unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable-television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. >> can you hear me? i hear echoes. it's all good? okay. we just found out michael is supposed to do a powerpoint presentation, so that will take about a half hour to find the powerpoint presentation he forgot to bring, so thank you for being here and fixed to the library of congress. thank you to david rubenstein, the chairman of the festivals.. we will have a little chat here, just a couple (along with 1 million other new acquaintances. michael and i go way back and let's just start out talking about

you were in art history major at princeton; right? venue go off to wall street a and do really well. michael, you could have been rich, i mean, you could have your own plane at this point. instead he went into the book business. tell us why you did that. are back about? >> so you know, joe and i were classmates in college and it's an accident that he was asked to interview me. they did know that we knew each other. this is opportunity for joel to express all the resentment he feels. >> that's correct. it's actually the undoing of joel and michaell. >> yeah, so the question is why i quit wall street. so, i didn't know i wanted what i wanted to

do with my life when i was in college unlike you. you knew you wanted to be a journalist and a writer. when i got out i didn't have any plans. it didn't occur to me partly because of how i grew up. i grew up in new orleans where no one really did anything for a living, so it didn't occur to me that i would have to. hence our history, i mean, it was a place where careers go to die, but it was a great place and i loved it. when i got out i didn't have any kind of plan. 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 and it was a two-year gap in their. >> headed you figure that out? >> d you had to write a senior thesis like i did

come see you basically had read a book to get out of princeton and i immersed myself in that and i loved it like i loved no other academic experience and made the jump in my mind that this would be a good thing to do forever if you could. the false start i had was i thought it was an academic career and the thesis, the guy who supervises the thesis not only told me i wasn't made for an academic career, but i asked him if he and my thesis he said because i was feeling pain about the writing and what he thought about the writing. he said put it this way, never try to make a living at it, so his whole life is now revenge against me, this one guy. william ap child's is his name. if you see that man-- he was great, actually a wonderful professor. so,o i got out and

started this to submit magazine pieces. i didn't know what i was doing. i didn't know anyone who wrote for living. it was a quick enterprise. there was a book called "the writer's market" w and it listed the names and addresses of all the editors in america m and for some reason i got in my head was the easiest thing i might be able to break into his in a flight magazines, so i started volunteering is it-- at the soup kitchen on the valerie and i thought the street people were so interesting and i started to get to know them. i wrote about new york homeless people and i said to the in-flight magazines in america o and i got this letter back from delta airlines that saidgh, you know, we liked the piece but you understand what we are in the business of doing we are trying to get people to go places not

avoid them. it said me a while to figure out the market. [laughter] eventually-- there is an editor in washington that basically gave me my start. an economist and wanted to give me my start. i sent him-- i called called him as a graduate student in london and said i really like your magazine. he gave me a chance and published, but that i get this job on wall street that promises a fortune. doesn't sound like a fortune now, but it was a hundred thousand dollars a year and put that in today's it's a couple hundred thousand dollars. i was 23. i thought this is incredible, i mean, i have to do this to see what it is, but by then i knew i wanted to write

for a living, so i have a friend and you joke about i could have been rich, but the people in my training class all went and hit wall street at just the right time to get really really rich. i have a friend that says when we met the first day of class he introduced himself and told me how he went to go into mortgage bonds and i said my name is michael lewis and i'm here to write a book b and that i already had it in mind i was going to write about this place i might have had that at least in the back of my mind and i wrote while i was there. this isth how the book career happened. while i was there i started to write about-- i continue to write and publish pieces about wall street. i put a piece on the op-ed of the "wall street journal" that had at the bottom michael lewis associate for the solemn brothers in london in the piece

argued investment bankers were overpaid. i was working in london and i came into work the next day and the head of salomon brothers in europe was sitting at my desk and he was a great guy and was the guy who gave me my job and he said, do you realize what you've done. i said yeah, i've a piece in the journal. it's a great and he said no, no, we have had a crisis meeting with the board of directors of salomon brothers to talk about how they will deal with this piece because it's being reprinted in these local newspapers around the country. he said no, this is a big big problem. he's not got a fire me, oddly. different era, but he said how are we going to fix this problem and i said you tell me because

