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

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in
Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
This week another Master's in Business Live, this time with
Michael Lewis. I've been fortunate to interview the poet Laureate
of Finance I don't know, maybe a dozen times, ten
times over the years. I've interviewed him after each of
the last few books. I've interviewed him live at a

(00:37):
couple of conferences and events. I've had dinners with him.
I've gotten drunk with him at a bar late at night.
Imagine the greatest storyteller of your generation and then sitting
at a bar and having a couple of drinks with him.
It's every bit as spectacular as you would imagine. So

(00:57):
when I read that his new book was coming out,
I said, Hey, if you're interested in speaking to a
small group at a local theater, I'd be happy to
set that up. And his pr people said great. So
at the Main Street Theater in Port Washington, to a
crowd of just three hundred people, he regaled us with

(01:21):
stories for ninety minutes. You will hear almost know me
in this because my job was just to give him
a nudge and then stay the hell out of his way.
You could tell the audience loved it. It was so
much fun. There were plenty of you know, stories I

(01:43):
had never heard before, including listen for the story about
Billy Bean and the F bomb. It really is special.
I thought this was a blast. I think you will
also with no further ado. Michael Lewis on his new
book Who Is Government and his career as a writer. Welcome, Welcome, Michael.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Welcome to uh, the north shore of Long Island, so gatsby,
Long Island.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
I've seen none of it. It was dark and rainy,
is it?

Speaker 2 (02:17):
It's so let's let's start out. How you doing. How's
the book to going? People pulled in.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
Saying it's who is Government?

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Who is Government?

Speaker 3 (02:27):
You said, what is government?

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, the same thing, who is going?

Speaker 3 (02:29):
And and it's an odd it's an odd. So there,
if we're going to be honest, here their books and
their book like objects. And this is closer to a
book like object because I didn't write the whole thing
I wrote. I wrote a third of it. I love it,
but I but I got I am I have six
other writers that I hired to do this with me. So,

(02:50):
so you I'm answering this is the way of answering
your question. The book tours. It's normally my least favorite
part of what I do for a living. It's and
and I don't know why that is.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
I just because it's a slog.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
It's it's I don't like being on TV, but you
got to do that. I don't The business of presenting
yourself this way is so different from the business of
writing the book that it's jarring in the first place,
and then the worst thing happens you start to like
it and and then you get you get going back
into like being a writer. Book is jarring. But the

(03:26):
thing that is usually a problem is that you know
you're kind of on the line. You know it's your book.
It's just you're out there alone. Now if people say
it sucks, I can just say it's the other people
who are responsible and so and so I feel it's
kind of it's kind of a it's kind of a
pleasure this one compared to the others going out and
talking about it.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
So I've only seen you with some of the other
authors once or twice. You on some show with Kamano
Bell and I don't think you were. I haven't seen
you with any of the other cole.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
Did you see that? Did you see it was Morning
Joe with Camal Bell?

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (03:57):
All right. So camal Bell is a six foot five inch,
three hundred and fifty pound black man, and he shows
up at Morning Joe in a sweatshirt that says immigrants
aren't criminals, but the president is one and and and
they say, they say, you can't wear that on TV.

(04:17):
Joe is not there, he's remote, and so they they
try to find something that will fit comeal Bell. Nothing
will fit come out.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
Why it was inside out? Is that what he did? No?

Speaker 3 (04:27):
What he did? No, it gets worse than that. They
then tried to get him to flip it around, and
it looked ridiculous. Then they put it right side the
right side out again, and they put black tape over
just the bottom part of that. And then when they
by the time we got he got finished, we'd lost
our segment. They'd run out of time, and Joe was
heading off to drive. There's this another hour and Joe's

(04:48):
head off to drive his kid to school, and they
called him and said that we can't have him on
because you know, we can't figure out what we do
with the sweatshirt. And Joe interceded and said, have him
wear the sweatshirt. He can make sure everybody can read it,
and put him on and what was But what was
really weird about it is that though Joe was comfortable
making that statement on his on his show, none of
the authorities in the actual studio were And so they

(05:11):
framed come out. It's like this giant head and you
can't see anything. And the whole time he's talking, he
keeps going, he goes, He's going like this with a sweatshees.
Did you see that?

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yeah, no, it it's incredibly distracting. I was trying to
have a conversation and he's this man is doing this
thing with this sweatterer. But yes, mostly it's been I mean,
I've done some stuff with some of the co authors,
mostly stage stuff. I've been on stage one way or
another in one city or another with all of them
or each of them. But most of most of the
other stuff, the TV stuff, I've had to do on

(05:42):
my own.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
So I want to get to this book in a minute,
but first I want to set the stage with the
Arc of the two prior.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
Books, because that are related to this.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Well exactly, that's what I'm teeing up. Don't get ahead
of me, just trying to help. So the premonition was
how the you us really did a mediocre job during
the pandemic. You focused on Charity Dean and the pandemic
emergency Response team and the mess they had to clean up.
I'm curious how that book led to the Fifth Risk,

(06:14):
which was the book that was the predecessor to this.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
So I'm gonna have to help you. The fifth Risk
is before this, before the before the premonition, it goes
fifth Risk Premonition.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
This then withdrawn. Okay, so the Fifth Risk is the
predecessor book to this? How did that lead?

Speaker 3 (06:36):
Yes, so there we go. Sorry, I got the order rum. Yeah,
sorry about that. And your wife, Wendy is here somewhere
in the front row. I'm so sorry you're feeling poorly. Thanks,
thank you for coming.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
By the way, wouldn't be the first time you've embarrassed
me in public, and we could save that conversation for later.
But okay, how did those books lead to?

Speaker 3 (06:57):
So this is how it happens. It's really simple and
it is all none of it all seems worthy from
a distance, like I have some great political or social purpose.
In fact, it's all literary opportunism. Trump is elected. The
first time. Trump fires a day after his election his
transition team and enterprise. I didn't know existed until I

(07:21):
read he'd fired it. But it was five hundred and
fifty people that Chris Christy had assembled for him to
go into the government and receive from the Obama administration
the briefings that a thousand people in the Obama administration
had by law spent six months preparing. So given its
Obama's probably like the best academic course in the history
of the government on the government. And Trump fired the

(07:43):
people who are going to go listen to this like
they just said, we don't need any he told Chris Christy.
Chris Christy told me, he said, we're so smart that
it'll take us an hour to figure out how the
government works. We don't need that. And I thought, this
is like a great comic premise that I can go
and wander around the government, get all these briefings that
he didn't bother to get, and the reader will feel

(08:04):
rightly like they know more about the government than the president.
And the president's supposed to be running it. And that
book it was a series again, it was more of
a book like object. It was three long vanity fair
pieces plus a piece that so it just happened to work.
Is that when you glue them all together. But I
picked intentionally the departments that nobody paid any attention to,

(08:29):
so not State or Treasury or anything like that. I
picked Commerce, Agriculture, and energy ones where if I turned
to my neighbors in Berkeley, all of whom have are
inflicting their political opinions upon me constantly. If I say
what does the Commerce Department do? I get a blank
stare they have no idea. And I found in those
places one really good material. Like all of the places

(08:53):
sort of like matter. There's stuff going on in each
of them that's really, really, really important, but unbelievable characters.
Can I tell you about one character? Sure, but I
don't want I don't want to get get you got
your train is on the track, and I don't want to.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Well, you're you're just skipping the best part of how
did you get access to all these people? You kind
of left out. If there's this giant transition team that
was supposed to be for the incoming Trump administration, and
he fired them all. How did you get asked?

