>> from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: michael lewis is here. he rose to prominence more than 25 years ago with "liar's poker."

last spring, he published "flash boys." one year later, a new afterward assesses the challenges that remain for high-frequency trading. i am pleased to have michael lewis back at this table. what is it that you are saying in the afterward that has happened since the publication of the book? michael: the public relations firm hired by high-frequency traders has gotten better at attacking me. charlie: a few of them came to see me after we did the long interview. hear us out, that is all they said. michael: it is an organized political campaign. what am i saying?

there are two ways of looking at the world. one is as a problem the regulators need to solve. you have a stock market that is screwed up. screwy incentives at the heart of it. it may lead to ruin, and if nothing else, it leads to a tax on investors. i never held out much hope there would be anything the regulators would do. there has been a lot of noise, but it is hard to see where it has led. nothing has actually happened. charlie: you think it will happen? what about the new york attorney general? michael: i think he might have real affects. he has sued barclays. there may be more lawsuits to follow.

he has broad power that could have some effect. while that is important, the real story is, what is happening on the ground in the market with these characters i wrote about. brad and the people at iex, they created an exchange where they made it as difficult as possible for high-frequency traders to take advantage of ordinary investors. the market is taking off. it is very profitable. they have attracted, since the book came out, $75 million of venture capital. they are growing and have become a public exchange like the new york stock exchange. that is a huge deal. companies moving the listings to them could happen. their volume will dramatically increase. they put pressure on the rest of the market to reform. charlie: more efficient and

lower cost. michael: for investors. that is the path to change. it seems to be happening. it certainly is the greatest hope. charlie: it seems to me that the attention, rather than on what you are saying, was that the market was rigged. you said, maybe it is. everybody ate that up. michael: yes, it is true. that created a little splash on 60 minutes. they asked if i thought the market was rigged, and i said yes. because i do. charlie: a lot of people said, i have been telling you this for years. michael: they might not be getting my meaning. it is rigged because there is a systematic risk. there are a handful of people sold special access to

information. when you come in as an investor, you are colliding with people with privileged access. charlie: have they changed that practice since you wrote the book? michael: it is hard to know. the technical issue is the speed difference between the market the ordinary investor sees and the high-frequency trader. i have been told that dark pools and exchanges have been investing in speeding up the market the ordinary investor sees. they might be shrinking the gap, but i don't know. i should know, but i don't know. it is not clear. there has been no systematic

change. the grift is still built into the market. charlie: we talked about this before. what does a store have to have for you to be interested? michael: i had very little native interest in a wall street scandal. it wasn't the scandal in that case. what interested me, the way people responded to it. these characters are what i loved about the book. you had these people inside the market, and exchanges and brokerage firms. even from high-frequency trading shops. they saw it was a big problem and how the market was functioning. they saw holes in the market. instead of trying to make money from the glitches, they banded together to try to fix it.

it showed, the moral impulse, to do something good in the world to like what you did all day exists on wall street. i thought this was hopeful. i thought, if i can explain what these people have done and amplify it, others will follow. charlie: you have said, if there is a story where i can do something good by doing the story, generally i will go for it. michael: it is red meat. it is not so much the consequences of the story. it is when i feel the story is so rich, if i don't do it, i have made a mistake. i have been entrusted with the story. in this case, i was. they weren't going to talk to anybody else.

when i feel interested with a story and i have a kind of obligation, it creates sufficient energy to go and do the work. charlie: when you figure out you have an idea with characters, it is like you have hit a home run. michael: and i hide it. i don't want people to know what i am doing. i don't want them to know i have this treasure. this was clearly a rich vein to mine. charlie: here is what people have said. like baron's. the notion that they use their technological advantage to pick up the little guys was wrong. michael: the head of the markets, who recently left the fcc, there was just a piece in

bloomberg news where he described the stock market as a death star, it is so screwed up. he could not speak freely at the fcc. there is a great deal of dissent about whether the stock market is actually -- charlie: john vogel, that is what you do to sell books. the real point, it does not make a difference to an investor who is in an index fund for a lifetime. michael: this is interesting. vanguard is the one big investor who is said, don't mess with the current system. charlie: they are reasonably low cost index fund. michael: they are great. this is not taking anything away from vanguard. the costs that are imposed by high-frequency traders, the tax falls on active investors.

