overview the orbital effect and help us advance our our civilizn even more. it will help us come together as a civilization. whoever wants to go to space, how we want to do it, nasa, elon musk, virgin galactic, i embrace it because it helpses us advance at a civilization. >> what are you doing today? >> i had a chance to talk to people here at the national book festival. chasing space, the book and young readers edition which has stem experiments in the back or steam experiments in the back. steam on the cheap. paper claims, scissors, you can build rockets. you can do all the really exciting things. the key to help get the next generation of explorers excited to take my place, to take our place, right? so help share messages of hope and inspiration in the future. >> are you still with nasa in any capacity?

>> i retired from nasa. but i help out in certain aspects when there are launches and missions and things.t i'm still an advocate and supporter of helping our space program. >> how is your 90-acre serenity farm in lynchburg? >> the farm got sold. i'm doing other things involved in kids getting outdoors and believing themselves.in >> here is the cover of the book. called, "chasing space, an astronaut story of grit, grace and second chances. t the author and our guest is leland melvin. booktv live coverage of the is 7th annual book festival now continues. we'll hear from best-selling author, michael lewis. his most recent book, "the undoing project." a friendship that changed our mind. this is booktv's live coverage.

>> can you hear me? i'm hearing an echo. it's all good? we just found out michael is supposed to do a power point presentation. that will take us half an houred to find the power point presentation he forgot to bring. thank you for being here. thank you to the library of congress. thank you to david rubenstein, the head of the festival. we'll have a chat, a couple of old friend, along with one million other new acquaintances in the hall. michael and i go way back. we'll start talking about you were a art history major at princeton, right? then you go off to wall street, you do really, really well at saloman brothers. michael, you could have been rich, you know? you could have your own plane at that point. instead you went into the book business. tell us why you did that?

how did that come about? >> so you know, joel and i were classmates in college. it is a actually, just an accident he was asked to interview me. they thought he would be good together. they didn't know we were good to each other. this is opportunity for joel to talk about the resentments. >> yes. this is the undoing project. >> yes. the question is why i quit wall street. so i didn't know i wanted what i wanted to do when i was in college. unlike you, you wanted to be a journalist and writer. when i got out, i didn't have any plans. i didn't, it didn't occur to me, partly because of how i grew up. i grew up in new orleans where nobody really did anything for a living. it didn't occur to me that i

would have to. so, hence our history, right? it was a place where careers go to die. and but it was a great place to study and i loved it. i did it because i loved it. when i got out i didn't have any plans. the job on wall street fell into my lap and it was a way to make a living but by the time i got it, i had figured out i wanted to write. it was a two-year gap in there. >> how did you figure that out? what made you -- >> you had to write a senior thesis to princeton. you basically had to write a book to get out of princeton. i emersed myself in that. i loved it like i loved no other academic experience. i kind of made the jump in my mind. this would be a good thing to do forever, if you could. the false start i had i thought it meant an academic career and the thesis, the guy who supervised me, the guy who

supervises the theses not only told me i wasn't made for an academic career but asked him at the end of my thesis defense, i was feeling a little vain about the writing, what he thought about the writing, he said, put it this way, never try to make a living at it. >> so this whole life is revenge against this one guy. >> william childs is his name. if you see that man -- >> where he is now? no one is hurting him. >> he was great, wonderful professor, archeologist. so i got out, i started just to kind of submit willy-nilly magazine pieces to magazines. i didn't know what i was doing. i didn't know anybody who wrote for a living. it was a six so thetic enter -- quiottic.

the book had names and addresses of all editors in america, the r thing i thought easiest to break into was in flight magazine. i was volunteering on the soup kitchens in bowery. i thought the street people were so interesting. i started to get to know homeless people. i wrote a piece to homelessrk magazines and sent it all the in-flight magazines. i got a flight from delta air lines, we kind of like the piece, we're in the piece of trying to get people to go to place, not flee them. we don't publish pieces about homeless people. it took me a while to figure out the market. eventually i started to get some things in print, an editor in washington, basically gave me my start. "the economist" in london gave me my start, michael kinsley.

