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Author Michael Lewis on 10 Years of “The Big Short," AI Bubble, and Sports Gambling
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A
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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman.
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C
And I'm Toby Howell.
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B
Today, Michael Lewis revisits the Big Short. Ten years later.
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C
What did he really think of the movie? Would he recast anyone? All that and more. It's Tuesday, November 11th. Let's ride.
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B
Good morning on Veterans Day. Like many of you, we are off for the federal holiday, but this podcast never sleeps in. You are about to hear a fascinating interview with one of the leading storytellers of our time. The author Michael Lewis has written more books that become movies than most authors have written books. He coined the term Moneyball and protected the blind side. But when Michael joined us in the studio recently, the conversation topic was about his third book adapted into a film, the Big Short.
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C
This winter marks the 10th anniversary of the Big Short movie, starring Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale and Steve Carell as the traders who saw the financial crisis coming before it happened and got really rich from shorting the housing market. We also talked sports betting. He's got strong thoughts on that, how he comes up with his titles and gave him some thoughts on how we'd recast the Big Short. Spoiler alert. We getting Jack Black involved. Such a fun convo and cannot wait for you all to hear. But first, a word from our sponsor, U.S. bank. It's no secret that the economy is a little rocky right now. You're already budgeting carefully, so the last thing you want is to have to pay for an unexpected vet bill or laptop repair completely out of pocket. Introducing the US bank Split World MasterCard, a new type of card that lets you pay later on every purchase.
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B
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C
Now, without further ado, here's Michael Lewis.
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B
Michael Lewis, thanks for joining us.
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D
It's a pleasure already.
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B
All right, so many people listening to the Show don't remember 2008. Heck, Toby over here just learned how to walk. So as you revisit the book and the Movie now in 2025, can you describe to people who may not have experienced the financial crisis firsthand how it's impacting their lives today?
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D
All right, so you first got to know a little bit about what happened very broadly. The big Wall street banks, which were at the time exciting places to work, you know, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and all the rest were like thought to be the smart places in the financial world. And these places made hundreds of billions of dollars of really stupid bets. You can think of the world back then as having organized itself around a bet. And the bet was on subprime mortgage bonds, which was in turn a bet on what was going to happen to house prices. And the Wall street firms were all, almost all really heavily on the wrong side of the bet. They owned a lot of this stuff, and not only because they had bought the actual loans. They used derivatives to replicate the absolute worst of them. So it's like the stupidest loans in theory replicate them infinitely. And so not only did we have like hundreds of billions of really dumb loans, but you had possibly infinite number of similarly stupid bets, all kind of concentrated in the heart of the financial system. On the other side of this were a handful of smart people who took the other side of the bets. And my book the Big Short tells the story of the financial crisis through the eyes of the people who were on the right side of the bed. All right, the market wakes up to how bad these loans are. The banks all basically would have failed. Even the ones that didn't go all in on it, where they say were so tied to the other banks, the whole financial system was going down like bankrupt. If this had happened in 1929 before the federal Reserve grew a pair, it would have been just depression. It would have been 35% unemployment. It would have been cataclysmic. The Federal Reserve and the US Government steps in and guarantees basically, I mean, this is crude. Think of it as they guarantee all the loans. They say we make everybody whole, we're going to take these off. Banks will take some haircuts but we're going to take all these loans off your balance sheets, and we're going to make all the banks stable, and it calms it all down. The effect of this is to infuriate both the left wing and the right wing. So this is where we're getting to why you need to know about it now. You can draw a direct line from that event to Donald Trump. You can draw a direct line from that event to aoc. If you've heard of Steve Bannon or Elizabeth Warren, their careers were actually created by this event. Their political careers on either side of the political spectrum. But what happens is one side becomes. The Tea Party is infuriated that the government has walked in to save these Wall street jerks from the mistakes they made. And it's a populist. Both sides are populist movements. But the. The correct idea they had is that, like, well, we in America live by capitalism and we all suffer when we make stupid business decisions. How come the richest people who went to the best schools, who made the most stupid decisions, why are their banks get propped up and they still get bonuses? This pissed off people just enormously and rightly so. And that anger was never slaked. The anger that. That anger is. You see. You see American political life now, you kind of wonder, why is everybody so angry? They say they're angry at different things. It starts there.
