Brought to you by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, committed to bringing higher finance to lower carbon named the most innovative investment bank for climate change and sustainability by the Banker. That's the power of Global Connections. Bank of America North America member f D I C. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, I have none other than Michael Lewis, and let me tell you I had a blast talking to him. He is just eloquent and charming and full of great stories. Uh. It was if you can imagine how much fun it would be to sit in a room and just chew the fat with Michael Lewis overall his books. Yes, it was that much fun. So rather than me give you a whole song and dance about his background, because you already know his background, you've already read most of his books, I'm just gonna shut up and with no further ado, my conversation with Michael Lewis. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholtz on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is none other than Michael Lewis. He is the author of such best selling financial stories as Moneyball, the Big Short Flashboys UH. Most recently he wrote The Undoing Project, a story about UH, Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the people who were essentially invented the field of behavioral economics. UM. I could talk about your resume forever, but let's jump right into this. Michael Lewis welcome to Bloomer. Pleasure to be back here. So let's let's jump right into a little bit about your background. So you you come out of the London School of Economics, you get a job at Solomon Brothers in the nine eighties, markets on fire, Sally's one of the hottest firms on the street, and you just walk away from that. What sort of pushed back did you get from your friends and family about yeah, making a ton of money, but this sort of stuff is not for me. It was a funny situation because through a lot of accident, I had had some success as Solomon Brothers. I got there and UM, I was taking under the wing of a big hedge fund manager in Europe, where where I was based. He did all his business through me, so I looked like a very profitable salesperson. I was. I was a derivatives person at Solomon Brothers. Really yeah, I was the I was the arm of John Merryweather's desk in London, and my job was explain options and futures to everybody because they were new and uh, and dream up new kinds of securities, which I did, and sell whatever I could sell to whoever I talked to. And uh. And that's the guy who eventually writes the big short. That's the guy eventually writes a BA shorn. You know it was? It was UM extremely useful that training in in in coming to grips with collateralized obligations and credit, the fault swaps and all the rest. But what ifs? So what happened was I UM, I knew going in that I wanted to write for a living. I had no idea if it was even possible. I was. I was writing magazine articles while I was at Solomon Brothers. Um the economists published the first I don't know, fifteen or twenty of them and with no byline. But then I'd I'd bundle up the clips and I'd send them off to editors and say, I actually wrote this. You can call this guy and check. And Michael Kinsley, who was the editor of The New Republic, and Amity Schlace, who was then the op ed editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, encouraged me and and a magazine in England too, so I had several outlets. Uh, and the stuff started getting attention. The stuff with my byline got me in trouble. I mean I wrote a work. Well, yeah, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal that ended up being reprinted in the U. S Journal on the op ed page. That's that argued that investment bankers were overpaid and at the bottom it it's at the bottom, it said. Michael Lewis is an associated Solomon Brothers in London. And when I came in the next day, Uh, the guy who ran Solomon belle As Europe was ashen face sitting at my desk and he and he said, I've been on the phone all night with members of the boards, board of directors that this is the things being reprinted across the country and and we can't have he was pleading. It was it was more in sorrow than an anger. It was you can't go in the Wall Street Journal and say you're with us and that we're overpaid. And I said, and I said, well, it's true, and he said it is true, but you know, you know but and then he said, he said, is there And he said, could you just you gotta stop writing? And I said, I I'm not gonna do that. And he said he was great. Actually was Charlie mcphaz's name. He was wonderful guy. And he says, well, is there anyway, um you could do it um under a different name so that nobody connects it back to us? And I said fine, And I wrote under the name Diana Bleaker, which was my mother's name, and my my definished the story. I STI, I'm writing under Diana Blinker. And Diana Bleaker publishes something in the New Republic. And I get a call from Chevy Chase's dad, who's an editor at Simon and Schuster, and he says, I figured out you're Diana Bleaker, uh, and you should write a book. And I thought, oh my god, someone will We'll pay me to write a book. And it wasn't much, but that at that moment, I went and I said to the my bosses, I'm out of here. I'm gonna'm gonna be gonna be a writer. And they thought I was insane. That didn't answer your question. They actually tried to talk me off the ledge And it was not really it was not, oh, you can't go write a book about Solomon Brothers. Nobody we even thought about that or even cared. It was more we need you here and I'm we're really worried about your mental health. You're not gonna I mean, you're not gonna be a writer. It was that kind of they were trying to help me. Uh So we had kind of these amount of to a therapy session with the guys who ran the European office. So you're just yuessing them. But I recall reading that you kept a diary most of the time. Was it's the whole four years you had Solomon Brothers. So I wasn't there four years. I was there just shy a three And uh it wasn't a diary in the way that I don't know you might imagine Jane Austin, because I was writing about it. I mean, so yeah, I started taking an interest in the what was specifically going on around me, uh as possible literary material maybe six months before I left, So not the whole time. What I did is I mean, during the training program, I wrote down everything, and so I had all that on all that stuff. Um, I actually the firm. I mean it would just it would. Public relations people of Wall Street firms today would not believe how loose it was. When I left, I called and said, I get some videotapes from the training program, just so I get the dialogue right. And then they were friends. When got me a couple of videos I needed, and uh, and people Louis Ronieri, who ran the mortgage right exactly helped me, uh, you know, kind of come to come to term with what had happened in his department. I went and interviewed all the mortgage traders. Everybody's just nobody said you can't write a we can't write a book about us, you know, nobody said you know, it was no there was no free sty of scandal around it. It was just like, it's kind of cool, you're gonna write a book. But I'm a good luck guy with that right Who wants who cares about a book that? Everybody couldn't be sweeter about it? So you leave an eight eight right now? I got to let me make sure I got the dates right and the book comes out in eighty nine. No, I left what I do. That's right. I left in. I waited the boy, but I actually I waited enough for me. I waited till the bonus hit the bank account in the end of January early February and left. I wrote the book in a year, and so the book was done by early eighty nine. It came at the end of eighty nine. Wow, that's amazing. I'm Barry rid Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is one of my favorite authors. His name is Michael Lewis, and you're probably familiar with him from books such as Liars Poker, The Big Short, Moneyball, and more recently The Undoing Project, A Story of two uh is reely psychologist who very much change the way we look at cognition and thinking. A friendship that changed our minds. So let's let's jump right into this, because first of all, I really enjoyed the book. I found it fascinating. We've had Failor and Conomon and other behaviorists on the show, and I love that sort of approach to thinking about thinking. And what I really liked was your introduction in the book. You explain how Failor and Cass Sunstein wrote a review of money Ball published in the New Republic, and they kind of call you out for saying, Hey, this is really all about cognition, and how did you ignore the works