Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in
Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: This week another Master's in Business Live, this time with
Speaker 2: Michael Lewis. I've been fortunate to interview the poet Laureate
Speaker 2: of Finance I don't know, maybe a dozen times, ten
Speaker 2: times over the years. I've interviewed him after each of
Speaker 2: the last few books. I've interviewed him live at a
Speaker 2: couple of conferences and events. I've had dinners with him.
Speaker 2: I've gotten drunk with him at a bar late at night.
Speaker 2: Imagine the greatest storyteller of your generation and then sitting
Speaker 2: at a bar and having a couple of drinks with him.
Speaker 2: It's every bit as spectacular as you would imagine. So
Speaker 2: when I read that his new book was coming out,
Speaker 2: I said, Hey, if you're interested in speaking to a
Speaker 2: small group at a local theater, I'd be happy to
Speaker 2: set that up. And his pr people said great. So
Speaker 2: at the Main Street Theater in Port Washington, to a
Speaker 2: crowd of just three hundred people, he regaled us with
Speaker 2: stories for ninety minutes. You will hear almost know me
Speaker 2: in this because my job was just to give him
Speaker 2: a nudge and then stay the hell out of his way.
Speaker 2: You could tell the audience loved it. It was so
Speaker 2: much fun. There were plenty of you know, stories I
Speaker 2: had never heard before, including listen for the story about
Speaker 2: Billy Bean and the F bomb. It really is special.
Speaker 2: I thought this was a blast. I think you will
Speaker 2: also with no further ado. Michael Lewis on his new
Speaker 2: book Who Is Government and his career as a writer. Welcome, Welcome, Michael.
Speaker 3: It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: Welcome to uh, the north shore of Long Island, so gatsby,
Speaker 2: Long Island.
Speaker 3: I've seen none of it. It was dark and rainy,
Speaker 3: is it?
Speaker 2: It's so let's let's start out. How you doing. How's
Speaker 2: the book to going? People pulled in.
Speaker 3: Saying it's who is Government?
Speaker 2: Who is Government?
Speaker 3: You said, what is government?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the same thing, who is going?
Speaker 3: And and it's an odd it's an odd. So there,
Speaker 3: if we're going to be honest, here their books and
Speaker 3: their book like objects. And this is closer to a
Speaker 3: book like object because I didn't write the whole thing
Speaker 3: I wrote. I wrote a third of it. I love it,
Speaker 3: but I but I got I am I have six
Speaker 3: other writers that I hired to do this with me. So,
Speaker 3: so you I'm answering this is the way of answering
Speaker 3: your question. The book tours. It's normally my least favorite
Speaker 3: part of what I do for a living. It's and
Speaker 3: and I don't know why that is.
Speaker 2: I just because it's a slog.
Speaker 3: It's it's I don't like being on TV, but you
Speaker 3: got to do that. I don't The business of presenting
Speaker 3: yourself this way is so different from the business of
Speaker 3: writing the book that it's jarring in the first place,
Speaker 3: and then the worst thing happens you start to like
Speaker 3: it and and then you get you get going back
Speaker 3: into like being a writer. Book is jarring. But the
Speaker 3: thing that is usually a problem is that you know
Speaker 3: you're kind of on the line. You know it's your book.
Speaker 3: It's just you're out there alone. Now if people say
Speaker 3: it sucks, I can just say it's the other people
Speaker 3: who are responsible and so and so I feel it's
Speaker 3: kind of it's kind of a it's kind of a
Speaker 3: pleasure this one compared to the others going out and
Speaker 3: talking about it.
Speaker 2: So I've only seen you with some of the other
Speaker 2: authors once or twice. You on some show with Kamano
Speaker 2: Bell and I don't think you were. I haven't seen
Speaker 2: you with any of the other cole.
Speaker 3: Did you see that? Did you see it was Morning
Speaker 3: Joe with Camal Bell?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: All right. So camal Bell is a six foot five inch,
Speaker 3: three hundred and fifty pound black man, and he shows
Speaker 3: up at Morning Joe in a sweatshirt that says immigrants
Speaker 3: aren't criminals, but the president is one and and and
Speaker 3: they say, they say, you can't wear that on TV.
Speaker 3: Joe is not there, he's remote, and so they they
Speaker 3: try to find something that will fit comeal Bell. Nothing
Speaker 3: will fit come out.
Speaker 2: Why it was inside out? Is that what he did? No?
Speaker 3: What he did? No, it gets worse than that. They
Speaker 3: then tried to get him to flip it around, and
Speaker 3: it looked ridiculous. Then they put it right side the
Speaker 3: right side out again, and they put black tape over
Speaker 3: just the bottom part of that. And then when they
Speaker 3: by the time we got he got finished, we'd lost
Speaker 3: our segment. They'd run out of time, and Joe was
Speaker 3: heading off to drive. There's this another hour and Joe's
Speaker 3: head off to drive his kid to school, and they
Speaker 3: called him and said that we can't have him on
Speaker 3: because you know, we can't figure out what we do
Speaker 3: with the sweatshirt. And Joe interceded and said, have him
Speaker 3: wear the sweatshirt. He can make sure everybody can read it,
Speaker 3: and put him on and what was But what was
Speaker 3: really weird about it is that though Joe was comfortable
Speaker 3: making that statement on his on his show, none of
Speaker 3: the authorities in the actual studio were And so they
Speaker 3: framed come out. It's like this giant head and you
Speaker 3: can't see anything. And the whole time he's talking, he
Speaker 3: keeps going, he goes, He's going like this with a sweatshees.
Speaker 3: Did you see that?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it it's incredibly distracting. I was trying to
Speaker 3: have a conversation and he's this man is doing this
Speaker 3: thing with this sweatterer. But yes, mostly it's been I mean,
Speaker 3: I've done some stuff with some of the co authors,
Speaker 3: mostly stage stuff. I've been on stage one way or
Speaker 3: another in one city or another with all of them
Speaker 3: or each of them. But most of most of the
Speaker 3: other stuff, the TV stuff, I've had to do on
Speaker 3: my own.
Speaker 2: So I want to get to this book in a minute,
Speaker 2: but first I want to set the stage with the
Speaker 2: Arc of the two prior.
Speaker 3: Books, because that are related to this.
Speaker 2: Well exactly, that's what I'm teeing up. Don't get ahead
Speaker 2: of me, just trying to help. So the premonition was
Speaker 2: how the you us really did a mediocre job during
Speaker 2: the pandemic. You focused on Charity Dean and the pandemic
Speaker 2: emergency Response team and the mess they had to clean up.
Speaker 2: I'm curious how that book led to the Fifth Risk,
Speaker 2: which was the book that was the predecessor to this.
Speaker 3: So I'm gonna have to help you. The fifth Risk
Speaker 3: is before this, before the before the premonition, it goes
Speaker 3: fifth Risk Premonition.
Speaker 2: This then withdrawn. Okay, so the Fifth Risk is the
Speaker 2: predecessor book to this? How did that lead?
Speaker 3: Yes, so there we go. Sorry, I got the order rum. Yeah,
Speaker 3: sorry about that. And your wife, Wendy is here somewhere
Speaker 3: in the front row. I'm so sorry you're feeling poorly. Thanks,
Speaker 3: thank you for coming.
Speaker 2: By the way, wouldn't be the first time you've embarrassed
Speaker 2: me in public, and we could save that conversation for later.
Speaker 2: But okay, how did those books lead to?
Speaker 3: So this is how it happens. It's really simple and
Speaker 3: it is all none of it all seems worthy from
Speaker 3: a distance, like I have some great political or social purpose.
Speaker 3: In fact, it's all literary opportunism. Trump is elected. The
Speaker 3: first time. Trump fires a day after his election his
Speaker 3: transition team and enterprise. I didn't know existed until I
Speaker 3: read he'd fired it. But it was five hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty people that Chris Christy had assembled for him to
Speaker 3: go into the government and receive from the Obama administration
Speaker 3: the briefings that a thousand people in the Obama administration
Speaker 3: had by law spent six months preparing. So given its
Speaker 3: Obama's probably like the best academic course in the history
Speaker 3: of the government on the government. And Trump fired the
Speaker 3: people who are going to go listen to this like
Speaker 3: they just said, we don't need any he told Chris Christy.
Speaker 3: Chris Christy told me, he said, we're so smart that
Speaker 3: it'll take us an hour to figure out how the
Speaker 3: government works. We don't need that. And I thought, this
Speaker 3: is like a great comic premise that I can go
Speaker 3: and wander around the government, get all these briefings that
Speaker 3: he didn't bother to get, and the reader will feel
Speaker 3: rightly like they know more about the government than the president.
Speaker 3: And the president's supposed to be running it. And that
Speaker 3: book it was a series again, it was more of
Speaker 3: a book like object. It was three long vanity fair
Speaker 3: pieces plus a piece that so it just happened to work.
Speaker 3: Is that when you glue them all together. But I
Speaker 3: picked intentionally the departments that nobody paid any attention to,
Speaker 3: so not State or Treasury or anything like that. I
Speaker 3: picked Commerce, Agriculture, and energy ones where if I turned
Speaker 3: to my neighbors in Berkeley, all of whom have are
Speaker 3: inflicting their political opinions upon me constantly. If I say
Speaker 3: what does the Commerce Department do? I get a blank
Speaker 3: stare they have no idea. And I found in those
Speaker 3: places one really good material. Like all of the places
Speaker 3: sort of like matter. There's stuff going on in each
Speaker 3: of them that's really, really, really important, but unbelievable characters.
Speaker 3: Can I tell you about one character? Sure, but I
Speaker 3: don't want I don't want to get get you got
Speaker 3: your train is on the track, and I don't want to.
Speaker 2: Well, you're you're just skipping the best part of how
Speaker 2: did you get access to all these people? You kind
Speaker 2: of left out. If there's this giant transition team that
Speaker 2: was supposed to be for the incoming Trump administration, and
Speaker 2: he fired them all. How did you get asked?
Speaker 3: He fired the ones who were going in to listen
Speaker 3: to the briefings, So you just briefings were still there
Speaker 3: in some ways, like in some wayss like the turkey
Speaker 3: sandwiches are still moldering, and you know that they had prepared,
Speaker 3: they'd figured out what drinks they might want. It was
Speaker 3: all all set up.
Speaker 2: So you reach out to reach out to.
Speaker 3: In the first place, people inside the Energy Department. I
Speaker 3: got some names of officials in the Energy Department, started
Speaker 3: with the outgoing Obama people, but quickly got into the
Speaker 3: civil service because the civil service does the briefings. Uh,
Speaker 3: I mean, they're the ones who are I mean in
Speaker 3: the Energy Department, for example, run a fifty billion dollars
Speaker 3: cleanup of the nuclear waste left behind in eastern Washington
Speaker 3: from the building of the atom bomb in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 3: It's still going on. You know, there's like that thing.
Speaker 3: There are all these things. There's a nuclear arsenal. I
Speaker 3: went and I went and met with the people who
Speaker 3: managed the nuclear arsenal arsenal, and they couldn't tell me
Speaker 3: that there was classified stuff. But they could tell me
Speaker 3: a lot, and their attitude was was so grateful. Someone's
Speaker 3: come to listen, like we did all this work to
Speaker 3: like explain how it all works. And and I started
Speaker 3: with energy, but not not you know, it could have
Speaker 3: gone anywhere, but I started with energy because I don't
Speaker 3: know if you remember, but Rick Perry, oops, was Donald
Speaker 3: Trump's pick for Secretary of Energy because he because he,
Speaker 3: I mean, Trump's mind is looks like oil Texas looks
Speaker 3: good on television. But Rick Perry had called for the
Speaker 3: elimination of the Energy Department when he was running for president.
Speaker 3: And that's a little awkward. You're going to go be
Speaker 3: running this place when you said it shouldn't exist.
Speaker 2: Tough first day.