the way we could fix it is that you don't write anymore and i said no, that's not going to happen. he was fond of me. what if you wrote under a different name and i said what if i wrote under the name of diana bleecker which was my mother's maiden name and he said perfect no one will ever think the woman is a man. i started right with abandon including stuff icing around mean under the name and a one day i get home from work in this careers taking off for diana bleecker. people want to read about wall street in 1977-- 1987ak. i get home from work went in there is is a phone call and the actor chevy chase, remember him? his dad, ned chase was an editor at simon & schuster and it's him and he said i found out that you are diana bleecker and he said i think you should write a book.

he said you should write a book and from that moment, that was in september, 1987, i was out the door and i knew that's what i wanted to do. the money didn't matter is actually kind of funny-- >> i'm the potted plant. the carrot. >> the carrot in the school play. so, what happened next was a waited till they gave me my bonus at the end of the year because i didn't want to lose that is was a huge pile of money and then said i'm leaving to write a book and they said we get a write about nice that i'm going to write about wall street.le they took me into a room and they didn't care i was writing a book on wall street. diastolic concerned them of a thought i was out of my mind and said you

understand that you made 250 this year and next year's like 500 and after that millions of dollars a year. you can stay here for another decade and in 10 years you won't have to work you could write a book and they said don't do this to yourself. they felt sorry for me, but i was so out the door that it didn't even burden me. i was so enamored with the possibility and amused with myself as now. what happened when i sat downed and write a paper so when you are 24 or 25-- i was 26 and, you know, you go with your gut. at this will not work for everyone, this career path. [laughter] clecs certainly being self amused is a good personality trait for this businessth. >> no question. >> i have a bunch of michael's books and this

is ""the big short". [applause]. >> at the end of the book is actually a harrowing encounter with john that coin, may he rest in future former los angelesar reading that passage as i reread it again this morning, tell us-- there's a moment where your old boss says major career and remind -- >> the reason i went to see him wasin he to since cleared-- me that i wrote that and that i had come in and a lot of the forces that had led to the financial crisis had been set in motion while-- by salomon brothers in some cases while i was on wall street and we were watching the end of a process and the big one was turningan the wall street partnerships into corporations,--

>> was a scary to see him? >> terrifying. he booked a table for two as favorite restaurant around the corner from his house when i sent him a note saying i would love to sit down with you and he said yes, but not much more. he said mimi at that table and i got there on time and he did not and it was a table where you sit with your legs together like you're on and i sat down and started to sweat.. what is this? e set this up so we sit like this were two hours he walked in and he said first thing is you are [bleep] brooke. your [bleep] brooke made your career and ruined of mine. >> and then you had a lovely lunch after that. >> i said that seems misinterpretation of history to me that i don't think my book ruined your career. didn't help, but i don't

to get ruined your career and then i see him some time after that that he was very genial. he always a box of books under his desk to sign for people and they came to his office. >> that is a win en. >> he said i'm your biggest customer. >> you gave a commencement speech at princeton a few years back and said-- you described yourself as lucky and said some people are just lucky and those of us who know you well, you wrote-- work incredibly hard. very hard workerst with an incredible gift for telling a story. you write another macular, i mean, so you are not lucky. what has been your secret you think in finding stories, not only that people want to read, but that no one elsein has told me "the

big short" the unix classic example. we had all been writing about the financial crisis and great recession and you come in with something that no one else had really written. had you find this stuff? >> it's not true that i'm not like you mean incredible-- incredible serendipity in my career and the fact i wanted to be a writer and got this job in the very best place on her to write about wall street, i was not only the firm, but the place in the firm, you know i was given the leisure by my parents to start around for two or three years after college and if they had not done that i doubt i would've become a writer >> you had some huge advantages. >> huge advantages. there's this odd conceit in our culture that once you have made it it was

