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

Imagine the greatest storyteller of your generation and then sitting at a bar and having a couple of drinks with him. It's every bit as spectacular as you would imagine. So when I read that his new book was coming out, I said, Hey, if you're interested in speaking to a small group at a local theater, I'd be happy to set that up. And his pr people said great. So at the Main Street Theater in Port Washington, to a crowd of just three hundred people, he regaled us with

stories for ninety minutes. You will hear almost know me in this because my job was just to give him a nudge and then stay the hell out of his way. You could tell the audience loved it. It was so much fun. There were plenty of you know, stories I had never heard before, including listen for the story about Billy Bean and the F bomb. It really is special. I thought this was a blast. I think you will also with no further ado. Michael Lewis on his new

book Who Is Government and his career as a writer. Welcome, Welcome, Michael.

part of what I do for a living. It's and and I don't know why that is.

It's just you're out there alone. Now if people say it sucks, I can just say it's the other people who are responsible and so and so I feel it's kind of it's kind of a it's kind of a pleasure this one compared to the others going out and talking about it.

heading off to drive. There's this another hour and Joe's head off to drive his kid to school, and they called him and said that we can't have him on because you know, we can't figure out what we do with the sweatshirt. And Joe interceded and said, have him

wear the sweatshirt. He can make sure everybody can read it, and put him on and what was But what was really weird about it is that though Joe was comfortable making that statement on his on his show, none of the authorities in the actual studio were And so they framed come out. It's like this giant head and you can't see anything. And the whole time he's talking, he keeps going, he goes, He's going like this with a sweatshees. Did you see that?

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

of the government on the government. And Trump fired the people who are going to go listen to this like they just said, we don't need any he told Chris Christy. Chris Christy told me, he said, we're so smart that it'll take us an hour to figure out how the

government works. We don't need that. And I thought, this is like a great comic premise that I can go and wander around the government, get all these briefings that he didn't bother to get, and the reader will feel rightly like they know more about the government than the president. And the president's supposed to be running it. And that book it was a series again, it was more of a book like object. It was three long vanity fair pieces plus a piece that so it just happened to work.

Is that when you glue them all together. But I picked intentionally the departments that nobody paid any attention to, so not State or Treasury or anything like that. I picked Commerce, Agriculture, and energy ones where if I turned to my neighbors in Berkeley, all of whom have are inflicting their political opinions upon me constantly. If I say what does the Commerce Department do? I get a blank stare they have no idea. And I found in those

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

It's still going on. You know, there's like that thing. There are all these things. There's a nuclear arsenal. I went and I went and met with the people who managed the nuclear arsenal arsenal, and they couldn't tell me that there was classified stuff. But they could tell me a lot, and their attitude was was so grateful. Someone's come to listen, like we did all this work to

like explain how it all works. And and I started with energy, but not not you know, it could have gone anywhere, but I started with energy because I don't know if you remember, but Rick Perry, oops, was Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Energy because he because he, I mean, Trump's mind is looks like oil Texas looks good on television. But Rick Perry had called for the elimination of the Energy Department when he was running for president.

And that's a little awkward. You're going to go be running this place when you said it shouldn't exist.

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

a deep dive into one of these people. Because the people they were a mission driven, usually very expert in some very narrow thing, completely incapable of telling their own stories, walled off by political people, so they weren't allowed to tell their own stories, oblivious to the sense any themselves as characters. But that's great. Characters don't know their characters. I mean the fact that you don't know you're a

character makes you an even better character. And I thought, I'm just going to pick one of these people, so who Now, when I had this problem, Trump had then shut down the government. It was the first it was a government shut down in eighteen and nineteen, early nineteen it was. It was early twenty nineteen, and he had furloughed sixty percent of the civilian workforce, sent them home

as inessential workers who without pay. So I got there is an organization in Washington called a partner Ship for Public Service that tries and fails over and over to get positive attention shined upon these federal workers. And they give an award called the Sammy Award to people who do something good in the civil service. It's been going on for this has been going on for two decades.

