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

Barry speaks with bestselling author and financial journalist Michael Lewis, live, from the Landmark Theater in Port Washington, NY. The wide-ranging, 90-minute conversation covered the full arc of his career, from “Liar’s Poker” to this year’s “Who is Government.” The informative – and at times hilarious – conversation included his experiences turning Moneyball into a film (including on-set hijinks from Brad Pitt), how his career as a writer evolved, and what he is working on next. You DO NOT want to miss this fun, rollicking live episode of Masters in Business. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At KKR, we've spent 50 years understanding what matters to our clients and companies. From pioneering private equity to investing across credit, real assets, insurance and sports, KKR has built the experience to navigate complexity, the judgment to recognize opportunity, and the conviction to create lasting value. Because when people and institutions are counting on us, understanding what matters isn't just important, it's everything. KKR, understanding what matters. Visit kkr.com/whatmatters.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 1:13Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

• 2:11Barry Ritholtz?

  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, 10 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 in 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

• 2:55Barry Ritholtz?

  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

• 3:33Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 4:01Barry Ritholtz?

  Welcome, welcome, Michael.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 4:05Barry Ritholtz?

  Welcome to the north shore of Long Island, to Gatsby Long Island.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  I've seen none of it. It was dark and rainy.

• 4:13Barry Ritholtz?

  So, let's, let's start out, how are you doing? How's the book tour going? People called in saying...

• 4:19Speaker 04

  It's called, "Who is Government?"

• 4:20Barry Ritholtz?

  "Who is Government?"

• 4:21Speaker 04

  You said, "What is government?"

• 4:22Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah, same thing. "Who is government?"

• 4:24Speaker 04

  And, and it's an odd, it's an odd, so they're, if we're gonna be honest here...

• 4:29Barry Ritholtz?

  Sure.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  They're books and they're book-like objects. And this is closer to a book-like object, because I didn't write the whole thing. I wrote, I wrote a third of it. I, I love it, but I, but I got, I, I am, I have six other writers that I hired to do this with me.

• 4:44Barry Ritholtz?

  So...

• 4:44Speaker 04

  So, you, I'm answering, this is a way of answering your question. The book tours, it's normally my least favorite part of what I do for a living. It's, and, and I don't know why that is. I just don't...

• 4:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Because it's a slog?

• 4:56Speaker 04

  It's, it's, I don't like being on TV, but you gotta do that. I don't, the, the, the business of presenting yourself this way is so different from the business of writing the book, that it's jarring in, in the first place. And then, the worst thing happens, you start to like it. And, and then you get, you get, going back in to like, being a writer, is jarring. But, but the, the thing that is usually a problem is that, you know, you're kinda on the line. You know, it's your book, it's just, you're out there alone. Now, if people say it sucks, I can just say it's the other people who are responsible. And so, and so I feel, it's kinda, it's kind of, it's kind of a pleasure, this one, compared to the others, going out and talking about it.

• 5:37Barry Ritholtz?

  So, I've only seen you with some of the other authors, once or twice. You were on some show with Kamau Bell, and I don't think you were, I haven't seen you with any of the other co-authors.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Did you see the, did you see, it was Morning Joe with Kamau Bell?

• 5:50Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Alright, so Kamau Bell is a six foot, five inch, three hundred, two hundred and fifty pound, black man.

• 5:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  And, and he shows up at Morning Joe, in a sweatshirt that says, "Immigrants aren't criminals, but the president is one." And, and, and, and, and they say, they say, you can't wear that on TV. Joe is not there, he's remote. And so they, they try to find something that will fit Kamau Bell. Nothing will fit Kamau Bell.

• 6:19Barry Ritholtz?

  Is that why it was Inside Out? Is that what he did?

• 6:21Speaker 04

  No, what he did, no, it gets worse than that. They then tried to get him to flip it around, and it looked ridiculous. Then they put it right side, the right side out again, and they put black tape over just the bottom part of that. And then, when they, by the time we got, he got finished, we'd lost our segment. They, they, 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, you know, we can't figure out what to do with a sweatshirt. And Joe interceded and said, have him wear the sweatshirt, he can, make sure everybody can read it, and put him on. And, but what was really weird about it is that though Joe was comfortable making that statement on his, on his show, none of the authorities in the actual studio were.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  And so they framed Kamau, it's like this giant head, and you can't see anything. And the whole time he's talking, he keeps going, he goes, he's going like this with a sweatshirt.

• 7:14Barry Ritholtz?

  I saw that.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  Did you see that?

• 7:15Barry Ritholtz?

  Yes.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, it's incredibly distracting. I was trying to have a conversation, and he's, 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. Um, but most of the, most of the other stuff, the TV stuff, I've had to do on my own.

• 7:37Barry Ritholtz?

  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, because I'm...

• 7:45Speaker 04

  That are related to this.

• 7:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, exactly, that's what I'm teeing up. Um, don't get ahead of me.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  Just trying to help.

• 7:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Um, so The Premonition was how the US really did a mediocre job during the pandemic. You focused on charity dean, and the pandemic emergency response team, and the mess they had to clean up. I'm curious how that book led to The Fifth Risk, which was the book that was the predecessor to this.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  So... I'm gonna have to help you.

• 8:15Barry Ritholtz?

  Go ahead.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  The fifth risk is before this, before the, before the premonition. It goes fifth risk, premonition, this.

• 8:22Barry Ritholtz?

  Then, uh, withdrawn.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:26Barry Ritholtz?

  So the fifth risk is the predecessor book to this.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 8:30Barry Ritholtz?

  How did that lead to this book?

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that, there we go. Sorry.

• 8:33Barry Ritholtz?

  I got the order wrong.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, sorry about that. And, 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.

• 8:42Barry Ritholtz?

  By the way, wouldn't be the first time you've embarrassed me in public. And we, we could save that conversation for later, but.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:50Barry Ritholtz?

  How, how did those books lead to this book?

• 8:52Speaker 04

  So this is how it happens. It's really simple and it is all, none, it all seems worthy from a distance, like I have some great political or social purpose. In fact, it's all literary opportunism. Trump is elected the first time. Trump fires a day after his election, his transition team. And Enterprise, I didn't know existed until I 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 a thousand 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.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  And, uh, Trump fired the people who are gonna 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, that, 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 the, that book, uh, it was, it was a serious, again, it was more of a book-like object. It was three long Vanity Fair pieces plus a piece. Uh, that, so it just happened to work as that when you glued them all together.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  But I picked intentionally the departments that nobody paid any attention to. So not state or treasury or anything like that. I picked, I, commerce, agriculture, and energy. Ones where if I turned to my neighbors in Berkeley, all of whom have, are inflicting their political opinions upon me constantly, if I say, what does the commerce department do, they, 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?

