← Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Michael Lewis on How the Global Financial Crisis Explains Trump, Crypto, and Everything Else
01:12:03
Loading summary
Transcript64 lines
- [00:00]
A
What's up? It's Todd McShay, host of the McShay show at the Ringer and Spotify. We're building this thing up and I couldn't be more excited to be back talking college football and everything. NFL Draft with the most informed audience out there. That's you, my co host Steve mentioned. I will be with you three times a week throughout the football season with all the latest news, analysis and scouting intel from around the league. For even more insight, subscribe to my newsletter the McShay Report to access my mock drafts, big boards, tape breakdowns and other exclusive scouting content you can't get anywhere else. It's going to be a great season and I hope you'll be with us at the McShay show every step of the way.
- [00:44]
B
This episode is brought to you by Canva. If you find yourself flipping between endless tabs and programs trying to realize your vision, you should try Canva, the all in one design platform that makes ideas flow into beautiful work. Whether you're a content creator, small business owner, or influencer, it's got all the tools you need in one place, like Canva Video. With thousands of templates or Canva docs for beautiful visual documents, Canva lets you bring your big ideas to life as fast as you can think of them. Put imagination to work at canva. Com. This episode is brought to you by Zendesk, introducing the next generation of AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone with an easy setup that can be completed in minutes, not months. Zendesk AI agents resolve 30% of interactions instantly, quickly giving your customers what they need. Loved by over 10,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more@Zendesk.com today. Michael Lewis in the last few days, I've been reading a book by a great writer who is not today's guest, the short story Master George Saunders. The book is called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In the book, Saunders shares several classic stories from Russian authors like Tolstoy and Chekhov and and then after publishing or printing those stories inside the book, he takes Peter's hand and explains to them how these stories work, how they work us over, how they fill us with meaning. It's a really beautiful and deeply engaging book, and if you want to learn to love Russian literature, or maybe even more instrumentally, if you want a really lovely meditation on creativity, I'd highly recommend it. But there's a line from one of the first chapters that really straightened my spine when I was making coffee this morning. The line is no worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception. This is apparently something Einstein said, or something he got close to saying, but the sentence has been translated and butchered and paraphrased so many times on its way from Einstein to us that it's not entirely clear what the original quote was. In any case, it's a very beautiful idea. No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception. There's a few ways to read this, I think. Or since this is a podcast, I should say there's a few ways to hear it. You could take the perspective of the creator when you are working on a hard problem, it's hard. Almost by definition, it can't be solved on a first pass if you're writing something important. Making something important, the initial struggle is not a sign of failure, perhaps, but a sign of the project's worthiness. I think what Saunders is telling us here via Einstein is that it's natural for the creative process to include a moment of frustration or even a bit of hopelessness. Another way to see it is to take the perspective of the audience. If you read or hear a piece of art that seems simple, there's a tendency to think that it was simple to make. But simple isn't easy. As they say, simple takes work. Making something that seems simple is very, very hard to the extent that the best stories seem natural, inevitable, perfect in their completeness. That's an artist taking a rugged piece of marble and carving, polishing, carving, polishing, until something beautiful and complete. Maybe a human face emerges from the marble block. One of the real masters of making the complex, simple, making faces emerge from that marble block is the author, Michael Lewis. I've been an enormous fan of his for many decades. Liars, Poker, Moneyball, the Big Short, and so many others. Today, Michael is my guest. I try to get many things out of him in the next hour, including his reflections on economic bubbles and how he finds such great and unforgettable characters. We spend lots of time today talking about how the global financial crisis never really ended, how we're still living in the world that it built, or maybe even the world it destroyed. We spend lots of time talking about Moneyball, the data analytics revolution, and how it's transformed sports outside of baseball and entertainment. But the theme we return to over and over again here is craft. How does Michael make the most complicated stories so indelibly simple in his books? What's the Secret to telling a good story in the first place. How do you know when you're in the possession of one? I really love today's conversation and I think you will too. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Michael Lewis, welcome to the show.
- [06:06]
C
It's a pleasure to be here.
- [06:08]
B
You have many gifts as a writer and one of them, I think is being at the right place at the right time. Or maybe more appropriately, being at the wrong place at the right time. You were a young trader on the Solomon Brothers bond desk during the 1987 crash. That experience led to your book Liars Poke. You were there to write the big short on the housing crash. You decide to tag along with this guy, Sam Bankman, fried just before that company goes infamously belly up. It seems to me like you have seen the human face of financial exuberance up close and personal in so many different ways. Do bubbles and financial crashes share some fundamental underlying characteristic that you've sussed out? Or are they like Tolstoy's unhappy families, where each is unhappy in its own way and every bubble crash is really its own organism, its own specimen.
- [06:58]
C
So each is its own specimen. So I mean, when you drill down far enough, it's going to be. You can find things distinctive about it. And I did this exercise just recently with Andrew Ross Sorkin, who's written a book about the crash of 29. Like just pretend. These are two pictures by, you know, one by Rubens, one by Rembrandt. The 1929 crash and the 2008 crash. Compare and contrast. But you can find things in common. I mean, I think of it, I mean, what is in common, like they all seem to have in common, is risk either gets misunderstood or hidden. The financial system is always trying to hide risk. It's a funny situation, right, because it's put on earth to expose it and price it accurately. But in fact, it's really valuable to be able to hide it. And so that's one thing that I think goes on like before every financial crisis. So maybe I wonder if incentives. You're asking me a question I hadn't actually thought about. But I wonder if before every financial crisis, incentives get screwed up. Like people are effectively paid to do really dumb things, that they're paid in the short term to ignore longer term risks. That was certainly true. That was fue fuel for what happened inside the big banks. It was fuel for what happened inside the bank's lending operations back before the 1929 crash. So maybe that's partly it too, that somehow the financial system, whatever it is at the time, gets itself twisted into this place where people are doing really well for themselves, creating what will be obviously in the end, a catastrophe. But I don't know. I don't know. I certainly wouldn't pretend to be able to predict these, like, when these things are gonna happen. And I would go one step further and say, anybody who tells you that they know when the crisis is coming, you should just not listen to them about anything. These are unpredictable events and so don't. Like, like the characters in the Big short, they knew that there were these problems and they knew that there was this really positive expected value trade to do. None of them would have pretended to know when this is going to happen. Maybe with one slight exception. So that it's just like it's a foolish game to pretend that these things are so knowable, they're predictable.