Speaker 3: But he had no idea what was in it. And
Speaker 3: the minute he found I was in it, he went
Speaker 3: into the Senate, his Senate hearings and said, God, I'm
Speaker 3: really sorry, like I was wrong. You shouldn't get rid
Speaker 3: of this place. So I went there because he was,
Speaker 3: because I just thought, this is like, this is the
Speaker 3: reductiono ad absurdum of this ignorance. And the pieces, the
Speaker 3: pieces really worked like they I mean, the material was
Speaker 3: so good. But what happened as I crept my way
Speaker 3: through the obscure parts of the federal government. I kept
Speaker 3: meeting incredible people, like people who I was not. I
Speaker 3: did not have a picture in my head of who
Speaker 3: the federal employee was. What I was meeting was very
Speaker 3: different from what I had imagined. And so the book
Speaker 3: comes out, it sells half a million copies, and it's
Speaker 3: glued together Vanity Fair articles which told you that there
Speaker 3: is an interest in a Civics lesson, which is what
Speaker 3: it was kind of, and I got the problem of
Speaker 3: having to write it as you will soon have and
Speaker 3: afterward to the paperback. It comes out a year later,
Speaker 3: and I thought, you know, I kind of Although it's
Speaker 3: worked so far, it bothers me that I've not done
Speaker 3: a deep dive into one of these people. Because the
Speaker 3: people they were a mission driven, usually very expert in
Speaker 3: some very narrow thing, completely incapable of telling their own stories,
Speaker 3: walled off by political people, so they weren't allowed to
Speaker 3: tell their own stories, oblivious to the sense any themselves
Speaker 3: as characters. But that's great. Characters don't know their characters.
Speaker 3: I mean the fact that you don't know you're a
Speaker 3: character makes you an even better character. And I thought,
Speaker 3: I'm just going to pick one of these people, so
Speaker 3: who Now, when I had this problem, Trump had then
Speaker 3: shut down the government. It was the first it was
Speaker 3: a government shut down in eighteen and nineteen, early nineteen
Speaker 3: it was. It was early twenty nineteen, and he had
Speaker 3: furloughed sixty percent of the civilian workforce, sent them home
Speaker 3: as inessential workers who without pay. So I got there
Speaker 3: is an organization in Washington called a partner Ship for
Speaker 3: Public Service that tries and fails over and over to
Speaker 3: get positive attention shined upon these federal workers. And they
Speaker 3: give an award called the Sammy Award to people who
Speaker 3: do something good in the civil service. It's been going
Speaker 3: on for this has been going on for two decades.
Speaker 3: And still know when he pays it any attention. But
Speaker 3: there've been lots of nominations for those awards, thousands of them.
Speaker 3: So I cross referenced, like anybody who's been nominated for Sammy,
Speaker 3: and that was like eight thousand people or something with
Speaker 3: who's been furloughed. And the list came back and it
Speaker 3: was like five thousand three. It was some huge list,
Speaker 3: And what the hell am I going to do with this?
Speaker 3: It was alphabetized. I just took the first name on
Speaker 3: the list, Arthur A. Allen. He was the first film
Speaker 3: on the list, and I found his phone number. I
Speaker 3: called him up and said, I want to come talk
Speaker 3: you about what you do. And I didn't really know
Speaker 3: what he did. So this is the beginning of this
Speaker 3: book because what happens with Arthur A. Allen. I go to
Speaker 3: see him. He is the lone oceanographer in the Coastguard
Speaker 3: Search and Rescue Division. He's been at it for thirty
Speaker 3: something years. And he pretty quickly tells me that like
Speaker 3: Americans have this unbelievable ability to get lost at sea,
Speaker 3: to just like we just do it better than anybody else,
Speaker 3: and and and it's and so the Coast Guard Rescue
Speaker 3: is constantly occupied. He he he figures out. A few
Speaker 3: years into his career, he witnesses a tragedy. He's he's
Speaker 3: out in the field. He's at the Chesapeake pay station.
Speaker 3: A storm, summer storm comes out of nowhere. The Coast
Speaker 3: Guard is pulling people off the Chesapeake Bay. They discovered
Speaker 3: that they got everybody but this one boat missing. And
Speaker 3: it's got a woman who was Art's wife's age and
Speaker 3: a little girl who was his daughter's age. And there
Speaker 3: they know because they know when the storm kicked up,
Speaker 3: when the boat likely capsized. They were on a sailboat,
Speaker 3: and so they know, and they know where they were
Speaker 3: when they capsized kinda. But what they don't know, presuming
Speaker 3: that they are on the upside down boat, is how
Speaker 3: that upside down sailboat drifts at sea. Objects drift differently,
Speaker 3: like if you're in an inner tube, it's you will
Speaker 3: move in the ocean differently than if you're an upside
Speaker 3: down sailboat, then you would if you were on a
Speaker 3: life raft, you know, and so on, and they find
Speaker 3: the girl and the mother dead the next morning, and
Speaker 3: Art says, that's never going to happen again. When he's
Speaker 3: telling me this story, like what he's done with his
Speaker 3: career a bunch of things, but he has basically invented
Speaker 3: the science of studying objects drifting at sea. And he's
Speaker 3: told me at this point in our interactions, i'd been
Speaker 3: I was there a couple of days before. I said, like,
Speaker 3: why did you even bother to do this? And he
Speaker 3: goes over to his bookshelf and he pulls the yellow
Speaker 3: newspaper article from the Norfolk Whatever about this mother and child.
Speaker 3: He starts to cry. He said that that could have
Speaker 3: been my wife, that could have been my child. And
Speaker 3: when I so, when that happened, I said, it's never
Speaker 3: going to happen again. So he starts studying how objects
Speaker 3: drift and throwing them into the Long Island Sound from
Speaker 3: he lives in Connecticut, and and he classifies a couple
Speaker 3: one hundred objects the results they and reduces their drift
Speaker 3: patterns to mathematic mathematical formula, like ten days after the
Speaker 3: coastguard gets his formula. A three hundred and fifty pounds man,
Speaker 3: this is a very American thing to do, runs out
Speaker 3: of his window on a cruise ship in the Carnival
Speaker 3: on a Carnival Cruise Line cruise eighty miles east of Miami,
Speaker 3: and isn't discovered missing for like several hours. And he
Speaker 3: does it at night because they have cameras on the
Speaker 3: side of the boat. They know when they can go
Speaker 3: back and say, oh, this is when he went off.
Speaker 3: But Art had studied fatman at sea, and that's a
Speaker 3: thing that he had a fat He actually stayed large
Speaker 3: and smaller people. He had fat guy at sea, And
Speaker 3: which will turn turn out to come in very handy
Speaker 3: in future years. But this is the first time fat
Speaker 3: guy at sea who goes over off a boat and
Speaker 3: isn't discovered missing for a few hours in human history.
Speaker 3: He's dead. Like it's like finding a person at sea
Speaker 3: is like finding a soccer ball in the state of Connecticut.
Speaker 3: You just it's it's almost impossible. They plucked this dude
Speaker 3: out of the water like seven hours. Because he's fat,
Speaker 3: he can live forever. You know, you're not no hypothermia.
Speaker 3: The risk is someone so it's gonna swallow him. But
Speaker 3: that's it. And it's really a huge advantage to have
Speaker 3: that fat. And they pluck him out and he's sort
Speaker 3: of like kind of cool. It's like like he's not
Speaker 3: panicked or anything. He's just floating at sea. But they
Speaker 3: they pull him out, and there are all these articles
Speaker 3: about like how great the search and rescue people are
Speaker 3: who pulled him out of the sea. No one asked
Speaker 3: how they find him. The coastguard themselves are shocked, like this,
Speaker 3: how well this worked? And this goes on. I mean,
Speaker 3: I taught interviewed another fat guy who fell off another
Speaker 3: boat in the Pacific, and I who was saved miraculously
Speaker 3: after like eight hours, and I said, like, how do
Speaker 3: you think they found you? And he said, what saved
Speaker 3: you or something? And he says, when I was floating
Speaker 3: in the ocean, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord
Speaker 3: and savior and that's why I was saved. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: You're a saved because of Arthur A. Allen. You know,
Speaker 3: that's who saved you. But nobody paid, had paid any
Speaker 3: attention to this dude and what he had done. So
Speaker 3: I spent a few days with him, listening to the
Speaker 3: I mean the whole intellectual stuff about how what he did,
Speaker 3: how he did what he did. It was riveting, but
Speaker 3: the motive, like this deed, I'm not going to let
Speaker 3: another American die because they we don't know this. He
Speaker 3: fixes the problem. Thousands of people are alive today around
Speaker 3: the world because of what he's done. He's been honored
Speaker 3: by other countries, Taiwan and Australia. Uh, but we don't
Speaker 3: even pay We pay him no attention. So I gather
Speaker 3: my stuff to go write the end of my book
Speaker 3: and I'm on my way back to the airport and
Speaker 3: he after I've spent the time with him, and he
Speaker 3: calls myself. This is the moment this book starts. He
Speaker 3: calls myself and he says, hey, you're a writer. And
Speaker 3: I said, I've been there with my notepad. You know,
Speaker 3: I've been like I've been. I know I had said
Speaker 3: something when I called him, but I said, and he said,
Speaker 3: he said, and he said, I just talked to my son.
Speaker 3: He says, like you've published books and one of the
Speaker 3: books became move a movie. And he goes, are you
Speaker 3: gonna are you gonna write about this? You can write
Speaker 3: about me? And I said, yeah, Art, I mean, why
Speaker 3: do you think I flew across country and spent three
Speaker 3: days interviewing your wife and children and all the rest.
Speaker 3: He said, I just thought you were really interested in
Speaker 3: how objects drift and and and and this is this this,
Speaker 3: this is your one an essential worker to your public servant.
Speaker 3: You're a civil servant. They have no sense like they
Speaker 3: deserve any kind of attention. The stories that come out
Speaker 3: of them are amazing. And I thought, man, I should
Speaker 3: have done the first time. I should have been diving
Speaker 3: into these people's lives. So the next time, if I
Speaker 3: ever come back, I'm going to come back focused on
Speaker 3: the people. And uh. And when I I was on
Speaker 3: a hiking trail with David Shipley, who was once until
Speaker 3: recently the opinion editor of the Washington Post, and he
Speaker 3: had space, and he had money, and and we could
Speaker 3: write as long as wanted in his pages. He said,
Speaker 3: I said, let me. I'm worried that if I go
Speaker 3: do this, it'll just be either, oh, this is Michael
Speaker 3: Lewis's take on the federal government, or I made it
Speaker 3: up or whatever like whatever. Whenever people don't want to
Speaker 3: hear the message, it's very easy to come after the
Speaker 3: writer and try to undermine.
Speaker 2: The whatever is is that why you picked? That's what
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 3: Say, And also to get a little bit of a
Speaker 3: bigger kind of sample, like not going to tell him
Speaker 3: what to do. I didn't even tell him why, I
Speaker 3: what what I was going to do. And I've done
Speaker 3: two of these big profiles in here, and the material
Speaker 3: is as good as ever. But I said, we're just
Speaker 3: gonna you just go into federal government and wander around
Speaker 3: and find a story. And six out of the five
Speaker 3: out of the six other six did much of what
Speaker 3: basically what I did. They found unbelievable character studies, individuals
Speaker 3: doing things that were just to shock them one. He's
Speaker 3: a wonderful right John Lanchester, English writer, decided instead that
Speaker 3: his character was the consumer price index, which is a challenge. Uh,
Speaker 3: but he actually makes it work. It's because it is
Speaker 3: an amazing achievement. But he writes so he he went
Speaker 3: off of the reservation a bit.
Speaker 2: I'll push back on the characterization when we come to
Speaker 2: that chapter, because I have a different spin on that. Oh.
Speaker 2: But but let's talk about some of the chapters in here,
Speaker 2: starting with Ronald Walters of the National Seminary.
Speaker 3: I can't start with myself.
Speaker 2: You want to start that way, I mean other other peoples.
Speaker 3: I edited it, but other people, other people. I give
Speaker 3: you such a shit, I will tell you.
Speaker 2: So you want to start with the coal mines, Let's let's.
Speaker 3: Start with No, no, no, I don't want to. I've already
Speaker 3: muscled you around too much. You're I'm the fish and
Speaker 3: you're the fisherman landing me. But but it's uh, Ronald Walters.
Speaker 3: So this is the one. The one writer who came
Speaker 3: to me after I had employed them all and said,
Speaker 3: is there anything on your cutting room floor that you
Speaker 3: would like to have written about that you didn't write?
Speaker 3: I said, well, that's funny, you say, but yes, it's
Speaker 3: Ronald Walters. Casey Sepp, who's a wonderful New Yorker writer.