• 10:57Barry Ritholtz?

  Sure.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  But I don't want, you got, I don't want to get, you got, your train is on track. And I don't want to interrupt.

• 11:03Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, you're, you're just skipping the best part of how did you get access to all these people? You kind of left out if there's this giant transition team that was supposed to be for the incoming Trump administration. And he fired them all. How did, how did you get access?

• 11:19Speaker 04

  He fired the ones who were going in to listen to the briefing.

• 11:22Barry Ritholtz?

  So you just.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  The briefings were still there in some ways, like in some places, like the turkey sandwiches were still moldering. And you know that they had prepared, they'd figured out what drinks they might want. It was all, all set up.

• 11:32Barry Ritholtz?

  So you reach out to who?

• 11:33Speaker 04

  I reach out to, in the first place, people inside the energy department. I, I got some names of officials in the energy department. Started with the outgoing Obama people, but quickly got into the civil service because the civil service does the briefings. Uh, I mean, they're the ones who are, I mean, in the energy department, for example, running a 50 billion dollar cleanup 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's, there are all these things, there's a nuclear arsenal. I went and, I went and met with the people who managed the nuclear arsenal, arsenal. And they couldn't tell me that there was classified stuff, but they could tell me a lot. And their attitude was, we're so grateful someone's come to listen.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Like, like we did all this work to like explain how it all works and, and, and I started with energy, but not, not, I, you know, it could have gone anywhere, but I started with energy because I don't know if you remember, but Rick Perry was.

• 12:31Barry Ritholtz?

  Oops.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  Oops, was Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Energy. Cause he, cause he, I mean, in Trump's mind, it's like, looks like oil, Texas.

• 12:40Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  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 gonna go be running this place when you said it shouldn't exist.

• 12:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Tough first day.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  But he had no idea what was in it. And the minute he found out what was in it, he went to the 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 like, this is the reductio ad absurdum of this ignorance. And the pieces, the pieces really worked. Like, 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. Like, people who, I was not, I did not have a picture in my head of who the federal employee was. What I was meeting was very different from what I had imagined. And so, the book comes out. It sells half a million copies, and it's glued together Vanity Fair articles, which

• 13:37Speaker 04

  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, an afterword 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.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  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 gonna pick one of these people. So, who? Now, when I had this problem, Trump had then shut down the government. It was the first, it was a government shutdown in 18 and 19, early 2019. And he had furloughed... Sixty percent of the civilian workforce, sent them home as inessential workers who, without pay. So I got, there is an organization in Washington called the Partnership for Public Service that tries and fails over and over to get positive attention shined upon these federal workers.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  And they give an award called the Sammy Award to people who do something good in the civil service. It's been going on for, this has been going on for two decades and still nobody pays it any attention. But there've been lots of nominations for those awards, thousands of them. So I cross-referenced, like, anybody who's been nominated for a Sammy, and that was like, eight thousand people or something, with who's been furloughed. And the list came back and it was like, five thousand, three, it was some huge list. And 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 wanna 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.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  Allen, I go see him, he is the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Division. He's been at it for thirty something years, and he pretty quickly tells me that like, Americans have this unbelievable ability to get lost at sea, to just like, we just do it better than anybody else. And, and, and it's, and so the Coast Guard Search and Rescue is constantly occupied. He, he, he figures out, some, a few years into his career, he witnesses a tragedy. He's, he's out in the field, he's at the Chesapeake Bay Station, a storm, 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.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  And it's got a, a woman who was Art's wife's age, and a little girl who was his daughter's age. And they're, they, they know because they know when the storm kicked up, when the boat likely capsized, they were on a sailboat. And so they know, and they know where they were when they capsized, kinda. But what they don't know, presuming that they're on, on the upside-down boat, is how that upside-down sailboat drifts at sea.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  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 gonna 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 yellow newspaper article from the Norfolk

• 17:37Speaker 04

  whatever about this mother and child, and 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 gonna happen again." So he starts studying how objects drift and throwing them into the Long Island Sound. He lives in Connecticut. And he classifies a couple of hundred objects. The results, and reduces their drift patterns to mathematical formula. 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

• 18:16Speaker 04

  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 fat man at sea. That's a thing. Fat guys floating at sea. He actually said, "Large and smaller people." He had fat guy at sea. 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. It's almost impossible.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  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 gonna swallow him, but that's it. And it's really a huge advantage to have that fat. And they pluck him out, and he's sort of like, kinda cool. It's like, he's not panicked or anything, he's just floating at sea. But they, they pull him out, and there are all these articles about... Like how great the search and rescue people are who pulled him out of the sea. No one asks how they find him. The Coast Guard themselves are shocked like how this, how well this worked. And this goes on. I mean, I taught, interviewed another fat guy who fell off another boat in, in, in the Pacific. And I, who was saved miraculously after like eight hours.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  And I said, like, how do you think they found you? And he said, what, 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 paid, had paid any attention to this dude and what he had done. So I spent a few days with him, listening to the, I mean, the whole intellectual stuff about how, what he did, how he did what he did, it was riveting. But the motive, like this, I'm not gonna 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.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  Uh, but we don't even pay, we pay him no attention. So I gather my stuff to go write my, the end of my book. And, and I'm on my way back to the airport and he, 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've been, I, I know I had said something when I called him. But I said, and he said, he said, man, he said, I just talked to my son. He says, like, you've published books and like one of the books became movie, a movie? And he goes, are you gonna, are you gonna write about this? Are you gonna 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?

• 21:10Speaker 04

  He said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift. And, and, and, and this is, this, this, this is your, one, inessential worker. Two, 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 gonna come back focused on the people. And, uh, and when I, I was on a hiking trail with David Shipley, who was once, until recently, the opinion editor of the Washington Post. And he had space and he had money. And his, and we could write as long as we wanted in his pages, he said.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  I said, let me, I'm worried if I go do this, it'll just be either, oh, this is Michael Lewis's take on the federal government, or I made it up, or whatever. Like, whatever, whenever, people don't wanna hear the message. It's very easy to come after the writer and try to undermine the whatevers in the

• 22:12Barry Ritholtz?

  Is that why you picked six other writers?

• 22:14Speaker 04

  That's what I did.

• 22:15Barry Ritholtz?

  To shield the accusation of bias?

• 22:17Speaker 04

  And also to get a bit, little bit of a bigger kind of sample. Like, not gonna tell them what to do. I didn't even tell them why I, what, what I was gonna do. And I've done two of these big profiles in here, and the material is as good as ever. Uh, but, I said, we're just gonna, you just go into the federal government and wander around and find a story. And six out of the, five out of the six, other six, did much of what, basically what I did. They found unbelievable character studies, individuals doing things that were just, just shocked them. One, he's, he's a wonderful writer. John Lanchester, English writer, decided instead that his character was the consumer price index, which is a challenge, uh, but he actually makes it work. It's, cause it is an amazing achievement.