- [09:37]
B
I want to return to one thing you said, which is that financial crises and bubbles tend to have this quality of the protagonists are hiding something. And what I thought of is that, you know, as individuals, we hide our misdeeds and we call it shame. But as companies, we sometimes hide our bad bets and we call it finance. And in many ways, the people who are best at sussing out these bubbles are those who are best out at sussing out what is essentially like corporate shame. Like, I was having a conversation with someone recently about fears of artificial intelligence being a bubble, which I want to get your mind on in just a second, and they said, what really scares me is that these companies often aren't building the data centers themselves. They're creating special purpose vehicles. They're creating this black box and they're putting money in the black box, and private capital is putting money in the black box, and that black box is actually going out and building the data center. But they're trying to hide this stuff off their balance sheet. That's what makes me scared. And so there again, it's sort of like, you know, you're in trouble. You know, the system understands itself to be flirting with danger when it begins to hide.
- [10:40]
C
Hide things. That's right. And as to this thought, Pat crossed my fleeted across my mind a few days ago, so I'll voice it, since it's a podcast and it's for voicing fleeting thoughts. But think about the whole incentive issue right now on a big scale. I think for the first time in history, we have a president who's. It's not the first time in history the president wants to seize control of the money supply that's happened before, it hasn't maybe succeeded all that well. But that's not an original ambition. But we have a president whose personal family fortunes are mostly tied now to crypto. And what's the way you make crypto go up? You debase the dollar, you create chaos. So that we have someone in a very powerful position who's got an incentive, a personal financial incentive to create a financial crisis, to create especially a debasing the dollar kind of financial crisis. That's just weird. I mean, I think if whatever happens, it's possible we will look back and say, well, that was odd that we allowed the President not just to get a hold of the money supply, but get a hold of money supply at the same time. These long $5 billion Bitcoin or whatever he's got and that he can make the bitcoin go up just by screwing with the money supply. There's an incentive that's baked in. Maybe he would never think like that. But as a basic matter of incentives, the incentive structure has changed and nobody's really pointed it out. So you gotta be really careful about the incentives because they do tend to lead to behavior.
- [12:27]
B
I want to attach some of these thoughts to your work on the Big Short, which we are now celebrating the 10 year anniversary of that great movie. Can you take me back to what you were doing when you stumbled onto the story of the Big Short? What project were you coming out of? How did you first catch wind of these renegade traders sniffing around the collapse of the financial system? What was Michael Lewis life like in God, that's funny. 2005, 2006, when you first started to.
- [12:52]
C
Sniff around this, it wasn't 0506 because I just. So I'd finished the Blind side in 06 and I'd moved in 07, my family for six months down in New Orleans. The kids were really little, put them in schools down there. New Orleans, where I'm from. Because I thought I was going to write a book about New Orleans. And it was going to be, it was going to be a memoir, but more than a memoir. And it was going to grow out of a piece. I went into New Orleans for Katrina for the New York Times Magazine and I wrote a big piece about it. And I thought this is the beginning of a book. And I still think that while I was in New Orleans for these six months gathering string for the book, I realized I couldn't really write this book while my parents were still wandering the earth. That it was just. And it was just like I would be pissing in there, drinking water. And there was nothing specific. It was just. It felt wrong to write the book that they would then suffer whatever social consequences for. And there's still. There's still alive and happy and healthy. So I was sitting there frustrated that I'd done this thing, moved everybody to New Orleans, and, oh, no, I maybe don't have a book that's not. And I don't even really want a book because I want my parents to be around. So, like, it's going to be a long time before, I hope, before this book get written. When I noticed Meredith Whitney talking, I was shocked that Meredith Whitney had made these calls about, I think it was Citibank. I can't remember who it was, but the losses. And I got her. And she had predicted or anticipated the market and, like, the losses they were going to have from their subprime portfolios. And I thought, that's really strange she was able to do that. I got her on the phone and she said something like, you know, it's a. This is a. This. This is more interesting than, you know. And the person you should talk to if you. Beyond me is this guy Steve Isem. And at that point, I just started watching it, and I went and visited Eisman, and I had thought my state of mind up to that point about Wall Street. So this is 2007. I'd written Liars Poker in 1989, but I'd been more or less. I'd felt like I was more or less Persona non grata on Wall street because of Liars Poker, that it made a lot of people angry. I was regarded as a little dangerous. I still had friends on Wall street, but when I would visit them to have lunch, they wouldn't let me up under their offices. It was like all that. So I thought. I did think, how would I ever do this? Nobody will want to talk to me. And then Eisenman wanted to talk to me, and that was fine. But Kyle Pope, editor, was at Portfolio magazine, and he called and said, you should write about this. And I thought, well, I could do a little magazine piece. So with that, it wasn't a book. It was like, oh, it'll be a little magazine piece. I started making the calls. I started calling the people around. Morgan Stanley had just announced it had lost $10 billion on what was obviously basically a single trade. And it just blew my mind. And it already figured out that someone was on the other side of that. And it was not a smart Wall street person for the most part. Or rather Wasn't a big institution. It was like one of these oddballs. And I called, and the Morgan Stanley people, several people from Morgan Stanley right around the trade, said, I'd love to have a beer with you. I'd love to tell you what's going on. It would be all be kind of on background. And so I came up to New York and I did this tour of the institutions, Merrill, Citi, Morgan Stanley. I found the relevant people. It was all kind of like, I'll tell you, you know it, but you don't know it from me. And in every case, I swear, in every case, it was someone who was a generation younger than me or about and who said at some point in the conversation, like, the reason I was happy to talk to you is, liars Poker is why I'm in the business. At some point I thought, jesus Christ, I created this crisis. All the people who are making these stupid bets got into the business because of my book. And I had this thought, but then I had the other thought, which was, oh, my God, the story is open to me. It's not closed to me because of Liars Poker. It's open to me because of Liars Poker. And I don't know, you have this. Maybe you do, maybe you don't have this experience, but I require so much access from, you know, to do the one story I wanted. I hate it to be. I really feel uncomfortable when I'm flying by radar. And when I realized, oh, my God, I'm going to get in. Then I thought I wrote the thing for Kyle, but then I called. Actually, while I wrote the thing, you were taking me back down memory lane. While I was writing the thing for Kyle, I thought, shit, this is a book. And I know how to do the book. I know exactly how to do the book. I know what the frame is. I have to find some characters, but I know what this is. And the phrase popped into my mind, the Big Short. And I thought, it's too good to stick on the magazine article. So we called it, whatever we called it, End of wall, I don't know what they called it. And I called the publisher. I said, I got a book. It's going to be called the Big Short. Now, what's even weirder is that I found out later that David Vineyard, who was, I think, the CFO at Goldman Sachs, wrote a memo about the Big Short, called it the Big Short. At roughly the time that I was thinking of the title, he had had the same phrase pop in his mind. But the minute I find that the minute I have the concept and I have a basic sense that the characters are available to me. And then I had like a title I thought was just. I love that title. I was just like off and running. And what I've learned since is that the Wall street that kind of I felt shut out from. Not that I was banging on a lot of doors, but I was shut out from. If I go and try to write a book about Wall street in 1992, I got shot, but. But it's changed so much. It's become very fragmented and that there are big parts of Wall street that actually I will always have access to. There are little pieces that I don't like. Getting into Jane street is very, very hard. But there are lots of people who will just talk to me.
