Bonus: An Evening with Michael Lewis, From "Liar’s Poker" to Today
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This week, another Masters in Business Live, this time with Michael Lewis. I've been fortunate to interview the Poet Laureate of Finance, I don't know, maybe a dozen times, ten times over the years. I've interviewed him after each of the last few books. I've interviewed him live at a couple of conferences and events. I've had dinners with him. I've gotten drunk with him at a bar late at night.

Imagine the greatest storyteller of your generation and then sitting in a bar and having a couple of drinks with him. It's every bit as spectacular as you would imagine. So when I read that his new book was coming out, I said, hey, if you're interested in speaking to a small group at a local theater, I'd be happy to set that up.

And his PR people said, great. So at the Main Street Theater in Port Washington to a crowd of just 300 people, he regaled us with stories for 90 minutes.

You will hear almost no me in this because my job was just to give him a nudge and then stay the hell out of his way. You could tell the audience loved it. It was so much fun. There were plenty of, you know, stories I had never heard before, including...

Listen for the story about Billy Bean and the F-bomb. It really is special. I thought this was a blast. I think you will also, with no further ado, Michael Lewis on his new book, Who is Government? and his career as a writer. Welcome. Welcome, Michael. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Welcome to...

The North Shore of Long Island, to Gatsby, Long Island. I've seen none of it. It was dark and rainy. So let's start out, how are you doing? How's the book tour going? People called in saying... Who is government? Who is government? You said, what is government? Yeah, same thing. Who is government? And it's an odd... So they're...

If we're going to be honest here, there are books and there are book-like objects. And this is closer to a book-like object because I didn't write the whole thing. I wrote a third of it. I love it, but I have six other writers that I hired to do this with me. So this is the way of answering your question. The book tour is normally my least favorite part of what I do for a living. And I don't know why that is. Because it's a slog?

I don't like being on TV, but you got to do that. The business of presenting yourself this way is so different from the business of writing the book that it's jarring in the first place. And then the worst thing happens, you start to like it.

And then you get going back in to like being a writer is jarring. But the thing that is usually a problem is that, you know, you're kind of on the line. You know, it's your book. It's just you're out there alone. Now, if people say it sucks, I can just say it's the other people who are responsible. And so I feel it's kind of a pleasure, this one, compared to the others, going out and talking about it.

So I've only seen you with some of the other authors once or twice. You were on some show with Kamala Bell, and I haven't seen you with any of the other co-authors. Did you see? It was Morning Joe with Kamala Bell. Yeah. All right, so Kamala Bell is a 6'5", 250-pound black man. Right. And he shows up at Morning Joe in a sweatshirt that says, immigrants aren't criminals, but the president is one.

And they say, "You can't wear that on TV. Joe is not there. He's remote." And so they try to find something that will fit Kamau Bell. Nothing will fit Kamau Bell. Is that why it was inside out? Is that what he did? No, it's worse than that. They then tried to get him to flip it around and it looked ridiculous. Then they put it right side, the right side out again, and they put black tape over just the bottom part of that.

And then by the time he got finished, we'd lost our segment. They'd run out of time. And Joe was heading off to drive. There's another hour, and Joe was heading off to drive his kid to school. And they called him and said that we can't have him on because we can't figure out what to do with a sweatshirt. And Joe interceded and said, have him wear the sweatshirt. Make sure everybody can read it and put him on.

Wow. But what was really weird about it is that though Joe was comfortable making that statement on his show, none of the authorities in the actual studio were. And so they framed Kamau. It's like this giant head. Oh, my God.

And you can't see anything. And the whole time he's talking, he keeps going... He's going like this with his sweatshirt. I saw that. Did you see that? Yes. Yeah. No, it's incredibly distracting. I was trying to have a conversation and this man is doing this thing with his sweatshirt. But yes, mostly it's been... I mean, I've done some stuff with some of the co-authors, mostly stage stuff. So I've been on stage one way or another in one city or another with all of them or each of them. But most of the other stuff, the TV stuff, I've had to do on my own. Okay.

So I want to get to this book in a minute, but first I want to set the stage with the arc of the two prior books. That are related to this. Well, exactly. That's what I'm teeing up. Don't get ahead of me. I'm just trying to help. So the premonition was how the U.S. really did a mediocre job during the pandemic. You focused on Charity Dean and the pandemic emergency response team and the mess they had to clean up. I

I'm curious how that book led to the fifth risk, which was the book that was the predecessor to this. So I'm going to have to help you. Go ahead. The fifth risk is before this, before the premonition. It goes fifth risk, premonition, this. Then withdrawn. Okay. So the fifth risk is the predecessor book to this. Yes. How did that lead to this book? Yes, so there we go.

Sorry. I got the order wrong. Yeah, sorry about that. And your wife, Wendy, is here somewhere in the front row. I'm so sorry you're feeling poorly. But thanks. Thank you for coming. By the way, wouldn't be the first time you've embarrassed me in public. And we could save that conversation for later. But how did those books lead to this book? So this is how it happens.

It's really simple, and it all seems worthy from a distance, like I have some great political or social purpose. In fact, it's all literary opportunism. Trump is elected the first time. Trump fires a day after his election his transition team.

An enterprise I didn't know existed until I read he'd fired it, but it was 550 people that Chris Christie had assembled for him to go into the government and receive from the Obama administration the briefings that 1,000 people in the Obama administration had by law spent six months preparing. So given it's Obama, it's probably like the best academic course in the history of the government on the government.

And Trump fired the people who were going to go listen to this. Like, they just said, we don't need... And he told Chris Christie, Chris Christie told me, he said, we're so smart that it'll take us an hour to figure out how the government works. We don't need that. And I thought, this is like a great comic premise, that I can go and wander around the government, get all these briefings that he didn't bother to get, and the reader will feel, rightly, like they know more about the government than the president. And the president's supposed to be running it.

And that book, it was a serious, again, it was more of a book-like object. It was three long Vanity Fair pieces plus a piece. So it just happened to work when you glued them all together. But I picked intentionally the departments that nobody paid any attention to. So not state or treasury or anything like that. I picked commerce, agriculture, and energy.

ones where if I turn to my neighbors in Berkeley, all of whom are inflicting their political opinions upon me constantly, if I say, what does the Commerce Department do, I get a blank stare. They have no idea. And I found in those places, one, really good material, like all of the places sort of like matter. There's stuff going on in each of them that's really, really, really important, but unbelievable characters. Can I tell you about one character?

Sure. But I don't want to get... Your train is on track, and I don't want to interrupt. Well, you're just skipping the best part of how did you get access to all these people you kind of left out if there's this giant transition team that...

that was supposed to be for the incoming Trump administration and he fired them all. How did you get access to this? He fired the ones who were going in to listen to the briefing. The briefings were still there. In some ways, it's like the turkey sandwiches were still moldering. They had figured out what drinks they might want. It was all set up. So you reach out to who? I reach out to, in the first place, people inside the energy department. I got some names of

officials in the Energy Department, started with the outgoing Obama people, but quickly got into the Civil Service, because the Civil Service does the briefing. I mean, they're the ones who are, I mean, in the Energy Department, for example, running a $50 billion clean-up of the nuclear waste left behind in eastern Washington from the building of the atom bomb in the 1940s. It's still going on. You know, there's like that thing. There are all these things. There's a nuclear arsenal. I went and met with the people who manage the nuclear arsenal,

And they couldn't tell me there was classified stuff, but they could tell me a lot. And their attitude was, we're so grateful someone's come to listen. Like, we did all this work to, like, explain how it all works. And I started with energy, but not, you know, it could have gone anywhere. But I started with energy because, I don't know if you remember, but Rick Perry was Donald Trump's pick. Oops.

for Secretary of Energy. Because he, I mean, in Trump's mind, he said, oil, Texas, looks good on television. But Rick Perry had called for the elimination of the Energy Department when he was running for president. And that's a little awkward. You're going to go be running this place when you said it shouldn't exist? Tough first day. But he had no idea what was in it. And the minute he found out what was in it, he went to his Senate hearings and said, God, I'm really sorry. Like, I was wrong. You shouldn't get rid of this place.