inevitable because of the virtue of you and that in fact that's not how it workedrt. obama was right when he said you didn't build itt you are such the recipient of benefits of this culture and not to-- and to tell the story without a high level of awareness of that-- that's why i get no credit. it's getting harder and harder to see how lucky you are. anyway, the story-- >> hayou had a lot of advantages and you had the freedom to look around and improvise, but you also found these stories that no one else saw, and the classic one is the blind side. a friend of yours told you such and such and suddenly you have an incredible book that

becomes a movie. >> "the blind side"s is typical for how i find stories in that you see it's just chance. "big short" might be slightly different, but "blindside" started with a bottle of wine and a editor and we were sitting in new york at a restaurant and he said-- we are trying to decide what i'm going to write next and whatever it was, 2544 or around their and he was thinking important people, he was thinking james diamond, never really interest me. let me write about the teacher that changed my life. put him on the cover of the new york cut times magazine. via baseball coach, but he was a teacherse and he said okay and while i was doing that i thought i will write about this story about this coach.

i talked to some of the people on my team. i was a pitcher on the team. and tim mcgraw was a catcher. i had not seen him since high school and he picks me up at the memphis airport. he had been this poor boy jerk in high school he didn't have enough to eat. he made great good of himself. he was a wonderful athlete and drafted and played in the nba. got dated by the cincinnati reds in high school. he went on to make a fortune in the fast food business. he wanted to show me his mansion. he took me to his mansion and we spoke for two hours or so about our old coach and the whole time in his living room there was a 6'5" 6'5" 365-pound black kid who did not say a word was not introduced to meti he was like you wereay when i was monologue in.

[laughter] >> he was that keratin the school play and on the way back to the airport i said sean, whoho is the black kid and he said that's leeann's new project. he started to get teary and he said when we saw him he was standing at the bus stop in the snow in t-shirt and shorts and she recognized him as someone who was at the kids school and said what you doing out there in choice in the t-shirt and put them in the caro and drove him home and he hasn't left and it turned out he had no family. he was living on the street, nothing to eat, illiterate and leeann, rich, white, evangelical, republican living on the outskirts of a racially divided city that i'm going to fix him and make him a rich white evangelical christian. [laughter] >> sean is amused by this.

yourid the kit in way. she's can do it she's going to do it and i just started following-- i thought that's odd. i thought i will follow that is not a book i just thought that's interesting. curious thing and i just want to know more. flashforward a few weeks , "money ball" had come out not long before and i got to be friends with the brain trust such as they were with nfl-- some were brain trust and some you would not trust with a brain, but the brain trust at the 40 niners was great and he and i hadan a "money ball" conversation about football and he said we have the money ball story that's the same because everyone has the same amount of money to spend. it's not aboutut thinking how to do more with less. what's it is about is figuring out how to distribute money across

the field and i said if you get me the history of how it's happened since free agency created a market and he pulled it outor and it was remarkable that you had this character on the offense of line, left tackle, who predicted that quarterback blindside his salary had gone from the lowest to the the field second-highest. he was the insurance policy on the most valuable asset as if the quarterback got hit on that side he would be hurt in a way he wouldn't normally. i thought that's interesting. flashforward six or eight months every about michael moore, but it's not my store. just my old high school friend doing something odd and shawn called me and said you won't believe what just happened. there's a lot of that. nick sabin, alabama came to his cool looking at players in our school and he saw michael on the basketball court and shawn knew him.

he said sean, who is that kids. that's a future nfl left tackle. he could see from the way he moves and i said sean, do you know what they get paid and he said no that's just what it was i told him the financial story and then i said-- i started to think there is a story here and the story is that the kid the moment he was identified as the future nfl left tackle which indeed he became, he went from like the most prized kid in the universe. from the least of value to on earth to the most valued the 17-year old in a flashlu and i thought a story that can be organized along these lines what are the forces in those kids lives that changes value and one of those forces is stuff that happened and it nfl strategy, but one of those forces is a mother. once i realized that, i

