Speaker 1: Pushkin most of two thousand and six. In early two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, doctor Michael Barry had experienced as a
Speaker 1: private nightmare. In an email, he wrote, the partner's closest
Speaker 1: to me tend to ultimately hate me. This business kills
Speaker 1: a part of life that is pretty essential. The thing is,
Speaker 1: I haven't identified what it kills, but it is something
Speaker 1: vital that is dead inside of me. I can feel it.
Speaker 2: I'm Lydia Dean caught a producer here and against the rules.
Speaker 2: And what we just heard is an excerpt from The
Speaker 2: Big Short, a book that Michael Lewis wrote in twenty ten.
Speaker 2: He's now releasing it for the first time as an
Speaker 2: audiobook narrated by him.
Speaker 3: Yep, and I'm here too, so LJ, I'm gonna tell
Speaker 3: you what I want you to do.
Speaker 1: You're a innocent outsider with no particular interest in the
Speaker 1: global financial crisis. It is like one of these huge
Speaker 1: events in American history, and it's really useful to me
Speaker 1: to hear what you're curious about, and also for me
Speaker 1: to explain to you why the people who were interviewing
Speaker 1: are the people we're interviewing, why they matter now?
Speaker 2: So I haven't thought about the two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: financial crisis since it happened, which is when I was
Speaker 2: in high school, and I'm gonna be honest, I actually
Speaker 2: didn't even really think about it.
Speaker 4: That much when it happened. Why would you, I was
Speaker 4: thinking about high school.
Speaker 2: Why did you want to revisit it? Why look back
Speaker 2: at it now?
Speaker 1: It has never lost its relevance. It has been this
Speaker 1: slow motion train wreck that comes right from that. The
Speaker 1: essence of its importance was the feeling of unfairness it
Speaker 1: generated by how it was dealt with. You had these
Speaker 1: elites on Wall Street doing things they shouldn't have been doing,
Speaker 1: getting paid a fortune to do them, and when it
Speaker 1: all goes wrong and everybody suffers, there's no apparent cost.
Speaker 1: They get to go about doing their business, they get
Speaker 1: bailed out by the government. Everybody has to live by
Speaker 1: the harsh rules of capitalism except the capitalists themselves. The
Speaker 1: feeling that the world is rigged, the anger generated by
Speaker 1: the event, has been the dominant mood in our political life.
Speaker 1: So I've thought for some time that they'll come a
Speaker 1: moment where it's worth looking back on it and saying, like,
Speaker 1: why was this important?
Speaker 3: What were the consequences of this event, right.
Speaker 4: And here we are, now's the moment.
Speaker 2: And you did it by talking to a bunch of people, right,
Speaker 2: who you thought could answer questions that you had that
Speaker 2: kind of came to you as you were rereading the book.
Speaker 2: And correct, the first person was Adam McKay, who is
Speaker 2: the director of the Big Short movie. How would you
Speaker 2: characterize your relationship to that.
Speaker 1: Movie the same as my relationship to the movies of
Speaker 1: all my books, is that I had no effect whatsoever
Speaker 1: on how they made the movie. But they pretended to
Speaker 1: listen to me. They pretended to care what I thought
Speaker 1: while they were making the movie. So I developed personal
Speaker 1: relationships with some of the actors and with the director.
Speaker 1: To make a movie from a book, you need to
Speaker 1: break the thing and remake it, and the authors I
Speaker 1: think uniquely unsuited.
Speaker 3: To do that. And the movie was different from the book.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to start with McKay because you know,
Speaker 1: I'm awed by him.
Speaker 3: He's a huge talent.
Speaker 1: He grappled with the same material, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: just kind of talk about how he grappled with it.
Speaker 1: You know, we had never had that conversation when the
Speaker 1: movie was made.
Speaker 2: Well, Adam McKay when he took on the movie right
Speaker 2: like before that, he had only done straight up comedies Stepbrothers, Talidy,
Speaker 2: the Knights. Were you anxious about interesting your book to
Speaker 2: this guy who up until then had only done comedies.
Speaker 1: Anxious is not doesn't describe what I felt. What I
Speaker 1: felt was incredulity. I thought there's no way they're going
Speaker 1: to turn this book into him, and so I was
Speaker 1: amazed that it happened. You know, in the first place,
Speaker 1: I thought, no way they're gonna be able to pull
Speaker 1: us off, And the fact that he pulled us off
Speaker 1: is incredible the way he did.