Speaker 3: She wrote a book about Harper Lee called Furious Hours,
Speaker 3: and we met because I reviewed that book for The
Speaker 3: New York Times so favorably. She got in touch and
Speaker 3: sent me toffee boxes of toffee. But when we became friends,
Speaker 3: Ronald Walters, this I'll be brief because I didn't get
Speaker 3: to know him. You know, I'm just reading. I'm reading
Speaker 3: it like you. But what it intrigued me Ronald Walters
Speaker 3: is in the Veterans administration. I think he's the only
Speaker 3: one who still has his job securely. But he may
Speaker 3: be insecure now too. But he took over these National
Speaker 3: Cemeteries Association, the cemeteries that where we bury veterans, and
Speaker 3: there are like fifty five of these things around the country.
Speaker 3: Like four million veterans are buried in them. They're burying them.
Speaker 3: It's an astonishing rate, and it's sort of like it's
Speaker 3: a sacred duty. It's where we bury our war dead.
Speaker 3: It's where we bury people who've made great sacrifice for
Speaker 3: the country, and it's a tribute to the country that
Speaker 3: we take it seriously that the Veterans Administration even has
Speaker 3: this program. But when he inherited it, it was struggling
Speaker 3: in it's a weird way to put it, consumer satisfaction.
Speaker 3: The consumers in this case were the loved ones of
Speaker 3: the people who were being buried, and he took it
Speaker 3: from And we know this because the University of Michigan
Speaker 3: measures customer satisfaction across the society. It's all institute, big institutions.
Speaker 3: Not just it's private sector, but also government agencies. And
Speaker 3: it was kind of like most of the government agencies,
Speaker 3: kind of high sixties. It was like a mediocre thing.
Speaker 3: And in a period of a decade, Ronald Walters took
Speaker 3: it to being not just the enterprise in the United
Speaker 3: States government that had the highest customer satisfaction, but the
Speaker 3: enterprise in the entire country, more than Costco, more than
Speaker 3: Amazon or FedEx or the other ones that people like it.
Speaker 3: And he never No one knew his name, no one
Speaker 3: knew who, how he did it, or why. And I
Speaker 3: had when I was fiddling around with picking someone to
Speaker 3: write the afterwards for the Fifth Risk, i'd heard his
Speaker 3: story and I almost I tried calling, and actually they
Speaker 3: didn't even return my calls. The veteran of his administration
Speaker 3: wouldn't talk to me. So so it was there and
Speaker 3: I said, go go find that out out about that,
Speaker 3: and so she writes about how he did what he did.
Speaker 2: It's an it's an absolutely beautiful chapter. It actually made
Speaker 2: me cry. Didn't only chapter in the book that that
Speaker 2: brings tears to your eyes. Let's talk about coal mining
Speaker 2: and how dangerous it is. Let's talk about your first show.
Speaker 3: So another case. So this is I mean it it's
Speaker 3: so unusual to find such a rich vein of material
Speaker 3: that is basically unexplored, that is so predictably yielding gold.
Speaker 3: And this So this is number This is number two
Speaker 3: for me. I've done our alan, I've done the agencies.
Speaker 3: I'm going to go pick another person. So I went
Speaker 3: back to kind of it the way I did it before.
Speaker 3: I got a list of the people who were nominated
Speaker 3: for Sammy's Awards this year or last year. And this
Speaker 3: list was almost six hundred people. And because it's they
Speaker 3: don't know what they're doing. I mean, they know what
Speaker 3: they're doing in some ways, but they just don't know
Speaker 3: how to create interest in people. All these this list
Speaker 3: of the people who've been nominated for the award, it
Speaker 3: just said their name and what they'd done, and you
Speaker 3: looked at the accomplishment and they were often amazing. It
Speaker 3: was like, you know, you know, but it would never
Speaker 3: say how they did it. No, cured cancer, but that
Speaker 3: was it kind of thing. John Smith at the National
Speaker 3: Institute Health Cured Cancer period. End of story. I was
Speaker 3: going through this listen. It was all just cold blooded.
Speaker 3: You know. It was just like until I get to
Speaker 3: Christopher Mars solve the problem of coal mine roofs falling
Speaker 3: in on coal miners, which has killed fifty thousand American
Speaker 3: coal miners in the last century, leading cause of death
Speaker 3: in the most dangerous occupation in the country. Uh, occupation
Speaker 3: is so dangerous that it was more dangerous being in
Speaker 3: a coal mine than being in the Vietnam War. That's
Speaker 3: how That's how dangerous it was. And and it's but
Speaker 3: it's said the last sentence was a former coal miner.
Speaker 3: They finally gave me something to think about. And so
Speaker 3: I looked and I thought, man, there has got to
Speaker 3: be a story here. I mean, I'm thinking grew up
Speaker 3: in West Virginia, like dad was injured or killed or so,
Speaker 3: you know, this son, how this person gets out and
Speaker 3: does this? So I had spun this whole tale up
Speaker 3: in my head. Uh, And I find his number, and again,
Speaker 3: like ourd Ali, he lives in Pittsburgh, I call him,
Speaker 3: I coal call him. In this case, he knew who
Speaker 3: I was. He'd read Moneyball and it turned out that
Speaker 3: he thought of himself as Moneyball in coal mines. But
Speaker 3: that's a whole separate thing. But but he he's I say,
Speaker 3: I just want to hear I just want to hear
Speaker 3: your story, like, give me the the ten minute version.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna give you the five minutes of the ten
Speaker 3: minute version because it hooked me. He says, I grew
Speaker 3: up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a
Speaker 3: professor at the university. And I thought, oh, like, my
Speaker 3: whole movie is different. I know, I don't know what
Speaker 3: the movie is, but this this not and I thought, oh,
Speaker 3: my interest went cool. And then he started to tell me.
Speaker 3: He says, if you looked at us a little bit,
Speaker 3: you'd find my dad was kind of famous. Robert Marx
Speaker 3: was his name, and Marx had been brought to Princeton
Speaker 3: without a PhD. To help Princeton. He had devised a
Speaker 3: mechanism for stress testing. He was stressed testing fighter planes
Speaker 3: for the Navy and the Air Force before they built them.
Speaker 3: He'd take the design, build a little model, and he
Speaker 3: had this complicated way of just testing whether or not
Speaker 3: this design was going to actually work in practice. And
Speaker 3: Princeton had brought him into test little nuclear reactors they
Speaker 3: wanted to build to see if it were earing crack.
Speaker 3: And Robert Mark one day was teaching an engineering class
Speaker 3: at Princeton when an undergraduate walks in from an art
Speaker 3: history class and says, this device you have, could you
Speaker 3: use it to like figure out what's holding Gothic cathedrals up?
Speaker 3: Because they just told that no one understands how the
Speaker 3: roofs of Gothic cathedrals don't collapse. There's no records left
Speaker 3: by the builders. Then they're built over a century. No
Speaker 3: one knows what's decorative, which is actually holding the weight.
Speaker 3: And he said yeah, And he became famous because he
Speaker 3: became the guy who figured out how they built the
Speaker 3: Gothic cathedrals and what was keeping them up, what was
Speaker 3: keeping the roof up. So that's Robert, that's the dad.
Speaker 3: Chris is telling me this in the first fifteen minutes
Speaker 3: I'm talking to him. So so that was my dadd
Speaker 3: He said, I had a problem with my dad's life.
Speaker 3: It was a Vietnam War. I got kind of radicalized.
Speaker 3: I thought, I saw it wasn't Princeton kids who were
Speaker 3: fighting and dying, and that really bothered me. And he
Speaker 3: said I He started throwing words around the house like bourgeois,
Speaker 3: and pretty soon he said, I'm not he could have
Speaker 3: gone to Harvard or Princeton. I'm not gonna do that.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna go join the working class. So he breaks
Speaker 3: with his dad, big break. He goes on the road.
Speaker 3: He works in an autofactory, works in a ups plant,
Speaker 3: finally ends up with several fellow radicals in a coal
Speaker 3: mine in West Virginia. The other three radicals all quit
Speaker 3: at the end of the first day. It's that brutal.
Speaker 3: He finds it interesting. Why he finds it interesting is
Speaker 3: still a bit of a mystery. But he stays in
Speaker 3: the mind for a year and almost dies twice that
Speaker 3: he sees how dangerous it is. He crawls out of
Speaker 3: the mind, goes and gets a PhD, a undergraduate and
Speaker 3: a PhD at Penn State in rock engineering, and begins
Speaker 3: the process of figuring out there's all his data that
Speaker 3: the US government has collected on that they've observed the problem.
Speaker 3: It's like the CDC does with the disease, that they've
Speaker 3: observed the problem without actually trying to stop the problem.
Speaker 3: So they've all his data on when Rufe's fell and
Speaker 3: what the conditions were. He starts to study it, and
Speaker 3: over a career, a really really interesting career, figures out
Speaker 3: how to stop this from happening and stops it from happening.
Speaker 3: So he's telling me this on the phone, and it
Speaker 3: does give me all the details of his work. But
Speaker 3: and I stop him and I say, oh, so you
Speaker 3: rebelled against your dad and then you just went and
Speaker 3: had your dad's career. He was figured out how to
Speaker 3: keep what was keeping up the rules of Gothic cathedrals,
Speaker 3: and you figured out how to keep the rules of
Speaker 3: coal mines up. And I mean, this is someone I've
Speaker 3: just started talking to on the phone. He gets outraged.
Speaker 3: It's like both, you know, like I'm calling you know,
Speaker 3: and that has nothing to nothing did what I did
Speaker 3: had nothing to do with my father's career. We have
Speaker 3: nothing in common. Completely different thing. If that's your theory,
Speaker 3: like go away kind of thing, and I said, just
Speaker 3: seems a natural observation, right, So so two things. When
Speaker 3: I went and spent a lot of time with him,
Speaker 3: we rolled around West Virginia. He took me into coal mines,
Speaker 3: and he doesn't mention till like the third day that, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, it was funny. Were you reconciled? How did
Speaker 3: you reconcile with your dad? And I asked him because
Speaker 3: they had become reconciled before his dad died, and he
Speaker 3: said it was gradually, he said, but there was this moment,
Speaker 3: he said, the National Cathedral. The federal government thought the
Speaker 3: National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down. This was
Speaker 3: in the year two thousand. One of the towers was
Speaker 3: subsiding faster than the other and they didn't know why.
Speaker 3: So they called his dad to test to see how
Speaker 3: the load was moving through the National Cathedral. And the
Speaker 3: dad figured out that his stuff didn't work because whatever
Speaker 3: was going on, it wasn't above ground, it was below ground.
Speaker 3: So he called the son, and his son had the
Speaker 3: stuff to go figure out what was going on the
Speaker 3: low ground, and together they wrote a paper about how
Speaker 3: the National Cathedral, what was going to happen, and we
Speaker 3: didn't have to worry about it falling down. But they
Speaker 3: studied it together and put everybody's minds to rest. Now,
Speaker 3: when you have that to navigate too in a story,
Speaker 3: you got a story. I mean, it's just like that.
Speaker 3: And and so Art Allen had the Yellow Wing newspaper, uh,
Speaker 3: Christopher Marks had the had the the dad I met.
Speaker 3: But I got to say, I've met lots of people
Speaker 3: in like the Storm Center and the National Weather Service
Speaker 3: who lost loved ones to tornadoes or that that this instrument,
Speaker 3: fel government is filled with all of all this purpose,
Speaker 3: all these things. That it's where the problems of the
Speaker 3: private sector doesn't want to deal with go. You know,
Speaker 3: it's like there's no money to be made in it.
Speaker 3: But we've decided to a society we want to address it.
Speaker 3: That's where that's where we that's what we use to
Speaker 3: address it. Who is attracted to these problems, People who
Speaker 3: have a particular interest in this problem for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: and that quality like caring about the problem. It's outside yourself.
Speaker 3: I'm going to fix the problem. Tends to come from
Speaker 3: a deep place, and that's where literature comes from. You know,
Speaker 3: it's the the motives of the characters are are are
Speaker 3: in our government. These are rich and interesting people with
Speaker 3: rich and interesting backstories. And you know, every time you
Speaker 3: kind of start scratching it one, you get it this.
Speaker 2: So let's address that a bit because I want to
Speaker 2: discuss your process a little bit, which I'm fascinated by.
Speaker 2: You once said to Malcolm Gladwell at the ninety second Street.