• 23:02Speaker 04

  But he, he writes, so he, he went off the reservation a bit.

• 23:05Barry Ritholtz?

  I'll push back on the characterization when we come to that chapter.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:10Barry Ritholtz?

  Cause I have a different spin on that.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 23:12Barry Ritholtz?

  But, but let's talk about some of the chapters in here, starting with Ronald Walters of the National Cemetery.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  I can't start with myself.

• 23:21Barry Ritholtz?

  You want to start that way?

• 23:22Speaker 04

  I mean, other people's, I edited it, but other people, other people, I give you such a sh- I will tell you-

• 23:28Barry Ritholtz?

  So, you want to start with the coal mines? Let's start with the coal mine.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  No, no, no, I don't want to, I've already muscled year-round too much.

• 23:34Barry Ritholtz?

  Feel free to muscle.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  I'm the fish and you're the fisherman.

• 23:37Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  You're supposed to be landing me. But, but it's, Ronald Walters, so, this is the one, the one writer who came to me after I had employed them all and said, "Is there anything on your cutting room floor that you would like to have written about that you didn't write?" I said, "Well, it's funny you say." But, yes, it's Ronald Walters. Casey Sep, who's a wonderful New Yorker writer, she, 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, but, and we became friends. Ronald Walters, this, I'll be brief, because I didn't get to know him, you know, I'm just read, I'm reading it like you.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  But, what had 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 cemetery's where we bury veterans. And there are like fifty-five of these things around the country, like four million veterans are buried in them. They're burying them, it's 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.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  The consumers in this case were the loved ones of the people who were being buried. And he took it from, and we know this because the University of Michigan measures customer satisfaction across the society. It's all institute, big institutions, not just, it's private sector, but also government agencies. And it was kind of like most of the government agencies, kind of high sixties. It was like a mediocre thing. And in a period of a decade, Ronald Walters took it to being not just the enterprise in the United States government that had the highest customer satisfaction, but the enterprise in the entire country, more than Costco, more than Amazon or FedEx or the other ones that people like.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  It, and he, and he never, no one knew his name. No one knew who, how he did it or why. And I had, when I was fiddling around with picking someone to write the afterward for the Fifth Risk, I'd heard his story and I almost, I, I tried calling and actually they didn't even return my calls. The veteran in his administration wouldn't talk to me. So, um, so it was there and I said, go, go find that out about that. And so she writes about how he did what he did.

• 26:17Barry Ritholtz?

  It's an, it's an absolutely beautiful chapter. It actually made me cry.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  Did it?

• 26:21Barry Ritholtz?

  Only chapter in the book that, that brings tears to your eyes.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  At K K R, we've spent 50 years understanding what matters to our clients and companies. From pioneering private equity to investing across credit, real assets, insurance and sports. K K R has built the experience to navigate complexity, the judgment to recognize opportunity and the conviction to create lasting value. Because when people and institutions are counting on us, understanding what matters isn't just important, it's everything. K K R, understanding what matters. Visit K K R dot com slash what matters.

• 26:56Speaker 05

  Your team is on a deadline, but moving all your enterprise data will take time your business simply doesn't have. IBM technology lets AI work with your data where it already lives. With an open hybrid cloud approach designed to build on your existing investments. It's another way IBM helps you put your data to work. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Visit I B M dot com to learn more.

• 27:25Barry Ritholtz?

  Let's talk about coal mining and how dangerous it is. Let's talk about your first chapter.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  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 is number two for me. I've done R. Allen, I've done the agencies, I'm gonna go pick another person. So I went back to kind of 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've been nominated for the award, it just said

• 28:15Speaker 04

  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. 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 Marx, solved 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.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Occupation's so dangerous that it was more dangerous being in a coal mine than being in the Vietnam War. That's how, that's how dangerous it was. And it's, 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, or, so you know, there's some, 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 R. Allen, he lives in Pittsburgh, I call him, I coal-call him. In this case, he knew who I was. He'd read Moneyball, and it turned out that he thought of himself as moneyballing coal

• 29:41Speaker 04

  mines, but that's a whole separate thing. But, but, he...

• 29:50Speaker 04

  He said, I say, I just wanna hear, I just wanna hear your story. Like, give me the, the ten minute version. I'm gonna give you the five minutes of the ten minute version, because it hooked me. He says, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a professor at the university. And I thought, oh, like, my whole movie is different. I know, I don't know what the movie is, but this, this not, and I thought, oh, my interest just went, cool. And then he started to tell me, he says, if you looked at us a little bit, you'd find my dad was kinda famous. Robert Marks was the name. And Robert Marks had been brought, brought to Princeton without a PhD to help Princeton. He had devised a mechanism for stress testing.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  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, 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 gonna crack. And Robert Mark, one day, was teaching an engineering class at Princeton. When an undergraduate walks in from an art history class and says, this device you have, could you use it to like, figure out what's holding Gothic cathedrals up? We, cause we just, they just told us that no one understands how these, the roofs of Gothic cathedrals don't collapse. There's no records left by the builders, then they're built over a century.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  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 fifteen minutes I'm talking to him. He says, so that was my dad. He said, I, I had a problem with my dad's life. It was the Vietnam War. I got kind of radicalized. I thought, I, I saw, it wasn't Princeton kids who were fighting and dying. And that really bothered me. And he said, uh, I, he, he said, he started throwing words around the house like bourgeois. And, and pretty soon he said, I'm not, he could have gone to Harvard or Princeton. I'm not gonna do that, I'm gonna go join the working class. So he breaks with his dad.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Big break. He goes on the road. Uh, 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. That he sees how dangerous it is. He crawls out of the mine, goes and gets a PhD, undergraduate and a PhD at Penn State in, in rock engineering. And begins the process of figuring out. There's all this data that the US government has collected on, they've, they've observed the problem, it's a bit like the CDC does with the disease, that they've observed the

• 32:44Speaker 04

  problem without actually trying to stop the problem. So they have 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, uh, he does give me all the details of his work, but, and, and I stop him and I say, "Oh, so you rebelled against your dad and then you just went and had your dad's career? He was, he figured out how to keep, what was keeping up the roofs of Gothic cathedrals and you figured out how to keep the roofs 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, "Bullshit." You know, like I'm calling, you know, and I have nothing to, I had nothing to, what

• 33:28Speaker 04

  I did had nothing to do with my father's career. I, we have, we have nothing in common, completely different thing. If that's your theory, like, go away, kind of thing. And I said, "It just seems a natural observation, right?" So, so, two things. Um, when I, I went and spent a lot of time with him. We rolled around West Virginia. He took me into coal mines. And he doesn't mention till like the third day, that, "Oh, you know, it was funny, were you reconciled, when did, 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, um, the federal government thought the National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down."