Speaker 5: Now, I remember.
Speaker 1: Thinking, the only way it works is funny. Like you
Speaker 1: ask a comedian to be funny, they can be funny,
Speaker 1: that's their job. When they're supposed to be funny, they're funny.
Speaker 5: I find that so hard for me.
Speaker 2: I feel like they can only be funny by accident.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right.
Speaker 5: I'm the same way.
Speaker 1: I can be funny by accident, very well put. And
Speaker 1: you know, I hate to say it. When I'm writing,
Speaker 1: I laugh at my own stuff. Laughter is like really
Speaker 1: important to the stuff. If it's not fun I lose interest.
Speaker 1: I don't think, oh, I'm writing a comedy. I think, oh,
Speaker 1: there's lots of funny bits in here. It's more like
Speaker 1: a tragedy the story with lots of funny bits in
Speaker 1: the middle of it.
Speaker 3: But when Kate took it on, I thought, if.
Speaker 1: Someone's gonna do it, it has to be wildly entertaining,
Speaker 1: otherwise nobody will come to the subject matter. So I thought,
Speaker 1: if anybody can do it, sure the guy who did Talladega,
Speaker 1: Nites and Anchorman is the guy.
Speaker 2: This is the Big Short Companion pod after the Break
Speaker 2: Michael Lewis's conversation with Adam McKay about how he transformed
Speaker 2: a wonky book about the two thousand and eight financial
Speaker 2: crisis into an Oscar winning film.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna ask you a lot of stupid questions,
Speaker 1: questions and there questions some of them might know kind
Speaker 1: of the answer to, but mostly don't. And before we
Speaker 1: get to the Big Short, I want you to tell
Speaker 1: me about the how you made your first movie, how
Speaker 1: you became a movie person, a movie director, what it
Speaker 1: was and how it happened.
Speaker 6: So I was head writer at Saturday Night Live. And
Speaker 6: you know the big advantage I had was I had
Speaker 6: come out of that Chicago long form scenic improv scene
Speaker 6: and basically all we did every single night of the
Speaker 6: week was improvised sketches. So I was very comfortable in
Speaker 6: that space, and so they made me head writer. I
Speaker 6: was head writer for three years, but I've always loved movies.
Speaker 6: So after three years, I was like, you know what,
Speaker 6: it's time to move on. I wanted to do my
Speaker 6: own stuff, and I was frustrated. I mean, ETC. Live
Speaker 6: is kind of like the New York Times. I mean
Speaker 6: it's a very established institution that has a certain way
Speaker 6: that it operates. And honestly, if you asked Louren Michaels,
Speaker 6: I think he would tell you he was sick of
Speaker 6: me arguing with him. So I was about to leave
Speaker 6: in you know, friendly terms, and I had a manager,
Speaker 6: Jimmy Miller, who said, if you're going to leave, you
Speaker 6: might as well make a totally unreasonable demand. So I
Speaker 6: went back and I said, all right, I want to
Speaker 6: make short films. I want you to give me a budget,
Speaker 6: I want you to let me name my credit. I
Speaker 6: don't want to ever have to go to production meetings
Speaker 6: or any of that stuff. And I still want to
Speaker 6: write sketches as I see fit. So I was like, oh,
Speaker 6: and I want to raise and I was expecting the
Speaker 6: response to come back, you know, get lost, and he
Speaker 6: said yes. And it was really all credit to Lauren.
Speaker 6: The experience I had shooting those short films was really
Speaker 6: when I knew like, oh, I'm a writer director. They
Speaker 6: were all on sixteen millimeter like real film, and they were.
Speaker 6: It was just an incredible experience. So Pharrell and I
Speaker 6: will Farrell and I had written a script which we
Speaker 6: couldn't get made over at Paramount, but we had. It
Speaker 6: was about a car salesman from Ana who was the
Speaker 6: greatest car salesman but fell into a slump. So we'd
Speaker 6: had so much fun doing that that we decided to
Speaker 6: write another script, and we wrote the Anchorman script, and
Speaker 6: the idea was ways that I would direct it, and
Speaker 6: once again to Lauren's credit, he loved it. He was
Speaker 6: behind it. He was like, McKay can direct. Ferrell is
Speaker 6: a star, and every single studio and financier in town
Speaker 6: passed on it. And I'll never forget. We were back
Speaker 6: in my little apartment in New York City and I
Speaker 6: was with Farrell and it, you know, nothing was going
Speaker 6: the way we thought it would go. And the only
Speaker 6: project that anyone wanted to make was this goofy script
Speaker 6: about him as a full adult being an elf. And
Speaker 6: we were just sitting in my apartment and we're like,
Speaker 6: we better make this good. I was hired to do that,
Speaker 6: to rewrite, and we hammered on it, and all the
Speaker 6: studios that it passed on. Anchorman came back and like
Speaker 6: there was like a little bidding war, and.
