Transcript: Michael Lewis on ‘Who is Government’



The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Michael Lewis on ‘Who is Government’, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

~~~

This is Masters in business with Barry Riol on Bloomberg Radio

Barry Ritholtz: This week on the podcast, what can I say? Every time I am afforded an opportunity to sit down with Michael Lewis, it’s just delightful. He, he’s such a fascinating character. The people and ideas he writes about are absolutely fascinating. His new book, he, he has this just absolutely insane way of seeing around a corner. I asked him, how come every time you find yourself covering a subject, six months later, it blows up and it’s in the headlines. He, he’s done it with, with the big shorty. The Big Short, though was mostly after the fact, but he did it with Flash Boys and he did it with, with Moneyball, and he certainly did it with going Infinite. And now he’s doing it again with who’s government. We talk a little bit about the Elon Musk and Doge, but we mostly talk about these nameless, faceless civil servants who dedicate their career to providing a service to the American taxpayer.

Whether it’s saving lives in coal mines or stopping cyber crime, or keeping you the food supply safe, the book is just filled with all these stories and it’s, it’s absolutely a nonpartisan, it’s not a left right thing. It’s, Hey, there are certain things that only government can do. The private sector isn’t building the interstate highway system or nasa. In fact, when you see private sector services in these spaces, it’s because they’ve built on top of the seminal work the government has done that no one would undertake these projects that are billions of dollars and take decades. The ROI just is too far, too long, too expensive. The book is fascinating. Michael’s fascinating. If you’re listening this far into the intro, it’s because you know this is gonna be delightful. With no further ado my discussion with Michael Lewis about his new book, who is Government, Michael Lewis. I don’t have to welcome you. Let’s just jump right into this and we’ll start with your prior book, the Fifth Risk, which is really the predecessor to who is Government. Tell us about that earlier book on presidential transitions.

Michael Lewis; Trump had just been elected for the first time and he had fired his transition team, and I didn’t, I, I learned all this after the fact, but outgoing presidents are required by law to prepare a transition, and so the Obama administration had deputed a thousand people inside the government to prepare the best course ever given on how the government works and not just the White House, right? The Department of Energy and all those other places. And Trump had fired the mechanism for getting the briefings. He fired all 550 people and told Chris Christie that he didn’t need to know because he could figure out everything he needed to know in an hour about how the federal government worked. When I saw this, I thought, it’s like a great comic premise. I’m gonna get to roll around the government and get the briefings, and the reader will be on the joke that we know more about the government than the president does, because they haven’t bothered to learn.

And so, and I, and it was just sort of like where you start, and I, and there like two things where I started and, and what kind of the, the spirit in which I did it, the spirit was go to places that no one has any idea what they do. Like most, the, the, I mean, I’m surrounded, I’m in Berkeley. I’m surrounded by people who talk about politics all the time and, and just wanna inflict their political opinions on me constantly. And but if I ask them, what does the Department of Commerce do? They have no idea.

Barry Ritholtz: Like they do commerce, right?

Michael Lewis;  Yeah, yeah. Their business. Some some business thing, yeah, something.  What they do is weather, you know? But it would never mind.

And, but I didn’t know that, so, so I just thought, I’m gonna go to the places that, that are most opaque to the American people. And so I picked, I picked the Department of Agriculture, commerce and Energy and thinking like, if I can make these swing on the page, I can make anything swing on the page and energy. But I started with energy because it was so great. He had appointed Rick Perry, former governor of Texas to be the Secretary of Energy. And Rick Perry had called for the elimination of the Department of Energy when he was around for president. Like, all this waste and fraud in the government we’re gonna get rid of whole departments. And one of ’em is department energy, and now he’s supposed to run it.

He found out quickly what I found out when I walked in and got the briefings that, oh, they run the nuclear stockpile. Oh, oh, they gave the loan that created Tesla, you know, oh, oh, there’s like, there’s one thing after another in it. And he had to backtrack in his hearing and say, oh, I didn’t mean that. You know, really, we need the Department of Energy. And so, so anyway, I don’t wanna go too long about this, but to, but to say that I wrote these things in Vanity Fair, long form narrative journalism. I stapled them together into the book, the Fifth Risk. It sold half a million copies.

Barry Ritholtz: That’s a lot for a finance book, right? It’s, people don’t understand. It’s a lot

Michael Lewis;  Oh, it’s a lot for a book. This was an indication, this was market testing. This was an indication to me that, oh my God, people really do actually want to know that there is these stories interest me, but it’s not just me. So I had in the back of that, in the back of my mind over the last few years, because I had this other takeaway from the Fifth Risk. And it was, although I, I’d written a lot about the, what the, these places done. It was like a travel, they were like travel pieces. It wasn’t until the very end in the paperback where I did a deep dive on a single character, on a single bureaucrat. And he was, and I had picked him his name kind of out of a jar. It was, the material was literary, the material was just epic.

It was so good. I thought, man, I wanna come back and just do more of that. Like grab people out of the government and just see, write about a person. I’m gonna, at some point it’s gonna, the accusation is gonna arise and it always does. Like, oh, this is just Michael Lewis making it up, or this is Michael Lewis with his own view or whatever. And so I thought, grab a bunch of other writers and, and do it with them. Drop them in, parachute them in wherever they want to go, and have them write stories so that you can see just how rich and interesting a place this is. And that’s what, that’s that idea is what led to who is government.

Barry Ritholtz: So I have to point out what an incredible knack you have for finding yourself in the right place at the right moment in history. You did it with FTX and, and Sam Bankman freed in the, that’s leading up, that’s pure luck. Pure luck. Okay, so, so now you, you write a book about the transition in the first Trump administration and lots of things you wr write about in the fifth risk turn out to be very prescient for how the administration in many different ways, I don’t wanna make a blanket statement about them, but in specific areas, specific policies kind of drop the ball and bad things happen. But the thing that’s so fascinating is this book about all these different government agencies and the really amazing work these people do comes out right into the doge elimination of, we’re gonna close the Department of Education, we’re gonna fire all these people, whether we have the authority to or not. Your timing is really exquisite twice, are you telling me this is dumb luck four times in a row?

Michael Lewis;  Alright, let me try. So kind of, but let, let me, let me, at a certain point, you

Barry Ritholtz: I know you’re fairly humble and it’s not a false humility, but at a certain point, us readers of your work have to say, Hey, this guy really sees around a corner, finds an area before anyone else has any inkling, big things are going on there. And by the time we realize it, he already has the full story out in paperback.

Michael Lewis;  I love how much, I love how much more credit you give me than I deserve. However…

Barry Ritholtz: Are you saying it’s luck? I don’t believe it. So,

Michael Lewis;  So, so, so if I were trying to explain me, like how, how, if I was trying to give myself some credit for the serendipity of my book publication dates, I, I guess what I’d say is that the best way to predict the future is just observe very closely the present. So it’s close observation of what’s going on in at a moment. And it’s also, the other thing is being interested in the thing you’re interested in rather than the thing everybody’s talking about. And so nobody’s talking about this, but it’s interesting. That’s, that’s good because it means that it’s gonna be fresh and different. And I guess it may be, it’s true that when I’m closely observing something, I’m really interested in that the world is not all that interested in that. Some of those things end up being the future and that that’s true. And so that’s, but it isn’t like, you know, you know, all kinds of people who make a decent living on the lecture C circuit, being able, pretending to be able to tell the future, right? Pretending you written a I’m, I’ve just gotten how not to invest, and I assume I will find in this book a chapter about false prognostication. We know that, you know, the future, it’s too complicated. So all you could tell is the present really well. And if you tell the present really well, and, and you’re not just defaulting to what everybody’s talking about in the moment, you will get the future sometimes.