- [19:15]
B
Now I want to ask a follow up question about craft. How do you know when you found the right character or the perfect story? You said this little thing in that answer that I was latching onto this idea that there was a moment where it felt like you could almost see the shape of the thing. You had the title, you had the character. You could imagine the contour of the rising action, falling action. How to set up drama, how to release drama. Can you take me into your process? When you think about the way that you, Michael, think about realizing that you have a book, that you have the next story. Is there a process or formula that holds across projects that you now recognize to be the thing you're looking for in that next great character, next great story?
- [20:05]
C
I tell you what, in the early stages, it's always the same. It's the sound and feeling of banging my head against the wall. I sense there's something on the other side of the wall and it's worth banging my head on it. But usually there's. This was a little bit of an unusual case, how quickly it came together. Moneyball was too. But the. On the opposite end of the spectrum was the Undoing project, which took eight years to come together. But I'm just thinking, like, I gotta bang my head against that wall and something will happen. And that takes the form of like just talking to a lot of people, but which the. So let me just tell you what popped into my head in the big short while I was working just on the magazine piece was, oh, so this is incredibly complicated story. I'm going to have to explain to not just myself, but my mother what a CDO squared is. This is not basically almost impossible, right? It's that complicated. It's that complicated a story. The Crisis is. It's just like the financial engineering was not just a separate bug. It was the feature. Like, it was extremely important that they had found ways to not just make all these bad subprime loans, but. But to replicate them using derivatives. And so no one knew how many of them there were. No one knew where they were. It was possibly infinite losses. So complicated story. However, it can be reduced to a really simple sentence. There was a giant bet being made in the financial system. Almost all the big financial firms where supposedly the wisdom resides, were on the wrong side of the bet. There was a constellation of mostly oddballs who are on the right side of the bed. Simple. What enabled someone to be on the right side of the bed? Which is another way of saying, what were they doing that Wall street wasn't doing that it should have been doing? Can you go and interview? And this is what I did. This is where that got exciting for me. And when I realized that, oh, there's a pool of people, and you can get to them. You can get to them through Greg Lippman, who sits in the middle of the whole thing, the Ryan Gosling character. But you can get to all of them. You can get all their names, and you can figure out the ones who really went all in as opposed to the ones who dabbled. And then you can go interview every single one of those and determine how they did their thing and figure out the different ways you got to the right answer that were interesting ways. Not an interesting way was this. Greg Lippmann told you to do it and you did it, and you didn't really understand it, never mind those people, but that you actually thought about the world in some way that led you to the right answer. And there turned out to be kind of three ways to get to the right answer, kind of intellectually. And then it was a matter. And there were people in each of the buckets, more than one, picking the character who could either best teach or was most fun to write about in that bucket. So it was. It was very deliberate. It's one of the. I'm trying to think if there's another time I'm engaged in a book now. That's the closest thing I've ever written to the big short where I realized that there was a kind of conceptual frame like that and I had a choice of characters. Like, I could have used him, or I could have used him. And that it was really. At that point, it becomes incredibly fun because it's almost all upside down. There's so many ways to do it that you're not at the mercy, you're not at sweaty feeling. If they don't call me back, I don't have a ball.
- [23:46]
B
You're almost like a casting director with a script in hand, right? Like, you have the script, and here's all these great actors who are coming up to read the sides and read their lines. And you're like, I am so lucky because I know what the script is. I'm happy with the script. The question is, who plays these roles? Who's the renegade traitor? Right? That's really cool.
- [24:04]
C
So let me just say who. Let me give you an example of what I mean by the buckets. So Charlie Ledley and Jamie May, the Cornwall capital guys, they got made fun as the cornhole capital guys. The only reason they found this trade, this problem, is they had a view of the world, correct view, that Wall street was systematically underpricing disaster insurance out of the money, way out of the money options on everything. And so that they went looking for just way out of the money options, disaster insurance on everything. Like, what's the likelihood the stock market's going to fall by 20%? They think it's like 1%. Wall street thinks it's 0.1%. So you can buy the option cheap. And you build this huge portfolio of all these insurance on disasters. And some of the disasters happen and they then with that frame of mind, they discover this thing called a credit default swap on subprime mortgage bonds, which is a way out of the money option on something that no one on Wall street thinks will ever happen. The housing market collapses and they start to dig and they think, oh, it looks like a nice bet. Then they start to dig and they go, oh, my God, this isn't a bet. This is almost a certainty. Oh, my God, this is criminal. So it was a predisposition that led them to the right answer. And each of the characters had that thing. And so it's just different things. So I wasn't casting. I wasn't casting exactly for person. It wasn't personality traits that separated the people from bucket to bucket or not really. It was a path to the right answer. And you're right, I was like a casting director in that I had choices, like active. I was conscious of him or him. And. And really the truth of the sad truth, what it really boiled down to is like, who am I going to have the most fun writing about that? You know, because if I'm having fun, the reader's having fun.
- [26:05]
D
This episode is brought to you by the home Depot. The holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and they're ready to transform your house into a holiday home, no matter your style or budget. They've got so many types of string lights to choose from. You can create everything from a soft glow to a colorful display of holiday cheers, and I love this innovation. Their warm white LED lights come with steady light technology so your lights stay glowing even if one bulb fails. Find everything you need to get your holidays started with the Home Depot. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Whether it's a game day or backyard fire pit, or simply to enjoy delicious food with the people you love, Whole Foods Market has got you find great everyday prices on 365 brand favorites like organic tortilla chips and salsa, plus apple cider sandwich cookies. Yum. And right now you can save 50%. That's right, 50% with prime on select frozen pizzas through October 28th. Visit your local Whole Foods Market today and store online. Terms apply. This episode is brought to you by mobile1 mobile1's synthetic motor oil knows your car is your happy place. But did you know your happy place has a happy place? It's not stuck in rush hour traffic. We've all been there, especially in la. It's always terrible. And the entire time you're sitting there, you know deep down that your car's favorite place is on the open road singing its favorite song while you sing along to yours.
- [27:23]
C
Mobile 1.
- [27:25]
D
For the love of driving, visit LoveOfDriving us to learn more.