Speaker 5: That was it.
Speaker 6: I got to make Anchorman.
Speaker 1: This is the beginning of your long form career as
Speaker 1: a film director. Yeah, is Ackerman, I remember you telling
Speaker 1: me that Anchorman you always had a kind of political objective,
Speaker 1: a cultural and there was cultural commentary there that maybe
Speaker 1: the audience didn't fully take on because they were too entertained.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean that's the background that I came out of Chicago,
Speaker 6: Second City. Dell Close. Dell Close, who's the famous long
Speaker 6: form improv teacher, used to always say, if you aim
Speaker 6: for art and you miss, you end up with comedy.
Speaker 6: If you aim for comedy and you miss, you end
Speaker 6: up with crap. So everything we did, even Anchorman, as
Speaker 6: silly as it is, if you look at the way
Speaker 6: we begin it with the shot choices. I mean, we
Speaker 6: were really trying to play it high stakes. Same thing
Speaker 6: with Talladega Knights Step Brothers. Always as ridiculous as they were,
Speaker 6: we were trying to play it at the highest stakes.
Speaker 6: And then Will and I would always have a little
Speaker 6: secret that we were like, Anchorman is actually about the
Speaker 6: collapse of mainstream news media. Talladega Knights is about this
Speaker 6: backwards pride of the w Bush supporters. Stepbrothers was about
Speaker 6: how consumerism turns grown men into children. And so every
Speaker 6: movie we had this little secret and we never tell anyone.
Speaker 6: So the big shorts, Yeah, I mean it was really
Speaker 6: like someone recommended the book. Oh they have good taste.
Speaker 6: I picked it up, Oh, let me read this, could
Speaker 6: not put it down, and I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 6: this story is incredible. I mean, people forget But at
Speaker 6: the time that book came out, that was like the
Speaker 6: book of that era, because we were in the full
Speaker 6: throes of what people now call the neoliberal economic model.
Speaker 6: That's where essentially corruption became quote smart. And it was
Speaker 6: this weird period which has now come to full blossom
Speaker 6: where not only our institutions but our culture itself, the
Speaker 6: way we operate as a society became something that was
Speaker 6: about get what you can get. You know, Michael, you're
Speaker 6: familiar with the last man out theory, which was the
Speaker 6: scariest thing I discovered when I was doing the Big Short,
Speaker 6: and that theory is get everything you can get your bonuses,
Speaker 6: make as much money as you can, screw everything, and
Speaker 6: just don't be the last man left. Make sure you're
Speaker 6: out before the collapse. And I really think if you
Speaker 6: look at the neoliberal economic age, that one theory explains
Speaker 6: so much. So yeah, I loved your book. You also
Speaker 6: have a really good sense of humor, so you made
Speaker 6: me laugh several times. And then I loved it in
Speaker 6: the book how you would call stuff out and stop
Speaker 6: and say, if you're confused right now. So was I
Speaker 6: when I heard this, And that was really the bell
Speaker 6: that went off.
Speaker 1: That was putting Margot Robbie in a bathtub to explain
Speaker 1: credit to fault swaps. Yeah, yeah, So the banks started
Speaker 1: filling these bonds with riskier and riskier.
Speaker 3: Mortgages, thank you, Benja.
Speaker 5: That way they can keep that profit machine churning. Right.
Speaker 1: By the way, these risky mortgages are called subprime.
Speaker 3: So whenever you hear subprime think shit.
Speaker 1: Our friend Michael Bury found out that these mortgage bonds
Speaker 1: that were supposedly sixty.
Speaker 3: Five percent triple A were actually just mostly full of shit.
Speaker 3: So now he's going to short.