So I went there because I just thought this is the reductio ad absurdum of this ignorance. And the pieces really worked. I mean, the material was so good. But what happened as I crept my way through the obscure parts of the federal government, I kept meeting incredible people. I did not have a picture in my head of who the federal employee was.

What I was meeting was very different from what I had imagined. And so the book comes out. It sells half a million copies, and it's glued together Vanity Fair articles, which told you that there is an interest in a civics lesson, which is what it was, kind of. And I got the problem of having to write it, as you will soon have, and afterward to the paperback that comes out a year later. And I thought, you know, I kind of, although it's worked so far...

It bothers me that I've not done a deep dive into one of these people, because the people, they were mission-driven, usually very expert in some very narrow thing, completely incapable of telling their own stories, walled off by political people so they weren't allowed to tell their own stories, oblivious to the sense, themselves as characters,

But that's great characters don't know their characters. I mean, the fact that you don't know you're a character makes you an even better character. And I thought, I'm just going to pick one of these people. So who? Now, when I had this problem, Trump had then shut down the government. It was the government shutdown of 18 and 19, early 2019. And he had furloughed 60% of the civilian workforce, sent them home as inessential workers without pay.

There is an organization in Washington called the Partnership for Public Service that tries and fails over and over to get positive attention shined upon these federal workers. They give an award called the Sammy Award to people who do something good in the civil service. This has been going on for two decades, and still nobody pays it any attention. But there have been lots of nominations for those awards, thousands of them.

So I cross referenced like anybody who's been nominated for a Sammy. And that was like 8,000 people or something with who's been furloughed. And the list came back and it was like 5,000, three, it was some huge list. And I thought, what the hell am I gonna do with this? It was alphabetized. I just took the first name on the list, Arthur A. Allen. He was the first one on the list. And I found his phone number. I called him up and said, I want to come talk to you about what you do. And I didn't really know what he did.

So this is the beginning of this book because what happens with Arthur A. Allen, I go to see him, he is the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Division. He's been at it for 30 something years and he pretty quickly tells me that like Americans have this unbelievable ability to get lost at sea, to just like we just do it better than anybody else. And so the Coast Guard Search and Rescue is constantly occupied.

He figures out a few years into his career, he witnesses a tragedy. He's out in the field. He's at the Chesapeake Bay Station. A summer storm comes out of nowhere. The Coast Guard is pulling people off the Chesapeake Bay. They discover that they got everybody, but there's one boat missing. And it's got a woman who was Art's wife's age and a little girl who was his daughter's age.

And they know because they know when the storm kicked up, when the boat likely capsized. They were on a sailboat. And so they know where they were when they capsized, kind of. But what they don't know, presuming that they're on the upside-down boat, is how that upside-down sailboat drifts at sea. Objects drift differently. Like if you're in an inner tube, you will move in the ocean differently than if you're on an upside-down sailboat than you would if you were on a life raft, you know, and so on.

And they find the girl and the mother dead the next morning. And Art says that's never going to happen again. When he's telling me this story, like what he's done with his career, a bunch of things, but he has basically invented the science of studying objects drifting at sea. And

He's told me at this point in our interactions, I was there a couple of days before, I said, like, why did you even bother to do this? And he goes over to his bookshelf and he pulls the yellowed newspaper article from the Norfolk whatever about this mother and child. He starts to cry. He said, that could have been my wife. That could have been my child. And when that happened, I said, it's never going to happen again. So he starts studying how objects drift.

and throwing them into the Long Island Sound from, he lives in Connecticut, and he classifies a couple of hundred objects. The results, it reduces their drift patterns to mathematical formulae.

Like 10 days after the Coast Guard gets his formula, a 350-pound man, this is a very American thing to do, runs out of his window on a cruise ship on a Carnival Cruise Line cruise, 80 miles east of Miami, and isn't discovered missing for like several hours. And he does it at night because they have cameras on the side of the boat. They know when they can go back and say, oh, this is when he went off. But Art had studied Batman at Sea.

That's a thing. That was a thing. He had a fat, he actually said large and smaller people. He had a fat guy at sea. And which will turn out to come in very handy in future years, but this is the first time. Fat guy at sea who goes over off a boat and isn't discovered missing for a few hours, in human history he's dead. Like it's like finding a person at sea is like finding a soccer ball in the state of Connecticut. You just, it's almost impossible.

They pluck this dude out of the water like seven hours, because he's fat, he can live forever. You know, no hypothermia. The risk is someone's going to swallow him, but that's it. And it's really a huge advantage to have that fat. And they pluck him out, and he's sort of like kind of cool. It's like he's not panicked or anything. He's just floating at sea. But they pull him out, and there are all these articles about

like how great the search and rescue people are who pulled him out of the sea. No one asks how they find him. The Coast Guard themselves are shocked, like how well this worked. And this goes on. I mean, I interviewed another fat guy who fell off another boat in the Pacific, and who was saved miraculously after like eight hours. And I said, like, how do you think they found you? And he said, well,

What saved you or something? And he says, when I was floating in the ocean, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. And that's why I was saved. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. You were saved because of Arthur A. Allen. You know, that's who saved you. But nobody had paid any attention to this dude and what he had done.

So I spent a few days with him listening to the, I mean the whole intellectual stuff about how he did what he did, it was riveting. But the motive, like this, I'm not going to let another American die because we don't know this. He fixes the problem. Thousands of people are alive today around the world because of what he's done. He's been honored by other countries, Taiwan and Australia, but we don't even pay, we pay him no attention.

So I gather my stuff to go write the end of my book. And I'm on my way back to the airport after I've spent the time with him. And he calls my cell. This is the moment this book starts. He calls my cell and he says, "Hey, you're a writer."

And I said, I've been there with my notepad. You know, I've been like, I know I had said something when I called him. And he said, man, he said, I was just talking to my son. He says, like, you've published books. And like one of the books became a movie. And he goes, are you going to write about this? Are you going to write about me?

And I said, yeah, Art. I mean, why do you think I flew across country and spent three days interviewing your wife and children and all the rest? He said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift. And this is your one, inessential worker.

to your public servant, your civil servant. They have no sense like they deserve any kind of attention. The stories that come out of them are amazing. And I thought, man, I should have done it the first time. I should have been diving into these people's lives. So the next time, if I ever come back, I'm going to come back focused on the people.

And when I was on a hiking trail with David Shipley, who was once, and until recently, the opinion editor of the Washington Post. And he had space and he had money. And we could write as long as we wanted in his pages, he said. I said, I'm worried that if I go do this,

it'll just be either, oh, this is Michael Lewis's take on the federal government, or I made it up, or whatever. People don't want to hear the message. It's very easy to come after the writer and try to undermine the whatever's in the book. Is that why you picked six other writers? That's what I did. To shield the accusation of bias. And also to get a little bit of a bigger kind of sample. Like, not going to tell them what to do. I didn't even tell them what I was going to do. And I've done two of these big profiles in here.

and the material is as good as ever. But I said, "You just go into the federal government and wander around and find a story." And five out of the other six did much of what, basically what I did. They found unbelievable character studies, individuals doing things that just shocked them. One, he's a wonderful writer, John Lanchester, English writer.

decided instead that his character was the consumer price index, which is a challenge, but he actually makes it work. It's because it is an amazing achievement. But he writes, so he went off the reservation a bit. I'll push back on the characterization when we come to that chapter. Right. Because I have a different spin on that. Oh. But let's talk about some of the chapters in here, starting with

Ronald Walters of the National Cemetery. I can't start with myself? You want to start that way? I mean, other people... I edited it, but other people... I give you such a... I will tell you... So, you want to start with the coal mines? Let's start with the coal mines. No, no, no. I don't want to. I've already muscled you around too much. Feel free to muscle. I'm the fish and you're the fisherman. You're supposed to be landing me. But it's...

Ronald Walters, so this is the one writer who came to me after I had employed them all and said, "Is there anything on your cutting room floor that you would like to have written about that you didn't write?" I said, "Well, that's funny you say, but yes, it's Ronald Walters."

Casey Sepp, who's a wonderful New Yorker writer, she wrote a book about Harper Lee called Furious Hours. And we met because I reviewed that book for the New York Times so favorably she got in touch and sent me toffee, boxes of toffee. But we became friends. Ronald Walters...

