and michael burry is the first one in. >> kroft: burry assumed a lot of people would figure out whats up to, but very few did. it took two years for the drama to play out, but the sub-prime mortgage market finally collapsed in 2007, just as he had predicted. so you made a ton of money. >> burry: made a ton of money, much more than i ever imagined, you know, i'd ever have. we made $725 million, i think, on the funds in 2007. >> lewis: michael burry's advantage was he wasn't part of the collective. he was just this guy in a t- shirt and shorts with a glass eyeball and asperger's syndrome, looking at the numbers and... when nobody else really was. >> kroft: how can they not look at the numbers? i mean, how can wall street be selling all of these... buying all of these mortgages and repackaging them, and... and not realizing that they're not very good mortgages? >> lewis: wall street is able to delude itself because it's paid to delude itself. that's the... i mean, one of the lessons of this story is that people see what they're incentivized to see. if you pay someone not to see the trut

there's a doctor turned investor in northern california named michael burry. he was early on the trade. before paulson and others. he's a head strung guy. he's a little bit stubborn. he didn't always get along so well with his own investors. a lot of them didn't believe him. he was doing really well with bidding on stock. this as we'll talk about in a second, the trade had nothing to do with stocks. it was derivatives, mortgages, a lot of his own investors didn't believe in him. they were skeptical. burry kind of persisted. he gets a lot of credit 37 he's really a kind guy and a generous guy. but he can be a little stubborn. unlikely and an interesting guy to have pulled this out. in southern california, another guy that i write about jeffrey green who was the hollywood type. he was a real estate investor who made a lot and lost it all and had made more afterwards. he steals the idea from john paulson and runs with it. they were good friends. he did a lot of his own work. he gets a lot of credit as well. he's not kind of the obviously guy to pull off the great