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B
So why wasn't your book angry? Because I was listening to a conversation with you and Adam McKay, the director of the Big Short movie. You told him that the movie was angrier than the book. Why wasn't your book angry? And was that on purpose?
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D
So that's. It's a really good question. And it was. And when I saw. When I watched what Adam did with the movie. Quick answer is the movie is five years after the book. The book comes out in 2010. I had not fully digested what had happened. I didn't know that no one was gonna go to jail. So that's one thing. But that's a cheap answer. Because I think the deeper truth is that Adam's just capable of more moral outrage than I am. He just has it in him. And I just don't. Like. I have a hard time getting outraged. I'm more amused is the wrong word. But I was just delightfully interested in the human folly. I thought it was kind of funny that all the Wall street firms were stupid. And I thought. And I was so interested in the. And I was focused on these characters who had done basically the smart thing. And There was. I did think this is. It wasn't outrage, but I did leave, I think, best books. I find when I try to write my books, you sort of leave room for the reader to decide how they feel about it. So if you're bringing a lot of outrage, bringing thunder to it, you don't give them any choice. It's like, oh, you gotta feel this way. It screws up the story. It's bad writing. But in this case in particular, I had this thing that I wanted the reader to feel uncomfortable with and have them figure out where they were gonna go with this discomfort. And the thing was the heroes, so in quotes, the protagonists of this book, who would. You would naturally be lionizing because, oh, wow, they're so smart. They figured out what was wrong and they made a killing. They made a killing on the collapse of the society. How do you feel about that? And I wanted to. If, if I'm throwing around a lot of outrage, you're not leaving the reader the room to jump one way or the other.
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B
That's the most disorienting thing about all this. I was just watching the movie yesterday and the fact.
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D
So was I.
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B
These guys. Yeah, as you to the climax. The fact that these guys know they're standing to make an insane amount of money as the world economy collapses. At the same time, it's. You don't really know exactly how to feel about that.
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D
You don't know how to feel about it. And what complicates it even further is all of the characters as they get into the big short, as they get into this. Oh, my God. First, I think I'm making a kind of interesting trade against Wall Street. This looks like a good bet. They're giving me. They're giving me 25 to 1 odds that nothing bad's going to happen here. And they dig in. They realize this is not just a good bet, it's a great bet. Wait, wait. This is almost a sure thing. I'm getting 25 to 1 odds for it's going to happen. And that starts to feel criminal. Like this is. There's some sort of criminal. And they start to realize that all the people on the other side of the bet, the people who. Whose institutions are going to lose money and those losses are going to be possibly foisted upon the taxpayer. The individuals have all made a fortune generating these crappy loans and it starts to look really sinister. And all the people on the right side of the bat went to various. It was either law enforcement or media. They went to Washington, they Went to the FBI, they went to the Wall Street Journal and tried to, like, look at this, like, this is a problem. And all of them thought, in fact, when I was approaching them to write about them, their trepidation was, if my name is in your book, I might get lynched because this society might be going down. Like, and, and the fact that the government came in and calmed it all down and it wasn't a depression, it was a recession. It still. People were angry, but not that angry, and not angry enough to go lynch the people, but they were worried about that. And so the complicating factor is they themselves were kind of trying to do something about it once they figured out the real implications of, of the situation.
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C
I'm going to try to ground it in present day again, because right now we have seen mentions of the word bubble kind of spike in the media specifically tied to A.I. do you see any current parallels between the current A.I. moment that we're in right now and 2008?