Speaker 3 (09:25):
He fired the ones who were going in to listen
to the briefings, So you just briefings were still there
in some ways, like in some wayss like the turkey
sandwiches are still moldering, and you know that they had prepared,
they'd figured out what drinks they might want. It was
all all set up.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
So you reach out to reach out to.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
In the first place, people inside the Energy Department. I
got some names of officials in the Energy Department, started
with the outgoing Obama people, but quickly got into the
civil service because the civil service does the briefings. Uh,
I mean, they're the ones who are I mean in
the Energy Department, for example, run a fifty billion dollars

(10:01):
cleanup of the nuclear waste left behind in eastern Washington
from the building of the atom bomb in the nineteen forties.
It's still going on. You know, there's like that thing.
There are all these things. There's a nuclear arsenal. I
went and I went and met with the people who
managed the nuclear arsenal arsenal, and they couldn't tell me
that there was classified stuff. But they could tell me
a lot, and their attitude was was so grateful. Someone's

(10:23):
come to listen, like we did all this work to
like explain how it all works. And and I started
with energy, but not not you know, it could have
gone anywhere, but I started with energy because I don't
know if you remember, but Rick Perry, oops, was Donald
Trump's pick for Secretary of Energy because he because he,
I mean, Trump's mind is looks like oil Texas looks

(10:46):
good on television. But Rick Perry had called for the
elimination of the Energy Department when he was running for president.
And that's a little awkward. You're going to go be
running this place when you said it shouldn't exist.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Tough first day.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
But he had no idea what was in it. And
the minute he found I was in it, he went
into the Senate, his Senate hearings and said, God, I'm
really sorry, like I was wrong. You shouldn't get rid
of this place. So I went there because he was,
because I just thought, this is like, this is the
reductiono ad absurdum of this ignorance. And the pieces, the
pieces really worked like they I mean, the material was

(11:19):
so good. But what happened as I crept my way
through the obscure parts of the federal government. I kept
meeting incredible people, like people who I was not. I
did not have a picture in my head of who
the federal employee was. What I was meeting was very
different from what I had imagined. And so the book
comes out, it sells half a million copies, and it's

(11:41):
glued together Vanity Fair articles which told you that there
is an interest in a Civics lesson, which is what
it was kind of, and I got the problem of
having to write it as you will soon have and
afterward to the paperback. It comes out a year later,
and I thought, you know, I kind of Although it's
worked so far, it bothers me that I've not done

(12:02):
a deep dive into one of these people. Because the
people they were a mission driven, usually very expert in
some very narrow thing, completely incapable of telling their own stories,
walled off by political people, so they weren't allowed to
tell their own stories, oblivious to the sense any themselves

(12:23):
as characters. But that's great. Characters don't know their characters.
I mean the fact that you don't know you're a
character makes you an even better character. And I thought,
I'm just going to pick one of these people, so
who Now, when I had this problem, Trump had then
shut down the government. It was the first it was
a government shut down in eighteen and nineteen, early nineteen

(12:44):
it was. It was early twenty nineteen, and he had
furloughed sixty percent of the civilian workforce, sent them home
as inessential workers who without pay. So I got there
is an organization in Washington called a partner Ship for
Public Service that tries and fails over and over to

(13:04):
get positive attention shined upon these federal workers. And they
give an award called the Sammy Award to people who
do something good in the civil service. It's been going
on for this has been going on for two decades.
And still know when he pays it any attention. But
there've been lots of nominations for those awards, thousands of them.
So I cross referenced, like anybody who's been nominated for Sammy,

(13:25):
and that was like eight thousand people or something with
who's been furloughed. And the list came back and it
was like five thousand three. It was some huge list,
And what the hell am I going to do with this?
It was alphabetized. I just took the first name on
the list, Arthur A. Allen. He was the first film
on the list, and I found his phone number. I
called him up and said, I want to come talk

(13:45):
you about what you do. And I didn't really know
what he did. So this is the beginning of this
book because what happens with Arthur A. Allen. I go to
see him. He is the lone oceanographer in the Coastguard
Search and Rescue Division. He's been at it for thirty
something years. And he pretty quickly tells me that like
Americans have this unbelievable ability to get lost at sea,

(14:07):
to just like we just do it better than anybody else,
and and and it's and so the Coast Guard Rescue
is constantly occupied. He he he figures out. A few
years into his career, he witnesses a tragedy. He's he's
out in the field. He's at the Chesapeake pay station.
A storm, summer storm comes out of nowhere. The Coast

(14:30):
Guard is pulling people off the Chesapeake Bay. They discovered
that they got everybody but this one boat missing. And
it's got a woman who was Art's wife's age and
a little girl who was his daughter's age. And there
they know because they know when the storm kicked up,
when the boat likely capsized. They were on a sailboat,
and so they know, and they know where they were

(14:50):
when they capsized kinda. But what they don't know, presuming
that they are on the upside down boat, is how
that upside down sailboat drifts at sea. Objects drift differently,
like if you're in an inner tube, it's you will
move in the ocean differently than if you're an upside
down sailboat, then you would if you were on a
life raft, you know, and so on, and they find

(15:13):
the girl and the mother dead the next morning, and
Art says, that's never going to happen again. When he's
telling me this story, like what he's done with his
career a bunch of things, but he has basically invented
the science of studying objects drifting at sea. And he's
told me at this point in our interactions, i'd been

(15:34):
I was there a couple of days before. I said, like,
why did you even bother to do this? And he
goes over to his bookshelf and he pulls the yellow
newspaper article from the Norfolk Whatever about this mother and child.
He starts to cry. He said that that could have
been my wife, that could have been my child. And
when I so, when that happened, I said, it's never
going to happen again. So he starts studying how objects
drift and throwing them into the Long Island Sound from

(15:57):
he lives in Connecticut, and and he classifies a couple
one hundred objects the results they and reduces their drift
patterns to mathematic mathematical formula, like ten days after the
coastguard gets his formula. A three hundred and fifty pounds man,
this is a very American thing to do, runs out

(16:19):
of his window on a cruise ship in the Carnival
on a Carnival Cruise Line cruise eighty miles east of Miami,
and isn't discovered missing for like several hours. And he
does it at night because they have cameras on the
side of the boat. They know when they can go
back and say, oh, this is when he went off.
But Art had studied fatman at sea, and that's a

(16:39):
thing that he had a fat He actually stayed large
and smaller people. He had fat guy at sea, And
which will turn turn out to come in very handy
in future years. But this is the first time fat
guy at sea who goes over off a boat and
isn't discovered missing for a few hours in human history.
He's dead. Like it's like finding a person at sea

(17:00):
is like finding a soccer ball in the state of Connecticut.
You just it's it's almost impossible. They plucked this dude
out of the water like seven hours. Because he's fat,
he can live forever. You know, you're not no hypothermia.
The risk is someone so it's gonna swallow him. But
that's it. And it's really a huge advantage to have
that fat. And they pluck him out and he's sort
of like kind of cool. It's like like he's not

