response before you've done the work.

54:51And it's nice to build the tension just in yourself. But having said that, I don't have, it's not, I mean, I just finished this and I don't have a book I'm writing now. I'll tell you what things that interest me. okay i think what elon musk and doge is doing is unbelievably interesting like it's it is a tornado ripping through the culture and i think that that daily journalism does a really good job of telling you just what kind of just happened on the surface it doesn't go below and that there is there's that that's worth paying close attention to another thing that really interests me is the commercialization of youth sports, of college and college sports, especially.

55:37The way this radical free agency has come to college sports and you've got 15 year old quarterbacks who have got$2 million name, image and likeness deals. And it's an environment that's just been upended. And it interests me on like who wins, who loses, who succeeds, who can coach in this environment, who can lead in this environment. I'm interested in college sports. and a third area and I don't we won't get into this too much but um grief you know I lost a child four years ago and I'm starting to find the words to describe that experience and I don't think it's a book but I don't know but these but I mean if you were here Barry in my office I have like you know 50 folders here of stuff that's you know at least in the back of my mind that might lead somewhere and you never know what's going to spark it.

56:32You never, I really never know what's going to, what's going to, the call I'm going to get or the person I'm going to meet or the thing I'm going to read where I think, oh, that's it. That's where I need to go. And it happens very quickly. I mean, it's like slow, slow, slow, slow, slow. And then, oh, there we go. And I'm in the - Gradually then all at once, you're quoting Hemingway? There we go. That's how it feels. It feels gradually than all at once. And I'm in the gradual phase right now. That's really interesting. I'm going to come back to sports in a minute, but I got to ask. So given all these files and given how this book was so different than prior books and then going infinite was so different than Flash Boys and on and on it goes.

57:17I'm curious about what's your writing routine like and how has it evolved over time like i am intimately familiar with the liar's poker story which i just love that whole thing we've talked about that many times but from kind of writing at night getting home from solomon brothers to being a full-time author how has your process changed i had to shift when kids start when we started having kids instead of a really late night life, it became a really, I became a morning writer. I may go back. Our son, our youngest is a senior in high school. And the minute he's out of the house, I would not be surprised if I revert to nocturnal beast.

58:01It's my, that's my natural state. But the process, the one thing I've noticed that's changed in my process is a deeper and deeper appreciation of the importance of the character of the, of the subjects that I, that I, the premonition is that it was a, it was for me, it was a sort of a breaking, it was a, it was a marking point because I thought I do want to write about this thing that's happening, the COVID, but I want to do it. I want to, I want to put the characters first and I almost cast it. I, that I, I went looking, I worried about the story less than I worried about the people I was writing about.

58:39I put the, and, and the same with SBS. It was like, this guy is, I don't know what's going to happen, but he's interesting. Like there's a thing to do here because this person is so interesting. The person will create the story. And I've tilted that direction. I mean, it was always there. I've always been writing about curious characters, but I've gotten more adamant. I've got to be more certain about the character before I start. Moneyball, I started with the idea kind of. it was uh it was like how they win a baseball games and oh my god it's inefficient oh my god analytics blah blah blah but it doesn't work unless billy bean is a really good character but i didn't i didn't discover how good a character he was for months he kept himself hidden for a while and i think i now have to feel more confident in the character before i start huh and and you know i'm thinking in the top off the top of my head so you have billy bean right and and then work you like brad katsiana at at iex uh danny kahneman um you just keep working your way through each of the books um to say nothing of michael barry every book leads to one of these characters um leads to uh this again this michael lewis character who's quirky and thoughtful and discovers a great out of consensus truth and uses it to either affect change or challenge the status quo.

1:00:09I think that shines through this. Certainly SBF was that guy, hold aside the fraud and the money and all that stuff, same sort of character. And what I'm hearing from you is that you've become, even though the stories are always fascinating and amazing. They seem to become more and more character driven as you've worked through your books. It's true. It's true. Like your theory of my oeuvre, I don't know how you explain how Liars Poker fits into it, for example. Freshman attempt and you're still getting, by the way, when you had the anniversary of that book and I literally picked it up having not read it for 25 years and I reread it, I'm like, oh, good writer shows potential.