editing "the new republic." i cold called him, graduate student in london. i really want to write for your magazine. he gave me a chance. he published a couple things. but then i get this job on wall street and the job on wall street promise as fortune. doesn't sound like a fortunes now, but it was $100,000 a year the first year. >> oh, my. >> put that in today's that is couple hundred thousand dollarsw >> you're 25, 26. >> i was 23 when i got the job. i just thought, this is incredible. i have to go do this, just to see what it is. but by then i knew i wanted to write for a living. ii have a friend from my saloman brothers training class. you joke about i could be rich. the people in my saloman brothers training class pitied me. they hit wall street the right time to get really rich. my friend introduced himself,

told me how he wanted to go into mortgage bond and whatever.fr i said my name is michael lewis. i'm here to write a book. i already had it in mind. i would write about this place. i might have had that, at least in the back of my mind. i wrote while i was there. this is longer answer than you want. this is why the book career happened.mi while i was there i started to write -- i continued to write about other things but i started to publish pieces about wall street. i put a piece on the op-ed of "the wall street journal" that had at the bottom, michael lewi is an associate with salman brothers in london. the piece argued that investment bankers were overpaid. i was working in monday done. i came in to work the next day. the head of salomon brothers europe was sitting at my desk. he was a great guy. he gave me my job. he was ashen. he said, do you realize what you've done?

i got a piece in the journal. it is great. he says, no, no. he says, we have had a crisis meeting with the board of directors at salomon brothers to talk about how we'll deal with this piece because it is being reprinted in all the local newspapers around the country. we're getting calls. i said, that's great. he said, no, he said, this is a big, big problem. he wasn't going to fire me, oddly. different era, he wasn't going to fire me, yet, but he sat down, how are we going to fix this problem? h and i said, you tell me. the way we could fix it, you don't write anymore. i said, nah. that isn't going to happen. i will keep writing. he was fond of me. he wanted me to stay. he said, what if you wrote under different name. what i wrote under the name of diana bleaker. my mother's maiden name. that is perfect. no one around here will ever

think a woman is a man. do the connection.in i started to write with abandon, including stuff i was seeing around me under the name of diana bleaker. i get home from work and diana bleaker's career is taking off. people want to read about wall street in 1977, 1987. i get home from work one day. there is a phone call.ro the actor chevy chase, remember him? his dad, ned chase was an editor at simon & schuster, very distinguished book editor. it is him. i found out that you're diana bleaker. he said, i think you should write a book. don't have to do it for me. i love it if you came here. you should write a book. from that moment, that was in september of 1987, i was out the door. i knew that is what i wanted to do. the money didn't matter. what happened next was kind of funny, you don't have to ask -- >> no. i am the potted plant. >> yes. yes.

>> the carrot in the school play. >> and so, the what happened next was, i waited until they gave me my bonus at the end of the year, because i didn't wantt to just lose that. u it was a huge pile of money. i then said, i'm leaving to write a book. and they said, what are you going to write about? i said i'm going to write about wall street. they took me into a room. they didn't care i was writing a book about wall street. that didn't concern them. they thought i was out of my mind. you make 250 this year. next year is 500. year of that a million dollars a year. you can stay here anotherer decade, you won't have to work and basically write a book.d they said, don't do this to yourself. they felt sorry for me.s

i was so it the door, it didn't occur to me to listen to it. i was so enamored, amused with myself as now. what happened when i sat down and wrote with a blank sheet of paper. when you are 25 or i was it 6 -- 26 then, i kind of wrote with my gut. >> this won't work for everyone. this kind of career path. being self-efused is good personality trait for this opinion. i have a couple of props. this is "the big short." michael's book. [applause] at the end of the book is an the actually incredibly harrowing encounter with john good fine? >> may he rest in peace. >> your former boss. rereading that passage.

there is a moment where your old boss said "liar's poker" made your career and ruined mine. >> to put it slightly different terms, he said, the reason i went to see him, the reason i h wrote that, that was book end, that i had come in, a lot of forces led to the financial crisis had been set in motion while, by salomon brothers in some cases while i was on wall street. we were watching the end of a process that john goodfriend help the put in motion. the big one, turning wall street partnerships into corporations. and he led -- >> was it scary to see him? >> it was terrifying. he booked a table for two at his favorite restaurant around the corner from his house, i sent him a note, love to sit down with you. he said yes. didn't say much more. said meet me at the table. i got there on time, he did not.

