presidential historian will discuss the relationship and political careers of presidents george h.w. bush and george w. bush. finally this week on saturday and sunday we'll be live at the 2017 miami book fair featuring senator al franken, best selling biographer walter isaacson, nbc news' katie, the ur and several others. many of these events are open for the public. look for them to air in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> and now booktv's monthly "in depth" program with best selling author michael lewis. mr. lewis has written many books including liars' poker, moneyball, the big short and most recently, "the undoing project: a friendship that changed our minds." ..

asked me i never really asked myself exactly. what lead me to want to write a book because they are a pain in the neck to do. you need a level of passion about it. usually what it is if i look back on it it is finding a person. an interesting person in an interesting situation and explore some interesting ideas. what almost always happens is i have a lot of little projects, magazine pieces, things i am investigating, it consumes me and i get to the point, this is such a good story i have an obligation to tell it. that is the point of the book, i have to do this, it should be done because it should be told. in terms of you asked me to go

to a class of journalism schools, to write a good story i wouldn't know how to begin. >> host: you were working for salomon brothers. >> guest: my career path, there should be something on the bottom of the tv screens at says try this in your own home. i don't think you can grasp the model on a literary career. i was an art history major in college. i wanted to -- i stumbled out of college without any particular direction. the first book, "liar's poker: rising through the wreckage of wall street," accidentally without a great deal of intention. what happened was while i was working on my princeton thesis, i became engrossed with the writing of it. i had never written for

newspapers, never conceived of myself as a writer. i like to read, but didn't have anybody telling me you are a born writer. when i finished and handed it to my professor and had a defensive thesis, i got very vain about how it was written and looked for him to say this is nicely written. he hadn't said it so in the course of this exchange i said what did you think of the writing? he said put it this way, never try to make a living at it. but i tried. when i got out of college, i really want to write, i want to write books so i started submitting things to magazines, things started to be published and one thing led to another. the practical thing that happened that was useful for my

career was doing something other than right. it was hugely useful given my subsequent career that i spent two years, gave me material, you wouldn't get in a normal journalistic life on the inside of something like that. that attached engines, and experience to write about. >> host: i wonder, you are currently working on, what are your upcoming projects? >> guest: at any time if you come to my office you would see a row on a bench, you might want to do this. there are dozens of things in various states of neglect. the thing that has me jazz, it will sound boring, right in the federal government when trump

was elected i watched the transition there were bits and pieces in the newspaper, the administration bylaw prepared for the transition, with 2 million employees in production, a level of 4000 who role in not knowing much but have to cram to figure out what is going on, the department of energy and agriculture and people who role in, from the point of view of the outgoing administration, and the obama administration, how they prepared for the transition in 2008 during a time of crisis obama directed his government to pay attention in a big way.

maybe the best course ever created how the federal government works from agency to agency, smart people waiting to teach and the trump administration didn't show up for it. some departments really didn't show up for it. i thought it was a missed opportunity. if you approve of everything obama stood for you could learn a lot from outgoing people how it works, the amount of overlap is greater then the political noise we would have you believe. i went to get the briefing, calling up career civil service, can you give me the talk with the briefing book that you were going to get whoever was supposed to show up, figure out how it works, what they might not know might

kill them and almost arbitrarily i started with the energy department, it is misnamed, the department of nuclear weapons and neglect of that is frightening. in the second one, a kind of test pace, you want to read about that, nuclear weapons, seems alarming a new administration with come in so haphazard about the nuclear stockpile. let's see, the department of agriculture, what goes on in there and spent several months getting those briefings and it was riveting to me, things they had to say, the range of activities, i will keep doing

it. where it leads i don't know. as i suggested, the first question, i feel excitement about the material. >> host: if you take a look "moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game" about algorithms, an interesting story about people and personalities and america's pastime how do you weave that together? >> guest: how does it start? i don't look and say there's a book here. it starts very small with an observation, watching my local baseball team, money was starting to happen in baseball, free agent salaries going through the roof. i looked and i thought that is hard. it used to be -- they were close to each other. and a right fielder paid $6

million, kicked off the left fielder, the class resentment, watching money on the field, the story is not that or not only that, how much money the team has, my team is a poor team, it has a fourth payroll for the new york yankees weighing as many games as the new york yankees, in an efficient market, we just buy the best there is, how come that is not happening? starts with a question. i go see management to ask about it. their answer is so riveting it takes a month to figure out this isn't a magazine piece or a little article. this is a book. >> host: really interesting character played by brad pitt

in the movie, i realized at some point could be the engine for the narrative. than the question of how you put it together in a way the reader will keep turning pages. the bottom of it, in an odd way is the easy part, figuring out what the story is about. what i thought the story was about, baseball was what we were going to be reading about but underneath the fact that any people, any labor market could be so inefficient, marked for baseball players, forget the baseball players, corporate employees doing what they do with millions of people watching them do their job, they were not counting things,

a lot of what they did on the field, they can be so valued you can build a juggernaut on the baseball team, who can't? that is the way markets miss value people. once you had that energy, that is an important story that transcends the immediate subject matter, laying out -- >> host: went did you get to the point? this is going to be the story? >> i can't always answer that question with every book but in the case of "moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game," it is funny. i was trying to figure how this operation starting with the front office, strategy, people using their intuition to better

statistical analysis, at one point i said what do players think? kind of odd, they don't look like most teams, you have to go slow, that kind of thing. players, we don't tell the players anything come all the stuff, it just confuses them. don't tell them. but i thought this is the start of a conversation with the player, a lab rat, you could talk to the lab rat. i was thinking i had a long magnet. the penny hadn't dropped and i went to go systematically bound the clubhouse. and and waiting for player to

come back from the showers and looking at the players coming back from the showers. for the first time i had seen the oakland days naked and it was a really unpleasant site like a baseball uniform -- a lot of body fat where there shouldn't have been, misshapen parts. i had the thought that if you line those bodies against the wall and ask anyone what they lived for a living no one would guess they were professional athletes. tv interview with maybe, not professional athletes. i realized how they didn't look right, mentioned this the next day, that is a funny thing you say because we talk about that. when a player looks wrong, one reason the market is valued, we see a player look like a famous baseball player who has played

before, the market will get a good player, they see him and say that is a player but if use short or fatter has club feet they say something is off about him and the markets are put off. we are essentially in the business of finding people who have defects and the more obvious defects the better it is in a way because the defects will distract baseball experts from seeing the real value of what that person is doing and that is when i thought how they look in baseball has an effect how they are valued? how can that be? that i started thinking this is a story of market and how screwed up they can be, not just baseball players but women in the workplace. it applies to a lot of things,

the way we stereotype and how that affects the value of people who are stereotyped. and how on earth i lay it out, that point, sitting here, tricked into writing a book, six weeks into a relationship that is a real magazine for the new york times, fine with that. i rolled in and said you can see the expression change but it was too late, spent so much time with me i couldn't get out of this.

>> host: 202-748-8200, 3 hours the first sunday of the month, in depth and our guest, michael lewis. we will take your calls in a minute. this is from 2011. >> i worked under sandy alderson. and went back the bill changed, and made sense for me and once i had access to that, no turning back for myself, it starts when michael lewis was in her office, it is a challenging situation, and the

organization itself, and sports analytics. >> host: your reaction. >> guest: it gets even funnier, got tricked into that. to understand, couldn't spend my time with them and see what they are doing. and much of that material, and the toronto blue jay's, texas rangers and seattle mariners affiliated with the organization and really different so billy been saw me doing this. he is writing about baseball. i try not to clue in the subject too much, he gets the

book, and when a reader can read it is too late, and he calls me, horribly upset, kind of shouting at me. and if i felt sneaky about it, it is not in his interest to write this book, gaining a market advantage and other teams, that was what he was upset about. i said what are you upset about you do you have me saying, can't say the word on tv, expletive, cursing all the time. i said what? you do curse all the time. you don't understand, my mother is really upset. if she reads this she will be

upset with your mother? i thought if that is all you are worried about, i thought you were worried that i exposed your secrets to major league baseball team that you will no longer be able to win baseball games for less money and this long pause, you don't think anyone in baseball is going to read your book? nobody is going to read your book. people do read the book and it goes crazy and his life will up. to his credit, he could easily have said michael lewis does not know what he is talking about. we gave him a few interviews but he got it all wrong. he could easily have thrown me under the bus but he didn't, he fought back on my behalf. flashforward, a few months, a movie studio wants to buy the

book and turn it into a movie. in 2004, 2003, a lot of movie studios by a lot of things i have written nothing had been made into a movie and, the money is an option and it is great, free money, they make it, billy calls me and says you won't believe who calls, some movie studio wants to buy my life rights to make into a movie, he's laughing. that is not going to happen. i said what did you say? know. i don't want a movie, i don't want the book, i don't want to movie. if you are thinking about it all the wrong way. they give you money, never make anything, they just buy stuff, you will take the money and put it in a drawer and they will never make it. from "liar's poker: rising through the wreckage of wall street" to a dozen magazine pieces they bought, and he is listening and goes wow, good deal. if i sign it they will give me

money so he signs it. every 18 months for six years he will get another check which he called me and said this is fantastic, they just send you money and never make the money. one day he calls me and says you mastered, brad pitt just called, he's on the way to my house, my wife is putting on makeup and the babysitter is wearing a dress, he said you said this wasn't going to happen. i was as shocked as anybody. i was shocked. these relationships i have with my subjects, i really am the chicken with the ham and egg breakfast, the subject is i'm interested, they are committed and i could move on with my life, but a book and a movie exploding in a person's life is amazing, the grace that he handled it. it is not pleasant.

even if it is pleasant, this way, it is odd and distorted. he has handled it very well. >> host: another book became a movie, blindside, is a true your wife that you would be an idiot if you didn't write the book? >> guest: yes. you may have gathered in order to write i need to tell myself a story about why i am writing the story. i am the only one who can tell the story because i have a privileged position. "the blind side: evolution of a game," it helps if it connect up to things you have done before. if it at least rhymes with something you've done before. i could write a book like that. it was not preposterous that i write a book even if it is

about baseball. there was a somatic connection but "the blind side: evolution of a game," the action involved, since we have three hours i can tell you this at length, shut me if i'm going on too long. >> host: we could go longer. >> guest: no one has listen to me at this link. anyway. >> host: we have 2 hours and 35 minutes. >> guest: i decided i wanted to write a piece, quixotic exercise about the teacher who most influenced me in my life who happened to be a great man named billy fitzgerald and i wanted to persuade new york times magazine to put billy fitzgerald on its cover and

just get at how someone gets into the head of the kids, so powerful and with such purpose, i hear now. -- >> host: let led to the book "coach: lessons of the game of life". >> guest: i was thinking about that in the story, from kinderh 12th grade, turning the radio, being there for 13 years.