Barry Ritholtz:Huh. I, I love that

Michael Lewis:  It’s similar to, it’s similar to investing. I bet. Very similar.

00:09:56 [Speaker Changed] No kidding,

00:09:56 [Speaker Changed] Right? It’s like, oh, this company really interests me. Why isn’t anybody here? Why isn’t anybody investing in it? But I’m really interested in it. That’s a, that’s like a great sign that you’re interested in. Nobody else’s figured it out yet. And that, that’s the, that’s a great sign with writing too.

00:10:11 [Speaker Changed] So something interests you. What I find fascinating is you end up kind of embedding yourself in unfamiliar places and fields that you haven’t necessarily studied before.

00:10:24 [Speaker Changed] Things I don’t know anything about, right?

00:10:26 [Speaker Changed] Like you, like, so by the way, that is a sign of a, of a curious intellect, Hey, I don’t know anything about this. I’m going deep down the rabbit hole to learn. But a lot of these things are kind of big institutions that don’t trust outsiders, that don’t trust the media or authors. How do you win these people over? I mean, you know, ni 2020s, Michael Lewis is a well-known guy, and maybe you have a, an ability to gain the trust of people now, but you’ve been doing this your whole career. How do you win the trust and how do you get close to people who are skeptical and reserved and holding the public in arms’ distance?

00:11:13 [Speaker Changed] So we’ve seen, you’ve seen how Elon Musk has approached government employees over the last 60 days with hostility, malice, and condescension. And that it’s the opposite of, of the way to approach someone if you actually wanna learn. So I don’t have a perfect answer to this, but a co I’ll say a couple of things that I think helped me. One is I’m usually just genuinely curious. Like, I really have some questions I want to answer. Why are you winning baseball games? You know, like, explain it to me. How did you figure out to short the market in 2007? How did you figure out how to stop coal mine roofs from falling in on the heads of coal miners? Like, I just, like, I, it’s like you, something ha has happened here and you know the answer. And I genuinely wanna know the answer. People respond to genuine curiosity, which is different from I have a theory and I want you to sort of dance inside my theory, which is like, I’ve sat in a room and I’ve decided there’s a story here.

00:12:09 This is the story I’m just gonna gather some quotes to, to fill in the story. Nothing I’ve done that’s any good is that it’s always like just a glimmer of an interest and I just wanna know. And so it creates a natural learning environment. That’s one. Two, don’t be boring. Like, I, I, if if it’s, if it’s tedious for me to show up, like that’s bad and which you want almost the opposite. It’s like, I hope he comes, ’cause I learned something last time just from the questions he asked. And, and he adds value in some other way, like he brings good sandwiches or whatever. So no, it’s, so, it’s like you wanna create an incentive system, right? People respond to incentives. You wanna create, you wanna make them want, want you there. It’s not, not just not want you there. It’s like, want you there.

00:12:55 So that’s, that’s a a, a second sort of prerequisite. And the third is I try to make it clear what I’m thinking when I’m thinking it. And so I’m not hiding like myself from the person I’m writing about. I’m letting ’em get to know me a little bit if I’m letting ’em bouncing theories off them and listening ’em respond and object or whatever. And so that they’re don’t, they aren’t shocked. They’re often shocked when they read the book ’cause they’re surprised what I’ve decided is important and what isn’t. They’re sometimes shocked by the way I see them or describe them a little shocked. But they aren’t shocked by like, what I’m interested in. They, I’m not, they don’t have a feeling. I’m being sneaky. So, so all those help, I think, and I have to say this, that people I write about, they often are really interesting people with really interesting stories.

00:13:53 And while they may not think of themselves and usually don’t think of themselves as characters, they’re very aware. They’re in the middle of something interesting. That’s why they’re doing it. So they can understand why I’m so interested. Like yeah, I get it. I, I, I, I, I get why you, you have all of a sudden gotten interested in local public health, says charity dean, because it’s broken and that’s why we’re not responding well to this. You know, it’s like, or I get why Sam Bankman free, he understood. I thought of him as weird, like, you are a weirdo moving through the world with a very weird view of the world and you’re, you’re seeking to impose this sort of abstract idea about how to live on the world around you. And I just wanna watch it. And he, he, he is like, yeah, I get that. I know I’m weird. I know what’s happening is weird and I understand why you’re amused by it. Go ahead, watch. You know, that, that, so that it has to be an honest relationship, right? It just has to be an honest relationship.

00:14:52 [Speaker Changed] So, so I’m curious, you, you’ve delved into baseball, into football, into high frequency trading, psychology, now government. What, what’s been the biggest surprise that you found in all these areas? Like, you’re delving into things that interest you, but what do, what really sticks out in any of your books where you say, huh, didn’t see that coming? Not counting SBF getting busted. No, you,

00:15:18 [Speaker Changed] You took away the easy one,

00:15:19 [Speaker Changed] Right? That’s, I know I did that on purpose. You think of that easy. That’s the obvious one, right? Yeah. Although, as, as I was reading that book, your book going infinite, like, like there are all sorts of little signposts along the way. I’m sure a lot of that’s just hindsight bias. ’cause as you were writing those chapters that hadn’t yet happened, right? But as you’re reading it, it’s like, oh, this can’t be good. You know, the all these little, little, it’s like a fault line with an earthquake. All these little pressures are building up along the book. I don’t know if that’s intentional. Oh, it’s

00:15:53 [Speaker Changed] Totally intentional. I didn’t start writing it until it all blew up.

00:15:55 [Speaker Changed] Oh, you didn’t? All right. So,

00:15:56 [Speaker Changed] So yeah, no, it’s intentional.

00:15:57 [Speaker Changed] So, but that was an obvious one. What, what was like, I didn’t see that coming. Alright, so

00:16:02 [Speaker Changed] Here’s one from this book. This is illustrating a general point. And the general point is the difference between what you imagine a story is and what’s or what’s going on in the world. What you, what’s your, what’s going on in your, when you’re just doing it through abstract kind of speculation compared to when you go out and report and learn and collide with the world and how much more interesting the world ends up being than you imagine, even when you imagine it being interesting. So the first story in this book, Christopher Mark, I, how do I find it? I find it because I get a list of nominees for civil service awards, like 600 people on this list. How do you pick one of ’em? It’s all these names and descriptions of things they’ve done. Joe Blow at the FBI has broken up a, a child porn ring but doesn’t say anything about Joe Blow.

