[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] ..

a look at why albert einstein was disregarded by many of his colleagues later in life. that's just a if of the program -- a few of the programs you'll see this weekend. for a complete television schedule, booktv.org.

booktv, 72 hours of nonfiction books and authors this holiday weekend. television for serious readers. now, we kick off the weekend with best selling author michael lewis on his latest book on the creation of behavioral economics. "the undoing projects." [inaudible conversations] >> hello, everyone. hello, everyone. good evening and welcome to this latest in conversation with event. my name is m be er -- mervyn king, and my guest is quite simply the most successful nonfiction author in the world, michael lewis. of his 13 titles, every single one has been a bestseller. his latest book, " the undoing project," is published this

week. please give a warm welcome to michael lewis. [applause]. >> thank you. is this on? all right. >> splendid. >> michael, let's -- >> this is pointed out to me? it's subliminal? [laughter] >> this is the way you try to achieve superiority in the interview context. [laughter] so most of your books have been about slightly odd people, unusual, quirky people who have defied conventional wisdom. this time you've written about two college professors. why have you written about two college academics? >> so the books never start with i want to write a book about this or that. what happened was this, i crawfished into this story over a period of years. a book i wrote called moneyball came out in 2003.

that book was ostensibly about baseball, but what it was really about, in my mind, was the way markets can misjudge, misvalue people. and this team, the oakland as, had figured that out, and because they lacked resources, they found new and better ways to value the players than existed. it meant what they were doing, basically, was replacing the intuitive judgment of the so-called experts with analysis of the performance statistics that was just better. it identified, it identified systematic mistakes that the experts made in evaluating the players. >> using business school research. >> exact bely. business school -- actually, the research they were using, it wasn't as if they had proprietary information. you could have gotten the stuff off the web, but nobody paid attention to it because they trusted their experts. so this book comes out, and an

economist and a lawyer together reviewed the book in the new republic. richard thayler and cass sunstein, and they said they liked my book and so on and so forth, but i seemed not to know that there were these two us israeli psychologists who explained why the experts got it wrong. danny and amos had done work showing the systematic biases the mind was prone to when it was making intuitive judgments. and i'd never heard of them. mervyn was my tutor at the london school of economics, and he's partly responsible for me never having heard -- [laughter] of danny and iowa as a result. -- and amos as a result. i was not the most distinguished student. but in any case --

>> i didn't want to burden you with too much. >> anyway -- [laughter] we have a long history, and later on if you want to get into it, i'm happy to get into it. [laughter] but i, so i never heard of these guys. and i thought -- i filed it away. i went and actually looked them up on the web, saw that danny kahneman had won the nobel prize in economics in 2002 and thought that's interesting. i have a drinking buddedty in berkeley. -- buddy in berkeley. this is how books come about. [laughter] very well known psychologist. his field is emotion, but he was amos tversky's teaching assistant. i said one night that this is bothering me that i didn't get the story. i told the story about this baseball, and i never got to why the experts were making the mistakes. and he said, well, danny has a house up the hill, i have his e-mail, i'll hook you up.

this was back, i still must have thought back in 2005 that nobel prize winners in economics were unapproachable as opposed to self-publicizing. so i but kind of tentative, but i called him up, he said come on up and have coffee, and we started a friendship. we'd go for long walks -- this is a longer answer than you want, but this is the answer -- was based upon me helping him sort through the crisis of confidence he was experiencing writing his book "thinking fast and sold" which has sold so many how many millions of copies now which he was sure the moment was published would destroy his reputation. it was wonderful. he had self-doubt like i had never seen, and he was in the process when i met him of paying people, friends, to go and find people to pay who he would not see so they'd be blind reviewers to write him anonymous reviews persuading him not to publish be

his book because it would ruin his reputation. [laughter] i mean, it was crazy. so my job was go up every six, eight weeks and say it's great, do it. and in the course of this conversation, i just was interested in him, he started talking about this relationship he had with amos tversky, and it was a love story. it wasn't sexual. but as i've said, the one-line movie summary of this book, it's "brokeback mountain", but they screw each other's ideas. [laughter] that's what it felt like. i felt like i was listening to the guys in "brokeback mountain" talking about each other. the emotion old this wing was really -- emotionalling aspect of this thing was -- i had

taught a writing course at cal. my favorite student was a kid named orrin tversky. i said to taanny, they owned it up to me. dan, this y was dubious, but they opened the doors to amos' files. i started on this in 2008, 2009, and i've been doing it ever since and finally worked up the nerve a couple years ago to write it. >> at what point did you decide this was going to be a book? >> only a few years ago. i mean, i worked and worked and worked on it being very danny kahneman-esque going back and forth -- my problem was, i had a couple big problems. one was i didn't know i could pull it off. i was a stranger to their field. i didn't, had never had as much as an introductory psychology