the table is one of those tables you sit together with your legs together like you're on a date. i sat down i started to sweat. i thought, what is this. he set this up so we'll sit like this for two hours. he walks in and he says, first thing he says, your-book, your your -- your -- book ruined my. that is dirt interpretation ofk history. it didn't help but it didn't ruin your career. we would settle in and i see him from time to time, he was to genial, he said that -- always kept a box of books under the desk to sign them for people that came to his office. >> so that is a win. that's a win. >> he said, i'm your biggest

customer. >> you came to princeton and described yourself as lucky. some people are just lucky. those of us who know you well you work incredibly hard, rightw you're like a very hard worker. you have an incredible gift for telling a story. you write in the vernacular. you, lucky, you're not lucky. what has been your secret in terms of finding stories, not only that people want to read but that no one else, has told? i mean "the big short." being classic example. we were all writing about the financial crisis, the great recession. you come in with something no one else really had written. how do you find this stuff? >> i will answer that question but it is not true that i'm not lucky. i mean it is -- incredible serendipity in my career.

the fact that i wanted to be a writer and i got this job in the very best place on earth to write about wall street in the 1980s, i was not only in the firm, but a place in the firm. you know, i was, i was given the leisure for my parents to fart around two or three years after college. if they hadn't done that, i doubt i would have become a writer. >> you had some advantages. >> huge advantages. the point of that speech was, there is this odd conceit in our culture that once you have made it, that it was inevitable because the virtue of you and that in fact, that is not how it works. obama was right, when he said you didn't build it. [applause] you were so, you were such the recipient of benefits of this culture bestows on you, and, and

to tell the story without, a high level of awareness of that, i was trying to get across to the princeton kids.e i think it is getting harder and harder to see how lucky you are. anyway, so the story -- >> realize the question. so yes, you had a lot of advantages. you had the freedom to look around and improvise but, you know, you also found the stories no one else saw, the classic one "the blind side." a friend of yours told you, suddenly incredible book become as movie. >> so "the blind side." it is typical how i find stories, in that you will see it is just chance, a chance into stories. the other was slightly different but "the blind side." it started off with a bottle of wine with a "new york" magazine

writer, jerry maserati. we sitting in a restaurant. cover of "new york times" magazine. it was whatever it was, 2004, 5, around there, thinking important people. he was thinking jamie dimon. he was thinking -- never really interests me. you know, if you want me to write about someone important, let me write about a teach they're changed my life. nobody knows who he is. put him on cover of "new york" magazine. he happened to be baseball coach but he was a teacher. he said, okay, go do it. i'm going to write about thiska personal story about this coach. i ought to talk to some of the people on my team. i was a pitcher on the team. sean tooey played by tim mcgraw in the movie was a catcher. i went to see him. i hadn't seen him since high school. he picked me up at memphis airport. he was this poor boy. in high school you thought he didn't have enough to eat.

he made great good of himself. he was wonderful athlete. drafted, played in the nba. drafted by the cincinnati redsho in high school. he had gone on to make a fortune in the fast-food business. he wanted to show me his mansion. he took me to his mansion. we spoke for two hours or so about our old coach and the whole time in his living room there was a 6-foot 5-inch 350-pound black kid, did not say a word. was not introduced to me. like you were when i was monologuing. he is a carrot in the school play. on the way back to the airport, i said, sean, who is the black kid? he said, oh, that is louann's project. her new project. started to get a little teary. we saw him, standing on the bus stop in the snow, in a t-shirt and shorts, she recognized him as somebody just come to kids

school. stopped what are you doing out there shorts and t-shirt. put him in the car and drove him home. he hasn't left. turned out he had no family. he was living on the streets. nothing to eat. was illiterate. leanne tooey, rich white, evangelical republican, living on outskirts of a racially-divided city. i will make fix him. i will make him a rich, white, evangelical christian. sean was, don't get in her way. she is going to do it, she is going to do it. i started following. i thought that was odd. it is pygmalian. can i finish how the book comes out?wi i didn't think this was a book. it was interesting. i just want to know more.

flash forward a few weeks. "moneyball" had come out not that long before. i got to be friends with the brain trust, such as they were, several nfl front offices. some of them actually were brain trust. some of them you wouldn't trust their brains. the brain trust at the 49ers were great. he and i started having "moneyball" conversation about football. there is not a "moneyball" story in football, it is same story. everybody has same amount of money to spend. not about rich teams and poor teams. it is not thinking about how to do more with less. what it is about, figuring out to distribute your money across the field. can you give me a history how that happened since free agency created a market. and he pulled it out. it was really remarkable you had this character on the offensive line, the left tackle, who protected the qb's blind side, he was had gone from the lowestw to the second highest other than

the qb. he was insurance policy from the qb. if he quarterback got hit from that side he would get hit in other the way normally. flash forward. six months, i was hearing about michael orr. they are rich and emotional. it is not my story. my high school friend. you will not believe what happened. nick saban, alabama coach, but then lsu head coach. came through school, looking at players through school. he saw michael on basketball coach. sean knew him. he said, sean, who is that kid? that is future nfl left tackle. you can see the way he moves he is an ntl left tackle.re sean, do you know what they get paid? you said that is what he was. told him story about nfl financial story. i started to think, well, there is a story here.