- [27:30]
B
I wanna get back to Crash in a second, but just to continue the story. The crash happens. The global financial crisis ensues. I loved your book Boomerang, your follow up to the Big Short and the Global Consequences of the gfc. And I think some people now are very familiar with direct consequences of the crash. The bankruptcies, maybe Dodd Frank, the regulations. In my work I focused a lot on how the crash decimated the construction business and led us, ironically, to this housing shortage today. Which might have surprised people who thought the housing bubble was all about an oversupply of homes. Now, in many places, we're dealing with the exact opposite, an undersupply of housing. How did the global financial crisis shape the world in ways that you understand because of your reporting, but you think many people today might not understand or might have taken their eye off the ball of because this event again happened so long ago.
- [28:25]
C
It's a hairball of a question because there's so many ways to go with it. But what are the consequences of the financial crisis. Let's just list some rather than conceptualize it too much. Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin. Bitcoin comes out of the financial crisis, according to Satoshi. Maybe he was making it up. But so what is bitcoin? What is crypto? I see it as an expression of mistrust of institutions, of government institutions and banks, which is not that people trusted the government in 2007 or people really trusted banks, but they did more than they do now. Elizabeth Warren and Steve Bannon, those are two political careers on either end of the political spectrum that are supercharged. And Bannon would tell you that, again, it's not as simple as his story, but he would tell you that. And he told me that he was politicized and radicalized by the financial crisis. Elizabeth Warren, that's more public. And everybody knows that. Did you know, by the way, this is just a weird side note, that Steve Bannon is the person who bought the movie rights to Liars Poker.
- [29:39]
B
Oh, my God.
- [29:40]
C
I found this out just by doing this podcast season, actually. I knew he was involved, I just didn't know quite how involved. And this time he came clean with me. He'd just come from his job at Goldman Sachs. People forget Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs and went to Hollywood where he made a bunch of money because he, among other things, was an investor in Seinfeld, right? And he had this group of production company with two guys, Norman Twain and Tom Mount, and they bought the rights for Warner Brothers, but it was their deal. And what he told me when I was just talking to him was he was so upset it was his idea to do it, to buy the rights. He was so upset by how bad the script was when it came in that he went into a dark room by himself and he wrote a Liar's Poker movie. And that he couldn't get anybody to take it seriously because he was just like the guy from Goldman Sachs. But Bannon is, I think he thinks, and I think, too, you can draw a line from the financial crisis to Donald Trump. I mean, this is where this feeling that the world is rigged by elites really gets ahead of steam. And it's not wrong. It's like, oh, wait a minute, these bankers did this and they get to survive. And if I make that kind of mistake, I'm doomed that I have capitalism and they don't. The government's going to be socialistic towards the elites. I mean, that is. It makes your blood boil, right? So I think the anger that's in this sort of the defining emotion of American political life. Now, I think that's. You trace it back to that. It's more than just that. But that fueled it in finance. I'm still kind of noodling on what the broader financial consequences were of the financial crisis. But one obvious one was, rightly the banks got made more boring. They got higher capital requirements. You can't do this, you can't do that. You're going to contort yourself in all these interesting positions. So the interesting jobs on Wall street moved out of the banks. They moved into these new things called high frequency trading firms. So where more money has been made than ever was made in the bank. Jane street and Jump Trading and Virtue Capital and Citadel went on and on and they moved into what were called private equity firms. But why they're called that anymore, I don't know. Because they're these massive banks. It's Apollo, it's Aries, it's Blackstone with trillions of dollars of corporate loans and the loans that the banks used to make. So the too big to veil institution may be those right now. So that's a like. So the risk and prestige got redistributed on Wall street because of the financial crisis. Last thing that I mean pops on because you mentioned Boomerang and Boomerang, Big Short was conceived of as a book. I plotted it as a book. Boomerang was a series of articles for Vanity Fair and just stapled together as a book. And I like the articles, but it was not conceived of as a book. And one of the things that just runs right through the reporting there, but maybe actually didn't find its way under the surface of the page as much as it should have, is that across the world, American credibility took a hit. It was no question that we were the originators of, if not the actual demise of a lot of these places. The ideas behind that led them to their demise. They thought we were good with money. And it's like, no, actually. And we thought we could trust them and no, actually we can't. And I think that's when someone comes and writes the story of the decline of the American empire. I mean, I think they'll look at that. It'll be a small piece of the story, but it's a piece of the story. Our credibility took a huge hit.
- [33:42]
B
I think it's a compelling case that the global financial crisis never ended. I mean, you mentioned Trump, you mentioned cryptocurrency, you mentioned declining faith in institutions, America's declining role in the global. I mean, these are all tributaries entering the delta of 2025. These are the most active stories in the world. And I think you're right that at the very least, the headwaters for a lot of those Trends started in 2007, 2009.
- [34:06]
C
So I wonder if you sense. I have two questions for you that actually, as I was coming over here to talk to you, I actually want to remind myself to ask you and put a pin in abundance, because I want you. Before I'm going to ask you a question on your own podcast about abundance, I want you to explain it to me. Me. But this since you covered, you did a lot of writing about COVID and you said it's a chance to think about what happened. We know we didn't perform very well there either. Do you find it as odd as I do that there seems to be some pretty decent lessons have been learned from the financial crisis and from COVID and that clearly the society has not learned them so from the financial crisis. I mean, I hate to say it because it makes everybody angry, but the importance of having an independent Federal Reserve and a strong federal government with a strong balance sheet, I mean, that was the reason you could put the fire out, was you had those firefighting institutions. And we are so playing right now with dismantling them. And so the mechanism for stopping the next financial. I mean, there's going to be another financial crisis. There always is, right? So when that happens, whatever it is that causes it, the mechanism for dealing with it has been so weakened. And you would have thought that in a rational society that people would look at what happened and say, okay, we're pissed that the government bailed out the bankers, but we have to acknowledge it's better that we didn't have a Great Depression. And so at the very least, these institutions, let's at least keep those functioning. But that's not where we are in our head. Just like we nod in our head about COVID it's like what worked and what didn't. I mean, I think it's like the next thing that comes along, if you can't shut schools for a few weeks, it's going to result in many, many, many more deaths and preventable deaths. But I don't think you can shut schools. I mean, it's. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe in some states the lesson has been learned. But I think most people come away from it saying, you don't lock anything down. That was a travesty that they lock anything down.
- [36:16]
B
I think the deepest irony with COVID is that it's very hard to look around the US and look around the world and point to one behavioral intervention that clearly worked everywhere.
- [36:30]
C
Right?