(17:20):
panicked or anything. He's just floating at sea. But they
they pull him out, and there are all these articles
about like how great the search and rescue people are
who pulled him out of the sea. No one asked
how they find him. The coastguard themselves are shocked, like this,
how well this worked? And this goes on. I mean,
I taught interviewed another fat guy who fell off another

(17:42):
boat in the Pacific, and I who was saved miraculously
after like eight hours, and I said, like, how do
you think they found you? And he said, what saved
you or something? And he says, when I was floating
in the ocean, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord
and savior and that's why I was saved. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no,
You're a saved because of Arthur A. Allen. You know,

(18:03):
that's who saved you. But nobody paid, had paid any
attention to this dude and what he had done. So
I spent a few days with him, listening to the
I mean the whole intellectual stuff about how what he did,
how he did what he did. It was riveting, but
the motive, like this deed, I'm not going to let
another American die because they we don't know this. He
fixes the problem. Thousands of people are alive today around

(18:26):
the world because of what he's done. He's been honored
by other countries, Taiwan and Australia. Uh, but we don't
even pay We pay him no attention. So I gather
my stuff to go write the end of my book
and I'm on my way back to the airport and
he after I've spent the time with him, and he
calls myself. This is the moment this book starts. He
calls myself and he says, hey, you're a writer. And

(18:50):
I said, I've been there with my notepad. You know,
I've been like I've been. I know I had said
something when I called him, but I said, and he said,
he said, and he said, I just talked to my son.
He says, like you've published books and one of the
books became move a movie. And he goes, are you
gonna are you gonna write about this? You can write
about me? And I said, yeah, Art, I mean, why

(19:11):
do you think I flew across country and spent three
days interviewing your wife and children and all the rest.
He said, I just thought you were really interested in
how objects drift and and and and this is this this,
this is your one an essential worker to your public servant.
You're a civil servant. They have no sense like they

(19:32):
deserve any kind of attention. The stories that come out
of them are amazing. And I thought, man, I should
have done the first time. I should have been diving
into these people's lives. So the next time, if I
ever come back, I'm going to come back focused on
the people. And uh. And when I I was on
a hiking trail with David Shipley, who was once until

(19:53):
recently the opinion editor of the Washington Post, and he
had space, and he had money, and and we could
write as long as wanted in his pages. He said,
I said, let me. I'm worried that if I go
do this, it'll just be either, oh, this is Michael
Lewis's take on the federal government, or I made it
up or whatever like whatever. Whenever people don't want to
hear the message, it's very easy to come after the

(20:15):
writer and try to undermine.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
The whatever is is that why you picked? That's what
I did.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
Say, And also to get a little bit of a
bigger kind of sample, like not going to tell him
what to do. I didn't even tell him why, I
what what I was going to do. And I've done
two of these big profiles in here, and the material
is as good as ever. But I said, we're just
gonna you just go into federal government and wander around
and find a story. And six out of the five

(20:44):
out of the six other six did much of what
basically what I did. They found unbelievable character studies, individuals
doing things that were just to shock them one. He's
a wonderful right John Lanchester, English writer, decided instead that
his character was the consumer price index, which is a challenge. Uh,

(21:04):
but he actually makes it work. It's because it is
an amazing achievement. But he writes so he he went
off of the reservation a bit.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
I'll push back on the characterization when we come to
that chapter, because I have a different spin on that. Oh.
But but let's talk about some of the chapters in here,
starting with Ronald Walters of the National Seminary.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
I can't start with myself.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
You want to start that way, I mean other other peoples.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
I edited it, but other people, other people. I give
you such a shit, I will tell you.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
So you want to start with the coal mines, Let's let's.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
Start with No, no, no, I don't want to. I've already
muscled you around too much. You're I'm the fish and
you're the fisherman landing me. But but it's uh, Ronald Walters.
So this is the one. The one writer who came
to me after I had employed them all and said,
is there anything on your cutting room floor that you

(21:56):
would like to have written about that you didn't write?
I said, well, that's funny, you say, but yes, it's
Ronald Walters. Casey Sepp, who's a wonderful New Yorker writer.
She wrote a book about Harper Lee called Furious Hours,
and we met because I reviewed that book for The
New York Times so favorably. She got in touch and
sent me toffee boxes of toffee. But when we became friends,

(22:19):
Ronald Walters, this I'll be brief because I didn't get
to know him. You know, I'm just reading. I'm reading
it like you. But what it intrigued me Ronald Walters
is in the Veterans administration. I think he's the only
one who still has his job securely. But he may
be insecure now too. But he took over these National
Cemeteries Association, the cemeteries that where we bury veterans, and

(22:42):
there are like fifty five of these things around the country.
Like four million veterans are buried in them. They're burying them.
It's an astonishing rate, and it's sort of like it's
a sacred duty. It's where we bury our war dead.
It's where we bury people who've made great sacrifice for
the country, and it's a tribute to the country that
we take it seriously that the Veterans Administration even has

(23:02):
this program. But when he inherited it, it was struggling
in it's a weird way to put it, consumer satisfaction.
The consumers in this case were the loved ones of
the people who were being buried, and he took it
from And we know this because the University of Michigan
measures customer satisfaction across the society. It's all institute, big institutions.

(23:26):
Not just it's private sector, but also government agencies. And
it was kind of like most of the government agencies,
kind of high sixties. It was like a mediocre thing.
And in a period of a decade, Ronald Walters took
it to being not just the enterprise in the United
States government that had the highest customer satisfaction, but the

(23:47):
enterprise in the entire country, more than Costco, more than
Amazon or FedEx or the other ones that people like it.
And he never No one knew his name, no one
knew who, how he did it, or why. And I
had when I was fiddling around with picking someone to
write the afterwards for the Fifth Risk, i'd heard his

(24:08):
story and I almost I tried calling, and actually they
didn't even return my calls. The veteran of his administration
wouldn't talk to me. So so it was there and
I said, go go find that out out about that,
and so she writes about how he did what he did.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
It's an it's an absolutely beautiful chapter. It actually made
me cry. Didn't only chapter in the book that that
brings tears to your eyes. Let's talk about coal mining
and how dangerous it is. Let's talk about your first show.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
So another case. So this is I mean it it's
so unusual to find such a rich vein of material
that is basically unexplored, that is so predictably yielding gold.
And this So this is number This is number two
for me. I've done our alan, I've done the agencies.