big mutual funds. retail investors, too. anybody trading a lot. the index funds are less active in the market. it gives them a relative advantage to have their competition being tapped. there is a reason he would be less concerned about it. there is also a feeling that whatever the problems are, don't fix it at the regulatory level because you just create more problems. they don't trust anybody to fix it. they are cynical. i have interviewed people who run some of the biggest institutional money managers in the world. hundreds of billions of dollars of equity funds. they are calculating the cost to them of the current market. they are livid about it. charlie: it is a cost item.

michael: people are front running their orders to it is not me saying the market is rigged. it is people in the heart of the market. it is ignorant. it is forgivable, because he created vanguard and vanguard is terrific. charlie: let's turn away from this, because we talked about this before. what interests you. does biography interest you? would you like to be walter isaacson? michael: i would not do it well. charlie: i think you would do it well. give me in an argument why you wouldn't want to. you wouldn't want to, because? michael: biography gives you a narrative.

there is a frame. he is born, he lived, he died. the narratives that excite me are those i find. what is the story? i would feel like too much was handed to me. there was a level of -- a good biographer has the capacity to get obsessed with the single character. charlie: it is also somebody who understands the why question. they know what, but not always why. what you discover that answers the why. and some speculation, too. michael: there are biographical elements to my books. i tried to capture characters on pages. it never interested me for some reason. charlie: no political or scientific figure?

michael: i don't like to think i am not interested in people. but even when i turned to someone like obama, my interest in writing about him is peculiar to how he makes decisions. that is the book i love to write. if he let me in to do it, i would take only a slice. charlie: that is the book he wants to write. michael: he wants to write a grand, sweeping narrative of his presidency. if you did not include that in his memoir, something is missing. michael: are you trying to kill my book project? it would be a nice complement to his book. charlie: what you don't want to write about, mr. president, mr. lewis does.

michael: some people, walter isaacson himself, he is a good friend. we grew up in new orleans. he was seven years ahead of me. i was told i should grow up to be like walter isaacson. when i wrote, "liar's poker," he said i should write a book about a great man. i didn't know where to begin. even though i was told by walter, no less a person than walter, it just didn't catch. it does not interest me. maybe it is egotistical. maybe i don't want someone else to take over my book to the extent that would. charlie: give me the one person who would most likely attract you. michael: if you put a gun to my head and said, you have to write a biography?

charlie: come on, you know what you would say. michael: obama? charlie: i don't know. michael: there is nobody i would want to spend that amount of time on. charlie: no athlete, president cultural figure? michael: there are a lot of books i would love to write that sound like biographies. peyton manning. i would love to spend a season with him, his last season with the denver broncos. just about the way someone can essentially think their way to success on a football field. charlie: somebody said, talking about me, the thing that interests me about you is you are fascinated by how people achieve what they do. what are the elements of their own, not success in terms of because you want to write about this is your way to success, but

success in terms of achievement. sacrifice. what that person knew to be able to climb that mountain. that interests me. does that interest you? michael: that does interest me. other things do, too. charlie: peyton manning. tom brady. michael: tom brady can actually throw a football. peyton manning uses his mind. his mind gives him a fraction of a second advantage. he is a high-frequency trader on a football field. i mentioned that for a specific reason.

i wouldn't want to go into his childhood. i wouldn't care that much. maybe a bit. there is nobody who leaps to mind. once upon a time, i thought it wasn't going to be a biography exactly, but to be like a biography about george soros. right after the berlin wall fell, and he was building his open society institutes, i thought there was a good story to do about him. i wrote a magazine piece he was offended by, so he would not let me do the book. charlie: what gave you the incentive to want to do something on soros? not just the open society things? michael: my interest was offensive to him. he clearly had an animal instinct in the markets that was unbelievable. it was like an animal in the jungle. charlie: how was it expressed? michael: in bets he made in the marketplace.