had a story and this always happens. i had it for six months before i had the nerve to say i'm going to write because i kind of thought-- i often think there is someone better to write this, someone who actually has empathy for those emotions or someone who knows about psychology or someone-- there is always some-- it's alien to me, so i really shouldn't be the one to do it. the truth is the fact that it's alien to you is why you should do it because maybe you get across to the people to whom it's alien in the stuff is interesting. pushed me over that edge and shawn came out and he was a color commentator and came out and they were playing the warriors and he started telling my wife and i some of those stories. he said he mentioned to my wife that it was interesting when michael

came into the house because we took him into a room and leeann showed him his bed and he started and he said what he said i'm never had a bad. 15 years old and had never had a bad. my wife started crying and then got in the cardg and said afterwards you are an idiot if you do anything but write this book as i started to write this book. it sounds like a one-off kind of thing, but that has happened to me with various stories over and over. >> you have a common theme of unrecognized value in several of your brooks. is that something you shoot for and think to yourself this book, every business person in america will buy my book at the airport because when you are sort of same is with money ball "the blindside" "the big short" and the new book, "undoing project" there is value out there that you could recognize. is that a conscious seem

you have? >> no. what does seem to happen a lot and i don't quite know why, i mean, i can guess why, but the books come back to market in the way markets don't function sometimes well. markets out of miraculous in a lot of ways, so value comes to market, open value of the market. some stories have a market angle to them. i think i have always been since i left new orleans, always been amused by what is valued and why because i came from a place that was very charming place to grow up, a really rich interesting childhood. i loved it and i love the culture, the people, the place. it was a failed place. it was not valued, so the fact that there are all these people over and over that are special and don't get valued properly and people who are distinctly not to special who get valued highly and that-- so

that has always interested me since i was a little kid. really interested me. my father told me not that long ago that he introduced me to the stock market, which i never had an interest and still don't have much of an interest, but he's obsessed with it. he likes to watch his portfolio. just watch it. [laughter] >> i don't get that, but so he's watching his portfolio saying i'm going to give you 10 shares of a stock and you can learn how to watch it, also. and i was 14 years old and he gave me a little black book t in which to keep the record of what i saw when i was watching it. he gave me 10 shares of chart house which was a restaurant. he gave it to me because it's a newborn-- new orleans restaurant and i looked at it, $20 a share, that he paid $220

i said, well 10 shares $12 a share is $200. wets the 20 bucks and he said that's what we had to pay to buy the stock and i said that's outrageous. he charges 20 bucks? just a phone call. how does that happen and i remember being outraged at the value assigned at that role even back then. >> venue invented online trading; right? we should talk as a novelty about your new book. [laughter] >> "the undoing project" tell us how you got into that. it's a did-- bit different from your other booksin, more about psychology, more academic. is a really fundamentally a friendship book about friends? >> i think it's a love story.

the movie love story, your thinking-- it is a love story. when i finished it and it was being sold for a movie, the hollywood reporter called me and asked me what is the one mind elevator pitch for this book like it's about these two academic sitting in a room dreaming up i does about the human mind works and how you turn that into a movie kind of thing. he said what's your pitch and i said "broke back mountain", but they [bleep] each other's ideas that's what it is. >> we can delete that line, somehow; right? >> just as friends here, joel. no one will be offended by that word.

so, what happened was the way this story came about is it's about to israeli psychologists. like you and you are working on a book i don't like to talk about it when i'm working on it d and it's amazing how quickly my books can be described in way that people don't want to know anything more about them. so, we working on, a book about baseball. no one asks another question, but if you want to stop a room cold like a dinner party, which he working on, israeli psychologists. that stops it appeared no one was to know anymore, but that's what this book is about. the way it came about was, it grew out of "money ball". "money ball" a book about evaluation of people that happen to be baseball players. interesting baseball players get ms. valued the way they did and they got missed valued by people making intuitive judgments