• 34:13Speaker 04

  This was in the year 2000. One of the towers was subsiding faster than the other. And, uh, 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, how it was, what was gonna 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 got a story. I mean, it's just

• 34:54Speaker 04

  like that, and, and so Art Allen had the Yellow Wing newspaper, Christopher Marx had the, had the dad. I met, but I gotta 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, that this instrument, the federal government, is filled with all of, all this purpose, all these things that, that, it's where the problems of the private sector doesn't want to deal with go. You know, there, it's like, there's no money to be made in it, but we've decided as a society, we want to address it. That's where, that's where we, that's what we use to address it. Who, who is attracted to these problems? People who have a particular interest

• 35:37Speaker 04

  in this problem for whatever reason. And that quality, like caring about the problem, it's outside yourself, I'm gonna fix the problem, tends to come from a deep place. And that's where literature comes from. You know, it's the, the motives of the characters are, are, are 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.

• 36:07Barry Ritholtz?

  So, 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."

• 36:36Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 36:37Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so expound on that a bit.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  You want the three minute or the five minute version?

• 36:42Barry Ritholtz?

  Whatever you're comfortable with.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  All right. I mean, this goes back to who I am. I mean, I'm basically, I'm in New, I grew up in New Orleans, was raised to be a decorative object. I was raised to-

• 36:53Barry Ritholtz?

  What does that mean?

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Not useful.

• 36:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  Like, like, nobody around me did anything useful and no one planned to.

• 36:59Barry Ritholtz?

  And hence you end up on Wall Street.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  No, yeah, well, that's funny, but, but, but, th- 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. Uh, but it's, but yes, there's a lot of New Orleans make their way to Wall Street. They do quite well on Wall Street. You get the gift of gab, kinda thing. But, um, you learn to tell a story, which is very valuable in the financial markets and also very valuable to writers. Uh, but I, I'm basically lazy. Like, that is true. Um, you know, it's, it's, 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.

• 37:45Barry Ritholtz?

  You, you've written fourteen books. How is that lazy?

• 37:48Speaker 04

  So, so, so, this is, I'm, I'm not lying. This is, this, I'm telling you the truth. You just have to figure out, you gotta make sense of it.

• 37:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  My father, my fa- this is God's truth. My father, when I, from the age of about seven to the age of when I was eighteen, had me persuaded that there was Latin, we had a coat of arms, Louis, Louis, 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, that, he was like, "Don't try, don't, don't sweat it. You're working too hard." It was the, it was, this is the environment I was raised in, and I took to it.

• 38:37Barry Ritholtz?

  But you didn't.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  But I did, up to a point.

• 38:41Barry Ritholtz?

  Every book you've written, you embed yourself in unfamiliar places.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  It's also true, no, it's true. It's, I'm curious. I got that too. I'm actually curious. I see something and I want to know about it. And, and it happens a lot. It just happens a lot. And so, it's with pleasure, I find, I pursue a curiosity. I ask, I curious, 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 trouble.

• 39:13Barry Ritholtz?

  But most people have that thought and go, huh, who knows? And they find. And you, you spend, you spend weeks and weeks and years.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  So, so, so, it is not, it is true that I do the work. It is true, I eventually do the work, but I do from a place of deep laziness. It's deep, it's like, that it is, I get curious, I start to get involved, I realize, oh my God, this is, look at this story. And it is, it is got to, it really does have to rise to the level in my mind, that this story is so important. And it's delusional, like, is any story that important? But it's, the story is so important, that I have an obligation to do it. So now, I, 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, then I forget about the laziness and I do the work.

• 40:06Barry Ritholtz?

  So, 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.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  So, this is incredibly lucky thing.

• 40:16Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay, so, I'll give you that, this one's lucky. Liar's Poker, you're there early in the rise of Wall Street.

• 40:24Speaker 04

  I was working there.

• 40:25Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay, you were working. Moneyball, no one had any idea what was going on with Sabre Metrics 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.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  A year, that was kind of cool. That was a year before.

• 40:42Barry Ritholtz?

  All right, but you know, after the...

• 40:43Speaker 04

  But that was also, I didn't know that was happening.

• 40:44Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, 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.

• 41:07Speaker 04

  I think it is. I, I mean, in that, you know, you and I, so he's just published a book too. How not to invest. It's really good. And, uh, and you, you say eighteen different ways in the course of this book. How skeptical you are of the ability to predict the future.

• 41:26Barry Ritholtz?

  Sure.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  I am too.

• 41:28Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  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 stock market's going to be.

• 41:35Barry Ritholtz?

  But you're always skating to where the puck's gonna be. Explain that.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  It's maybe, I think the puck is just coming to where I happen to be. That, that, that, so, so I don't think, I, I really think it, Sam Bankman Fried lands on my front porch. After someone asked me to just interview him and evaluate him. From, I didn't go looking for him. He walked up and I said, this is interesting, I'm gonna follow, I'm just gonna follow him around. Um, this, I had, I had this nagging sense that I've 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, uh, that, I mean, I had no idea that Trump was gonna do what he's done to the government, no, none.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  I, I did have a sense like he didn't care about it, that he was gonna just completely try to gut it. I had no sense. Uh, so, in every case, I know the, how much accident there was. I will say, if I were trying to make the case that I have, I know something that other people don't, or there's something about me that leads to being a little ahead of the curve. I'd always say that the best, the closest thing to the best way to predict the future is just pay attention to the present. That you pay closer attention to the present than other people are. You, you see, it's, the, the, the future is there. And so, it is, uh, I, I do pay attention to the present. I observe. And, and, and I also, so this gets back to the laziness.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  Um, that, that when you're lazy, it's an, it's not necessarily a bad thing to be a little lazy. Amos Tversky, Amos Tversky, my character in The Undoing Project, had a great line, which I, which, which I tell every kid who asks for advice. I just repeat it. He says, people waste years of their lives not being willing to waste hours of their lives. That people get so worked up about making, being busy, moving their career up, they don't let anything, they don't let things in. They, they're like always achieving. And if you just back away and let the world come into you,

• 43:41Speaker 04

  it's, that's a helpful approach to a writer. Also, if, if you're a little lazy, like you would rather basically not be doing anything, it takes a level of interest to move you. 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.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  Before I sit down and bother to put a word on the page, I've gotten so, I've had to get so excited about it, to offset the natural tendency not to do anything. And so that it's, it's like, the material is leaping over higher hurdles, to get to the place with me that I want to write about it. So maybe that's, that has something to do with this.

• 44:23Barry Ritholtz?

  Can, can I float a theory to you?

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Sure, I think it's gonna be [BLEEP], you can do it.