I'll be brief because I didn't get to know him. I'm reading it like you. But what intrigued me, Ronald Walters is in the Veterans Administration. I think he's the only one who still has his job securely, but he may be insecure now too. But he took over the National Cemeteries Association, the cemeteries where we bury veterans.

And there are like 55 of these things around the country. Like 4 million veterans are buried in them. They're burying them at an astonishing rate. And it's sort of like, it's a sacred duty. It's where we bury our war dead. It's where we bury people who've made great sacrifice for the country. And it's a tribute to the country that we take it seriously, that the Veterans Administration even has this program. But when he inherited it,

It was struggling in its, it's a weird way to put it, consumer satisfaction. The consumers in this case were the loved ones of the people who were being buried. And he took it from, and we know this because the University of Michigan measures customer satisfaction across the society. It's all big institutions. Not just its private sector, but also government agencies.

And it was kind of like most of the government agencies, kind of high 60s. It was like a mediocre thing. And in a period of a decade, Ronald Walters took it to being not just the enterprise in the United States government that had the highest customer satisfaction, but the enterprise in the entire country.

More than Costco, more than Amazon or FedEx or the other ones that people like. And he never, no one knew his name, no one knew how he did it or why. And I had, when I was fiddling around with picking someone to write the afterword for the fifth risk, I'd heard his story and I almost, I tried calling and actually they didn't even return my calls. The Veterans Administration wouldn't talk to me.

So it was there and I said, go find out about that. And so she writes about how he did what he did. It's an absolutely beautiful chapter. It actually made me cry. Did it? Only chapter in the book that brings tears to your eyes. You know, ETF volumes tend to go up in a crisis situation. You know, when the going gets tough, they get going. Why? Because they are a source of liquidity when other things are not that liquid, which is exactly why the SEC sort of sketched

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Let's talk about coal mining and how dangerous it is. Let's talk about your first chapter. So this is, I mean, it's so unusual to find such a rich vein of material that is basically unexplored, that is so predictably yielding gold.

And this, so this is number two for me. I've done our Allen. I've done the agencies. I'm going to go pick another person. So I went back to kind of did it the way I did it before. I got a list of the people who were nominated for Sammy's Awards this year or last year. And this list was almost 600 people. And because it's, they don't know what they're doing. I mean, they know what they're doing in some ways, but they just don't know how to create

interest in people. All these, this list of the people who'd been nominated for the award, it just said their name and what they'd done. And you looked at the accomplishment and they were often amazing. It was like, you know, but it would never say how they did it. You know, cured cancer, but that was it, kind of thing. John Smith at the National Institute of Health, cured cancer, period. End of story. I was going through this list and it was all just cold-blooded, you know, it was just like, until I get to Christopher Marks,

Solve the problem of coal mine roofs falling in on coal miners, which has killed 50,000 American coal miners in the last century, leading cause of death in the most dangerous occupation in the country. Occupation is so dangerous that it was more dangerous being in a coal mine than being in the Vietnam War. That's how dangerous it was. But it said, the last sentence was, a former coal miner.

They finally gave me something to think about. And so I looked and I thought, man, there has got to be a story here. I mean, I'm thinking, grew up in West Virginia, like dad was injured or killed. How this person gets out and does this. So I had spun this whole tale up in my head.

And I find his number. And again, like Art Allen, he lives in Pittsburgh. I call him. I cold call him. In this case, he knew who I was. He'd read Moneyball. And it turned out that he thought of himself as Moneyball in coal mines. But that's a whole separate thing. But he... I say, I just want to hear your story. Like, give me the 10-minute version. I'm going to give you five minutes of the 10-minute version because it hooked me. He says...

I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a professor at the university. And I thought, oh, like my whole movie is different. I know. I don't know what the movie is, but this is not. And I thought, oh, my interest just went. And then he started to tell me, he says, if you looked at us a little bit, you'd find my dad was kind of famous. Robert Marks was the name.

And Robert Marks had been brought to Princeton without a PhD to help Princeton. He had devised a mechanism for stress testing. He was stress testing fighter planes for the Navy and the Air Force before they built them. He'd take the design, build a little model, and he had this complicated way of just testing whether or not this design was going to actually work in practice. And Princeton had brought him in to test little nuclear reactors they wanted to build to see if it was going to crack.

Robert Mark one day was teaching an engineering class at Princeton when an undergraduate walks in from an art history class and says, "This device you have, could you use it to like figure out what's holding Gothic cathedrals up?" Because they just told us that no one understands how the roofs of Gothic cathedrals don't collapse. There's no records left by the builders. They're built over a century. No one knows what's decorative, what's actually holding the weight.

And he said, yeah. And he became famous because he became the guy who figured out how they built the Gothic cathedrals and what was keeping them up, what was keeping the roof up. So that's Robert. That's the dad. Chris is telling me this in the first 15 minutes I'm talking to him. He said, so that was my dad. He said, I had a problem with my dad's life. It was the Vietnam War. I got kind of radicalized. I thought, I saw, it wasn't Princeton kids who were fighting and dying. And that really bothered me. And he said, I...

He started throwing words around the house like bourgeois. And pretty soon he said, I'm not, he could have gone to Harvard or Princeton. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go join the working class. So he breaks with his dad, big break. He goes on the road. Works in an auto factory, works in a UPS plant, and finally ends up with several fellow radicals in a coal mine in West Virginia. The other three radicals all quit at the end of the first day. It's that brutal.

He finds it interesting. Why he finds it interesting is still a bit of a mystery, but he stays in the mine for a year and almost dies twice. He sees how dangerous it is. He crawls out of the mine, goes and gets a PhD, an undergraduate and a PhD at Penn State in rock engineering and begins the process of figuring out

There's all this data that the US government has collected on that they've observed the problem It's bit like the CDC does with the disease that they've observed the problem without actually try to stop the problem So they've all this data on when roofs fell and what the conditions were. He just he starts to study it and Over a career a really really interesting career figures out how to stop this from happening and stops it from happening So he's telling me this on the phone

And he does give me all the details of his work. And I stop him and I say, oh, so you rebelled against your dad and then you just went and had your dad's career. He figured out what was keeping up the rules of Gothic cathedrals and you figured out how to keep the rules of coal mines up. And, I mean, this is someone I've just started talking to on the phone. He gets outraged. It's like, bull****.

You know, like I'm calling, you know, that has nothing to, I had nothing to do, what I did had nothing to do with my father's career. We have nothing in common, completely different thing. If that's your theory, like go away kind of thing. And I said, just seems a natural observation, right? So, so two things, um,

When I went and spent a lot of time with him, we rolled around West Virginia. He took me into coal mines. And he doesn't mention to like the third day that, oh, you know, it was funny. Were you reconciled? How did you reconcile with your dad?

And I asked him, because they had become reconciled before his dad died. And he said it was gradual. He said, but there was this moment. He said the National Cathedral, the federal government thought the National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down. This was in the year 2000. One of the towers was subsiding faster than the other. And they didn't know why.

So they called his dad to test to see how the load was moving through the National Cathedral. And the dad figured out that his stuff didn't work because whatever was going on, it wasn't above ground, it was below ground. So he called his son. And his son had the stuff to go figure out what was going on below ground. And together they wrote a paper about how the National Cathedral, what was going to happen, and we didn't have to worry about it falling down, but they studied it together and put everybody's minds to rest.

Now, when you have that to navigate to in a story, you've got a story. I mean, it's just like that. And so Art Allen had the yellowing newspaper. Christopher Marks had the dad. But I've got to say, I've met...

Lots of people in, like, the Storm Center and the National Weather Service who lost loved ones to tornadoes or that this instrument, the federal government, is filled with all this purpose, all these things. It's where the problems of the private sector doesn't want to deal with go. You know, it's like if there's no money to be made in it, but we've decided as a society we want to address it, that's what we use to address it.

Who is attracted to these problems? People who have a particular interest in this problem for whatever reason. And that quality, like caring about the problem, it's outside yourself. I'm going to fix the problem.

tends to come from a deep place. And that's where literature comes from. You know, it's the motives of the characters are in our government. These are rich and interesting people with rich and interesting backstories. And, you know, every time you kind of start scratching at one, you get at this. So let's address that a bit because I want to discuss your process a little bit, which I'm fascinated by.