of the people who created the science and most of Versking and Danny Knoman. So the question is, was this book a little bit of a mia kulpa for that oversight in in money Ball? You know, it wasn't And I wasn't really feeling guilty about it. I felt I felt um, I felt Uh. I was surprised that there there had been working psychology that that explained what was going on in the minds of baseball scouts when they missed judge baseball players and among other things. I was surprised I'd never heard of these guys, because I did do a master's in economics. But it was before that all has happened, you know, And when when did you When I got out of the the LC and so nobody talked about this kind of stuff. You were being taught rational expectation, it was just starting to and um, and then uh, what happens is that I was out drinking with a friend. Uh, I got named dak Or Keltner who was a psychologist of the Berkeley uh in the Berkeley at cal and he's he's like a wonderful guy and it and I told him, I said, you know, it's odd that your field somehow has something to say about this book I wrote. And he said, Danny lives just up the hill. You can go. You can go see him. And he's a friend. I said, really. And it took me. I took me sometime to take him up on that offer. But he introduced me to Danny and when who By the way, he had won the Nobel Prize for his work the year before money Bull comes. That's right, that's right in economics and act. That was weird. You nobody said, how is the psychologist winning the Nobel Prize in economics? This nobody? Nobody. You look at the descriptions of his Nobel Prize and it says, oh, this is normal. It's bizarre. Uh. Well, the underlying premise for all of economics is that humans are are rational, optimized, nothing of the sort. I'm not saying it's not deserved. I'm saying that if you told him when he was doing his work that he's gonna win a Nobel Prize in economics. He looked at you like you had three heads. But uh, what happened? Really it was organic. It's kind of curious. I want to meet a guy who win the Nobel Prize. That was probably the first thought, was I to go meet somebody who won a Nobel Prize. And I didn't go up thinking I'm gonna write a book about him, and I gotten. We just became friends. I started following him. I started I'd see him when he was in town. We go on along walks, uh in the hills, and he would talk about his relationship with Amos. And that's what interested me that I thought these guys had this incredible love affair. I mean, it wasn't there was no sex. The sex was having the ideas, but it was there was a drama to their relationship that got me interested. I called it an intellectual romance in the review you haven't read, um, But since you mentioned Amos, let's let's talk a little bit about him, because there's this really bizarre thing you mentioned in the afterward. So, and I'm not giving away the ending to any of this. So, both Kneman and Tversky talked about the role of luck in people's lives, coincidentally, when you start thinking about doing this book you had previously taught or coached Amos Tversky's son. Well, this gets weird, right, I mean, that's really well. When at some point I can't remember when the penny dropped, I realized I had a kid in the year I taught writing a cow whose last name was Tversky, and he was about my favorite student, and we had a friendship. I'd see him every year for dinner, and he never mentioned anything about his dad. I wouldn't even known who he was anyway, so there would be no reason. Uh. But then I wrote I remember writing or in Diversky notes, saying, is Amos your dad? And he said yeah, yeah, And I said, well, I'm toying with the idea of writing a book about his collaboration with Danny. And he goes, oh really. It was kind of like he said, my mom, I'm sure my mom will be happy to help. It was basically what he said, but but it was it was serendipitous, to say the least. So you you teach Amos Tversky's son, Danny Conuman lives up the street from you. You spend five years softening up Kneman in order to do the book that he was really reluctant. There were two stages of this assault. The first was um getting helping him a little bit, uh right, because his publisher's agent thought it was insane for him to be talking to me about a book before he wrote his, and you're going to steal the idea? Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't. It was so different, it didn't matter to me. But he said, we could you just wait until I'm done with this and so so that that was the first. So there was not even possibility of doing the thing until after he was done with that. And then he never really ever said no, you're not going to write a book about us, But he expressed extreme skepticism and uh and and concern whenever I'd kind of bring it up, and he was UM. I wanted him to want to do it, and I never got him there. I never got him there at best. And so but I got him to the point where he would answer my question and uh, and he was um. He was wonderful about it in the end, But it did. Yes, if I would say five years, I went and saw him an O seven. It was about two thousand twelve when it became very earnest. So here's where I'm going to call you out for a little bs in the book. And you write, you know, the book didn't require a writer as much as a stenographer, And based on everything we've just said, that line is pure nonsense because it's clear from everything you just said, and I'm not blowing smoke, nobody else could have done this book except you because of your relationship with Orange Diversity and your friendship with Danny. Who else could have put these pieces together the way you did. Well. When I said that it required a stenographer, what I meant was the people I was interviewing, these these seventy five year old, eighty year old Israeli people, intellectuals. What was coming out of their mouths was it was all I want to do it. I didn't. I don't use a tape recorder. Every one of them had a chilling war story, women and men. Everything was everybody had almost died many times in the most dramatic ways, and all of them had exquisite ideas and observations about my main characters. So what I meant was they did a lot of the work for me, and that work normally I would have to do insight into the characters. It had been done for me and by by intellectual bulldozers. However, your point is well taken that I was positioned to do it, and when I finally I some The last little hurdle I had to get over was in my own mind. I was afraid of the material because I didn't know I well, I didn't know anyth about psychology. I didn't know much about Israel. I was walking into a really new territory for me, and I thought, I kept thinking, who who should write this book? And maybe Malcolm got Gladwall should write this book. You'd do a great job. He's got uh, he's really facile with complicated ideas. He's he'd be perfect for it. Didn't see it didn't seem like my book. And then I realized that it's got to be my book, because the only way you tell the stories if you're inside these people, and no one else is going to get inside these people. Brought to you by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Seeing what others have seen, but uncovering what others may not. Global Research that helps you Harness disruption voted top global research firm five years running. Merrill Lynch Pierce, Fenner and Smith Incorporated. I'm Barry Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Michael Lewis. He is the Poet Laureate of Financial nonfiction UH and Wall Street related narratives. Uh. Let's jump right into some of the really interesting books you've written in the past and and some of the responses to them. Um. I was watching UH sixty minutes when you were talking about Flashboys, and you came out and said the markets were rigged and all hell breaks loose? What what was the pushback like to that? Wait? Was funny because it didn't even occur to me I was saying anything controversial. I thought everybody knew it. The writ and they pretty much always be read and but the way they it was just the way they're rigged has changed. And uh, really it's it's so if you sit with the people who at I X, the the exchange I was writing about, and have them show you in real time kind of what's going on in the market, you say, well, that's rigged. Uh. So I didn't think it was a kind of surprised that it generated the response it did. But the blowback. It's the book that was the most unpleasant to publish. Really, Yes, in that, by the way, fascinating book. I love the opening about the line of sight with running the fiber optic cables and and how milliseconds make a difference. So the the it was the most unpleasant