• 44:28Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, well, Malcolm Gladwell's glad, grand unified theory of Michael Lewis books is biblical allegories.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:36Barry Ritholtz?

  That's [BLEEP].

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, that is [BLEEP].

• 44:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Right. Daniel and the Lions, then, is Liar's Poker, The Blind Side is Good Samaritan, David and Goliath, Moneyball. Like, you're not doing biblical allegories.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  No. I mean, you can, the truth is, you can find almost any, you can map almost any story onto the Bible.

• 44:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:54Barry Ritholtz?

  But, but here's what's not [BLEEP], 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. That's, those are the same characters, but every...

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Who's that character in Liar's Poker?

• 45:35Barry Ritholtz?

  You.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  You think that's me?

• 45:37Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, you show flashes of you.

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:40Barry Ritholtz?

  It was your first book, so we'll cut you a little slack.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:43Barry Ritholtz?

  But, you know, in fact, let's talk about Liar's Poker.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, so...

• 45:48Barry Ritholtz?

  So we, we, we did a podcast on the 30th anniversary.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:52Barry Ritholtz?

  You had to go reread it, not just reread the book, but read it out loud for the audio version.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I hadn't reread it since I wrote it.

• 45:59Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so first, what was that experience like?

• 46:02Speaker 04

  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 a, I was just, I was really raw.

• 46:17Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 46:26Speaker 04

  But you know, it's funny.

• 46:27Barry Ritholtz?

  And you were 26, so you could cut yourself some slack.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  Some things I noticed. One is there was just general infelicity, but I noticed that whenever I thought I was being funny, I wasn't funny. And whenever I didn't, I was. Like, oh, that's funny, but I didn't know it was funny. You know, it was bad, it was embarrassing. You know, there was, I was, I thought, there were lines that were clearly like designed to get people to laugh, and then I shouldn't have been doing it. And there were structures, so it was, but, but, I mean, I'm feeling finally towards it. It got my, it launched my career.

• 47:00Barry Ritholtz?

  And let me also point out.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  I'm still stuck on your theory.

• 47:03Barry Ritholtz?

  So, but let me just point out that you wrote that book while you were working full-time at Solomon Brothers. You were doing this nights and weekends, right? At least that's when you started sketching this. This wasn't Michael Lewis, the full-time writer.

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 47:17Barry Ritholtz?

  Right? So, so when you look back at that, you gotta give yourself a little, hey, not bad for a first effort.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  No, no, no, it's fine. It's not bad for a first book. I agree. It's not bad for a first book. But the, when I think about, your description of what of my books.

• 47:32Barry Ritholtz?

  The quirky outsider.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  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. He is, yes, he's got, we're all quirky. Like underneath, we all have little things, things going on that are.

• 47:47Barry Ritholtz?

  We're all above average, is that what you're saying?

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Or a little, we all have stuff, but.

• 47:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Your characters have a lot of stuff.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  Mike, sometimes they have a lot of stuff. But the, the, the thing, what I think of, I think of it as more as. I get excited by someone who could teach me. And all my characters are are teaching me something about the world. And now, the kind of person who's teaching you something about the 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.

• 48:29Barry Ritholtz?

  Flash boys.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  Flash boys. That he is the least quirky person who ever carried a book. He is normal. He's like as normal as they 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. But.

• 48:49Barry Ritholtz?

  And figures out a way around it.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  And figures out, yes, figures out.

• 48:53Barry Ritholtz?

  He's the least quirky of all your characters. But let's stick with Moneyball.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  But.

• 48:58Barry Ritholtz?

  How did you gain access to the A's? How did they, you know, grant you keys to the kingdom?

• 49:04Speaker 04

  This often happens, too, that you have a question. And the question is equally interesting to the subject. So I called Billy Bean, went and go see him. I said, I just, look, it doesn't make any sense. You're spending one-fifth 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. The sport, 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.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  And it got more and more interesting, and I disguised how interesting I was. And when I just divulged, you know, 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 but there was, and I had found ways to insinuate myself into into their lives. I mean. This is like, how do you make yourself, how you, 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, they forget you're there. Kind of hang around. So that was the trick there. You know when that book, did I ever tell, have I told you when that book became a book?

• 50:26Barry Ritholtz?

  No.

• 50:26Speaker 04

  Like when I came home at 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, I was, I was in the locker room of the Oakland A's interviewing, telling the players. I was interviewing the players one by one and telling them what, that, why they were, they were playing first base, or why they were the leadoff hitter. They, they, no idea. 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 just not, they won't handle it well. And, and, but the players were really interested. So I was, they, I was welcoming the clubhouse.

• 51:07Speaker 04

  And, and they were coming out of the showers. I was waiting for my guy to talk to them. And I, for the first time, I saw the Oakland A's naked. And it was such a disgusting sight. It was, it was, it was like, it was just, I mean.

• 51:21Barry Ritholtz?

  Not, not wristed professional athletes.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  It was like, they had cankles and they had, 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 ask anybody what they did for a living, nobody would guess professional athlete. That, that, they would guess like, you know, Wall Street guys. They could, they could be Wall Street guys. They could be accountants. They could be flight attendants. They could be, but not, 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. Uh, that, that, that, that, they, they said that we, and the, and there's a, that we get excited when they are unattractive without their clothes on. And they don't look, they don't look right.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  Uh, because the market, we, we are evaluating them blind. It's just we're evaluating, we're looking for performance statistics. And when we find the player whose statistics are, are promising, but they look wrong, we know why the market's misvaluing them. They're misvaluing because of the way they look. And I remember, it blew my mind. I remember going, driving home and thinking, oh my god. This is when you have a duty to write it. Like, never mind baseball. Just think of this as a corporation. And they got these employees, they've been doing the same thing for a hundred 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,

• 52:50Speaker 04

  who can't be? Everybody can be. So this is a universal story. It's that feeling, like this is a universal story. And, uh, and so I got very excited and I wrote my publisher note and said, sorry, here it comes. I'm gonna 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, they, I mean, Oakland 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, know that nobody else was doing this. And, um,

• 53:30Speaker 04

  and so, but, 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, you know, I don't want them, I don't want them bothering me. Uh, and he got the book, he was furious. It was like, he was angry.

• 53:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Because you let out the secret?

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Two things. One was, like, since when am I the main character? Could've told me, you know, it's that kind of thing. It's like, I'm not, I was not, I didn't sign up for this kind of thing. But, but the second thing he says, I thought he was gonna be pissed off because I, I had revealed their secrets. That's what I was worried about. I was worried that was the betrayal. He says, he's, he's on the phone, he's like incoherent. And I said, what is bothering you? And he said, you have me saying [BLEEP] all the time. And I said, you do say [BLEEP] all the time. What am I supposed to do there? And he said, you don't understand, my mother's gonna be so upset. And, and, and, and I said, your mom? You know, like, really? It was like a sigh of relief. That's what we're worried about here, low level problem.