Speaker 1: The between stabetic games. Got it. You never adapted a
Speaker 1: book before, had you?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 6: My wife is a theater director, and she had adapted
Speaker 6: a lot of stuff. It's kind of her specially. But
Speaker 6: most importantly, I knew that there are no hard rules,
Speaker 6: and I also knew from talking to people that they
Speaker 6: were very confused by the financial language. And I said,
Speaker 6: we have to time this exactly right, right at the
Speaker 6: moment where your average audience is like, what are they
Speaker 6: talking about? We have to stop. And I knew we
Speaker 6: had picked the right moment when my sound guy came
Speaker 6: to me and said, hey, Adam, I just got to
Speaker 6: let you know, this is really confused, and I was like, yes,
Speaker 6: We're in good shape.
Speaker 5: When we come back.
Speaker 1: I asked Adam McKay how he got so many big
Speaker 1: stars to sign up for the Big Short.
Speaker 7: How did the Volkswagen Beetle go from being Hitler's dream
Speaker 7: car to a hippie icon. How did a disgruntled center
Speaker 7: fielder change the business of sports I'm Jacob Goldstein and
Speaker 7: on Business History, my co host Robert Smith and I
Speaker 7: dig into the people and companies who created the modern world.
Speaker 7: Business History is full of innovations and failures and insights
Speaker 7: into how business works today. At the end of today's
Speaker 7: episode of Against the Rules, we're going to play a
Speaker 7: clip from our episode about Jim Simon's decades ago. Simon's
Speaker 7: basically invented modern algorithmic trading, and after a few early hiccups,
Speaker 7: including buying up all the potatoes in Maine, Simon's built
Speaker 7: a machine that generated in incredible returns for decades. The
Speaker 7: show is called Business History and the previous coming up.
Speaker 7: At the end of today's episode of Against the Rules.
Speaker 1: I'm back with writer and director Adam McKay.
Speaker 2: For you.
Speaker 1: What were the challenges like taking the book and turning
Speaker 1: into a script or did it just kind of come naturally?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, there was already a script written Charles
Speaker 6: Charles Randolph had written a script, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 6: there's some really good stuff in here, but I know
Speaker 6: exactly what to do, and that rewrite. I think it
Speaker 6: was turned around pretty quickly. And then Paramount had the
Speaker 6: script and they have no interest because they're like the
Speaker 6: guy who did step Brothers with Wall Street, and we
Speaker 6: realized we had to get big star. So just on
Speaker 6: our own, we went out to Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling,
Speaker 6: Brad Pitt and it was one of those freaky moments
Speaker 6: where they all said yes. And Adam Goodman was running
Speaker 6: Paramount and to his credit, he was like, okay, I
Speaker 6: mean they didn't give us a huge amount of money,
Speaker 6: but they gave us, you know, the green light, and
Speaker 6: that was it.
Speaker 1: Do you know why your actors said yes? Do you
Speaker 1: know why Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt
Speaker 1: all said I want to do I'm.
Speaker 6: Gonna say this and it sounds very immodest.
Speaker 5: But that was a good script.
Speaker 6: Like that was I mean, these actors get, you know,
Speaker 6: one hundred scripts a year, maybe they read like thirty
Speaker 6: or forty. That was a good script. And then in
Speaker 6: every case I met with them before they said yes,
Speaker 6: so I was able to say, like, I know you
Speaker 6: know me from X Y Z, but here's how I
Speaker 6: see this. This will be different. I right away knew
Speaker 6: that I wanted Barry Ackroyd to be the DP because
Speaker 6: we had a lot of scenes in offices, and we
Speaker 6: needed to make the mundane of a phone call have urgency.
Speaker 6: And no one adds life to scenes like Barry Ackroyd.
Speaker 1: Give me an example of how he creates drama from
Speaker 1: a phone call.
Speaker 5: That's this is different.
Speaker 6: So what he does is his background is as a
Speaker 6: documentary filmmaker. So we started with long lens in the
Speaker 6: corner of the room, don't look at me, and crazy
Speaker 6: stuff going on. And through the years of doing that,
Speaker 6: he learned how to look for the right light, how
Speaker 6: to find the artistic shot. And by the time I
Speaker 6: met him and he was at full peak ability and
Speaker 6: the only thing I told him was occasionally, I'm going
Speaker 6: to want to do traditional Dolly, big Hollywood shots. I
Speaker 6: wanted to be a blend. And he was totally cool
Speaker 6: with it. And it was some of the most exciting
Speaker 6: filmmaking I have ever seen because it's a constant process
Speaker 6: of discovery. He kind of treats it like I don't
Speaker 6: know what's going to happen. This is a documentary, So
Speaker 6: you can see them constantly zooming in finding something, Oh,
Speaker 6: I like this hangout. Meanwhile, I'm behind the monitor going, oh, Verry,
Speaker 6: that is incredible.