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D
I mean, the, the big feature of the 2008 crisis was the disguising of risk. All the complexity in the financial instruments disguised what these people were doing. And so it was hide the risk. Nobody, you know, it took a while, it took some digging to see just how sort of unstable the situation was. This is wide open. This is right out in the open. You know how much people are spending on A.I. you know, they're making. It feels more like the Internet boom, right? Like everybody's there saying the world has changed. It's going to be completely new. This is transformative, and everybody's going to make a fortune off of A.I. we need to pour all this money into A.I. it's a bet. It is, but it's a bet we all know they're making and that it feels like, I mean, who knows what's going to happen. My instinct is that they're all a little optimistic about the financial returns of AI and probably underselling the social disruption of AI A lot of people are going to lose their jobs, so more pissed off people. In our country, anger just goes ratchets up in our political process. I could see that happening. I don't think AI is going to come kill us all. They like to say that it's kind of funny how the AI people, they don't pause to talk about the actual, really plausible social consequences of this because they can't do anything about it. And if we actually stop and think about it, we might hate them. They say we want to stop AI from killing us all. Like, they go right there, and it makes them feel. It makes everybody. It kind of distracts everybody from the real problem and also makes them feel very important because they're in the middle of something that might kill us all. But when I think about what is the connection between 08 and what might happen now, I don't think that. I think something else. And what I think is, in 08, even though the systems, the institutions we had in place, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, performed a miracle, I mean, it really. They saved us. I mean, you can be upset that nobody went to jail. You can be upset that they bailed out the banks, but the alternative was so bad that they saved a lot of pain. Yet the country's takeaway was, we hate those institutions. Like, we don't trust them. We trust them less and less. The Federal Reserve's independence right now is being threatened, as it's not been threatened maybe ever in its history. I don't know. You can argue, but I think that's true. The federal finances are so out of control. I mean, seemingly, not only are we running these huge deficits, but we seem incapable of addressing them. That's the thing. It's like we just had an exercise, the Doge exercise, which was the most dramatic attempt to cut the deficit that we'll ever see again, probably. And the deficits have gone up. So you've got this really unstable. The grownups in the room in 2008 who could stabilize a financial crisis are no longer grownups. And the institutions that might come in and make everything calm down are getting less and less capable of doing it. So I worry about not, like, sure there's going to be a financial crisis somewhere. It happens all the time. Every 20 years or 30, it'll happen. I don't know what will trigger it or why. There are other stories about AI that out there that might lead, but it's like, what do you do when there is one?
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C
We were talking before the show how the titles of your books seem to just encapsulate exactly the idea and the moment that you were trying to capture. So, Moneyball, Big Short. If you were to write a book about our current moment, maybe it's the AI frenzy. Maybe it's about knowing you want a title. I want a title from you. I want to put you on the side.
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D
You just told me, before we go on, that your mom wants you to write a book, and now you're getting me to give you the title.
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C
I think you almost gave us one. It was like, no grownups in the room or something like that. Oh, something there.
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D
Oh, that's not bad. I know. Yeah, that's not bad.
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C
It's from you.
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B
So how long does it take you typically, to come up with a book title?
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D
It comes. It usually arises organically from the writing of the book, and it usually is agony. If you saw, like, the false starts, you'd be horrified. You would be.
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C
Wait, scare us a little bit. I want to hear about. What was the big start before the Liars Poker?
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D
Oh, well, the title on the book proposal was Fast and Loose in the Golden Years.
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C
It kind of sounds like a seven.
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B
It sounds like a six. Yeah.
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D
No, it's like, it was horrible. It was never going to last. And then there were 74 others like that. The Big Short was a little different because I came into the story at a snail's pace. I was reluctant to get into it in the first place because I thought Wall Street. Wall street was so pissed off about Liars Poker, I did not think they would let me back in and that I just wouldn't be able to get the story. So I went in, I stuck a toe in the water and did a magazine piece during which I figured out. I realized, oh, my God, I can get this. And when I realized it was about this simple bet, and it was about the people who were on the right side of the bet, and the bet was a short, the big Short. That phrase just popped into my mind. And I remember thinking, I'm not going to tell the magazine about that because I want to save it for the book. It was too good of a title. And then what happened? This is creepy. After I published the book, this came out somewhere else at roughly, almost exactly the same time I was working on the magazine piece, the CFO of Goldman Sachs, a guy named at the time, named David Vinier, wrote a memo about what was going on in the markets. And he called. He called the trade. He said, the trade here is the Big Short, if the Big Short is shorting the housing market. So he came up with the title. It is. It's one of my favorite titles.
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B
It's great. And maybe this is a. An easier question. Maybe it's a harder question. If you were the director and the Big Short was in development now, who would you cast?
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D
I mean, they're all the same actors could still do it, but. So Ryan Gosling as Greg Lippman. I cannot improve upon that. I just can't even. I wouldn't. I don't even know where to start. And Christian Bale as Michael Berry I just can't do any better than that. So I would cast those two. They could still do it, and I'd cast them. I love Steve Carell's performance, but I could think of, like, what actor. You help me. What actor, when you see him is fingernails on chalkboard. Like, is so, so upsetting. Like, irritating.