he picks me up at the airport and the first thing he said was who writes your books? i said i write my books. your name is on the mend you promote them but who writes them? i sit down and write my books. he goes you are a dumbass like me in the back of english class, no way you write books. took me forever to persuade them that i was actually the pen in the operation and not just a front man for a bookselling operation. he takes me to his house. he was a poor boy growing up and made a huge success of himself in the outskirts of memphis tennessee and introduces me to his family. in his living room, 6 foot 5, 350 pound, basically introduced to me or explained in any way.

that is my goal, came to the school, in shorts and a t-shirt in the snow and pulled over, one thing led to another, basically homeless and not functioning in school so took him in and we got back in touch and the story of what is going on in their house and it is clearly pygmalion except with a modern twist, rich white evangelical, trying to -- with some success he starts to become under her regime, starts

to succeed in school, he starts to come out of the shell a bit. a really gifted athlete was drafted by the new jersey nets, playing in the nba, by the cincinnati reds, that good, maybe could have played a central baseball and sean is a fixer like he knows how to fix and said i can train him up. like a basketball player, i could train him in college, that will be his ticket into college. the coach will get him into the school. pause for a second because of moneyball, sports franchises talk about analytics, how you

intellectualize and became friends with the guy in the front office san francisco 49ers football team and talk about the interesting questions about money in sports, not how much money you have because everybody has the same payroll. it is more how the money is distributed. do you have any data in 3 agency happens, a time when everybody got paid by the organization, the valuable position and brought up the data, what we all expect in other fields but used to be in the old days like a running back, more high profile player and with free agency this guy called the left tackle who guards the quarterback's blindside, became the second highest paid player and no one

knew their names but they were very peculiar physical type, elephants or ballerinas, huge, especially big hands, defenders coming in, long arms, incredibly agile, quick. i was learning about that. you will never believe what just happened. nick sabin, coach of the crimson tide and lsu tigers, come through the school and seen michael or on the basketball court and said that is a future nfl left tackle. at that point he had been in uniform on the football field and put him on the bench, a sophomore, an expensive player who didn't hit anybody and seemed disoriented on the field. at this point i turned to my

wife and heard some of the stories and it is quite moving, shows michael or is dead and he stares at it, i never had a bite in my life. this is a new thing for me. that is in the movie and these things were happening but that is not my kind of story, to get a kid you grew up with and make them a main character in a book, seems like it is cheating in some way. a color commentator of the memphis grizzlies and went to dinner telling stories, there is a book here but not my book, we got in the car and, you are needed if you don't make this

the next book. the inherent drama in the story, i realize at some point, the way to organize it, i could harmonize with my own writing path, and it was if you ask the question how does michael or go from being a homeless foraging street kid who is likely to be dead or in jail, very bad neighbor in memphis and projected future when he is 15 is not pretty, from least valued invisible people in his age to one of the most, future nfl left tackle which he became in two years.

how does that happen? one of the things, the forces in nfl football that led to particular things to become valuable, and another thing is a mother but i will write a story around this kid, about these forces. what got me jazzed about it, it was related to the "moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game" story, we think of inner-city poor america, the athletes get out because they do get out, their talents are so conspicuous they get spotted, the truth is something as conspicuous as a future left tackle would have been less

active, and some other people but took some accidents. if that kid can be missed, what talents are in their? or not being trained, such a waste, what motivated me, the story of my life, said this. i don't think i tried. in my writing career i got less concerned about how to explain why i should write this. i kind of do it now but back then i was anxious about it. >> host: your wife, the audience may know who she is. >> guest: most people know who she is more quickly than they know who i am.

the face of mtv for a stretch, she was on air at mtv and the photographer, art photographer, you can go to her website, she is really good and i watched her, hard to do. she was on tv, i don't know if you are this way but she didn't have the ambition to be on tv, she started behind the camera, she was interested in being behind the camera and the talent when they didn't show up, the guy ran places and the person who didn't show up took the job, that is how she ended up on tv, it is a funny story. i was covering the new republic in a very peculiar way the 1996 presidential campaign, dole

versus clinton, the main candidates were not saying anything interesting. i noticed there was a really interesting story, all people running for president never going to win. most are names you will never know. amazing the people running for president, you think you are running for president, always minor characters, alan keyes, had this passion, far more passionate than major candidates who were never going to win. i could tell a travel story. i was on the road constantly. the primary -- a little bit of an intermission looking for material, taking up these trends eyespot down the road

and one of them was adrift with mtv, the choose or lose, registering young people. so i called to see what you are doing and the publicist at mtv on the other end of the bus. seattle, going from portland to seattle, michael lewis called and demanded an interview which i had not done. i knew she was, not really. then they came to me and said would you like it? why not? so i met and her attitude, she was hit when she showed up,

dinner with him, flying, not allowed to tag along at the event. i have seen what he does in pages of the new republic and i don't want it done to me. i will have dinner with him, or any more than that and she flew in, we had dinner, came along the next day and the next, that was 1996. we were married in the fall of 97, floating around the world. >> host: a lot to talk about with michael lewis on booktv, in-depth. george from new york city, go ahead. >> caller: in your book "the undoing project: a friendship that changed our minds" you say is when he came on the amethyst

theory, any idea of a future nobel prize, how did you guess the year before he got the nobel prize that he would get it? >> guest: should i give some background here? my most recent book which i published last december? >> host: why the title "the undoing project: a friendship that changed our minds"? >> guest: it was about a collaboration about the nobel prize in economics which was quite a trick, didn't actually know all that but the work they did in psychology so infected economics, economics could be north. there is a general answer to your question and that was when i thought about what these guys had done, what they had done was attack the idea of rational man in various ways, showed the way the human mind was

susceptible to making cognitive error, making certain kinds of mistakes. these mistakes were meaningful it would lead to medical diagnoses, bad decisions about which baseball players to employ if you were a baseball manager. they were undoing a false and conceited view of man but the phrase came from 1996, i had access to his papers and in the file or he had a folder labeled the undoing project and this was particularly poignant, they had a collaboration, intellectual collaboration, a love affair, almost beside the point, the undoing project, he

and danny were working on when they busted up and they busted up, danny -- the idea was in that moment they were trying to untangle rules of human imagination in the mere idea, not just a free-floating indefinable thing, a breathtakingly interesting idea and they were doing it in an interesting way, danny came with the original idea, he thought amos wasn't interested but amos was scribbling away in his folder he called the undoing project. there was a miscommunication between the two. if the bridge from amos and danny is richard thaler, he's an economist is psychological

insights how the mind works in economics and he won the nobel prize, he will get it in december for his work. it wasn't that hard when i wrote that line in the book to guess that richard thaler was likely to win the nobel prize, they are bandied about and he was one of them. the thing that was so interesting and important in intellectual history, he was a guy who wasn't good at school. people who are a professional economists, good at math, a very interesting, he came in a professionally odd way but there was an important career he was willing to give up economics and he had an idea of

human beings, he was predisposed to exploiting psychological insights. >> host: it is amazing how history books -- how much must be invented. >> guest: one of the insights is we are pattern seeking creatures, we will see patterns when there is no pattern. amos gave a talk to a group of historians early in their collaboration showing the way people will after an event we've a narrative that makes it seem inevitable like trump

being elected president, historians show why that was bound to happen when they could never have predicted it. what they are doing after the fact is composing the false sense of certainty how the world moves, making life seem more inevitable than they are, as if it is woven into the profession of historian and in fact the truth of life is their reality, it is not a fixed point, it is the clout of possibilities and there are many alternative realities that might have happened and there is nothing, life is not as deterministic as all that. the person who watched him give

this thought in -- they were ashen faced when they walked out because they were aware he was showing them their work and they were susceptible to the same sorts of mental errors composing a false sense, cleaning up the past to make a neat story that we all do as we move through life. >> host: if someone were to write a book about michael lewis, which often would you want to write the story? >> guest: is in a living author? >> host: no. >> guest: it would be a very dull book, generally about writers lives, probably an inverse relationship between how interesting the life is and how interesting the work is but when you see a writer have an interesting colorful life, the work will not be that good. he becomes a character and not

really. there is not much material. i hope will be a writer i hate because it would be punishment but someone who would get me or fun to be written about, someone like that, who approaches the act of writing for himself, and aspect of fun, would not be an election, it would be a big mistake. it would be some high-level journalist. that is what i would pick but going to happen i promise you. >> host: we go to michael next.

>> caller: i am a huge fan. i want to know if you ever considered writing about public education or if you spent a year in a public school in the inner-city there would be a lot of stories. >> guest: i'm thinking of writing about the department of education. the short answer is no. it is partly because i don't pick my subject, an area i must enter, healthcare or public education. it is more accidental. i read something, something curious in some school, that might lead to a book. my middle child in public

school, i work when i am home, derelict of duty right now. this is at public school and it is the most entertaining job and high stress job in the world blooge-at 4000 questions and don't know the answers to any of them because it is a chaotic place. there is material in that world, such a vital place. >> host: humble, texas, you are next, good afternoon. >> caller: i lived right outside houston, long-suffering astros fan and happy camper today and the next month or so and i love "moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game". it was an awesome book that changed my thinking about baseball and business in

general. my question, i am not a huge baseball fan but i understand the houston astros management has taken an approach described as tanking the team in order to improve its prospects for a future run at a championship. to me that sounds a little odd and not right and i would like to get michael lewis's comments on that. >> host: congratulations on the astros. there is a strategic dimension, the philadelphia 76ers did this, losing his job because management couldn't stomach that, accumulate high graphics, not intentionally losing but not trying to win because the worse you do the higher up you

are in the draft, you have access to talent year after year if you lose year after year and you can build, 76ers are showing you can tank your way to a good team. baseball is trickier. i'm not the world authority on this. astros take their way to the world series and losing those games year after year in the hands of good management, that is what they were thinking, the first pick of the draft several years running and that makes a big difference. strategically it is harder with baseball because harder to identify the best talent. it is a little more obvious.