00:16:51 I get to a name on the list. It says Chris Mark, solve the problem of coal mine roofs falling in on the heads of coal miners, which killed 50,000 coal miners in the last century. A former coal miner. It says, alright, sitting at my desk, I’m thinking, man, there’s a story. And I already think I know what the story is. I think the story is, alright, this guy probably grew up in West Virginia, former coal miner. He’s, there’s gotta have been some personal, if it’s killing all these coal miners. And he got outta the coal miner to fix it. A friend, a relative, someone got killed by a coal mine. He that it was like, there’s a movie in this kind of, I already had it in my head, but then I call him up, I find him, he lives in Pittsburgh. He knows who I am ’cause he’s Red Moneyball.

00:17:33 He’s like, why the hell are you calling me? Like, it was just bizarre. It was like, he took me a while to believe it was me. And I said, I just like, I saw this line on a list. He didn’t even know he’d been nominated for a prize. So it was especially weird. And he, and he said, I said like, I just, just gimme the five minute summary of your story. And he says, the first thing outta his mouth is, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a professor at the university. I thought, oh, there goes my story. Right? It’s so much for presumptions, right? So much for presumptions, so much for the movie, right? Well, but hold on. In the next 10 minutes he tells me this, he had been a radical in the sixties as a little kid radicalized started calling, throwing around words like bourgeois.

00:18:14 His father said that he was like, didn’t wanna join the ruling class, didn’t wanna go to Harvard, which he could have. And Dr. Leaves high school early to go join the working class. Much to his father’s chagrin, like his father’s really upset. His father is famous guy. I mean his, in his world, Robert Mark. Robert Mark was a civil engineer who took technology. He used to like stress test fighter planes for the air force and nuclear reactors for Princeton. He took it and used it to figure out, to stress test gothic cathedrals. He built little models of like sharks and rim and he could show what was holding the roof up basically. And he could also show why it might collapse or where it was weak. And so he actually taught all art architectural historians how the, the medieval builders had built the gothic cathedrals.

00:19:04 And there’s, there’s actually documentaries about him in this. So anyway, that’s his dad. Chris Rebels against his dad, not gonna have anything to do with your way of life, not having to do anything with you. Ends up working in an auto factory in a, in a UPS plant. And finally in a coal mine in West Virginia, he ends up with like his fellow young radicals, 19 years old, working in a coal mine. The young radicals la last like a day. ’cause it’s so awful. Chris actually likes the working in the coal mine. It, he’s interested in it, but it’s incredibly ja dangerous. He almost is killed twice by falling roofs. Eventually figures. I could get outta this and figure out how to like stop this. He goes back to Penn State, gets his degree, and then he’s got his own intellectual journey, right? This is, which I don’t get into while I’m talking to him, but in this first phone call, he says, I, it took, you know, it took 30 years, but I figured out how to keep the roofs of coal mines from falling on the heads of coal miners.

00:19:57 And I say, oh, so you rebelling at your dad who was figuring out how the roofs of gothic cathedrals didn’t fall down. And you just do the same thing underground. You figure out like how to keep the roof of a coal mine up. And he, in the first 20 minutes, he’s pissed at me, he says, I have nothing to do with my dad. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what my father did. And I, and I thought, oh my God, this is even better than I thought. It’s a father son story. And the fa the son thinks he’s rebelling against his father. And in fact he goes and sort of lives out a different version of his father’s life and what’s wild about the story. So I have that thought. And when I start to get to know him, it takes a while before he says to me like, days of spending time with him, oh, and my dad and I finally kind of collaborated.

00:20:45 I said, what? And he says, yeah, yeah, the government called my father because they thought the national cathedral in Washington was falling down. And I don’t know if that national cathedral in Washington was built over a century, it’s tilted. They, they, what happened was they built an insufficient foundation for what they redesigned on top of it. And the fathers brought is brought into like, oh Jesus, can you pr tell us how to keep this thing from falling? And the father gets there and realizes the problem’s underground. And so he, he has to call his son. And together they write a paper explaining why it’s not gonna, you know, how it’s all working and why it’s probably not gonna fall down. But it’s beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful, like an amazing story. And it was, and it was so different from what I, my feeble imagination had dreamed up. And this happens over and over and over and over.

00:21:38 [Speaker Changed] You know, the, the most amazing thing about that chapter, and we’ll talk about the book in more detail in a few minutes, you kind of buried the lead in your discussion. He is studying this problem for 30 years. Like this isn’t like he keeps coming back to it. This is three decades of his life. And he eventually figures it out. Issues like a set of guidelines to coal companies and every engineer and every safety person and every coal mine that now becomes the standard. Plus the government makes it a regulatory requirement. And it wasn’t that, oh, the free market figured this out, but for the regulations we would still be having all these coal mine collapses.

00:22:25 [Speaker Changed] What’s wildly cool about Christopher Mark is that not only does he do all this, he becomes the historian of his own subject. He becomes an he, he writes these papers explaining why coal mine safety had was so poor. And he finds the whole world in this very narrow subject. And there’s a moment that’s actually really interesting where he shows that the technology had been created to actually pre to just prevent a lot of the disasters. And the coal mine industry, it was, so

00:22:58 [Speaker Changed] You’re talking about the ceiling rods? Yeah,

00:23:00 [Speaker Changed] The the roof bolts. The bolts right, the bolts, you bolt the roof to itself. It’s not intuitive. Like when they first started doing it, the miners are like, what the hell you, how are you gonna bolt the roof to itself? But you bolt you, you drill, essentially you’re attaching more less unstable rock to deeper, more stable rock. And you, you anchor it in, in what’s in the mountain above it. But I mean, this is a long time ago. This is invented 50, 60 years ago or whatever. But instead of using the technology properly, like in a way that pro really prevents, reduces roof falls, the industry uses it to make it cheaper, to make it just as safe as it’s always been, meaning not safe. So they maintain the same level of mortality, like the same level of risk. It’s just less cost and just reducing the cost of what they’re doing to hold the roof up.

00:23:52 And so what they’d done, and it’s because it’s because the industry was so competitive that nobody could take the step of making the extra expense of making the mine really safe. And they had acclimated the working guys in West Virginia mainly, but the coal miners who work everywhere in the country to this level of risk. So they were just used to it. It was really interesting that the market, you would think if you were sitting in a room alone thinking about it, you think, oh, some coal mine companies gonna make their mine safer and that’s gonna make it easier to track workers less expense because the roof is fall not falling in as much. But no, that’s not what happened. What happened

00:24:32 [Speaker Changed] Was, you’re familiar with, you’re familiar with the Peltzman effect. Does that ring a bell?

00:24:36 [Speaker Changed] No. Tell me what it is. So

00:24:38 [Speaker Changed] Sam Peltzman, and this is my in, in 2040, my next book, Sam Peltzman iss, the guy who studies seat belts and airbags and a BS and all that stuff. And what turns out to happen is exactly what happened with the coal mine. Oh, as soon as you get a seatbelt and an airbag, you’re driving, oh, this car feels solid and safe. So I could drive a little faster. Wow. And so we have all the safety equipment that keeps getting built into cars and yet the fatality rates don’t drop. Right? It’s not that we’re all gonna just do 55 and we’re that much safer, all this great no crumple zones and lane detection and all these things. They make us complacent and comfortable. And so we drive faster and the fatality rates are the same. So you can either maintain the same behavior and have the fatality rate drop or like drivers and coal mine companies, you could have the same fatality rate, but with a whole lot more speed and or coal mining. Right? It’s a, it’s a fascinating psychological thing. It’s

00:25:47 [Speaker Changed] Fascinat what is, I want you to apply that effect to investing. What’s the aversion of the pel? It’s the peltzman effect.