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B
Yeah.
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D
His job is to irritate.
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B
Well, we. We had a list. We. We recast this.
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D
Oh, you did? Okay, so that was, you know, that's called. This is called Boomer asking. You asked me a question. You want me to ask you? Okay, so tell me, fellows, if you were going to cast my movie, now, why don't you tell me who should play who?
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B
I agree that Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale are top tier, but we just had a little fun with it. So we're going to put, you know, for a new generation, Toby's generation. So we did Timothee Chalamet as Michael Burry. We did Glenn Powell as Jared Bennett, Ryan Gosling's character. That's good. We're going to keep Margot Robbie. She's good. Okay, we're going Jack Black as Brad Pitt's character. Oh, yeah, we like that one. Jeremy Strong stays the same. He's perfect. He's an incredible actor. We got to get Miles Teller in there somehow so he can be the quant or maybe the dumb mortgage guys. And then here we go. Okay, we'll talk Mark Baum, Steve Carell. We're going to go Adam Sandler. I think Adam Sandler, Uncut Gems.
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D
He'd be great. He'd be great.
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C
He could do it.
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D
He would be. He could do it.
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C
He could do it.
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D
Yeah, you're right.
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B
So that's good.
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D
Good. Well done. If it doesn't work out for you, if it doesn't work out for you in podcasting, you can be casting directors.
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C
Casting directors. We're going to take a quick break and come back with more Michael Lewis right after this.
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B
You know that saying, more money, more problems.
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D
Toby, of course.
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C
Why do you think my life is so chaotic?
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B
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C
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B
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C
Level up your commute and join Ripple and host David Schwartz for a special series of blockchain conversations on Block Stars, the podcast Payments Custody stablecoin. It's happening with Ripple. I want to talk a little bit about your process for finding out what to write about, though. Sometimes it seems like the story just finds you. Other times maybe you go out searching for it. How do you know what's the next rabbit hole that you want to dive down?
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D
It starts usually with just idle curiosity, like some question. I mean, with the Big Short, it was like, how did those firms get so stupid? I just didn't understand it because I had worked inside Salomon Brothers when the part of Solomon Brothers that was making its proprietary bets. And I knew that like back then, if you were on the other side of those trades, you were in trouble, that they were making the smart bets, they had better information, they were just better positioned. And how that place in the firms had become stupid, that was my question. And it just led to Moneyball. I had this team that was winning games and had no money like this. If you start thinking about just as markets like a team, the teams have one baseball team has five times more money than another baseball team. You would think that they'd buy all the best baseball players and just win all the time. Why wasn't that happening? Sam Bankman Fried he walks into my life and this was a really broad question. He was so bizarre and it was so crazy what was going on. You know, he was the richest person in the world under 30 when no one knew who he was. And it had all happened in 18 months and presidents wanted to hang out with him and Tom Brady wanted to be his friend and all the Wall street heads wanted to be with him. And it was just like he was the center of the universe. It was like, what the hell's going on? And where is this going to end? It was like, I want to just watch this.
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B
So.
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D
And I. And when it sticks, I mean, I do it with. It doesn't always work out. Yeah, I gotta. I start things and it just. I lose interest. But when it sticks, it's like that question gets me into a place where I'm seeing a character, seeing scenes, situations, seeing that. Let's continue with Sam Bankman. Fried. After initial astonishment and then also awareness that he was gonna let me just follow him around some, a lot, I started thinking, like, what can I do with this character? And I realized he could take you into Jane Street. He could take you into American politics and money in politics. He could take you into crypto. I didn't know where else. I didn't know. He could also take you into bankruptcy and prison.
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B
I follow him then.
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D
I followed them. Bankruptcy, though. It's like he can light up these systems. And so I'm thinking, like, what can you do with this material? And is it a story? So it's very organic and very. Feel your way through it, just like.
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C
What you're interested in.
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D
Yeah. And if it gets boring to me, it's gonna be boring for the reader. So I'm out if it's boring.