to publish because it made so many people so angry, who were angry, who who were going to try to do something about it, And the reason was It took me about a moment to realize that what the reason was. It's the first time and the only time I've written a book that was going to take money away from Wall Street people that that that it was. It was it came as news, uh, to some extent the story I told the guys who were my main characters had news in their hands that they didn't hadn't given anybody else. And unlike the big short liars poker um, the money hadn't all been made. I wasn't I wasn't writing something retrospectively. I was writing something that was going on that if it was shut down, would cost people billions of dollars and it and all of a sudden, people are furious. They're hiring lobbyists to go to Washington and spread stuff on the internet, and it was like being on the receiving end of a political campaign. Very it was. It was a crude and kind of if you knew anything about the subject, and kind of intellectually embarrassing one. But nevertheless it was it was just weird have people so hostile. So you you go on TV, you get into a debate with the CEO of the Bats exchange. He says a bunch of things that turned out to be not so true. Ultimately he steps down from the vision. I said, you essentially are to blame for him getting fired. What other crazy sort of stuff came out of that book? We know. Brad Katayama was a guest on the show and was quite delightful. The main character of the book was on that CNBC show with me, and he's the reason the guy from Bat Bats he called him out. He called him out, and he had he had ability to call h out in a way I did not, because once you get into the weeds of the subject that unless you are the world's authority defending yourself again against whatever, he has the world's authority absolutely and so um, what other stuff. It's mainly like calls from lawyers, yeahs or hey Mike Needle, lawyer. But also um, just just the idea that people are being hired, people have now jobs to attack a book. That that just was weird and grease balls. I mean people you just would not really you wouldn't think anybody would want on their side who are I mean transparently kind of like making it up as they go along. Uh. That that was just an odd experience. I've never had anything like that. I mean you would think maybe Solomon Brothers would have done something like that after Liar's Poker, but nothing, nothing, They were great kind of I mean there was people were upset, some people, but they did they would have done something like that. It felt the world of big shot Wall Street people has become much more um sneaky and manipulative and and dark in the sense that brad cotts the other points us out. He says, it's amazing how people think it's just the done thing to create a propaganda campaign filled lies, because the lies travel so fast and the truth is complicated, and so you can just you can just paper the paper the internet with with all this nonsense and nobody knows the difference between this this this statement and this statement. Well, thank thank goodness, something like that would never happen in a political So, you know, Matt was my experience of seeing I've always ten assume that like most people would look and say, well, clearly he's lying. Clearly he's been hired to say this credit and uh, that's not how it works. Uh. It's people to say, oh, it must be two stories there, the classic false equivalence, Well, the Earth is around, the Earth is flat. They both made yes, yes, and and uh. On the other hand, Joe says the Earth is flat and you could see it's flat. You know, you can't really see any curvature. It is flat. Yeah, So that's but that is how that's how it felt. And I thought at some point, I thought, you know, unless I devote my life full time to to waging a counter campaign, which I don't have the time or inclination to do or interest now that it's just it was that, thank god that I had characters who had a big interest in doing so that if I X wasn't around and with serious backers, I mean, all of this would have just I look like I look like a quack. I look like a crank who wrote this. Um, so you've written enough really interesting things about unusual circumstances that I think most people give you the benefit of the doubt. Um not most people of the sec not most people who are paid not to give me the benefit of the doubt. So I think that, uh that the if that public policy would not have had any would would not have responded at all to the story if it were even if it were completely true, unless there were an agent out there, namely I X pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and uh so, so it's just disturbing. It just think you think the truth will set you free, and it's really clear what's true, and nobody, you know, it doesn't get to people in the way that you would think. Um, that's that's unbelievable. So that's that was my That was my That was the most it was the most disturbing publishing experience. I'm Barry Hults. You're listening to Master's in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is author Michael Lewis. Most recently he wrote the book The Undoing Project, The Friendship That Changed Our Minds, but he's also written such classic Wall Street Books as Liars, Poker, Moneyball, The Blindside, Flashboys, The Big Short. You did a book on the election right after The Losers. It's that wasn't the original That's that wasn't my title. I want to call it loses because I followed all the people who lost. By the way, was there an original title for The Big Short? Or was it always always the Big Short? Alright, I'll share something with you later that I think you'll appreciate. So let's talk a little bit about your writing process. So where do you begin? I know you have an office at home with a desk and a computer. Do you just sit down and say, let me start banging something out? How do these ideas German social interaction in the beginning? Really? Yeah? So I don't. I'm not a novelist, and my material is not just in my head. It's out there in the world. And so I spent I spend three times in much time I'm gathering the material as I do actually writing it. So typical book takes a year and a half to report and research, maybe a bit more and six months to write. Is it research right? Research right? Or research research research right right? Right? It's nothing but research for a long time, and when I start writing, I'm usually still doing bits and pieces of research, and in the end I'm doing no research and of just writing. So it's the writing of it is. I don't want to say it's an afterthought, but by the time that's right, I'm constantly thinking about how the story goes, and by the time I sit down to actually start a book, I at least think I know exactly where it ends. Like I had the last sentence to this book in my head pretty much, and I usually have a title. Sometimes I don't, and it like drives me crazy because I think that it crystallizes for you with the books about to have the title. There's a buzz in my head that bothers me if I don't have the title in my head, So it takes sometimes it takes a while to find that title, but usually I have that. So at the blind side, I had the big short The Undoing Project came pretty early as a as a title undoing what we previously thought about cognition, Yes, and it was also what they were working on when they broke up. They had a project they had tentatively titled the Undoing Project. And so and I like the phrase. So anyway, the and then when the writing starts always goes in slightly different ways than I imagine. Things drop that I thought were important you see in print, and they no longer resonate the word I don't even get him into print. I get to the point in the story where I thought they belong. I realized, as it did boring, this is unnecessary. So things fall away. Is a lot of that numb and and sometimes internally things swell all of a sudden, things I thought were words on the page, we're end up being eight thousand words on the page. And it's this book surprised me that way that things everything that I whole sections did fall away, and things that I thought were short ended up being long. So that's a that raises a really interesting point when when you're playing with an idea, do you know from the beginning this is a Bloomberg View post, this is a long Younger magazine story. Oh, this is a full blown book. At what point do you have a sense that, hey, there's legs here. A column of the length of the Bloomberg View thing is always just a columns an opinion. It's preciually a humorous take on something, and uh, I've never had one of those become