just because you get the first pick in the draft doesn't mean you will draft the right person with it and there are many examples of first pics in the draft because they have gotten hurt or not as good as they thought they were. as a strategy, trickier in baseball, it with a combination of stuff they did, sophisticated operation. if that happens, it passed without that much commentary. the astros came from the cardinals and after that, the cardinals hacked into the astros computers, when someone goes to jail, isn't it amazing

we actually have management information, intellectual property in the front office that is worth attacking. if you go back 20 years there is nothing you could have hacked that is a worse habit. they are doing things other people in baseball find interesting and if they just lost it wouldn't have been a strategy, how do i feel about teams like the 76ers, not trying so hard, the management assembled with talent, with a view to the fourth year of the season. a little it tasteful but doesn't bother me that much but it is a deal with the fan base, putting up long enough to build the team and if it is the main strategic option for becoming

an nba champion i don't blame them. the philadelphia 76ers, we win a championship but if we don't, never going to win, go try it. >> host: "liar's poker: rising through the wreckage of wall street" came out in 1989. you talk about your own dad buying stocks, you know the story, who was making money buying stocks. >> guest: that is not in "liar's poker: rising through the wreckage of wall street". i might have mentioned that at some point. there is a point, when he was trying to teach about the stock market i don't know what i was, 12 or 13 years old. it was very interesting, a little black book, leather book where you listed investment and kept track of them and explains what stock was and bought me 20

shares of a company called chart house, picked it, he thought it was something i could relate to, restaurants in new orleans and follow it. in the ledger, $10 a share, 20 shares, $10 a share, $230, 230, why do we pay 230? the other 30 is to the broker. the broker is the one you call and say you want to buy. i said something like all he does is take your phone call and call somebody and say by that and he is charging that? where does he live? i want to go egg his house. i was so outraged.

my first brush with wall street, charging too much for their service. and stopped selling things they should by but giving up my new year's resolution. >> guest: one of the threads, the flash board, screwed up the incentives in the financial world. still to this day, as the incentive, that is how we make money. not trading that much. doctors had the incentive to prescribe medication you

shouldn't take or give you an operation, doctors have a code of ethics. doctors with financial incentive. and in their heart and wallet. and the bad incentives, felt them immediately, it was bond sales or whenever they have, to sell the stuff they made the most money on, the guys at the top of the firm, the stuff no one else could sell. more money, the firm made. and and they don't see the

value in it. in the first 6 months, and not being able to sleep. and professional many managers, billions of dollars when they should have known better. and that is what it is. >> were you making money? >> guest: seems the way they are paid now.

and $90,000. and it was 250 or so. and they don't ask much money. that is the track, it is doubled the next year or the next year. and 25 or 26. it was making money. this is how your mind gets screwed up. i knew how much they do roughly making firms. it was tens of millions of dollars. i remember feeling cheated, and my mind is going the wrong way. what they were paying was trivial.

it was a fun relationship. in many ways the financial world is a more fun place to be. the fact that i would be there on that trading floor, the financial university, my job at the center of the center, writing magazine articles while on their, that are about what i am saying but known to my experiences. diana bleeker, my mother's maiden name, diana bleeker, i wrote under diana bleeker, it appeared in the new republic and all over the trading floor. most people didn't know it was me.

they just let it happen. there was a charm to that. when i left i realized i could make a living as a writer, people -- the book contract, 250 grand i was getting paid i left for a $40,000 book contract and the best deal i ever made but when i explained to the bosses who were my bosses that i was going to quit and be a writer and write a book about wall street you would think their response with the red alert, if michael lewis doesn't get out of here, sign a nondisclosure agreement, instead it was like a crazy person, don't do this. you are going to get rich here, don't ruin your future by trying to be a writer. they were so genuinely concerned about my mental health, not about some book, there was charm in that. if you try to do that now, if you are in goldman sachs and you roll out the door after two

years, i'm going to write a book, you wouldn't get home. >> host: what did john guthrie of the book? >> guest: the book met with -- >> host: who was he? >> guest: he ran salomon brothers when i was there. .. recently, but the book met with an odd reaction in the firm. it was banned from the trading floor but everybody brought it in anyway and read under the desk. i was getting calls from friends. i had so many friends, i would just like consulate informed of what was going on. the upper management was vastly irritated with me. i cause and no end of trouble. ..

he would call in later years. i had lunch with him. he would call me from time to time. at the end you -- he point amusing, bought boxes of the book and would sign copies of them. he told me he was my biggest customer. in the end there was some reconciliation, and i grew very fond of him. but he did not like the book. >> host: the title might be obvious but how did you come up with "liar's poker" i thought it captures the level of -- a level

of mendai ty as a game and it was a gambling environment. it just gave you the that feel. it didn't -- it didn't just pop into my held. i still have a folder called my title folder to deal with every book, and whenever i'm working, title pops in my head and i write it in the folder. so there will be dozen of possible titles, and i go look at that and i can remember that i -- i remember what did. i took six titles, i thought they were all beside, including "liar's poker" and sent thome -- them to my editor and circled the "liar's poker" and said, that's the title. >> host: tim, in california, you are next. go ahead.

>> caller: hi, mikeat lewis. you are my absolute favorite author. i live in san rafael, across the bay from you, and this shows you the power of c-span, letting me get in touch with you. i have been watching lately the news about all the climate change disasters, all of the hurricanes from the southeast and houston and puerto rico, and the devastating fires we have had here in the bay area, and it brought back to me a very vivid story about the insurance industry and how they don't pay claims even though you have a solid contract with them, and it brought back memories of a very

big story that i know about between the insurance industry and the government and so forth, and i wondered how does a person get a story to you? how does a person get a chance to at least tell you the idea of a story or something that actually happened over a period of 20 years, and get you to think about it or get you to suggest someone that might be able to bring those issues out into the open for the public. >> host: tim, thank you for the call. >> guest: thanks for the call. it's funny. lots of people know my next book -- what my next book is. it may be the most common thing

that people do is come up and say you need to write a book about x. the problem is they should be -- they feel very strongly about whatever the x is but i don't have any particular feeling about it at all if wonder, why don't you write a book about x since you care so much about about it? only once in my career had someone tell me you should write a store about x and it was true, and i did write astare about x. we can come back to that. mostly i, for whatever reason, niece to discover my own stories, so i don't like -- i don't have a web site. i stay off of social media entirely. i try to hide my phone number.

but i do read letters people write when they say, you really should write a store about x. this is the best way to get it is send a letter to my publisher and my publisher forwards and it'll read it. couldn't encourage i. the likelihood i'll particularly change my life for two years because of the story you want me to tell is kind of -- it's low. i'm not that good -- the next question is, you need the story told? i can understand that feeling. where do you go? i'm not the obvious best person because i'm in the middle of a media enterprise. the obvious answer would be the san francisco chronicle or some journalistic enterprise might be a good place to go to. every now and then, someone will dom me and say, you need to write a story about x and i this will think i don't knee to write that story but i know a writer who writes that kind of story. don't know that's ever led

anywhere good. so this is a long way of saying, i'm a frustrating person to deal with if what you hope to get another of me is a book about a subject you want me to write about. >> host: but that story about xow you wrote about? >> guest: "flash boys" the most meaningful, genuine attempt in my lifetime to reform wall street from within, by a group of people, namely immigrants, who are now americans, who saw just how distorted and unfair the stock market has become and the big stock markets had abdicated their responsibilities to provide a -- to be an umpire to provide a fair place for little guys and big guys to come together and trade. instead creating an exchange to president high frequency traders

from. taking advantage of everybody else. when i first heard the stir was working on "the big short" and danny moses, a character in the big short, said to me -- a canadian guy from the royal bank of canada rolled into our office, and we had been having problem with our stock market orders help explain what was going on. that's your next book. you won't believe this guy. this guy at that point, brad, spent several years with a team of people engaged in this forensic investigation of how the stock market actually worked, and he presented some of this to these guys, and they said this your story. went, ya, ya, ya. let's get back back back to "thg short." and i wrote "the big short," i a read a newspaper article a couple years on, about a russian guy whod a worked at goldman

sachs and been arrested when he walked out the door of goldman sachs for stealing propriety tear high frequency stock market trading code he had written or helped to write and somebody decided it was their property and he had taken a flash drive and in the fbi was on him right away. i got interested. i thought, hmm, isn't thatting in, the back end of the financial crisis, the only one who gets arrest -- from goldman sachs who gets arrestedes the person goldman sachs wants arrested. then there was a news can't that the high frequency trading code, the ron he had to be arrested and held without bail was this code, if it fell into the wrong hands, it was some high door hyperbolic use by the prosecutor and i thought, goldman sachs is

the right hand? you're presuming it's been in the right hand? there's code that can do this? i realized i needed to know what high frequency trading was and danny moses said this guy who could explain it and i said who is this guy? and i went -- which i should have done in the first place -- and stat and listened to some electric toward from the these guys investigating the stock market and my jaw was on the floor. thought, why didn't i listen in the first place? so "flash boys" comes about because of the conversation but no other one. >> host: jim from west palm beach, florida, you're next. >> caller: hi, michael. big fan. read "liar's poker," read "the big short," saw he movie "blindside." could you give us your comment on the current state of markets and the way that federal reserve, the new york fed, the

bis, the world central banks, where some of them are now buying stock, and they also have this low historic interest rate environment which is sort of an enabler of the government running huge deficits, and that how this is -- this low interest rates are really hurting saves. your normal saver, and then also lastly, just right now we have a record amount of margin debt, and it's put our stock market into record territory by a lot of different metrics, but it seems like no one cares until the yield curve inverts. i just appreciate you thoughts on this. >> guest: so, i suspect my thoughts on this are not as interesting as your thoughts on this. you're probably paying closer attention to this than i am. i would just say, broadly, that you look at the markets now, we're still living in the world of the financial crisis.

the central banks are still trying to back their way out of what the felt they had to go to in response to financial crisis, which was the huge amount of liquidity into the markets. do things like buy hundreds of billions of dollars or mortgage-backed securities. and they're finding it hard to -- once you lower interest rates to zero or basically zero, coming back the other way is hard. i wonder, stock market -- there was a conventional wisdom tom when president trump was elected pratt that the stock market would collapse. i collapsed for a moment and then was back.