You once said to Malcolm Gladwell at the 92nd Street Y, the subjects choose me. I don't go looking for books. The stories wander into my life and they get to the point where they can't not be written. The stories kind of find me. A relationship develops between me and the story. I have no choice. That's true. So expound on that a bit. You want the three-minute or the five-minute version?

Whatever you're comfortable with. All right. I mean, this goes back to who I am. I mean, I'm basically, I grew up in New Orleans, was raised to be a decorative object. I was raised to- What does that mean? Not useful. Okay. Like nobody around me did anything useful and no one planned to. And hence you end up on Wall Street. No. Yeah, well, that's funny. But there's a certain charm you acquire on the streets of New Orleans that are very useful when you're trying to sell a bond.

But yes, a lot of New Orleans make their way to Wall Street. They do quite well on Wall Street. You get the gift of gab kind of thing. But you learn to tell a story, which is very valuable in the financial markets and also very valuable to writers. But I'm basically lazy. Like, that is true.

You know, it's core in me. Like, the working part of me has been added on somehow. But the deep me, I would just sit around and scratch myself for the rest of my life. You've written 14 books. How is that lazy? So, this is... I'm not lying. I'm telling you the truth. You're just going to have to figure out... You've got to make sense of it. Okay. My father...

My father, this is God's truth. My father, from the age of about seven to the age of when I was 18, had me persuaded that there was Latin. We had a coat of arms, Lewis, and there was always a Latin under it. He persuaded me that what that Latin said, which he translated, was do as little as possible and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task.

My father raised me to be lazy. You know, I mean, that he was like, don't sweat it. You're working too hard. This is the environment I was raised in. And I took to it. But you didn't. But I did. Every book you've written, you embed yourself in unfamiliar places. It's also true. No, it's true. I'm curious. I got that too. I'm actually curious. I see something and I want to know about.

And it happens a lot. It just happens a lot. And so with pleasure, I find, I pursue a curiosity. I ask, why are the Oakland A's winning baseball games with no money? Like, how is that possible? That's a beginning, that's a curiosity.

And so I go to the club most people have that thought and go who knows You spend you spend weeks and we're so So so it is not it is true that I do the work it is true of it I eventually do the work, but I do from a place of deep laziness. It's deep. It's like it that it is I get curious I start to get involved and

I realize, oh my God, look at this story. And it really does have to rise to the level in my mind that this story is so important. And it's delusional. Is any story that important? But the story is so important that I have an obligation to do it. So now I have to do it because I have an obligation. I make myself feel that way.

And when I feel that way, then I'm off. Then I forget about the laziness and I do the work. So you have this incredible knack of finding yourself in the right place at the right time before everybody else figures out what's happening. So this is an incredibly lucky thing. Okay, so I'll give you that. This one's lucky.

Liars poker, you're there early in the rise of Wall Street. I was working. Okay, you're working. Moneyball, no one had any idea what was going on with Sabermetrics and how this scrappy little broke team was able to put together a competitive run. Going infinite, you embed with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. That was kind of cool. That was a year before. I didn't know that was happening. Oh.

You didn't know that was happening. And then the whole undoing project with Danny Kahneman, who just coincidentally lived down the street from you. You have this ridiculous knack to finding yourself at the head of a wave that's about to crash over society. I mean, once or twice is dumb luck. How do you do it six times in a row? That's not exactly luck. I think it is.

I mean, you know, you and I, so he's just published a book too, How Not to Invest. It's really good. And you say 18 different ways in the course of this book.

how skeptical you are of the ability to predict the future. Sure. I am too. Okay. Everybody wants you to predict the future and you just shouldn't do it because it's just, you know, you can't, who knows where the stuff is going to be. But you're always skating to where the puck's going to be. Explain that. It's maybe, I think the puck is just coming to where I happen to be. So I don't think, I really think, Sam Bankman Freed lands on my front porch after someone asked me to just

interview him and evaluate him. I didn't go looking for him. He walked up and I said, "This is interesting. I'm just going to follow him around."

I had this nagging sense that I'd left all this gold in the mine. I still feel that way. There's gold in that mine still. And I left the gold in the mine. Let's go back there and get it and bring some friends and they can have some of the gold too. And I mean, I had no idea that Trump was gonna do what he's done to the government. None.

I did have a sense that he didn't care about it, that he was going to just completely try to gut it. I had no sense. So in every case, I know how much accident there was. I will say, if I were trying to make the case that I know something that other people don't, or there's something about me that leads to being a little ahead of the curve, I'd only say that

The closest thing to the best way to predict the future is just pay attention to the present. That you pay closer attention to the present than other people are. You see the future is there. And so it is, I do pay attention to the present. I observe. And I also, so this gets back to the laziness.

That when you're lazy, it's not necessarily a bad thing to be a little lazy. Amos Tversky, my character in The Undoing Project had a great line which I tell every kid who asks for advice, I just repeat it. He says, "People waste years of their lives "not being willing to waste hours of their lives."

that people get so worked up about being busy, moving their career up, they don't let things in. They're like always achieving. And if you just back away and let the world come into you, that's a helpful approach to a writer. Also, if you're a little lazy, like you would rather basically not be doing anything,

It takes a level of interest to move you. Like, I know a lot of writers who just go, they can always find something to write about because they know, they feel like they have to be writing, so they just force it. Before I sit down and bother to put a word on the page, I've gotten so, I've had to get so excited about it to offset the natural tendency not to do anything. And so it's like, the material is leaping over higher hurdles to get to the place with me that I want to write about.

So maybe that has something to do with this. Can I float a theory to you? Sure. I think it's going to be bulls**t if you can do it.

Well, Malcolm Gladwell's grand unified theory of Michael Lewis books is biblical allegories. Right. That's ****. Yeah, that is ****. Right. Daniel and the Lions then is liar's poker. The Blindside is Good Samaritan. David and Goliath, Moneyball. Like, you're not doing biblical allegories. No. I mean, you can... The truth is you can find almost any... You can map almost any story onto the Bible. Right. Right. But here's what's not...

is every Michael Lewis book features a character and the archetype Michael Lewis character

quirky outsiders pushing against the grain because they've discovered some interesting insight or truth or previously unknown thing that is against the consensus and then they apply that to their field and either they make a lot of money shorting stocks or they save fat guys who've fallen off of cruise ships. Those are the same characters but every... Who's that character in Liar's Poker?

You. You think that's me? Well, you show flashes of you. It was your first book, so we'll cut you a little slack. But, you know, in fact, let's talk about Liar's Poker. So we did a podcast on the 30th anniversary. Right. You had to go reread it, not just reread the book, but read it out loud for the audio version. Yeah, I hadn't reread it since I wrote it. So first, what was that experience like? Awful.

I mean, I don't know if you've ever gone back, but I was 26 when I wrote that. And I'd never written anything. I mean, I'd written letters to my mother and a few articles in The Economist. And I mean, it was just, I was really raw.

But still there are flashes of the future Michael Lewis, the writer, throughout. Hey listen, first of all, for a first time book, it was great. But you know it's funny. And you were 26, so you could cut yourself some slack. There were some things I noticed. One is there was just general infelicity, but I noticed that whenever I thought I was being funny, I wasn't funny. And whenever I didn't, I was. Like, oh, that's funny, but I didn't know it was funny.

It was embarrassing. There were lines that were clearly designed to get people to laugh, and I shouldn't have been doing it. I feel finally towards it. It launched my career.

And let me also point out. I'm still stuck on your theory. But let me just point out that you wrote that book while you were working full-time at Salomon Brothers. You were doing this nights and weekends, right? At least that's when you started sketching this. This wasn't Michael Lewis, the full-time writer. Correct. Right?

So when you look back at that, you've got to give yourself a little, hey, not bad for a first effort. No, it's fine. It's not bad for a first book. I agree. It's not bad for a first book. But when I think about your description of my books. The quirky outsider. The line that's right. I think of it this way.

Because Billy Bean's not quirky. Billy Bean's like the coolest guy in the room when he walks into a room. Yes, we're all quirky. Underneath, we all have little things going on. We're all above average? We're all a little neurotic. We all have stuff. Your characters have a lot of stuff. Sometimes they have a lot of stuff. What I think of, I think of it more as I get excited by someone who can teach me.