• 54:33Speaker 04

  And, and it turned out not to be a low level problem. She was furious. She, she is still furious and she's angry at me. Uh, she's still angry at me. I swear to god she's angry about it. And, uh, but, but I said to Billy, I said, I started laughing. I started, I said like, I was so worried you were gonna 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 gonna 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, it's like, "They're always gonna read your book. They don't know how to read." He said,

• 55:16Speaker 04

  "We've been doing this for years. Nobody's asked a question." And he was kinda 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 gonna say, "Oh, I learned something from this book," or, "Oh, we've been doing it the wrong way."

• 55:36Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, didn't the GM of the Red Sox eventually come?

• 55:39Speaker 04

  No. While I was working on the book, John Henry had just bought the Red Sox.

• 55:44Barry Ritholtz?

  The hedge fund manager.

• 55:45Speaker 04

  And he was saying, he actually said, "What do I gotta 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 kinda fun, I remember doing this on payphones in the airport. I became, they weren't allowed to negotiate.

• 56:00Barry Ritholtz?

  To talk, right.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  So they negotiated through me. So I helped organize Billy's contract with the Red Sox. And Billy was gonna go, and then changed his mind last minute. 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 being 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 book. Like, the head of Goldman Sachs at the time, I know, talked to the owner of the Mets and said, "You're being ripped

• 56:45Speaker 04

  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've happened anyway. What would've happened if I hadn't written the book is, the Red Sox would've done this. They would've won the World Series using... Sabermetrics or statistics, they would have gotten total credit for revolutionizing the sport and no one and Billy Bean would have been a footnote. That's what would have happened.

• 57:09Barry Ritholtz?

  Of all your books that became a movie, that's probably my favorite film version.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  Is it?

• 57:16Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 57:26Speaker 04

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

• 58:05Barry Ritholtz?

  See at the opening.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, see at the opening, and if it, just make it don't suck. And it's on you if it does. Because it's your, it's gonna, 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.

• 58:24Barry Ritholtz?

  They don't know you're lazy.

• 58:25Speaker 04

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

• 59:28Speaker 06

  When you own your own business, you own every decision. Catch the red eye or take the 6 a.m.

• 59:33Speaker 07

  Make a new hire or promote internally.

• 59:36Speaker 06

  Celebrate a win with a toast at the gate or unwind at the lounge. Big props to this team. Some decisions are a win-win, like earning eight times points on Chase Travel. Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business, the business card that gives back all you put in. Visit chase.com/reservebusiness to learn more. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, any member FDIC, subject to credit approval, terms apply.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  Can I tell you a story about the Moneyball movie? Sure. The Moneyball movie was this sort of... So...

• 1:00:05Barry Ritholtz?

  You guys want to hear a story about Moneyball, right?

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  No, no, so the Moneyball movie. So Billy being, in addition to being pissed off at me because I had him saying [BLEEP] 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. When he's... 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

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  publication, in that all of baseball was angry, really angry. And he said, he called me one day, he says, like, "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. Like, I didn't want the book. I don't want a movie. I don't need this." And I said, "Billy, you don't understand. 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 I, 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.

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  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, but, and, and then one day he calls me up and says, you [BLEEP]. He said, he said, Brad Pitt just called me and he says he's coming over to the house. He says, my, 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 ha- he, 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, 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 a set, the set a couple of times.

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  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 than, 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.

• 1:03:04Speaker 04

  Could he just walk down and shake a couple of hands and make everybody feel good? And so I, I called him. I said, Billy, like, it's not that big a deal. Just come on over. And he said, are you going to be there? And I said, yeah. He says, okay, then I'll come. I'll come and I'll just spend 10 minutes. I don't want them to think I'm into it though. So it 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 production, young male production assistant comes running out of left field and he's got the headgear and he's got a, he's got a notepad and he comes running up to Billy. And says, "Mr. Bean, Mr. Bean, you've been my hero ever since I read your book. I just, I want to tell you how you changed my life." And Billy's like, "It's not my book." He, he wrote the book.

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  He points to me, 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 at 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, has the gay Billy Bean's memoir.

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

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

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  And he had Sony Pictures call me to talk Billy to come into the field so he could play this, he had thought of this joke. And so he could play this joke on Billy, on Billy Bean. And it worked. It really worked.

• 1:05:01Barry Ritholtz?

  So that is a great story.

• 1:05:07Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  Oh, that's funny.

• 1:05:26Barry Ritholtz?

  And you, you, similar story? You go to-

• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  What nearly as good a story. So Danny Kahneman, the great Israeli psychologist, who's one of the main characters of The Undoing Project.

• 1:05:36Barry Ritholtz?

  One of the two main characters.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, one of the two main characters. And he and Amos both had done a lot of work with the Israeli military. He had, he had Moneyballled Israeli troops to determine who should be a, an officer. And he devised these, these metrics. So you can measure it rather than just do it by an interview. So he was there very early. The reason I even wrote that book is I came back to that book after Moneyball. Because when Moneyball comes out- Richard Thaler, economist, Cass Sunstein is 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.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  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, "What are you, they're here for Danny." And it turns out, there's an Israeli underwear model named Michael Lewis. And he's got like, 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 model. Yeah.

• 1:06:58Barry Ritholtz?

  Unbelievable. So, so there's a question I want to, I've been wanting to ask you for a while, and I just never get to it, so I'm gonna force it early. You have, I know you have all these stories that are half-told, and all these things that are future projects. I'm always curious if there was a loose thread in a story that you said, "I really want to pull that and see what happens," in some of the books you've published, but you haven't gotten to.

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  What, what? What do you mean?

• 1:07:30Barry Ritholtz?

  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 in folders and stuff.

• 1:07:53Speaker 04

  Right. Is there any, you mean, what do I have on the back burner that might go on to the front burner?

• 1:07:58Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, that's another question. It's, it's what kind of loose thread has been out and about from some of the books you've written, that you just?

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  You thinking something?

• 1:08:07Barry Ritholtz?

  No, nothing in particular. This is, this was a little- A Twitter question. I said, "Give me some questions for..." This was the only one that I thought was half decent.

• 1:08:16Speaker 04

  I thought you were asking me...

• 1:08:17Barry Ritholtz?

  I was wrong.

• 1:08:18Speaker 04

  No, no, no, but it's funny because I don't... No, I have books that I... They're books that I started and stopped because they didn't work. There's a book that got away that would have been a shot at a masterpiece, but the subject tossed me out because I made the mistake of writing something in a magazine about him before I wrote the book.

• 1:08:37Barry Ritholtz?

  What was that?