the caller is right that one of the unfortunate side effects of the monetary policy that was required to numb the pain of the financial crisis is the saves were hurt, and probably one of the unfortunate side effects is that people, if there's not a normal return on savings, people go looking for risk that maybe they shouldn't take. >> host: let me have you respond. this is from last year, on cnbc about "flash boys." >> you said in the book, that's when i knew the markets were rigged. you having thises you're trying to pears your -- parse your words now. >> quote little that way in the book. let's walk through -- who you believe or not because you said it. let me work. >> a yes or no question. do you believe it or not. >> i believe markets are rig

expelled i think you're part of the rigging. if you want to do this, let's do this. the word high frequency trading should be eliminate from the vocabulary. >> you use that. >> not his book. >> this computerized -- >> you're quoting. >> computerized trading is computerized scalping. you cannot scalp trade. you cannot scalp orders on -- >> host: mikeat -- michael louis, from august of last year. >> guest: wasn't from august last year. it well before that. the book cram out -- the book came out 2014. that was a great moment. that is brad, the main character of "flash boys," reluctant to good after the guy who is the -- who runs the bat exchange, which being create nor benefit of high frequentty -- >> host: the bat is better

alternative trading system? >> guest: yes. a great acronym. its bat. sed up on the other side of the lincoln tunnel, and stock market orders from manhattan go through optical fiber through the lincoln tunnel and they get there first and high frequency traders brad discovers there's something wrong in the market and finditude high frequency traders putting small orderle 0 the exchange and able to detect the orders coming through the market and race to other exchanges in new jersey, like the new york stock change that-under -- that are further away and front line the order. >> host: how many seconds. >> guest: less than that. microseconds. and we're talking about -- you can't -- it's very hard to conceive othe units of time that are meaningful in the stock market. units of time -- we're talk about the speed of light from

the other side of the lincoln tunnel to mawa new jersey, that's pretty fast, and people were at the time -- i don't know -- i don't know if they're still doing -- the exchanges were selling the right to position your trading machine next to the server, which was actually the stock market, and the closer -- they're in these buildings. they were fighting to get their computer next to the exchange computer so they could get a faster view of the market than everybody else. so everybody isn't seeing the market at the same time. everybody sees it -- high frequency trade ellers cobble together a faster picture of the market than the official picture. anyway, that exchange was on cnbc. several interesting things about it. the gee who was looking to fa fight with brad lost his job soon thereafter. it was reported, because of lies

he had told on air, the new york attorney general got in touch with bat and said you can't misrepresent your business. brad asked him questions and they sid he misrepresented what anyway were doing. so he's gone. the exchange -- it looks -- ended up being dish was there but no. i was in a remote location but they had me a becomes and supposed to participate neglect conversation and was actually a fight between the two of them. they guy from bat was informed that this was going to happen in advance. we don't -- neither brad nor i knew he would be there until we showed up itch think what they thought would happen is brad would be humiliated. instead he humiliate the guy. the great moment i remember from is, though, is that night, went to dinner with two guys who ran

at the time goldman sachs' equity department and they had seen how rot then market got and made a tactical decision they were going to support brad in building this new exchange because they didn't want to be associated with what was going to happen if anybody ever found out that what -- how the stock market worked. they joined the forces of good they said, when that show aired, which the cnbc producer -- i don't know if it's true or not but later told me was the most watched episode on cnbc. told my wife that and said, congratulations, you're the tallest midget. nevertheless, these guys said the trading floor at goldman stopped. goldman owns -- i don't know if they still do but open a stake in the bat exchange, they did not own a stake in brad's

exchange because brad wanted to keep it clean. wanted to know -- didn't want the brokers to own his business. they would have been very happy. to so while it's going on, this old goldman partner, guy from the old days, is standing there watching this, and he turns to the head of the stock market department and says, that angry guy -- the guy from -- he said got $50 million stake in that company? my friend said, yes, he said the little guy? meaning brad. doesn't own any of that market? yep, we're screwed. everybody was watching it thought that was a watershed moment. i that one day when this story is told, honestly from 50 years from now, people will say that was big moment in the history of wall street. really think that. think -- even though right now it is a world that's been built

to combat brad, political campaign was essentially organized against the book and against him, rig -- regular laters are being bought and sold every day. think they're going to win. they're a profitable exchange now but they're going to win and that wasp an important moment because, because, the regulatory pratt has proven itself enable unable to get its mind around wall street. can't control wall street because at some level the regulator is being paid 1/50th 1/50th of the person they're regulating is being paid. the incentives are all screwed up. the regulator just wants to work nor person they're regulating the form can happen with entrepreneurship.

people can blow the whistle and say you -- investors, don't want to be ripped off? maybe it's not a lot of money but didn't have to be this way, let's organize, come to us. and i think if he shows that's possible, that it will happen in other markets. >> host: that was from april of 2014. i think these are two of you shortest books, "coach: lessons in the game of life" and "home game: an accidental guide to fatherhood." yes. the question. >> host: why did you write them. what did you learn? >> guest: different in each okay. "home game" is a journal i kept, structured journal, the first six months after every -- each of my three children were born, and what prompted it was i was hey done when our first child wag born, quinn, now 18, i was

having wholly inappropriate responses to the situation itch didn't understand why i didn't feel instantly attached to this creature, why i didn't feel what a new father was supposed to feel, and i would talk to my wife and she said, you need to go to therapy or write it down kind of thing. so i started to write it down and i confessed to my friend, the journalist, jacob, the kind of things i was thinking and feeling, and he would say, i don't have anything to say but i'm thinking and feeling feeline same thing. he just had kid. and so i started to write a little dish just essentially started to publish bits of the journal in the online magazine which jacob edited, and eventually became that. i tell you that when people come up to me, and want to have the warmest conversations about the

stuff i've written, those are the two books they want to talk about. either dads who said, thank god. i thought i was going insane. and i read and it i -- or moms who say, i thought my husband was the biggest jerk. you gave me great relief to know it was one who was even bigger. >> host: did you feel differently after your subsequent kids? >> guest: i am such a involved and in love dad that all that seems like a distant memory, and if i hadn't weren't it down i'd say it was great right from the beginning, but it what nose great. was horrible. so i really, really glad i preserved it. i feel different with subsequent kids? no. the first six or eight months i found just hellish, every time, and it was -- it wasn't just that. it was that -- wasn't just that

it was bad. it is how it was bad. the positive thing is wasn't experiencing, as well as the negative thing is was experiencing. and it was just different. sometimes it's where writing comes from, you feel like what you're feeling and thinking is different from what everybody is saying. there's an opportunity in that. so i smelled literary opportunity. i always thought this is really -- i confessed this, and i think my wife thought this. if i turn this experience into literary material i'm more likely to spend more time with the kid, because at least they're literary material. so then subsequently what happened is, i just got -- once you're -- what found as a father is the act of taking care of -- where love comes from, the love of the child, it's not -- not exactly wired for it.

at least i wasn't wired the same way my wife was wired for it, but taking care of something, teaches you -- creates the feeling of love. so you -- in the taking care of them you get to a different place but takes a little while. once you start talking, it was a completely different thing. once you can star interabilitying -- interacting them, it changes everything. i'm very involved now, coaching and everything if think fatherhood is a joy, but i didn't at first. >> host: your wife keeps you in check? what way. probably the answer is generally globally, yes. but specifically with regard to children? probably kept me in check in the very beginning and then we both just very involved parents. not exactly a division of labor anymore. wore both hands on.

except when i'm on c-span for three hours. should be parenting right now. >> host: we have another hour and a half. bob is next from kansas go ahead, bob. >> caller: michael, i'm very impressed with your body of work. i have a series of questions. one thing you first brought up that drew my attention is the the come modification, and the robin hood tax, chase sales tax on zap trading and that's an interesting concept in terms of what would that -- that what put

the change and balance on the zap stock traiting at the speed of light. >> guest: so, tax high frequency trading, people have suggested that. as much pleasure at it would give me because they irritated me no end, the high-frequency trading industry. their public presentation is -- you never know what the unintended consequences of the tax i worry about and there's better ways to attack the problem. it's at the level of incentive. every one of these wall street book its i've written, incentives are in there, and do not allow exchanges -- exchanges pay brokers to send them orders in a certain form. get rid of that do not allow exchanges to sell privilege access to information. they can say oh, yeah, everybody

can buy it but not everybody can spend a million dollars a year on technology needed to assemble a faster picture of the stock market. if you just stop those things, which you could get is the benefit of high-frequency trading and there are so. without so many of the cost, so much pollution. it's not that we want to go back to a time where trading was much slower and run by humans that's not the point. the point is there have been great gains to stock market investors like to everybody else from technology, and wall street has managed to claw back gains in the form of rents in athey shouldn't have. >> host: rupert in rancho cucamonga, card. >> caller: i wanted to ask michael the question, what motivates him in his writing, and then i kind of -- he kind of

answered the question by saying he's a great story-teller. what wanted to find out from michael, though, he said the fact that some friend of him said he didn't think the would have ban great writer, yet he tells such fantastic stories. think you're a great story-teller. what motivates you to be such a great story-tell juror thank you, rupert. >> guest: this is an interesting question, why people write. some people write for money. some people write for political -- they have some political position they want to get across. politically -- with a little p. some people right because they like attention. i think that probably all of the motives play part in my life. i can't deny that it would be harder to do if no one paid me to do it or that it would be

harder to do it if nobody paid any attention to it, or it would be harder to do if i didn't have an overt political interest in the story i was telling. i think actually, underneath off that is the fact it just gives me pleasure. the doing of it gives me pleasure. when i'm sitting there, i've been told dish write with head phones on. listen to a track of music over and over and it drowns out everything. it's silly but that's how i write. have people teal enemy when they're in room with me, i'm laughing all the time. which is sad but it gives me pleasure. when i was working on my southeastern thesis and writing magazine articles that no one would ever read, the time just went away i just really liked doing it. >> host: do you have an office, where place where you write? >> guest: yeah. have -- in berkeley, california,

and i have a little redwood cabin, 50 yards from our house. walk down to the cabin and i work there. i have little kids kids and i de my ten-year-old walker to school and then i write. novelists have the story where they have to write 500 words every day, or have a rule that makes themself write a certain amount over day itch belt i write only one out of three days a year -- on average. much -- a lot of my time is figuring out what i want to write about and learning but it. i'm a nonfiction writer, and even novelists have to do some research but diane awful lot of work for figure out -- to find the part of real life i want to carve out into a story and figure out how to carve it. >> host: shankar in new york with michael lewis.

>> caller: i've always found you to be the most sensible about the room when i read you and i want to did your advice what to kell me young son who enjoys his job in a big investment bank, but is dreading the prospect of hearing about his bonus numbers in a couple of weeks time, and it's really affecting everything he feels about the job. >> guest: because he is afraid it's not going to be as high as i he wants? >> caller: yes. that is part of the bonus system, isn't it? >> guest: yes. if he actually likes the job apart from whatever the bonus is, boy, really is making himself unnecessarily miserable there are whole class of people do mostly for the money and that's a shame. so he is already ahead of the game. tell him he is already ahead of the game because he actually

likes his job. if he want piston put it in perspective, send him a list of what, like, the average pay for the -- for coalminers -- give him a list of other jobs very unpleasant where they are paid a lot less than what he will be paid. think that if i had a child who wound up in a while street firm -- highly unlikely -- and that child said to me, it really sucked because i'm only getting $150,000 instead of four million or whatever it is. i would say, here's a ticket into the woods. go spend a couple of weeks and walk around the wood asks think about your priorities in life. you're do so much better than everybody. if you let this -- if you let this make you miserable, you'll let anything make you miserable. i would tell him it's not acceptable to be -- to let a wall street firm have that kind of power over his happiness.