- [36:30]
B
Right. Where can you say that closing the schools clearly worked everywhere for months and months. Eventually parents get angry. Eventually kids need to go back to school. Where can you say that lockdowns for months and months truly worked? You can say it worked in some places, but in other places, there's an exception. The one thing that clearly worked everywhere were the vaccines. Yes, you could take the vaccine in Mississippi, you could take the vaccine in Moldova, you could take the vaccine in some other M country. I can't. Mongolia, just to be alliterative. It worked everywhere. It's the same molecular effect in the body. And the Trump administration, to its enormous credit, had this program, Operation Warp Speed, that took the land speed record for vaccine development from nine, 10 years to 10 months. It was a miracle, you know, it was a miracle. It was a miracle. A miracle. I'm glad we said it at the same time. What is the legacy of Operation warp speed? Today, RFK Jr, the head of Health and Human Services Under Donald Trump 2.0, is trying to ban synthetic MRNA medicine from the entire medical apparatus. No one in the Republican Party talks about Operation Warp Speed. Too few people, I think, in the Democratic Party talk about Operation Warp Speed because they don't wanna give Donald Trump credit for doing anything. But in this case, something extraordinary was accomplished. I think to your point, the same way that a rational country would have a kind of programmatic response to financial crises that was learned from 2007. A rational country would look at Operation Warp Speed and say, how do we build an OWS for everything? What can we Operation Warp Speedify that we haven't done so already? Where's the OWS for Alzheimer's and for Parkinson's and for pancreatic cancer and for SSRIs? God knows there's so many needs and there's no conversation. And ironically, the president, who's responsible for this, who, by the way, we just learned a week ago, actually got the vaccine booster, wants to preside over an administration that is trying to gut America's trust in all vaccines, specifically the COVID vaccine and MRNA science entirely. It's pretty unbelievable. And if it existed in some kind of Shakespearean drama or movie, it would be almost too on the nose to have the details be what they are. But the details are what they are. So that's my reaction. I think it's crazy that we didn't look at one of the great public policy successes of the last 70, 100 years in American history and say, God, how do we replicate this a thousand times over? We didn't. We've basically forgotten it. No one talks about it anymore except for me. Every fifth podcast or so.
- [39:05]
C
So we share a bewilderment at our country's inability to learn the correct lesson.
- [39:11]
B
Yes, you're more familiar with the Right Way to be bewildered by the aftermath of the gfc, and I'm more familiar with my bewilderment with COVID I want to talk a little bit about extending the lessons that you took from the Big Short and following the housing bubble. The beats of this housing bubble story. Speculation, a sudden increase in a certain kind of investment. A. We were talking about this a few minutes ago. Financial opacity and interest in disguising investments. A lot of that applies to the artificial intelligence story right now. I mean, private companies are spending more on AI really, than any group of private companies have spent on any project in human history.
- [39:53]
C
But we do know how much they're spending. They tell us they do.
- [39:56]
B
Yeah, they report a number. Whether that number is the full picture, I think is a secondary question. But let's assume that they're telling us what they're spending. And so there's a little bit of clarity there, I guess. I'm just interested to get your mind on what's going on in AI right now. Are you writing the AI book? Or if not, how are you following this story?
- [40:18]
C
I want to quote Amos Tversky, one of my subjects. I'm far less interested in artificial intelligence than I am in natural stupidity. And I'm interested. It's not that I'm not interested. It's. It's just like everybody's interested, so why bother, I guess. It's funny, the financial crisis is an example where I did bother when everybody was interested. And Trump's Washington is something that everybody's interested. And I have bothered. I just don't feel I have much to add. So everything I say, what is it? Happy Gilmore, when the guy got up and gave us, he said, before, before I speak, everybody in here is stupider for having listened to you. There's a risk of this. So there's a risk. Everybody will be just a little stupider for what I'm about to say. The first thing that I just suspicious of is that any of this investment will be justified by the financial returns. It's like the Internet. It was really obviously socially disruptive. It was a big deal. AI is a big deal, but doesn't mean necessarily that you're going to make a lot of money from it. Maybe a few people will. But it's just like it feels kind of indiscriminate. And nobody has a very persuasive story to tell about how the money is going to be made. I just don't. Which they do. What they're very persuasive about, when you talk to the big companies that are developing the technology one, they're very persuasive. It's going to eliminate a lot of jobs. And they don't have an answer to the question like, okay, what happens in this already very angry society when you eliminate 25 million ordinary jobs held by ordinary people? I mean it's going to explode. That's not our problem is that kind of thing. And so that's a thing that interests me. It's like nobody's planning for what the social consequences of this are. They're all thinking it's like it's this financial bonanza when what it's going to be is socially really disruptive. And I don't hear any real plan. You're not going to resettle all those people into higher value jobs. That's not going to happen. So that's a second thing. The third thing is I'm just a little suspicious of the intelligence itself. I don't feel, I mean this is. I may really sound stupid in five years. I don't feel threatened by only knows it could not write the Big Short the moment before I wrote the Big Short because it would never have heard of Michael Berry or Steve Eisman or Charlie or Jamie or Greg Lippman. It wouldn't have had any of the information. Now after I wrote it, it might be able to do something that undermined my ability to sell my book. But. But it's not going out in the world and finding new things in the way that I do when I write something and I only write something when I now if I were just like an op ed writer, I don't know, maybe that would be different. But it does feel limited to me and it feels useful for some things, but feels very limited. So I'm not a genius. If I don't feel threatened by it, and I'm right not to feel threatened by it, that there are limits here that they're not acknowledging. They're basically very blithely saying it's going to replace you. And I just don't believe that. I just don't believe it. I don't see how it won't.
- [44:14]
B
It won't replace you. And that's for many reasons, but one of them is that there's something that nonfiction journalists, especially nonfiction journalists who write original books and tell original stories have to make a core part of their job that is currently a core weakness of generative intelligence. Generative AI, which is having the agency to ask the right first questions. Generative AI is very good at answering questions if you ask it. Give me a 15,000 word history of the 1987 stock market crash so that I can apply its lessons to the next crash in the 2000s. It'll do a really good job writing you a history of 1987, but you had to think of that question in order to make the connection to the 2020s. And it seems to me like your job. And we have, you know, I'm a nonfiction journalist too, but we have very different remits. I think your job is to begin from this place of absolute, like, you know, sorry if I'm misconstruing ignorance.
- [45:18]
C
Yes.