Speaker 2: Why the subjects choose me? I don't go looking for books.
Speaker 2: The stories wander into my life and they get to
Speaker 2: the point where they can't not be written. The stories
Speaker 2: kind of find me. A relationship develops between me and
Speaker 2: the story. I have no choice, that's true. So expound
Speaker 2: on that a bit.
Speaker 3: You want the three minute of the five minute.
Speaker 2: Version, whatever you're comfortable with.
Speaker 3: All right, I mean this goes back to who I am.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm basically I grew up in New Orleans,
Speaker 3: was raised to be a decorative object. I was raised
Speaker 3: what does that mean useful? Okay, Like nobody around me
Speaker 3: did anything useful and no one planned to and hence
Speaker 3: you end up on Wall Street. No, yeah, well that's funny.
Speaker 3: But but but there's a certain charm you acquire on
Speaker 3: the streets. Of New Orleans that are very useful when
Speaker 3: you're trying to sell a bond. But it's that. But yes,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of New Orleans make their way to
Speaker 3: Wall Street. They do quite well on Wall Street. You
Speaker 3: get the gift of gab kind of thing. But you
Speaker 3: learn to tell a story, which is very valuable in
Speaker 3: the financial markets and also very valuable to writers. But
Speaker 3: I I'm basically lazy. Like that is true, you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's it's core in me, like the working part
Speaker 3: of me has been added on somehow, But the deep
Speaker 3: meat I would just sit around scratch myself for the
Speaker 3: rest of my life.
Speaker 2: If you've written fourteen books, how is that lazy?
Speaker 3: So so so this is I'm not lying. This is this.
Speaker 3: I'm telling you the truth. You just can't to figure out.
Speaker 3: You got to make sense of it.
Speaker 2: Okay, My father, my fault.
Speaker 3: This is God's truth. My father when I from the
Speaker 3: age of about seven to the age of when I
Speaker 3: was eighteen, had me persuaded that there was Latin. We
Speaker 3: had a coat of arms, Lewis, and there was always
Speaker 3: a Latin under it. He persuaded me that what that
Speaker 3: Latin said you translated was do as little as possible,
Speaker 3: and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a
Speaker 3: slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task. My father
Speaker 3: raised me to be lazy, you know. I mean that that.
Speaker 3: He was like, don't try, don't sweat it, you're working
Speaker 3: too hard. It was it was, this is the environment
Speaker 3: I was raised in, and I took to it.
Speaker 2: But you didn't.
Speaker 3: But I did.
Speaker 2: Up to every book you've written, you embed yourself in
Speaker 2: an unfamiliar place.
Speaker 3: It's no, it's true. It's I'm curious. I got that too.
Speaker 3: I'm actually curious. I see something and I want to
Speaker 3: know about it, and and it happens a lot. It
Speaker 3: just happens a lot. And so it's with pleasure I
Speaker 3: find I pursue a curiosity. I ask curiosity, why are
Speaker 3: the Oakland A's winning baseball games with no money?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: How is that possible? That's the beginning. That's a curiosity.
Speaker 3: And so I go to the truck.
Speaker 2: Most people have that thought and go who knows? And
Speaker 2: you spend, You spend weeks and weeks.
Speaker 3: So it is not it is true that I do
Speaker 3: the work. It is true that I eventually do the work,
Speaker 3: but I do from a place of deep laziness. It's deep,
Speaker 3: it's like that it is. I get curious, I start
Speaker 3: to get involved. I realize, oh my god, this is
Speaker 3: look at this story and it is it is got
Speaker 3: to it really does have to rise to the level
Speaker 3: in my mind that this story is so important and
Speaker 3: it's delusional, like is any story that important? But it's
Speaker 3: the story is so important that I have an obligation
Speaker 3: to do it. So now I have to do it.
Speaker 3: Because I have an obligation, I make myself feel that way,
Speaker 3: and when I feel that way, then I'm off. Then
Speaker 3: I forget about the laziness and I do the work.
Speaker 2: So you have this incredible knack of finding yourself in
Speaker 2: the right place at the right time before everybody Else's
Speaker 2: probably lucky thing. Okay, so i'll give you that. This
Speaker 2: one's lucky. Liar's poker. You're there early in the Rise
Speaker 2: of Wall Streets. Okay, you're working moneyball. No one had
Speaker 2: any idea what was going on with Sabermetrics and how
Speaker 2: this scrappy, little broke team was able to put together
Speaker 2: a competitive run going infinite. You in bed with STX
Speaker 2: and Sam Bankman Freed.
Speaker 3: That was kind of cool. That was a year, right,
Speaker 3: but you know I didn't know that was happening.
Speaker 2: You didn't know that was happening. And then the whole
Speaker 2: undoing project with Danny Kahneman, who just coincidentally lived down
Speaker 2: the street from you. You have this ridiculous act to
Speaker 2: finding yourself at the head of a wave that's about
Speaker 2: to crash over society. I mean, once or twice is dumb.
Speaker 3: Luck.
Speaker 2: How do you do it six times in a row?
Speaker 2: That's not exactly luck.
Speaker 3: I think it is. I mean in that you know
Speaker 3: you and I. So he's just published a book too,
Speaker 3: How Not to Invest. It's really good and and you
Speaker 3: you say eighteen different ways in the course of this book,
Speaker 3: how skeptical you are of the ability to predict the future.
Speaker 3: Sure I am too. Everybody wants you to predict the future,
Speaker 3: and you just shouldn't do it because it's just you know,
Speaker 3: you can't who knows where this is?
Speaker 2: But you're always skating to where the puck's going to be.
Speaker 3: Explain that it's maybe I think the puck is just
Speaker 3: coming to where I happen to be. That so I
Speaker 3: don't think I really think Sam Begman fried Lands on
Speaker 3: my front porch after someone asked me to just interview
Speaker 3: him and evaluate him from I didn't go looking for him.
Speaker 3: He walked up and I said, this is interesting. I'm
Speaker 3: going to follow I'm just going to follow him around this.
Speaker 3: I had had this nagging sense that I left all
Speaker 3: this gold in the mind. I still feel that way.
Speaker 3: There's gold in that mind still. And I left the
Speaker 3: gold in the mine. Let's go back there and get
Speaker 3: it and bring some friends and they can have some
Speaker 3: of the gold too. And I mean, I had no
Speaker 3: idea that Trump was going to do what he's done
Speaker 3: to the government. None. I did have a sense like
Speaker 3: he didn't care about it, that he was going to
Speaker 3: just completely try to gut it. I had no sense.
Speaker 3: So in every case, I know how much accident there was.
Speaker 3: I will say, if I were trying to make the
Speaker 3: case that I have I know something that other people don't,
Speaker 3: or there's something about me that leads to being a
Speaker 3: little ahead of the curve, I'd only say that the best,
Speaker 3: the closest thing to the best way to predict the
Speaker 3: future is just pay attention to the present. That you
Speaker 3: pay closer attention to the president than other people are.
Speaker 3: You See, it's the future is there, and so it
Speaker 3: is uh, I do pay attention to the present. I
Speaker 3: observe and and and I also so this gets back
Speaker 3: to the laziness, that that when you're lazy, it's an actor.
Speaker 3: It's not necessarily a bad thing to be a little lazy.
Speaker 3: Amos Tversky. Amos Tversky, my character in The Undoing Project,
Speaker 3: had a great line which I which which I tell
Speaker 3: every kid who asks for advice, I just repeat it.
Speaker 3: He says, people waste years of their lives not being
Speaker 3: willing to waste hours of their lives. That people get
Speaker 3: so worked up about making being busy, moving their career up.
Speaker 3: They don't let anything. They don't let things in. They're
Speaker 3: like always achieving. And if you just back away and
Speaker 3: let the world come into you, it's that's a helpful
Speaker 3: approach to a writer. Also, if if you're a little lazy,
Speaker 3: like you would rather basically not be doing anything, it
Speaker 3: takes a level of interest to move you. I know
Speaker 3: a lot of writers who just go They can always
Speaker 3: find something to write about because they know they feel
Speaker 3: like they have to be writing, so they just force it.
Speaker 3: Before I sit down and bother to put a word
Speaker 3: on the page I've gotten, so I've had to get
Speaker 3: so excited about it to offset the natural tendency not
Speaker 3: to do anything, and so that it's it's like the
Speaker 3: material is leaping over higher hurdles to get to the
Speaker 3: place with me that I want to write about it.
Speaker 3: So maybe that's that has something to do with this.
Speaker 2: Can can I float a theory to sure I think
Speaker 2: it's going to be you can do it well well,
Speaker 2: Malcolm Gladwell's glad brand unified theory of Michael Lewis books's
Speaker 2: biblical allegories? Right, that's yeah, that is right, Daniel in
Speaker 2: the lines, Then is Liar's poker? The blind side is good, Samaritan,
Speaker 2: David and Goliath moneyball, Like, you're not doing biblical allegories, No.
Speaker 3: I mean you can. The truth is you can find
Speaker 3: almost any you can map almost any story onto the
Speaker 3: box right right.
Speaker 2: But but here's what's not is every Michael Lewis book
Speaker 2: features a character and the archetype Michael Lewis character quirky
Speaker 2: outsiders pushing against the grain because they've discovered some interesting
Speaker 2: insight or truth or previously unknown thing that is against
Speaker 2: the consensus, and then they apply that to their field.
Speaker 2: And either they make a lot of money shorting stocks
Speaker 2: or they save fat guys who've fallen off a cruise ships.
Speaker 2: That's those are the same characters.
Speaker 3: But every who's that character in Liar's Poker You think that's.
Speaker 2: Me, Well, you show flashes of you. It was your
Speaker 2: first book, so we'll cut you a little slack. But
Speaker 2: you know, in fact, let's let's talk about Liar's Poper. Yes,
Speaker 2: so we we did a podcast on the thirtieth anniversary.
Speaker 2: You had to go reread it, just reread the book,
Speaker 2: but read it out loud for the audio version.
Speaker 3: I hadn't re read it since I wrote it.
Speaker 2: So so first, what was that experience?
Speaker 3: Like awful? I mean, I don't know if you've ever
Speaker 3: gone back. And but I was twenty six when I
Speaker 3: wrote that, and I'd never written anything. I mean, I'd
Speaker 3: written letters to my mother and a few articles in
Speaker 3: the Economist, and I mean there was a it was
Speaker 3: just work. I was really raw, and I'm still.
Speaker 2: There are flashes of the future. Michael Lewis the writer throughout.
Speaker 2: Hey listen. First of all, for a first time book,
Speaker 2: it was great, but.
Speaker 3: You know it's fun.
Speaker 2: You were twenty six, so there was some things.
Speaker 3: Some things I noticed. One is there was just general infelicity.
Speaker 3: But I noticed that whenever I thought I was being funny,
Speaker 3: I wasn't funny. And whenever I didn't, I was like,
Speaker 3: oh that's funny. But I didn't know it was funny.
Speaker 3: You know, it was bad. It was embarrassing, you know,
Speaker 3: there was I was. I thought there were lines that
Speaker 3: were clearly like designed to get people to laugh, and
Speaker 3: then I shouldn't have been doing it, and there were
Speaker 3: structured So it was But but yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 3: feel finely towards it got my launched my career. I'm
Speaker 3: still stuck on your theory.
Speaker 2: So but let me just point out that you wrote
Speaker 2: that book while you were working full time at Solomon Brothers.
Speaker 2: You were doing this nights and weekends, right at least
Speaker 2: that's when you started sketching this. This wasn't Michael Lewis
Speaker 2: the full time writer, correct, Right, So so when you
Speaker 2: look back at that, you got to give yourself a
Speaker 2: little first time.
Speaker 3: I know it wasn't. It's fine. It's not bad for
Speaker 3: first book. I agree, it's not bad for first book.
Speaker 3: But the when I think about your description of what
Speaker 3: of my book, the quirky of the line. That's right.
Speaker 3: I think of it this way because they're not. Billy
Speaker 3: Bean's not quirky. Billy Bean's like the coolest guy in
Speaker 3: the room. When he walks into a room, he is, Yes,
Speaker 3: he's got We're all quirky, like underneath, we all have
Speaker 3: little things that things going on. Then we're all neurotic
Speaker 3: or a little We all have stuff. But you're right,
Speaker 3: aaracter have a lot of stuff, like sometimes they have
Speaker 3: a lot of stuff. But the the thing what I
Speaker 3: think of I think of it as more as I
Speaker 3: get excited by someone who could teach me, and all
Speaker 3: my characters are are teaching me something about the world.