And all my characters are teaching me something about the world. And now the kind of person who's teaching you something about the world often is someone who has been challenging the world. So that's true too. They're often in kind of conflict with the world. But what's attracting me to them, I never think, oh, quirky, great. I never think that. Brad Katsuyama is not quirky. He's a nice Canadian boy.

Flash Boys. Flash Boys. He is the least quirky person who ever carried a book. He is normal. He's like as normal as they get. And there's some stuff there. What there is, is nice Canadian boy collides with Wall Street and is upset when he sees what's going on. And figures out a way around it. And figures out, yes, figures out... He's the least quirky of all your characters. But let's stick with Moneyball. But...

How did you gain access to the A's? How did they, you know, grant you keys to the kingdom? This often happens too, that you have a question and the question is equally interesting to the subject. So I called Billy Beane, went to go see him, I said, "I just, look, it doesn't make any sense. You're spending one fifth what the Yankees are spending. How can you be competing? If this market is efficient, the Yankees should be buying all the best baseball players and you would just lose all the time."

And he said, "No one has asked me that question. It's what I think about all the time." He's just covered by sports writers. And the sports, the baseball writers at the time paid no attention to the financial disparities. They weren't thinking of the money on the field. And that's all they thought about was the front office, was the money on the field. So he was interested in the question in the first place. And also I didn't tell him I was writing a book. I told him I thought, I didn't know what I was going to write. Maybe a little magazine piece, maybe nothing.

And it got more and more interesting, and I disguised how interesting I was. And when I divulged two months into it that I was thinking about writing a book, it was too late. He couldn't get rid of me. I knew too much. But there was, and I had found ways to insinuate myself

into their lives. I mean, this is like, how do you make yourself, how you get them to let you hang around? That's the important thing. You've got to hang around. You've got to be kind of in the, you know, just they forget you're there.

kind of hang around. So that was the trick there. You know when that book, have I told you when that book became a book? No. Like when I came home late at night and I said, wrote my publisher and said, this is going to freak you out, but I'm going to write a sports book. I was in the locker room of the Oakland A's

I was interviewing the players one by one and telling them why they were playing first base or why they were the leadoff hitter. They had no idea. The A's front office regarded it as a science experiment, and they were the lab rats, and it just confused their lab rats if you told them what the experiment was. And they told me, like, don't talk to them about it. They won't handle it well.

But the players were really interested. So I was welcoming the clubhouse, and they were coming out of the showers. I was waiting for my guy to talk to them. And for the first time, I saw the Oakland A's naked, and it was such a disgusting sight. It was like, it was just, I mean... Not...

Wrist professional athletes. It was like they had cankles and they were all fat. They look like a beer league team. They look like... And I had the thought, which I relayed to the front office.

It was like if you line those naked bodies up against a wall and asked anybody what they did for a living, nobody would guess professional athlete. They would guess like, you know, Wall Street guys. They could be Wall Street guys. They could be accountants. They could be flight attendants. They could be, but not professional athletes. And the front office said, it's funny you say that because we are aware of how unattractive they are without their clothes on.

They said that we get excited when they're unattractive without their clothes on, and they don't look right because the market, we are evaluating them blind. It's just we're looking for performance statistics. And when we find the player whose statistics are promising, but they look wrong, we know why the market's misvaluing them. They're being misvalued because of the way they look.

And I remember it blew my mind. I remember driving home and thinking, oh, my God. This is when you have a duty to write it. Like, never mind baseball. Just think of this as a corporation. And you've got these employees. They've been doing the same thing for 100 years. Millions of people are watching them. Stats attached to every move they make on the job.

If those people can be misvalued because of the way they look, who can't be? Everybody can't be. So this is a universal story. It's that feeling. Like, this is a universal story. And so I got very excited, and I wrote my publisher note and said, sorry, here it comes. I'm going to be writing a book called Moneyball. And now the flip side of this is...

None of my subjects ever know what I'm doing. They really don't. They know I'm hanging around, but they... I mean, Oakland A's saw me... I spent a week with the Blue Jays. I spent days with the Rangers. I spent days with the Mariners. I spent time with the Red Sox. And I had to do that to know that they were special, like, and know that nobody else was doing this. And so from their point of view, it was like, what's he doing? Like, Billy... And so when Billy Bean got the book...

And my subjects only get the book when everybody else gets the book. I don't want them bothering me. And he got the book. He was furious. It was like he was angry. Because you let out the secret? Two things.

One was, since when am I the main character? Could have told me. It's that kind of thing. I didn't sign up for this kind of thing. But the second thing he says, I thought he was going to be pissed off because I had revealed their secrets. That's what I was worried about. I was worried that was the betrayal. He says, he's on the phone. He's like, incoherent. And I said, what is bothering you? And he said, you have me saying **** all the time.

And I said, you do say ****. What am I supposed to do there? And he said, you don't understand. My mother's going to be so upset. And I said, your mom? You know, like, really? I was like, sigh of relief. If that's what we're worried about here, low-level problem. And it turned out not to be a low-level problem. She was furious. She is still furious, and she's angry at me. She's still angry at me. I swear to God she's angry about it. But

But I said to Billy, I said, I started laughing. I started saying, like, I was so worried you were going to be angry with me for stitching together this narrative that revealed all your secrets. I found out as much as I could, and I put as much of it in the book as I could, and it's going to blow your competitive advantage. I thought that's what you were angry about.

And there's this pause on the other end of the line, and he says, "You don't think anybody in baseball is gonna read your book." He says, he's like, "They're always gonna read your book. They don't know how to read." He said, "We've been doing this for years.

Nobody's asked a question and he was kind of right. He was right about that. It was too narrow. He was right that nobody ever reads a book who thinks they know what they're doing and changes their mind. Like no GM at the time was going to say, oh, I learned something from this book or, oh, we've been doing it the wrong way. Well, didn't the GM of the Red Sox eventually come? No. While I was working on the book,

John Henry had just bought the Red Sox. The hedge fund manager. And he was saying, he actually said, what do I got to do to prevent you from writing this book? Because he said, we're about to do this here. And he wanted to hire Billy. And I became, it was kind of fun. I remember doing this on pay phones in the airport. I became, they weren't allowed to negotiate. Right. So they negotiated through me. So I helped organize Billy's contract with the Red Sox. And Billy was going to go. And then change his mind last minute. Right.

and Theo Epstein becomes the GM of the Red Sox. See, Theo was trying to hire Billy too. He was part of the group inside, but the rest is history, and Theo leads the Red Sox to victory, and Billy Bean is written out of that story. But the Red Sox were about to do it. New owner, like new owner who had background in finance. So he gets this. He gets statistics and data and all that. What happened was other owners read the

Like, the head of Goldman Sachs at the time, I know, talked to the owner of the Mets and said, you're being ripped off by your own management. Like, they don't know what they're doing. And at the ownership level, they started to change things. So that was how the change happened. It would have happened anyway. What would have happened if I hadn't written the book is the Red Sox would have done this. They would have won the World Series using...

sabermetrics or statistics, they would have gotten total credit for revolutionizing the sport and Billy Beane would have been a footnote. That's what would have happened. Of all your books that became a movie, that's probably my favorite film version. Is it? What was that process like watching... Do you just essentially sign the papers and that's it? Or did they retain you for script consulting or anything like that? What happens is...

for sure, the movie people would rather the author be dead. There's no question. Like, all you can do from their point of view is cause trouble. Like, complain. Or give advice. And I was aware of this quite early. Like, I know they don't care what I think. It was really clear they didn't care. But they were trying to pretend like they sort of cared. And this was Blindside, actually, was the first one. And I thought...

But they wouldn't leave me alone. I couldn't just say, "Here, really, just give me the money, I'll give you the book, and whatever you do..." See at the opening. Yeah, see at the opening and just make it don't suck. And it's on you if it does, because it's not my movie, it's your movie. And they refused to accept that blunt relationship.

I think because they don't believe that I actually think that. And so what happens is they pretend to be interested. They don't know you're lazy. They don't know I'm lazy. I really, they pretend to be interested in what I think. I have to pretend to believe they're interested in what I think. We have this false interaction where I give them advice and they ignore it all.