Speaker 1: But you know what, you know what that sounds like.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a visual a rhyme with how you
Speaker 1: approach the words. You are so open, you're holding your
Speaker 1: script so loosely, and you're letting things happen sometimes that
Speaker 1: aren't in the script, always so that you don't know
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. That if everybody was sort of
Speaker 1: like roped to the words on.
Speaker 6: The page, I actually think, see what you think of this, Michael.
Speaker 6: I think this hyper capitalist end result culture we're now
Speaker 6: in eradicates discovery. So if you're gonna sell a book
Speaker 6: or you're going to write an article, you have to
Speaker 6: tell them the conclusion. And I'm old enough to remember
Speaker 6: the early eighties the late seventies, people would go into
Speaker 6: movies and have no idea where it was gonna end up.
Speaker 6: There would be investigative pieces where the writer would start
Speaker 6: with A and end up with like W. And the
Speaker 6: more and more financialized America has become the less unless.
Speaker 5: You see that.
Speaker 6: I think our lower budget helped us a lot with
Speaker 6: the big short. You know, the executives could have missed
Speaker 6: on it, and once we got those big stars, they
Speaker 6: had cover for the boardroom. Like if the boardroom asked them,
Speaker 6: why did you give thirty five million dollars to the
Speaker 6: guy who did Step Brothers. They could just say, we
Speaker 6: have Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, and
Speaker 6: on and on.
Speaker 1: I am at my best, and the best things happen
Speaker 1: when I have a very loose notion and I don't
Speaker 1: know what's going to happen. I love that that feeling
Speaker 1: of like being on a ride you're not quite sure
Speaker 1: where it's going. So the actors gave you cover. How
Speaker 1: did you decide who was going to play who? Let's
Speaker 1: take one. How did you.
Speaker 5: Pick Christian Bale to play Michael Berry?
Speaker 4: He's just.
Speaker 6: One of the ten greatest film actors ever. And I
Speaker 6: would just say, if you're gonna like create that list
Speaker 6: of people that are chameleons, people that are really artists.
Speaker 6: I started doing all this stuff in nineteen ninety, which
Speaker 6: is crazy, and so I've met a lot of actors.
Speaker 6: We had a lot of hosts at Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 6: I was doing those short films. I got to work
Speaker 6: with feature actors, and I just started noticing that there
Speaker 6: is a giant gulf between personality actors who kind of
Speaker 6: operate off their charisma with some real skills, and then
Speaker 6: these like I mean, for lack of a better term,
Speaker 6: but like real artists and Bail just wow. Seeing his
Speaker 6: process was incredible.
Speaker 5: I was watching it.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, oh my god, that's Michael Berry on
Speaker 1: the screen.
Speaker 7: I've always been more comfortable alone.
Speaker 5: I believe it was because of my glass eye. I
Speaker 5: lost the eye. A child of alash separates me from people.
Speaker 1: I could not have told Christian Bale how to do it.
Speaker 1: That meant Christian Bale figured stuff out that I had
Speaker 1: not articulated. So this bothered me because I thought, I'm
Speaker 1: an observer, I'm an observant chap. I should have observed
Speaker 1: whatever it was that he would have needed to play
Speaker 1: Michael Berry. So we're on the junket and I'm you know,
Speaker 1: on stage, you know, four or five times with Christian Bale,
Speaker 1: and you sometimes talking about the movie in the book
Speaker 1: and the story, and backstage I have a lot of
Speaker 1: time to chit chat with him, and I kept badgering him, like,
Speaker 1: how the hell did you do that? Because all I
Speaker 1: knew was like Michael Berry had told me, Michael Berry said,
Speaker 1: I called him, I said, what's going on?
Speaker 5: With the movie he goes.