something I didn't think it was. But magazine pieces sometimes blow up and get much much bigger. Moneyball started as a magazine piece because I just had a question for the Oakland A's like, how are you winning? And I thought, well, that would be a cute little story. Actually it wasn't even be a long magazine piece. And after a day with the front office and I went, oh my god, this is something big here. I don't know what it is, but it's not a short magazine piece. It took me six weeks to figure out what it was and just talking to him, and then now the year to report it. I gotta assume. So if people who are not familiar with the story, Oakland a is one of the smallest budgets in the entire baseball league, and suddenly they start a new approach to let's throw away the old nonsense of evaluating players, so they didn't talk about any of that. You all you saw as a fan where wow, they look a little strange. They look like a Beer league softball team. They're all these kind of fat guys who hit home runs and can't catch the ball, and they're winning all these games? How's this happening? And uh? And then you when you see the budgets, like they're paying for their players a fifth of what the Yankees are and they're winning as many games. If the market's efficient, that makes no sense that you should buy all the best players and just beat the A's. So what's going on there? And it was a market efficiency story. It's like something's wrong there. And I thought there would be an easy explanation. I didn't know what it was gonna be. And the explanation was very involved. And and the big thing was the A's front office had never been asked the question because of the sports journalists were not at all focused on this on the money side of things. They you know, some have some money, someone don't have some money. But they didn't think in terms of like market efficiency. And so Billy Bean, who ran the Oakland A's, had never had a chance to download on anybody all these thoughts he had about the how screwed up the evaluations? So I had, so it was completely fresh material. He said to me. No one's asked that question. Where the sports journalists drinking from the same kool aid as everybody else? They just didn't think it was interesting. You know, it really is a matter of what you find interesting. What was interesting is who they traded for or whether they went last night or who had not. Here's a giant philosophical shift in the way baseball team should be assembled that we don't care about. That. Tell me about your new second basement. In fairness, wasn't as if the Oakland front office was trying to tell their story. They just no one asked them for it, and they had not been approached by anybody saying I want to know what you're doing here, because something's going on. Except the owner of the Boston Red Sox, the new owner of the Boston Red Sox, who was trying to yeah, he he knew something was He was a financial guy. Something's going on there, and and so he was already sniffing around a little bit. So not a coincidence that a financial ride recognized. So that's statistical side of this, And a quantz running another baseball team said hey, there's some something here that's right. That's that that's not a coincidence, And the a's were it was atharctic for them to just talk have someone to talk to you about it, because it was what they thought about all the time is how you make your resources go further, how you find bargains in baseball, what's going on in the mind of baseball scouts, what's wrong with old fashioned baseball strategies? All they were rethinking the game. So money Ball became Billy Bean's confessional to you. It wasn't so much a confessional because that implies that he feels no. No, it was it was Billy be but it was Moneyball becomes story outlet for Billy to kind of get things off his chest about what he's seen. Yes, he tells the story. It took him a little while to get comfortable telling me a story, but not that long. You're pretty good at ingratiating yourself with people to get them to to come out and speak with you. You know. I try to let him get to know me a bit so they feel more comfortable. And the truth is that if I'm going to do a long thing, a long piece of writing about someone, I have to genuinely feel basically positively disposed to them. That if I actually thought he was a creep or dishonest or whatever, I just I wouldn't want to spend the time with him necessary for the book. So it becomes a kind of easy relationship because he senses I basically like him, and he says that I'm basically a sane person, and he says I might do anything really creepy, and so there's a trust develops, and it's just a very broad trust. I don't want anybody see what I write about them or anything. But at some points starts to feel comfortable with me, and I'm gonna tell my story. Somebody might as well be him. That's what you're gunning for. Nobody's ever gonna feel completely comfortable with it. You just say someone's gonna get this story, might as well be him. Let's stay with the idea of a magazine story that would have or could have become a book. In the Sunday New York Times magazine, you published How the egg Heads Cracked. It's a nine thousand word opus about long term capital management. My former boss. Oh really, John Merryweather, That's that's right. So the question is, and with all due respect to Roger Lowenstein, I love when when Genius failed he was a guest on the show, But really you could have it in that book as well. Yes, why didn't that become a book. Because when I went back, when I'm researching this and I'm looking at that, my head of research says, hey, check out this article. I'm like, wow, this could easily have been a Michael Lewis book. I turned the question on his head. Why even bothered it? Right that? Because I really thought I was done writing about Wall Street in a big way, and you never want to write the same book twice. And while that's just too close in time, Yeah, yeah, it was a decade, but I just thought, been there, done that. The question that I actually asked was is this worth doing? And I thought, well, you know, these guys are being demonized in the press. Nobody really understands what they did. I kind of understand what they did, and they can explain it to me in a way I can explain to people. So it just like takes some of the weirdness out of the environment around them. So I just thought it would be it would be useful for me to go in have them explain it to me, and then explain it to a broader audience. And they didn't exactly trust me because I had written Liars Poker. I mean, that's that's trust is they they were. Some of them were irritated about that. Really, not a lot of the solid guys. Yeah, well they were. They were in my immediate colleagues, Hans hoffen Schmidt, hushmid Humid. So I gotta ask you about that. So he became your frame of reference for did I do the right thing? Leaving Sally was early. Well, we kind of tracked through the training program together, right, and we ended up kind of in a similar sort of role. He was in the foreign exchange department. I was with John Merryweather's a group, and we're kind of getting paid the same amount of money. And I did kind of think, well, if I'd stayed at Solomon Brothers, I'd kind of done how Hans did. And he killed and he made a ton of money, put it into the longtime capital. He was putting fifty million dollar bonuses, and then it all up to that point I thought, Jesus, did did I make a mistake becoming a writer? I never really felt that way, but it was like he was my measure of the opportunity cost. So the line in when the heads cracked after LTCM blows up and he's tens of millions of dollars go to zero. You're tracking this and you say, I once again was satisfied to be paid by the word do you. I don't remember writing it, but it's absolutely try. I felt that way. Thank God. I'm a camera writer, so financially sound decision. For people who would like to find more Michael Lewis, you can go to either his website, which is Michael Lewis. I don't have a website. Michael Lewis rights some my publisher has a website for you. But bonds and normal Amazon, wherever fine books are sold, you can find the works of Michael Lewis. You can check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com or follow me on Twitter at rid Halts. I'm Barry rid Halts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio, brought to you by Bank of America Merrill Lynch committed to bringing higher finance to lower carbon named the most innovative investment bank for climate change and sustainability by the Banker. That's the power of global connections. Bank of America, North America. Remember F D I C