about their value and i thought that's what the story was. it comes out and gets reviewed by distinguished legal scholar and behavioral economists. they sate nice story, but mr. lewis has missed the point of his own story, basically. what he has told is a kind of case study. a case study in the way the human mind leads us astraytu when it is operating from the gut, human intuition. the ways in which the human mind leads us astray is mapped by these two israeli psychologistss in the late 70s and i went i miss the story. i never heard of it. >> you get one bad review or questionable

review in the new republic and write an entirely new book silicates for comp kidded them that, obviously. i had never heard these guysd even though the year"-- "money ball" was being written. it bothered me i missed the trick. i like to think that people say that an explanation is where the mind comes to rest and books are explanations. what you do you-- with your stories where your mind came to rest and i think i have exhausted the material that no one can cut-- come behind me and find something great that i did notto find, but this is something really great that didn't even occur to me. something that is wired in certain ways and people have figured out how we are wired that explains the whole "money ball" story.

it's just bother me for years i thought about it not the way the father-- my father watched the stock market, but i mentioned it to a psychologist friend and he saidrk danny, and lives happily mile from your house. you can talk to him about this and get it off your chest. i knocked on his door and we developed a relationship walking through the hills of berkeley and he would talk about his now dead colleague, his lover. was in his physical lover, but in every other way they were like passionately involved with each other and tumultuously involved with each other and then i thought i'm going to win this penny drops. i taught for a term. i was supposed to teach writing, which, i mean, didn't do a good job. one of my favorite students turned out he

was amos' oldest son and access to both sides of this collaboration and the material-- i kept saying i'm not the one to write this. i'm not jewish and it takes place in israel, and a lot of it. the backdrop is the birth of the israeli state in early israel. i didn't take psych 101 and no particular interest in psychology at that point. i was all alien. took me forever to talk myself into a place where i thought i should be the one to do it. what led me to this point, eight years after i first learned about it was the people who knew the story were starting to die and it was growing clear that if i did not tell it it would be gone.

i think it's an incredibly important story. i think their work is incredibly important.e, very emotional story between the two men. i thought it was an unusual story. at that point they turned to danny and said it's going to seem odd to you because you know i don't know anything, but i want to write a book about thisd and he hemmed and hawed and didn't like it and i said okay, it you guys-- the work is too important someone will write a book about it and it will probably be a bad book in your view and if anyone should have a right to have a bad book about you, it should be me and so that's how it started. >> did he himself write a book or did you write that book for him thinking back, i mean, because at the end you mention you saw some early chapters of the book-- >> i saw it on its way to the garbage can. he was when i i met him among the first things out of his mouth said you come at a good time

because they asked me to write this book, but it's such garbage it will remind reputation and it's going in the garbage. i said can i read it any then said don't throw this in the garbage can. i watched him-- the quality and danny that is peculiar that he adds to a degree i have never seen in any other human being is doubts or doubt about everything around him including his own thoughts. he's like constantly chewing up what he creates before gets out the door. so, he got to a point after throwing it away and pulling it out of the trash can for five times where he said i know what we will do because he didn't trust my judgment. he said g i'm going to give that money to a friend of mine who's a specialist in my field

and have him distribute this money and thirds to three people he likes and he won't tell me who they are and their job is to trash the book, to write a negative review for me so i can see about it is. his own book. he paid $5000 fori [bleep] reviews for his own book to talk him out of publishing that. this is a peculiar territoryng. that's what you are looking for. >> genius. >> even better, he thinks he's normal. the best characters don't know their characters. the minute someone knows they are character they lose altitude on the page and he soared the whole way through. he was just a different person and he had a lot of different thoughts and he would have never had the thought if he had not had this love affair with amos. anyway, it was a long torturous path to writing the book because it was even more off my

beaten track than usual. >> so, you have a lot of other opportunities offered to you about writing a movie or i think-- did you write a novel once? you know the movies made of your broke so when people want to know what is brad pitt really like [laughter] >> do we want to know? i can tell you. yes, but before we get into the movie thing i don't want to create the impression i had anything to do at the movies. i think they are great, but the apropos of this gathering that the people in hollywood really prefer authors be dead. [laughter] >> because all the living author does is cause trouble. he wants credit. he wants to criticize