Speaker 3: And now the kind of person who's teaching you something
Speaker 3: about the word often is someone who has been challenging
Speaker 3: the world. So that's true too. They're often in kind
Speaker 3: of conflict with the world. But what's attracting me to them?
Speaker 3: I never think, oh, quirky great. I never think that
Speaker 3: Brad Katsuyama is not quirky. He's a nice Canadian boy
Speaker 3: and the last boy Flash Boys that he is the
Speaker 3: least quirky person who ever carried a book. He is normal.
Speaker 3: It's like as normal as they get, and there's some
Speaker 3: stuff there with what there is is nice Canadian boy
Speaker 3: collides with Wall Street and is upset when he sees what's.
Speaker 2: Going on, but and figures that a way around.
Speaker 3: And figures out, Yes, figures out that.
Speaker 2: He's the least quirky of your characters. But let's stick
Speaker 2: with money ball. But how did you gain access to
Speaker 2: the A's How did they, you know, grant you keys
Speaker 2: to the kingdom?
Speaker 3: This often happens too, that you have a question and
Speaker 3: the question is equally interesting to the subject. So I
Speaker 3: called Billy Bean, went and go see him. I said,
Speaker 3: I just look, it doesn't make any sense. You're spending
Speaker 3: one fifth with the Yankees are spending. How can you
Speaker 3: be competing? If this market is efficient, the Yankee should
Speaker 3: be buying all the best baseball players and you would
Speaker 3: just lose all the time. And he said, no one
Speaker 3: has asked me that question. Is what I think about
Speaker 3: all the time. The sports. He's just covered by sports
Speaker 3: writers and the sports the baseball writers at the time
Speaker 3: paid no attention to the financial disparities. They weren't thinking
Speaker 3: of the money on the field, and that's all they
Speaker 3: thought about was the front office was the money on
Speaker 3: the field, so he was interested in the question in
Speaker 3: the first place. And also I didn't tell him I
Speaker 3: was writing a book. I told him I thought I
Speaker 3: didn't know what I was going to write. Maybe a
Speaker 3: little magazine piece, maybe nothing. And it got more and
Speaker 3: more interesting, and I disguised how interesting I was. And
Speaker 3: when I just divulged, you know, two months in and
Speaker 3: do it that I was thinking about writing a book,
Speaker 3: it was too late. He couldn't get rid of me.
Speaker 3: I knew too much. But but there was and I
Speaker 3: had found ways to insinuate myself into into their lives.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is like, how do you make yourself?
Speaker 3: How you how you get them to let you hang around?
Speaker 3: That's the important thing. You've got to hang around. You
Speaker 3: got to be kind of in the you know, just
Speaker 3: they they forget you're there, kind of hang around. So
Speaker 3: that was the trick there, you know in that book
Speaker 3: that ever told I told you when that book became
Speaker 3: a book, Like when I came home at late at
Speaker 3: night and I said, wrote my publisher and said, this
Speaker 3: is going to freak you out, but I'm going to
Speaker 3: write a sports book. I was. I was, I was
Speaker 3: in the locker room of the Oakland A's interviewing telling
Speaker 3: the players. I was interviewed the players one by one
Speaker 3: and telling them what why they were they were playing
Speaker 3: first base, or why they were the leadoff hitter they
Speaker 3: in front off no idea. The race front office regarded
Speaker 3: it as a science experiment and they were the lab rats,
Speaker 3: and it just confused their lab rats if you told
Speaker 3: them what the experiment was, and they told me, like,
Speaker 3: don't talk to them about it. They just not they
Speaker 3: won't handle it well. And but the players were really interested,
Speaker 3: so I was they. I was welcoming the clubhouse and
Speaker 3: and they were coming out of the showers. I was
Speaker 3: waiting for my guy to talk to them. And for
Speaker 3: the first time I saw the Oakland A's naked, and
Speaker 3: it was such a disgusting sight. It was it was
Speaker 3: it was like it was just I mean not not
Speaker 3: it was just professional athlete. It was like they had
Speaker 3: cankles and they had they were all fat. They look
Speaker 3: like a Beer League team. They looked like And I
Speaker 3: had the thought, which I related to the front office,
Speaker 3: it was like if you line those naked bodies up
Speaker 3: against a wall and asked anybody what they did for
Speaker 3: a living, nobody would guess professional athlete. That they would
Speaker 3: guess like you know, Wall Street guys. They could they
Speaker 3: could be Wall Street guys. They could be accountants, they
Speaker 3: could be flight attendants, they could be not professional athletes.
Speaker 3: And the front office said, it's funny you say that
Speaker 3: because we are aware of how unattractive they are without
Speaker 3: their clothes on. Uh that that that that they said
Speaker 3: that we and the andres that we get excited when
Speaker 3: they are unattractive without their clothes on and they don't
Speaker 3: look when they don't look right because the market we met,
Speaker 3: we are evaluating them blind. It's just we're providing. We're
Speaker 3: looking for performance statistics. And when we find the player
Speaker 3: whose statistics are are promising but they look wrong, we
Speaker 3: know why the market's misvaluing them. They're miss being the
Speaker 3: value because of the way they look. And I remember,
Speaker 3: I just it blew my mind. I remember going driving
Speaker 3: home and thinking, oh my god, this is when you
Speaker 3: have a duty to write it like never inlind Baseball,
Speaker 3: this thing of this as a corporation, and they got
Speaker 3: these employees. They've been doing the same thing for one
Speaker 3: hundred years. Millions of people will watching them. Stats attached
Speaker 3: to every move they make on the job. If those
Speaker 3: people can be misvalued because of the misvalue because of
Speaker 3: the way they look, who can't be everybody can be.
Speaker 3: So this is a universal story. It's that feeling like
Speaker 3: this is a universal story. And uh and so I
Speaker 3: got very excited, and I wrote my publisher note and said, sorry,
Speaker 3: here it comes. I'm going to be writing a book
Speaker 3: called Moneyball. And now the flip side of this is
Speaker 3: none of my subjects ever know what I'm doing. They
Speaker 3: really don't. They know I'm hanging around, but they days,
Speaker 3: I mean, like, okay, they saw me. I spent a
Speaker 3: week with the Blue Jays, I spent days with the Rangers.
Speaker 3: I spent days with the Marriage I spent time with
Speaker 3: the Red Sox. And I had to do that to
Speaker 3: know that they were special, like know that nobody else
Speaker 3: was doing this and and so but so from their
Speaker 3: point of view is like, what's he doing? Like Billy
Speaker 3: and so when Billy Bean got the book, and my
Speaker 3: subjects only get the book when everybody else gets the book,
Speaker 3: you know, I don't want them. I don't want them
Speaker 3: bothering me.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: And he got the book. He was furious. It was
Speaker 3: like he was angry because you two things. One was like,
Speaker 3: since when am I the main character could have told me?
Speaker 3: You know? Is that kind of thing? It's like, I'm not,
Speaker 3: I was not. I didn't sign up for this kind
Speaker 3: of thing. But the second thing, he says, I thought
Speaker 3: he was going to be pissed off because I had
Speaker 3: revealed their secrets. That's what I was worried about. I
Speaker 3: was worried that was the betrayal. He says, He's on
Speaker 3: the phone, he's like incoherent, And I said, what is
Speaker 3: bothering you? And he said, you have me saying all
Speaker 3: the time. And I said, you do say what am
Speaker 3: I supposed to do there? And he said, you don't understand.
Speaker 3: My mother is going to be so upset. And I said,
Speaker 3: your mom, you know, like really it's like a sigh
Speaker 3: of relief. That's what we're worried about here. Low level
Speaker 3: problem and turned out not to be a low level problem.
Speaker 3: She was furious. She is still furious, and she's angry
Speaker 3: at me. She's still angry at me. I swear to God,
Speaker 3: she's angry about it. And but but I said to Billy,
Speaker 3: I said, I started laughing, and I started said, like
Speaker 3: if I was so worried you were going to be
Speaker 3: angry with me for for stitching together this narrative that
Speaker 3: revealed all your secrets. I found out as much as
Speaker 3: I could, and I put as much of it into
Speaker 3: the book as I could. And it's going to blow
Speaker 3: your competitive advantage. I thought, that's what you were angry
Speaker 3: about it. And his pause on the other end of
Speaker 3: the line, and he says, you don't think anybody in
Speaker 3: baseball is going to read your book? He says, it's
Speaker 3: like they're always going to read your book. They don't
Speaker 3: know how to read, he said. But he said, like,
Speaker 3: we've been doing this for years, nobody's asked a question.
Speaker 3: And he was kind of right. He was right about
Speaker 3: that it was too narrow. He was right that nobody
Speaker 3: ever reads a book who thinks they know what they're
Speaker 3: doing and changes their mind. Like no GM at the
Speaker 3: time was going to say, oh I learned something from
Speaker 3: this book, or oh we've been doing it the wrong way.
Speaker 2: Well, didn't the GM have the Red Sox.
Speaker 3: No. While I was working on the book, John Henry
Speaker 3: had just bought the Red Sox and he was saying
Speaker 3: he actually said, what do I got to do to
Speaker 3: prevent you from writing this book, because he said, we're
Speaker 3: about to do this here and he wanted to hire Billy,
Speaker 3: and I became it was kind of fun. I remember
Speaker 3: doing this on payphones in the airport. I became they
Speaker 3: weren't allowed to negotiate, right, so they negotiate through me.
Speaker 3: So I helped organize Billy's contract with the Red Sox
Speaker 3: and Billy was going to go and then changed his
Speaker 3: mind last minute, and theo Epstein becomes the GM at
Speaker 3: the Red Sox. The THEO was trying to hire Billy too.
Speaker 3: He was part of the group inside and but the
Speaker 3: rest is history, and THEO leads the Red Sox to
Speaker 3: victory and Billy Bean is written out of that story.
Speaker 3: But the Red Sox were about to do it. New
Speaker 3: owner like new owner who had background in finance, so
Speaker 3: he gets this, he gets statistics and data and all that.
Speaker 3: What happened was other owners read the book, like the
Speaker 3: head of Goldman Sachs at the time, I know, talk
Speaker 3: to the owner of the Mets and said, you're being
Speaker 3: ripped off by your own management, like they don't know
Speaker 3: what they're doing. And at the ownership level they started
Speaker 3: to change things so that that's that was how the
Speaker 3: change happened. It would have happen anyway. What would have
Speaker 3: happened if I hadn't read written the book is the
Speaker 3: Red Sox would have done this. They would have won
Speaker 3: the world series using sabermetrics or statistics. They would have
Speaker 3: gotten total credit for revolutionizing the sport and no one
Speaker 3: and Billy Dean would have been a footnote.
Speaker 2: That's what would have happened of all your books that
Speaker 2: became a movie. That's probably my favorite film version is it?
Speaker 2: What was that process like watching? Do you just essentially
Speaker 2: sign the papers and that's it? Or did they retain
Speaker 2: you for script consulting or anything?
Speaker 3: Right, So what happens is what happens is for sure
Speaker 3: the movie people would rather the author be dead, There's
Speaker 3: no question. Like all you can do from their point
Speaker 3: of view is cause trouble, like complain or give advice.
Speaker 3: And I was aware of this quite early, like I
Speaker 3: know they don't care what I think. It was really
Speaker 3: clear they didn't care, but they were trying to pretend
Speaker 3: like they'd sort of cared. And this was blindside. Actually
Speaker 3: it was the first one. And and I thought, but
Speaker 3: they wouldn't leave me alone, like I couldn't just say here, really,
Speaker 3: just give me the money. I'll give you the book
Speaker 3: and whatever you do, no, whatever you do, see you
Speaker 3: see at the opening and if it just just make it,
Speaker 3: don't suck and uh and and it's on you if
Speaker 3: it does, because it's yours, it's gonna be. It's not
Speaker 3: my movie, it's your movie. And they refuse to accept
Speaker 3: that blunt relationship, I think because they don't believe that
Speaker 3: I actually think that. And so what happens is they
Speaker 3: pretend to be interested.
Speaker 2: They don't know you're lazy.