Brought to you by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, committed to bringing higher finance to lower carbon named the most innovative investment bank for climate change and sustainability by the Banker. That's the power of Global Connections. Bank of America North America member f D I C. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, I have none other than Michael Lewis, and let me tell you I had a blast talking to him. He is just eloquent and charming and full of great stories. Uh. It was if you can imagine how much fun it would be to sit in a room and just chew the fat with Michael Lewis overall his books. Yes, it was that much fun. So rather than me give you a whole song and dance about his background, because you already know his background, you've already read most of his books, I'm just gonna shut up and with no further ado, my conversation with Michael Lewis. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholtz on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is none other than Michael Lewis. He is the author of such best selling financial stories as Moneyball, the Big Short Flashboys UH. Most recently he wrote The Undoing Project, a story about UH, Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the people who were essentially invented the field of behavioral economics. UM. I could talk about your resume forever, but let's jump right into this. Michael Lewis welcome to Bloomer. Pleasure to be back here. So let's let's jump right into a little bit about your background. So you you come out of the London School of Economics, you get a job at Solomon Brothers in the nine eighties, markets on fire, Sally's one of the hottest firms on the street, and you just walk away from that. What sort of pushed back did you get from your friends and family about yeah, making a ton of money, but this sort of stuff is not for me. It was a funny situation because through a lot of accident, I had had some success as Solomon Brothers. I got there and UM, I was taking under the wing of a big hedge fund manager in Europe, where where I was based. He did all his business through me, so I looked like a very profitable salesperson. I was. I was a derivatives person at Solomon Brothers. Really yeah, I was the I was the arm of John Merryweather's desk in London, and my job was explain options and futures to everybody because they were new and uh, and dream up new kinds of securities, which I did, and sell whatever I could sell to whoever I talked to. And uh. And that's the guy who eventually writes the big short. That's the guy eventually writes a BA shorn. You know it was? It was UM extremely useful that training in in in coming to grips with collateralized obligations and credit, the fault swaps and all the rest. But what ifs? So what happened was I UM, I knew going in that I wanted to write for a living. I had no idea if it was even possible. I was. I was writing magazine articles while I was at Solomon Brothers. Um the economists published the first I don't know, fifteen or twenty of them and with no byline. But then I'd I'd bundle up the clips and I'd send them off to editors and say, I actually wrote this. You can call this guy and check. And Michael Kinsley, who was the editor of The New Republic, and Amity Schlace, who was then the op ed editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, encouraged me and and a magazine in England too, so I had several outlets. Uh, and the stuff started getting attention. The stuff with my byline got me in trouble. I mean I wrote a work. Well, yeah, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal that ended up being reprinted in the U. S Journal on the op ed page. That's that argued that investment bankers were overpaid and at the bottom it it's at the bottom, it said. Michael Lewis is an associated Solomon Brothers in London. And when I came in the next day, Uh, the guy who ran Solomon belle As Europe was ashen face sitting at my desk and he and he said, I've been on the phone all night with members of the boards, board of directors that this is the things being reprinted across the country and and we can't have he was pleading. It was it was more in sorrow than an anger. It was you can't go in the Wall Street Journal and say you're with us and that we're overpaid. And I said, and I said, well, it's true, and he said it is true, but you know, you know but and then he said, he said, is there And he said, could you just you gotta stop writing? And I said, I I'm not gonna do that. And he said he was great. Actually was Charlie mcphaz's name. He was wonderful guy. And he says, well, is there anyway, um you could do it um under a different name so that nobody connects it back to us? And I said fine, And I wrote under the name Diana Bleaker, which was my mother's name, and my my definished the story. I STI, I'm writing under Diana Blinker. And Diana Bleaker publishes something in the New Republic. And I get a call from Chevy Chase's dad, who's an editor at Simon and Schuster, and he says, I figured out you're Diana Bleaker, uh, and you should write a book. And I thought, oh my god, someone will We'll pay me to write a book. And it wasn't much, but that at that moment, I went and I said to the my bosses, I'm out of here. I'm gonna'm gonna be gonna be a writer. And they thought I was insane. That didn't answer your question. They actually tried to talk me off the ledge And it was not really it was not, oh, you can't go write a book about Solomon Brothers. Nobody we even thought about that or even cared. It was more we need you here and I'm we're really worried about your mental health. You're not gonna I mean, you're not gonna be a writer. It was that kind of they were trying to help me. Uh So we had kind of these amount of to a therapy session with the guys who ran the European office. So you're just yuessing them. But I recall reading that you kept a diary most of the time. Was it's the whole four years you had Solomon Brothers. So I wasn't there four years. I was there just shy a three And uh it wasn't a diary in the way that I don't know you might imagine Jane Austin, because I was writing about it. I mean, so yeah, I started taking an interest in the what was specifically going on around me, uh as possible literary material maybe six months before I left, So not the whole time. What I did is I mean, during the training program, I wrote down everything, and so I had all that on all that stuff. Um, I actually the firm. I mean it would just it would. Public relations people of Wall Street firms today would not believe how loose it was. When I left, I called and said, I get some videotapes from the training program, just so I get the dialogue right. And then they were friends. When got me a couple of videos I needed, and uh, and people Louis Ronieri, who ran the mortgage right exactly helped me, uh, you know, kind of come to come to term with what had happened in his department. I went and interviewed all the mortgage traders. Everybody's just nobody said you can't write a we can't write a book about us, you know, nobody said you know, it was no there was no free sty of scandal around it. It was just like, it's kind of cool, you're gonna write a book. But I'm a good luck guy with that right Who wants who cares about a book that? Everybody couldn't be sweeter about it? So you leave an eight eight right now? I got to let me make sure I got the dates right and the book comes out in eighty nine. No, I left what I do. That's right. I left in. I waited the boy, but I actually I waited enough for me. I waited till the bonus hit the bank account in the end of January early February and left. I wrote the book in a year, and so the book was done by early eighty nine. It came at the end of eighty nine. Wow, that's amazing. I'm Barry rid Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is one of my favorite authors. His name is Michael Lewis, and you're probably familiar with him from books such as Liars Poker, The Big Short, Moneyball, and more recently The Undoing Project, A Story of two uh is reely psychologist who very much change the way we look at cognition and thinking. A friendship that changed our minds. So let's let's jump right into this, because first of all, I really enjoyed the book. I found it fascinating. We've had Failor and Conomon and other behaviorists on the show, and I love that sort of approach to thinking about thinking. And what I really liked was your introduction in the book. You explain how Failor and Cass Sunstein wrote a review of money Ball published in the New Republic, and they kind of call you out for saying, Hey, this is really all about cognition, and how did you ignore the works