(24:58):
I'm going to go pick another person. So I went
back to kind of it the way I did it before.
I got a list of the people who were nominated
for Sammy's Awards this year or last year. And this
list was almost six hundred people. And because it's they
don't know what they're doing. I mean, they know what
they're doing in some ways, but they just don't know
how to create interest in people. All these this list

(25:19):
of the people who've been nominated for the award, it
just said their name and what they'd done, and you
looked at the accomplishment and they were often amazing. It
was like, you know, you know, but it would never
say how they did it. No, cured cancer, but that
was it kind of thing. John Smith at the National
Institute Health Cured Cancer period. End of story. I was

(25:40):
going through this listen. It was all just cold blooded.
You know. It was just like until I get to
Christopher Mars solve the problem of coal mine roofs falling
in on coal miners, which has killed fifty thousand American
coal miners in the last century, leading cause of death
in the most dangerous occupation in the country. Uh, occupation

(26:03):
is so dangerous that it was more dangerous being in
a coal mine than being in the Vietnam War. That's
how That's how dangerous it was. And and it's but
it's said the last sentence was a former coal miner.
They finally gave me something to think about. And so
I looked and I thought, man, there has got to
be a story here. I mean, I'm thinking grew up

(26:24):
in West Virginia, like dad was injured or killed or so,
you know, this son, how this person gets out and
does this? So I had spun this whole tale up
in my head. Uh, And I find his number, and again,
like ourd Ali, he lives in Pittsburgh, I call him,
I coal call him. In this case, he knew who
I was. He'd read Moneyball and it turned out that

(26:45):
he thought of himself as Moneyball in coal mines. But
that's a whole separate thing. But but he he's I say,
I just want to hear I just want to hear
your story, like, give me the the ten minute version.
I'm gonna give you the five minutes of the ten
minute version because it hooked me. He says, I grew

(27:07):
up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a
professor at the university. And I thought, oh, like, my
whole movie is different. I know, I don't know what
the movie is, but this this not and I thought, oh,
my interest went cool. 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 Marx

(27:29):
was his name, and Marx had been brought to Princeton
without a PhD. To help Princeton. He had devised a
mechanism for stress testing. He was stressed testing fighter planes
for the Navy and the Air Force before they built them.
He'd take the design, build a little model, and he
had this complicated way of just testing whether or not

(27:49):
this design was going to actually work in practice. And
Princeton had brought him into test little nuclear reactors they
wanted to build to see if it were earing 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?

(28:12):
Because they just told that no one understands how the
roofs of Gothic cathedrals don't collapse. There's no records left
by the builders. Then they're built over a century. No
one knows what's decorative, which is 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.

(28:35):
Chris is telling me this in the first fifteen minutes
I'm talking to him. So so that was my dadd
He said, I had a problem with my dad's life.
It was a 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. And he
said I He started throwing words around the house like bourgeois,

(28:57):
and pretty soon he said, I'm not he could have
gone to Harvard or Princeton. I'm not gonna do that.
I'm gonna go join the working class. So he breaks
with his dad, big break. He goes on the road.
He works in an autofactory, works in a ups plant,
finally ends up with several fellow radicals in a coal
mine in West Virginia. The other three radicals all quit

(29:17):
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 mind for a year and almost dies twice that
he sees how dangerous it is. He crawls out of
the mind, goes and gets a PhD, a undergraduate and
a PhD at Penn State in rock engineering, and begins

(29:39):
the process of figuring out there's all his data that
the US government has collected on that they've observed the problem.
It's like the CDC does with the disease, that they've
observed the problem without actually trying to stop the problem.
So they've all his data on when Rufe's fell and
what the conditions were. He starts to study it, and
over a career, a really really interesting career, figures out

(30:04):
how to stop this from happening and stops it from happening.
So he's telling me this on the phone, and it
does give me all the details of his work. But
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 was figured out how to
keep what was keeping up the rules of Gothic cathedrals,
and you figured out how to keep the rules of

(30:24):
coal mines up. And I mean, this is someone I've
just started talking to on the phone. He gets outraged.
It's like both, you know, like I'm calling you know,
and that has nothing to nothing did what I did
had nothing to do with my father's career. We have
nothing in common. Completely different thing. If that's your theory,
like go away kind of thing, and I said, just
seems a natural observation, right, So so two things. When

(30:50):
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 till 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 gradually, he said, but there was this moment,

(31:12):
he said, the National Cathedral. The federal government thought the
National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down. This was
in the year two thousand. 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

(31:32):
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 the son, and his son had the
stuff to go figure out what was going on the
low 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. Now,

(31:54):
when you have that to navigate too in a story,
you got a story. I mean, it's just like that.
And and so Art Allen had the Yellow Wing newspaper, uh,
Christopher Marks had the had the 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

(32:16):
who lost loved ones to tornadoes or that that this instrument,
fel government is filled with all of 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 to a society we want to address it.
That's where that's where we that's what we use to

(32:38):
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 the motives of the characters are are are

(33:01):
in our government. These are rich and interesting people with
rich and interesting backstories. And you know, every time you
kind of start scratching it one, you get it this.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
So let's address that a bit because I want to
discuss your process a little bit, which I'm fascinated by.
You once said to Malcolm Gladwell at the ninety second Street.
Why 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

(33:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:45):
You want the three minute of the five minute.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
Version, whatever you're comfortable with.

Speaker 3 (33:49):
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 useful? Okay, Like 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 but but there's a certain charm you acquire on

(34:12):
the streets. Of New Orleans that are very useful when
you're trying to sell a bond. But it's that. But yes,
there's 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 I'm basically lazy. Like that is true, you know,

(34:38):
it's it's it's core in me, like the working part
of me has been added on somehow, But the deep
meat I would just sit around scratch myself for the
rest of my life.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
If you've written fourteen books, how is that lazy?

Speaker 3 (34:54):
So so so this is I'm not lying. This is this.
I'm telling you the truth. You just can't to figure out.
You got to make sense of it.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Okay, My father, my fault.

Speaker 3 (35:05):
This is God's truth. My father when I from the
age of about seven to the age of when I
was eighteen, 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 you translated was do as little as possible,

(35:25):
and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a
slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task. My father
raised me to be lazy, you know. I mean that that.
He was like, don't try, don't sweat it, you're working
too hard. It was it was, this is the environment
I was raised in, and I took to it.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
But you didn't.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
But I did.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Up to every book you've written, you embed yourself in
an unfamiliar place.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
It's no, it's true. It's I'm curious. I got that too.
I'm actually curious. I see something and I want to
know about it, and and it happens a lot. It
just happens a lot. And so it's with pleasure I
find I pursue a curiosity. I ask curiosity, why are

(36:11):
the Oakland A's winning baseball games with no money?

Speaker 2 (36:13):
Like?

Speaker 3 (36:13):
How is that possible? That's the beginning. That's a curiosity.
And so I go to the truck.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
Most people have that thought and go who knows? And
you spend, You spend weeks and weeks.

Speaker 3 (36:29):
So it is not 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

(36:51):
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 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. Then
I forget about the laziness and I do the work.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
So you have this incredible knack of finding yourself in
the right place at the right time before everybody Else's
probably lucky thing. Okay, so i'll give you that. This
one's lucky. Liar's poker. You're there early in the Rise
of Wall Streets. Okay, you're working moneyball. No one had

(37:32):
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 in bed with STX
and Sam Bankman Freed.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
That was kind of cool. That was a year, right,
but you know I didn't know that was happening.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
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 act to
finding yourself at the head of a wave that's about
to crash over society. I mean, once or twice is dumb.

Speaker 3 (38:08):
Luck.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
How do you do it six times in a row?
That's not exactly luck.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
I think it is. I mean in that you know
you and I. So he's just published a book too,
How Not to Invest. It's really good and and you
you say eighteen different ways in the course of this book,
how skeptical you are of the ability to predict the future.
Sure I am too. Everybody wants you to predict the future,

(38:36):
and you just shouldn't do it because it's just you know,
you can't who knows where this is?