00:25:55 [Speaker Changed] I I think what it really is about is the broader picture is unintended consequences. You think when the seatbelt laws are passed, the result will be we’ll have fewer deaths and safer vehicles. But instead the actual res unintended consequence faster cars is, is is that people just drive faster. So from investing perspective, you know, Paul Volcker famously said, there’ve been no the other than the atm, there’s been no innovations in finance, but there actually have been between ETFs and online trading, and now trading is free. And I, in the book, I go through a whole long list and what ends up happening and now you have the gamification of Robinhood. So instead of making things cheaper and easier and faster for investors, we’re still encouraging, or at least the industry is encouraging many of our own worst instincts. And of course, the outcomes instead of saying, Hey, I could buy an ETF and buy the whole market for three bips and it cost me nothing to trade, and wow, isn’t that great? Instead of doing that, a lot of people say, oh, I could day trade, I could, you know, jump in and out of Nvidia. This is, this is great. It it is the airbags, a, b, s and seat belts of investing. And instead of taking the win, we just keep pushing our risk aversion slides up with the lack of friction

00:27:24 [Speaker Changed] That the, the, the greater the illusion of safety we create in the markets, the more people, the more recklessly the people

00:27:31 [Speaker Changed] Behave. Especially if you’re in the midst of a bull market. Yeah. Because at that point, hey, markets only go up. That’s all they do. So I, I say this to you all the time and you push back, but I gotta bring it up again. All of the characters in the book are very Michael Lewis, they’re all outsiders. They’re quirky, they’re pushing against the grain. ’cause they’ve discovered some great out of consensus truth. You’ve disagreed with that description before. Has this book changed your mind? Because it’s, even the chapters you didn’t write are still Michael Lewis characters. All

00:28:12 [Speaker Changed] Right. So I want you to, all right, I’m gonna push back again. I, these writers who did this with me are some of my favorite writers on the planet. And,

00:28:20 [Speaker Changed] And they are all excellent.

00:28:22 [Speaker Changed] So lemme just name them. So we, the people know it is Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks, Kamal Bell, Casey Sep, Sarah Val and John Lanchester. So John Lanchester, English writer, and they all have, they were, I picked them one ’cause they’re all fun. Two ’cause they’re all able to kind of go in and find stories that other people don’t see. And three, their voices are so different from each other. I thought they’d find very different things. John Lanchester, he doesn’t find a person, he finds the consumer price index. It’s a whole chapter about, it’s, I just found riveting about what the United States does to count things and that the United States government is like the greatest counting mechanism in the world. And that it’s that it’s the one democracy where counting was, it was, it was built into the Constitution. You couldn’t distribute power unless you had a census to count where the population was. And he says as example he and how complicated this is and how much, you know, how much expertise is deployed within the government to do it. Well he, he explains over many pages how the consumer price index is put together. So right there, there you go. There is something that I, that is not a Michael Lewis character

00:29:31 [Speaker Changed] That’s the exception that proves the rule. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna put this right

00:29:34 [Speaker Changed] Back at you. No exceptions don’t prove rules just so you know. But the exception when that, that expression means it tests the rule.

00:29:41 [Speaker Changed] Okay,

00:29:41 [Speaker Changed] So and so that I would, I just tested the rule, said I’m, so 00:29:45 [Speaker Changed] You gave me the one,

00:29:45 [Speaker Changed] I’m gonna test it

00:29:46 [Speaker Changed] Again. You gave me the one chapter that wasn’t a Michael Michael Lewis character. So the conversation we just had about Christopher Mark and the coal mines, oh my God, how is he not a total Michael Lewis? Oh, of course. Alright, alright, sure. Next chapter. And you didn’t write this, I think this was Casey S’s chapter about Ronald Walters and the National Cemetery Administration. So

00:30:09 [Speaker Changed] This is a little bit of a cheat because Casey asked me which year, what if I had anything left on, on the cut. She had, she said we should, do you have anything on the cutting room floor from the fifth risk? And I had all this stuff on the cutting room floor ’cause there was so much stuff. And I said, you know, there is this dude who wouldn’t take my calls. Like I, I couldn’t get him. Oh, really? Oh yeah, no, it was, it was like they, they didn’t want to, and I, of course was going through communications as officials and they never respond properly, but his name was Ron Walters. And I, what I knew was this, that they’re inside the Veterans Administration. There’s something called the, there’s the a function, the management of the national cemeteries where we bury our war dead, we bury our veterans.

00:30:51 It is a sacred duty of the society. And that this, that like all the functions of the all the different agencies, this place has its customer satisfaction measured by ser by survey. And that when Ron Walter came into the job of running the national cemeteries, it had very mediocre customer satisfaction. I don’t know why, I don’t know what was going on. I don’t know anything in the story. Casey wrote the story. But that over a, a couple of decades, he took the place from being kind of mediocre to having the highest customer satisfaction of any institution in America, private or public, that includes Costco, Walmart, FedEx. He somehow figured out the problem and no one knew who he was. He didn’t advertise himself. If he had done this in business, he’d be like on the cover of business magazines and giving lectures for money on the lecture circuit. You know, that. But, but he, he was just this faceless bureaucrat who would figure something out. And I said to Casey, go write, I’d write about him. And for whatever reason, he took her call and she, and she, she, we, he, she walks us through his story.

00:32:02 [Speaker Changed] First of all, that that chapter made me cry, number one. Yep. It it’s incredibly touching and and it makes you proud to be an American. It really, I know that’s corny, but it really does. But all right, so that’s a cheap, let, let me,

00:32:19 [Speaker Changed] Let me, that’s so the next, so the next one, Dave, it’s probably Dave Eggers, Dave Eggers. And he goes and finds the people in Nassau who looking for little green men in deep outer space. Oh,

00:32:27 [Speaker Changed] It’s searchers.

00:32:28 [Speaker Changed] Yeah.

00:32:29 [Speaker Changed] Alright,

00:32:30 [Speaker Changed] So maybe not little green men. They’re looking for life and out. Well,

00:32:33 [Speaker Changed] And the fascinating thing is we’re, we’re gonna clearly find the first line I highlighted. In all likelihood in the next 25 years, we’ll find evidence of life on another planet. I’m willing to say this because I’m not a scientist and I don’t work in media relations for nasa. What he’s talking initially about is not intelligent Star Trek, star Wars life, but hey, there’s hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, everywhere. Yeah. Those are the fundamental building blocks. And we’ll find some bacteria somewhere.