of the people who created the science and most of Versking and Danny Knoman. So the question is, was this book a little bit of a mia kulpa for that oversight in in money Ball? You know, it wasn't And I wasn't really feeling guilty about it. I felt I felt um, I felt Uh. I was surprised that there there had been working psychology that that explained what was going on in the minds of baseball scouts when they missed judge baseball players and among other things. I was surprised I'd never heard of these guys, because I did do a master's in economics. But it was before that all has happened, you know, And when when did you When I got out of the the LC and so nobody talked about this kind of stuff. You were being taught rational expectation, it was just starting to and um, and then uh, what happens is that I was out drinking with a friend. Uh, I got named dak Or Keltner who was a psychologist of the Berkeley uh in the Berkeley at cal and he's he's like a wonderful guy and it and I told him, I said, you know, it's odd that your field somehow has something to say about this book I wrote. And he said, Danny lives just up the hill. You can go. You can go see him. And he's a friend. I said, really. And it took me. I took me sometime to take him up on that offer. But he introduced me to Danny and when who By the way, he had won the Nobel Prize for his work the year before money Bull comes. That's right, that's right in economics and act. That was weird. You nobody said, how is the psychologist winning the Nobel Prize in economics? This nobody? Nobody. You look at the descriptions of his Nobel Prize and it says, oh, this is normal. It's bizarre. Uh. Well, the underlying premise for all of economics is that humans are are rational, optimized, nothing of the sort. I'm not saying it's not deserved. I'm saying that if you told him when he was doing his work that he's gonna win a Nobel Prize in economics. He looked at you like you had three heads. But uh, what happened? Really it was organic. It's kind of curious. I want to meet a guy who win the Nobel Prize. That was probably the first thought, was I to go meet somebody who won a Nobel Prize. And I didn't go up thinking I'm gonna write a book about him, and I gotten. We just became friends. I started following him. I started I'd see him when he was in town. We go on along walks, uh in the hills, and he would talk about his relationship with Amos. And that's what interested me that I thought these guys had this incredible love affair. I mean, it wasn't there was no sex. The sex was having the ideas, but it was there was a drama to their relationship that got me interested. I called it an intellectual romance in the review you haven't read, um, But since you mentioned Amos, let's let's talk a little bit about him, because there's this really bizarre thing you mentioned in the afterward. So, and I'm not giving away the ending to any of this. So, both Kneman and Tversky talked about the role of luck in people's lives, coincidentally, when you start thinking about doing this book you had previously taught or coached Amos Tversky's son. Well, this gets weird, right, I mean, that's really well. When at some point I can't remember when the penny dropped, I realized I had a kid in the year I taught writing a cow whose last name was Tversky, and he was about my favorite student, and we had a friendship. I'd see him every year for dinner, and he never mentioned anything about his dad. I wouldn't even known who he was anyway, so there would be no reason. Uh. But then I wrote I remember writing or in Diversky notes, saying, is Amos your dad? And he said yeah, yeah, And I said, well, I'm toying with the idea of writing a book about his collaboration with Danny. And he goes, oh really. It was kind of like he said, my mom, I'm sure my mom will be happy to help. It was basically what he said, but but it was it was serendipitous, to say the least. So you you teach Amos Tversky's son, Danny Conuman lives up the street from you. You spend five years softening up Kneman in order to do the book that he was really reluctant. There were two stages of this assault. The first was um getting helping him a little bit, uh right, because his publisher's agent thought it was insane for him to be talking to me about a book before he wrote his, and you're going to steal the idea? Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't. It was so different, it didn't matter to me. But he said, we could you just wait until I'm done with this and so so that that was the first. So there was not even possibility of doing the thing until after he was done with that. And then he never really ever said no, you're not going to write a book about us, But he expressed extreme skepticism and uh and and concern whenever I'd kind of bring it up, and he was UM. I wanted him to want to do it, and I never got him there. I never got him there at best. And so but I got him to the point where he would answer my question and uh, and he was um. He was wonderful about it in the end, But it did. Yes, if I would say five years, I went and saw him an O seven. It was about two thousand twelve when it became very earnest. So here's where I'm going to call you out for a little bs in the book. And you write, you know, the book didn't require a writer as much as a stenographer, And based on everything we've just said, that line is pure nonsense because it's clear from everything you just said, and I'm not blowing smoke, nobody else could have done this book except you because of your relationship with Orange Diversity and your friendship with Danny. Who else could have put these pieces together the way you did. Well. When I said that it required a stenographer, what I meant was the people I was interviewing, these these seventy five year old, eighty year old Israeli people, intellectuals. What was coming out of their mouths was it was all I want to do it. I didn't. I don't use a tape recorder. Every one of them had a chilling war story, women and men. Everything was everybody had almost died many times in the most dramatic ways, and all of them had exquisite ideas and observations about my main characters. So what I meant was they did a lot of the work for me, and that work normally I would have to do insight into the characters. It had been done for me and by by intellectual bulldozers. However, your point is well taken that I was positioned to do it, and when I finally I some The last little hurdle I had to get over was in my own mind. I was afraid of the material because I didn't know I well, I didn't know anyth about psychology. I didn't know much about Israel. I was walking into a really new territory for me, and I thought, I kept thinking, who who should write this book? And maybe Malcolm got Gladwall should write this book. You'd do a great job. He's got uh, he's really facile with complicated ideas. He's he'd be perfect for it. Didn't see it didn't seem like my book. And then I realized that it's got to be my book, because the only way you tell the stories if you're inside these people, and no one else is going to get inside these people. Brought to you by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Seeing what others have seen, but uncovering what others may not. Global Research that helps you Harness disruption voted top global research firm five years running. Merrill Lynch Pierce, Fenner and Smith Incorporated. I'm Barry Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Michael Lewis. He is the Poet Laureate of Financial nonfiction UH and Wall Street related narratives. Uh. Let's jump right into some of the really interesting books you've written in the past and and some of the responses to them. Um. I was watching UH sixty minutes when you were talking about Flashboys, and you came out and said the markets were rigged and all hell breaks loose? What what was the pushback like to that? Wait? Was funny because it didn't even occur to me I was saying anything controversial. I thought everybody knew it. The writ and they pretty much always be read and but the way they it was just the way they're rigged has changed. And uh, really it's it's so if you sit with the people who at I X, the the exchange I was writing about, and have them show you in real time kind of what's going on in the market, you say, well, that's rigged. Uh. So I didn't think it was a kind of surprised that it generated the response it did. But the blowback. It's the book that was the most unpleasant to publish. Really, Yes, in that, by the way, fascinating book. I love the opening about the line of sight with running the fiber optic cables and and how milliseconds make a difference. So the the it was the most unpleasant