course, and i was going to have to yet my mind -- get my mind writing around their position in the field. and i had to write about the early israel hi state. i can imagine a million people telling me exactly how i got it wrong after i published it. so i was reluctant. i made five trips to us rile. i made four trips of more than ten days each before i committed to do the book, that's how, how much kind of legwork i did before i even thought, yeah, i can do the book. but it was three years ago or so i finally said i'm doing it, and what i concluded was their story was so interesting, enough people thought it was important that someone was going to do it, and it was interesting enough that it justified doing it. and i thought that anybody who's going to do this is not going to have the access to the material that i've had already, open access to the tversky family and

its files, danny being forthcoming with me. so someone's going to do it, and they're probably going to do it badly. and i said to danny, who went back and forth about whether i should do this or not, i said, look, someone's going to write a book about you maybe after it's gone. it's probably -- after you're gone. it's probably going to be a bad book, and you're not going to like it. why not me if i'm going to write the bad book? and he said, that's probably right. he said all of that's probably right. it's probably going to be a bad book, so on and so forth. so that's -- it came about. it came about very hesitantly. it was unlike any of the other books i've done. most of the other books i've spotted the subject, and in three or four months i'm in it. and at least as a maggen zien article -- magazine article. that's not the way this worked. >> so in the end, how did you -- i mean, danny, presumably, was going to and fro about whether

this was a good idea, and your relationship with him evolved. how in the end did you persuade him, just as you said? >> just as i said. he would say -- i knew -- so danny is the human embodiment of doubt. and his whole life he's had nothing stable. he has an idea, he becomes wedded to it for a few hours, and then he turns on it. he lives his life that way, almost resisting commitment to anything. and i think it's partly because he doesn't like to defend things. but he would put it i like to change my mind. this makes it very difficult for people who are collaborating with him -- >> yes. >> and the stories are legendary about the papers about to go to publication, he calls and gotta pull it. and he used to do this with amos, and amos would sit with a drink in his hand saying let's wait for the call. he'd talk him down, and the paper would go in. and i just, i thought i'm going to have a problem because if i

get in the middle of this and he changes his mind, it's going to be a lot of wasted effort. so the fallback position was always it's not -- the question isn't a book is going to be written or not going to be written, someone's going to write the book. so this is not going to get better. you know i'm at least fun. so that, i think that was the selling point. he was never happy with the idea. he never was really excited that i was writing a book about him. and when he got it, he was really not excited. [laughter] and read it. i mean, it's -- he, all of the subjects of all of my books have had this jolt when they've read it. and i tell them all that jolt you feel, you're going to feel even if i got it exactly right. remember the first time you heard your voice on tape, it didn't sound like you. you're going to have that feeling a little bit, but at least ask the people who know

and love you whether i got it right bar -- before you get really angry. >> before tonight i spoke to one academic who will be nameless who had done joint work with danny, and he said danny is the most difficult person i have ever had to deal with. so what was amos' secret to create this extraordinary creative partnership? you describe in the book how they would just sit day after day in a room, there'd be no one else in the room, people would hear them outside talking and laughing, and then suddenly these great thoughts and ideas would come out. how did amos manage to pull off working with danny? >> i think it was painful and difficult sometimes because nothing was stable. but i think -- so amos tversky is one of the most interesting characters i've ever encountered. it was difficult at first how i was going to bring this guy back to life. >> he died in --

>> '96 at age 59. and he, but he sends such vivid signals even from the grave because he never did anything he didn't want to do or never safed a piece of -- saved a piece of paper he didn't want to save. anything he saved in his filing cabinet, any friend he had, any party he went to he was there because he wanted to be there, and that included his relationship with danny, as difficult as it was. because he wants to be in it because he senses quite rightly this is a are, very fertile mind who's general -- generating ideas. and the grist for their mill was, i think, danny's i'd-generating -- idea-generating machine. first, there aren't many people in the history of danny in whom danny has up conditional faith or trust in their minds.