Speaker 1: He said, Christian Bale visited me. He's the weirdest guy
Speaker 1: I've ever met. And I said, if Michael Berry is
Speaker 1: calling you weird, and I said, well, what was weird
Speaker 1: about it? He said, he said, he just want to
Speaker 1: come for a day. He came in the morning, sat
Speaker 1: across from me until the evening, did not get up
Speaker 1: to go to the bathroom, and just watched me the
Speaker 1: whole day and asked me some questions. And then at
Speaker 1: the end of it, he said, could I just could
Speaker 1: I have that T shirt in those shorts because I'm
Speaker 1: going to use those.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna weare those when I play you and Wow.
Speaker 5: But I saw.
Speaker 1: I went to Christi Balle, I said, like, what the
Speaker 1: hell happened in those twelve hours? Like what did you
Speaker 1: figure out? Because there was something about his body, languages.
Speaker 1: I couldn't figure out why he had got him because
Speaker 1: Michael Berry, in his presence, you feel this discomfort. And
Speaker 1: Christian Bale had replicated that, and he says to me,
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk about it. I really pestered
Speaker 1: him and finally he says, okay. He says, it wasn't
Speaker 1: that complicated. Oh, if you watched him, you could see
Speaker 1: he does it's a breathing. He breathes in the wrong
Speaker 1: places of sentences. Yes, and he says as long and
Speaker 1: if you do that, you get all herky jerky. And
Speaker 1: I had not noticed that. The genius in seeing that
Speaker 1: with just breathtaking to me. And he said to me,
Speaker 1: I told McKay, just reminded me to breathe in the
Speaker 1: wrong places and everything else will come. Does that ring
Speaker 1: a bell?
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, oh yeah, he told me exactly that. What
Speaker 6: I noticed about him Bury is he's a lovely guy.
Speaker 6: I noticed this contrast of extremely sensitive, big heart and
Speaker 6: then armor. We never got into the way he was raised.
Speaker 6: We didn't need to, but I could identify with the
Speaker 6: idea growing up as a nineteen seventies latchkey kid with
Speaker 6: kind of the tumult of childhood, the chaos, seeking a
Speaker 6: safe place.
Speaker 5: So we're going to take a quick break now.
Speaker 1: When we return, Adam McKay and I talk about the
Speaker 1: event behind both the book and the movie, the financial
Speaker 1: Crisis of two thousand and eight. When I think of
Speaker 1: the difference between the movie and the book that you know,
Speaker 1: aside from Margaret Robbie being in a bathtub rather than
Speaker 1: a footnote in my book talking to the reader, I
Speaker 1: think there's a tonal difference.
Speaker 5: It's to your credit, it's to your moral credit. The
Speaker 5: movie's angrier than the book.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And it may be partly because some time had passed
Speaker 1: and we could see what had happened. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: part I think it's partly temperamental. I think you have
Speaker 1: an ability to get angrier than I do.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 6: You know, that is a great point because I always
Speaker 6: joked with Ferrell that when we did those broad comedies,
Speaker 6: I used to call Anchorman, Taladegan, Knights and step Brothers
Speaker 6: the mediocre white Man Trilogy, because they're all about white
Speaker 6: guys who think they're better than they are. I think
Speaker 6: they're more powerful unearned confidence and really, looking back on it,
Speaker 6: when you go big Short vice don't look up, yep,
Speaker 6: I would call it the collapse trilogy.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 6: I mean, I think now even mainstream people can admit,
Speaker 6: like the West is collapsing, like the climate is collapsing,
Speaker 6: you know. And Big Short was the first with that
Speaker 6: in the sense that I was really angry with Obama
Speaker 6: for not prosecuting, not doing the right thing as far
Speaker 6: as the allocation of all the money taking care of
Speaker 6: the homeowners. And that was kind of my peak betrayal
Speaker 6: moment because I had really is embarrassing, but I had
Speaker 6: really believed in Obama. It just never occurred to me
Speaker 6: that someone could be so cynical in that vulnerable moment.
Speaker 6: It never occurred to me that someone could step into
Speaker 6: that seat and just go same old, same old confrontation adverse.
Speaker 6: And that betrayal was really deep.
Speaker 5: You got radicalized by the financial crisis.
Speaker 6: Yes, I mean, the only thing I'll say is I've
Speaker 6: always been left.
Speaker 5: I grew up you know this.
Speaker 6: You know, we were on food stamps, welfare.
Speaker 5: I was poor.