- [45:18]
B
You have no idea what your next protagonist is gonna be. You have no idea what your next story is going to be. There's no formula that says, oh, the guy who just wrote about left tackles is next going to take on credit default swaps. There's just no formula on the planet that says that's the right way to go from nonfiction project to nonfiction project. So it emanates entirely from within you. You begin from ignorance. Your job is asking good first questions. And this is the thing that AI is worse at doing. AI is a specialist at sitting in the genie chair and taking incoming prompts from people who are have the agency to ask the first question. So in a way, I think you are right to fear the social dislocation of millions of jobs that might be vulnerable to this kind of technology. And you are right that this technology does not threaten you or the many Michael Lewises of the future that will be writing nonfiction books. Because I think in many ways, their jobs are most insusceptible to this kind of technological intelligence.
- [46:17]
C
With the exception of really talented conspiracy theorists.
- [46:22]
B
With the exception of really talented conspiracy theorists. We'll see if we keep that one.
- [46:25]
C
All right, so I want to keep you talking for just one more minute because I don't want to forget this. I want you to explain the origin of your abundance book. I just want you to explain it to me. Where this comes from. It's been, obviously a huge hit. I started to read it, and I decided I wanted. And I knew. I knew I was going to be talking to you, I thought, I'll just have him explain it to me. Just. Could you just give me the. Like, you're talking to your mom explanation what this is?
- [46:55]
B
Sure. I'll tell you first where it came from. Speaking of COVID I was standing in line in Washington, D.C. to get a COVID test or a box of COVID tests for my family in 2022. And Covid tests were being rationed at that time. And so we had to queue up. And this queue was going around the corner of Mount Pleasant, outside of the local library. And as I'm shivering there, I just got really mad. I was like, we are now multiple years into this pandemic, and we are rationing tests. How can we not produce enough tests for the population of the richest country in the world? And as I was thinking about the fact that there was a scarcity of tests, I got thinking more about the problem of scarcity during the pandemic, that there was a scarcity of medical equipment. There was a scarcity of masks, which got Anthony Fauci to say that people shouldn't wear masks. They didn't do anything. And that was partly born out of the fact we were worried about it running out. There was a scarcity of vaccines in the early innings of their being rolled out. And I just thought, God. And of course, there was the scarcity of actual stuff. If you were trying to order a couch or a chair in the middle of, say, 2021, when the supply chains are being snarled, I just thought the whole experience of this pandemic just feels like one scarcity after another. And as I got thinking about the rest of my work and the rest of my columns for the Atlantic, I thought, scarcity isn't just the story of the pandemic. It's the story of the American century. Right now, one of the most important macroeconomic trends is the shortage of housing in the places where Americans most want to live. In California, on the coasts, in many places, home prices were surging at that time in practically every single metro. And then it wasn't just a shortage of housing. It was a shortage of clean energy. I care a lot about the environment. I care a lot about climate change. And it was astonishing to me that states like California and Massachusetts were falling so far behind states like Texas, where the political leaders don't really give a shit about climate change, but Texas was building all the solar and wind, and California and Massachusetts weren't. So they would scarcity and clean energy. I just thought, you know, what. What's the antidote? To what seems like a century of scarcity punctuated by a crisis defined by scarcity. It's an abundance agenda. And sort of from that little seed I tried to grow this idea of how can abundance heal what is hurting us. And so that was the origin of the book. But it doesn't explain why the book caught on the way it did. So I mean, just to take, to fill out the story, I suppose Ezra was writing about his own ideas about supply side liberalism, moving the future of liberalism from caring just about demand, taxing and spending to supply what we actually build. And so when we realized that we were basically going to be writing the same book around the same time, we figured that it would be easier on our lives and on our wives lives for us to co write the book rather than race each other to the finish line. So that was the theory. But then let's Fast forward to 2025. We write the book. Writing a book, I think it's a total pain in the ass. I'm glad we did it, but God, it's hard to write a book. We wrote the book. It comes out and it comes out in a really specific period where the brand of the Democratic party bottoms out. And Democrats have never, as a brand, as a party, been less popular, at least according to this Gallup Time series that goes back many decades. And so this book that we originally, that we wrote as an investigation of things that are true about the material sectors of America that we care about the most. Why aren't there more houses and how do we build them? Why isn't there more clean energy and how do we build it? Why doesn't government work well and how do we make it work better? Why is it so hard to come up with scientific breakthroughs in medicine? And why are scientific breakthroughs in many cases and by some analyses becoming rarer and more expensive? Those are the core questions we were trying to answer. And those aren't inherently political questions. But the book landed in an environment in 2025 where there was a vacuum of self identification for the Democratic Party. What does the Democratic Party stand for? And what in particular, I suppose you could say, does the center left, the Democratic Party stand for right? The Bernie wing has known for years, decades, you could say, what it stands for. What does the center left stand for? And so the book provided, I think, for a lot of people this opportunity to self define what the future of center left liberalism is about. It's about the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and getting back to those basics as a party housing, energy, affordability, good governance and scientific breakthroughs that make our lives better and healthier and longer. That's what politics should be about. That's what policy should be about. And let's stop with this, you know, this bullshit over authoritarianism and, you know, worrying about sort of whose identity is better and worse. Let's get back to the fundamental basics. The lobbyist of Maslow's hierarchy. Let's get back there. And I think that's part of what's made the message appealing at a time when there's a certain group of people who are looking for that kind of self definition. That would be. I probably wouldn't go on that monologue to a parent or grandparent, but that's my extremely useful.
- [52:05]
C
It was extremely useful. And I have lots of follow up questions and I'll just keep them to myself because I don't want to ruin your podcast by talking about you the whole time.
- [52:14]
B
Okay, we'll save a follow up question for email. I want to end on craft and we can talk back and forth to each other about craft. So 10 years ago, the Big Short comes out as a movie. Awesome movie. Not the first movie or only movie that has been made of your work. You've got the Blind side. You've got Moneyball. My sister works it for Netflix. So I understand at a really high level abstraction just how different movies are from writing. And I guess I would summarize that difference as being writing is sort of intensely and necessarily solitary. And movies are not solitary at all. They are team sports. They're the ultimate team sport. Do you like turning your books into movies? What do you like about it?