>> host: one more call, troy, from bethel, missouri. >> in regard to the film adaptation of "money ball" if you felt the portrayal of art howell was accurate, and it has nothing to do with phillip seymour hoffman, he was fine. then when you were researching michael lore at the university of mississippi, did you come in contact with patrick willis, who of course, use know, later went on to the san francisco 49ers and will probably be in the pro football hall of fame. but patrick willis had a really tough upbringing, too. have a good day. >> guest: thank you. >> host: thank you, troy. >> guest: i'll take the second one first -- actually, our last question before the break? art howell quickly. one significant difference

between the character played by phillip seymour hoffman, may he rest in peace, and it was the art howells resentment for having his job taken over and his strategy dictated by the front office. that simmered and was hand of healed in a passive aggressive way in the life. in the movie that ahead him get in the face of billy bean and fight with him. that didn't happen. so that was kind of like willingness to actually fight with his bosses, he didn't have in the flesh. patrick willis. patrick willis, was a really interesting character. when michael lore got the university of mississippi, he was maybe a you're or two behind patrick, and michael -- i can

remember -- i have -- the answer is, yes, met patrick willis and had lunch with him because there was an instant connection. patrick had been adopted bay white family, and at a pretty young age, and the family saw in him someone who might connect with michael and make and smooth his transition into ole miss. what i really remember about patrick willis is that he had been on the bench, i think, his freshman year, and he was -- this guy was an unbelievably gifted linebacker, and i was up in the press box at the ole miss ole miss stadium in oxford, mississippi, sitting with scouts, nfl scout, and i was sitting with them -- someone from the giants and the pounds, just there to watch lsu play ole miss. was there because i was working on this book and i wanted to talk to them about what they

thought about michael hims was on the field. looked like an nfl left tackle i was just kicking tires and an lsu running back comes through on the ole miss three yard line, going score and out of nowhere appears patrick willis, gets him, lifts him up on his shoulders, jackknifes him into the ground, and the running back weighed 24-pounds and the whole play, what was that little and after such violence you -- i turned to the guy from the giants and i said, do you know who that guy is? he said we have to talk to him. he's obviously covering a lot of ground on the field but nobody knows who he is yet. and so i can remember it was kind of the moment he was being discovered and it was entering you. think the guy is an orb pro linebacker but the year before he was on the bench and then comes off and wreaks havoc on the football field. so i remember patrick willis fondly, very, very sweet guy who

you would not believe had the passion for violence he displayed on the field. >> host: your dad was a lawyer, your mom a community organize sneer that makes my mom sound duller than she is. would say activist. my dad, yes, and call him a lawyer? he was a lawyer, but what he did is he ran a law firm. a really gifted administrator who didn't particularly like being a lawyer but he liked running a law firm. he ran a law firm. both were people who -- between them they ran every civic organization in new orleans at one point or another, and my mother is still very active. on the board odd various charter schools and created charter schools after katrina, and she is out the door every morning at 6:00 in the morning and busy all over the city. so, my father is mostly retired. >> host: your great-grandfather.

>> guest: my great-grandfather is the story. we're going to get into family? the short story is, my lewis ancestor, joshua lewis, my great-great-great grandfather, was sent by thomas jefferson to new orleans, in 1803, to receive the purchase from the french and he became the -- the louisiana purchase -- the first chief justice of the louisiana supreme court and wrote the first legal point for lewis. people -- lawyers know this. and stayed. his son was the mayor of new orleans, john lewis. and the family never left down on that side mitchell mother's side of the father, my father's side of the family refers to as

the carpet baggers. showed up in the 1830s. my father's family have been in new orleans since then, and has been woven into the fabric of the city in a lot of different ways. >> our guest is author michael lewis on c-span2's tent "in depth" here on book tv. we'll be back with more of your phone calls on c-span2. >> most kid his background wouldn't come within 200-miles of this place. >> he's new here. expect you to make him feel welcome. >> hi. >> smile at them. it lets them know you're their friend. >> who is that? >> big mike. >> what is he wearing? it's below freezing. do you have any place to stay tonight? don't you dare lie to me. come on.

♪ ♪ >> was this a bad idea? >> it's just for one night. it is just for one night, right? >> found some time to figure out another bedroom for you. >> this h mine? >> yes, sir. >> never had one before. >> what, a room to yourself? >> a bed. >> don't be surprised if one day you wake up is and he gone. >> michael was here? >> last night. tell him to sleep with one eye open. >> you threaten my son, you threaten me. ♪ ♪ >> michael's grades have improved enough that he can go out for spring football in march. s >> one, two, three, four -- >> this team is your family, michael. when you look at him, you think of me, how you have my back. are you going to protect the family,'a michael? >> yes, ma'am. >> s.j., you're going to want to

get that. [cheers and applause] >> who's the big guy eating with your little brother? >> his big brother. >> i b think what you're doing s so great. [cheers and applause] >> honey, you're changing that boy's life. ♪ >> no, he's changing mine. ♪ ♪ >> your goal shouldn't be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. >> who are you? >> here are 25 players that have been overlooked for one reason or another. in here is a championship team, can afford. >> who's the kid? >> the kid is the new assistant g.m.. we're going to shake things up. tell 'em. >> you want me to speak in. >> when i point at you, yeah. the new direction of the oakland as. we are card counters at the blackjack table. we're going to turn the odds on

the casino. >> you don't put a team together with a computer, billy. >> adapt or die. >> billy beane has come in and tried to reinvent a system. now it's just not working out. they call it moneyball, i think that he bought a ticket on the titanic. >> hey, daddy, do you think you'll lose your job? >> what? >> i go on the internet sometimes. well, don't go on t the interne. watch tv or talk to people. do youou believe in this thing r not? >> 100%. >> listen up. you may not look like a winning team, but you are one. so play like one tonight. [cheers and applause] >> we're doing something really unexpected and special, and the whole city iswh feeling it. >> if we win with this team, we change the game for good. >> banks have conditioned us to trust them.

what have we gotten from that? 25% interestst rates on credit cards. they have screwed us on student loans that we can never get out from under. >> when the banks committed the greatest fraud in u.s. history -- >> no one is paying anticipation. >> it's unbelievable. >> four outsiders risked it all too take them down. >> we are going to make the big banks hurt. >> how can the banks let this happen? >> it's fueled by stupidity. >> that's not stupidity, that's fraud. >> tell me the difference between stupidll and legal, and i'llif have my wife's brother arrested. [laughter] >> banks got greedy, and we can profit off their stupidity. >> do you havey any idea what yu up against? >> we have to act now. >> so mike barry, who doesn't wear shoes, knows more than the government? >> dr. mike barry. yes, he does. >> i'm worried about you. >> i'm fine. >> what do you know -- >> my couch. i love you, honey, i'll talk to you later. >> there's some shady stuff going on. god, this is intimate.

i feel like i'm financially inside of you or something. >> okay. >> h people lose homes, people lose jobs -- >> the banks have more sense than greed. >> you're wrong. >> we canan do everything strait and still go broke. >> we need to go all in. >> the ratings agencies, the banks, the government, they're all asleep at the wheel. >> you think this is a game? this is a once in a lifetime deal. >> i'm thinking. >> sometimes there's nothing you can do. it's scary. >> banks defrauded the american people. now we can kick them in the teeth. >> okay, here we go. >> the big short. ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ >> host: we continue on c-span2's "in depth" with michael lewis, the longest interview you have done. >> guest: surpassed by an hour already. >> host: you better keep me

entertained. >> host: let's talk about two of your older books. "the new, new thing" in 1999 and "next" in 2009. >> guest: yep. this is again related to my wife. she dvr a every met tabitha -- >> host: are you going to write a book about your wife. >> guest: maybe at some point i should. she got a fellowship at stanford. so this was ''97-'98 calendar year. >> host: just married. >> guest: she got it before we were married and got married during the fellowship, and i just followed her out there, and didn't have any particular reason for being in palo alto, california, and never had been the internet bubble was happening around me, story after story after story, so i start to poke around that. and it was clearly one of this historic events that i happened to be sitting in in the middle of, and i thought how do you due

it as a story, who is the person who sits in the middle of this thing? at the time the person was the guy named jim clark who has -- he was part of the silicon valley old guard in some ways, started a company called silicon graphics and made one small fortune that way but was behind the creation of netscape, which was launching the web. it's a funny store. it occurred to me. i was watching the things around me, writing about various internet phenomenonons but at the sentence of it all was this unnatural willingness to just plow anywhere everything you had just done. silicon valley was a machine for plowing under the old and replacing it with the new, and people don't naturally usually do that. companies don't naturally do that. you have to create an ethic, create an expectation that that's going to happen for it to

happen, and clark, even though he was then probably in his 50s. not a young silicon valley person -- was legendary for plowing under his own life and business, always kind of moving forward. can remember, a coffee shop across from the street from the stanford campus and i thought i ought to write a book about clark. this sun sun unsettledness feelu feel out here. didn't have a cell phone, very throw it get a cell phone. wish some part -- some part of me wish is never had one but nevertheless, i went to pay phone in back of the coffee shop and there was a pay phone and there was also a phone book, and i went in the phone book and i found clark in the phone book, i stuck in a quarter and i called jim clark, and i got a housekeep

are and she said jim is in the office but you can call him there. this is a billionaire. and i called the next number. he picks up thank you phone and i said i'm michael lewis -- he said i read "liar's for poker" and i was on a bike. he said come on over. and he was at that time -- his office was a pretty depressing room on top of a jenny craig weight losses center. what he was doing when i got there was trying to program, write the program for a giant sailboat, for a yacht. that would enable him to sail the boat across the atlantic from his desk without -- just like a challenge. a fully automated boat that he could control remotely, and i just thought dish started talking to him. just want to spend more time with this guy, i thought. and that led to "in the new, new

thing" and that led to some articles on the back of "the new, new thing" which was glued together in "next." in a writer's life there are book and book-like objects, and books conceived as a whole thing and book-like objects are a magazine piece that is between hard covers or a home game was a series of journal is published and pasted together. >> host: what was netscape? >> guest: netscape? >> yeah. >> guest: it was the first router. and the -- you think back to that time tech browser is what people thought would be valuable. >> host: it want that long ago knife you go back at the the end of "the new, new thing" jim clark work was regarded by everybody as the visionary in silicon valley, who is kind of seemed to always have his finger on what it about to happen, the

end of the book he decided he's getting out of this react of the internet bubble because he says it's just become a bubble, it's no -- gotten so crazy, the stock market valuations are so crazy, he wants to get his money out because even he is scared, and the deal that kind of triggered the, oh, my god, this is insane, is the -- someone says, you can own a big piece of this company called google that is a search engine but you have to pay $25 million for it. he said, that's ridiculous. not going to pay $25 million. that would be worth -- maybe tens of billions of dollars now. the thought that goggle was preposterous, and so he gets out. the valuation of google was preposterous. one thing about "next" we have an hour, chance for me to talk about books nobody asks me about about. i got interested when me bubble burt -- clark was right.