And still know when he pays it any attention. But there've been lots of nominations for those awards, thousands of them. So I cross referenced, like anybody who's been nominated for Sammy, and that was like eight thousand people or something with who's been furloughed. And the list came back and it was like five thousand three. It was some huge list, And what the hell am I going to do with this? It was alphabetized. I just took the first name on the list, Arthur A. Allen. He was the first film

on the list, and I found his phone number. I called him up and said, I want to come talk you about what you do. And I didn't really know what he did. So this is the beginning of this book because what happens with Arthur A. Allen. I go to see him. He is the lone oceanographer in the Coastguard Search and Rescue Division. He's been at it for thirty

something years. And he pretty quickly tells me that like Americans have this unbelievable ability to get lost at sea, to just like we just do it better than anybody else, and and and it's and so the Coast Guard Rescue is constantly occupied. He he he figures out. A few years into his career, he witnesses a tragedy. He's he's out in the field. He's at the Chesapeake pay station. A storm, summer storm comes out of nowhere. The Coast Guard is pulling people off the Chesapeake Bay. They discovered

that they got everybody but this one boat missing. And it's got a woman who was Art's wife's age and a little girl who was his daughter's age. And there they know because they know when the storm kicked up, when the boat likely capsized. They were on a sailboat, and so they know, and they know where they were when they capsized kinda. But what they don't know, presuming that they are on the upside down boat, is how

that upside down sailboat drifts at sea. Objects drift differently, like if you're in an inner tube, it's you will move in the ocean differently than if you're an upside down sailboat, then you would if you were on a life raft, you know, and so on, and they find the girl and the mother dead the next morning, and Art says, that's never going to happen again. When he's telling me this story, like what he's done with his career a bunch of things, but he has basically invented

the science of studying objects drifting at sea. And he's told me at this point in our interactions, i'd been I was there a couple of days before. I said, like, why did you even bother to do this? And he goes over to his bookshelf and he pulls the yellow newspaper article from the Norfolk Whatever about this mother and child. He starts to cry. He said that that could have been my wife, that could have been my child. And when I so, when that happened, I said, it's never

going to happen again. So he starts studying how objects drift and throwing them into the Long Island Sound from he lives in Connecticut, and and he classifies a couple one hundred objects the results they and reduces their drift patterns to mathematic mathematical formula, like ten days after the

coastguard gets his formula. A three hundred and fifty pounds man, this is a very American thing to do, runs out of his window on a cruise ship in the Carnival on a Carnival Cruise Line cruise eighty miles east of Miami, and isn't discovered missing for like several hours. And he does it at night because they have cameras on the side of the boat. They know when they can go back and say, oh, this is when he went off.

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

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

panicked or anything. He's just floating at sea. But they they pull him out, and there are all these articles about like how great the search and rescue people are who pulled him out of the sea. No one asked how they find him. The coastguard themselves are shocked, like this, how well this worked? And this goes on. I mean, I taught interviewed another fat guy who fell off another boat in the Pacific, and I who was saved miraculously after like eight hours, and I said, like, how do

you think they found you? And he said, what saved you or something? And he says, when I was floating in the ocean, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior and that's why I was saved. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, You're a saved because of Arthur A. Allen. You know, that's who saved you. But nobody paid, had paid any attention to this dude and what he had done. So I spent a few days with him, listening to the I mean the whole intellectual stuff about how what he did,

how he did what he did. It was riveting, but the motive, like this deed, I'm not going to let another American die because they we don't know this. He fixes the problem. Thousands of people are alive today around the world because of what he's done. He's been honored by other countries, Taiwan and Australia. Uh, but we don't even pay We pay him no attention. So I gather my stuff to go write the end of my book and I'm on my way back to the airport and he after I've spent the time with him, and he

calls myself. This is the moment this book starts. He calls myself and he says, hey, you're a writer. And I said, I've been there with my notepad. You know, I've been like I've been. I know I had said something when I called him, but I said, and he said, he said, and he said, I just talked to my son. He says, like you've published books and one of the books became move a movie. And he goes, are you gonna are you gonna write about this? You can write

about me? And I said, yeah, Art, I mean, why do you think I flew across country and spent three days interviewing your wife and children and all the rest. He said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift and and and and this is this this, this is your one an essential worker to your public servant. You're a civil servant. They have no sense like they deserve any kind of attention. The stories that come out of them are amazing. And I thought, man, I should

have done the first time. I should have been diving into these people's lives. So the next time, if I ever come back, I'm going to come back focused on the people. And uh. And when I I was on a hiking trail with David Shipley, who was once until recently the opinion editor of the Washington Post, and he had space, and he had money, and and we could write as long as wanted in his pages. He said,

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

doing things that were just to shock them one. He's a wonderful right John Lanchester, English writer, decided instead that his character was the consumer price index, which is a challenge. Uh, but he actually makes it work. It's because it is an amazing achievement. But he writes so he he went off of the reservation a bit.