- [52:59]
C
So I don't do it. You know, I sell the book. I sold everything to the movies. My cupboard is empty. They've magazine pieces, books. I've sold more things to the movies. And for the longest time I just assumed that they just gave me money for free. They would never make any of my books. And if you told me they were going to make Moneyball and the Big Short into movies, I would have said that's not going to happen. Especially a Big Short. But even Moneyball, it's like, it's a little wonky in places. And so you're asking me do I like doing it? But I don't do anything. You don't do it? No. What happens is it's really this transaction occurs and it's a pretty simple transaction. First it's money for the book. And at that point I think it's theirs. It's theirs to break it, remake it. And if it's bad, it's their problem. If it's great, they get credit for it. And I tell them that whoever they are, it's usually a director or a writer, it's yours. I'm not going to complain. You're not going to hear a peep from me, no matter what you do. And they refuse to believe that I feel that genuine detachment. And it is absolutely true that Hollywood way prefer for authors to be dead. Because what they have in the back of their mind is this guy is going to cause me trouble at some point and he's going to complain I ruined his work of art, whatever it is. And so they feel like they need to keep you close. They just don't believe. They won't just go do it. So a social relationship in each case developed, very close ones with other directors where. And it was based on it starts with them pretending to be interested in what I have to say because they feel they need to do that. And me pretending to believe that they're actually interested. I mean, at some level, everybody knows that these conversations are pointless. But out of that. So this is where it gets fun. Out of that, friendships developed. It's not true. You can't build a friendship on a lie. It starts with a lie. And then what does happen is I become useful. And this has been increasingly so useful to them in the selling of the movie. So I get roped back in for the Oscars and the junkets and all that stuff. And that's a gas. I mean, my God, it's just so much fun because it's not really your thing. So you don't take any of it personally. It's like if somebody doesn't like it. I mean, I found this when I was watching the Blind side. The first time I ever saw anything of mine on the screen. It was a screening of the Blind side before the movie was released for charity. It was for Goodwill. And the movie company allowed the thing to be screened so that Goodwill could raise some money. And I chipped in by coming. And my job, I was really foolish in retrospect, was to watch the movie for the first time and get up and talk about my feelings about it right after. And I'd seen nothing, like nothing they could have done anything. And midway through, I leaned over Tabitha to my wife and I said, I don't know if I like this. And she said, don't say that. Just shut up. Whatever you say, whatever you think. And. And I. And I thought. And I sat and I thought. But there was something really weird going on because I actually cried during the movie and I laughed a lot and I thought, when have I done. How often am I doing that into movies? Not really often. So I could see that it worked and it did what it was supposed to do. And I realized what I was doing as I watched it. And then after this, I've never done it since. I was taking credit for everything I thought worked and I was blaming them for everything that I thought didn't. And once I realized that, I just stopped. Like, I just don't. I stopped judging and I just let the things happen. And I've been. Think about how lucky I've been. I mean, these three movies, all the Oscar nominated. Sandra Bullock won the best actress. McKay got a. You know, it's just like it could have fallen into such worse hands, all of them. And it's just. History is littered with writers who think that the movies ruin their books. And in every case.
- [57:21]
B
Well, some of them are right. I mean, some are right. You're one of my favorite writers. So is Stephen King. The batting average for Stephen King movies and short story adaptations is very uneven. Like Shawshank, wonderful. The Shining, incredible. There's a lot of stuff made of Steven movies.
- [57:43]
C
He has so many plate appearances that he is just gonna. He's. He's going to get the. He's gonna get the average result. He's got too many plates that I. I have three plate appearances and in each case I got extra base hits.
- [57:55]
B
You're like Kirk Gibson, right? He comes up to the plate, hits an important home run once or twice.
- [57:59]
C
And it all worked out. Eventually it's not gonna work. Something's gonna happen because eventually these things are complicated to pull off. If other ones happen, eventually something is going to get made that's not good. But I would say the other thing is that the combination of. So I don't think what is the movie? When I'm going and writing a book. In fact, my personal experience has been the things that are sort of the least likely to become movies end up becoming movies. So the dumbest thing I could do is look for a movie. My job is to do a really good book. And if the book is great, maybe it speaks to some person who wants to break it and turn it into a movie. I think the one thing that the books have going for them that Stephen King's don't is that Stephen King's books, you can see the movie in the books. They're much more just pure narrative. So mine are hard enough that if anybody's going to bother to make them, they have to really care about something. They aren't doing it gratuitously because, oh, it's a Stephen King. You might just make the movie because it's a Stephen King book. And how wrong can you go with these stories? You could go very, very wrong. So it's taken, in each case, someone with kind of a passion for the thing and that ends up taking them to places that they might not otherwise get. I think that's the only thing I can. Only thing close to a secret to the movies I can find is that it's like it's tracking people who just. They're driven by something.
- [59:31]
B
Two last questions. You write books, you make podcasts, you've written columns and magazine features. You've done the Hollywood thing, which includes everything from those early meetings with the director screenwriter to the Oscar circuit. What is your peak experience like as a maker of nonfiction media in every possible format? When are you in the highest possible state of flow?
- [59:56]
C
When I'm four chapters into a book and I know how it all goes. And the narrative is, the train is on the tracks and I'm all by myself and I have a few months left, four or five months left, and I don't have any interruption. And it's just. I know for me that's obviously some people aren't going to like it, but it's singing for me. I can hear it kind of hear that I get so excited. I mean, I get so excited that I don't need anything. I don't need anything in the world. I don't need companionship. I need food and exercise and sleep. That's it. Nothing else. No tv, no nothing. I get such pleasure from that moment. Now there's a lot of kind of trouble getting to that moment, but it's when I know I have the material in the bag and it's a big, long narrative. So easily. There's nothing close. There's nothing close.
- [60:55]
B
Do you find that other nonfiction writers feel the same way? Or do most writers, you know, have a tortured relationship with the actual writing of the book where they do it? Maybe they do it very well and they do it very often, but they find the actual writing of the book to be a kind of self prescribed torture.
- [61:14]
C
Almost all the writers I know, including very close friends, kind of came up in life as writers. Like they were identified in their minds. They were writers pretty young and they were indoctrinated by a system that teaches you that writing's supposed to be miserable. It's supposed to be torture. There's an agony of the artist kind of thing, that it's supposed to be really hard. And if it's not, hard is the wrong word, it's supposed to be painful kind of thing. And. And so I think most of writers right now regarded as an embarrassing admission to say, oh, no, this was easy. I love this. That's a sign that they're shallow, they're not suffering enough. How could it be art if they're not suffering? And because I came to it late and all by myself without a whole lot of encouragement, I've. I never had that. What I had instead was I'm laughing at the letter, I'm writing to my mother home from London, and it's going on and on. It's starting to look like something you could publish. And it gave me. What drew me to it was the pleasure of it. So I didn't learn that I was supposed to suffer. And I think that helps me. I think it helps me because I think when you think you're suffering, even if you're not, but if you're telling yourself you're suffering, you kind of inflict the pain on the reader one way or the other, that it says, no, you're angry. I don't feel that way. I feel like when I get. It isn't that there isn't a lot of hard work or that there isn't a lot of trouble getting to the point, but when I have the point, when I'm at a point where I have the story and I'm writing it, I'm in such a state of pleasure that I just want the reader to feel that pleasure. And I think that's a benefit. And I haven't. I can't say I have really great writers who are close friends. I've never heard any of them talk about it that way. I think the closest might be. There's one exception. I don't know what Dave Eggers would say. I think Dave Eggers feels the same way. I think he feels the same way, but I don't know that. I've never asked him the question.