00:33:02 [Speaker Changed] You know what they’re gonna find? They’re gonna find the pelman effect. They’re gonna find somewhere way out there. They’re gonna, someone will have discovered the pelman effect. But, but, but the, yeah. So Dave, so how Dave, so Dave is working with these characters. I thought Dave, I told Dave this just the other day. The Dave, when he announced he was doing NASA and these people who were doing this incredibly cool work at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, Geraldine Brooks, another of the writers said, yep, Dave is way too talented to do this. This is such an easy thing to make. Interesting. He needs to pick something that’s harder to write about. That this was, he, she, she thought he was cheating. That it was just like, of course everybody’s gonna love to read about this. And Geraldine said to him, said to me to say to him, if he does that, I’m gonna find the most repulsive government worker to write about.

00:33:55 I’m gonna go into the IRS, the most hated loathed branch of the government, and I’m gonna write about the IRS. So she did that in response to Dave’s piece. And she does do that. So that I wouldn’t, I mean, Dave has more, those characters are not characters I would’ve naturally sought out. They are characters. So as he puts it, he, he, he was like, he has no scientific aptitude. He, like, he stopped doing math and science when he was like seven years old. And he’s a poet at heart. So he finds it riveting when, when scientists can make comprehensible to him, complicated stuff they’re doing. And he had found these people and they could explain in a way, he could explain how they were doing what they were doing. And it is riveting. But I, but

00:34:39 [Speaker Changed] It’s also very Michael Lewis very, these quirky, you know, these are very quirky characters.

00:34:44 [Speaker Changed] All, all right, I’m gonna push back. I’m gonna push back.

00:34:46 [Speaker Changed] But before you push back, you just brought up Geraldine Brook Brooks and the cyber sleuth in the IRS. Here’s a guy who’s an accountant teaching classes in Brazilian jujitsu and like, like becoming a ninth level black. Like that is not your run of the mill. I need your papers to get your taxes filed.

00:35:06 [Speaker Changed] No, he’s had of, he’s works in the cyber crime division of the IRS and has collected billions of dollars for the government busting up cyber crime rings. Jared Kopman, his name, and here’s a, here’s a kicker for you. His unit, which is like a huge profit maker. They, they, they, I mean they cost nothing and they, they generate billions has been gutted by Doge in any case. But this is before it was gutted. Geraldine found this dude. I don’t know how she found him actually. She just went off. She said, I’m going in the IRS and I’m coming out with a story. And so she went in the IS and found him and, and called me. You know, it’s funny, she did call me. So this is not pushing back on you. When she was done with the story, she had to go back to a novel she was writing kind of thing.

00:35:52 And she said, this is such your kind of story. She said, there’s, there’s all this stuff behind it. You really need to look into it. Like it might be a book for you. So she had the thought she’d run into a story that I might have written. And that might be true there. But here’s what I’m gonna, let me just say this. Maybe I’m so jazzed by our federal government. ’cause when you walk into these places, they’re all these really curious characters doing really curious things and you haven’t heard of them. And you might not think they’re important until you do. And and they are characters in the best sense. They don’t think of themselves as characters. They just like, they are who they are. And they can be kind of shockingly interesting without realizing how interesting they are and that the stuff they’re doing is breathtakingly important, like existential risk, level of importance. So yes, I’m interested in that and they’re all over the government. And I, I think that if you said you have to spend the rest of your career wandering this institution writing about these people, I could, I could pull it off I that I could, I I could, I could use it as a launchpad for every other book I ever wrote if I had to.

00:37:05 [Speaker Changed] You mentioned Doge. One of the things that comes up in the book in her chapter is these guys that are literally saving tens of billions of dollars in cyber fraud. Their, their pay tops out at like $130,000. Something crazy. Like any one of them could go to a Wall Street Bank and 10 x their salary. Yep. Like, stop and think about how insane that is. And then you fire and we gotta cut those jobs

00:37:30 [Speaker Changed] And then you, we don’t Yeah. That you fire them. And not only that, you insult them before you fire them. Right. Give me a list of the five things you did last week. You know, it’s just, it’s obscene what’s going on right now. And that’s one of the, that that would be a place where you would dramatize some of the obscenity. Yeah. So I don’t think there’s a character in the book that couldn’t be paid a whole lot more money outside of the federal government. And this is another thing, I think this is between the lines of the book, but all these people are much more interested in mission than money. And this is hard for Wall Street people to get their minds around sometimes. But I don’t think entirely, there are a lot of Wall Street people who really get the joy of mission.

00:38:06 And these are people who take pay pay cuts because they want to do this thing. And nobody says this in any of the chapters, but I think all of the chapters say this, all these people have found the secret to a meaningful life. They’ve all, they, none of these people on their deathbeds are gonna look up and say, wow, I wished I, I wish I’d gone to Goldman, you know, that. Or I wish I’d made a whole lot of money. And that they all fulfill, like they did what they were supposed to do. And that, that’s kind of cool. There is this thing going on, how to lead your life right through it, right through the whole book. And I, and there’s a moment when I’m talking to Chris Mark, who, I mean, one of the reasons I find it hard to report Chris Mark, the coal mine guy, is that, you know, he won’t stay in the Ritz, he’ll stay in the Hampton Inn.

00:38:55 So I gotta stay in the Hampton Inn, you know, you know, he wants to sit in the back of the plane, so I gotta sit in the back of the plane. And so, you know, it’s like I I that I have, you know, a standard of comfort I’ve gotten used to that he finds like immoral, maybe too strong a word, but like unnecessary. And I, at one point he said to me, and I put it in the book because he has decided to live a life that’s materially modest, but spiritually rich. He said to me, we taught our kids there, there are two ways to be rich. One is to make a lot of money and the other way is to not need very much. And so I just thought, wow, you know, it’s interesting.

00:39:32 [Speaker Changed] Say what you will about the luxury quality of the Hampton Inn. It ain’t a coal mine. If you spent, and, and he spent a year or two working in a coal mine. Wait, I’m above ground on clean sheets with air conditioning and heat. Sign me

00:39:47 [Speaker Changed] Up pe and a Peloton now. Right? I couldn’t believe it. There’s a peloton in there.

00:39:52 [Speaker Changed] By the way, when I first saw this title, I picked up the book and I’m like, huh, I wonder if Michael’s gonna get a little partisan. This is one of those things that could really red state, blue state, but there’s none of that. This is all about you pay taxes and here’s what the government does to serve you. Whether you’re the family of a deceased veteran or relying on weather forecasts or stopping cyber crime or, you know, on and on it goes. These are really broad, non-partisan topics. Did did it ever enter your mind? Oh, someone’s gonna accuse me of, oh, that that punk Berkeley writer is really a libtard and we really don’t care what he has to say. Did did that ever enter your mind as you were putting this together? Of course.

00:40:42 [Speaker Changed] I mean, it was, it was top of mind. It was in, in a way. I mean, ’cause you, it has happened already and it will happen that you, it is a feature of our society right now that everything gets quickly politicized and you’re either, you’re either in tribe A or tribe tribe B. You’re either, you’re either an Ole Miss Rebel or a Alabama crimson tide player. You know, it’s the, it is, you’re, you’re on one team or the other. The the people need to need to see you that way. And especially the people who are most absorbed with the politics. And if you write anything that challenges the assumptions, prejudices, bigotry of one side or the other, they’re gonna try to dismiss it by just saying, you’re a member of the other tribe. So I can’t, you just can’t do anything about that except try to come at the material pure of heart and open a mind.