But out of this, some really lovely friendships have sprung. Like, it's a social relationship. So I'm friends with all the directors who've made the movies. Really friends. And some of the actors are still in my life. And like, Jonah Hill will just call me up out of the blue and say, "I got a problem. I'm gonna just talk this through." And that kind of thing. And that's been great.

You know, ETF volumes tend to go up in a crisis situation. You know, when the going gets tough, they get going. Why? Because they are a source of liquidity when other things are not that liquid, which is exactly why the SEC sort of sketched the ETF design out back in 1988 after the Black Monday. Hear more about the evolution of ETFs and their growing influence on portfolios. Tune in to P. Jim's The Outthinking Investor wherever you listen.

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Can I tell you a story about the Moneyball movie? Sure. The Moneyball movie was this sort of... You guys want to hear a story about Moneyball, right? No, no. So the Moneyball movie. So Billy Bean, in addition to being pissed off at me because I had him saying **** all the time, he was put... I really admire the guy. He was put in a really difficult position. The book puts him in opposition to his industry. He knows something everybody else doesn't. All the other GMs hate him.

all of a sudden. He didn't deserve this. But instead of throwing me under the bus, he just fought. He said, there's nothing in the book that's not true. So you want to fight about it? Come fight. And he's brave. He's basically a very brave person. However, it was so unpleasant, the book, among the most, maybe the most unpleasant publication in that all of baseball was angry, really angry.

And he said, he called me one day, he says, "Sony Pictures is trying to buy my life rights to make a movie." And I says, "I just want to tell you I'm not doing this. I didn't want the book. I don't want a movie. I don't need this." And I said, "Billy, you don't understand. They never make the movie. They just give you money for your rights." That I've sold, I don't know, a dozen magazine articles, five books. Money just comes out of Hollywood and they never make anything because they hadn't made anything at that point.

And when I gave him the list of like the amounts I'd raked in from Hollywood for doing absolutely nothing, he sort of said, like, this is free? And I said, yeah, it's free. And so he took a bunch of money for his life rights. It was an option that renewed every 18 months. And every 18 months he'd call me. He goes, you're a genius. Like, this is unbelievable. You're right. They're not going to make this movie. It goes on for years, you know, like seven years. And then one day he calls me up and says, you ****.

He said, Brad Pitt just called me, and he says he's coming over to the house. He says, my wife is putting on makeup, and the babysitter's going home to get a dress. And it was like, he said, you said this wouldn't happen. I remember, he was like, you said this wouldn't happen. And I said, I don't know what to tell you. Like, I'm a little shocked this is happening. So flash forward, I don't know, a year, six months, they're shooting in the Oakland Coliseum.

And I'd gone to the set a couple of times. This was the cool thing. I brought my kids because they had 8,000 extras in the Oakland Coliseum and they'd gotten body doubles for the 2002 Kansas City Royals and Oakland A's. So like Barry Zito looked more like Barry Zito than Barry Zito. And they're replaying this game and they're moving the 8,000 people around the Coliseum to make it look like it's full. It's a great drama. Before I go over to see this,

They call me and say Sony calls me and says Billy bean is refusing to have anything to do with anybody like he's not visited the set he let Brad Pitt come to his house once and That was it and that he's like everybody's worried. He's just angry about this. Could you get him down? His office is at the stadium could he just walk down and shake a couple of hands and make everybody feel good and

And so I called him. I said, "Billy, it's not that big a deal. Just come on over." And he said, "Are you going to be there?" I said, "Yeah." He says, "Okay, then I'll come. I'll come." And I just spent 10 minutes. I don't want them to think I'm into it though. So I was like, "Okay, they know you're not into it. Come on over, shake some hands." So we get there. I'm there on the field and he comes walking out and this young male production assistant comes running out of left field and he's got the headgear and he's got a notepad and he comes running up to Billy.

And he says, Mr. Bean, Mr. Bean, you've been my hero ever since I read your book. I just want to tell you how you changed my life. And Billy's like, it's not my book. He wrote the book. He points to me and goes, no, this is your book. The guy's so, it's like weird. He says, will you just please sign my book? And Billy says, all right, I'll sign your book. And so he opens the notepad. And there were two Billy Beans in the major leagues at the same time.

And they both played in the same outfield on the Tigers and I think the Twins. I mean, it's weird. They were both there on the field at the same time. And the other Billy Bean was gay. And he came out of the closet and wrote a memoir. And it was called like Hitting from the Other Side of the Plate. And so this guy has the gay Billy Beans memoir. And Billy, the straight Billy Bean...

He's like, there's nothing good is happening right now. He's like, what do I say? What do I do? You don't say I'm not gay. There's nothing you can do in this situation. And I look over, and in the A's dugout, Brad Pitt's rolling around. He set the whole thing up.

And he had Sony Pictures call me to talk Billy to coming to the field so he could play this, he had thought of this joke, so he could play this joke on Billy B. And it worked. It really worked. So that is a great story. Thank you.

Before we open this up for questions, I want to ask one or two more questions, including another story you told about name confusion when you had spent some time in Israel with Danny Kahneman.

Oh, that's funny. And you, similar story, you go to... Wasn't nearly as good a story. So Danny Kahneman, the great Israeli psychologist, who's one of the main characters of The Undoing Project. One of the two main characters. Yeah, one of the two main characters. And he and Amos both had done a lot of work with the Israeli military. He had moneyballed Israeli troops to determine who should be an officer. And he devised these metrics so you can measure it rather than just do it by an interview.

So he was there very early. The reason I even wrote that book is I came back to that book after Moneyball because when Moneyball comes out,

Richard Thaler, economist, Cass Sunstein, his writing partner, reviewed it and said, Michael Lewis has written a really interesting story, but he doesn't know what it's about. And they said it's a case study in the work of Kahneman and Tversky. That's how I even heard that these guys existed. Anyway, I go to Israel. We're going to the military base where Danny did that money-balling work for the Israeli army. And we get there.

And they are 400 of the best-looking young women I've ever seen just waiting for us, like waiting in a mob behind the gates when we come through. And they look at us, and they just kind of like melt away. At first, I thought, wow, Danny's got it going on. You know, I mean, it's like, they're here for Danny. And it turns out there's an Israeli underwear model named Michael Lewis in

And he's got like unbelievable abs. And so they'd seen Danny Kahneman's coming with Michael Lewis, and they thought it was the underwear of Michael.

Yeah, yeah. Unbelievable. So there's a question I've been wanting to ask you for a while and I just never get to it so I'm gonna force it early. I know you have all these stories that are half told and all these things that are future projects. I'm always curious if there was a loose thread in a story that you said, I really wanna pull that and see what happens

In some of the books you've published, but you haven't gotten to. What do you mean? What characters, what lines of thought that you kind of briefly go over and sort of say in the back of your head, gee, I should really circle back to that. That looks really interesting, but just haven't gotten around to from any of your books. Because I know you have dozens and dozens of

things that you've started new, you have all your research and folders and stuff. Right. You mean, what do I have on the back burner that might go on to the front burner? Well, that's another question. It's what kind of loose thread has been out and about from some of the books you've written that you just... Are you thinking something?

No, nothing in particular. This was literally a Twitter question. I said, give me some questions for... This was the only one that I thought was half decent. I thought you were asking me... I was wrong. No, no, no. But it's funny because I don't... No, I have books that... They're books that I started and stopped because they didn't work.

There's a book that got away that would have been shot at a masterpiece, but the subject tossed me out because I made the mistake of writing something in a magazine about him before I wrote the book. What was that? George Soros. It was 1990, and Soros was interested in me for a bunch of reasons. Soros had somebody he really admired as a money manager. He was Soros' Soros. Mm-hmm.

His name was Nils Taub. He ran Jacob Rothschild's money in London. And he was, he was, he's the smartest person I've ever met in the financial markets, about the financial markets. He had just that, he had, you know how Soros has those jungle instincts? He had them times two. And older guy, he took me under his wing when I was at Salomon Brothers. I cold called him.