the internet market collapses, worth hundreds of millions of dollars and then zero the next day. thought when i was writing about this event, that the internet -- the financial consequences of the internet were trivial compared to the social consequences, and that as a -- noise in 2001 was, all fraud, all phony, not that big of a deal. a lot of that. and i thought, no, actually, we want to do is trace what the social consequences. mate be true the internet is not an engine for corporate profits. that but it is an engine for social change. so i wrote these long essays -- reported pieces about things that happened on the internet that gave you a glimpse into a very odd future. so, one of them was about a kid in new jersey, named jonathan labet, who at age 13 or 14, he

was a kid of a very modest family, middle, lower middle class family, whose grandmother has given him 100 bucks or 500 bucks at some point, and he gotten online and opened a brokerage account, dumb yesterday up the documents in order to seem like a grownup and on the internet nobody knowsor a dog or a kid, and he had turned the grub stake from this grandmother into i think 700,000 or $800,000 in trading profits, and was doing things like going to the local mercedes dealer, even though he couldn't drive, picking out a car. handing over $50,000 in cash, and saying, hold it for me until i get my driver's license. he was outrageous. and the sec had followed his activity because of what he was doing is finding tiny little penny stock companies and then buying the stock and then promoting them on internet ports, like writing advertisement for them, because he thought that's what you do in

the stock market but a he saw that is what merrill lynch was dog but the sec couple on on him forestock manipulation. so it was a story about -- the phenomenon. >> host: how much did he keep. >> guest: he kept almost all of it. if he paid a fine, it was trivial. he kept almost all of it. >> host: you know what he is doing today. >> guest: haven't learned from him in years, which is odd. most of my subjects anytime close touch with. 'll hear from them once a month or every couple months. last i heard from him, he sent me an invitation and -- a house in miami beach and had -- he had gotten into what, but he had

decided in his head, when -- guy into this life a bit because i wrote this piece about him and trying to coax him into going to college and he thought college was a waste of time would make money without going to college and i assume that's what he has been doing. >> host: ron, joining us from orchid, new hampshire. you're on booktv. good afternoon. >> caller: hi, thank you for taking my call. >> guest: hi. >> caller: i was -- wanted to get your comment on the uniting amendment? >> guest: no, haven't heard of it. explain. >> caller: gist the crowd sourced constitutional amendment. the last few years people have been going on a web site and trying to write a new constitutional amendment and addresses a whole bunch of things, including, like, term limits for congress and legalizing pot, and getting rid

of discrimination against sexual orientation, and sexual identity. all this stuff that congress won't do but the people actually want. and one thing it does that i wanted to ask you about was the tax system. it creates a tax that taxes all transactions with no exemptions or deductions, and the total transactions in the united states total over $1,200,000,000,000,000 per year. and when you tax that, if you tax less than 1%, like a half a percent, it comes out to over $6 trillion. >> host: ron, thank you for the call. any thoughts? >> guest: so, what is that adam sandler movie, maybe billy madison, he is in a debate in

school and says what he has to say, and then the principal says thank you very much. we're all at stupider for having herd that. whatever i would say you would say, thank you very much. we're all a little stupider for hearing that. i don't know what he is talking about. sounds like a really interesting constitutional amendment. >> host: let me tie it into what you wrote about in your books, the role of social media, the role of the internet, in politics. because there is a direct connection -- we saw that in 202016 with donald trump and twit. >> guest: i am a story teller, and i have not -- i mean -- we can all see the internet is having weird effects in politic die have anything to add. >> host: from "next" you wrote, people who bother to imagine how

the internet might change democracy usually take it will take power from the politics and gift it to at the people. >> guest: id write that? i don't re-read any of my booked ever so i don't remember most of what i write, haven't been -- i don't remember what i wrote. said that is the conventional wisdom at the time? did i chat length it? i did i have the decency to say maybe it's not true? it's had obviously perverse effects. it's opened up -- it's open up the political marketplace, right? it's been part of the -- among the forces that corrode the authority of the party system. without the internet you don't get trump, anything like trump. and trump, without the internet, can't communicate the way he communicates. you don't get twitter. so, it's i -- i think it's

broadly democratizing and. >> host: going back to our first hour, this is if it is. >> host: back to our first hour, michael has studied the department of energy, what do the rest of us need to know about nuclear energy? >> guest: the way i went into the department of energy, these enterprises are so fast, getting them across in 10 or 15,000 words is a huge challenge. i went into a particular angle, what is the risk? what is the risk of a white house disengaged from managing the government, didn't bother to get the memo and understands what the department is, what

can go wrong, the department of energy starts with a fellow named john mcwilliams who was the first chief risk officer inside the department and came from a successful investment career, made his fortune in private equity investment, brought in the first place to help assess the risk running in the investment portfolio if they make their loans, subsidized loans to technology that may pay off or long-term scientific research and investment in technology, the whole department, what is the risk here, nuclear energy was

not on the list, the future of nuclear energy was a footnote in what concerned him. much more concerned about the iran nuclear deal that would come apart, the white house wouldn't understand it was negotiated by people who know how to make a nuclear bomb, and the iranian government won't be able to do it and they won't actually get to that because they never got briefed about it so there is a story about nuclear energy i don't know much about. when i was a kid this was supposed to be energy of the future. and overreacted to 3 mile island, public policy took some

odd turns and it would be a smart way to go to invest in nuclear power and didn't go there for complicated political reasons that would require a way to do that. >> host: finish this sentence, the state of american politics today is what? from your standpoint? >> guest: test. disturbing would be another word i come to mind. the notion that there is no such thing as the truth, no such thing as fact, you can assemble your own version of reality with your own newsfeeds and ignore evidence to the contrary, you can have an electorate that is so polarized, can't imagine how

the other side sees the world the way it does except to ridicule the other side. it makes you fear democracy. the absence of a walter cronkite like source of news where everybody agrees that is more or less right, we trust is that, where we are all participating in the same reality, seems to be a necessary ingredient for democracy, it is an accidental threat. i don't know how it is going to play out. my most recent book one of the big take aways, people are predicting things, turn as fast as possible in the other direction, most things that are predictable are not, predicting what is going to happen in the political life of america, don't bother.

we don't know what happens to drive the future. it does seem like a volatile uncertain crime. what drove me in writing this series wasn't just how alarmed i was that the new administration just ignored this wonderful course in federal government that was there for the taking, but the whole approach to governing seems to be increasing ever so slightly in some cases, not ever so slightly in other cases, catastrophic risk, the risk that various catastrophes happen. what is on my mind now? how to get through this. i live on the west coast, the

north korean government, and decided it is fun to shoot a missile at us or put one in a boat and floated into los angeles harbor. all kinds of serious risk, and in february, north korea on anybody's radar, north korea, he said this, the reason the department of energy is worried about north korea and you wouldn't think, why would the department of energy -- the national lab, national science lab that evaluates what north koreans are doing when firing these missiles willy-nilly into the ocean and realized some time ago there was method to the madness and they were improving their missile technology in ways, making jumps no one expected them to

make. they managed to get ukrainian scientists into help build missiles, but required intellectual property to make it much more lethal. we are sitting in a world where nuclear war went from something i didn't think very much about a couple years ago, i am aware there is a risk, to being a real risk. less dramatic, the city corrosion of the workforce, and appreciate what it does and it is waste and inefficiency and corruption, the corrosion that emerges from that approach you may not see it as dramatically as a nuclear explosion, but it

will have devastating effect. i am trying to be hopeful but naturally an optimist. they are paired together -- the world's greatest -- wandering around looking for what will go wrong all the time. pessimism is just stupid, you live in -- imagining the bad thing happening and it actually happens, wandering around because a nuclear bomb is going to go off in san francisco, i almost consciously adopt a strategy of optimism but the strategy is daily right now. >> host: we are talking with michael lewis, 14 books. >> guest: i don't know how many

books i have written. you might list -- an anthology of other people's writing for charity, i don't remember the title of it. the actual book, conceived as books, beginning to end and handed in as books, the new new thing, "moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game," the blind side, "the undoing project: a friendship that changed our minds," those are the books. >> host: we will go to sandra in santa rosa, california. >> caller: interesting to listen to what you were talking about.

you should have a weekly, 1-hour program on television. >> guest: you are hiring me. >> caller: if i could do that i would. >> guest: you would be so sick of me. >> caller: everything else is soundbite and no one knows anything. we don't get in-depth information we need from you. i read the department of energy article and it was so revealing, i felt i was on the inside. we don't know anything. i knew it was bad but didn't know how bad it was until i read that article. one of your books that i got the most out of, the way you express yourself we really need to hear. most of us are too busy, not

me, but watching stupid programs on television instead of becoming educated about what is going on in the world and what you just said in the last 5 minutes about the state of the world is pretty horrifying and i want to commend you for doing something to help us to be more informed. >> host: you brought up -- >> he is in santa rosa. >> guest: stay on the line. >> host: so -- >> guest: there is a book between covers but it was written as a series of magazine places. the idea of the question, the thing that interested me was the back end of the financial crisis, i had written the american story, what i had written about in "the big short: inside the doomsday

machine," this is a global crisis experienced by different societies in different ways. the same root cause which was in discriminant lending. people handing out money for people to do what they wanted without thinking about what it was. ceased to be a break on the process in the financial game and in iceland for example, this population the size of peoria, three of the biggest banks in the world in a decade, developed a rationalization about why iceland for its whole history has been prevented from achieving its destiny of being the capital of global finance, and the icelandic president giving speeches how icelanders,

the viking mentality the mentality, the world can see we are naturally gifted financiers. they had that delusion until it came crashing down. the greeks wanted to bloat their already bloated public-sector. what people did with the money i saw this way. entire societies were left alone in a dark room with a huge stack of money and doing what they want to do and you could see the perversion in society by what they did with the money. in this increasingly one world where you can buy the same stuff in new york and london and tokyo, that many opportunities for distinguished travel, and aspect of society, peculiar about society through some lens and this was an opportunity to get was peculiar about iceland and greece and ireland and germany through the

lens of the money. there are stories about countries experiencing the financial crisis, the material was unbelievable. iceland, i could go on about this, but population, 300,000 people, generally all were related, 300,000 people. the chief source of wealth was fishing. cheap energy, thermal energy, geothermal energy and for complicated reason, aluminum in iceland but fishing was the big thing.