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B
And three of your books have been adapted into movies. Moneyball, big short, the blind side. That's three. More than 99.9999% of nonfiction writers. So what is it about the stories you tell that are so cinematic?
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D
You know, if we were doing this interview in 2008, you might say, like, have you ever sold anything to the movies? And I'd say, I've sold everything to the movies. And you say, well, how come you don't have any movies made? You know, it was not clear to me that the things I wrote were natural movie material until they started making them. And it was, you know, decades into my career. So I don't think of the things I write as particularly suited to the movies. In fact, let's just take the big short. I don't think anybody read that book and said, oh, that should be a movie. Really hard to do as a movie. I think something like this happened. I think so. The Blind side, it is true, had this family drama in the middle of it, although it had an awful lot of football history and strategy. And they ditched the football history and strategy, and they just took the family drama. It got made by accident, all the Hollywood studios turned it down. And, well, actually, Fox had bought it for Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts didn't want to play the part. Fox dropped it. No one else wanted it. The writer, director, John Lee Hancock, went all over town. Nobody. Zero people wanted it. The guy, a rich guy who lived down the street from the Tuohy family, the main family in the book, Fred Smith, FedEx guy, said, this is basically a direct quote. I saw that. I saw that happen. That's a really cool story. I'll pay for that to be made. I'll just do that. And so he paid. His daughter had a little production company, but he also said, I'm not paying anybody. Like Sandra Bull can do it, but she gets equity. We're not paying. So they made it on a shoestring. So that thing gets made in a kind of accidental way. It is the. It's. If you Google it, it's like the biggest grossing sports movie after Rocky. It's $300 million at the box office and another $200 million after that. And it's just a money machine. So what does that do? Oh, Michael Lewis books, you know, so Moneyball was sitting there, not made. Brad Pitt really wanted to do it. All of a sudden, that becomes plausible. So. So I think that's how it started. And there's been no flop. So. So I think that's it. And I'd say that the re. They've been. If they've been good, it's because they're kind of unlikely movies. And when people are making them, they're making them because they have a real jones for the subject. They really care about it.
- [25:12]
B
The Michael Lewis cinematic universe. Yeah, essentially. So the current season of your podcast is about revisiting the big short. The last season of your podcast was.
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D
All about sports betting just five months.
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B
Ago, which I'd love to get your thoughts. Yes. How do you see this all shaking out? We've had an increasing number of gambling scandals across sports, some signs of scrutiny from regulators, and now prediction markets seem poised to shake the whole thing up. What is the end game here?
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D
I think that if you put me in a room with a senator who says, what do we need to do about this? Like, what's the problem? First you'd say it's a new Senate senator who knows nothing. Someone was like, what do we shape? First is like, this was illegal up until, whatever, five years ago, six years ago, and that it was basically illegal outside of Vegas. Sure, there were people doing it on the streets, but it was not Easily accessible. There are a lot of obstacles between potential sports gamblers and big bets. Supreme Court decides that the federal government's law is unconstitutional. And so every state can do what it wants to do. And we now have 38 states or something and have legalized sports gambling for people. Supposedly for people 21 and over, in fact. And I do this with a podcast. I gave my 17 year old son five grand and said, have at it. We're going to put a GoPro on your head and a mic on you. We're going to see what happens to you. And he had accounts up and running and he could have bet hundreds of thousands of dollars within a nanosecond. 17 years old. And he was living in a state where it's illegal, California. So there's no barriers. Like even. It's even more permissible than the laws would suggest.
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C
Now, wait, so you gave your son $5,000 just to go see what happened?
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D
To make a podcast episode.
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C
What happened?