And I said, basically, I know that there's no reason you want to talk to me. I've just arrived. I'm 24. I said, I'm a new guy here. Can I take you out to breakfast? And something about the interaction caused him to say, sure, you can take me out to breakfast. And we went out to breakfast. And he said, you're not going to try. As long as you don't try to tell me anything, sell me anything, pretend you know something, I'll do my business through you. And for the next two years,

Over the next two years, he became the second biggest customer at Salomon Brothers. And I didn't ever have to do anything. I just picked up the phone. And I would describe to him what I'm seeing on the trading floor. I'd describe what I was seeing in the markets. But I never said, you should do this, because it would have been folly. And he appreciated that. And he told Soros about me when I left to write Liar's Poker.

And so Soros was very receptive to me and he took me on a private trip, you know, when the Berlin Wall fell, he built all these institutes for democracy around Eastern Europe. He took me on a private trip through these places and there was a book to do about both his fear about the threats to democracy, which seemed very prescient right now, and like this isn't forever, these places don't, they have to learn democracy and we have to help them.

and what he was doing in the financial markets. And he was going to let me write about both. And like an idiot, I wrote, because I was at the New Republic, I wrote for the New Republic a piece about the trip.

And it was not rude about him. It was what I thought of him. But I did make fun of his writing. Like all the theories. He has all these theories about how markets work. Reflexivity. Yeah, all that. This intellectualizing, which is, he is a jungle animal. And it's like, he layers on top of it a complicated explanation. And he was so vain about his philosophy that he was really irritated when someone didn't take it seriously. And that was it. Didn't want to see me again.

And that was the one, the huge one. I'll never make that mistake again. It was gold, the material. And no one else was going to get it. And no one did. No one wrote the book. The book never got written. And that book could have been a very valuable book. But I have that. I have those kind of things. I don't have... And I have... I think I'm not going to talk about what they are, but I think I know what the next two books are. I think I know what I'm about to go do. But I don't have anything... I don't have anything where I think, oh...

Oh, I wished I'd written... If I wanted to do it, I'd go do it, you know?

I sold Moneyball as two books. I thought the second book was going to be about the kids they drafted that year using algorithms. And I spent two years in the minor leagues chasing around after these guys. No go. Two years. I was in uniform as a Midland Rockhound in Midland, Texas, and kept shagging fly balls before the game. Like, I put a no go. It's just all notes under my office. Yeah, no go. So you know I always come with like four hours worth of questions, but...

What I'd like to do... How many did we not get to? Oh, three quarters. But it doesn't matter. I want to bring the house lights up. You never expect me to talk so much. No, my job is to give you a nudge and get out of the way. Okay. So I think I mostly accomplished what I wanted to. Yep. Why don't we bring up the house lights that are up and let's see if there are any questions from the audience. One back here? I'm not going to...

Just say your name and where you're from, because Michael's from California. We'll give him a Long Island geography lesson. Go ahead. Hi, Mr. Lewis. My name's Andrew Minacucci. Huge fan of yours. All your books and your podcast, Against the Rules, as well. I'm from just up the street, so very, very convenient commute.

I have a question for you related to Losers. They're wrote to any place but the White House, one of your, I believe, criminally underrated books. Can you expand upon your relationship with John McCain as well as what you think he means to American politics? What a question. Great question. I never get asked about John McCain. But if you ask me what the most influential thing I ever wrote was, I might say the first thing I wrote about John McCain.

I met John McCain, so I was assigned to cover the '96 presidential campaign for the New Republic. I was learning my craft. I'd written Liar's Poker, but I had not, I mean, I'd never written for a school newspaper. No English teacher ever thought I was worth more than a C. You know, I was just like, there was no, I had no background for this. And the New Republic at the time was filled with the most talented collection of writers I've ever seen in one place, and editors.

And the editor at the time was Andrew Sullivan. And Andrew shipped me off to just go do what I would do on the road. And I got in a car and I never got out of it. I was all over the country for the next nine months. And it quickly became clear that the '96 presidential campaign was the most boring presidential campaign in human history. And around Bob Dole and Bill Clinton were armies of communications people who were gonna make sure you never saw anything interesting.

And so I just started writing about what was interesting rather than what I was supposed to write about. And I started to pick up characters who resonated with me and with, in small groups of voters. So I flipped it. I made minor characters the main characters and put Dole and Clinton in the background. And it really worked as a series in the New Republic. And then it brought out as a book. But in the course of this,

I was in a terminal in Spartanburg, South Carolina at 11 o'clock at night, told the Dole campaign was going to land and pick me up. The question was why would they do that and why they would do that was McCain was in the same terminal. And I recognized him vaguely. It was just the two of us. And they came over and just said hi. And we started talking. And he was at that time discrediting.

He was one of the Keating Five. He'd been involved in the savings and loan scandal. He had barely won his reelection. And he was just different than any politician I met. He was like real.

And I just started getting interested in him. And then I learned his story about how he had been held in prison and his limbs had been broken during the Vietnam War, and that they were torturing him. This was the amazing thing. The Vietnamese were torturing John McCain to get him to accept early release. They were trying to let him go because his father was an admiral, and they thought they could undermine the morale of the American troops if they started letting the fancy people's kids out of prisoner of war camps.

And so he got beat up over and over because he refused to go home before the people who had been captured before him. So the piece that created-- I found it by just-- I was just hanging with him because I was interested in him. I didn't know where it was going to lead. He didn't really belong in a book about the '96 presidential campaign, except he was Dole's most popular surrogate. But that was-- that to one side.

He let slip that he has this relationship, and it came out very naturally. This guy, I was coming over to his office, this other guy was coming over to his office, named David Ifshin. And David Ifshin was a Vietnam War protester who went with Jane Fonda to Hanoi and piped anti-war propaganda into John McCain's cell.

And if she had later in life, things had changed since that time. And McCain had been celebrated for his war heroism. And if she had become kind of blacklisted by American politics because of his involvement, even though McCain kind of admired his conviction. And McCain saw if she ends up going to work for Clinton and then

Someone came out with a story about how if she had done this with Jane Fonda and Clinton was about to kind of release him and McCain got involved and told Clinton like you keep him on and I'm gonna get up and give a speech about this guy on the on the Senate floor about He's my friend. They developed a relationship and so I wrote the story about this relationship between the war protester and the war hero and it was 3,000 words in the New Republic which ends up in this book losers and

And McCain at that moment was sort of like untouchable by the journalists. Nobody was paying him much attention and he was a little disgraced. Overnight, everybody wanted to write the same story. And he got his relationship to the rest of the world, to the media in Washington, just changed. We became friends and he let me in on this process. He was like, that piece changed my life.

And it made it possible for him to go become the candidate he became. It was amazing watching what a little piece of journalism can do. And it was a very moving story. The wrinkle to it was when I wrote the story, Ifshin was dying. He was dying of cancer. He was on his deathbed. So Ifshin was telling me about what John McCain had done for him from his deathbed. And it was just powerful. And so I don't know what to say about this except that

I found in spending time with him that even in politics, you could find these pockets of authenticity. And if you respected them, they generated a different kind of response than most political writing. And I also found that like,

if you found what was good in someone in the political process, the readership wanted to hear it. They were so used to the kind of distance, the critical distance, which ends up being kind of antiseptic. You don't ever really know the person. And McCain, he wasn't really running for anything at the time. He certainly wasn't a presidential candidate. I could let the reader get close to him, and the reader really enjoyed that. And when he ran for president...

You know, he almost knocked off Bush the first time. I mean, they started out really well, but that campaign, he called me before and he said, I want you to come with me. Just be with me where you don't have to write about it if you don't want to write about it. But I want you to I want you to watch. I want to see you watch this process.

Up close, like in the middle of a campaign. And I said, how close can I get? He said, you have the other bedroom in my place in Washington. We'll actually live together and you just go wherever you... And we just had our first child and I could not go to my wife and say, guess what? I'm going off with John McCain for the next year. And he...

being old school, being a man of his generation, did not understand it. It was like, what? It's a kid? You know, he's a military guy too. Like they would breed and then go off on a ship for the next five years. And so he was just bewildered by the fact that I was not going to ride shotgun on his first presidential campaign because I had had this child.

And that ended up being kind of the end. I mean, at that point I became a little more distant friend. But it would have been fun to watch it. - For sure. Let's get another question.

I saw you today on Nicole Wallace's program. On the way? Could you believe I got here? I couldn't believe I was wondering if it would be canceled. Yeah. But you said one thing that had me fascinated. You said that most people don't know what government does. And you said nobody knows what the Department of Commerce does. What does it do?