Speaker 6: So I always grew up as the guy who's like, look,
Speaker 6: this system worked. That LBJ great society was really working
Speaker 6: in the seventies, in the early eighties before Reagan and
Speaker 6: then Bill Clinton dismantled it. But I definitely the anger
Speaker 6: you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's well earned.
Speaker 5: It's well earned. It's a funny thing.
Speaker 1: I don't feel I have the right to be angry.
Speaker 1: It's that you were really a little bit. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just that I was raised with the opposite you.
Speaker 1: I was raised with incredible privilege. Not only did I
Speaker 1: did we not have food stamps. I couldn't have told
Speaker 1: you what a food stamp was. I thought, it's like
Speaker 1: something you put on our letter. You know, it's or
Speaker 1: collected and sold for profit.
Speaker 6: I'm to your credit. Pretty much every book you've written
Speaker 6: has been suspicious of the power structure, the jargon.
Speaker 1: But it comes from a different place. It comes from
Speaker 1: New Orleans. It comes from being an outsider to the
Speaker 1: mainstream culture, and I think that's where it starts.
Speaker 5: Also, but also comes from a place of.
Speaker 1: I do have the fairness gene, like I get really injustice.
Speaker 1: In unfairness really upsets me.
Speaker 5: And so that's that's the other thing.
Speaker 1: We only have a few minutes left, And there was
Speaker 1: something I wanted to say, because first off, it was
Speaker 1: very clearly the least likely book.
Speaker 5: Of mine to be turned into a movie.
Speaker 1: So it was to me an amazing triumph it happened
Speaker 1: at all. It was like the dog walking on its
Speaker 1: hind legs.
Speaker 5: Thing, like the wonder is that does it well? Is
Speaker 5: that it does it at all?
Speaker 1: But that it was that good, and it was so
Speaker 1: difficult to make the degree of difficulty was incredible, and
Speaker 1: so it was in some ways the movie that I
Speaker 1: felt least responsible for. So it was touching and curious
Speaker 1: to me that when the movie came out, you insisted
Speaker 1: on dragging me along for the ride, and so that
Speaker 1: I not only was I doing the junkets with you,
Speaker 1: but I was in the second row of the Oscars.
Speaker 1: I'd been to the Oscars before, but i'd been by
Speaker 1: the time I got to the Oscars for The blind
Speaker 1: Side and Moneyball, I was very much a spectator, like
Speaker 1: I was just there to watch the you know, everybody
Speaker 1: get nominated and maybe win. In this case, I sit
Speaker 1: down on my seat in the second row and one
Speaker 1: of the Oscars attendants come over and says, if the
Speaker 1: movie wins Best Picture and it had a real shot,
Speaker 1: says Adam McKay, insists that you come on stage and
Speaker 1: receive the.
Speaker 5: Oscar with us.
Speaker 1: And I was so I was really touched by that,
Speaker 1: like like I teared up, like it was just like
Speaker 1: could it was wholly.
Speaker 5: Unnecessary on your part.
Speaker 1: I really have thought from the minute I started at
Speaker 1: interactions with the movie business that everybody in the movie
Speaker 1: business would really for the author to be dead because
Speaker 1: he does CAUs he causes nothing but trouble, like there's no.
Speaker 3: Upside, and and and you.
Speaker 1: Wanted to be alive. I was just really pleased with that.
Speaker 1: And I'm and grateful.
Speaker 6: I've said to you over and over again through the years,
Speaker 6: the energy of reading that book is directly.
Speaker 5: In the movie.
Speaker 6: I just think maybe part of the power of your stories,
Speaker 6: you know, it's the fact that you do come from
Speaker 6: a whatever you want to call it, privilege, you know,
Speaker 6: somewhat wealthy background and New Orleans, which is an outsider city.
Speaker 6: I mean, you look historically like a lot of revolutionaries
Speaker 6: were wealthy. And there's a credibility to that voice that
Speaker 6: really can't be challenged because no one can say to you, oh,
Speaker 6: Michael Lewis, you just want to get rich. Here's my privilege,
Speaker 6: here's my name. There's a real power to it. And
Speaker 6: I think your point about I believe in fairness stands
Speaker 6: stronger because you come from where you come from.
Speaker 1: In your movies, you make these useful and jarring cuts
Speaker 1: from one thing to the next. I'm going to make
Speaker 1: a useful and jarring cut to the end of this conversation.