Speaker 2 (38:39):
But you're always skating to where the puck's going to be.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Explain that it's maybe I think the puck is just
coming to where I happen to be. That so I
don't think I really think Sam Begman fried Lands on
my front porch after someone asked me to just interview
him and evaluate him from I didn't go looking for him.
He walked up and I said, this is interesting. I'm

(39:03):
going to follow I'm just going to follow him around this.
I had had this nagging sense that I left all
this gold in the mind. I still feel that way.
There's gold in that mind 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

(39:23):
idea that Trump was going to do what he's done
to the government. None. I did have a sense like
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.
I will say, if I were trying to make the
case that I have I know something that other people don't,

(39:45):
or there's something about me that leads to being a
little ahead of the curve, I'd only say that the best,
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 president than other people are.
You See, it's the future is there, and so it
is uh, I do pay attention to the present. I

(40:06):
observe and and and I also so this gets back
to the laziness, that that when you're lazy, it's an actor.
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 which which I tell
every kid who asks for advice, I just repeat it.

(40:27):
He says, people waste years of their lives not being
willing to waste hours of their lives. That people get
so worked up about making being busy, moving their career up.
They don't let anything. They don't let things in. They're
like always achieving. And if you just back away and
let the world come into you, it's that's a helpful

(40:48):
approach to a writer. Also, if 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 know they feel
like they have to be writing, so they just force it.

(41:09):
Before I sit down and bother to put a word
on the page I've gotten, so I've had to get
so excited about it to offset the natural tendency not
to do anything, and so that it's 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's that has something to do with this.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
Can can I float a theory to sure I think
it's going to be you can do it well well,
Malcolm Gladwell's glad brand unified theory of Michael Lewis books's
biblical allegories? Right, that's yeah, that is right, Daniel in
the lines, Then is Liar's poker? The blind side is good, Samaritan,
David and Goliath moneyball, Like, you're not doing biblical allegories, No.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
I mean you can. The truth is you can find
almost any you can map almost any story onto the
box right right.

Speaker 2 (41:59):
But but here's what's not is every Michael Lewis book
features a character and the archetype Michael Lewis character quirky
outsiders pushing against the grain because they've discovered some interesting
insight or truth or previously unknown thing that is against

(42:23):
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 a cruise ships.
That's those are the same characters.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
But every who's that character in Liar's Poker You think that's.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
Me, Well, you show flashes of you. It was your
first book, so we'll cut you a little slack. But
you know, in fact, let's let's talk about Liar's Poper. Yes,
so we we did a podcast on the thirtieth anniversary.
You had to go reread it, just reread the book,
but read it out loud for the audio version.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
I hadn't re read it since I wrote it.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
So so first, what was that experience?

Speaker 3 (43:07):
Like awful? I mean, I don't know if you've ever
gone back. And but I was twenty six 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, and I mean there was a it was
just work. I was really raw, and I'm still.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
You know it's fun.

Speaker 2 (43:32):
You were twenty six, so there was some things.

Speaker 3 (43:34):
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.
You know, it was bad. It was embarrassing, you know,
there was I was. I thought there were lines that
were clearly like designed to get people to laugh, and
then I shouldn't have been doing it, and there were

(43:57):
structured So it was But but yeah, I mean, I
feel finely towards it got my launched my career. I'm
still stuck on your theory.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
So 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, right at least
that's when you started sketching this. This wasn't Michael Lewis
the full time writer, correct, Right, So so when you
look back at that, you got to give yourself a
little first time.

Speaker 3 (44:28):
I know it wasn't. It's fine. It's not bad for
first book. I agree, it's not bad for first book.
But the when I think about your description of what
of my book, the quirky of the line. That's right.
I think of it this way because they're not. Billy
Bean's not quirky. Billy Bean's like the coolest guy in
the room. When he walks into a room, he is, Yes,

(44:48):
he's got We're all quirky, like underneath, we all have
little things that things going on. Then we're all neurotic
or a little We all have stuff. But you're right,
aaracter have a lot of stuff, like sometimes they have
a lot of stuff. But the the thing what I
think of I think of it as more as I

(45:09):
get excited by someone who could teach me, and all
my characters are are teaching me something about the world.
And now the kind of person who's teaching you something
about the word often is someone who has been challenging
the world. So 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

(45:31):
Brad Katsuyama is not quirky. He's a nice Canadian boy
and the last boy Flash Boys that he is the
least quirky person who ever carried a book. He is normal.
It's like as normal as they get, and there's some
stuff there with what there is is nice Canadian boy
collides with Wall Street and is upset when he sees what's.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Going on, but and figures that a way around.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
And figures out, Yes, figures out that.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
He's the least quirky of your characters. But let's stick
with money ball. But how did you gain access to
the A's How did they, you know, grant you keys
to the kingdom?

Speaker 3 (46:10):
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,
I just look, it doesn't make any sense. You're spending
one fifth with the Yankees are spending. How can you
be competing? If this market is efficient, the Yankee 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. Is what I think about

(46:31):
all the time. The sports. He's just covered by sports
writers and the sports 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

(46:54):
more interesting, and I disguised how interesting I was. And
when I just divulged, you know, two months in and
do it that I was thinking about writing a book,
it was too late. He couldn't get rid of me.
I knew too much. But but there was and I
had found ways to insinuate myself into into their lives.
I mean, this is like, how do you make yourself?

(47:15):
How you how you get them to let you hang around?
That's the important thing. You've got to hang around. You
got to be kind of in the you know, just
they they forget you're there, kind of hang around. So
that was the trick there, you know in that book
that ever told I told you when that book became
a book, Like when I came home at late at
night and I said, wrote my publisher and said, this

(47:36):
is going to freak you out, but I'm going to
write a sports book. I was. I was, I was
in the locker room of the Oakland A's interviewing telling
the players. I was interviewed the players one by one
and telling them what why they were they were playing
first base, or why they were the leadoff hitter they
in front off no idea. The race front office regarded

(47:58):
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 not they
won't handle it well. And but the players were really interested,
so I was they. I was welcoming the clubhouse and
and they were coming out of the showers. I was
waiting for my guy to talk to them. And for

(48:19):
the first time I saw the Oakland A's naked, and
it was such a disgusting sight. It was it was
it was like it was just I mean not not
it was just professional athlete. It was like they had
cankles and they had they were all fat. They look
like a Beer League team. They looked like And I
had the thought, which I related to the front office,

(48:40):
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. That they would
guess like you know, Wall Street guys. They could they
could be Wall Street guys. They could be accountants, they
could be flight attendants, they could be not professional athletes.
And the front office said, it's funny you say that
because we are aware of how unattractive they are without

(49:03):
their clothes on. Uh that that that that they said
that we and the andres that we get excited when
they are unattractive without their clothes on and they don't
look when they don't look right because the market we met,
we are evaluating them blind. It's just we're providing. We're
looking for performance statistics. And when we find the player
whose statistics are are promising but they look wrong, we

(49:28):
know why the market's misvaluing them. They're miss being the
value because of the way they look. And I remember,
I just it blew my mind. I remember going driving
home and thinking, oh my god, this is when you
have a duty to write it like never inlind Baseball,
this thing of this as a corporation, and they got
these employees. They've been doing the same thing for one
hundred years. Millions of people will watching them. Stats attached

(49:50):
to every move they make on the job. If those
people can be misvalued because of the misvalue because of
the way they look, who can't be everybody can be.
So this is a universal story. It's that feeling like
this is a universal story. And uh 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

(50:14):
none of my subjects ever know what I'm doing. They
really don't. They know I'm hanging around, but they days,
I mean, like, okay, they saw me. I spent a
week with the Blue Jays, I spent days with the Rangers.
I spent days with the Marriage I spent time with
the Red Sox. And I had to do that to
know that they were special, like know that nobody else
was doing this and and so but so from their

(50:36):
point of view is like, what's he doing? Like Billy
and so when Billy Bean got the book, and my
subjects only get the book when everybody else gets the book,
you know, I don't want them. I don't want them
bothering me.