the killing he made on the british pound, for example. he had been unbelievably successful. then, after the fact, he had erected an intellectual edifice to explain his success which i thought had little to do with it. he wanted to have a theory about why he was successful, when it was not the theory. that was doing it. i was interested about what he thought and what he was extra doing in the market. charlie: to read everything you have written suggests to me you are more interested in character than story. michael: there is some truth to that. i like story, too. charlie: it is only to give your character something to do. michael: that is true. i am very interested in characters.

characters in situations. charlie: i went to the theater the musical, "hamilton." i learned a lot of things about alexander hamilton. it all began because of a biography that the guy who created the musical took with him on a vacation. he took the book with him. he came back and said, i can do this. michael: this is a musical. he's not the only one who took the book on a vacation. charlie: that is why he is a genius. it is hip-hop. it is brilliant. i love it. the inspiration about character. his life, when you think about it, it is the guy who lost his

life in a duel. a question about whether he fired his gun in the air because he wants to die. michael: biographers have the response voting to include boring stuff. that is a burden. charlie: editors have the responsibility to take it out [laughter] michael: i do not feel the urge. charlie: do you have any urge to do anything you are not doing? michael: i have been trying and failing to get a tv show on the air. different tv shows. charlie: give me one. michael: the one i am handing in, showtime, they commissioned me to write a pilot for a drama set in wall street in the 1920's. drawing from characters from life. if that gets on the air, i run a tv show. charlie: do you know andrew ross sorkin, he has a show.

paul giamatti is one of the characters. michael: tv is in a golden age. the writer retains control over it. i would love to do this. it has taken me a while to learn how to write screenplays. charlie: what did you have to learn? michael: where to put the margins. also, -- charlie: what about the margins? can't you go read a screenplay and see how it works? and then talk to somebody who does it well? michael: it is a very compressed storytelling form. when somebody takes one of my books and turns it into a movie, first they have to turn it into a short story.

learning the art of compression, lots of little tricks. that is something i would like to do that i have not done. charlie: have you created seven or eight that have been turned it down? michael: this is the fifth. they turned them down. they did not turn down the idea. they paid me to write a script. a couple are still alive. my ideas. one of them, "the blind side," i had an idea for tv show to come off the back of that. the movie would have killed that. i keep trying and failing several times. it feels like something i should be doing. i do not feel uncomfortable with the genre. it feels very natural. charlie: would you be interested

in doing a long magazine piece or a biography about some of the -- somebody who was a criminal? michael: you are hooked on this biography thing. i'm not leaving until i am writing a biography. charlie: theater is a biography. everything is about conversations between two people. michael: the biography, what am i supposed to do? charlie: somebody who is a huge criminal. if you could have access -- michael: bernie madoff. a drug kingpin. a mass murderer. charlie: pablo escobar. michael: i don't think i would be interested in writing a book about somebody i did not admire

on some level. it has to be a criminal i admire. robin hood. charlie: it would have to be somebody who has come to help their guys. “blacklist.” michael: there has to be something i admire about him. that is doable. not a biography but a book. charlie: would you want to climb the himalayas? michael: i don't have a bucket list. i do a lot of that kind of stuff. we climb mountains once a year for five or six days. charlie: which mountains? michael: no big mountains. in british columbia and costa rica. charlie: why don't you go climb mount everest? michael: somebody else has done

that. charlie: it doesn't look that fun to me, by the way. michael: i don't mind suffering a little bit. i don't have a bucket list. charlie: undiscovered in life? michael: for me? a bunch of things undiscovered country at things i would love to explore as a writer. i would like to go back to my childhood in new orleans. charlie: tell the sort of the new orleans you knew as a kid. where everybody was a walter isaacson want to be. michael: he was the only successful person in new orleans. he actually wants to go and do stuff. most of us want to do lay around and scratch ourselves. [laughter] i do have a list of subjects i want to do. charlie: let's hear them. michael: that is one of them.

charlie: i want to help you out because somebody's going to hear this and say, this is what i want to do. michael: there is a sequel to "moneyball" that i will write one day. charlie: why do you want to write it? michael: it is a different book. it grew out of moneyball. it is about a kid they drafted in 2002. unlikely misfits. i followed them for years, but i never wrote anything. there's one i'm going to work on next, make my tv show, but i can tell you now. charlie: any achievements you want to do in terms of, back to mountains and sports?