even danny was awed by amos' mind, that everybody said that there's a famous -- [inaudible] the michigan psychologist designed the one-line intelligence test, and it was about amos. he said the longer it takes you to figure out after you've met amos that he's smarter than you, the stupider you are. [laughter] and everybody who knew amos felt that way. and danny was aware that this was just this very powerful magician, is what he was. and he gave danny a sense of security. i think danny thought, danny was always worried something's wrong with this. if amos approved of it, it must be right. so amos settled him down that way, and amos was also supremely confident. so he made danny feel confident. and amos, for a stretch anyway -- up until they basically get to this country, i

think -- treated danny's, all of his ideas kind of uncritically. there was a kind of unconditional love. and danny responded very well to that. so it was a magic in that. i think that danny, you know, that the taming of danny for ten years is one of the miracles of the relationship and the ability to kind of keep him from flipping on them, on the ideas. but anyway, amos spent -- when i was going through his filing cabinets, there are break-up letters in them, there's this drama in the filing cabinets. and among the signs of the drama were when there were these stack of papers that were clearly -- actually, some of them were marked -- preparation of phone call with danny. and it was bullet points of all

the things danny was going to be upset about and and amos' response. and this clearly happened over and over and over. and so he spent a lot of time, now amos, as i said, did nothing he didn't want to do. he would take his wife to the movies, and if he doesn't like the movie after five minute, he'd leave her, go home and watch hill street blues and go back and get her at the end of the movie. he'd say they already took my money, they're not getting my time x. he told people, you should never stay in a board meeting or faculty meeting or even a party if you don't want to be there. and you don't have to think of an excuse. he said if you just get up and walk, it's amazing how the mind comes one the words to explain why you're leaving. [laughter] he was just unbelievably efficient. i mean, in a prier the natural way, and yet he was willing to endure this relationship, and i thought that was a powerful statement on the -- about what he thought of danny.

>> there's lots of practical advice in the words of amos. not from danny, but amos, yes. so amos says at one point, he said if you want to do research, it's a good idea to be in a permanent state of underemployment. it is better or to waste hours than to end up weeing years. >> yes. this is very good advice. >> and giving yourself time to think. don't rush around being busy. i can't tell you how many people i've met who arer the write business -- terribly busy and -- it's absolutely crucial. >> yeah. >> can we turn for a minute to some of their ideas? >> sure. >> what you describe in the book is a process in which they start working, first of all, on how people behave, how they make judgments. and what these people do is to say, well, you know, economics

has become a very deductive discipline. you make certain assumptions at the beginning which no one really understands, but they sound plausible, and then you make lots of deductions about what constitutes rational behavior. and what they do is lots of experiments which say actually people don't behave like that. and it takes a long time to persuade economists that maybe people don't behave in the way economists normally assume. so they study these biases, behavioral biases that you describe in the book, and then they move on to say, well, now we've identified some of the biases. let's ask a different question which is how do people make decisions. they make judgments and they may get these things wrong, how do they make decisions. and what intrigued me about it was that both in the words a few times of amos but particularly where you describe what it means to us think about real word situations, you bring in the

idea of people telling stories. so it's not just based on mathematics. it's people telling stories. and there is a quote on page 250 where you actually quote danny on this occasion saying no one ever made a decision because of a number. they need a story. so how far do you think economics and social sciences should move away from the more rigorous mathematical views and the use of numbers towards encouraging us all to tell a story? >> i was afraid you were going to ask me a question like this. i'm back as your student, and i'm about to get a c of. -- c. >> tell a story. >> i don't have much should in me. you know, one of the things that's interesting about their work and and the way it found its way into economics is it clearly wasn't intentional in the beginning. they didn't think they were addressing economics. they thought they were addressing decision theory which was a weird branch of psychology

which happened to share with economics some assumptions about human behavior, that man was a good intuitive statistician, whatever. there was some overlap there. but it's only kind of midway through their relationship that amos wakes up in a big way to the implications for economics, and danny is the slowest of all. i mean p even now he claims never did he intend to influence economics, and they gave him a nobel prize for it. [laughter] so i don't think amos would have said that the assumptions that economists make are useless. they serve the purpose of the models, and the mod pells -- models, they're tools. these are tools. i think amos would have said maybe it's going to get even more interesting to try to adapt the model to actual human behavior rather than this theoretical economic man you dreamed up. but he was aware that it created

horrible problems more economics and that he was vastly increasing the workload for economists, and he was very sympathetic to economists. he said this is just too much trouble for us. now, and economics does do a lot. it's very useful. i mean, i was, the course of study i pursueed has been there are a whole lot of ideas that i took onboard, and these were ideas that were all generated by people who were assuming rationality in man. so i don't think, i don't think the lesson from dan think and amos is -- danny and amos is you chuck out economics and you find a storytelling approach. what they, in that quote, the passage you just quoted what danny was saying -- i think that's when he goes to the israeli foreign minister and shows him -- >> yes. >> -- and shows him the best probability estimates of what will happen, how arab countries

will respond if the israelis do walk away from the peace negotiation. and the estimate is like 10% increase in the probability of war, and the foreign minister says, ah, 10% is nothing. and the number didn't mean anything to him. that's where they walk away from this field called decision analysis which was stillborn, basically. and it was stillborn, they decided, because people in position of importance, they don't want the power being taken away from them by an algorithm or by probability estimates, and they do want to think in stories. so that's not exactly an answer to your question except that, except that my takeaway from my experience with them is not that economics is in need of serious reform. it isn't that at all. >> right. >> anyway -- >> so -- >> b-? [laughter]