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (50:48):
And he got the book. He was furious. It was
like he was angry because you two things. One was like,
since when am I the main character could have told me?
You know? Is that kind of thing? It's like, I'm not,
I was not. I didn't sign up for this kind
of thing. But the second thing, he says, I thought
he was going to be pissed off because I had

(51:10):
revealed their secrets. That's what I was worried about. I
was worried that was the betrayal. He 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 what am
I supposed to do there? And he said, you don't understand.
My mother is going to be so upset. And I said,

(51:32):
your mom, you know, like really it's like a sigh
of relief. That's what we're worried about here. Low level
problem and 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. And but but I said to Billy,

(51:53):
I said, I started laughing, and I started said, like
if I was so worried you were going to be
angry with me for 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 into
the book as I could. And it's going to blow
your competitive advantage. I thought, that's what you were angry
about it. And his pause on the other end of
the line, and he says, you don't think anybody in

(52:14):
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. But he said, like,
we've been doing this for years, nobody's asked a question.
And 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

(52:36):
time was going to say, oh I learned something from
this book, or oh we've been doing it the wrong way.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
Well, didn't the GM have the Red Sox.

Speaker 3 (52:44):
No. While I was working on the book, John Henry
had just bought the Red Sox 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,
and I became it was kind of fun. I remember
doing this on payphones in the airport. I became they
weren't allowed to negotiate, right, so they negotiate through me.

(53:08):
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 at
the Red Sox. The THEO was trying to hire Billy too.
He was part of the group inside and but the
rest is history, and THEO leads the Red Sox to
victory and Billy Bean is written out of that story.

(53:28):
But the Red Sox were about to do it. New
owner like new owner who had background in finance, so
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, talk
to the owner of the Mets and said, you're being

(53:50):
ripped off by your own management, like they don't know
what they're doing. And at the ownership level they started
to change things so that that's that was how the
change happened. It would have happen anyway. What would have
happened if I hadn't read 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 no one

(54:11):
and Billy Dean would have been a footnote.

Speaker 2 (54:13):
That'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?

Speaker 3 (54:31):
Right, So what happens is what happens is for sure
the movie people would rather the author be dead, There's
no question. Like 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

(54:52):
clear they didn't care, but they were trying to pretend
like they'd sort of cared. And this was blindside. Actually
it was the first one. And 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 you
see at the opening and if it just just make it,

(55:13):
don't suck and uh and and it's on you if
it does, because it's yours, it's gonna be. 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.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
They don't know you're lazy.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
They don't know I'm lazy. I really like they pretend
to be interested in what I think. I have to
pretend to be believe they're interested in what I think.
We have this false interaction where I give them advice
and they ignore it all and 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

(55:53):
are still in my life, and like Jonah Hill will
just call me up out of the blue and say,
I got problem. I'm we just talk this through, and
that kind of thing, and and that that is great,
that's been great. Can't take a story about the Moneyball movie? Sure,
it's it's the Moneyball movie. Was this sort of so you.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
Guys want to hear a story about Moneyball?

Speaker 3 (56:12):
Right? So the Moneyball movie? So Billy being an 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 does, and all the other
gms hate him. All of a sudden when he's he

(56:32):
didn't deserve this, but he instead of instead of throwing
me under the bus, he just fought. He said, there's
not nothing in the book that's not true. So you
want to 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

(56:55):
the most unpleasant publication, and that all of baseball was angry,
really angry. And he said he called me one day
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. Like 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.

(57:16):
They never make the movie. They just give you money
for your rights that 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

(57:36):
is free, and 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 eighteen months, and
every eighteen months he called 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. But and then one day he calls
me up. He says, you, he said, Brad Pitt just

(57:57):
called me, and he says he's coming over the house.
He says, my wife is putting on makeup, and the
babysitters going home to get a dress and it was like,
he said, you said this wouldn't happen. I remember it.
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,

(58:18):
a year, six months. They're shooting in the Oakland Colisseum
and I've gone to the set a couple of times.
This is the cool thing I brought my kids because
they had eight thousand extras in the Oakland Coliseum and
they've gotten body doubles for the two thousand and two
Kansas City Royals and Oakland A's so like Barry Zito
looked more than like Barizedo than Barry Zito. And they're
replaying this game and they're moving the eight thousand people

(58:41):
around the colosseum 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.

(59:04):
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? And 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? And I said yeah. He says, okay, then
I'll come. I'll come, and I just send ten minutes.
I don't want them to think I'm into it, though,
so I was like, Okay, they know you're not into it,

(59:26):
Come on over, shake some hands. So we get there.
I'm there on the field and he comes walking out
and this production young male production assistant comes running out
of left field and he's got the head gear and
he's got a hes got a notepad, and he comes
running up to Billy and says, mister Bean, mister Bean,
you've been my hero ever since I read your book.

(59:48):
I just want I want to tell you how you
change 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, 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 at the same outfield on the Tigers, and I

(01:00:11):
think the twins. I mean, it's weird. They were both
there on the field same time. And the other Billy
Bean was gay, and he came out of the closet
and wrote a memoir and it called like hitting from
the other side of the plate. And so this guy
has has the Gay Billy Beans memoir and Billy, the
straight Billy Bean is He's like, there's nothing good is

(01:00:34):
happening right now. It's like, he's like, what do I say?
What do I do? You don't say I'm not gay.
You don't say you don't 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

(01:00:54):
talk Billy to come into the field so he could
play this. He had thought of this joke, and so
he could play this joke on Billy on Billy b
and it worked, It really worked.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
So that is a great story. Before we open this
up for questions, I want to ask one or two
more questions, including another story you told about a name
confusion when you had spent some time in Israel with

(01:01:28):
Danny Khanneman. Oh, that's funny, and you you similar story.

Speaker 3 (01:01:33):
You go to Danny Connoman, the great Israeli psychologist who's
one of the main characters of the Undoing Project.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
I was one of the two main characters.

Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
Yeah, one of the two main characters. And he and
Amos both had done a lot of work with the
Israeli military, hid moneyballd Israeli Israeli troops to determine who
should be a an officer and devise whole these these
metrics so you can measure it rather than just do
it by an interview. So he was there very early.
The reason I ever even wrote that book is I
came back to that book after Moneyball because when Moneyball

(01:02:05):
comes out, Richard Thaylor, economist Cass Sunstein's 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 Economen and Teversky.
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 moneyballing work for the for the

(01:02:27):
Israeli army. And we get we get there and they
are four hundred of the best looking young women I've
ever seen and just waiting for us, like waiting in
a mob behind the gates. When we come through, and
they look at us and they just kind of like
melt away. And at first I thought, Wow, Danny's got
it going on, you know. I mean, it's like, we

(01:02:48):
are there here for Danny. And it turns out this
an Israeli underwear modic model named Michael Lewis, and he's
got like he's got like unbelievable abs. And so they
they'd seen Danny knnom Is coming with Michael lie and
they thought it was the underwear model.