- [27:01]
D
Yeah, I wanted. First it was so, I don't want to ruin the story, but the point was actually his mother was. My wife was upset because he has kids around him who have gambling problems in his high school class. And he is, you know, she saw that he might be the kind of person who would develop a problem. And I said to her, like, this is like giving a kid a pack of cigarettes when he's 10, making him smoke them all and he never wants to touch him again. That we're gonna. That I'd rather. Or put it another way, I'd rather teach him what it is rather than hear from his friends get on his phone. So we had an actual marital spat about me doing this. And it's in the podcast. It's like she's, you can tell she's pissed, but. So what happens is it was kind of beautiful. I'll ruin it. I'll ruin it a little bit. It was kind of beautiful. He did it. I had him do it with a friend who was an older kid, a few years older, high school friend from high school, from his high school basketball team. And they, they do all kinds of idiotic stuff, like they think they're smart and they're not smart. Walker. My son comes to realize just how badly stacked the odds are against them. They go in thinking they know, like, if the warriors are gonna win, you know, they have. And they come out thinking like, oh, this is way, way more complicated than we knew and we were idiots to think we could win. But the weird thing is they win. So he comes out with A sack of money and a lesson, and he actually has never touched it again and he's not interested in it. So that was a happy ending. The truth is not happy. The truth is, to me, the wild thing was FanDuel and DraftKings. So we worked with professional sports gamble people who knew what they were doing and the people who know what they're doing, I mean, who actually get the odds slightly in their favor. And they're not many of them really aren't many of them. Their bets can be identified, the smart bets. The smart better can be identified with three or four bets. Even if they make losing bets. Like they can tell that you just made a positive expected value bet and they boot you out. And what they do on the other end is if they see, they can see if you're really stupid and you're a little addicted to it, and they cultivate you, you become a vip. So of course, Las Vegas has always booted out card counters and so on and so forth, but this is like everybody has a casino in their pocket and the casino instantly figures out if you're really prone to having a problem and they encourage the problem and it's with you all the time and there are no snags. It's just really too easy to do. Now the shocking thing to me is we reveal all this in the podcast I had my producer working with. I mean, she had hundreds of thousands of dollars going with a profit with professionals. We used her as we call as a mule. He called him a mule. To place the bets of the smart gamblers so that to disguise them because she didn't know what she was doing, but she was making smart bets. But she's a 30 year old woman. We thought they wouldn't notice. They noticed. And so we, we thought when we put all this on the air that they'd like protest, argue back. Nobody's argued back. Nobody has anything to say. This is what it is. It's, it's so predatory. And the question is like, all right, if you expose all, you know, teenage boys in America to this and let them do it, how many of them are going to become addicts and I don't know, 5%? There's something, there's some work that's been done on this, but it's a ticking bomb. It's like a social problem. It's like smoking. It's a predatory industry.
- [30:46]
C
And now everything seems like it's financialized. With the rise of prediction markets, poly markets, you can bet on everything.
- [30:53]
D
So I did not see that coming. I thought, oh, God, we're all going to be at the mercy of FanDuel and DraftKings. And it turns out that this big, beautiful bill, this recent tax bill, disadvantages them in relation to prediction markets. The prediction markets got themselves classified as commodity exchanges. So you can't deduct all of your losses on FanDuel, but you can deduct all of your losses on Kalshi. So it's, it would move the intelligent gambler off of fanduel and onto Cali.
- [31:19]
C
But there's no house anymore then. There's no one setting lines. It's just the masses there. So I guess you're just betting against this Senator.
- [31:27]
D
Is that, is that because there's no, there's no house at all?
- [31:29]
C
You're just. It's whatever the market is saying is most likely to happen, like, wherever the money is. That's how, like, the odds change. So.
- [31:35]
D
So I'm not sure that's right. So I'm not. I'm just telling you what I've heard recently. My understanding is that the prediction markets, basically that their businesses are evolving. I think it's happened all so fast, but I think they make all those markets use outsourcing, the market making to like, high frequency traders. So you're on the other side of your bets is, you know, Susquehanna or Jump trading or one of these places. And Kalshee is missing. I mean, at some point, Kali is going to figure out we should be making these markets, I think. But I don't. I don't know. I don't know.
- [32:12]
C
Next season, your podcast right there. We just got to it. Switching gears a little bit. You've written a lot of beloved books. We've read and we've read a lot of beloved books from you. And I listened to a podcast you were on a couple of years ago where you say you write every book to a unique soundtrack, where it's funny, filled with songs that you just listen to over and over again. How did that become part of your writing routine?