the story is, because the kid then went. moment identified as future nfl left tackle, which he indeed became, he went from, like most prized kid in the universe. he had gone from the least valued, 15-year-old on earth, to the most valued 17-year-old in a flash. i thought there was a story that can be organized along these lines, what are the forces in this kid's life that changed his value?s and one of those forces is stuff that happened in nfl strategy. but one of those forces is a mother. once i realized that, i had a story. this happens, i had it six months before i had the nerve to write it.t i often think there is someone better to write it. someone has empathy or knows emotions. or someone who knows about psychology or someone who knows,

there is always, something, it is alien to me, so i really shouldn't be the one to do it. but the truth is, the fact that it is alien to you is why you should do it. because enables you to get across to other people with whom it is alien, stuff about it that is interesting. he pushed me over the edge. sean came out. he was a color commentator for the memphis grizzlies. they were playing warriors. we went to dinner. he started telling my wife and i some of the stories. one he mentioned, had not said to me it, was interesting when michael came into the housee because we took him into the room, louian showed at bed.. he stared at it. she said, what? i never had a bed. s he was 15 years old. he never had a bed.ve my wife started crying. she got in the car, said afterwards, you're an idiot if you do anything but write this book. so i started to write the book.

it sounded like a one-off kind of thing. that in various forms over and over. >> you have a common theme of recognized value in several of your books. is that conscious thing you shoot for? this book every business people in america will buy my book at the airport for the next life. because what you're sort of saying, with "moneyball," "the blind side," "the big short." with the new book, "the undoing project" there is value out there if you recognize it s that a conscious theme you have? >> no. what does seem to happen a lot, i don't quite know why, i can guess why, the book come back to markets a lot and way markets don't function very well. markets are miraculous in a lot of ways. value comes from the market assigns.

the bottom stories have a market angle to them. i think i always been since i left new orleans, always been bemused what gets valued and why.ee because i came from a place was very charming place to grow up. it was at that really rich, interesting childhood. i love people, i love the culture, i love the people, i love the place. it was a failed place. it was not valued. you see this over and over, people who are special who don't get valued properly and peoplend who are distinctly not special who get valued very highly. that always interested me since i was a little kid, really interested me. my father told me not that long ago, he introduced me to the stock market which i never have an interest, and still don't have much of an interest. but he is obsessed with it. likes to watch his portfolio. just watch it.

i don't get that. but, so, he is watching his portfolio. he is saying, i'm going to give you 10 shares of a stock could you can learn how to watch it too.s watc [laughter]. i was is or 14 years old. he gave me a little black bookok to keep a record of what i saw when i was watching it. gave me 10 shares of chart house, a restaurant company. he gave it me, because it is new orleans restaurants owned by char house. it was $20 a share but he paid $220. i said, well 10 shares at $20 a share. so it is $200. what is the other to bucks? that is what we had to pay to sandy to buy the stock. i said, i'm going to egg his house. that is outrage just. that is outrage just, he charges to bucks, what does he do, make a phone call?

how does that happen? i can remember being outraged at the value assigned the role back then. >> then you invented online trading. we should talk just as a novelty, about your new book, "the undoing project." so till us how you got into that. it's a little different fromth your other books. more about psychology. a little more academic. is it really fundamentally a friendship book? is it about friends? i >> i think it's a love story. you know the movie, a love story, bull -- when i was finished it, it was being sold, for a movie, hollywood reporter called me and asked me what is the one line "elevator pitch" for this book?

about these two academics sitting in a room dreaming up ideas how the human mind works, how do you turn that into movie kind of thing. what is your pitch? >> it is "brokeback mountain" but they -- each other's ideas. that is how i think of this book. that is what it is. >> we can delete that line somehow, right? it is not on the internet, is it? >> just as friends, joel. >> okay. >> nobody would be offended by that word. so what happened was, the way this story came about, it is about israeli psychologists, aim most and dan. are you working on a book, i don't like to talk about when i'm working on it, amazing how quickly my books can be described in a way people don't want to know anything more about them. "moneyball."