>> we're going to reflect. >> i tried. i bullshitted my way through like a good princeton student. >> a good princeton student. [laughter] danny's now at princeton. >> he's emeritus. he'ses from here, is where he lives. >> did winning a nobel prize, do you think, change his views about economics or his own research? >> it transformed him. one of the things i was told by all the israelis who knew him when is that one of my problems as a writer or is going to be the person that i met was unrecognizable to the person they knew back then, that he was far less gloomy and troubled and almost, not exactly a sunniness about him, but he was just easier with the world around him and that for some reason the nobel prize had -- you know, you don't think of it changing a person's kind of basic demeanor, but apparently it had. i don't think -- so it changed his relationship to the world.

other than, that's the big, that was the big effect it had. >> so it removed some of the self-doubt that he had. >> let me tell you a story. i'm going to ruin the book for you a bit, but in the interest of this moment, he -- so one of the things that ripped apart the relationship was that the minute they came to north america, amos was recognized as a global academic superstar. and danny didn't, danny wasn't given the time of day. amos gets the fastest appointment, i'm told, by stanford ever made in the history of stanford. they find out he's available in the morning, and be they're offering him lifetime employment in the afternoon, and danny isn't offered a job except the university of british columbia. iowa no gets almost -- amos almost instantly gets a prize for the work they did together. amos lived in fear he was going to get the nobel prize alone.

he got the nobel prize be, i interviewed someone who was with him, i mean, the macarthur prize, he was in israel when he was notified. the person with him said he was livid. how could they do this, it's going to rip the relationship apart. danny was already full of self-doubt, and the world is telling him that amos is the genius. and amos didn't do quite enough to address the problem, and that starts to tear at the relationship. anyway, amos dies in 1996, and the nobel prize is not given to the dead. you have to be alive to get it. and the work is seemingly regarded as sufficiently important that the nobel committee is considering giving it to danny, the prize. and in 2001 he gets a call saying they want you to come give a talk in stockholm. and danny interprets this as they think the work is important enough for the prize, but they don't believe i had anything to do with it. it was an audition for me to show them that i was worthy of

the prize. which, whether it's true or not, this is what's going on in his head. so he goes and gives a talk that has nothing to do with his work to show that he's worthy, he was the kind of person that might have contributed to this work. and the, so this is how full of self-doubt he is. the day the prize is announced, the day the prize is announced, he and his wife are waiting by the phone in princeton, new jersey, because they think this may be it, and the phone doesn't ring. and he tells me, he tells me the story that his whole life his imagination has been -- his fantasy life has been so vivid that he's careful about what he fantasizes about because when he fantasizes about it, it's as if

he's experienced it. and that this began when he was a child in the holocaust hiding from nazis in chicken coops and barns with his mom and dad in the south of france and that he had fantasies about single-handedly defeating the german army. through adult life he had these very vivid fantasies. and he said he found out when he fantasized about something that he wanted, it actually reduced his motivation to go get it because it was as if he already had it. he didn't allow himself to fantasize about the nobel prize. because he wanted it so badly. so he's sitting there waiting for this call about this thing he's not allowed himself to imagine he's not getting because maybe he's not worthy, and the phone doesn't ring. and his wife gets up and says, you know, it's not going to happen. too bad. she's english, so she keeps it brief. [laughter] and she goes off to go exercise. [laughter] and he allows himself to fantasize about what he would

have done had he won the nobel prize and what he would have done with all the things for amos that amos would never do for him, that he would, he would give his talk at the nobel prize with a giant photograph of amos behind him. he'd bring amos' and wife and children with him. the eulogy he gave at amos' funeral, he would pin it to the acceptance speech. and he's sitting there allowing himself to fantasize about it, and the phone rings. that's the end of the book. >> it is. many authors write one successful book. very few manage a second, third, fourth let alone thirteen. what is the secret, what have you found to be the secret9 of writing consistently books that people really enjoy reading? >> a kind of exquisite, god-given talent. laugh of -- [laughter]

which nobody could actually emulate or hope to aspire to, so there's no point in really talking about it. [laughter] >> it certainly fits the facts. [laughter] observation equivalent to reality. >> my career is full of serendipity. it's incredibly lucky that i ended up at solomon brothers in the middle of the '80s boom as a knew yeah kid who -- naive kid who kind of wants to be a writer. i started out very lucky, and the luck has compound. the luck in the beginning has given me access to stories i never really would have had access to. the reason danny's willing to talk to me is i've got all these books i've written that he's thought something of. is so there's -- >> how do you decide what to write about? >> what i care a lot about. i have to care so much about it. if i care a lot about it -- there's always a feeling before