She wrote a book about Harper Lee called Furious Hours, and we met because I reviewed that book for The New York Times so favorably. She got in touch and sent me toffee boxes of toffee. But when we became friends, Ronald Walters, this I'll be brief because I didn't get to know him. You know, I'm just reading. I'm reading it like you. But what it intrigued me Ronald Walters is in the Veterans administration. I think he's the only one who still has his job securely. But he may

be insecure now too. But he took over these National Cemeteries Association, the cemeteries that where we bury veterans, and there are like fifty five of these things around the country. Like four million veterans are buried in them. They're burying them. It's an astonishing rate, and it's sort of like it's a sacred duty. It's where we bury our war dead.

It's where we bury people who've made great sacrifice for the country, and it's a tribute to the country that we take it seriously that the Veterans Administration even has this program. But when he inherited it, it was struggling in it's a weird way to put it, consumer satisfaction. The consumers in this case were the loved ones of the people who were being buried, and he took it from And we know this because the University of Michigan

measures customer satisfaction across the society. It's all institute, big institutions. 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 it. And he never No one knew his name, no one

knew who, how he did it, or why. And I had when I was fiddling around with picking someone to write the afterwards for the Fifth Risk, i'd heard his story and I almost I tried calling, and actually they didn't even return my calls. The veteran of his administration wouldn't talk to me. So so it was there and I said, go go find that out out about that, and so she writes about how he did what he did.

list was almost six hundred people. And because it's they don't know what they're doing. I mean, they know what they're doing in some ways, but they just don't know how to create interest in people. All these this list of the people who've been nominated for the award, it just said their name and what they'd done, and you looked at the accomplishment and they were often amazing. It was like, you know, you know, but it would never say how they did it. No, cured cancer, but that

was it kind of thing. John Smith at the National Institute Health Cured Cancer period. End of story. I was going through this listen. It was all just cold blooded. You know. It was just like until I get to Christopher Mars solve the problem of coal mine roofs falling in on coal miners, which has killed fifty thousand American coal miners in the last century, leading cause of death in the most dangerous occupation in the country. Uh, occupation is so dangerous that it was more dangerous being in

a coal mine than being in the Vietnam War. That's how That's how dangerous it was. And and it's but it's said the last sentence was a former coal miner. They finally gave me something to think about. And so I looked and I thought, man, there has got to be a story here. I mean, I'm thinking grew up in West Virginia, like dad was injured or killed or so, you know, this son, how this person gets out and does this? So I had spun this whole tale up

in my head. Uh, And I find his number, and again, like ourd Ali, he lives in Pittsburgh, I call him, I coal call him. In this case, he knew who I was. He'd read Moneyball and it turned out that he thought of himself as Moneyball in coal mines. But that's a whole separate thing. But but he he's I say, I just want to hear I just want to hear your story, like, give me the the ten minute version. I'm gonna give you the five minutes of the ten

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

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

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

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

fighting and dying, and that really bothered me. And he said I He started throwing words around the house like bourgeois, and pretty soon he said, I'm not he could have gone to Harvard or Princeton. I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna go join the working class. So he breaks with his dad, big break. He goes on the road. He works in an autofactory, works in a ups plant, finally ends up with several fellow radicals in a coal mine in West Virginia. The other three radicals all quit

at the end of the first day. It's that brutal. He finds it interesting. Why he finds it interesting is still a bit of a mystery. But he stays in the mind for a year and almost dies twice that he sees how dangerous it is. He crawls out of the mind, goes and gets a PhD, a undergraduate and a PhD at Penn State in rock engineering, and begins the process of figuring out there's all his data that the US government has collected on that they've observed the problem.

It's like the CDC does with the disease, that they've observed the problem without actually trying to stop the problem. So they've all his data on when Rufe's fell and what the conditions were. He starts to study it, and over a career, a really really interesting career, figures out how to stop this from happening and stops it from happening. So he's telling me this on the phone, and it

does give me all the details of his work. But and I stop him and I say, oh, so you rebelled against your dad and then you just went and had your dad's career. He was figured out how to keep what was keeping up the rules of Gothic cathedrals, and you figured out how to keep the rules of coal mines up. And I mean, this is someone I've just started talking to on the phone. He gets outraged. It's like both, you know, like I'm calling you know, and that has nothing to nothing did what I did

had nothing to do with my father's career. We have nothing in common. Completely different thing. If that's your theory, like go away kind of thing, and I said, just seems a natural observation, right, So so two things. When I went and spent a lot of time with him, we rolled around West Virginia. He took me into coal mines, and he doesn't mention till like the third day that, oh, you know, it was funny. Were you reconciled? How did

you reconcile with your dad? And I asked him because they had become reconciled before his dad died, and he said it was gradually, he said, but there was this moment, he said, the National Cathedral. The federal government thought the National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down. This was in the year two thousand. One of the towers was subsiding faster than the other and they didn't know why. So they called his dad to test to see how