what are you working on? book about baseball statistics. nobody wanted to ask another question. if you want to stop a room cold, stop a dinner party. what are you working on? a book about two israeliwo psychologists. that no one wants to know anymore. the way it grew about, it grew out about "moneyball." it was a book about misevaluation of people but it happened to be about baseball players. very interesting about how baseball players got misvalued and they got misjudged about misvalued by people. the book came out. it got reviewed by kass sun stein, richard that i -- thaylor. behavior psychologist. in "new republic.." nice story, mr. lewis missed the

point of his own story basically. what he has told is a kind of a, it's a case study. he has given us a case study in the ways that the human mind leads us astray when it is operating from the gut, human a intuition. and the ways in which the human mind leads us astray were mapped by these two israeli school exists, in the late '70s. i went, i missed the story. i thought i didn't know. i never heard of it. >> thesis, you're a writer, get one bad review or questionable review in the "new republic." you write an entirely new book. >> it was more complicated than that obviously. i never heard of these guys, even though the year "moneyball" was being written khan won the nobel prize in economics and he didn't even know economics. that was impressive.

so he, i just, it bothered me that i missed this trick. it is a great -- i like to think, i like to think, people say that an explanation is where the mind comes to rest and the books are explanation. what you do with your story is kind of where your mind came to rest.. i like to think i have kind of exhausted the material. i mined out the material. no one else can go behind me anl my material and find something great i didn't find. this is something really great, didn't even occur to me, that there is something we're wired in certain ways and people figured out how we're wired to explain the whole "moneyball" story. w it just bothered me for years.ex i thought about it. not the way my father watched stock market, but i mentioned it to a psychologist friend and he said in berkeley where i live, and he said, danny carmen lives half a mile from your house. you can talk to him about this, get it off your chest. that's what i did.

i knocked on his door of the we developed a relationship. we would go on long walks through the hills in berkeley and he would talk about his now dead colleague, his lover. wasn't his physical lover but in any other way they were passionately involved with eache other and tumultuouslies involved with each other, amos. i don't know when this penny dropped. i talked for a term, it was a class at cal. i was supposed to teach writing. i didn't do a very good job of it. one of my favorite students was a kid named orin taversky. turned out he was amos' older son. i had access to both sides of the collaboration. the material, i kept thinking i'm not the one to write this. this is really interesting. i don't know. i'm not jewish. this story takes place in israel, a lot of it. the backdrop of the is birth of

israeli state and early israel. i didn't even take psych 101. i had no particular interest in psychology up to that point. it was all alien. took me forever to talk myselflf into a place where i thought i should be the one that should do it. the what led me to this point eight years i started walking in the hills with danny, the people who knew the story were starting to die. it was getting very clear if i didn't tell it would be gone, it just wouldn't be. i think it is an incredibly important story. i think their work is incredibly important. it is for the ages. it is a very emotional story between these two men. i thought it was an unusual story. so at that point, i turned to danny and i said it will seem odd to you because you know i don't know anything but i'm p going to walk a book about. he hemmed and hawed.

didn't like the idea of it. so i made a case, i said you guys, your work is too important. someone will write a book about it. probably in your view it will be a bad book. if anybody should have the right to write a bad book about you it should be me because of walking through all the hills with you. that is how it started. >> he himself wrote a book or did you ghost write the book for him thinking fast and slow? you mentioned you saw early chapters of the book. >> i saw it on its way to the garbage can. he was, when i met him among the first things out of his mouth, you come at a good time, they asked me to write this book, it is such garbage it will ruin my reputation. so it will go in the garban cand where it belongs. i said, can i see a chapter or two? he gave me a chapter or two. i said, don't throw it in the garbage can. the quality in danny is peculiar

has a degree i have never seen in any other human being is doubt. doubt about everything around him including his own thoughts. he is like constantly chewing up whatever he creates before it ever gets out the door. so he got to a point after throwing it away, pulling it out of garbage can, throwing it away and pulling it out of garbage can three or four times, i know what i will do? he didn't trust my judgment on the manuscript. i will give money to a friend of mine in the specialist in the field, having distribute the money in thirds to three people he likes, their job is to trash the book, write a negative review for me. to see how i can the book. >> his own book. >> he paid $5,000 for s --

reviews of his own book. this is what he is looking for, even better. he thinks he is normal. so the best characters, you know this, the best characters, don't know their characters. the minute someone knows they're a character they lose altitude on the page. he soared the whole way through. he was just a different person and he had had a lot of different thoughts. he would never have had the thoughts if he had not had this love aware with amos taversky. it was a long, tortuous path to writing the book because it was even more off my beaten track than usual. >> you have a lot of opportunities offered to you, writing a movie or you know, i think you, did you write a novel once? you played around with it.