a book, and that -- before i decide it's a book, and i have to have the feeling, and the feeling it isn't about me, it's about the material. and i've been entrusted with it. and and i have an obligation to tell the story well, don't screw it up. so that's the feeling with which i need to go in because it was miserable doing the book. so i have to be able to go back to that, you have a responsibility to tell the story. now, the general gift of gab and ability to put sentences on the page and all that, i mean, that's developed over time. i was never, until i met you as a graduate student, maybe six months or a year before, i didn't have any ambition to be a writer. no english teacher ever thought i was a gifted writer. i got a d in english my sophomore year in high school. there are many, many former teachers of mine who view my career as the way people view

donald trump being president -- [laughter] like something's wrong in the world. [laughter] the if he's this that stage. i wrote a book, the blind side, about this family in memphis, tennessee. you probably saw the movie, anyway, you didn't read the book. and the main character in that movie, the father of the family, the character that tim mcgraw played, when i was my student, my classmate the 13 years in new orleans, louisiana, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and he said the only prize you and i got when we got out was the prize for being there 13 years, and that was absolutely through. and when i saw him in the encounter that led me to write the story of the blind side, his first question to me was who writes your books? [laughter] i said, i do. and he says, that's bullshit. he says you're the dumb ass in

the back of the class with me. come on, just tell me. he honestly could not get his mind around the possibility that i had put pen to paper or sat at a computer and generated words that were this coherent. [laughter] so there's a huge, there's an accidental quality to this career, and it's had this compounding effect. it gets easier and easier in a weird way to get access to the things you need to write the good story. >> right. now, in all your books there's quite a large biographical element. people loom large. there's always -- i mean, what's unusual is there's always a serious story, plot line as well, but it's also people, this merging of two. but you've never really written a book about conventional, successful people. the great hero. you haven't written a book about napoleon or -- >> oh, you know, that's true. >> so why have you steered away

from that subject matter and honed in on -- homed in on people but none of us before we ever opened a book would imagine wanting to read about? >> well, there's no need for that story. it comes back to the sense of obligation, that there are going to be a hundred books about donald trump or about -- you know, the closest, i did a little piece about obama, that that was the closest i got -- >> the magazine. >> the magazine piece be. but, so that, i think that's the big thing. who needs me for that? there are lots of people who can do those things. the finding the unusual, the finding the meaningful story no one realizes the meaningful is the trick for me. and seeing the meaning in it. and waking the world up to it is my role. so everybody's already awake to the importance of -- it's just hard for me to get excited about it. that's not to say it would never

happened, but it's funny, when my career started, i have a friend be named walter isakson who is the head of the aspen institute now and has written biographies of steve jobs and einstein and ben franklin and so on and so forth. sowater isakson, who's wonderful, a wonderful writer, as a child he was the most successful person anybody knew. he went to harvard, he was a rhodes scholar. everything went right. every two years the headmaster brought him into the newman school to tell us what we should be when we grew up. so the first be piece of advice walter isakson gave me after i wrote liars poker was now you need to write a book about a great man, and i thoughting, no. [laughter] that's not what i'm going to do. that's to what you do. >> yes. >> and i just never felt it.

it never felt the slightest inclination to do it. the idea bores me. so that's not a good start for a literary project, to be bored by the idea. >> there's obviously a lot of serendipity, as you said earlier, but you can't be purely passive. you must go out and look for interesting stories. you don't -- >> yeah. >> -- sit at home and they come like manna from heaven. how do you go about looking for stories, and what is it when you see a story triggers something in your mind that says i need to find out more about this, hkd this could be an interesting story? >> it usually is really easy, how did i miss that? how did i not think about what was going on in the minds of these people who are making this systematic misjudgments? it's an obvious question, and i didn't ask it, so this was an oversight on my part. but, i mean, i'll just go one by one. with moneyball it was there's

this baseball team that's winning as many games as the new york yankees, if this market is efficient, how on earth are they doing it? i thought maybe it was a magazine piece, and i went and asked them a question, and the answer was breathtakingly interesting. so it usually starts with some curiosity like that. and it leads me into a place. and then the interest mushrooms, and it mushrooms --ing it has to, for the book, for it to be a back book, it has to mushroom in specific ways. i have to find characters that have literary dimensions to them in situations that are really compelling. and they have to be willing to the let me hang around. so it isn't, there's no system to it. i'm not scouring the newspapers looking for what the next book is. i don't know what the next book is right now. i almost never do. and it's, so there's -- i'm as

likely to get it from a dinner party, a beginning of an idea from a dinner party as i am or a conversation with a friend as from anywhere else. >> right. >> it's not a systematic process. it's a haphazard process. >> it really is serendipity. >> it is. i'm -- so the way i feel when i'm looking for -- i never really look for book subjects. they kind of find me one way or the other. but i tell my kids, my kids are 17, 14 and 9, and they're very intelligent, and even so i have persuaded them that i have a gift for finding parking spots in the very hard to park bay area, and i'll say we'll go to a restaurant, i'll say there's going to be a parking spot right there. one out of ten times there's going to be one there, but it happens often enough they think he actually has a talent for finding a parking spot. [laughter] >> this is the parking hot bias bias -- parking lot bias. [laughter] >> that's right.