Speaker 3: They don't know I'm lazy. I really like they pretend
Speaker 3: to be interested in what I think. I have to
Speaker 3: pretend to be believe they're interested in what I think.
Speaker 3: We have this false interaction where I give them advice
Speaker 3: and they ignore it all and and but out of
Speaker 3: this some really lovely friendships have sprung, like it's a
Speaker 3: social relationship. So I'm friends with all the directors who've
Speaker 3: made the movies, really friends, And some of the actors
Speaker 3: are still in my life, and like Jonah Hill will
Speaker 3: just call me up out of the blue and say,
Speaker 3: I got problem. I'm we just talk this through, and
Speaker 3: that kind of thing, and and that that is great,
Speaker 3: that's been great. Can't take a story about the Moneyball movie? Sure,
Speaker 3: it's it's the Moneyball movie. Was this sort of so you.
Speaker 2: Guys want to hear a story about Moneyball?
Speaker 3: Right? So the Moneyball movie? So Billy being an addition
Speaker 3: to being pissed off at me, because I had him
Speaker 3: saying all the time he was he was put I
Speaker 3: really admire the guy. He was put in a really
Speaker 3: difficult position. The book puts him in opposition to his industry.
Speaker 3: He knows something everybody else does, and all the other
Speaker 3: gms hate him. All of a sudden when he's he
Speaker 3: didn't deserve this, but he instead of instead of throwing
Speaker 3: me under the bus, he just fought. He said, there's
Speaker 3: not nothing in the book that's not true. So you
Speaker 3: want to you want to fight about it, come fight.
Speaker 3: And he's brave. He's basically a very brave person. However,
Speaker 3: it was so unpleasant, the book among the most maybe
Speaker 3: the most unpleasant publication, and that all of baseball was angry,
Speaker 3: really angry. And he said he called me one day
Speaker 3: says like Sony Pictures is trying to buy my life
Speaker 3: rights to make a movie. And he says I just
Speaker 3: want to tell you I'm not doing this. Like I
Speaker 3: didn't want the book, I don't want a movie. I
Speaker 3: don't need this. And I said, Billy, you don't understand.
Speaker 3: They never make the movie. They just give you money
Speaker 3: for your rights that I've sold, I don't know, a
Speaker 3: dozen magazine articles, five books. Money just comes out of
Speaker 3: Hollywood and they never make anything, because they hadn't made
Speaker 3: anything at that point. And when I gave him the
Speaker 3: list of like the amounts I'd raked in from Hollywood
Speaker 3: for doing absolutely nothing, he sort of said, like, this
Speaker 3: is free, and I said, yeah, it's free, And so
Speaker 3: he took a bunch of money for his life rights.
Speaker 3: It was an option that renewed every eighteen months, and
Speaker 3: every eighteen months he called me. He goes, you're a genius,
Speaker 3: Like this is unbelievable. You're right, they're not going to
Speaker 3: make this movie. It goes on for years, you know,
Speaker 3: like seven years. But and then one day he calls
Speaker 3: me up. He says, you, he said, Brad Pitt just
Speaker 3: called me, and he says he's coming over the house.
Speaker 3: He says, my wife is putting on makeup, and the
Speaker 3: babysitters going home to get a dress and it was like,
Speaker 3: he said, you said this wouldn't happen. I remember it.
Speaker 3: He was like, you said this wouldn't happen. And I said,
Speaker 3: I don't know what to tell you, like I'm a
Speaker 3: little shocked this is happening. So flash forward, I don't know,
Speaker 3: a year, six months. They're shooting in the Oakland Colisseum
Speaker 3: and I've gone to the set a couple of times.
Speaker 3: This is the cool thing I brought my kids because
Speaker 3: they had eight thousand extras in the Oakland Coliseum and
Speaker 3: they've gotten body doubles for the two thousand and two
Speaker 3: Kansas City Royals and Oakland A's so like Barry Zito
Speaker 3: looked more than like Barizedo than Barry Zito. And they're
Speaker 3: replaying this game and they're moving the eight thousand people
Speaker 3: around the colosseum make it look like it's full. It's
Speaker 3: a great drama. Before I go over to see this,
Speaker 3: they call me and say Sony calls me and says,
Speaker 3: Billy Bean is refusing to have anything to do with anybody,
Speaker 3: Like he's not visited the set. He let Brad Pitt
Speaker 3: come to his house once and that was it, and
Speaker 3: that he's like everybody's worried. He's just angry about this.
Speaker 3: Could you get him down? His office is at the stadium.
Speaker 3: Could he just walk down and shake a couple of
Speaker 3: hands and make everybody feel good? And so I called him.
Speaker 3: I said, Billy, like, it's not that big a deal.
Speaker 3: Just come on over. And he said, are you going
Speaker 3: to be there? And I said yeah. He says, okay, then
Speaker 3: I'll come. I'll come, and I just send ten minutes.
Speaker 3: I don't want them to think I'm into it, though,
Speaker 3: so I was like, Okay, they know you're not into it,
Speaker 3: Come on over, shake some hands. So we get there.
Speaker 3: I'm there on the field and he comes walking out
Speaker 3: and this production young male production assistant comes running out
Speaker 3: of left field and he's got the head gear and
Speaker 3: he's got a hes got a notepad, and he comes
Speaker 3: running up to Billy and says, mister Bean, mister Bean,
Speaker 3: you've been my hero ever since I read your book.
Speaker 3: I just want I want to tell you how you
Speaker 3: change my life. And Billy's like, it's not my book.
Speaker 3: He wrote the book. He points to me. He goes, no,
Speaker 3: this is your book. The guy is so it's like weird.
Speaker 3: He says, will you just please sign my book, and
Speaker 3: Billy says, right, I'll sign your book, and so he
Speaker 3: opens the notepad. And there were two Billy Beans in
Speaker 3: the major leagues at the same time, and they both
Speaker 3: played at the same outfield on the Tigers, and I
Speaker 3: think the twins. I mean, it's weird. They were both
Speaker 3: there on the field same time. And the other Billy
Speaker 3: Bean was gay, and he came out of the closet
Speaker 3: and wrote a memoir and it called like hitting from
Speaker 3: the other side of the plate. And so this guy
Speaker 3: has has the Gay Billy Beans memoir and Billy, the
Speaker 3: straight Billy Bean is He's like, there's nothing good is
Speaker 3: happening right now. It's like, he's like, what do I say?
Speaker 3: What do I do? You don't say I'm not gay.
Speaker 3: You don't say you don't There's nothing you can do
Speaker 3: in this situation. And I look over and in the
Speaker 3: A's dugout, Brad Pitt's rolling around. He set the whole
Speaker 3: thing up, and he had Sony Pictures call me to
Speaker 3: talk Billy to come into the field so he could
Speaker 3: play this. He had thought of this joke, and so
Speaker 3: he could play this joke on Billy on Billy b
Speaker 3: and it worked, It really worked.
Speaker 2: So that is a great story. Before we open this
Speaker 2: up for questions, I want to ask one or two
Speaker 2: more questions, including another story you told about a name
Speaker 2: confusion when you had spent some time in Israel with
Speaker 2: Danny Khanneman. Oh, that's funny, and you you similar story.
Speaker 3: You go to Danny Connoman, the great Israeli psychologist who's
Speaker 3: one of the main characters of the Undoing Project.
Speaker 2: I was one of the two main characters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one of the two main characters. And he and
Speaker 3: Amos both had done a lot of work with the
Speaker 3: Israeli military, hid moneyballd Israeli Israeli troops to determine who
Speaker 3: should be a an officer and devise whole these these
Speaker 3: metrics so you can measure it rather than just do
Speaker 3: it by an interview. So he was there very early.
Speaker 3: The reason I ever even wrote that book is I
Speaker 3: came back to that book after Moneyball because when Moneyball
Speaker 3: comes out, Richard Thaylor, economist Cass Sunstein's writing partner reviewed
Speaker 3: it and said, Michael Lewis has written a really interesting story,
Speaker 3: but he doesn't know what it's about. And they said
Speaker 3: it's a case study in the work of Economen and Teversky.
Speaker 3: That's how I even heard that these guys existed. Anyway,
Speaker 3: I go to Israel. We're going to the military base
Speaker 3: where Danny did that moneyballing work for the for the
Speaker 3: Israeli army. And we get we get there and they
Speaker 3: are four hundred of the best looking young women I've
Speaker 3: ever seen and just waiting for us, like waiting in
Speaker 3: a mob behind the gates. When we come through, and
Speaker 3: they look at us and they just kind of like
Speaker 3: melt away. And at first I thought, Wow, Danny's got
Speaker 3: it going on, you know. I mean, it's like, we
Speaker 3: are there here for Danny. And it turns out this
Speaker 3: an Israeli underwear modic model named Michael Lewis, and he's
Speaker 3: got like he's got like unbelievable abs. And so they
Speaker 3: they'd seen Danny knnom Is coming with Michael lie and
Speaker 3: they thought it was the underwear model.
Speaker 2: Yeah, unbelievable. So so there's a question I want to
Speaker 2: I've been wanting to ask you for a while and
Speaker 2: I just never get to it. So I'm going to
Speaker 2: force it early. You have, I know, you have all
Speaker 2: these stories that are half told and all these things
Speaker 2: that are future projects. I'm always curious if there was
Speaker 2: a loose thread in a story that you said, I
Speaker 2: really want to pull that and see what happens in
Speaker 2: some of the books you've published, But you haven't gotten
Speaker 2: to what what.
Speaker 3: What do you mean?
Speaker 2: What characters? What lines of thought that you kind of
Speaker 2: briefly go over and sort of say in the back
Speaker 2: of your head, Gee, I should really circle back to that.
Speaker 2: That looks really interesting. But just haven't gotten around to
Speaker 2: from any of your books, because I know you have
Speaker 2: dozens and dozens of things that you've started new. You
Speaker 2: have all your research and folders and stuff.
Speaker 3: Right, is there any you mean, what do I have
Speaker 3: on the back burner that might go on to the
Speaker 3: front burner?
Speaker 2: Well, that's another questions. It's what kind of loose thread
Speaker 2: has been out and about from some of the books
Speaker 2: you've written that.
Speaker 3: You just you're thinking something?
Speaker 2: No, nothing in particular. This was literally a Twitter question.
Speaker 2: I said, give me some questions for this was the
Speaker 2: only one that I thought was half I thought you
Speaker 2: were asking me.
Speaker 3: I was wrong, No, no, no, But it's funny because I
Speaker 3: don't know I have books that there are books that
Speaker 3: I started and stopped because they didn't work. There's book,
Speaker 3: a book that got away that would have been a
Speaker 3: shot at a masterpiece. But the subject tossed me out
Speaker 3: because I made the mistake of writing something in a
Speaker 3: magazine about him before I wrote the book.
Speaker 2: And what was that?
Speaker 3: George sorows It was nineteen ninety and Soros was interested
Speaker 3: in me for a bunch of reasons. He I had
Speaker 3: Sorrows had somebody he really admired as a money manager,
Speaker 3: like he was Soros's Soros. His name was Neil's Taub.
Speaker 3: He ran Jacob Rothchild's money in London, and he was
Speaker 3: he was He's the smartest person I've ever met in
Speaker 3: the financial markets about the financial markets. He had just
Speaker 3: that he had. You know, Soros has those jungle instincts.
Speaker 3: He had them times too. And older guy. He took
Speaker 3: me under his wing. When I was at Solomon Brothers.
Speaker 3: I co called him and I said, basically, I know
Speaker 3: you're I know that there's no reason you want to
Speaker 3: talk to me. I've just arrived, I'm twenty four. I said,
Speaker 3: I'm a new guy here. Kind of take you out
Speaker 3: to breakfast. And something about the interaction caused him to say, sure,
Speaker 3: you can take me out to breakfast, and we went
Speaker 3: out to breakfast, and he said, you're not going to
Speaker 3: try to if as long as you don't try to
Speaker 3: tell me anything, sell me anything, pretend do you know something,
Speaker 3: I'll do my business through you. And for the next
Speaker 3: two years. Over the next years, he became the second
Speaker 3: biggest customer at Salomon Brothers. And I didn't never have
Speaker 3: to do anything. I just picked up the phone and
Speaker 3: I would describe to him, like what I'm seeing on
Speaker 3: the trading floor, I describe what I was seeing in
Speaker 3: the markets. Said you should do this because it would
Speaker 3: been folly. And he appreciated that, and he told Soros
Speaker 3: about me when I left to write Liar's Poker, and
Speaker 3: so Soros was very receptive to me, and he took
Speaker 3: me on a private trip. You know, when the Berlin
Speaker 3: Wall fell, he built all these institutes for democracy around
Speaker 3: eastern Europe. He took me on a private trip through
Speaker 3: these places. And there was a book to do about
Speaker 3: both his fear about the threats to democracy, which seemed
Speaker 3: very prescient right now and like this isn't forever, these
Speaker 3: places don't don't They have to learn democracy and we
Speaker 3: have to help them. And what he was doing in
Speaker 3: the financial markets, and he was going to let me
Speaker 3: write about both, and like an idiot, I wrote because
Speaker 3: I was at the New Republic. I wrote for the
Speaker 3: New Republic a piece about the trip. And it was
Speaker 3: not rude about him. It was what I thought of him.