you had movies made of your books so what people want to know, what is brad pitt really like? [laughter] >> do you want to know. >> before we get into the movie thing, i don't want to createsi the impression i did anything to do with the movies. i think they're great. apropos of this gathering people in hollywood really prefer authors be dead. the living author wants credit and scrutinized. taking his precious work of art, you will screw it up. he wants to cast in the picture. they just don't like you live. they convey this the other thing about hollywood. they are fastidiously polite. everybody is challenging each

other first one to be rude. when you're in a. everyone is showing off how gracious they can be while sticking a knife in your bark -- back. not like wall street in that way. what evolves between a living author who maintain as good relationship with the movie w business, is, this, they pretend to be interested in you have to say. you pretend to believe they're interested. as long as no one think there is is genuine there, the relationship can be quite lovely. >> okay. >> that is what happened with brad pitt. and the relationship was quite lovely. i don't know if we're going to ever be together again. i hope we are. but i'll tell you a story that

encapsulates a part of brad pitt, when you meet him, you're supposed to think he must be dumb because he is so beautiful but he is not dumb. he is very smart. he is very interested in things. he is a delight to talk to. he is easy. he is surprisingly shockingly normal without being completely normal. this is a brad pitt story. bean, who brad pitt played, had nothing to do with the movie, to the point he refused to go to the set. when they said they were going to make the movie, after i told him selling life rights without fear of making a movie. they would not make a movie about baseball statistics he called me up. you bastard. he is angry. he said brad pitt just called he is coming to my house. my wife is putting on makeup. and the babysitter is wearing a dress.makeup [laughter]

you bastard, boom. in the middle of making a movie, the movie people, who want you to engage in this false relationship where you pretend to believe they care what you think, were getting very uncomfortable that bill libant wasn't coming to the set. he wasn't returning phonee calls-- billy bean. filming in the oakland coliseum three weeks, his office is right there. he refused to come down. one day they called me. please, everybody's upset. could you get billy to the set. so i called billy and i said, u just put everyone out of their misery. come down for ten minutes. nothing bad will happen. just say hi. smile. be charming. you can leave. he said you promise you will be there? he said, i will be there. he wanted me to hold his hand. so i drive out to the set. you have seen the movie. there are night scenes in the coliseum where they recreate ad

game between the oakland as crd kansas city royals. 8,000 people they move around in the seats to make it look full. i go out with my daughter, dix sir, nine years old, 10 yearswix old. they finished shooting one of the scenes brad pitt is moody, walking around the field, nobody in the stands. he comes over. that is the kind of guy he is. he gets down on one knee, talking for ten minutes. she is around my leg. with terror in his eyes. she said, who is that weird old guy? in walks billy bean. billy comes over. brad pitt vanished. a production assistant with head gear and folder with a book in it, comes running over. and he says, mr. bean, mr. bean, thank you for coming to the set. we've been waiting all this time. he says you're my hero. your book changed my life.

billy looks at me, says, it is his book. and i said, yeah, my book. no, the guy refused. no, your book, mr. bean, changed my life. your book. would you please sign my book. l he -- all right i sign the book. there were two billy beans in professional baseball. they played in the same outfield on the twins and tigers. one spell i had it with a e on the end and other without. the other billy beane came out of the closet and wrote a book coming out of closet. it was, changing for the other team? something like that. hitting from the other side of the plate. i don't know what it was. it was that kind of title. and the young man, flips openf the book and it is the gay billy bean's memoir. i billy beane inside, there is no right answer at this point, right?

over in the dugout brad pitt is rolling around laughing. because he has set the whole thing up as a practical joke. that was only reason he wanted billy beane to come to the movie. >> okay.jond >> that is brad pitt. >> that is brad pitt story. >> that is a brad pitt story. i'm glad i asked. will do we will have microphones to ask questions.n, don't make a speech how much you love michael.h >> that is better than the reverse. >> i think there are microphones. here you go. you can ask a question. >> they're all up here? some in the back? >> i guess i will start. >> yes, sir.p >> so, i have read several of your books and it seems to me you have a fairly consistent

technique where you very strongly personalize sort of a theme. you're writing about the emergence of the left tackle as an important player in football and restructuring of the economics of the game and so you really drill down on michael orr. you're writing about the economics of baseball. it is billy beane. you do, with the big short, you have a couple of main characters still very strongly personalizing these larger themes. clearly there are advantages to that in terms of narrative strength. talk a little about the pluses and also about the minuses of that approach. >> of writing through people? i don't know any other way to do it? what i have found from the very beginning of my career withun "liar's poker" where i was thehe main character, i found myself very easy to sympathize with. >> it's a gift.