so my gift for finding stories is a similar thing. i kind of half believe myself i have the gift for finding stories, and every now and then one opens up. >> fantastic. well, let's open the conversation up to our audience who would like to ask questions. there are roving microphones. there's one over there on the -- straighting over there. gentleman in the light bluish shirt. one here. just put your hand up again, sir, and the microphone will come to you. there are others on this side -- yes, one there. okay. go ahead. >> thanks very much. thanks so much for coming. i'm very curious, so danny kahneman doesn't seem like the kind of guy who just opens up to anyone, and you were somehow able to build this trusting relationship, and he trusted you to give you this information. i'm curious how you were able to do that. how was the first meeting you had with him, and what did you do to try to get him to open up to you?

>> i didn't do it consciously in the beginning because i didn't think i was going to be writing about it. i juz was going to go see him and talk about the relationship between his work and the book i'd written. so i walk in his front door the first time, he's in purple cr crocs, and he looks like -- in an israeli shirt, and he's very casual. and i said, i think i said something like i'm honored to meet if you, and he looked at me and said, oh, you mean the nobel prize be, don't worry about that. that's dumb. and he was very -- he made the interaction very easy right away. but he was agonizing over this book. and we quickly were talking about his book. and he was giving me stuff read, and i'd say what i thought about it and all the rest and advise him on how to deal with his publisher and whatever it was that we were talking about. we had a natural subject of conversation. he, for his exercise, he was

then -- this was 2008, he was 76. he would basically race walk through the hills of berkeley. he would time himself on walks ever since he was a kid, he'd try to beat his own time. he's not an athlete, but he's very competitive. so i'd go on these race walks with him, and he started saying things so interesting i'd bring a note pad. that was the next stage. and finally i said, you know, there may be a story in this, can i just, you know, you okay with that? and he was, i don't even know if he ever said yes, but he never said no. [laughter] and he never, he never rigorously went through his life story with me. everything i got -- i got a nugget here, a nugget there. and his memory would be triggered thing ins. so i was -- thinkingerred by things -- triggered by things.

so i was gathering stuff in a very unsystematic way from him over eight years. and it couldn't have happened fast. if i had been -- if it had been a more straightforward reporter/subject relationship, it would have lasted five minute, and he'd have had no interest in it. the great trick, though, to getting people who are interesting to cooperate with you on this kind of project or anything is to be interesting to them. and useful. so i do this with all subjects. i mean, i'm not doing it -- i just do it kind of naturally. it's not a ploy. but if you can somehow be helpful to them and fun to be around, it's amazing how much easier it is to be around them. so with the oakland as, i mean, moneyball, i would report what was going on in the clubhouse to the front office, and i would tell the players what was going on in the front office, and delay always wanted to see me -- and they always wanted to see me because they

wouldn't talk to each other. and danny, danny became interested in what was coming out of amos' file cabinet, these love letters -- he didn't know, he didn't have anything. all of his papers had burned up in the oakland fire in 1989, so he had no -- it was just triggering memory after memory, i was having him relive this relationship, and he was interested in that. >> question. back there. in the middle somewhere. no? there was one down here. >> yep. >> how -- [inaudible] would the book have been different if amos was still alive? >> danny says it wouldn't have been written because amos would have disapproved of it. this little two-system think thing. amos would have said that's a metaphor, and amos didn't like metaphors. amos thought metaphors were tools for deception. be and so i think that whether

danny would have listened to him on, i don't i don't know if amoe alive, a lot of things might have happened. presumably, they would have gotten the nobel prize together. and, i mean, they might -- here's the answer to the question, actually with. they, from the very beginning, had this sense that their work should be popularized, that there was a broader audience outside of just narrow psychology journals for this stuff. and they went back and forth forever on this project even when they were busted up, there were some memos back and forth. and they could never get it off the ground. they were always culling it. and they -- killing it. and they were both responsible for it. i think the honest answer is the book wouldn't have been written. that book is the book they would have written together, and they weren't going to write it. so i think it just wouldn't have happened. >> gentleman here.