this story happened over and over. a fisherman goes to his wife, i can trade foreign exchange at the new bank instead of fishing and you make twice as much money and it is not cold or miserable and we are good at training, the wife says are you sure about that? why would you know anything about that? everyone is getting rich, we are not going to fish, i am sorry, i interviewed this, this is an exaggeration and turns out they are creating a financial calamity of global epic proportions, they are catastrophic. it comes tumbling down after it collapsed. the only financial viable investment in the country when i arrived is a woman who set

up, how to invest your money, the premise is i promise no man will ever be able to get his hand on your money but mistrust of men, all-male overconfidence. the moment the husband said i know where i am going and the wife says all of a sudden there are three states from where they are supposed to say and look at a map. the country had just elected not only the first female prime minister but the first lesbian prime minister, didn't want her head estate sleeping with a man, the hostility towards the mail financial overconfident impulse was at its global peak. different things in different places. will probably cost $10 in the

phone bill. >> caller: one time you said you were going to write about california, the pension issue that has become such a problem, we don't have money to spend on important things because of the amount of money spent on pensions, 100 million in seminole county alone, that is not a year, is it? it is or effect. that was what i was wondering about. >> guest: one chapter, was not a particularly edifying chapter but in terms of brave politicians, chuck reed, the mayor of san jose who was in a war with the police department, trying to cut their pension.

it is a huge issue that i might write about, the finances are out of control, what we pay, how california is spending its money. a lot of this is by economic success, tax revenue, is strong, but combination of bed deals cutting republic employees, legal obligation they have to pay fees pensions, low investment returns because interest rates have been low so long. this is a slow-moving iceberg of a problem but a slow-moving catastrophe in the making not just in california that all these pension calculations are based on the returns of 8% or

investment returns that pensions themselves are not earning so you have to have shortfalls and we will have some messy political -- >> host: among your favorite books, confederacy, what is this about? i haven't read it. >> guest: it was a novel written by john kennedy, my homeboy, grew up not far from where i grew up in new orleans who killed himself before the novel was published. going back and forth, i don't know what happened but he killed himself. it is one of the funniest books i have ever read. anybody give me a book that describes the world, it is the book i give because ignatius

riley, since don quixote, the best subject since don quixote, a wholly original character, one of those books with tears streaming down my face which i haven't read it in a decade, one of the few books i have read more than once. >> host: how was it published after he killed himself? >> guest: he embedded in the novel a very funny portion of his own mother who was a lunatic, charming new orleans lunatic and very expressive out there woman and after he died she was convinced her son had written a work of genius, she ran around bothering people to read the book and cornered a

local novelist from new orleans, from across the lake after one of his classes, teaching at loyola university, dirty manuscripts, brown paper bag and said my dead son wrote this, please read it and get it published which in his introduction he said this is what you want, the mother of a dead child who has written the work of genius and now it is in my hands and started reading this thing thinking he was -- give a two or three pages to say this is no good or don't see how it is published and if you turn the page, he did it with growing wonderment, couldn't believe how good it was. he got it to a publisher, can't remember who published it first. anyway. he gets it published and it

wins a pulitzer or national book award, the same year walker person's novel -- it is, in this culture unlike in english culture, really hard to pull off a comic novel that is recognized in literature, the same way it is hard to have a comedy as a movie taken seriously as something that makes you cry. the oscar always goes to the portentous drama as opposed to the clever comedy. he pulled off a book that is a work of literature, one of the funniest things i have ever read. the catharsis, having something explained to you that you didn't realize needed explaining, one thing i needed explained to me is what is so

peculiar about this place that is different from everywhere else i go. i experienced it but put words to its, characters -- results. >> host: rachel in gastonia, you are on the air with michael lewis. we 15 i watched you on c-span, the national book festival, and played the interview over and over and get so depressed. i believe you gave in interview and the undoing project, you said if you make decisions using your gut, you will get worse. we have a president who does that. are we screwed? >> guest: the short answer is

yes. the point, this is the source of the moneyball theory, the undoing project, one of the many points is you can show how people are going by their got will get to systematically wrong answers. not that the gut is always wrong but if you have a choice between gut decisions and data-driven decisions where the data is really good capturing what you need to make the decisions go with the data because the gut will mislead you because your mind mislead you in various ways which your point is very well taken that we went from a president in obama who was extremely aware of the limitations of his own mind and so he was a very smart person, he was very aware that

the job of president is a decision-making job and we can construct our environment so we are less likely to make mistakes but we are still going to make mistakes but nevertheless, encourage input from people who might not feel comfortable speaking, acknowledging the first impulse i feel might be foolish, recognizing there is a whole literature on decision-making, obama read something that had been demonstrated the mere act of making decisions arose through power of decisionmaking a. when you go to sam's club or costco and are assaulted by implicit decisions you are exhausted. give people a choice and their ability to make choices is

corroded. obama did things like got rid of all his closest but his blue and gray suits so he wouldn't have to decide what he wore, and clean the environment to make it as likely as possible that he would make the decision. now someone who thinks he knows everything who is flying by the seat of his pants all the time and plays on praise where he is doing consciously or not i don't know, the common diversity would point out as human beings longed for certain things and in our leaders we punish intelligence. we don't want the press to say there is a 98% we will get nuked or there is only 75% chance the economy is going to get better. we don't want probable.

we should what probabilistic thinkers expressing themselves clearly but we don't lose we want people to say this is how it is going to happen and i know. every con man who ever walked the earth knows this, certainty, seeming certain from anyone who ever sold stocks on wall street knows that what you do is seem totally certain about the thing you are proposing, that will sway your audience. so we have a president who seems very certain things that are very uncertain and that worries me. i know i'm not supposed to be partisan but i think we are in a disturbing moment. >> host: berkeley, california. my home. curley, you are next. >> caller: how are you guys doing? big fan of c-span, michael lewis, big fan of your books. you guys have covered a lot of

browned that is very interesting, i could go a lot of different places but i need to start in defense of the gut for a second if i could. first of all the simplest one is didn't billy dean uses gut to decide that guy from cleveland who was using numbers everybody told him was never going to work, he used his got to make that decision? we believe that for another time but i want to ask you about, looks, what you were saying, the analysis you were making about why data is better than thinking something without challenging it and you did a good job explaining that and there's always those behavioral economic issues where you go into a class where people will

end up doing an auction for a $20 bill on the front line and the guy ended up playing $22 for a $23 bill, the excitement of the moment is the essence of an auction situation and making markets but i want to bring up for a second black scholes which i know you know what i am talking about. they used numbers analysis of the best kind to come up with a situation that led to where it was. >> guest: i am at your mercy. you only for three hours. >> host: i would like you to respond to curley. would you agree with him? >> guest: he is absolutely right in what he was saying there are times you don't have choice but to go with your gut. but being aware that that is what you are doing and being aware of the kind of mistakes,

the nature of the mistakes that decisions lead to will help you build your gut in a better way. the hiring, a person who could do statistics to apply statistical analysis to baseball players, that is more, he knew what kind of person he needed and there were a lot of people watching, someone who is trained in statistics and the world of baseball. he knew what he was looking for and if you were going to go after me, he was being kind. in "moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game" there are passages, billy dean himself, the high priest of using analytics to evaluate baseball players says screw it, i think this. he did go with a player because

he thought the player was doing drugs, he was detecting a social effect the play was going to have and in theory would say it doesn't matter but in fact it did matter. being in a leadership position i don't think you can lead just by numbers, people won't listen to numbers, they need a story. it is more complicated than leaving everything to an algorithm. absolutely true. i agree with that. he went on, how about we leave it at that and move on to other things. >> host: books by michael lewis beginning with "liar's poker: rising through the wreckage of wall street" back in 1989, the money culture, pacific rift, the fault line between the us and japan, losers, the road to everyplace but the white house,

the new new thing, silicon valley story in 1999, "next: the future just happened" in 2001, "moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game" followed by "coach: lessons of the game of life" and of course "the blind side: evolution of a game" came out in 2006. home game, accidental guide to fatherhood, boomerang, travels in a new third world, flash boys, "flash boys: a wall street revolt," your recent book, a friendship that changed our minds. what was the easiest and most difficult book. >> guest: i didn't know -- i didn't know how hard it was supposed to be. in all these books like a character on the page, the character was me. i was my material, a large part

of that and i was amused by myself. >> host: where you laughing? >> guest: laughing until tears came down my face. that came out of me very fast. i said this to people, the quality of execution is difficult. a very easy degree of difficulty. i lived it. the hardest to write after that, the big -- "the big

short: inside the doomsday machine" basically because if you understand the financial crisis, you really do have to explain collateralized debt obligation, nobody can explain that. all you can do, all you can do is give the reader at best the illusion they understand, the complexity of what happened was difficult to weave that in and not lose the reader. you had to rewrite one of them and take it on again, which was most difficult to do and probably be "the big short: inside the doomsday machine". >> host: suzanne from williamsburg, virginia. >> caller: has been a great three hours almost. >> guest: you have been watching for 3 hours? the 15 pretty hard to believe. i started my journey with "liar's poker: rising through the wreckage of wall street" so i had to go through the whole

thing. the reason i am calling is i have a story you might enjoy. i was living in manhattan in the early 80s and my roommate was dating john meriwether, long-term capital management, well before it was long-term capital management, well before the infamous -- what you wrote about, my old roommate was kicking dinner, john and i used to sit in the living room and play number games, try to figure out the least amount of gases to figure out what is in each other's heads. i also -- >> guest: ruining a date. that is what you were doing. >> caller: i also wonder if that was the very beginning of john's rise and downfall, vegetable game in the living