1:00:58Not quite Michael Lewis yet. But you can see, and this is a compliment. Oh, it comes through like, oh, I see exactly how all these little things, like all the seeds of Michael Lewis are planted throughout Liars Poker. and then it just blossoms in every subsequent book. So your first book was like, all right, this is real. Oh, he's a first time author. This is a really good book for a first time author. But that author wasn't a fully formed Michael Lewis. Nor, how old were you? 30 something? 20. I wrote it when I was 26. Okay. So a 26 year old Michael Lewis is certainly should never be expected to be a 30, 40, 50, 60 something michael lewis seasoned wizened and just having lived life so and i say i want you understand i'm saying that as i know no i i had to reread it when i did the audiobook i reread how bizarre is doing an audiobook by the way is it not the craziest thing you've ever done it's it's when i going back to something i wrote 30 something years ago that was weird uh and it it was unsettling because I wanted to fix all this stuff, you know?

1:02:17Right. You want to edit as you're reading. Yeah. I know things I didn't even notice at the time. It just like appalling to me. Right. But doing my own audio books as I mostly do now, it's the one thing I always notice is how much, how you read it differently, how you see it differently when you're reading it aloud, that you see stuff that you wouldn't, you don't see when you just read, when you're doing it on the page. and that you shouldn't let a book out the door without having read it aloud. I had an editor who used to say to me, you should take your columns and read them out loud and you'll have a totally different feeling for it.

1:02:55Plus you discover half your vocabulary are things that you have never spoken out loud and don't know how to pronounce because you've only read them and written them. That's right. That's right. Capitalization. It took me like 10 minutes to get that word. iterative because I've only read and written them. How often do you get to say capitalization and you always mangle it because you're, so it's really fun. All right. So I only have you for a few moments left. I got to throw you a curve ball since you've, you've written about baseball. You've written about little league coaching. You've written about football.

1:03:32Even you've written about basketball and Daryl Morey, which by the way, there's a book in basketball, although maybe it's too late because Steph Curry and LeBron James are already towards the back part of their career. But I have to ask, what sports do you watch? What are your teams? Who do you root for? And we're recording this just as March Madness has already destroyed all the brackets. I had Drake. I had Drake over Missouri. Oh, yeah, really? Yeah, I did. I didn't have McNeese State, but I came close. I thought about it. And then I thought Clemson is going to bounce from losing to Duke. And I was wrong about that.

1:04:12But my bracket looks great, except for that. It's right now it's intact, except for the McNeese State game. I watch college basketball. I watch it more like everybody else during March Madness. I watch playoff baseball. I watch the Cubs. I watch the Cubs. You're not a Chicago guy? Nope. But Nico Horner is their second baseman. and Nico was in high school with Quinn, my daughter, and Quinn was a pitcher on the softball team and Nico was a pitcher on the baseball team. And in the off season, Nico and his English teacher father, and me and Quinn would be out there, the only ones out there working out.

1:04:52And so I got to know Nico a little bit. And he's this unbelievable kid, just a great kid. And so he has led me to become a Cubs fan. And it's actually a fun team. They're infield before games. This is something I might want. They, they get, they sit in a circle and, and they pick a different person and everybody has to say something nice about it. It's like, it's like, it's a completely different model of how you like collaborate, but you know, for, for guys in sports. But so I watched that. I watch some WNBA. I watch the NBA, the warriors are my team and have been there. Right. You're right. I mean, we've been so blessed.

1:05:34uh i think kerr is a magician and i think curry has been i mean the whole thing has just been magical to watch uh and the a's used to be my team but they've left me right uh and football i watch obsessively so football i watch more college and nfl football than anything um and my team in the in the nfl is the saints uh which is we've had our ups and downs uh but i've never you know, New Orleans has never left me. And, uh, and in college football, um, I don't really have, I like the Ole Miss rebels. I got very attached when Michael Orr was there. I traveled around with that team, but I don't have one team.

1:06:16My in basketball, the team that I like college basketball. I don't know why, because I didn't go there. I'm a Duke basketball addict. It's like, you jump one way or the other would Duke either hate him or love him. Well, their coach was so beloved for so many years. And their new coach will be too. I think Shire is fabulous. So I think he's managing it in a different environment, but clearly has the ability to do it. Michael, as always, every time we have one of these conversations, they're delightful. And I'm going to just announce here, anyone who wants to come listen to Michael discuss not just this book, but his whole career, April 7th at the Gene Rimsky Theater in Port Washington.

1:06:59It's going to be a lot of fun. I get to pepper Mike with all sorts of questions that we haven't gotten to here. We have been speaking with Michael Lewis. His new book is Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the previous 500 conversations we've had over the past 11 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg.com, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Sarah Livesey is my audio engineer.

1:07:42Anna Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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