>> there's a line in the book where i think danny talks about comparing the human being to being an organism that's equipped with, like, a hormonal system that's similar to a jungle rat. having the ability to push buttons of mass destruction or something similar to that. >> right. >> i'm kind of curious kind of given the current political climate what amos would actually think in terms of his prediction on the election and whether or not he would feel that it was kind of justified based upon the type of irrationality as well as, you know, the set of cognitive biases that are going on? >> how he would filter this experience. he would -- first, he would say, take great pleasure in people's inability to predict the election. he wouldn't himself have any prediction, or if he did, he'd keep it private and say i know this is probably bullshit, but he would say, you know, these people are, that they're -- they think the future is more knowable than it is.

they think the world is a more certain place than it is. amos, one of his great, lovely lines, he said reality is not a point, it's a cloud of possibilities and that we're always in a probable listic situation even when we don't know it and we insist on making it feel like a deterministic situation to the point where after the fact when something really, really shocking happens, we go back and tell a story about how it was inevitable. and we explain that which we can't predict with nothing more, no more information other than the outcome. and we do it over and over and over. he left a room like this filled with historians ashen-faced by explaining to them what was going on in their minds in their work and how there was a huge fallacy at the heart of it. so he would have, first thing he would have done is take great pleasure in how nobody -- he'd have been appalled by trump, but that's a separate thing. that's not original. [laughter] he would have then, along with

danny, taken great interest in the way people undid the election like a tragedy. they were exploring the rules of the imagination with their undoing project when they broke up, and the way people undid something they didn't like that happened like the way people undoing instantly followed the rules they had described. they ended the e-mails, they undid the comey -- fbi director's letter. and the first rule in the undoing project was you start at the end of the causal chain, and you undo the first thing you can undo to reverse the outcome. without regard to the probabilities involved. so there was a greater than 50% chance that donald trump was born a girl, but nobody thinks if only donald trump was born a girl, they think if only james comey had not stirred up trouble a week before the election. there are lots -- there are a billion different scenarios in which donald trump is not president, but people focus on a couple. and he'd have taken an interest

in how they do that and what they're doing, and danny would have been really interested too. they would have been very interested in trump's appeal, and it's the appeal of all people who are willing to appear confident about things that are unknowable and certain about things that are unknowable. and he preys, actually pretty successfully, on these weaknesses in the human mind. people think in stereotypes rather than statistically. so you tell a story about a mexican immigrant who's murdered somebody, and nobody think, oh, what are the stats on that? are mexican immigrants more likely than anybody else to murder an american? they think, no, they have an image. muslim terrorists. he's always bouncing from stereotype to stereotype, and people do -- the point is, amos

would say the point isn't racism, sexism. people actually think in these classifications. you have to resist them. and trump doesn't resist any of that. so they would have, i think he'd have had something to say about that. but i don't, i don't think his actual feelings about trump himself would be that different from a lot of people's. >> question there. >> i'm curious, you mentioned that there are a lot of things that have to go right in order for you to write a story. what's the closest you've come to writing a story without actually writing it, and why did you decide to not write it? >> i've got two big cases. one was when i sold moneyball, i sold it as two books, and this was going to be a sequel, and i spent the better part of three years chasing around after minor league baseball players to the

point where i was actually in uniform in the aa midland rock hounds, shouting instructions from the dugout. and i thought i was going to trace through the kids the oakland as had drafted by algorithming the, what happened with the ideas and the revolution, if there was a revolution. but the problem with moneyball, it got so noisy, and people were so -- there was so much stuff written about it, i just felt be it devoured my own story. so i had, i put a huge amount of work into that, and it just came to nothing. so instead of writing a sequel, i ended up writing the prequel, which is what this is in a way. the other one, the one that got away which violates a bit, contradicts a bit what i was saying earlier about not being interested in great men or famous people, george soros. you know who he is?

soros, the hedge fund manager but also in the early '90s the creator of the open society network in eastern europe. i spent a couple of weeks with him roaming his empire and writing a magazine piece about it, and it was -- he was a book. at that moment he was a great, great, great book. and he agreed to let me write it, to let me just trail around behind him, and then he read the magazine piece i wrote, and the magazine piece was very flattering about him but dismissive of his intellectual life. and he had great theories to explain, basically, his animal instincts, and they're -- they just seemed like -- i thought they were nonsense. but i quite with admired him. and he did not like the way i treated his ideas, and he pulled the plug on it. and that, that's a great shame. i could have done a lot with him as a subject at that moment in history, and it would have spoken, it would be evergreen. so i was really sorry to lose that one.