00:41:34 You know, it’s like these are stories that are true stories. You can maintain your prejudice in bigotry and whatever you think of federal workers, you know, you could, if you want to preserve that stereotype in your head, fine. But you’ve gotta acknowledge the truth of the stories. Like, okay, all federal workers are wasteful. Where do you put Chris Mark then he just, he just, he’s saving thousands of lives in, of working class men. Basically, what do you do with that? So what do you do with this and that and the other thing, I mean, there’s so many of these stories, so the FDA,

00:42:07 [Speaker Changed] So on and on it goes,

00:42:10 [Speaker Changed] It’s almost, I’d say it’s, I think this is true that to the extent you succeed in really threatening either sides prejudices, you are going to elicit a violent reaction. And so I expected the book, given the current moment where Elon Musk and Doja is trying to basically fire all these people, that it would elicit a violent reaction. And I’ve stayed off social media. I don’t know exactly how much of the violent reaction has happened, but I’ve gotten whispers of it. Like, and, and I, it’s funny, I’ve find, it’s funny to find myself, I do live in Berkeley and people love to bring that up when they’re trying to classify me. But in Berkeley, I’d be a Republican, you know, I mean, I mean that’s not hard. But I grew up, where

00:42:56 [Speaker Changed] Are you originally from? Remind people I up

00:42:57 [Speaker Changed] In New Orleans, right? I’m like a kid who, I’m like a kid who played sports and didn’t think about politics and, and like voted for Reagan once. And like John McCain was a close friend. And it’s like the idea that I’m like, oh, firmly this lefty person is insane. That it’s just insane. I mean, I, it’s, and it’s, it’s a tell for me when people try to shove me into that box. ’cause it means they’re not dealing with the story. And it happens from the other side, the blind side. There’s the whole, the the crazy left to has taken the blind side story is like, oh, Michael’s like a racist. Who’s told the white savior story? No, seriously,

00:43:36 [Speaker Changed] Seriously. I I’ve read all about that. Listen. 00:43:38 [Speaker Changed] Yeah,

00:43:38 [Speaker Changed] No, it’s amazing. How many times have you and I, this is gotta be like our eighth, 10th interview. Yeah. I have lost track. Yeah. Yeah. When I’m prepping stuff and I have my research assistant go out, Hey, find me something I haven’t, we haven’t talked about in these previous eight conversations. Well, you know, the pushback to the blindside is the whole story is fake and, and here’s the litigation and here’s the depositions. And I’m like, yeah, I’m sorry, I’m, I’m not, I’m not buying into this. This is, this is clearly someone has a, a grudge. Yeah. But,

00:44:09 [Speaker Changed] So, but, but I mean the New York Times ran a cover story like a year. Yeah, yeah. It’s like trying to, to trying to sort of, I don’t know exactly what it was trying to do, but it, what is a But between the lines is trying to say like the story, no, now looking back on it, we can say the story was false in some way. No one who was there at the time, disapproved of the story when the book came out, Michael Lore himself loved the book. All everybody around him said this like true great true story. You know, there was never, it’s been, it got reinterpreted at high woke. It got reinterpreted as a condescending story about a young black boy, which is not what it was. You’re,

00:44:48 [Speaker Changed] You’re by the way being generous to the people who have changed. Your friend Malcolm Gladwell would clearly call it revisionist history. Yeah. Because oh, we are gonna, we’re gonna rethink this in light of current morays. Yeah. And,

00:45:04 [Speaker Changed] But that’s all flipped again. So it’s, it’s, I it’s gonna, it’s gonna make a come. It’s, there’s, there’s, there was a revolution, a counter revolution and the Counter Counter revolution. It’s, it’s, but my point is that, that I have had my work filtered through people’s bizarre, perverted political prisms and certainly

00:45:26 [Speaker Changed] Happened last book going in

00:45:27 [Speaker Changed] For that. Yep. It, it gets dis it gets distorted. My views get misrepresented to the extent I have views that mostly it’s not an expression of you, it’s a telling of a story that I’m doing. And I’ve had it from both sides. And it’s not pleasant from either side. And this one, it was really clear, the side, it’s where the blow blow back’s gonna come is from the, from the right. Now here’s, it’s funny, I have a little suspicion, I feel like a little uncomfortable at, at preaching to the converted at cheap applause. I’m now finding myself on stages with this book. And of course the audience is all kind of on its side. The audience is all often liberal people, federal workers, and you know, I have them at hello. And I don’t particularly like that. I mean, it’s better than having, having them hate you.

00:46:15 But I want people to just like the story, like judge it by the quality of the thing rather than judge it by whether it confirms your prejudices. And that that’s, and it’s just increasingly, this is something that’s changed in my li my literary career in my life. It’s getting harder and harder to, to pierce people’s prejudices that they’re so, they come in so armored with some opinion that’s very half-baked, that they have possibly even uttered themselves on social media so that they’ve, they’ve, they’ve sort of like, they’re anchored in it and they don’t want to, they don’t wanna even think about anything different than what they’ve said. And so you’re, you’ve got this, you’ve got an army of kind of prejudice readers that you, that you, you have to deal with that it’s just louder than it wa it’s ever been. And it makes it hard to get the story told.

00:47:07 [Speaker Changed] What’s really ironic is that a lot of the people who are the beneficiaries of a lot of the government work, coal mine, most obvious is they’re in red states. And so there’s a little bit of a, there’s a little bit of craziness with that. But let’s talk a a about the process of the book. The, the eight or nine chapters you write. The first one you write the last one, and then the middle six are the six writers. You, you mentioned, I don’t really think of you as an editor, I think of you as a writer. What was that like having, not only to edit this, but edit friends?

00:47:46 [Speaker Changed] What I did was talk them into doing it. I recruited them and I talked to them about what stories that they might write. But after that, I left everything to David Shipley, who was who, who

00:47:59 [Speaker Changed] Oh sure. I know David.

00:48:00 [Speaker Changed] And, and who’s former Bloomberg editor. And so, so I didn’t have to do any of the line in, I didn’t touch anybody’s pieces. I, I kept, I kept great distance from that and most of them didn’t need that. Couple, couple did I do, I have often engaged with other writers and having them bounce their stories off me and talk about how they might do do it so that that’s easy for me and fun and all these writers were kind of spoiled for choice. It wasn’t like throwing up their hands and saying, what am I gonna write about? I don’t have a story. It was more, should I do A or B or C? So that, that part was fun, really fun. I can’t tell you how easy this thing was. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s surprising. I thought if when I involve, I was a little trepidatious about involving other writers.

00:48:48 ’cause I, they’re all neurotic, you know, they never know what they, no, it’s hurting catch. You never know what they’re gonna do. Right. And what they’re gonna show or, and everybody hit their marks and were kind of, nobody was trouble. They were all, they all did what they were supposed to do. And, and, and I did, you know, that was the other thing. You know, the moment, the gut check moment for me was I got ’em all riled up. Are there gonna be these great stories? Go do it. And then I realized, oh, I gotta write something. And finding my, I I thought, oh, it’s gonna be tough for me to like rise to this occasion again. And I found, I think these are two of the more interesting long form narrative stories I have ever written. And they are,

00:49:30 [Speaker Changed] And that’s saying something.