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

studied it together and put everybody's minds to rest. Now, when you have that to navigate too in a story, you got a story. I mean, it's just like that. And and so Art Allen had the Yellow Wing newspaper, uh, Christopher Marks had the had the the dad I met. But I got to say, I've met lots of people in like the Storm Center and the National Weather Service who lost loved ones to tornadoes or that that this instrument, fel government is filled with all of all this purpose,

all these things. That it's where the problems of the private sector doesn't want to deal with go. You know, it's like there's no money to be made in it. But we've decided to a society we want to address it. That's where that's where we that's what we use to address it. Who is attracted to these problems, People who have a particular interest in this problem for whatever reason, and that quality like caring about the problem. It's outside yourself.

I'm going to fix the problem. Tends to come from a deep place, and that's where literature comes from. You know, it's the the motives of the characters are are are in our government. These are rich and interesting people with rich and interesting backstories. And you know, every time you kind of start scratching it one, you get it this.

you're trying to sell a bond. But it's that. But yes, there's a lot of New Orleans make their way to Wall Street. They do quite well on Wall Street. You get the gift of gab kind of thing. But you learn to tell a story, which is very valuable in the financial markets and also very valuable to writers. But

I I'm basically lazy. Like that is true, you know, it's it's it's core in me, like the working part of me has been added on somehow, But the deep meat I would just sit around scratch myself for the rest of my life.

He was like, don't try, don't sweat it, you're working too hard. It was it was, this is the environment I was raised in, and I took to it.

to do it. So now I have to do it. Because I have an obligation, I make myself feel that way, and when I feel that way, then I'm off. Then I forget about the laziness and I do the work.

There's gold in that mind still. And I left the gold in the mine. Let's go back there and get it and bring some friends and they can have some of the gold too. And I mean, I had no idea that Trump was going to do what he's done to the government. None. I did have a sense like he didn't care about it, that he was going to just completely try to gut it. I had no sense. So in every case, I know how much accident there was.

I will say, if I were trying to make the case that I have I know something that other people don't, or there's something about me that leads to being a little ahead of the curve, I'd only say that the best, the closest thing to the best way to predict the future is just pay attention to the present. That you pay closer attention to the president than other people are. You See, it's the future is there, and so it

is uh, I do pay attention to the present. I observe and and and I also so this gets back to the laziness, that that when you're lazy, it's an actor. It's not necessarily a bad thing to be a little lazy. Amos Tversky. Amos Tversky, my character in The Undoing Project, had a great line which I which which I tell every kid who asks for advice, I just repeat it. He says, people waste years of their lives not being

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

takes a level of interest to move you. I know a lot of writers who just go They can always find something to write about because they know they feel like they have to be writing, so they just force it. 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.

feel finely towards it got my launched my career. I'm still stuck on your theory.

or a little We all have stuff. But you're right, aaracter have a lot of stuff, like sometimes they have a lot of stuff. But the the thing what I think of I think of it as more as I get excited by someone who could teach me, and all my characters are are teaching me something about the world. And now the kind of person who's teaching you something about the word often is someone who has been challenging the world. So that's true too. They're often in kind

of conflict with the world. But what's attracting me to them? I never think, oh, quirky great. I never think that Brad Katsuyama is not quirky. He's a nice Canadian boy and the last boy Flash Boys that he is the least quirky person who ever carried a book. He is normal. It's like as normal as they get, and there's some stuff there with what there is is nice Canadian boy collides with Wall Street and is upset when he sees what's.

all the time. The sports. He's just covered by sports writers and the sports the baseball writers at the time paid no attention to the financial disparities. They weren't thinking of the money on the field, and that's all they thought about was the front office was the money on the field, so he was interested in the question in the first place. And also I didn't tell him I was writing a book. I told him I thought I didn't know what I was going to write. Maybe a

little magazine piece, maybe nothing. And it got more and more interesting, and I disguised how interesting I was. And when I just divulged, you know, two months in and do it that I was thinking about writing a book, it was too late. He couldn't get rid of me. I knew too much. But but there was and I had found ways to insinuate myself into into their lives. I mean, this is like, how do you make yourself? How you how you get them to let you hang around?