Speaker 6: Thanks for doing us pleasure, man.
Speaker 5: The pleasure is always mine.
Speaker 1: I always leave any conversation with Adam McKay feeling like
Speaker 1: I want to go.
Speaker 5: Write something again anyway.
Speaker 1: Coming up next week, we're going to beat some of
Speaker 1: the real life characters, the short sellers, traders and investment
Speaker 1: bankers who appeared in both the movie and the book,
Speaker 1: the ones who saw the financial crisis looming long before
Speaker 1: anyone else did. Thanks for listening to this episode of
Speaker 1: The Big Short Companion podcast, See you soon.
Speaker 2: Against the Rules The Big Short Companion is hosted by
Speaker 2: Michael Lewis. It's produced by Me Ludy, Jean Kott, and
Speaker 2: Catherine Girodeau. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our theme was
Speaker 2: composed by Nick Burtel, and our engineer is Hans Dale.
Speaker 2: She special thanks to Nicole opten Bosch, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela
Speaker 2: Lawrence and the rest of the Pushkin Audiobooks team. Against
Speaker 2: the Rules is the production of Pushkin Industries. To find
Speaker 2: more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you'd like
Speaker 2: to listen ad free and learn't about other exclusive offerings.
Speaker 2: Don't forget to sign up for a Pushkin Plus subscription
Speaker 2: at Pushkin dot fm, slash Plus or Honor Apple Show page,
Speaker 2: and you can get the big short now at Pushkin,
Speaker 2: dot fm, slash Audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.
Speaker 7: It's Jacob Goldstein. I'm the co host of a new
Speaker 7: show called Business History, and we're bringing you a clip
Speaker 7: right now from an episode we did about a mathematician
Speaker 7: named Jim Simon's. Simons wanted to take human emotions out
Speaker 7: of investing, and after a few early hiccups, including buying
Speaker 7: up all the potatoes in Maine, he created one of
Speaker 7: the greatest money machines in history. I really hope you
Speaker 7: like the clip, and if you want to hear more,
Speaker 7: please check out the show. It's called Business History and
Speaker 7: it's available wherever you're listening right now.
Speaker 4: They were doing what we would call today michechine learning.
Speaker 7: Machine learning is like, essentially, you build a system in
Speaker 7: a computer, you feeded a bunch of data, and the
Speaker 7: system sort of builds a map of the relationships in
Speaker 7: that data, and then with new data it can kind
Speaker 7: of interpolate or extrapolate and make guesses about what should
Speaker 7: come next.
Speaker 4: And of course today.
Speaker 7: We have an exciting, maybe misleading confounding term for machine learning.
Speaker 4: We call it AI exactly right, right, this is still
Speaker 4: very basic machine learning, and the computer at the time
Speaker 4: keeps making mistakes that they didn't really understand. So, for instance,
Speaker 4: once the computer developed a taste for potatoes, main potatoes,
Speaker 4: the system kept buying main potato futures in the state
Speaker 4: of Maine, potato potatoes, big harvest year, next year or whatever. Yes, okay,
Speaker 4: until two thirds of the company's money was in potatoes.
Speaker 4: They were all in potatoes. And they got a call
Speaker 4: from the regulators, the.
Speaker 7: Cftb PP comodi's Futures Trading Commission.
Speaker 4: Right yeah, saying whoa who are you guys, Like, what
Speaker 4: are you doing over there? You have almost cornered the
Speaker 4: market on potatoes. You have to sell. And they ended
Speaker 4: up losing money on the trade because blown out on potatoes,
Speaker 4: they had stopped the computer whatever the computer's plan was.
Speaker 4: But you know, this was just one small weird thing.
Speaker 4: Simon and Baum were really kind of nervous about this
Speaker 4: whole thing. They had taken investors money, they didn't really
Speaker 4: know if their system worked. And as the story gets told,
Speaker 4: they start to like second guess the computer and themselves,
Speaker 4: and they start to think, well, I have this intuition
Speaker 4: that gold's gonna go up because of the geopolitical situation,
Speaker 4: and they'd make some money on that, and then they
Speaker 4: lose some money on that, and so by doubting their
Speaker 4: own system, it just wasn't really working. And at that
Speaker 4: point they're just Wall Street investors. Right when the big
Speaker 4: computer trying to buy more potatoes and and the man
Speaker 4: won't let em buy potatoes.