michael: i would like -- i coach my kids in softball and baseball. we want to win the national championship. charlie: is that achievable? michael: yes. it is softball, for the middle child. that would be great. i don't think that way. i never had a resume, except they made me write one. i never thought, i think it makes you unhappy to think, i want to get that prize. charlie: but you do want to do things that make you feel alive. charlie: there are a lot of books i want to write. my tv show is at the top of my mind. i want to create the show and run it. charlie: do you know people in hollywood?

the big short is going to be a movie? michael: with brad pitt, christian bale. great cast. charlie: this might be a movie? michael: if aaron sorkin does his job, yes. it could happen. that is out of my hands. i don't have much to do with it. they would prefer me to be dead. charlie: are you a hard worker? michael: i'm a sporadic worker. i think of myself as a lazy person. i have great capacity to procrastinate. when i get really in a project i vanish into it. it does not feel like work. i'm not a hard worker. work is doing something that feels like work.

charlie: one last question on economics. what is happening in europe and what is going to have it with the greeks? michael: there was a piece about how the greeks are up in arms and they went to lynch the guy who does economic statistics. he is accused of having made the deficit look worse than it was to sell the bail out. 10 years ago, he was being lynched for making it disappear. we have a culture clash. a slow rolling culture clash. it starts with the financial crisis. these economic differences. now, the question is, can the greeks and the germans survive in the same currency? i don't so. i think the germans have realized, unless we are willing

to support the greeks, we don't want them in this. they seem to be actively spooking them into leaving. leaving is a big deal. i don't know exactly how that happened. i don't think the currency goes away. i think the greeks are going to leave. charlie: they will leave the eurozone. michael: who knows. my opinion is not worth anything. it began with a lie. about greek deficits. when relationships start with a lie, they tend not to work out. charlie: this is a paperback edition of "flash boys." aaron sorkin may make it into a

movie. back in a moment. stay with us. ♪

charlie: aaron levie is here. he is the ceo and cofounder of box.

the company announced box for industries. it provides tailored solutions for media. cyber security is one of the challenges. i'm pleased to have aaron levie back at the table. what has happened to box since i saw you last? aaron: not much. just the standard things. took it public. 1200 employees. a bit of growth since we were here last. our industry continues to change rapidly. enterprises need new and the best in class solutions to change how they work. we are fortunate our platform

has been adapted to help enterprises do that. charlie: when you go to an enterprise, what do you tell them? aaron: when we first started the company, we were changing how you work with your information. you could access files from any device. all new workflows. if he were in life sciences, you could collaborate with researchers. in financial services, you could digitize a business process. transforming how businesses use information and data. the multiplier is cyber security threats. financial services and retail. all these new attacks that are happening. enterprises need better ways of managing and securing information. we can lower the cost, but we can also improve how you are securing your intellectual property. charlie: i read a quote that, we are in a once in a generation shift in terms of migration to the cloud. aaron: you have the threat of

cyber security on legacy systems. also, if you are a hospital or bank and managing billions of dollars in infrastructure for storing data, that is not your key competitive advantage. it is building world-class experiences. it is not going to be, how will -- well do you store content. if you can work with providers who help you do that, box for your content, that lets you free up your time and energy and resources to focus on something that is going to help you become more competitive. that is what is pushing the move to the cloud. it is being accelerated because of the threats enterprises are facing. charlie: what inning are we? aaron: i always get sports analogies wrong.