>> it was a gift. i felt everything that character felt. [laughter] and approved of almost everything that he did and said. very quotable. so the. so the trick, such as it is, it is a trick also how i naturally get interested in things. i write interesting characters through people. almost all the books have in common aside, other than the market ainge bell, they're interesting characters to me in interesting situations. so the trick is, that if you can attach the reader to the character, at beginning of the book, they will follow that character anywhere. trust me there is no one in america wants to read my description of collateralized debt obligations. once you realize lives of people you have come to know turn onn what that is, you want to know.

it's a very, very powerful device that, origins of literature. i don't regard it though, as, you say the minuses. what would be the minuses? you know, you placed, i guess you could argue, that you're, you're kind of placing undue emphasis on a single person dealing with big -- but i don't -- i usually pick my characters who deserve that emphasis. billy beane deserves to be the face of the transformation of baseball through intellect. >> let's go over here. >> anyway. >> i just wanted to thank you for ""flash boys"" on wall street and the effect that had. i ended up reading that. i went to school with ronnie morgan. that is coincidence.ea

went up to iex. t got involved in that whole battle. fidelity ended up closing my account i kept insisting i should directly connect to iex. maybe you can talk a little bit about that, but thank you very much. >> talk about "flash boys" a little bit? is that coming out? . . coming up? >> guest: they never die but right now it is dead. the problem, the problem is revealed in the sony hack, emails back and forth how impossible it was to make this movie, the problem, they have gotten nervous about making an asian guy a white guy. they don't have well enough known asian male actor, which i think is crazy.

in the movie you could create a person, but the flash was scary to me is still very much alive. it's not sorted out. there is a war going on, a hard lesson that won't be properly regulated. it's not. its own narrow vested interest in a way that essentially causes taxes to be levied on the rest of us. right now they are and these guys are the single greatest force shining a light on the problem and trying to fix it. i think-- he's canadian, but he is a canadian-- american hero. very moving. 60 minutes did their piece and there was a lot of screaming and yelling.

people shouted at me that i got it wrong. knowing demonstrated to me that what they are saying is not true and it's shocking the problems, so-- i don't know. >> gentlemen over here. >> what are you working on now? >> well politics has gotten interesting. [laughter]as >> i was struck after the presidential election with who was elected president, but it was interesting to me and maybe march, april the vast gap between the effort that the obama administration put into the transition and the trump administration had put into the transition.

the obama administration creater -- inspired by bush, obama was grateful to bush for how much effort he put into handing the government over to him and obama had two or 3000 people in his administration to essentially create a course in how the federal government worked so that in our crazy system with all of these people who don't know much about what' going on in the department of energy say that they can quickly get up to speed and the day after as in past handovers, the day after the election 30, 400 people from the new administration going into every government agency and cramming for 70 days until thent inauguration because there are a lot of people who know a lot for

a bid and by law from getting in touch with their own agencies, so you have very weird need to for thorough quick education and really a lot of vintage-- mission-critical things. some people literally did not show. spaces are indeed. offices were set aside for the education. non- ideological defense. i think we will pay a big price. this problem is a bomb with a long fuse.bo mismanagement of the government that results in this is a bigat big deal. that's happily made the material interesting. [laughter] >> i mean, trump has electrified the federal government. who would want to leave the department of energy a year ago?

you wouldn't. we have a guy on top doesn't even know that. [laughter] >> it's incredible, i mean, youd can't make this stuff out. it's hollywood comedy after hollywood comedy waiting to happen, so what i'm doing now, the trump administration didn't bother to get the briefings, so i did this 12000 words where i run around the department of energy because i didn't know, but i went and got the briefings that the trump people didn't ges to figure out what the hell this place does because you need to know and i will move through the government, so that's a project. [applause]. >> i have a quick question on the undoing project on