00:49:31 [Speaker Changed] It is saying, I mean, I’ve had some great material. I, I think the material I’m always good as my material, right? I can’t make, I can’t put in what God left out.

00:49:39 [Speaker Changed] Agree to disagree.

00:49:41 [Speaker Changed] No, it’s true though. It’s true. If you, I you, I really, if I have boring really bad material, it wouldn’t be very good. But this case, the ingredients were there for excellent meals and, and it just, they turned out beautifully. I’m just really proud of ’em. You know, I, I’m,

00:49:55 [Speaker Changed] I love that feeling of like, I don’t know how this is gonna, when you start, I’m intrigued by this. I don’t know where it’s gonna go. And then when you’re done, it’s like, oh, this turned out be like, I thought this was a good idea and hey, this turned out even better than I expected. It really is a, a lovely sensation as a writer. It,

00:50:14 [Speaker Changed] It is a, it is a completely lovely sensation. And the whole book, when I look back on it, it feels like the whole group was in a flow state that the whole group,

00:50:24 [Speaker Changed] Everybody,

00:50:25 [Speaker Changed] Nobody over, nobody overthought it, it people just went and did what they did. They played their best game and, and I did too. And so it was, it was really gratifying and it’s had the response to it. I mean, of course now with what’s going on, but the, you know, most of them appeared in the Washington Post over running up to the election. And the response was just, I remember the letter, the after the first one, the woman who edits the, the, the comment section said, I’ve never seen anything like this. Really? Yes. I mean, it was just, just exploded. And this is all before Trump’s elected. And now the things all together in one piece, in one place, in the, the, you know, there’s this deconstruction of the government going on, it sits in the middle of the conversation. I mean, it’s like it that the world is smiling upon this work. There’s no question,

00:51:19 [Speaker Changed] There is no question. It could not possibly be more timely. I know I only have you for a limited amount of time. There’s two questions I have to ask. One sports related. And the obvious question I always feel like I have to ask you is, Hey, what’s the ’cause what I, you recall the dinner with a bunch of people talking about SBF? Yep. So I gotta ask you, what’s the next Michael Lewis story that’s gonna be told? What story haven’t you told? What subject haven’t you touched that you’re eager to attack?

00:51:54 [Speaker Changed] Well, I kind of have a rule and the rule is I don’t, I don’t really like to talk about it. I know that it takes the energy out of it. Oh

00:52:02 [Speaker Changed] Really? 00:52:02 [Speaker Changed] Yeah.

00:52:02 [Speaker Changed] Why don’t you talk about it? That’s why I thought you just didn’t wanna reveal.

00:52:05 [Speaker Changed] No, no. It’s like I, you’re getting, you’re sort of getting the response before you’ve done the work and it’s, I, it it’s sort of, it, it’s, it’s nice to build the tension just in yourself. But having said that, I don’t have, it’s not, I mean, I just finished this and I don’t, I don’t have a book I’m writing now. I’ll tell you what things that interests me.

00:52:29 [Speaker Changed] Okay.

00:52:30 [Speaker Changed] I think what Elon Musk and Doge is doing is unbelievably interesting. Like it’s, it is a tornado ripping through the culture. And no doubt, I think that that daily journalism does a really good job of telling you just what kind of just happened on the surface. It doesn’t go below. And that there is, there’s that, that’s worth paying close attention to. Another thing that really interests me is the commercialization of youth sports, of college and college sports. Especially the, the way this radical free agency has come to co college sports. And you’ve got 15-year-old quarterbacks who have got $2 million name, image and likeness deals. And that, that, that, and it’s an environment that’s just been upended and it interests me on like, who wins, who loses, who succeeds? Who, who can coach in this environment, who can lead in this environment? I interest in college sports and a third area, and I don’t, we don’t wanna get, wanna get into this too much, but, but grief, you know, I lost a child four years ago and I’m starting to find the words to describe that experience.

00:53:37 And I don’t think it’s a book, but I don’t know. But these, but I mean, if you were here, Barry in my office, I have like, you know, 50 folders here of stuff that’s, you know, at least in the back of my mind that might lead somewhere. And you never know what’s gonna spark it. You never, I really never know what’s going to, what’s going to the call I’m gonna get, or the person I’m gonna meet, or the thing I’m gonna read where I think, oh, that’s it, that’s where I need to go. And it happens very quickly. I mean, that, it’s like slow, slow, slow, slow, slow. And then, oop, there we go. And I’m in the, I’m in the

00:54:14 [Speaker Changed] Gradually then all at once you’re quoting Hemingway. There

00:54:16 [Speaker Changed] We go. That’s how it feels. It feels gradually then all at once. And I’m in the gradual phase right now.

00:54:22 [Speaker Changed] Huh. That, that’s really interesting. I’m gonna come back to sports in a minute, but I gotta ask, so given all these files and given how this book was so different than prior books and then going Infinite was so different than Flash Boys and on and on it goes, I’m curious about what’s your writing routine like and how has it evolved over time? Like, I am intimately familiar with the Liar’s Poker story. Yeah. Which I just love that whole thing. We’ve talked about that many times. Yeah. But from kind of writing at night, getting home from Salomon Brothers to being a full-time author, how has your process changed?

00:55:04 [Speaker Changed] I had to shift when kids start, when I, we started having kids instead of a really late night life. It became a really a a, I became a morning writer. I, I may go back. Our son, our, our youngest is a senior in high school. And the minute he’s outta the house, I would not be surprised if I revert to Nocturnal Beast. It’s my, that’s my natural state. But the process, the one thing I’ve noticed that’s changed in my process is a deeper and deeper appreciation of the importance of the character of the, of, of the subjects that I, that I, the premonition is that it was a, was for me, it was a sort of a breaking, I, I, it was, it was a marking point because I, I thought, I do wanna write about this thing that’s happening co the, the covid, but I wanna do it.

00:55:52 I wanna, I wanna put the characters first. And I almost cast it. I that I, I went looking, I, I worried about the story less than I worried about the people I was writing about. I put the, and, and the same with SBF. It was like, this guy is, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but it’s in, he’s interesting. Like, there’s a thing to do here because this person is so interested. The person will create the story. And I’ve tilted that direction. I mean, it was always there. I was, I’ve always been writing about curious characters, but I’ve gotten more adamant, I’ve gotta be more certain about the character before I start Moneyball. I started with the idea kind of, it was, it was like how they win a baseball games and oh my God, it’s inefficient. Oh my God, analytics, blah, blah, blah. But it doesn’t work unless Billy Bean is a really good character. But I didn’t, I didn’t discover how good a character he was for months. He kept himself hidden for a while. And I think I now have to feel more confident in the character before I start.