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  George Soros. It was 1990 and Soros was interested in me for a bunch of reasons. He... I had... Soros had somebody he really admired as a money manager. Like, he was Soros's Soros. 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... You know Soros has those jungle instincts? He had them times two. And, older guy. He took me under his wing when I was at Solomon Brothers. I cold-called him. And I said, basically, "I know you're... I know that there's no reason you want to talk to me.

• 1:09:20Speaker 04

  I've just arrived. I'm 24 years..." 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 to... 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 Solomon Brothers. And I didn't ever have to do anything. I just picked up the phone. And I would describe to him, like, what I'm seeing on the trading floor. I'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.

• 1:10:03Speaker 04

  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 the these places. And there was a book to do about both his fear about the threats to democracy, which seem 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 his in the financial markets and he was gonna let me write about both and like an idiot. I then I 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 rude about him, it was it was what I thought of him.

• 1:10:46Speaker 04

  But I did make fun of his writing, like the the all the theories. He has all these theories about why how markets work.

• 1:10:52Barry Ritholtz?

  Reflexivity.

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, all that this intellectualizing, which is it's 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 wanna see me again. And that was the that was the one huge one, I'll never make that a mistake again. It was gold, the material. And no one else was gonna get it and no one did. No one wrote the book, the book never got written. Uh, and that book could be could have been a very valuable book. But I have that, I have those kind of things. I don't have, and I have, I think I I'm not gonna talk about what they are, but I think I know what the next two books are. Think I know what I'm about to go do. Um, but I don't have anything.

• 1:11:37Speaker 04

  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. Uh, I have, 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.

• 1:11:54Barry Ritholtz?

  No go.

• 1:11:55Speaker 04

  I, two years, I was in uniform as a Midland Rockhound in Midland, Texas, and kept shagging fly balls before the game. Like, I put, and no go. It's just all notes in a, under my office. Yeah, no go.

• 1:12:09Barry Ritholtz?

  So you know I always come with like four hours worth of questions, but what I'd like to do-

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  How many, how many did we not get to?

• 1:12:17Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, three quarters, but it doesn't matter. I want to bring the house lights up.

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  You never expect me to talk so much.

• 1:12:23Barry Ritholtz?

  Um, no, I, my job's to give you a nudge and get out of the way.

• 1:12:26Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:12:27Barry Ritholtz?

  So I, I think I, I mostly accomplished what I wanted to.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  Yep, yep.

• 1:12:30Barry Ritholtz?

  Why don't we bring up the house lights are up and let's see if there are any questions from the audience.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  One back here?

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm not gonna, uh-

• 1:12:39Barry Ritholtz?

  Just say, say your name and, uh-

• 1:12:41Speaker 04

  It's hard to see you, so-

• 1:12:42Barry Ritholtz?

  And where you're from, because Michael's from California. We'll, we'll give him, um, a Long Island geography, um, lesson. Go ahead.

• 1:12:50Speaker 08

  Uh, hi, Mr. Lewis. Uh, my name's Andrew Minicucci. Huge fan of yours, um, all your books and your podcast Against the Rules as well. Um, I'm from just up the street, so very, very convenient commute. Um, I have a question for you, um, related to losers. Uh, The Road to Any Place But the White House, one of your, I believe, criminally underrated books. Uh, can you expand upon your relationship with John McCain as well as, um, what you think he means to American politics?

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  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. Um, I met John McCain, I, so I was, 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 not, 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.

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  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. I got in a car and I never got out of it. I was all over the country for the next nine months. And it quickly became clear that the ninety-six presidential campaign was the most boring presidential campaign in human history. And and around Bob Dole and Bill Clinton were armies of communications people who were going to make sure you never saw anything interesting. And that you that so I just started writing about what was interesting rather than what I was supposed to write about. And I and I started to pick up characters who resonated with me and with in small groups of voters. So I made the I flipped it. I made minor characters, the main characters and put Dole and Clinton in the background.

• 1:14:49Speaker 04

  And it really worked as a series in The New Republic and then I it brought it out as a book. But in the course of this, I was in a air, you know, a terminal in Spartanburg, South Carolina. At eleven o'clock at night told the Dole campaign was going to land and pick me up. And 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 disgraced. He was part of the one of the Keating five. He'd been involved in the in the savings and loan scandal. He'd barely won his reelection. And he he was just different than any politician I met. He was like real.

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  And I just started getting interested in him. And then I learned his story about how he had been in he'd been held in prison and his limbs had been broken during the Vietnam War. And that they were torturing him. This was the amazing thing. The Vietnamese were torturing John McCain.

• 1:15:49Speaker 04

  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 in the fancy people's kids out of prisoner of war camp. And he, and so he got beat up over and over because he refused to go home before the people who had been, who'd been captured before him. Now, it, so the piece that create, I, I found it by just, I was just hanging with him because I was interested in him. I didn't know where it was gonna lead. He didn't really belong in a book about the ninety-six presidential campaign, except he was Dole's most popular surrogate, but that was, that to one side.

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  He let slip that he has this relationship and it was, it came, 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 Ifshin had later in life, uh, things had changed since that time and McCain had been celebrated for his war heroism and Ifshin had become kind of blacklisted by American politics because of his involvement, even though McCain kind of admired his conviction. And McCain saw, uh, Ifshin ends up going to work for Clinton and then someone came

• 1:17:14Speaker 04

  out with a story about how Ifshin 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'd, but developed a relationship. And so I wrote the story about this relationship between the war protester and the war hero. And, uh, it was three thousand words in The New Republic, which ends up in this book, Losers. And McCain at that moment was sort of like untouchable by the journalist. 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.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  He would, 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.

• 1:18:42Speaker 04

  And if you respected them, that 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. Like, 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.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  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 wherever, 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?" And he said, "You have the other bedroom in my place in Washington. We'll just, we'll actually live together and you just go wherever you..." And we'd just had our first child and I could not go to my wife and say, "Guess what? I'm going off of 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.

• 1:20:04Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  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. So, 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.

• 1:20:26Barry Ritholtz?

  For sure. Let's get another question.

• 1:20:30Speaker 09

  I saw you today on Nicole Wallace's program.

• 1:20:33Speaker 04

  On the way, could you believe I got here?

• 1:20:35Speaker 09

  I, that's, yes. I couldn't believe, I was wondering if it would be canceled.

• 1:20:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Speaker 09

  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?

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  Well, there's a book called The Fifth Risk, and there's a chapter in that book by me that explains it. But, but, you know, when you ask people who don't know, they kind of say, commerce? Business?

• 1:21:06Barry Ritholtz?

  Business, of course.

• 1:21:07Speaker 04

  So, eighty percent of the budget is the National Oceanographic Administration.

• 1:21:13Barry Ritholtz?

  NOAA.