to publish because it made so many people so angry, who were angry, who who were going to try to do something about it, And the reason was It took me about a moment to realize that what the reason was. It's the first time and the only time I've written a book that was going to take money away from Wall Street people that that that it was. It was it came as news, uh, to some extent the story I told the guys who were my main characters had news in their hands that they didn't hadn't given anybody else. And unlike the big short liars poker um, the money hadn't all been made. I wasn't I wasn't writing something retrospectively. I was writing something that was going on that if it was shut down, would cost people billions of dollars and it and all of a sudden, people are furious. They're hiring lobbyists to go to Washington and spread stuff on the internet, and it was like being on the receiving end of a political campaign. Very it was. It was a crude and kind of if you knew anything about the subject, and kind of intellectually embarrassing one. But nevertheless it was it was just weird have people so hostile. So you you go on TV, you get into a debate with the CEO of the Bats exchange. He says a bunch of things that turned out to be not so true. Ultimately he steps down from the vision. I said, you essentially are to blame for him getting fired. What other crazy sort of stuff came out of that book? We know. Brad Katayama was a guest on the show and was quite delightful. The main character of the book was on that CNBC show with me, and he's the reason the guy from Bat Bats he called him out. He called him out, and he had he had ability to call h out in a way I did not, because once you get into the weeds of the subject that unless you are the world's authority defending yourself again against whatever, he has the world's authority absolutely and so um, what other stuff. It's mainly like calls from lawyers, yeahs or hey Mike Needle, lawyer. But also um, just just the idea that people are being hired, people have now jobs to attack a book. That that just was weird and grease balls. I mean people you just would not really you wouldn't think anybody would want on their side who are I mean transparently kind of like making it up as they go along. Uh. That that was just an odd experience. I've never had anything like that. I mean you would think maybe Solomon Brothers would have done something like that after Liar's Poker, but nothing, nothing, They were great kind of I mean there was people were upset, some people, but they did they would have done something like that. It felt the world of big shot Wall Street people has become much more um sneaky and manipulative and and dark in the sense that brad cotts the other points us out. He says, it's amazing how people think it's just the done thing to create a propaganda campaign filled lies, because the lies travel so fast and the truth is complicated, and so you can just you can just paper the paper the internet with with all this nonsense and nobody knows the difference between this this this statement and this statement. Well, thank thank goodness, something like that would never happen in a political So, you know, Matt was my experience of seeing I've always ten assume that like most people would look and say, well, clearly he's lying. Clearly he's been hired to say this credit and uh, that's not how it works. Uh. It's people to say, oh, it must be two stories there, the classic false equivalence, Well, the Earth is around, the Earth is flat. They both made yes, yes, and and uh. On the other hand, Joe says the Earth is flat and you could see it's flat. You know, you can't really see any curvature. It is flat. Yeah, So that's but that is how that's how it felt. And I thought at some point, I thought, you know, unless I devote my life full time to to waging a counter campaign, which I don't have the time or inclination to do or interest now that it's just it was that, thank god that I had characters who had a big interest in doing so that if I X wasn't around and with serious backers, I mean, all of this would have just I look like I look like a quack. I look like a crank who wrote this. Um, so you've written enough really interesting things about unusual circumstances that I think most people give you the benefit of the doubt. Um not most people of the sec not most people who are paid not to give me the benefit of the doubt. So I think that, uh that the if that public policy would not have had any would would not have responded at all to the story if it were even if it were completely true, unless there were an agent out there, namely I X pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and uh so, so it's just disturbing. It just think you think the truth will set you free, and it's really clear what's true, and nobody, you know, it doesn't get to people in the way that you would think. Um, that's that's unbelievable. So that's that was my That was my That was the most it was the most disturbing publishing experience. I'm Barry Hults. You're listening to Master's in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is author Michael Lewis. Most recently he wrote the book The Undoing Project, The Friendship That Changed Our Minds, but he's also written such classic Wall Street Books as Liars, Poker, Moneyball, The Blindside, Flashboys, The Big Short. You did a book on the election right after The Losers. It's that wasn't the original That's that wasn't my title. I want to call it loses because I followed all the people who lost. By the way, was there an original title for The Big Short? Or was it always always the Big Short? Alright, I'll share something with you later that I think you'll appreciate. So let's talk a little bit about your writing process. So where do you begin? I know you have an office at home with a desk and a computer. Do you just sit down and say, let me start banging something out? How do these ideas German social interaction in the beginning? Really? Yeah? So I don't. I'm not a novelist, and my material is not just in my head. It's out there in the world. And so I spent I spend three times in much time I'm gathering the material as I do actually writing it. So typical book takes a year and a half to report and research, maybe a bit more and six months to write. Is it research right? Research right? Or research research research right right? Right? It's nothing but research for a long time, and when I start writing, I'm usually still doing bits and pieces of research, and in the end I'm doing no research and of just writing. So it's the writing of it is. I don't want to say it's an afterthought, but by the time that's right, I'm constantly thinking about how the story goes, and by the time I sit down to actually start a book, I at least think I know exactly where it ends. Like I had the last sentence to this book in my head pretty much, and I usually have a title. Sometimes I don't, and it like drives me crazy because I think that it crystallizes for you with the books about to have the title. There's a buzz in my head that bothers me if I don't have the title in my head, So it takes sometimes it takes a while to find that title, but usually I have that. So at the blind side, I had the big short The Undoing Project came pretty early as a as a title undoing what we previously thought about cognition, Yes, and it was also what they were working on when they broke up. They had a project they had tentatively titled the Undoing Project. And so and I like the phrase. So anyway, the and then when the writing starts always goes in slightly different ways than I imagine. Things drop that I thought were important you see in print, and they no longer resonate the word I don't even get him into print. I get to the point in the story where I thought they belong. I realized, as it did boring, this is unnecessary. So things fall away. Is a lot of that numb and and sometimes internally things swell all of a sudden, things I thought were words on the page, we're end up being eight thousand words on the page. And it's this book surprised me that way that things everything that I whole sections did fall away, and things that I thought were short ended up being long. So that's a that raises a really interesting point when when you're playing with an idea, do you know from the beginning this is a Bloomberg View post, this is a long Younger magazine story. Oh, this is a full blown book. At what point do you have a sense that, hey, there's legs here. A column of the length of the Bloomberg View thing is always just a columns an opinion. It's preciually a humorous take on something, and uh, I've never had one of those become