That's the important thing. You've got to hang around. You got to be kind of in the you know, just they they forget you're there, kind of hang around. So that was the trick there, you know in that book that ever told I told you when that book became a book, Like when I came home at late at night and I said, wrote my publisher and said, this is going to freak you out, but I'm going to write a sports book. I was. I was, I was in the locker room of the Oakland A's interviewing telling

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

so I was they. I was welcoming the clubhouse and and they were coming out of the showers. I was waiting for my guy to talk to them. And for the first time I saw the Oakland A's naked, and it was such a disgusting sight. It was it was it was like it was just I mean not not it was just professional athlete. It was like they had cankles and they had they were all fat. They look

like a Beer League team. They looked like And I had the thought, which I related to the front office, it was like if you line those naked bodies up against a wall and asked anybody what they did for a living, nobody would guess professional athlete. That they would guess like you know, Wall Street guys. They could they could be Wall Street guys. They could be accountants, they could be flight attendants, they could be not professional athletes.

And the front office said, it's funny you say that because we are aware of how unattractive they are without their clothes on. Uh that that that that they said that we and the andres that we get excited when they are unattractive without their clothes on and they don't look when they don't look right because the market we met, we are evaluating them blind. It's just we're providing. We're

looking for performance statistics. And when we find the player whose statistics are are promising but they look wrong, we know why the market's misvaluing them. They're miss being the value because of the way they look. And I remember, I just it blew my mind. I remember going driving home and thinking, oh my god, this is when you have a duty to write it like never inlind Baseball, this thing of this as a corporation, and they got these employees. They've been doing the same thing for one

hundred years. Millions of people will watching them. Stats attached to every move they make on the job. If those people can be misvalued because of the misvalue because of the way they look, who can't be everybody can be. So this is a universal story. It's that feeling like this is a universal story. And uh and so I got very excited, and I wrote my publisher note and said, sorry, here it comes. I'm going to be writing a book called Moneyball. And now the flip side of this is

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

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

was worried that was the betrayal. He says, He's on the phone, he's like incoherent, And I said, what is bothering you? And he said, you have me saying all the time. And I said, you do say what am I supposed to do there? And he said, you don't understand. My mother is going to be so upset. And I said, your mom, you know, like really it's like a sigh of relief. That's what we're worried about here. Low level problem and turned out not to be a low level problem.

She was furious. She is still furious, and she's angry at me. She's still angry at me. I swear to God, she's angry about it. And but but I said to Billy, I said, I started laughing, and I started said, like if I was so worried you were going to be angry with me for for stitching together this narrative that revealed all your secrets. I found out as much as I could, and I put as much of it into the book as I could. And it's going to blow

your competitive advantage. I thought, that's what you were angry about it. And his pause on the other end of the line, and he says, you don't think anybody in baseball is going to read your book? He says, it's like they're always going to read your book. They don't know how to read, he said. But he said, like, we've been doing this for years, nobody's asked a question. And he was kind of right. He was right about

that it was too narrow. He was right that nobody ever reads a book who thinks they know what they're doing and changes their mind. Like no GM at the time was going to say, oh I learned something from this book, or oh we've been doing it the wrong way.

So I helped organize Billy's contract with the Red Sox and Billy was going to go and then changed his mind last minute, and theo Epstein becomes the GM at the Red Sox. The THEO was trying to hire Billy too. He was part of the group inside and but the rest is history, and THEO leads the Red Sox to victory and Billy Bean is written out of that story.

But the Red Sox were about to do it. New owner like new owner who had background in finance, so he gets this, he gets statistics and data and all that. What happened was other owners read the book, like the head of Goldman Sachs at the time, I know, talk to the owner of the Mets and said, you're being ripped off by your own management, like they don't know what they're doing. And at the ownership level they started to change things so that that's that was how the

change happened. It would have happen anyway. What would have happened if I hadn't read written the book is the Red Sox would have done this. They would have won the world series using sabermetrics or statistics. They would have gotten total credit for revolutionizing the sport and no one and Billy Dean would have been a footnote.

it was the first one. And and I thought, but they wouldn't leave me alone, like I couldn't just say here, really, just give me the money. I'll give you the book and whatever you do, no, whatever you do, see you see at the opening and if it just just make it, don't suck and uh and and it's on you if it does, because it's yours, it's gonna be. It's not my movie, it's your movie. And they refuse to accept that blunt relationship, I think because they don't believe that

I actually think that. And so what happens is they pretend to be interested.