behavioral economic issue. you been in wall street a number of years and you know so much of wall street is aced on a fishing market. what are your thoughts about the impact on that whole business as more to get to realize thatt idiosyncrasies and realities and we are not as rational as some people think we are. >> what i think impact of behavioral economics will be on wall street? s >> yes. >> you know, if you lived in a sane world, much of what wall street does we would not bee doing. shortly after my father explained to me that the guy inn charge also explained wall street floats on [bleep] and it really still does. it's amazing in this day and age that people will give the condo financial advice they give with a straight face. they claim to know where the

prices of things are going or have some insight and direct people's money on the basis of this insight when they have no idea. they will construct a story about their investment career that seems to demonstrate that they predicted things that were inherently not only did they not predict him. they were inherently unpredictable, essentially random prophecies are being construed as patterns and the patterns of being devout-- designed by priests in the pre-skip paid a lot of money for it.st that is crazy. columnists would have a lot to say about it, but the truth is that people don't like taking responsibility for making their own financial decisions and so they will always pay theseay priests, i think, to get rid of the problem. they can't get in their heads that not only is that person not

an expert, there's no such thing as the expertise. they can get in with a bad expert, you lost my money. they can't get in their headd that they shouldn't listen to anyone, so the damage that the intellectual work goes at a behavioral economics can do to wall street i think is minimal because wall street is responding-- and psychological deep need that has nothing to do , so you can't argue it away. in short, i think the answer is very minimal. >> where do you invest your money, just curious. is it a mattress? >> so, if-- saying you think wall street floats on bowl

[bleep] is not saying you don't think the american economy is incredible miracle in an engine of wealth creation. the economy is wonderful. of the american economy is a great miracle in human history and i invest in it, but i don't invest in it under the direction of some wall street guru. i think the two smart things to do-- first decide how much you want to put in the stock market and how much you want to put somewhere else and after that how you put it in the stock market, i either by very low cost index money or i give it to warren buffett and i do this by buying brookshire half the way. this is stock that he has and he is the one person on that planet who has a different value assigned to it. people pay more for his money

because of his reputation and he gets deals no one ever gets, soa i long have blasted him for being in this situation. i gave up and i surrendered and i'm so happy i surrendered. i own a bunch of brookshire hathaway stock. >> hello. i wonder approximately what percentage or to what degree yoe choose-- you two have preparedce or practiced this interview and the response? [laughter] >> she asked how did we prepare. >> tomorrow night we are in new york. the next night boston.gh >> where were we last night? >> we did this before at politics and prose up the street, but this is a slightly larger crowd. >> i have interviewed joel. i don't know if you talk to me about my book. >> this is fake news.

i'm always asking about your book. >> he wrote a book about georgee washington. you should all buy it. >> are you still the softball commissioner for your daughter's league? >> i retired a year ago because my daughter outgrew me, but i ran the competitive travel softball program in the bay area. >> that must have been a heady thing, softball commissioner. >> actually, it was a fantastic social experiment. i think we have to wrap it up, but i live in berkeley, which is filled with these liberal people who don't believe in competition. [laughter] >> the softball league is another recreational softball league. it's wonderful.. the albany girls softball league and the rulers if you coach thie league you have to lose half of your games. [laughter] >> so, the perfect coach goesrf 500.

however, someone years ago realized that some people had a competitive streak and so they allowed an organization on the side that after their big concluded, all-stars were picked and they would go out into the wilds of california and play republicans. [laughter] >> this was always a miserable, it was every game was custards last stand, a miserable experience. girls would be sent off and get mutilated by these republicans. i took over the operation seven years ago and i created liberal warriors. [laughter] >> everyone in this room has the same thought, this is his next book. >> we went out and we really kicked republican aspect.

my 15-year old now come her team was number one in the country and we got very very good in the way i got good with by going outside the culture of berkeley and getting hard college women softball players who did not want to hear we are going to lose.>> g >> you have only lost a small fraction. >> so, when my daughter, dixie, team is going like 40 and one, my son walker is seven years old, six years old in the dugout as a bat boy and has agreed to take this job with his sisters team because there is a trophy. he has his wall filled with these trophies now and walkerr was sitting in one of these-- with one of these coaches i hired the wet gate-- the oney game they were going to lose. they are down by six runs after

two innings and he turns to the coach and he says, we are going to lose this game and she flipped and started screaming at him, my kid. you are going to sit in this dugout and if you're going to be the bat boy you need to think more positive thoughts, so walker sits there for a minutes and think about it and he says shannon, i'm positive we are going to lose this game. [laughter] >> on that note, it's been a pleasure. >> thank you for coming. [applause].