room. it was a wedding culture. i would love to hear more about that. are people born that way? by acquaintance or whatever? >> guest: john meriwether was my boss at solomon brothers. i worked for the sales arm, his was of historic interest because of what they did, the proprietary trading arm and if you go back a decade earlier none of the partnerships had this operation in that scope, they were making these enormous bets, so big that by 1989-1990, more than 100% of the firm's profits were from what was overseen by john meriwether, and 800 prison firm, everyone else losing money, making it

up. the whole enterprise organized itself around john meriwether's desk. these were a huge gamble. he was gambling in the beginning in the marketplace, options and futures were invented and traded everywhere. there were lots of actual mispricing, people who were smart with the numbers and in response to your question about is it a gambling culture? it was very much a gambling culture and felt like we walked onto the trading floor, a bit like people who are predisposed to alcoholism in a bar or predisposed to gambling

addiction betting, tracked to that place and there it was encouraged. in defense of the play it was pretty shrewd that they were separating smart gamblers from dumb gamblers and giving money to the smart gamblers to play with but you didn't do what john meriwether did unless you liked to gamble. most people couldn't sleep at night. in the end he is so successful he becomes too big for his own firm and they create long-term capital management and it is catastrophic and almost brings down the global financial system but you only get to that place, allowed to make those if you have been successful for a long time. >> host: does sandra bullock capture leon to we in the movie blindside? >> guest: she captures -- when

her husband saw the movie so for the first time he went -- exactly what he said. oh my god! just there are two of them! it was shocking. first time i have seen one of my characters end up on screen so i was even more impressed than i should have been. i subsequently saw brad it capture billy dean in all kinds of interesting ways, christian bale captured michael berry in all kinds of interesting ways. steve carell -- these actss of imitation, impressions they do, the movie business seems like a nonsense business, hollywood and celebrities, but in los

angeles, there is a trade and a craftsman, unbelievable skill and talent and these actors, the good ones, are so talented that you can't believe it when you see it. can i tell a story? >> host: absolutely. >> guest: i love deborah more, she is the best and did an unbelievable job. the actor who scared me the most with his powers was christian bale. he scared me because michael berry who has asperger's syndrome, no connection to the outside world, the first to see what is going on in the subprime mortgage market, the only one with an argument about when the market will turn and why and it is based on having studied the loans that were made that shouldn't have been made. in person a little quirky. i had heard that christian bale

had gone and spent one day with him. that was it. he asked can i spend the day, just be with you? came in in the morning, watched him, very natural conversation. it was odd for me because he didn't get to go to the bathroom or eat, sat in my office for 12 hours and i was exhausted at the end of it. christian bale on screen becomes michael berry. he is wearing the clothes michael berry was wearing when i met him, went into his clothes closet and took them. i cornered christian bale and said you spent day with him, i spent a year studying this person and i could not have done an impression. you are doing all kinds of things, don't know what it is,

you got it across. he didn't want to talk about it. acted like magicians don't want to tell their magic tricks. he said okay, it was obvious right away, he brise funny. what? when he talks he takes breaths in audit places in a sentence. from that all his mannerisms emerge. i saw that right away. i said to the director, i should get my breathing right, then everything will follow. >> host: in 2012, ucla address. >> in 2006, a bunch of us shorted portugal, italy, greece and spain, we called them the pigs for a reason. i can explain it in one sentence. when the entitled themselves, the party accelerates, the brutal hangover is inevitable.

my career after ucla was in such a manner i found myself in the middle of the financial meltdown, profiting from it because i had predicted it. i had been a chicken little or a cassondra to some, especially in government. i'm one lucky s ob. and truth i was just trying to figure it all out. >> guest: coming back to me, watching him. he trained to be a doctor but he was more interested in the stock market. he comes out and says to me why did you stop being a doctor? he said i thought about i asked myself do i care about people? not really. a really honest kind of self possession. i shouldn't be a doctor, i don't care about people.

i find him unbelievably lovable. i love the guy, very good person, very interesting person, has his own take on the world that happened to fit with that moment. the portrayal of him, he is on stage, you sit at his desk, it was incredible what this guy did with him. anyway, this starts with sandra bullock. >> host: this is from 2010. let's get your reaction. >> one sunday after church we were at north oxford baptist, true story, he had run the football more times than he ran left. what is wrong with him? the school bus picked them up, he needs to the running left. we are coming out of church and he comes on the parking lot and i break to the left, sean is like grabbing me, that is -- i kind of stepped in front of the

car, he rolled down into the are you doing today? not real good actually, coach. what is the problem? i am trying to figure out, my son was a free season consensus all-american left tackle, really talented, i said you ran the ball right, 50 times yesterday, left to 10 times. i'm not explaining this. go back and watch the film because you did, and get back to me, run the ball left. >> guest: she is the best, very funny. the scene in the movie she is marching up to the high school coach telling him what to do in that clip, the ole miss football coach, she is

assaulting the college football coach at that point. i see her last year and a close friend -- she has seats with the memphis grizzlies basketball, and has seats next to the opposing team's bench. and spends the whole game, and they are all listening to her but she is forced nature, interesting thing about movies, when i met, when i spent, when

i reengaged and starting to think about writing a story about michael or's book, a bunch of reasons, didn't think any goodwood come of it, didn't like the idea of being on stage, nervous about it, i know. she wasn't shy, in her own world she was a force but had no sense of herself as a character and acquired a sense of herself as a character and one reason sandra bullock showed the character she was by doing what is great. i am glad no one has tried to make a movie about me because it would be very hard especially if it was done well to go through your life with such a vivid impression of your self being seen by millions and not have it affect you in some way. >> host: catherine in

california, you are next. what part of the state are you from? >> guest: margarita and thank you again for c-span and booktv, for many years. >> host: michael lewis for three hours. >> caller: well, i want to agree with sandra from santa rosa. i have two questions, when i was listening, i was struck by not being a thinker. i think you are a thinker and don't want to disturb your self-image. if you think of yourself as conscience of the culture, or more broadly the culture itself, i do and i don't want

to disturb your self image which is so creative, that is one question but just ignore it if it might bother you. that is not a silly postscript to the whole thing, in your list of authors there are no women. i am wondering if you are inspired by women as you read them, why are they not on your list of inspiration or is it just a short list? is my question. >> host: thank you for watching booktv. >> guest: a representative sample in some ways and the broad answer is i to read books by women and go back to the

beginning. and no one inspires me anymore. if we do this for a long time, i spend so much time tearing up your own pros that you read so critically. i read so much more critically with less pleasure than when i was 20 years old. they can't get inside me, the thing i like least about what i do turning it into a career, deadens my interest, changes my interest in reading, the list you have from me, pretty sure when i was 20 years old, rebecca west got inside me, and

-- i discovered this seemingly plain style british writer, the clarity of their pros generated this power and made me think that is the way to go, be as clear as possible, don't use fancy words when a little word will do, don't use comp located sentences when a simple sentence will do, to say it in a fancy way. in those days when i was careful of being inspired she is on the list but not many other people are on the list. >> host: if there is one writer from all-time you would want to

meet, who would it be? >> guest: what do i get to do with him? spent days with more have dinner or -- >> host: you get to spend dinner with him. >> guest: i don't think i want to have dinner with george orwell but might spend a couple weeks with him, take a while to get through to him in a meaningful way. mark twain. for dinner. mark twain, i have read so much about him, might get a lot more out of dickens because it would be fresher. >> host: stephen in decatur, illinois. >> caller: i have a short attention span was i was in to you, your pursuit of the truth,

i heard you earlier, i think i see you right because the truth is like gold. from ways, and so you discovery the truth and you know the difference between fool's gold and constructed for your assumptions, the actual truth and i find i see it in your eyes, you have the truth -- >> guest: could be my colored contact lenses. it is true, what you say, when you find what seems like an interesting truth, it is really energized as a writer.

however, disproving this in three hours, it is not my style, back to the previous caller's point, i don't think of myself as anyone's conscience, can hardly function as my own. the reader controls -- the reader has to have some control to the truth. and what to think about that, all good stories have a reader size hole the reader walked into it exercises discussion over. the product of this is one of the frustrations if you are hoping for your books to deliver truth to the reader, they come away with a different

truth. they read it in a way you have no idea. i keep coming back to why i write. the pleasure i get of doing it i hope the reader is getting the pleasure at the same caliber of pleasure, to create some pleasure and beyond that, i don't have much control. >> host: you answer why you write, from elizabeth, how much time do you spend researching, writing and how much time does michael lewis spend just thinking? >> guest: the typical book, not exactly the same, roughly what

would happen, a string for the book and writing. i write 6 or 7 hours a day, 18 months, writing character sketches, ideas, organizing the structure of the thing, my writing is sporadic. when i write i write a lot and i write very fast and revise revise revise. but it is immersive. there was a second part of the question. >> how much time do you spend just thinking in the process of writing in general? >> guest: in my upbringing, my father used to say when i was a kid the the lewis family have a

motto, inscribed on the lewis family coat of arms in latin, he told me, had me believing this when i was 20 years old. the lewis family motto, do as little as possible and that unwillingly for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than perform an arduous task. i mention this because the idea that what i am doing when i'm not writing is something difficult like thinking is false. i spend a lot of my life just kind of farting around, enjoying my life. i can't say i read someplace that bill gates has a think week where he goes away to think. how would you do that? i am going to go think? i don't know how that works

with the wave works for me is reactive. i have to be doing something at a thought occurs. never, when i am engaged in writing a book to i sit down and systematically thinking. for me, am i writing -- probably a third to half of the hours of my life and then parenting, friends, figuring out how to give my life meaning otherwise. somewhere in the very thought or two might occur but you will be very disappointed. >> host: michael lewis, we are out of time. we thank you very much for your time. appreciate you being with us. another book or two when you? >> guest: why not. my kids will star. the world keeps giving me material. >> host: thank you so much.

.. >> pulitzer prize-winning journalist daniel golden takes a look at spy rings at american universities, and jessica bruder talks about the lives of migrant workers in the united states. on this weekend's "after words" program, muslim-american federal agential nouri discussed his experiences fighting domestic

terrorism in america. he's interviewed by author michael german. also this weekend fox news host brian kilmeade provides a history of the battle of new orleans and the life of andrew jackson. amy knight talks about the critics of vladimir putin who have been killed since he came to power. and a recounting of the women who joined the suffrage movement in the early 20th century, and the before columbus foundation hosts the american book awards that recognizes outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of america's diverse literary community. that's all this weekend on booktv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books. television for serious readers. >> and now on booktv it's the 15th annual wisconsin book festival from the state's capital in madison. over the next eight hours, we'll have a full lineup of authors on