you taking his precious work of art and screwing it up. he wants to tell you who to cast. he was saying around with you. they don't like you alive. so, they convey this-- that was the odd thing about hollywood is that there are fast to do sleep-- that everyone always-- almost challenges each other to be rude first in a conversation in la in the movie business like everyone is showing off how gracious they can be even while they are sticking a knife in your back. it's not like wall street that way. so, between a living author who maintains a good relationship with the movie business is this-- they pretend to be interested in what you have to say and you pretend to believe they are interested and as long as no one thinks

there is anything genuine there than the relationshipte can be quite lovely. [laughter] >> that's what happened with brad pitt and the relationship was quite lovely. i don't know if we will ever be together again. i hope we are, but i will tell you a story that encapsulatesto a part of bread that. when you meet brad pitt you are supposed to think he must be dumb because he's so beautiful, but he is not dumb. he's very smart, interested in things and a delight to talk to. b shockingly normal without being completely normal, but this is a bradd pitt story. he wanted nothing to do with this movie to the point he refused to go to this set. when they said they're going to make the movie after i told him hee could sell his rights without fear of making the movie.

he called me up andr said you bastard. he was angry. he said brad pitt just called and he's coming to my house and my wife is putting on makeup. [laughter] >> and the babysitter is wearing a dress. [laughter] >> you bastard. so, in the middle of making the movie the movie people who want you to engage in this relationship where you pretend to believe that they care what you think , was an comfortable that billy dean was not coming to the set. he wasn't returning the phone calls and didn't want anything to do with it. they were filming in his office in an open call us him for a few weeks and his office is right there and he would refuse to come down. one day they called me, please, everyone is upset. could you get billy to the set.

i called the billy and said just put everyone out of their misery and come down for 10 minutes. nothing bad will happen. to say hi and smile and then you can leave and, he said you promise that you will be there and i said yes. so i drive out to the set and you see the movie in the coliseum where they re-created a game between the a's and the kansas city royals and all these body doubles with 8000 people in the seat and they move around the stadium to make it look for. i go out with my daughter dixie who's been nine or 10 years old. they just finished shooting one of these things were brad pitt is walking around the field he comes over because that's the kind of guy he is and gets down when me and starts talking to dixie and i leave them alone for 10 minutes. 10 minutes later dixie's around my leg and i looked down and she has this look of terrorne and her eyes and she said

was that weird old guy. in walks billy dee. billy comes over and bradd pitt vanished. a production assistant with a folder with a broken it comes running overn and he said mr. bean, thank you for coming to the set. we've been waiting for veyou. he said you are my hero and your book changed my life. billy looked at me and said it's his broke and i said no, it was your broke mr. dean that changed my life. please sign my book. he said okay i'll sign the book. they were to billy dean's in professional baseball work they played in the same outfit on the twins and the tigers took one spelled with an eight e. the other billy dee came out of the cause and wrote a book about coming out of the closet [laughter]

>> is plain for the other team, something like that. i don't know what it was, but it was that and thetitle young man flips open the book and it's the gay billy dean memoir. billy dean is like there's no right answer at that point. [laughter] >> : the dugout brad pitt is rolling around laughing because he set the whole thing upp as a practical joke and that was the only reason he wanted billy dean to come to the movie. [laughter] >> so, that's brad pitt. that they brad pitt story. >> i'm glad i asked. [applause]. >> we have microphones and we will do questions come up and ask a question. don't make a speech about how much you love michael. we know how much you love him. >> that's betteron.