- [32:34]
D
The first time I remember doing this was I was sent on the road by the New Republic to write to cover the 96 presidential campaign. And for the first time, I'm like riding in motels and hotels and riding with people around me. And I needed to shut the world out. And the easy way to do it was just put headphones on and listen to music. And then I found that was really not just soothing because what it does for me does a couple things. I find. It isn't just distraction. That's a problem when I write that slows me down. It's the possibility of distraction. Like, the possibility you're going to be interrupted so early in the mornings and really late at night. Great times, because no one's ever going to knock on the door kind of thing. And this created this, like, nobody can interrupt. And so it created that space where I'm just going to do the work. But the other thing that happened, and this is really true, that I developed this Pavlovian response to the songs. And I hear the song, I think, right. You know, it has this effect of, like, want to work.
- [33:32]
C
And what kind of songs are we talking?
- [33:33]
D
Oh, it's pop song. It's pop. So it has Taylor Swift. It's. It's. It's some country and some pop.
- [33:38]
C
So you're a sleeper agent. We can get you to start. Right.
- [33:41]
D
It's up. It's. It's kind of upbeat.
- [33:43]
C
Yeah.
- [33:44]
D
My daughter sends me, like, constant. The way it gets refreshed is her. She sends me, try this, try this, try this. And one out of eight works. And you'd be shocked what's on it.
- [33:54]
B
Your next book is going to be written to Addison Rae.
- [33:57]
D
It's going to be great deal.
- [33:58]
C
Listens to literal white noise.
- [34:01]
D
It's a story, so you do a thing.
- [34:03]
C
But what are you listening to?
- [34:04]
B
Like rain.
- [34:04]
D
Yeah, he listens to rain that puts me to sleep.
- [34:07]
C
And he's done that for six years now.
- [34:09]
B
They're going to study my brain. They're going to find some weird things because I do listen to that a lot because I get distracted by music.
- [34:14]
D
Especially with lyrics, you know, I understand. It's funny, it's not every song I can do this to it. It's a certain kind of song where you can just. It can just become background noise. And so it can't be saying to anything too deep that I understand, because that would be disruptive. But the rain and waves and all that just put me to sleep, so I can't do that.
- [34:34]
B
All right, so we know your next book is going to be set to Addison Rae and maybe some other pop stars. What. What project are you exploring, if any?
- [34:43]
D
I'll tell you just broadly that I spent two of the last three books, and if you count the premonition, three out of four have been. I mean, I found myself surprising to myself, drawn to government, to what's happening in the federal government. I would normally, I think on almost any other time in my life, have thought, whatever happens there, in the end, it's all going to just be fine. It's like swatting an elephant. You can't move it in any direction. I actually think the turmoil in Washington is really important now. It's just become a different thing. And I found unbelievable material like the Fifth Risk. And I did a thing in March. We published a book called who Is Government? Which I curated and wrote about a third of. And I got writer friends and I just parachuted them into the government, said, find a story. And it was. They proved to me that it wasn't just me, that they're like amazing stories in the federal government. There's a narrative that's organizing itself now in my head about what's going on. And. And I have the same feeling. I have a very similar feeling about what's going on now in Washington as I had about the Big Short. It's this huge hairball of a story. It is a genuine crisis. It's a gut check for the culture kind of thing. And there's a way to kind of cast. Find the cast of characters to tell.
- [36:02]
C
The story through the big house. The big God. I'm trying to think of a name. I'm really trying.
- [36:08]
B
We know it's coming. Two movie theaters. 2040 starring Shalom.
- [36:12]
D
A couple of just tips about titles. Yes, please don't, like, riff on your old tit like. Or anybody else's title. You don't want to be, like a subset of someone else. You want it to be completely original. And the other thing is, to a very large extent, the book makes the title. I can't tell you how many people told me Moneyball sucked as a title. Everybody, including all the characters in the book, like, oh, that's a shitty title. And that title is now fantastic. So it's. It. The books. The books kind of will take care of the title. And the other little tip would be shorter is better than longer, usually.
- [36:51]
C
Big, shorter. Gosh. All right, I'll stop there, Michael. That's all the time we have. Thank you so much for joining us. This was absolutely awesome. Everyone listening, make sure to go check out the Big Short audiobook, narrated by Michael Lewis, and listen to against the Rules, your podcast, which is all about the Big Short this year, this season. So a lot of good material coming out. And thank you so much for jumping in the studio with us.
- [37:14]
D
Totally fun. Tell your moms that they raised you well.
- [37:16]
B
Thank you. You're getting that, Mom.
- [37:19]
C
Thank you for that.