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 problem. I'm we just talk this through, and that kind of thing, and and that that is great, that's been great. Can't take a story about the Moneyball movie? Sure, it's it's the Moneyball movie. Was this sort of so you.

not nothing in the book that's not true. So you want to you want to fight about it, come fight. And he's brave. He's basically a very brave person. However, it was so unpleasant, the book among the most maybe the most unpleasant publication, and that all of baseball was angry, really angry. And he said he called me one day says like Sony Pictures is trying to buy my life rights to make a movie. And he says I just want to tell you I'm not doing this. Like I

didn't want the book, I don't want a movie. I don't need this. And I said, Billy, you don't understand. They never make the movie. They just give you money for your rights that I've sold, I don't know, a dozen magazine articles, five books. Money just comes out of Hollywood and they never make anything, because they hadn't made

anything at that point. And when I gave him the list of like the amounts I'd raked in from Hollywood for doing absolutely nothing, he sort of said, like, this is free, and I said, yeah, it's free, And so he took a bunch of money for his life rights. It was an option that renewed every eighteen months, and every eighteen months he called me. He goes, you're a genius, Like this is unbelievable. You're right, they're not going to make this movie. It goes on for years, you know,

like seven years. But and then one day he calls me up. He says, you, he said, Brad Pitt just called me, and he says he's coming over the house. He says, my wife is putting on makeup, and the babysitters going home to get a dress and it was like, he said, you said this wouldn't happen. I remember it. He was like, you said this wouldn't happen. And I said, I don't know what to tell you, like I'm a little shocked this is happening. So flash forward, I don't know,

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

around the colosseum make it look like it's full. It's a great drama. Before I go over to see this, they call me and say Sony calls me and says, Billy Bean is refusing to have anything to do with anybody, Like he's not visited the set. He let Brad Pitt come to his house once and that was it, and that he's like everybody's worried. He's just angry about this. Could you get him down? His office is at the stadium. Could he just walk down and shake a couple of

hands and make everybody feel good? And so I called him. I said, Billy, like, it's not that big a deal. Just come on over. And he said, are you going to be there? And I said yeah. He says, okay, then I'll come. I'll come, and I just send ten minutes. I don't want them to think I'm into it, though, so I was like, Okay, they know you're not into it, Come on over, shake some hands. So we get there.

I'm there on the field and he comes walking out and this production young male production assistant comes running out of left field and he's got the head gear and he's got a hes got a notepad, and he comes running up to Billy and says, mister Bean, mister Bean, you've been my hero ever since I read your book. I just want I want to tell you how you change my life. And Billy's like, it's not my book. He wrote the book. He points to me. He goes, no, this is your book. The guy is so it's like weird.

He says, will you just please sign my book, and Billy says, right, I'll sign your book, and so he opens the notepad. And there were two Billy Beans in the major leagues at the same time, and they both played at the same outfield on the Tigers, and I think the twins. I mean, it's weird. They were both there on the field same time. And the other Billy Bean was gay, and he came out of the closet and wrote a memoir and it called like hitting from

the other side of the plate. And so this guy has has the Gay Billy Beans memoir and Billy, the straight Billy Bean is He's like, there's nothing good is happening right now. It's like, he's like, what do I say? What do I do? You don't say I'm not gay. You don't say you don't There's nothing you can do in this situation. And I look over and in the A's dugout, Brad Pitt's rolling around. He set the whole thing up, and he had Sony Pictures call me to talk Billy to come into the field so he could

play this. He had thought of this joke, and so he could play this joke on Billy on Billy b and it worked, It really worked.

The reason I ever even wrote that book is I came back to that book after Moneyball because when Moneyball comes out, Richard Thaylor, economist Cass Sunstein's writing partner reviewed it and said, Michael Lewis has written a really interesting story, but he doesn't know what it's about. And they said it's a case study in the work of Economen and Teversky. That's how I even heard that these guys existed. Anyway,

I go to Israel. We're going to the military base where Danny did that moneyballing work for the for the Israeli army. And we get we get there and they are four hundred of the best looking young women I've ever seen and just waiting for us, like waiting in a mob behind the gates. When we come through, and they look at us and they just kind of like melt away. And at first I thought, Wow, Danny's got it going on, you know. I mean, it's like, we