>> i think there are microphones. their eco. ask a question. >> are they all appear or other sum of the back? >> i guess i will start. >> yes, sir? >> i have read several of your books and it seems to me you have a fairly consistent technique where you strongly personalize sort of a theme. so you are writing about the emergence of the left tackle as an important player in football and the restructuring of the economics of the game and so you really drill down on michael or writing about the economics of baseball. with ""the big short" irrevocable main characters but still strongly personalizing these larger themes. clearly there are advantages to that in terms of narrative strength.

talk about about the pluses and also the minuses of that approach. >> of writing three people? i don't know any other way to do it. what i found from the beginning of my career where i was the main character, i found myself easy to sympathize with. [laughter] >> it was a gift. i felt everything that character felt. [laughter] >> approved of almost everything he did and said. the trick such as it is -- it's a trick that i naturally get interested in things, interested through characters, through people and almost all the books have in common aside from a market angle is their characters-- interesting characters to me an interesting situations. the trick is that if you

can attach the reader to the character at the beginning of the book they will follow that character anyway. trust me that there is no one in america who will want to read my description of collateralized debt obligation, but once you realize the lives of these people you have come to know turn on knowing what that is then you want to know, so it's a very very powerful life that is the origins of the literature. i don't regard it, though, you say the minuses, what would be the minuses. i guess you could argue that you are kind of facing undue emphasis on a person when-- i usually pick people that deserve the emphasis. billy dean deserved to

be the face of the transformation of baseball through intellect. anyway. >> i wanted to thank you for flash boys on wall street and the affect that had. i rode that, went to school with a ronnie morgan. that was a coincidence. got involved in that whole battle. fidelity ended up closing my account because i kept insisting i should directly connect to ie x. maybe you can talk a bit about that, but thank you very much. >> talk about that abet. >> may never die, but right now it's close to dead end of the problem is revealed in the sony hack. e-mails back-and-forth about how impossible it was to make a movie with eight asian lead. p i

they have gotten to the point where they are nervous about making a asian guy a white guy. they don't have well enough known asian male actor, which i think isth crazy. crazy because the whole point is that he's unknown in real life. the actor could create the person. the flash boys story to me is still very, very, very much alive. it's not sorted out. there's a war going on at the heart of wall street and it won't be properly regulated. it's not. our narrow vested interest in a queer regulation in the weight it essentially causes taxis to it-- taxes to be levied on the rest of us right now. the single greatest force shining a light on

the whole problem and trying to fix it. ice-- he's canadian, that he's an american hero. i find the story very moving. 60 minutes did their peace there was a lot of screaming and yelling and a lot of people shouting at me that i got it all wrong. no one has demonstrated to me that what they are saying is not true. it's shocking the problems. i don't know. >> gentlemen over here. >> what are you working on now? >> well, politics has gotten interesting. [laughter] >> i was struck after the presidential election with you got elected president.

but, it was interesting to me and i have, have gotten-- maybe in march, april the vast yawning gap between the effort that the obama administration had put into the transition and of the trump administration had into the transition and obama administration had-- inspired by bush, obama had been grateful to brush for how much effort he put into handing the government over to him and obama had deputed to a 3000 people around him through his administration to create a short course in how the federal government works i, so that in our crazy system with these people rolling and that you don't know much about d what's going on in the department of energy say, they can quickly get up to speed. the day after-- that

assumption was as in the past, handovers that the day after the election they would be 30, 40 people from the new administration rolling into every government agency and crammingmi for 70 days until the inauguration because after the inauguration happens people are for bitten by law from getting in touch with their old agencies, so you have very real need for a thorough, click education and really mission-critical things. trump peopleio literally didn't show. of the parking spaces were empty, offices were set aside like non- audiological differences. i think this-- we will pay a big price. it's a bomb with a long refuse, but the mismanagement of the

government that results from this is a big deal. happily, it's made some material interesting. [laughter] >> i mean, trump has electrified the federal government. who doesn't want to read about the department of energy? they preside over the nuclear arsenal and there is a guy on top that doesn't even know that. it's kind of incredible. you can't make this up. it's hollywood comedy after hollywood comedy waitedhi to happen. what i'm doing right now , the trump administration didn't bother to get the briefings and i'm doing the briefings. i did this monthgs ""vanity fair" where i go around the department of energy. i would didn't know, but i wasn't pretending to run it. i figured out what the hell this place does.