- [63:28]
B
There's certainly a lot of joy in his writing. I mean, for all of the sadness in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I think is Egger's first book, there's no way the person writing that book didn't love writing it. There's a joy that emanates from the book that's like. I kind of felt that way about when I read Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Shaban. Like, there's no way that Michael Shaban, who I don't know at all, there's no way he had a bad time writing that book. It's how I feel about someone I don't know.
- [63:56]
C
That's true, that's true. That's such a joyful nonfiction writer though. That's a novel.
- [64:01]
B
Last question. I want to ask you about your legacy and the degree to which you think about it at all. You mentioned the funny experience of interviewing investors as you were beginning to report out the big short and realizing that they all got into this business because they read and loved Liars Poker. In which case you, I think a little bit self deprecatingly said that you felt somewhat responsible for the global financial crisis, which obviously I don't think anyone is exactly pinning on your shoulders. But I think about this with the legacy of Moneyball as well. You didn't invent the concept of analytics in sports. You wrote about it, you popularized it and you put a word to it. But I'm very interested in the fact that Moneyball has been seen as making baseball more boring. Three true outcomes, Everything is a walk and strikeout and home run. And I wrote a piece that I was really proud of a few years ago called, I think it was called something like the Dark side of Moneyball. And everything that talked about how the had nothing to do with my disliking you. It was basically about how the analytics revolution hadn't just come for baseball, it had obviously come for basketball with what is now called Moriball, the three point revolution. I think to a certain extent it's come for football. The last five years have sequentially been the year of the shortest average completed pass in NFL history. The passing game has gotten much shorter. You see this in Hollywood, the rise of sequels, adaptations and reboots. You see it in television. These entertainment companies have access to way more analytics than they ever have before. And it's my little pet theory that the smarter the entertainment companies become, sometimes the dumber the content becomes because they hold up a mirror to audience preferences and the reflection in the mirror just says, make something just like the last thing that you made. People love familiarity. And so that's not to ask you to respond to this particular theory, but it is to say that the concept of Moneyball, of analytics and sports and entertainment, has become absolutely huge. It dominates a lot of culture. And I wonder, your books have a way of seizing on these seismic cultural trends right at an inflection point. In their history. I wonder how you think about the legacy of your books years after they're published. Do you think about it or to a certain extent, is it like pushing a bottle out into the ocean and saying, I hope someone gets the message, but it's not my bottle anymore.
- [66:26]
C
It's more that. In fact, the message in the bottle is a metaphor that often occurs to me. I don't think I have any real responsibility to it once the book is written. I mean, books obviously come up. You can't just walk away from them entirely. I never reread them. I just. So I just don't think about it this way. I guess it's because I'm still working. So I'm not reflecting on any. I'm not thinking about reflecting on a career. I gotta say, it is kind of great that when my child starts her Wall street job that someone hands her liar's poker to say, if you want to understand Wall street, read this book without having any idea she's my child. That is just. I just love that. I love. And I love the way when the books have real effects. It's just kind of fun. Even when. But when Moneyball came out, it was incredibly controversial. I mean, you wouldn't have maybe seen the controversy. But I could not turn on a baseball game without someone saying something rude about the book. Or me or Joe Morgan especially was just going on about it constantly. The old time baseball, people hated it and it threatened their jobs. So I love that. I love it when people get all worked up. That's how you know the book's alive. It's worth people getting angry about. So I like that part of it. The Moneyball of everything would have happened without the book. This was inevitable. I would say I just want to respond to the thing he was saying about sports. It is true that Moneyball made baseball more boring that the bad approach. Because basically, as it turns out, the smart way to play baseball is to move as little as possible. It's like don't swing, don't steal bases. Position the infielders so that everybody catches the balls, hit right to them. It's like one thing after don't bunt all the rest. And so it becomes less kinetic. That just so happens to be a deep truth about baseball. And baseball needs to respond to that by doing things like making the bases bigger and not letting the position infielders and so on and so forth. Someone once asked me, how would I fix baseball? And I said, put a live lion on the field. That if you had a Lion that was actually hungry and that would start to get. You wouldn't get the full excitement of an NFL game, but you get some of that thrill of like someone might die and people would have to run for all sorts of other reasons than the ball being hit. But I don't think it's really true that analytics has made football or basketball more boring.
- [69:12]
B
I think basketball, I don't think so.
- [69:14]
C
And if you go back to really the original use of analytics, football, I mean going forward and fourth down, the passing game, as opposed to the three yards and a cloud of dust, this is an analytics. So it is true that right now the passing game's getting shorter, but even that game is much more fun to watch than just handing the ball off to the running back. So I think that it's case by case whether more data driven, sort of efficiency oriented approach makes things more fun or less fun. I agree it makes it less fun in the entertainment industry, but it's almost, but it's almost like a poor use of analytics. It's not clear to me the entertainment industry has gotten smarter. I don't know. I'd love to see if people are actually making more money. I doubt it. So I don't know. But the short answer is I don't really think, oh, like I have a legacy. I don't think that. I don't think about that that way. I think I put messages in the bottle and I think it's really cool when someone in some distant land gets the bottle, opens it and reads it.
- [70:23]
B
Well, I have to disagree with you on the last point, which is that you don't have a legacy. You do have a legacy. And the legacy is Lewis Ball, the new professional game being released by Major league baseball in 2027 in which a lion or tiger is released in the middle of the game in the sixth or seventh inning. No one knows exactly when the lion or Tiger's coming out, but it's a vehicle, it has to be released at some point during the game. And then we just let the players fend for themselves.
- [70:50]
C
What if each manager is given a choice, lion or Tiger, and the choice when to release it and can leave it on the field a couple of innings.
- [70:59]
B
Yeah, it's like Shohei Ohtani. We know you can pitch, we know you can hit. Can you outrun a Tiger? This is the next stage that baseball has to move into in order to get back its audience.
- [71:08]
C
But you have a bat. You have a bat.
- [71:10]
B
He does.
- [71:11]
C
He does have a bat.
- [71:12]
B
Exactly. Yeah. You can even store certain equipment, like under the larger bases that you can open up and then fend off the Lions and Tigers. All right, next time I have you on the podcast, we'll work out Lewis Ball. We'll trademark it. We'll make a bunch of money that way. Michael Lewis, thank you so much. This was a blast.
- [71:26]
C
Thanks for having me, Derek.
- [71:28]
B
Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Beroldi and we are back to our twice a week schedule. We'll talk to you soon.
- [71:44]
C
Sam.