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
Yeah, unbelievable. So so there's a question I want to
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. You have, I know, you have all
these stories that are half told and all these things
that are future projects. I'm always curious if there was

(01:03:24):
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 what.

Speaker 3 (01:03:34):
What do you mean?

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
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

(01:03:55):
have all your research and folders and stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
Right, is there any you mean, what do I have
on the back burner that might go on to the
front burner?

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
Well, that's another questions. It's what kind of loose thread
has been out and about from some of the books
you've written that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:11):
You just you're thinking something?

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
No, nothing in particular. This was literally a Twitter question.
I said, give me some questions for this was the
only one that I thought was half I thought you
were asking me.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
I was wrong, No, no, no, But it's funny because I
don't know I have books that there are books that
I started and stopped because they didn't work. There's book,
a book that got away that would have been a
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.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
And what was that?

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
George sorows It was nineteen ninety and Soros was interested
in me for a bunch of reasons. He I had
Sorrows had somebody he really admired as a money manager,
like he was Soros's Soros. His name was Neil's Taub.
He ran Jacob Rothchild's money in London, and he was

(01:05:04):
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 too. And older guy. He took
me under his wing. When I was at Solomon Brothers.
I co called him and I said, basically, I know
you're I know that there's no reason you want to

(01:05:25):
talk to me. I've just arrived, I'm twenty four. I said,
I'm a new guy here. Kind of take you out
to breakfast. And 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 if as long as you don't try to
tell me anything, sell me anything, pretend do you know something,

(01:05:45):
I'll do my business through you. And for the next
two years. Over the next years, he became the second
biggest customer at Salomon Brothers. And I didn't never 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 describe what I was seeing in
the markets. Said you should do this because it would
been folly. And he appreciated that, and he told Soros

(01:06:05):
about me when I left to write Liar's 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 seemed

(01:06:27):
very prescient right now and like this isn't forever, these
places don't don't 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. I wrote for the
New Republic a piece about the trip. And it was
not rude about him. It was what I thought of him.

(01:06:51):
But I did make fun of his writing, like all
the theories he has, all these theories about why how
markets work, reflexivity. Yeah, all that this intellectualizing me, which
is it's he is a jungle animal, and it's like
the 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

(01:07:13):
was it didn't want to see me again. And that
was that was the one huge one. I'll want to
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, and that book could be 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

(01:07:33):
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

(01:07:53):
the kids they drafted that year using algorithms. And I
spent two years in the minor leagues chasing around after
these guys. 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 in under my office. Yeah, no go.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
So you know I always come with like four hours
worth of questions.

Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
But how may did we not get to?

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
Oh? Three quarters? But it doesn't matter. I want to
bring the house lights up.

Speaker 3 (01:08:26):
You never expect me to talk so much.

Speaker 2 (01:08:28):
No, my job is to give you a nudge and
get out of the way. Okay, So I think I
I mostly accomplished what I wanted to. Why don't we
bring up the house lights? They are up, and let's
see if there are any questions from the audience. I'm
not gonna just say say your name and it's hard
to see you and where you're from. Liis Michael's from California.

(01:08:50):
We'll give him a long island geography.

Speaker 4 (01:08:55):
Go ahead, Uh, mister Lewis, My name is Andrew MINNACOUCHI
huge fan of yours, all your books and your podcast
Against 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

(01:09:15):
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?

Speaker 3 (01:09:27):
What 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 ninety six
presidential campaign for the New Republic. I was learning my craft.

(01:09:48):
I'd written Liar's Poker, but I had not. I mean,
I 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
oh 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, and the

(01:10:10):
editor at the time was Andrew Sullivan. And andrews 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 ninety six presidential campaign was the
most boring presidential campaign in human history, and around Bob

(01:10:30):
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 with in small groups of voters. So I made
the I flipped it. I made minor characters the main

(01:10:51):
characters and put Dole and Clinton in the background, and
it really worked as a series in the New Republic,
and then it pop brought it out as a book.
But in the course of this I was in an
air a terminal in Spartanburg, South Carolina, at eleven o'clock
at night, told the Dole campaign was going to land
to pick me up. And no question was why would

(01:11:12):
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,
just said hi, and we started talking. And he was
at that time disgraced. He was part of one of
the Keating Five. He'd been involved in the savings and
loan scandal. He'd barely won his re election, and he

(01:11:33):
was just different than any politician I met. He was
like real and I just started getting interested in him.
And then I learned his story about how he had
been 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.

(01:11:56):
They were trying to let him go because his father
was an admiral, and they thought they undermine the morale
of the American troops if they started letting the fancy
people's kids out of prisoner of war camp and he
and so he got beat up over and over because
he refused to go home before the people who have
been who had been captured before him. Now, it so

(01:12:19):
the piece that create I found it by just I
was just hanging with him because I was interested in him.
I didn't know where it was going to lead. He
didn't really belong in a book about the ninety six
presidential campaign, except he was Dole's most popular surrogate. But
that was that the one side he lets slip that
he has this relationship, and it was it came, It

(01:12:41):
came out very naturally. This guy I was coming over
his office. This other guy was coming over his office
named David if Sheen. And David if Sheen was a
Vietnam War protester who went with Jane Fonda to Hanoi
and piped anti war propaganda into John McCain's cell And
if Shin had later in life things had changed since
that time, and McCain had been celebrated for his war heroism,

(01:13:04):
and if she had become kind of blacklisted by American
politics because of his involvement, even though McCain kind of
admired his conviction. And McCain saw if she ends up
going to work for Clinton. And then someone came out
with a story about how if she had done this
with Jane Fonda, and Clinton was about to kind of

(01:13:25):
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 on
the scent floor, about he's my friend. They'd developed a relationship,
and so I wrote the story about this relationship between
the war protester and the war hero, and it was
three thousand words in The New Republic, which ends up

(01:13:46):
in this book Losers, and McCain at that moment was
sort of like untouchable by the journalist. Nobody it was
paying 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. He would he we became friends,

(01:14:07):
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. It
was it was amazing watching what a little piece of
journalism can do. And it was very a very moving story.
The wrinkle to it was when I wrote the story,
if she was dying, he was dying of cancer. He
was on his deathbed, so if she was telling me

(01:14:29):
about how what John McCain had done from him, from
it 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 and if you respected them, that they

(01:14:53):
they they generated a different kind of response than most
political writing. And I also found that, like if you
found it was good good in someone in the political process,
the readership wanted to hear it, like they were so
used to the kind of distance, the critical distance, which
ends up being kind of anti septic. You don't ever
really know the person. And McCain he wasn't really running

(01:15:16):
for anything at the time. Yeah, I certainly wasn't a
presidential candidate. I could get let the reader get close
to him, and the reader really enjoyed that. And when
he ran for president, you know, he almost knocked off
Bush the first time. And I mean 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 where you don't have to write about

(01:15:37):
it if you don't want to write about it, but
I want you to. 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? And he said, you have the
other bedroom in my place in Washington. We'll just we'll
actually live together and 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

(01:15:58):
off with John McCain for the next year, and he,
being an 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. And 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.