Speaker 3: But I did make fun of his writing, like all
Speaker 3: the theories he has, all these theories about why how
Speaker 3: markets work, reflexivity. Yeah, all that this intellectualizing me, which
Speaker 3: is it's he is a jungle animal, and it's like
Speaker 3: the layers on top of it, a complicated explanation. And
Speaker 3: he was so vain about his philosophy that he was
Speaker 3: really irritated when someone didn't take it seriously. And that
Speaker 3: was it didn't want to see me again. And that
Speaker 3: was that was the one huge one. I'll want to
Speaker 3: make that a mistake again. It was gold the material,
Speaker 3: and no one else was going to get it, and
Speaker 3: no one did. No one wrote the book. The book
Speaker 3: never got written, and that book could be could have
Speaker 3: been a very valuable book. But I have that. I
Speaker 3: have those kind of things I don't have, and I
Speaker 3: have I think I'm not going to talk about what
Speaker 3: they are, but I think I know what the next
Speaker 3: two books are. I think I know what I'm about
Speaker 3: to go do, but I don't have anything. I don't
Speaker 3: have anything where I think, oh, oh, I wished i'd written.
Speaker 3: If I wanted to do it, i'd go do it.
Speaker 3: You know I have. I sold Moneyball as two books.
Speaker 3: I thought the second book was going to be about
Speaker 3: the kids they drafted that year using algorithms. And I
Speaker 3: spent two years in the minor leagues chasing around after
Speaker 3: these guys. Two years I was in uniform as a
Speaker 3: Midland Rockhound in Midland, Texas and kept shagging fly balls
Speaker 3: before the game, like I put a no go. It's
Speaker 3: just all notes in under my office. Yeah, no go.
Speaker 2: So you know I always come with like four hours
Speaker 2: worth of questions.
Speaker 3: But how may did we not get to?
Speaker 2: Oh? Three quarters? But it doesn't matter. I want to
Speaker 2: bring the house lights up.
Speaker 3: You never expect me to talk so much.
Speaker 2: No, my job is to give you a nudge and
Speaker 2: get out of the way. Okay, So I think I
Speaker 2: I mostly accomplished what I wanted to. Why don't we
Speaker 2: bring up the house lights? They are up, and let's
Speaker 2: see if there are any questions from the audience. I'm
Speaker 2: not gonna just say say your name and it's hard
Speaker 2: to see you and where you're from. Liis Michael's from California.
Speaker 2: We'll give him a long island geography.
Speaker 4: Go ahead, Uh, mister Lewis, My name is Andrew MINNACOUCHI
Speaker 4: huge fan of yours, all your books and your podcast
Speaker 4: Against Rules as well. I'm from just up the street,
Speaker 4: so very very convenient commute. I have a question for
Speaker 4: you related to Losers The Road to any Place but
Speaker 4: the White House, one of your I believe criminally underrated books.
Speaker 4: Can you expand upon your relationship with John McCain as
Speaker 4: well as what you think he means to American politics?
Speaker 3: What a question, great question. I never get asked about
Speaker 3: John McCain. But if you ask me what the most
Speaker 3: influential thing I ever wrote was, I might say the
Speaker 3: first thing I wrote about John McCain. I met John
Speaker 3: McCain so I was assigned to cover the ninety six
Speaker 3: presidential campaign for the New Republic. I was learning my craft.
Speaker 3: I'd written Liar's Poker, but I had not. I mean,
Speaker 3: I never written for a school newspaper. No English teacher
Speaker 3: ever thought I was worth more than a c. You know,
Speaker 3: I was just like there was no I had no
Speaker 3: oh background for this, and the New Republic at the
Speaker 3: time was filled with the most talented collection of writers
Speaker 3: I've ever seen in one place and editors, and the
Speaker 3: editor at the time was Andrew Sullivan. And andrews shipped
Speaker 3: me off to just go do what I would do
Speaker 3: on the road, and I got in a car and
Speaker 3: I never got out of it. I was all over
Speaker 3: the country for the next nine months, and it quickly
Speaker 3: became clear that the ninety six presidential campaign was the
Speaker 3: most boring presidential campaign in human history, and around Bob
Speaker 3: Dole and Bill Clinton were armies of communications people who
Speaker 3: were going to make sure you never saw anything interesting.
Speaker 3: And so I just started writing about what was interesting
Speaker 3: rather than what I was supposed to write about. And
Speaker 3: I started to pick up characters who resonated with me
Speaker 3: and with in small groups of voters. So I made
Speaker 3: the I flipped it. I made minor characters the main
Speaker 3: characters and put Dole and Clinton in the background, and
Speaker 3: it really worked as a series in the New Republic,
Speaker 3: and then it pop brought it out as a book.
Speaker 3: But in the course of this I was in an
Speaker 3: air a terminal in Spartanburg, South Carolina, at eleven o'clock
Speaker 3: at night, told the Dole campaign was going to land
Speaker 3: to pick me up. And no question was why would
Speaker 3: they do that? And why they would do that was
Speaker 3: McCain was in the same terminal and I recognized him vaguely.
Speaker 3: It was just the two of us, and they came over,
Speaker 3: just said hi, and we started talking. And he was
Speaker 3: at that time disgraced. He was part of one of
Speaker 3: the Keating Five. He'd been involved in the savings and
Speaker 3: loan scandal. He'd barely won his re election, and he
Speaker 3: was just different than any politician I met. He was
Speaker 3: like real and I just started getting interested in him.
Speaker 3: And then I learned his story about how he had
Speaker 3: been he'd been held in prison and his limbs had
Speaker 3: been broken during the Vietnam War, and that they were
Speaker 3: torturing him. This was the amazing thing. The Vietnamese were
Speaker 3: torturing John McCain to get him to accept early release.
Speaker 3: They were trying to let him go because his father
Speaker 3: was an admiral, and they thought they undermine the morale
Speaker 3: of the American troops if they started letting the fancy
Speaker 3: people's kids out of prisoner of war camp and he
Speaker 3: and so he got beat up over and over because
Speaker 3: he refused to go home before the people who have
Speaker 3: been who had been captured before him. Now, it so
Speaker 3: the piece that create I found it by just I
Speaker 3: was just hanging with him because I was interested in him.
Speaker 3: I didn't know where it was going to lead. He
Speaker 3: didn't really belong in a book about the ninety six
Speaker 3: presidential campaign, except he was Dole's most popular surrogate. But
Speaker 3: that was that the one side he lets slip that
Speaker 3: he has this relationship, and it was it came, It
Speaker 3: came out very naturally. This guy I was coming over
Speaker 3: his office. This other guy was coming over his office
Speaker 3: named David if Sheen. And David if Sheen was a
Speaker 3: Vietnam War protester who went with Jane Fonda to Hanoi
Speaker 3: and piped anti war propaganda into John McCain's cell And
Speaker 3: if Shin had later in life things had changed since
Speaker 3: that time, and McCain had been celebrated for his war heroism,
Speaker 3: and if she had become kind of blacklisted by American
Speaker 3: politics because of his involvement, even though McCain kind of
Speaker 3: admired his conviction. And McCain saw if she ends up
Speaker 3: going to work for Clinton. And then someone came out
Speaker 3: with a story about how if she had done this
Speaker 3: with Jane Fonda, and Clinton was about to kind of
Speaker 3: release him, and McCain got involved and told Clinton, like,
Speaker 3: you keep him on, and I'm going to get up
Speaker 3: and give a speech about this guy on the on
Speaker 3: the scent floor, about he's my friend. They'd developed a relationship,
Speaker 3: and so I wrote the story about this relationship between
Speaker 3: the war protester and the war hero, and it was
Speaker 3: three thousand words in The New Republic, which ends up
Speaker 3: in this book Losers, and McCain at that moment was
Speaker 3: sort of like untouchable by the journalist. Nobody it was
Speaker 3: paying much attention, and he was a little disgraced. Overnight,
Speaker 3: everybody wanted to write the same story, and he got
Speaker 3: his relationship to the rest of the world, to the
Speaker 3: media in Washington just changed. He would he we became friends,
Speaker 3: and he let me in on this process. He was like,
Speaker 3: that piece changed my life and it made it possible
Speaker 3: for him to go become the candidate he became. It
Speaker 3: was it was amazing watching what a little piece of
Speaker 3: journalism can do. And it was very a very moving story.
Speaker 3: The wrinkle to it was when I wrote the story,
Speaker 3: if she was dying, he was dying of cancer. He
Speaker 3: was on his deathbed, so if she was telling me
Speaker 3: about how what John McCain had done from him, from
Speaker 3: it for him from his deathbed, and it was just powerful.
Speaker 3: And so I don't know what to say about this
Speaker 3: except that I found in spending time with him that
Speaker 3: even in politics, you could find these pockets of authenticity
Speaker 3: and if you and if you respected them, that they
Speaker 3: they they generated a different kind of response than most
Speaker 3: political writing. And I also found that, like if you
Speaker 3: found it was good good in someone in the political process,
Speaker 3: the readership wanted to hear it, like they were so
Speaker 3: used to the kind of distance, the critical distance, which
Speaker 3: ends up being kind of anti septic. You don't ever
Speaker 3: really know the person. And McCain he wasn't really running
Speaker 3: for anything at the time. Yeah, I certainly wasn't a
Speaker 3: presidential candidate. I could get let the reader get close
Speaker 3: to him, and the reader really enjoyed that. And when
Speaker 3: he ran for president, you know, he almost knocked off
Speaker 3: Bush the first time. And I mean they started out
Speaker 3: really well, but that campaign he called me before and
Speaker 3: he said I want you to come with me, just
Speaker 3: be with me where you don't have to write about
Speaker 3: it if you don't want to write about it, but
Speaker 3: I want you to. I want you to watch. I
Speaker 3: want to see you watch this process up close, like
Speaker 3: in the middle of a campaign. And I said, how
Speaker 3: close can I get? And he said, you have the
Speaker 3: other bedroom in my place in Washington. We'll just we'll
Speaker 3: actually live together and you just go wherever you And
Speaker 3: we just had our first child, and I could not
Speaker 3: go to my wife and say, guess what, I'm going
Speaker 3: off with John McCain for the next year, and he,
Speaker 3: being an old school being a man of his generation,
Speaker 3: did not understand it. It was like, what, it's a kid,
Speaker 3: you know, he's a military guy too, Like they would
Speaker 3: breed and then go off on a ship for the
Speaker 3: next five years. And so he was just bewildered by
Speaker 3: the fact that I was not going to ride shotgun
Speaker 3: on his first presidential campaign because I had had this child.
Speaker 3: And that ended up being kind of the end. I mean,
Speaker 3: at that point I became a little more distant friend.
Speaker 3: But it would have been fun to watch it.
Speaker 2: For sure. Let's get another question.
Speaker 5: I saw you today on Nicole Wallace's program.
Speaker 3: On the way Could you believe I got here?
Speaker 5: I couldn't believe. I was wondering if it would be canceled.
Speaker 5: But you said one thing that had me fascinated. You
Speaker 5: said that most people don't know what government does. And
Speaker 5: you said, nobody knows what the Department of Commerce does.
Speaker 3: What does it do? Well, there's a book called the
Speaker 3: Fifth Risk, and there's a chapter in that book by
Speaker 3: me that explains it. But but you know, when you
Speaker 3: ask people who don't know, they kind of say commerce, business, business,
Speaker 3: of course. So eighty percent of the budget is the
Speaker 3: National Ocean Graphic and Noah, and seventy five percent of
Speaker 3: that budget is the Weather Service. So what they do
Speaker 3: weather prediction is at the center of the Department of Commerce,
Speaker 3: which is a little odd, but I mean the names.