i like the baseball one. i think we are in the first third of the innings. somewhere between one and three. charlie: you have made a decision with box to transition away from the consumer. aaron: we did. we started the company in college. my cofounder and i, 2004, when the idea came about. we focused on the consumer market. what happened was, we saw google, apple, microsoft potentially as big competitors in the consumer space. when we looked at the enterprise market, there were tens of billions of dollars that we did not think would enable them to be more productive and not as secure. we decided to pivot the company

and focus on enterprise. that was 2006-7. all we have done is focus on building a platform for large enterprises. charlie: i think you have said we underestimated the potential of mobile. aaron: at first, this is an extra device that people will want to access their information. we realized, instead of hospitals, is the new device where people will pull up information. and in a retail device, that is how they are working and interacting with clients. in agricultural businesses, that is where people are looking up agricultural and farm data. mobile isn't just a way to augment experiences. it brings people to computers for the first time. it is a change for the consumer business. you can go after billions of people. it should change for the enterprise business because you have networks that people want to be able to access information

from. charlie: along comes the iphone. g5, g7. what has that done for your business? it gives people a chance to access in the most convenient and efficient way. aaron: it changes the enterprise landscape of technology. in one path that the world was on, where people came to the corporation in their corporate office and worked on a pc, likely windows. from a network that was closed off to the world, that was one way of doing computing. what has changed is, everybody has an iphone or ipad. they have brought those technologies into the workplace. they need access to new technologies. that is creating a disruptive force.

ways of consuming applications. new startups that emerged. very importantly, it changes the security landscape. you can't secure the way of working on mobile devices the same way you do a corporate network. that has disrupted the security model. no longer can you have a perimeter around your business protecting it. there is no logical separation of your business and the outside world. you are everywhere and sharing with everyone. you need a new security model to enable able to work in this new enterprise. charlie: i was thinking about this in terms of the digital revolution, but i will ask about it in terms of the mobile revolution. we are at 10-15% of the potential power?

aaron: what we are finding out about mobile is it is not just a way to access information in a new way. what steve jobs did not show is it is a way to have a car come to you on demand. he did not show it is a way to have food delivered to you. nobody knew. it was unfathomable, not only because they did not launch the app store, but it was not a linear improvement on the pc. at first, the phone was just a

linear improvement. it let you have your computer in your pocket. and being able to hail a phone doesn't have to do with the computer, it is a whole infrastructure that did not exist previously. charlie: access to a network. does does uber get credit for it or did it come before uber? aaron: i think uber should get most of the credit. there are people who will say there was something created first, but nothing had commercial appeal. pressing a button on your phone and having the physical world change. now that trend is pervasive. startups that deliver food on demand. products you can purchase on demand. that is a small example of what mobile does. it will change health care financial services. apple pay disrupts the traditional banking experience. it is no longer a formfactor for consuming information. it is a way to interact with the rest of the world. charlie: what do you think of the apple watch? aaron: i have not worn it.

i think it is going to be an incredible accessory in the broader ecosystem of these technologies. having siri on it, i think that is cool. tying into your iphone, the interplay between your personal device, a phone, a computer, which is the powerful computer. it is all about having technology integrated into the new and contextual parts of our lives. the watch is in addition to that. charlie: who are the dominant companies in the cloud? amazon? ibm? aaron: besides us? one is by metrics, and the other is relevance and momentum. by metrics, you have to say amazon. microsoft is getting there.

charlie: you can see it by the advertising. aaron: in this case, i would say that is turning out to be the case. they are making a lot of progress. if you're not picking about pure cloud computing but applications, salesforce.com. way more on the enterprise side. google is trying to make a comeback. they should have owned the cloud, if you think about the scale and infrastructure, it should have been theirs for the taking, but amazon got there first. charlie: that is interesting to me. why didn't google get there first. they are out there with an operative philosophy that they will be in a lot of businesses. they are not focused on just four things like steve jobs was. but google missed it.

aaron: they have done incredibly well in terms of catching the next trends. the one thing they missed was the scale of their cloud computing business. but you have others you should not count out. ibm has an interesting take on the space. they say we have massive customer relationships in the world's largest businesses. they have partnerships with players like apple and twitter which are saying, maybe we can add value to existing technology that is not enterprise ready. i would say what ibm and the team there is doing is fascinating to watch. i would not count them out. charlie: do you have a moat around your company? aaron: our moat is in a couple of forms.