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

me under his wing. When I was at Solomon Brothers. I co called him and I said, basically, I know you're I know that there's no reason you want to talk to me. I've just arrived, I'm twenty four. I said, I'm a new guy here. Kind of take you out

to breakfast. And something about the interaction caused him to say, sure, you can take me out to breakfast, and we went out to breakfast, and he said, you're not going to try to if as long as you don't try to tell me anything, sell me anything, pretend do you know something, I'll do my business through you. And for the next two years. Over the next years, he became the second biggest customer at Salomon Brothers. And I didn't never have

to do anything. I just picked up the phone and I would describe to him, like what I'm seeing on the trading floor, I describe what I was seeing in the markets. Said you should do this because it would been folly. And he appreciated that, and he told Soros about me when I left to write Liar's Poker, and so Soros was very receptive to me, and he took me on a private trip. You know, when the Berlin Wall fell, he built all these institutes for democracy around

eastern Europe. He took me on a private trip through these places. And there was a book to do about both his fear about the threats to democracy, which seemed very prescient right now and like this isn't forever, these places don't don't They have to learn democracy and we have to help them. And what he was doing in the financial markets, and he was going to let me write about both, and like an idiot, I wrote because I was at the New Republic. I wrote for the

New Republic a piece about the trip. And it was not rude about him. It was what I thought of him. But I did make fun of his writing, like all the theories he has, all these theories about why how markets work, reflexivity. Yeah, all that this intellectualizing me, which is it's he is a jungle animal, and it's like the layers on top of it, a complicated explanation. And he was so vain about his philosophy that he was really irritated when someone didn't take it seriously. And that

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

two books are. I think I know what I'm about to go do, but I don't have anything. I don't have anything where I think, oh, oh, I wished i'd written. If I wanted to do it, i'd go do it. You know I have. I sold Moneyball as two books. I thought the second book was going to be about the kids they drafted that year using algorithms. And I spent two years in the minor leagues chasing around after

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

I never written for a school newspaper. No English teacher ever thought I was worth more than a c. You know, I was just like there was no I had no oh background for this, and the New Republic at the time was filled with the most talented collection of writers I've ever seen in one place and editors, and the editor at the time was Andrew Sullivan. And andrews shipped me off to just go do what I would do on the road, and I got in a car and

I never got out of it. I was all over the country for the next nine months, and it quickly became clear that the ninety six presidential campaign was the most boring presidential campaign in human history, and around Bob Dole and Bill Clinton were armies of communications people who were going to make sure you never saw anything interesting. And so I just started writing about what was interesting

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

But in the course of this I was in an air a terminal in Spartanburg, South Carolina, at eleven o'clock at night, told the Dole campaign was going to land to pick me up. And no question was why would they do that? And why they would do that was McCain was in the same terminal and I recognized him vaguely. It was just the two of us, and they came over, just said hi, and we started talking. And he was at that time disgraced. He was part of one of

the Keating Five. He'd been involved in the savings and loan scandal. He'd barely won his re election, and he was just different than any politician I met. He was like real and I just started getting interested in him. And then I learned his story about how he had been he'd been held in prison and his limbs had been broken during the Vietnam War, and that they were torturing him. This was the amazing thing. The Vietnamese were torturing John McCain to get him to accept early release.

They were trying to let him go because his father was an admiral, and they thought they undermine the morale of the American troops if they started letting the fancy people's kids out of prisoner of war camp and he and so he got beat up over and over because he refused to go home before the people who have been who had been captured before him. Now, it so the piece that create I found it by just I was just hanging with him because I was interested in him.

I didn't know where it was going to lead. He didn't really belong in a book about the ninety six presidential campaign, except he was Dole's most popular surrogate. But that was that the one side he lets slip that he has this relationship, and it was it came, It came out very naturally. This guy I was coming over his office. This other guy was coming over his office

named David if Sheen. And David if Sheen was a Vietnam War protester who went with Jane Fonda to Hanoi and piped anti war propaganda into John McCain's cell And if Shin had later in life things had changed since that time, and McCain had been celebrated for his war heroism, and if she had become kind of blacklisted by American politics because of his involvement, even though McCain kind of admired his conviction. And McCain saw if she ends up

going to work for Clinton. And then someone came out with a story about how if she had done this with Jane Fonda, and Clinton was about to kind of release him, and McCain got involved and told Clinton, like, you keep him on, and I'm going to get up and give a speech about this guy on the on

the scent floor, about he's my friend. They'd developed a relationship, and so I wrote the story about this relationship between the war protester and the war hero, and it was three thousand words in The New Republic, which ends up in this book Losers, and McCain at that moment was sort of like untouchable by the journalist. Nobody it was

paying much attention, and he was a little disgraced. Overnight, everybody wanted to write the same story, and he got his relationship to the rest of the world, to the media in Washington just changed. He would he we became friends, and he let me in on this process. He was like, that piece changed my life and it made it possible for him to go become the candidate he became. It was it was amazing watching what a little piece of journalism can do. And it was very a very moving story.