something I didn't think it was. But magazine pieces sometimes blow up and get much much bigger. Moneyball started as a magazine piece because I just had a question for the Oakland A's like, how are you winning? And I thought, well, that would be a cute little story. Actually it wasn't even be a long magazine piece. And after a day with the front office and I went, oh my god, this is something big here. I don't know what it is, but it's not a short magazine piece. It took me six weeks to figure out what it was and just talking to him, and then now the year to report it. I gotta assume. So if people who are not familiar with the story, Oakland a is one of the smallest budgets in the entire baseball league, and suddenly they start a new approach to let's throw away the old nonsense of evaluating players, so they didn't talk about any of that. You all you saw as a fan where wow, they look a little strange. They look like a Beer league softball team. They're all these kind of fat guys who hit home runs and can't catch the ball, and they're winning all these games? How's this happening? And uh? And then you when you see the budgets, like they're paying for their players a fifth of what the Yankees are and they're winning as many games. If the market's efficient, that makes no sense that you should buy all the best players and just beat the A's. So what's going on there? And it was a market efficiency story. It's like something's wrong there. And I thought there would be an easy explanation. I didn't know what it was gonna be. And the explanation was very involved. And and the big thing was the A's front office had never been asked the question because of the sports journalists were not at all focused on this on the money side of things. They you know, some have some money, someone don't have some money. But they didn't think in terms of like market efficiency. And so Billy Bean, who ran the Oakland A's, had never had a chance to download on anybody all these thoughts he had about the how screwed up the evaluations? So I had, so it was completely fresh material. He said to me. No one's asked that question. Where the sports journalists drinking from the same kool aid as everybody else? They just didn't think it was interesting. You know, it really is a matter of what you find interesting. What was interesting is who they traded for or whether they went last night or who had not. Here's a giant philosophical shift in the way baseball team should be assembled that we don't care about. That. Tell me about your new second basement. In fairness, wasn't as if the Oakland front office was trying to tell their story. They just no one asked them for it, and they had not been approached by anybody saying I want to know what you're doing here, because something's going on. Except the owner of the Boston Red Sox, the new owner of the Boston Red Sox, who was trying to yeah, he he knew something was He was a financial guy. Something's going on there, and and so he was already sniffing around a little bit. So not a coincidence that a financial ride recognized. So that's statistical side of this, And a quantz running another baseball team said hey, there's some something here that's right. That's that that's not a coincidence, And the a's were it was atharctic for them to just talk have someone to talk to you about it, because it was what they thought about all the time is how you make your resources go further, how you find bargains in baseball, what's going on in the mind of baseball scouts, what's wrong with old fashioned baseball strategies? All they were rethinking the game. So money Ball became Billy Bean's confessional to you. It wasn't so much a confessional because that implies that he feels no. No, it was it was Billy be but it was Moneyball becomes story outlet for Billy to kind of get things off his chest about what he's seen. Yes, he tells the story. It took him a little while to get comfortable telling me a story, but not that long. You're pretty good at ingratiating yourself with people to get them to to come out and speak with you. You know. I try to let him get to know me a bit so they feel more comfortable. And the truth is that if I'm going to do a long thing, a long piece of writing about someone, I have to genuinely feel basically positively disposed to them. That if I actually thought he was a creep or dishonest or whatever, I just I wouldn't want to spend the time with him necessary for the book. So it becomes a kind of easy relationship because he senses I basically like him, and he says that I'm basically a sane person, and he says I might do anything really creepy, and so there's a trust develops, and it's just a very broad trust. I don't want anybody see what I write about them or anything. But at some points starts to feel comfortable with me, and I'm gonna tell my story. Somebody might as well be him. That's what you're gunning for. Nobody's ever gonna feel completely comfortable with it. You just say someone's gonna get this story, might as well be him. Let's stay with the idea of a magazine story that would have or could have become a book. In the Sunday New York Times magazine, you published How the egg Heads Cracked. It's a nine thousand word opus about long term capital management. My former boss. Oh really, John Merryweather, That's that's right. So the question is, and with all due respect to Roger Lowenstein, I love when when Genius failed he was a guest on the show, But really you could have it in that book as well. Yes, why didn't that become a book. Because when I went back, when I'm researching this and I'm looking at that, my head of research says, hey, check out this article. I'm like, wow, this could easily have been a Michael Lewis book. I turned the question on his head. Why even bothered it? Right that? Because I really thought I was done writing about Wall Street in a big way, and you never want to write the same book twice. And while that's just too close in time, Yeah, yeah, it was a decade, but I just thought, been there, done that. The question that I actually asked was is this worth doing? And I thought, well, you know, these guys are being demonized in the press. Nobody really understands what they did. I kind of understand what they did, and they can explain it to me in a way I can explain to people. So it just like takes some of the weirdness out of the environment around them. So I just thought it would be it would be useful for me to go in have them explain it to me, and then explain it to a broader audience. And they didn't exactly trust me because I had written Liars Poker. I mean, that's that's trust is they they were. Some of them were irritated about that. Really, not a lot of the solid guys. Yeah, well they were. They were in my immediate colleagues, Hans hoffen Schmidt, hushmid Humid. So I gotta ask you about that. So he became your frame of reference for did I do the right thing? Leaving Sally was early. Well, we kind of tracked through the training program together, right, and we ended up kind of in a similar sort of role. He was in the foreign exchange department. I was with John Merryweather's a group, and we're kind of getting paid the same amount of money. And I did kind of think, well, if I'd stayed at Solomon Brothers, I'd kind of done how Hans did. And he killed and he made a ton of money, put it into the longtime capital. He was putting fifty million dollar bonuses, and then it all up to that point I thought, Jesus, did did I make a mistake becoming a writer? I never really felt that way, but it was like he was my measure of the opportunity cost. So the line in when the heads cracked after LTCM blows up and he's tens of millions of dollars go to zero. You're tracking this and you say, I once again was satisfied to be paid by the word do you. I don't remember writing it, but it's absolutely try. I felt that way. Thank God. I'm a camera writer, so financially sound decision. For people who would like to find more Michael Lewis, you can go to either his website, which is Michael Lewis. I don't have a website. Michael Lewis rights some my publisher has a website for you. But bonds and normal Amazon, wherever fine books are sold, you can find the works of Michael Lewis. You can check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com or follow me on Twitter at rid Halts. I'm Barry rid Halts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio, brought to you by Bank of America Merrill Lynch committed to bringing higher finance to lower carbon named the most innovative investment bank for climate change and sustainability by the Banker. That's the power of global connections. Bank of America, North America. Remember F D I C