i moved it to the government and to the other departments, so that is a project. [applause]. >> i have a quick question on the undoing project and behavioral economic issues. you been out of wall street for a number years and so much is based on making rational decisions, what are your thoughts about the impact of the whole business more getting to realize of the irrationality and we are not as rational as so many people think we are >> the impact of behavioral economics on wall street? >> yes. >> you know, if we lived in a saner world, much of what wall street does would not be doing.

shortly after my father explained it to me that the guy charging 20 bucks to buy the stock, he also explained to me that wall street floats on [bleep] and it really still does. it's amazing in this day and age that people will give the kind of financial advice they give with a straight face. people will claim to know where the prices of things are going or have some insight into it and actually direct people's moneyec on the basis of this insight when they have no idea. they will construct a story about their career that seems to indemonstrate that they predicted things that were inherently not only did they not predict them they were inherently unpredictable the processes are being construed as patterns and the patterns are being designed by people up a lot of money for. is crazy. economists would have a

lot to say about it. bus, the truth is that people don't like taking responsibility for making their own financial decisions, so they will always pay these people i think to get rid of the problem. abbé can't get get it in their heads that not only is that person not an expert, there is no such thing as an expertisexp. they can get it in their head that he was a bad expert and lost my money. they can't get it in their head that they shouldn't listen to anyone.irld so, the damage that the intellectual work grows at a behavioral economics can do to wall street i think is minimal because wall street is responding to -- psychological need that has nothing to do

so you can argue it away. in short, i think the answer is very little. >> where do you invest your money? just curious. mattressus? >> so, if-- saying you think wall street floats on [bleep] is not saying you don't think that the american economy is an incredible miracle and an engine of wealth creation. of the economy is wonderful. the american economy is one of the great miracles 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-- the broadest thing is to decide how much you want to put in the stock marketci and how much you want to put somewhere else. after that, how you put it in the stock marketen,

i either by low-cost index funds, a basket of stocks or i give it to warren buffett and i do this by buying berkshire hathaway and this is a basket of stock he has. he is the onehe person on the planet who has a different value assigned to. people pay more for his money because of his reputation and he gets deals no one ever gets, so i have long lambasted him for being in this situation, and then i just gave up and surrender to. i'm so happy i surrendered. i own a bunch of brookshire hathaway stock. >> hello. i wonder approximately what percentage or to what degree you choose how to repair the practice this interview and the responsepr? [laughter] >> she asked how much we prepared.

>> tomorrow night we are in new york and the next night boston. >> where were we last night? >> we did this before at politics and prose of the street, but this is a slightly larger crowd. >> i don't know if you have ever actually talk to me about my book. >> this is fake news. i always ask you about your book. >> he wrote a book about george washington. >> really have a couple minutes.: are you still there softball commissioner for your daughter's leg? >> i retarded year ago because my daughter outgrew me. i ran into a problem with the competitive softball program in the east bayay. >> that must have been eight heady thing,>> the feeling of powerth. >> actually, it was a fantastic social experience. i know we have to wrap it up. i live in berkeley, which is filled with liberal people who don't

believe in competition. [laughter] >> about softball league is a little rock racial softball league. albany girls softball league.if coaching this league and have to lose happy of games. [laughter] >> so, the perfect coach goes 500. however, some years ago someone realized some people had a competitive streak and so they allowed an organization on the side of reform that after the leak concluded that all-stars were picked .. republicans. and this was always a miserable -- every game was custer's last stan. it was a miserable experience. these little girls were sent off and get mutilated by these red

and tooth and claw republicans. i took over the operations seven years ago, and i created liberal warriors. >> host: everyone in this room has the same thought. this is his next book. >> guest: and we went out and we really kicked some republican ass. it was really great. and earned their respect for the fir time. so, my 15-year-old now, when she was ten, her team was number one in the country, and we got very, very good, and the way i got good was by going outside of the culture of berkeley and getting hard-ass college women softball players who did not want to hear, we're going to lose. can i give you a cute little story. >> host: a small fraction. >> guest: when my daughter's team is going 40-1, my son, walker, is seven years old, six