as we go in to a couple of industries, we have box for industry where we power content management and collaboration for health care companies like stanford hospital, m.d. anderson, eli lilly. when we go into a specific industry, what we do is more institutions use box to collaborate and share information. that creates a network effect where if you are collaborating with other partners, more and more players adopt the platform. it has been true and health care and life sciences. that has been true in media and entertainment. the same is going to be true in retail, financial services, and other categories. our job is to build the best solution to help you share and collaborate. that extends to the other apps you want to use, the other

institutions you want to share with through box. charlie: how conscious are businesses about security on the cloud? aaron: this has been the biggest change in the last year. we have focused on security. you cannot build a cloud solution if you are not focused on security. what has changed is our customers. it used to be a thing to check the box. then it became a differentiating factor. in a post sony, jpmorgan, target world, enterprises of all varieties care about cyber security. for the first time, we have ceos

and boards of directors paying more attention to the i.t. investments they are making and the culture of i.t. in their organization. it used to be that you could meet with a ceo of an industrial or entertainment company or retailer and they did not know what was going on in i.t. that was somebody else's problem. now you have ceos that are doing briefings with the board of directors. reviewing the security strategy with the board of directors. this is something every ceo in the world and america is beginning to pay attention to. you will see more investment in security technologies. modern technologies like salesforce.com. for us, our big strategy is, if there's a better way to protect your information and control data, that will keep you more

secure. charlie: you grew up in seattle. who were your heroes? aaron: a lot of people we looked up to. by proximity, you had to care about bill gates and jeff bezos. i studied michael dell, looking at what he was doing at a young age. charlie: was the goal to build a company? aaron: with my cofounder, i had built different ideas and products we were growing up in high school. the four people in the founding team grew up together. we would try different ideas. the idea was, can we solve an interesting problem? after trying 20 bad ideas, something finally struck. and stuck with box. charlie: what amazes me is you have the name box. aaron: we started out at

box.net. and then we moved to box.com. we want to build a simple solution, in a box. i'm glad you appreciate that. charlie: where is it going? where is box going? aaron: we are in 48% of the fortune 500. hundreds of thousands of businesses that use the product and customers. there is a lot of growth we are focusing on, being able to bring the product to more businesses. two weeks ago, we launched box for financial services where we are taking our technology and we are helping everything from

private equity firms to asset management firms transform how they are using their data. charlie: what do you mean, transform how you use your data? aaron: anytime you have a work flow, you are using a complex set of technologies to manage data. any financial services business, your data is the thing you are relying on to make decisions. you have to move information quickly and securely. you have regulatory controls. we make that very simple at box. if you are a private equity firm, looking at lots of different deals and projects you have in some cases thousands or hundreds of thousands of files. we help secure that information and make it available to the right people. if you are a mortgage lender taking in loans you are going to process on an annual basis, you need scalable platforms.

these subcategories, we have technology or our services can be leveraged so these enterprises can adapt our products. you are going to see us going with partnerships, advanced technology, to transform how these businesses use content and information. charlie: if mobile was a huge catalyst, what is the next huge catalyst? aaron: i think there are a bunch of things impacting our customers. some which we relate to and some of which are just going to change their business models. certainly, artificial intelligence is a conversation going on in the valley. a lot of companies are wondering, what will a.i. mean

to my business question mark health care? financial services? advanced automation that is emerging. self driving cars. the ability to have automated driving. that is going to change the car industry and the electronics markets. what you can now do with large amount of data. it is called big data in our industry. how is data going to change health care? where we are able to deliver better medicine, better predictive services and outcomes? there is no reason you should visit a doctor where you are not looking at a large amount of data applied specifically to your problem. every doctor and physician and nurse is not using a wealth of data to drive the decisions they are using to interact with you. you do not have access to your health records or health data. that inefficiency created, where you have to refill information all of those things are impacted by the cloud, mobile.

our job is to help enterprises prepare for that. there are going to be a lot of different technologies created to help customers and enterprises move into the future. charlie: thank you for coming. aaron: thank you, charlie. charlie: thank you for joining us. see you next time. ♪

cory: live from pier three in san francisco, welcome to "bloomberg west" where we cover technology, innovation, and the future of business. i'm cory johnson. here in san francisco, we are covering the kleiner perkins ellen pao sex descrimination case. we are going to look at a lot of different angles at this important case, what it means for kleiner perkins and what it