>> well, i think there's only one way we can really bring this to a close, and that's to put this test of serendipity, and three people -- i give three people a chance in two sentences to suggest what the subject of michael's next book would be. [laughter] >> that's very good. >> anyone want to come up with any ideas? >> we have one right here. >> big women. >> women? >> great women. >> >> great women. >> all the questions were from -- >> but i don't even write about great men. what i need is little women. right? i need women who are obscure in some interesting situation. my publisher is right behind you, and she says i'm incapable of writing women accurately. [laughter] so it's, that may be. maybe it's just beyond me. i can only do, you know, if men are dogs and women are cats.

dogs are easy. they're hungry and tired, and that's it. those are my characters. simple characters. simple guys. the women are complicated, and i can't get my mind around them. [laughter] but phil -- i'm with you. well, the blind side had a woman -- but if another one opened up, i would be biased to doing it. it's just a question of the material being there. >> okay. two more suggestions. yes, there's one there. >> in one of your books, i think it was -- [inaudible] big short you talk about men on to wall street and that they have narcissistic personality disorder, and now we have a president that might have -- >> might? [laughter] this is a weird, weird dude. i mean, we are talking about -- we have not plumed the depths of his -- plumbed the depths of his weirdness. >> i think if you really looked at that as a mental disorder and see how it flows through different corporations and decisions are made -- >> yeah. so that's a really good topic,

but who's the character? >> i know, because there are lots of them. >> yes. [laughter] >> but that would be your job, to find who would be the most fascinating -- [laughter] person with narcissistic personality discored that you could bring through. right now@probably trump but, you know, it would be gas nateing if you really look at -- fascinating if you look on the spectrum of what it entails, and then you could almost predict how behavior and decisions are being made. >> splendid. >> all right. >> one more suggestion. one more from this side. >> how about deignny white of -- dana white of the ufc and how that came about. >> well, you first have to tell me what it is. ufc the fighting? oh. i find that stuff so depressing. it doesn't -- people shouldn't be hitting each other in a cage. [laughter] so it's hard for me to want to draw more attention to it. >> well, we're not doing terribly well in.coming up with a -- well in coming up with a

great subject. [laughter] i think, though, what we've learned tonight is why it is whatever michael writes, we all, millions of us, enjoy reading it. you're only in new york for a day i know, michael, but thank you so much for coming to stern. it's been absolutely fascinating. and there could be no better christmas present from all of your loved ones, holiday present -- [laughter] than michael's book, and he will be signing the books at the back afterwards. in the meantime, on your behalf, let's thank michael for coming. >> thank you. [applause] >> suspiciously like a little pen to help you write your next book. [laughter] >> thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> this is booktv on c-span2, it's for serious readers or -- television for serious readers. here's our prime time lineup. starting tonight at 6 p.m. eastern, david bodanis discusses why albert einstein was disregarded by many of his colleagues later in his life. at 7:30, a panel on race in america moderated by author and white house correspondent april be ryan. and at 9:15 p.m. eastern, the manhattan institute's beth acres argues that the student loan crisis is overmown. overblown. on booktv's "after words" program at 10 p.m. eastern, new york magazine's jonathan chait examines president obama's legacy in a conversation with cnn's jim acosta. and we wrap up our saturday prime time lineup at 11 with john mcwarer the's thoughts on

the evolution of language. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. >> at that time, the british empire was huge, you know, it ruled 450 million people, a quarter of the population, and they were spread all over the world. and so they were spread very thin, you know? they were constantly putting down, putting down results, but to them, you know, these little colonial wars that they would fight, it was all about gallantly, you know, and being dashing. they hated losing their red coats, you know? they thought the khakis made them look like bus drivers -- >> yep. >> and they were still even, you know, for the boer war, when it began, they were still fighting in these perfect, precise lines. >> so it really was a prelude to world war i. >> it absolutely was. it was the beginning of modern warfare, and i think, you know, not that many americans know especially about the boer war,

but it was some of the first guerrilla fighting, the first concentration camps and all of those things. the british army going in was completely different from the british army coming out, and it prepared them for world war i. >> right. you write really splendidly about the boers, people whom most of us know, about whom we know very little. is the boer presence in south africa still very strong? >> well, they, obviously, the prelude to the afrikaners and, fortunately, things are changing a lot. you know, the boers were interesting peoplement they were very independent, they were very religious, and they were unabashedly racist. and, you know, that's sort of -- you may have heard of the great track where in 1835 they moved from the cape hundreds of miles into the interior, and that was set up primarily by the fact that two years earlier in the british empire had abolished

slavery. and even though the british empire be promised people in africa k native africans and the indian population that was living there that as soon as they won the war things would change and be better for them, as we all know, that took much longer than anyone would have hoped. and so of course there is still an afrikaner presence, but, you know, obviously nelson mandela was a huge breaking point for that. and things have changed quite a bit. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> hello, everyone, thank you so much for coming. weaver going to have a discussion -- we're going to have a discussion, and then