Speaker 3: One of our problems in explaining our federal government is
Speaker 3: the names of the places don't actually describe the places. Energy, Commerce,
Speaker 3: Agriculture should be Department of Rural. It's rural, it keeps
Speaker 3: rural America afloat. Commerce should be the Department of Weather.
Speaker 3: That would be good. I didn't really oppose this idea
Speaker 3: of turning the Department of Defense into the Department of War.
Speaker 3: That's a little more on the nose, But that.
Speaker 2: Wasn't it the Department of War way back when.
Speaker 3: Energy is the Department of Science and Technology. That's what
Speaker 3: it is. It's it's it's amazing what is in the
Speaker 3: energy but all the national labs.
Speaker 2: In the fifth Risk, you tell the story that they
Speaker 2: want to privatize the Commerce Department all the energy reporting.
Speaker 2: And then once you do that, where are you getting
Speaker 2: the data for all these people saying, well, I get
Speaker 2: the weather on my app.
Speaker 3: They get it from ACCU Weather, but ACU Weather gets
Speaker 3: it from the National Weather Service, right, that's right, So
Speaker 3: it was they the ACU. What they Trump tried to
Speaker 3: do the first time around is give the Department of
Speaker 3: Commerce to the ACU Weather CEO and let him have
Speaker 3: his way with it. And what would have happened was
Speaker 3: he would have he would have created preferential access, probably
Speaker 3: to his own so.
Speaker 2: His own app would have gotten more. And you also
Speaker 2: describe in the book how much more accurate weather forecasting
Speaker 2: is getting tornado warning.
Speaker 3: So it's like, this is the thing about government. It's
Speaker 3: it's like when it does something right, people just it's
Speaker 3: like it's the way you treat your parents. When they're
Speaker 3: good parents, you don't even notice they get no credit.
Speaker 3: It's when they screw up you notice. And that's the
Speaker 3: relationship we have with our government. We're like a fourteen
Speaker 3: year old boy and our government is our mother. That's
Speaker 3: sort of the the how mature our relationship is. But
Speaker 3: the National Weather what they have done, if you go
Speaker 3: back and talk to a weatherman has been doing it
Speaker 3: for fifty years, he kind of say, like, you know,
Speaker 3: what I used to do is like wake up in
Speaker 3: the morning, go outside and say, sonny could be sunny
Speaker 3: for a while. You know that they could do almost nothing,
Speaker 3: you know, out a day or two kind of thing.
Speaker 3: These accurate forecasts out seven days, the you know, being
Speaker 3: able to figure out where which way a hurricane's going,
Speaker 3: getting better, a tornado prediction. All this stuff is huge
Speaker 3: achievement with huge effects, Like it really makes all our
Speaker 3: lives and has a big effect on commerce too, right
Speaker 3: on business your plane. Did you remember when you were
Speaker 3: flying as a kid and the plane was just always
Speaker 3: bumping around, Like it's not doing that nearly as much
Speaker 3: because the airlines have better data about from the National
Speaker 3: Weather Service about what's going on up in the with
Speaker 3: the with the currents. So that happens, and nobody says, wow,
Speaker 3: cool they did that.
Speaker 2: It's all taken.
Speaker 3: It's all it's all taken for granted, now what what
Speaker 3: the dystopia is. But it gets privatized and and and
Speaker 3: Barry gets the the premium gold or platinum or whatever
Speaker 3: it is Tornado forecast, and I get the I get
Speaker 3: the silver forecast. So my I'm in my house when
Speaker 3: it comes through, and you aren't. You know that that
Speaker 3: it's it becomes I mean a real matter of equity.
Speaker 3: If we're seeing, if we're getting different, I mean, it
Speaker 3: seems like that should be a public good.
Speaker 2: It makes plenty of sense. Let's balcony, let's get a
Speaker 2: question up top. Are fire away? Hi?
Speaker 3: Uh So?
Speaker 6: First of all, you talked about the ninety six campaign,
Speaker 6: and just so you know, I listened to some of
Speaker 6: your podcasts from that as well. You are in this
Speaker 6: American Life as well.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you remember that back in nighty oh,
Speaker 3: So that's funny. Ira Glass was just starting This American
Speaker 3: Life when I was doing that, and he called and said,
Speaker 3: could you just I mean, this was back when they
Speaker 3: were a pretty low budget I would just go as
Speaker 3: an episode, go read the New Republic stuff. So I'm like,
Speaker 3: four or five of these things are early episodes of
Speaker 3: this American life. And he became a good close friend
Speaker 3: through that. But yes, so I've never listened to them,
Speaker 3: but yeah, you.
Speaker 6: Did a phenomenal job. You should listen to them again
Speaker 6: and maybe compile them. They were great you talked about
Speaker 6: besides from McCain in that story, you relate, you did
Speaker 6: something about some you did a lot about Dole, and
Speaker 6: you also did something about I don't know, some other
Speaker 6: guy in business who it was.
Speaker 3: It was a photo Trump it was. His name was
Speaker 3: Maury Taylor, and he was the businessman who was running
Speaker 3: to make government.
Speaker 2: Put up his own money.
Speaker 3: He spent seven million dollars, getting seven thousand votes in
Speaker 3: New Hampshire and Iowa, and he was in many ways
Speaker 3: the most reasonable candidate. He was like when you gave
Speaker 3: everybody what he stood for, everybody kind of agreed, and
Speaker 3: then they saw him and freaked because he did none
Speaker 3: of the artifice of the of the politician. But he
Speaker 3: was great fun. I remember him this well. So this
Speaker 3: is another moment the New Republic. For a moment thought
Speaker 3: what the hell is he doing. He's turning Morey Taylor
Speaker 3: into the main character of our ninety six presidential campaign coverage.
Speaker 3: And I did. He was the main character of that story.
Speaker 3: But it was I went out with him just to
Speaker 3: see what the hell was going on. He was in
Speaker 3: Iowa and he had three r three huge RVs with
Speaker 3: speakers on the front, and he'd Blair Bruce Springsteen as
Speaker 3: he went into town, and he had kegs of beer
Speaker 3: on the back, and he'd get he'd throw a party
Speaker 3: in every town. But the day, the morning I was
Speaker 3: with him, he rolls into this the biggest public school
Speaker 3: in Iowa. I can't remember where it was, AIM's or somewhere,
Speaker 3: and it's and they've rolled out, They've made all the
Speaker 3: students go to the local the auditorium. It's huge to
Speaker 3: hear the presidential candidate. And Morey's been a presidential candidate
Speaker 3: for about at that point, like four weeks. And before that,
Speaker 3: he was the He was the Sea at the same time,
Speaker 3: CEO of Titan Tire and Wheel, a Midwestern tire company,
Speaker 3: and had no experience or knowledge of politics. He didn't
Speaker 3: know anything, but he except he knew about life. He
Speaker 3: was he was like you. He was like a great dad,
Speaker 3: but he didn't know anything. And so he gets up.
Speaker 3: I don't know what they're expecting, but it's sort of
Speaker 3: like the Civics lesson for the day, and they're they're
Speaker 3: a thousand kids out there, and they're all asleep because
Speaker 3: it's eight in the morning. He comes bursting through the
Speaker 3: doors and and he looks up and he said, and
Speaker 3: the first thing he goes is like kid in the
Speaker 3: pink hair. In my day, we used to get rid
Speaker 3: of the weirdos, and and and and and the kid goes,
Speaker 3: you know, and they're all alert, and he goes and
Speaker 3: then he says, I want someone here tell me what
Speaker 3: the most important thing in life is. And you could
Speaker 3: see all the teachers getting a little uncomfortable, but you're hope.
Speaker 3: They're hoping he's going to say, you know, love, family, country, something.
Speaker 3: And they're guessing these things, and they're they're guessing what
Speaker 3: they think a presidential candidate would say it. Nah, nah,
Speaker 3: that's nothing. You guys don't know anything. And he reaches
Speaker 3: into his pocket he pulls out a huge want one
Speaker 3: hundred dollar bills money. This is the most important thing
Speaker 3: in life. And you can see all the teachers going,
Speaker 3: oh my god. And he had me at that moment.
Speaker 3: He had me. I said, wherever this guy goes, I
Speaker 3: want to see what happens.
Speaker 2: Seven million dollars for seven thousand.
Speaker 3: Yes, and he still bothers me. I mean, he still
Speaker 3: calls me all the time to tell me why I
Speaker 3: need to love Trump. He loves Trump to tell me
Speaker 3: why I'm wrong. Like this thing drives him crazy. It's
Speaker 3: like government doesn't do anything good. You know, He's like,
Speaker 3: he's that kind of Republican.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, there are a lot of people who
Speaker 2: have that sort of philosophy ingrained in them since you
Speaker 2: know Reagan. What makes this book so interesting is how
Speaker 2: you're not taking a partisanside left or right. No, you're
Speaker 2: you're not talking politics. That's here are the people who
Speaker 2: do the people's business with your tax payer dollars. I
Speaker 2: love the story about the guy who is the tax collector.
Speaker 2: There's a line in the book that stuns me. There's
Speaker 2: six million people who are entitled to the earned tax
Speaker 2: credit that don't apply. And then there's something like twenty
Speaker 2: five thousand people who've made more than a million dollars
Speaker 2: that haven't filed their taxes. Since twenty seventeen. How come
Speaker 2: we're not trying to help the people who are owed
Speaker 2: this credit and collect from the people who can't be
Speaker 2: bothered to pay taxes. That doesn't seem partisan. That just
Speaker 2: seems administratively competent.
Speaker 3: That's right. No, No, the whole point. If you'd ask
Speaker 3: me what the point of the thing was when we started,
Speaker 3: it was just I know, they're great stories, and I'm
Speaker 3: going to use these writers to demonstrate it isn't me.
Speaker 3: It's like, these stories are there and they should be told.
Speaker 3: That was it After the fact. There is a purpose
Speaker 3: to it. And the purpose is you can have your
Speaker 3: about the government. You can have you can hold the
Speaker 3: stereotype of the lazy, indolent nine to five, doesn't care
Speaker 3: about anything, milking you, waste, fraud, abuse, deep state, whatever
Speaker 3: it is you think, but you're not allowed to have
Speaker 3: it without knowing this. If you want to read these
Speaker 3: stories and still think that, okay, but you got to
Speaker 3: know what. You got to hear these stories. And if
Speaker 3: you hear these stories, some part of you will think
Speaker 3: I shouldn't really think that that's dumb. It's more complicated
Speaker 3: than that. Sure, they're problems with the government, sure, the
Speaker 3: things that need to be fixed, sure, and a lot
Speaker 3: of it is like the way we administer the situation
Speaker 3: we put them in. But there are unbelievable people here.
Speaker 3: There are in many ways the best among us. They're
Speaker 3: there to serve and they found some purpose and in
Speaker 3: that purpose they found a purpose in life. They've learned
Speaker 3: how to lead their lives in a very meaningful way.
Speaker 3: And for us to go after them as if their
Speaker 3: enemies is it's very damning about us. And that's kind
Speaker 3: of what we're trying to get across.
Speaker 2: It's nine oh five. Is that a spot where we
Speaker 2: should do?
Speaker 3: That's what we say.
Speaker 2: Let's wrap it up. Thank you so much, everybody. Let's
Speaker 2: hear it. Thank you, sir Michael Lewis. That was my
Speaker 2: conversation with Michael Lewis. We went out to dinner afterwards.
Speaker 2: He had an early morning TV hits and we literally
Speaker 2: had dinner at nine point thirty ten fifteen. He had
Speaker 2: a run back to the hotel. But oh my goodness,
Speaker 2: that was just so much fun. And you can imagine
Speaker 2: just sitting down with him to dinner afterwards. It's just
Speaker 2: every bit as magical as you would imagine. Every time
Speaker 2: he comes into town and I have an opportunity to
Speaker 2: sit down and interview him, I jump at it. I
Speaker 2: hope you enjoyed this one as much as I do.
Speaker 2: Special thanks to the folks at the Main Street Theater
Speaker 2: in Port Washington, especially Karen, for allowing me to put
Speaker 2: this together. It was really a great time. Ye