Well, there's a book called The Fifth Risk, and there's a chapter in that book by me that explains it. But when you ask people who don't know, they kind of say commerce, business. Business, of course. So 80% of the budget is the National Oceanographic Administration. NOAA. NOAA. And 75% of that budget is the Weather Service.

So, what they do, weather prediction is at the center of the Department of Commerce, which is a little odd. But, I mean, the names, one of our problems in explaining our federal government is the names of the places don't actually describe the places.

Energy, commerce. Agriculture should be Department of Rural. It's rural. It keeps rural America afloat. Commerce should be the Department of Weather. That would be good. I didn't really oppose this idea of turning the Department of Defense into the Department of War. That's a little more on the nose.

Wasn't it the Department of War way back when? Energy is the Department of Science and Technology. That's what it is. It's amazing what is in the energy, but all the national labs. In the fifth risk, you tell the story that they want to privatize...

the Commerce Department, all the energy reporting, and then once you do that, where are you getting the data for all these people saying, "Well, I get the weather on my app. I don't... We don't need this." They get it from AccuWeather. But AccuWeather gets it from the National Weather Service. Right. That's right. So it was... What Trump tried to do the first time around is give the Department of Commerce to the AccuWeather CEO.

and let him have his way with it. And what would have happened was he would have created preferential access.

Probably to his own. So his own app would have gotten more. And you also describe in the book how much more accurate weather forecasting is getting, tornado warning. So it's like this is the thing about government. It's like when it does something right, people just, it's like, it's the way you treat your parents. When they're good parents, you don't even notice. They get no credit. It's when they screw up that you notice. And that's the relationship we have with our government. We're like a 14-year-old boy and our government is our mother.

mother. That's sort of how mature our relationship is. But the natural weather, what they have done, if you go back and talk to a weatherman who's been doing it for 50 years, he kind of say like, you know, what I used to do is like wake up in the morning, go outside and say, sunny. It could be sunny for a while. You know, that they could do almost nothing, you know, out a day or two kind of thing.

of thing. These accurate forecasts out seven days, being able to figure out which way a hurricane's going, getting better tornado prediction, all this stuff is huge achievement with huge effects. It really makes all our lives and has a big effect on commerce too, right? On business.

Your plane, did you remember when you were flying as a kid and the plane was just always bumping around? Again, it's not doing that nearly as much because the airlines have better data from the National Weather Service about what's going on up in the, with the current. So,

That happens. And nobody says, wow, cool, they did that. It's all taken for granted. It's all taken for granted. Now, what... The dystopia is, like, it gets privatized and Barry gets the...

the premium gold or platinum or whatever it is, tornado forecast, and I get the silver forecast. So I'm in my house when it comes through and you aren't. It becomes a real matter of equity if we're getting different. I mean, it seems like that should be a public good. Makes plenty of sense. Balcony, let's get a question up top. Here we are. Fire away. Fire away.

So first of all, you talked about the '96 campaign. And just so you know, I listened to some of your podcasts from that as well. You were on This American Life as well. I don't know if you remember that. Back in '90s? Oh, so that's funny. Ira Glass was just starting This American Life when I was doing that. And he called and said, could you just-- I mean, this was back when they were pretty low budget. I would just go, as an episode, go read the New Republic stuff.

So I'm like four or five of these things are early episodes of this American life. And he became a good close friend through that. But yes, so I've never listened to them, but I remember reading them. You did a phenomenal job. You should listen to them again and maybe compile them. They were great. You talked about, besides from McCain, that story you relayed, you did something about...

You did a lot about Dole, and you also did something about, I don't know, some other guy in business who... It was a proto-Trump. His name was Maury Taylor, and he was the businessman who was running to make government... Put up his own money. He spent $7 million getting 7,000 votes in New Hampshire and Iowa.

And he was in many ways the most reasonable candidate. He was like, when you gave everybody what he stood for, everybody kind of agreed and then they saw him and freaked because he did none of the artifice of the politician. But he was great fun. I remember him, well, so this is another moment. The New Republic for a moment thought, what the hell is he doing? He's turning Maury Taylor into the main character of our 96th presidential campaign coverage. And I did. He was the main character of that story. But it was, I went out with him.

just to see what the hell was going on. He was in Iowa, and he had three-hour...

Three huge RVs with speakers on the front. He had Blair Bruce Springsteen as he went into town. And he had kegs of beer on the back. And he'd throw a party in every town. But the morning I was with him, he rolls into the biggest public school in Iowa. I can't remember where it was, Ames or somewhere. And they've rolled out, they've made all the students go to the auditorium. It's huge.

To hear the presidential candidate. And Maury's been a presidential candidate for about, at that point, like four weeks. And before that, he was at the same time CEO of Titan Tire and Wheel, a Midwestern tire company, and had no experience or knowledge of politics. He didn't know anything, except he knew about life. He was like a great dad, but he didn't know anything.

And so he gets up. I don't know what they're expecting, but it's sort of like the civics lesson for the day. And there are a thousand kids out there, and they're all asleep because it's 8 in the morning. He comes bursting through the doors, and he looks up, and the first thing he goes is, like, kid in the pink hair, in my day we used to get rid of the weirdos. And the kid goes, oh, you know, and they're all alert. And he goes, and then he says, I want someone here to tell me what the most important thing in life is.

And you could see all the teachers getting a little uncomfortable, but they're hoping he's going to say, you know, love, family, country, something.

And they're guessing these things, and they're guessing what they think a presidential candidate would say. And he's, "Nah, nah, that's not the, you guys don't know anything." And he reaches into his pocket and he pulls out a huge wad of $100 bills. Money, this is the most important thing in life. And you can see all the teachers going, "Oh my God." And he had me. At that moment, he had me. I said, "Wherever this guy goes, I want to see what happens."

$7 million for $7,000. Yeah, and he still bothers me. I mean, he still calls me all the time to tell me why I need to love Trump. He loves Trump. To tell me why I'm wrong. Like, this thing drives him crazy. It's like, government doesn't do anything good. You know, he's like, he's that kind of Republican. Well, you know, there are a lot of people who have that

sort of philosophy ingrained in them since, you know, Reagan. What makes this book so interesting is how you're not taking a partisan side left or right. No. You're not talking politics that's

Here are the people who do the people's business with your taxpayer dollars. I love the story about the guy who is the tax collector. There's a line in the book that stuns me. There's 6 million people who are entitled to the earned tax credit that don't apply. Yep.

And then there's something like 25,000 people who've made more than a million dollars that haven't filed their taxes since 2017.

How come we're not trying to help the people who are owed this credit and collect from the people who can't be bothered to pay taxes? That doesn't seem partisan. That just seems administratively competent. That's right. No, no. The whole point, if you'd asked me what the point of the thing was when we started, it was just I know they're great stories and I'm going to use these writers to demonstrate it isn't me. It's like these stories are there and they should be told. That was it.

after the fact, there is a purpose to it. And the purpose is you can have your prejudice about the government. You can hold the stereotype of the lazy, indolent, nine to five, doesn't care about anything, milking you, waste, fraud, abuse, deep state, whatever it is you think. But you're not allowed to have it without knowing this. If you want to read these stories and still think that, okay.

But you've got to know, you've got to hear these stories. And if you hear these stories, some part of you will think, I shouldn't really think that. That's dumb. It's more complicated than that. Sure, there are problems with the government. Sure, there are things that need to be fixed. Sure, and a lot of it is like the way we administer, the situation we put them in.

But there are unbelievable people here. They are in many ways the best among us. They're here, they're there to serve. And they found some purpose. And in that purpose, they found a purpose in life. They've learned how to lead their lives in a very meaningful way. And for us to go after them as if they're enemies is, it's very damning about us. And that's kind of what we're trying to get across.

It's 9:05. Is that a spot where we should... I think that's where we say goodbye. Let's wrap it up. Thank you so much, everybody. Let's hear it for Michael Lewis.

Thank you.

And it's just every bit as magical as you would imagine. Every time he comes into town and I have an opportunity to sit down and interview him, I jump at it. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I do. Special thanks to the folks at the Main Street Theater in Port Washington, especially Karen for allowing me to put this together. It was really a great time.

Let's talk about.

We'll be right back.

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