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  NOAA. And seventy-five percent 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.

• 1:21:32Barry Ritholtz?

  Energy, commerce?

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  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. But, yeah, that...

• 1:21:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Wasn't it the Department of War way back when?

• 1:21:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:22:00Barry Ritholtz?

  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 are saying, "Well, I get the weather on my app." I don't, we don't need this.

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  They get it from AccuWeather, but AccuWeather gets it from the National Weather Service. Right, that's right. So, it was, they, the Accu, what they, 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, he would have created preferential access, probably, to his own.

• 1:22:37Barry Ritholtz?

  So, his own app would have gotten more, and you also describe in the book, how much more accurate weather forecasting is getting, tornado warnings.

• 1:22:45Speaker 04

  So, it's like, this is the thing about government. It's, it's like, when it does something right, people just, it's like, it's the way you treat your parents. When they're good parents, you don't even notice. They get no credit. It's when they screw up, you notice. And that's the relationship we have with our government. We're like a 14-year-old boy, and our government is our mother. That, that's sort of the, that, the, how mature our relationship is. And, and, but the National Weather, what they have done, if you go back and talk to a weatherman who's been doing it for 50 years, he, he kind of say like, you know, I, what I used to do is like, wake up in the morning, go outside, and say, "Sunny! Could be sunny for a while." You know, that they could do almost nothing, you know, out a day or two, kind of thing. These accurate forecasts, out seven days, the, you know, being able to figure out which

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

  way a hurricane's going, getting better tornado prediction, all this stuff is huge achievement with huge effects. Like, it really makes all our lives, and, 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 about, from the National Weather Service, about what's going on up in the, with the, with the currents. So, um... That happens and nobody says, wow, cool, they did that.

• 1:24:01Barry Ritholtz?

  It's all taken for granted.

• 1:24:02Speaker 04

  It's all taken for granted. Now, what happened, but the dystopia is like it gets privatized and, and, and Barry gets the, the premium gold or platinum or whatever it is tornado forecast and I get the, I get the silver forecast. So my, I'm in my house when it comes through and you aren't, you know, that, that it's, it becomes, I mean, a real matter of equity if we're seeing, if we're getting different. I mean, it seems like that should be a public good.

• 1:24:32Barry Ritholtz?

  Makes plenty of sense. Let's, balcony, let's get a question up top. Here we are. Fire away.

• 1:24:41Speaker 10

  Hi. 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.

• 1:24:53Speaker 04

  Back in 90, 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 is 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, I've never listened to them, but I remember reading.

• 1:25:19Speaker 10

  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, some, you did a lot about Dole and you also did something about, I don't know, some other guy in business who.

• 1:25:37Speaker 04

  It was a, it was a photo Trump. It was, his name was Maury Taylor.

• 1:25:40Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:25:41Speaker 04

  And he was the businessman who was running to make government.

• 1:25:43Barry Ritholtz?

  Put up his own money.

• 1:25:44Speaker 04

  Put up, 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, of the politician. But he was great fun. I remember him, this, well, so this is another moment. The New Republic for a moment thought, what the hell is he doing? He's turning Maury Taylor into the main character of our 96 presidential campaign coverage. And I did, he was the main character of that story. But it was, I went out with him just to see what the hell was going on. He was in Iowa and he had three R. Three huge RVs with speakers on the front and he Blair Bruce Springsteen as he went into

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  town and he had kegs of beer on the back and he'd get he'd throw a party in every town. But the one the day the morning I was with him, he rolls into this the biggest public school in Iowa. I can't remember where it was Ames or somewhere and it's and they've rolled out they've made all the students go to the local the auditorium it's huge to hear the presidential candidate and Maury's been a presidential candidate for about at that point like four weeks and before that he was the he was the at the same time CEO of Titan Tire and Wheel Midwestern Tire Company and had no experience or knowledge of politics. He didn't know anything but except he knew about life. He was he was like he was like

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  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 there a thousand kids out there and they're all asleep because it's eight in the morning and he comes bursting through the doors and and he looks up and he said the first thing he goes is like kid in the pink hair in my day we used to get rid of the weirdos and and and and the kid goes you know and they're all alert he goes and then he says I want someone here tell me what the most important thing in life is and you could see all the teachers getting a little uncomfortable but you're they're hoping he's gonna say you know love, family, country, something and they're guessing these things and they're guessing what they think

• 1:27:49Speaker 04

  a presidential candidate would say it'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 hundred dollar bills money this is the most important thing in life and you can see all the teachers going oh my god and he had me at that moment he had me I said wherever this guy goes I want to see what happens.

• 1:28:10Barry Ritholtz?

  Seven million dollars for seven thousand.

• 1:28:12Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 1:28:28Barry Ritholtz?

  Well you know there are a lot of people who have that. Sort of philosophy ingrained in them since Reagan. What makes this book so interesting is how you're not taking a partisan side, left or right.

• 1:28:46Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:28:47Barry Ritholtz?

  You're not talking politics. It's here are the people who do the people's business with your taxpayer dollars.

• 1:28:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:56Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 1:29:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:29:11Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 1:29:33Speaker 04

  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 have, you can hold the stereotype of the lazy, indolent, 9 to 5, 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 gotta know, you gotta hear these stories.

• 1:30:17Speaker 04

  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 likely, 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, it's very damning about us. And that's, that's kind of what we're trying to get across.

• 1:30:57Barry Ritholtz?

  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. Thank you so much. From Michael Lewis.

• 1:31:06Barry Ritholtz?

  That was my conversation with Michael Lewis. We went out to dinner afterwards. He had an early morning TV hits and we literally had dinner at 9:30, 10:15. He had to run back to the hotel. But, oh my goodness, that was just so much fun. And you can imagine just sitting down with him to dinner afterwards. It's just every bit as magical as you would imagine. Every time he comes into town and I have an opportunity to sit down and interview him, I jump at it. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I do. Special thanks to the folks at the Main Street Theater in Port Washington, especially Karen, for allowing me to put this together. It was really a great time.

• 1:32:03Speaker 11

  If you listen to financial news, you know a lot of time is spent thinking about what's next. The next opportunity, the next investment, the next move. But sometimes what matters most is being ready for what you never saw coming. For more than 75 years, Cincinnati Insurance has worked with independent agents to help protect businesses, homes, valuables, and more. Because planning for the future isn't only about knowing what's next, it's about making sure you're ready for what you can't predict. Let Cincinnati Insurance make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at C-I-N-F-I-N dot com.

• 1:32:40Speaker 12

  The world of business is constantly evolving and Comcast business keeps you totally in step with secure AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries. They're powering over 90% of the Fortune 500 and millions of small businesses. That's a lot of muscle. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2:00 a.m. like it's 2:00 p.m. One partner powering how business gets done for companies around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast business.