(01:16:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:16:32):
For sure. Let's get another question.

Speaker 5 (01:16:36):
I saw you today on Nicole Wallace's program.

Speaker 3 (01:16:39):
On the way Could you believe I got here?

Speaker 5 (01:16:41):
I couldn't believe. I was wondering if it would be canceled.
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.

Speaker 3 (01:16:57):
What does it do? Well, there's a book called the
Fifth Risk, and there's a chapter in that book by
me that explains it. But but you know, when you
ask people who don't know, they kind of say commerce, business, business,
of course. So eighty percent of the budget is the
National Ocean Graphic and Noah, and seventy five percent of

(01:17:20):
that budget is the Weather Service. So what they do
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. It's rural, it keeps

(01:17:42):
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 that.

Speaker 2 (01:17:56):
Wasn't it the Department of War way back when.

Speaker 3 (01:17:58):
Energy is the Department of Science and Technology. That's what
it is. It's it's it's amazing what is in the
energy but all the national labs.

Speaker 2 (01:18:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:18:21):
They get it from ACCU Weather, but ACU Weather gets
it from the National Weather Service, right, that's right, So
it was they the ACU. What they Trump tried to
do the first time around is give the Department of
Commerce to the ACU Weather 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

(01:18:42):
to his own so.

Speaker 2 (01:18:43):
His own app would have gotten more. And you also
describe in the book how much more accurate weather forecasting
is getting tornado warning.

Speaker 3 (01:18:50):
So it's like, this is the thing about government. It's
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 they get no credit.
It's when they screw up you notice. And that's the
relationship we have with our government. We're like a fourteen
year old boy and our government is our mother. That's
sort of the the how mature our relationship is. But

(01:19:13):
the National Weather what they have done, if you go
back and talk to a weatherman has been doing it
for fifty years, he kind of say, like, you know,
what I used to do is like wake up in
the morning, go outside and say, sonny 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, the you know, being
able to figure out where which way a hurricane's going,

(01:19:35):
getting better, a tornado prediction. All this stuff is huge
achievement with huge effects, Like it really makes all our
lives and 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, Like it's not doing that nearly as much
because the airlines have better data about from the National

(01:19:57):
Weather Service about what's going on up in the with
the with the currents. So that happens, and nobody says, wow,
cool they did that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
It's all taken.

Speaker 3 (01:20:07):
It's all it's all taken for granted, now what what
the dystopia is. But it gets privatized and and and
Barry gets the the premium gold or platinum or whatever
it is Tornado forecast, and I get the I get
the silver forecast. So my I'm in my house when
it comes through, and you aren't. You know that that

(01:20:28):
it's it becomes I mean a real matter of equity.
If we're seeing, if we're getting different, I mean, it
seems like that should be a public good.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
It makes plenty of sense. Let's balcony, let's get a
question up top. Are fire away? Hi?

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
Uh So?

Speaker 6 (01:20:48):
First of all, you talked about the ninety six campaign,
and just so you know, I listened to some of
your podcasts from that as well. You are in this
American Life as well.

Speaker 3 (01:20:57):
I don't know if you remember that back in nighty 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 a pretty low budget I 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

(01:21:18):
this American life. And he became a good close friend
through that. But yes, so I've never listened to them,
but yeah, you.

Speaker 6 (01:21:25):
Did a phenomenal job. You should listen to them again
and maybe compile them. They were great you talked about
besides from McCain in that story, you relate, you did
something about some you did a lot about Dole, and
you also did something about I don't know, some other
guy in business who it was.

Speaker 3 (01:21:43):
It was a photo Trump it was. His name was
Maury Taylor, and he was the businessman who was running
to make government.

Speaker 2 (01:21:48):
Put up his own money.

Speaker 3 (01:21:50):
He spent seven million dollars, getting seven thousand 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 of the politician. But he
was great fun. I remember him this well. So this
is another moment the New Republic. For a moment thought

(01:22:11):
what the hell is he doing. He's turning Morey Taylor
into the main character of our ninety six presidential campaign coverage.
And I did. He was the main character of that story.
But it was I went out with him just to
see what the hell was going on. He was in
Iowa and he had three r three huge RVs with
speakers on the front, and he'd Blair Bruce Springsteen as
he went into town, and he had kegs of beer

(01:22:32):
on the back, and he'd get he'd throw a party
in every town. But the day, the morning I was
with him, he rolls into this the biggest public school
in Iowa. I can't remember where it was, AIM's or somewhere,
and it's and they've rolled out, They've made all the
students go to the local the auditorium. It's huge to
hear the presidential candidate. And Morey's been a presidential candidate

(01:22:55):
for about at that point, like four weeks. And before that,
he was the He was the Sea 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, but he except he knew about life. He
was he was like you. He was like a great dad,
but he didn't know anything. And so he gets up.

(01:23:17):
I don't know what they're expecting, but it's sort of
like the Civics lesson for the day, and they're they're
a thousand kids out there, and they're all asleep because
it's eight in the morning. He comes bursting through the
doors and and he looks up and he said, and
the first thing he goes is like kid in the
pink hair. In my day, we used to get rid
of the weirdos, and and and and and the kid goes,
you know, and they're all alert, and he goes and

(01:23:38):
then he says, I want someone here tell me what
the most important thing in life is. And you could
see all the teachers getting a little uncomfortable, but you're hope.
They're hoping he's going to say, you know, love, family, country, something.
And they're guessing these things, and they're they're guessing what
they think a presidential candidate would say it. Nah, nah,

(01:23:58):
that's nothing. You guys don't know anything. And he reaches
into his pocket he pulls out a huge want one
hundred dollar bills money. This is the most important thing
in life. And 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.

Speaker 2 (01:24:15):
Seven million dollars for seven thousand.

Speaker 3 (01:24:17):
Yes, 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.

Speaker 2 (01:24:33):
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 partisanside left or right. No, you're
you're not talking politics. That's here are the people who

(01:24:56):
do the people's business with your tax payer 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
six million people who are entitled to the earned tax
credit that don't apply. And then there's something like twenty

(01:25:18):
five thousand people who've made more than a million dollars
that haven't filed their taxes. Since twenty seventeen. 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.

Speaker 3 (01:25:38):
That's right. No, No, the whole point. If you'd ask
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

(01:26:00):
about the government. You can have 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. If you want to read these
stories and still think that, okay, but you got to

(01:26:21):
know what. You 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, they're problems with the government, sure, the
things that need to be fixed, sure, and a lot
of it is like the way we administer the situation
we put them in. But there are unbelievable people here.
There are in many ways the best among us. They're

(01:26:41):
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.
And for us to go after them as if their
enemies is it's very damning about us. And that's kind
of what we're trying to get across.

Speaker 2 (01:27:02):
It's nine oh five. Is that a spot where we
should do?

Speaker 3 (01:27:05):
That's what we say.

Speaker 2 (01:27:06):
Let's wrap it up. Thank you so much, everybody. Let's
hear it. Thank you, sir Michael Lewis. That was my
conversation with Michael Lewis. We went out to dinner afterwards.
He had an early morning TV hits and we literally
had dinner at nine point thirty ten fifteen. He had
a run back to the hotel. But oh my goodness,
that was just so much fun. And you can imagine

(01:27:28):
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. I
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

(01:27:53):
this together. It was really a great time. Ye

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