The wrinkle to it was when I wrote the story, if she was dying, he was dying of cancer. He was on his deathbed, so if she was telling me about how what John McCain had done from him, from it for him from his deathbed, and it was just powerful.

And so I don't know what to say about this except that I found in spending time with him that even in politics, you could find these pockets of authenticity and if you and if you respected them, that they they they generated a different kind of response than most political writing. And I also found that, like if you found it was good good in someone in the political process, the readership wanted to hear it, like they were so used to the kind of distance, the critical distance, which

ends up being kind of anti septic. You don't ever really know the person. And McCain he wasn't really running for anything at the time. Yeah, I certainly wasn't a presidential candidate. I could get let the reader get close to him, and the reader really enjoyed that. And when he ran for president, you know, he almost knocked off

Bush the first time. And I mean they started out really well, but that campaign he called me before and he said I want you to come with me, just be with me where you don't have to write about it if you don't want to write about it, but I want you to. I want you to watch. I want to see you watch this process up close, like in the middle of a campaign. And I said, how close can I get? And he said, you have the

other bedroom in my place in Washington. We'll just we'll actually live together and you just go wherever you And we just had our first child, and I could not go to my wife and say, guess what, I'm going off with John McCain for the next year, and he, being an old school being a man of his generation, did not understand it. It was like, what, it's a kid, you know, he's a military guy too, Like they would breed and then go off on a ship for the

next five years. And so he was just bewildered by the fact that I was not going to ride shotgun on his first presidential campaign because I had had this child. 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.

One of our problems in explaining our federal government is the names of the places don't actually describe the places. Energy, Commerce, Agriculture should be Department of Rural. It's rural, it keeps rural America afloat. Commerce should be the Department of Weather. That would be good. I didn't really oppose this idea of turning the Department of Defense into the Department of War. That's a little more on the nose, But that.

sort of the the how mature our relationship is. But the National Weather what they have done, if you go back and talk to a weatherman has been doing it for fifty years, he kind of say, like, you know, what I used to do is like wake up in the morning, go outside and say, sonny could be sunny for a while. You know that they could do almost nothing, you know, out a day or two kind of thing.

These accurate forecasts out seven days, the you know, being able to figure out where which way a hurricane's going, getting better, a tornado prediction. All this stuff is huge achievement with huge effects, Like it really makes all our lives and has a big effect on commerce too, right

on business your plane. Did you remember when you were flying as a kid and the plane was just always bumping around, Like it's not doing that nearly as much because the airlines have better data about from the National Weather Service about what's going on up in the with the with the currents. So that happens, and nobody says, wow, cool they did that.

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

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

for about at that point, like four weeks. And before that, he was the He was the Sea at the same time, CEO of Titan Tire and Wheel, a Midwestern tire company, and had no experience or knowledge of politics. He didn't know anything, but he except he knew about life. He was he was like you. He was like a great dad, but he didn't know anything. And so he gets up.

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

the most important thing in life is. And you could see all the teachers getting a little uncomfortable, but you're hope. They're hoping he's going to say, you know, love, family, country, something. And they're guessing these things, and they're they're guessing what they think a presidential candidate would say it. Nah, nah, that's nothing. You guys don't know anything. And he reaches into his pocket he pulls out a huge want one hundred dollar bills money. This is the most important thing

in life. And you can see all the teachers going, oh my god. And he had me at that moment. He had me. I said, wherever this guy goes, I want to see what happens.

credit that don't apply. And then there's something like twenty five thousand people who've made more than a million dollars that haven't filed their taxes. Since twenty seventeen. How come we're not trying to help the people who are owed this credit and collect from the people who can't be bothered to pay taxes. That doesn't seem partisan. That just seems administratively competent.

about the government. You can have you can hold the stereotype of the lazy, indolent nine to five, doesn't care about anything, milking you, waste, fraud, abuse, deep state, whatever it is you think, but you're not allowed to have it without knowing this. If you want to read these stories and still think that, okay, but you got to know what. You got to hear these stories. And if you hear these stories, some part of you will think I shouldn't really think that that's dumb. It's more complicated

than that. Sure, they're problems with the government, sure, the things that need to be fixed, sure, and a lot of it is like the way we administer the situation we put them in. But there are unbelievable people here. There are in many ways the best among us. They're there to serve and they found some purpose and in that purpose they found a purpose in life. They've learned how to lead their lives in a very meaningful way. And for us to go after them as if their

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

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. Ye