00:56:49 [Speaker Changed] Huh. And, and you know, I’m little thinking in the top, off the top of my head. So you have Billy Bean, right? A and, and then work Youi Brad Ziana at, at IEX. Yep. Danny Kahneman. You just keep working your way through each of the books to say nothing of Michael Burry e Every book leads to one of these characters, leads to this, again, this Michael Lewis character who’s quirky and thoughtful and discovers a great out of consensus truth and uses it to either affect, change or challenge the status quo. I I think that shines through this. Certainly SBF was that guy, hold aside the fraud and the of money and all that stuff. Same sort of character. And what I’m hearing from you is that you’ve become, even though the stories are always fascinating and amazing, they seem to become more and more character driven as you’ve worked

00:57:55 [Speaker Changed] Your, your no, your books. It’s it’s true. It’s true. Like your theory of my OI don’t know how you explain how Liars Poker fits into it. For example,

00:58:05 [Speaker Changed] Freshman attempt, and you’re still get, by the way, I when, when you had the anniversary of that, that book. Yeah. And I literally picked it up having not read it for 25 years, and I reread it. I’m like, oh, good writer shows potential. Not quite Michael Lewis yet. But you could see, and I agree, this is a co agree, did agree, this is a compliment. Oh, you, it, it comes through like, oh, I see exactly how all these little things, like all the seeds of Michael Lewis are planted throughout Liar’s Poker, and then it just blossoms in every subsequent book. So the first, your first book was like, all right, this is real. Oh, he’s a first time author. This is a really good book for first time author. But that author wasn’t a fully formed Michael Lewis, nor how old were you? 30 something.

00:58:59 [Speaker Changed] 20. I wrote it when I was 26.

00:59:01 [Speaker Changed] Okay. So a 26-year-old Michael Lewis is certainly should never be expected to be a 30, 40, 50, 60 something. Yeah. Michael Lewis seasoned wizened and just having lived life. So, and I say, I want you to understand, I’m saying that as a

00:59:18 [Speaker Changed] Compliment. I know. No, I, I re I had to reread it when I did the audio book. I re reread

00:59:23 [Speaker Changed] It. How Bizarre is doing an audio book, by the way? Is it not the craziest thing you’ve ever done?

00:59:28 [Speaker Changed] It’s, it’s, when I, going back to something I wrote 30 something years ago that was weird. And it, it was unsettling because I wanted to fix all this stuff, you know? Right.

00:59:39 [Speaker Changed] You wanna edit

00:59:40 [Speaker Changed] As you read, you know? Yeah. I know. Things I didn’t even notice at the time are just like appalling to me. Right. And, but doing my own audio books as I mostly do now, I, it’s the, the one thing I always notice is how much, how you read it differently, how you see it differently when you’re reading it aloud. That you see stuff that you wouldn’t, you don’t see when you just read, when you’re doing it on the page. And that you shouldn’t let a book out the door without having read it aloud.

01:00:09 [Speaker Changed] I I, I had an editor who used to say to me, you should take your columns and read them out loud and you’ll have a totally different feeling for it. Plus you discover half your vocabulary are things that you have never spoken out loud and don’t know how to pronounce because you’ve only read them and written them. And That’s right, that’s right. Capitalization. I took me like 10 minutes to get that word iterative. ’cause I’ve only read and written them. How often do you get to say capitalization and you always mangle it ’cause you’re, so, it’s really fun. All right. So I only have you for a few moments left. I gotta throw you a curve ball since you’ve, you’ve written about baseball, you’ve written about little league coaching, you’ve written about football, even you’ve written about basketball and Darryl Morrie, which by the way, there, there’s a book in basketball, although it may, it’s too late. ’cause Steph Curry and LeBron James are already towards the back part of their career. But I have to ask, what’s sports do you watch? What are your teams, who do you root for? And we’re recording this just as March Madness has already destroyed all the brackets.

01:01:20 [Speaker Changed] I had Drake, I had Drake over Missouri, Clemson. 01:01:24 [Speaker Changed] Oh yeah. Really?

01:01:25 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, I did. I didn’t have me state, but I came close. I thought about it and then I thought, Clemson’s gonna bounce from losing to Duke. And I was wrong about that. But my bracket looks great, except for that I, it’s, right now it’s intact except for the mcd McNee state game. I watch college basketball. I watch it more. I like everybody else. During March Madness, I watch playoff baseball. I watched the Cubs, I watched the Cub. So I watched the Cub.

01:01:52 [Speaker Changed] Wait, you’re not a, you a Chicago guy?

01:01:55 [Speaker Changed] Nope, but Nico Horner? No. Nico Horner is their second baseman. And Nico was in high school with Quinn, my daughter and Quinn. And when Quinn Quinn was a pitcher on the softball team, and Nico Nico was a pitcher on the baseball team. And in the off season, Nico and his English teacher father and me and Quinn would be out there. The only ones out there working out. And so I gotta know Nico a little bit. And he’s a gr he’s this unbelievable kid. Just a great kid. And so he, he has led me to become a Cubs fan. And it’s actually a fun team. They, they, they, they’re infield before games. This is something I might want. They, they get, they sit in a circle and, and they pick a different person and everybody has to say something nice about, it’s like, it’s like, it’s a completely different model of how you like collaborate. But, you know, for, for guys in sports. But so I watch that, I watch some W-N-B-A-I watch the NBA, the Warriors are my team and have been right there.

01:02:54 [Speaker Changed] Right.

01:02:54 [Speaker Changed] You’re right. I mean, we’ve been so blessed. I think Cur is a magician. And I think Curry has been, I mean, the whole thing has just been magical to watch and the a’s used to be my team, but they’ve left me right. And football, I watch obsessively. So football, I watch more college and, and NFL football than anything. And my team in the, in the NFL is the Saints, which is, we’ve had our ups and downs, but I’ve never, you know, new Orleans has never left me. And, and in college football, I don’t really have, I like the Ole Miss Rebels. I got very attached when Michael Laura was there. I traveled around with that team, but I don’t have one team. My in basketball, the team that I like college basketball. I don’t know why, because I didn’t go there. I’m a Duke basketball addict. It’s like I’ve, you jump one way or the other with Duke, you either hate him or love him and, well,

01:03:50 [Speaker Changed] Their coach was so beloved for so many years. I think that’s,

01:03:53 [Speaker Changed] And the new coach will be too. I think Shire is fabulous. So I think it’s a different, he’s, he’s managing it in a different environment, but clearly has the ability to do it.

01:04:03 [Speaker Changed] Michael, as always, every time I, we have one of these conversations, they’re, they’re delightful. And I’m gonna just announce here, anyone who wants to come listen to Michael, discuss not just this book, but his whole career, April 7th at the Gene Rimsky Theater in Port Washington. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. I get to Pepper Mike with all sorts of questions that we haven’t gotten to here. We have been speaking with Michael Lewis. His new book is Who Is Government, the Untold Story of Public Service. If you enjoy this conversation, well be sure to check out any of the previous 500 conversations we’ve had over the past 11 years. You can find those at iTunes, spotify, bloomberg.com, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Sarah Lipsey is my audio engineer. Anna Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. I’m Barry Riol. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

~~~

The post Transcript: Michael Lewis on ‘Who is Government’ appeared first on The Big Picture.