Michael Lewis
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That is fascinating. That's finance. So that wasn't even this. This was like, what's the difference between a compliment and a substitute in the marketplace? When prices go up, what happens to demand and supply?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah, it was Adam Smith 101. I thought, wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They are cool. And one school of economics gave me a chance to play catch up. They had a program where they put you through their whole undergraduate program in a year and you got a master's in year two. My father, in his wisdom, he called it the Lewis family deal. And this is the joy of being raised with privilege.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He said, as long as you're doing something, I will cover your expenses for the first three years out of college. Oh. So I was working as the art dealer, but I didn't get paid very much. I actually became a woodworker's apprentice for six months. And then I went to the Lund School of Economics for two years. And that was, in a lot of ways, transformative. That's where I started publishing stuff.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I started submitting things willy-nilly to magazines. And the British are much more receptive than Americans to amateurs. It's not, who are you? They just read it and go, wow, I like this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's true, but there are many fields that we treat as professions that they treat as crafts or guilds. You don't have to go to journalism school.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
She married into it. New Orleanians understand this language more than anybody on earth. She's my first cousin once removed. Yeah, no one knows.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Which means she's my mother's first cousin. She married Baron Patrick von Stauffenberg. Fucking A. Let's go. He is the nephew. You know the von Stauffenberg who put the bomb onto Hitler's table? No. Yes. His uncle was the one who tried to assassinate Hitler. Whoa.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And he's great. They were great. I got to London, and they had dinner parties, and I would be the young person they would invite over to amuse the older people. One day, she says, I got an extra seat at a dinner, and it's in St. James's Palace. It was hundreds of people, but the Queen Mother was coming, and she said, you can meet the Queen Mother. And I thought, why not, you know?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
She was Queen Elizabeth's mother.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I was sat between two women, both of whose husbands ran Solomon Brothers London office. And at the end of it, one of them said, whatever you're doing, you stop doing, you ought to come work for my husband. Come work at Solomon Brothers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks, both recognizable and unrecognizable names, about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph. My hope is that people will finish an episode of Reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
The fix was in at that point. I went over and had interviews, but it was kind of like, whatever. Everybody seemed to like me right when I walked in the door. And then I got offered this job.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So this is really true. It masquerades as a pure meritocracy. The first break is not pure meritocracy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I had that point in my head. I was getting out of school, and at this point, the Lewis plan was over. I had to make a living. I was publishing stuff, but I was being paid so poorly, you couldn't live on it. And I thought this when I got out of college, when I started to write stuff that didn't get published. Have lots of experiences. Writers have this problem. They just become writers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And then they don't know anything but writing. And that gets very boring. And you write books about being a writer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
How do you enter into that space? Yeah, that's right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And a bag of tricks, probably. Yeah. So I thought and still think. Whenever you have a chance to have meaningful life experience that isn't writing, have it. It will inform the writing. And it gets harder and harder to do that. You're typed as the writer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
True, because you don't have to do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
A lot of interesting stuff happens because you have to do it. But I thought of Wall Street. Not only is it going to pay me a whole bunch of money, but this could be interesting to write about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It was Wall Street in the 80s. Yes. Nobody quite understood what had just happened. Why were young people who had just come out of college being paid the equivalent of $100,000 or something to start when they clearly didn't know anything? Like, what was that all about? It was also true that serious quantitative ability was starting to get valued.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So this was the moment where they're starting to grab people out of like the physics department at MIT. And it was just happening in our place. We were at the bleeding edge of that. And as chance had it,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
it wasn't just that i got a job on wall street at that moment the firm i joined solomon brothers was making more money than all the other wall street firms combined what had happened has been an explosion in indebtedness in the society the government was borrowing lots of money there was the invention of mortgage bonds when did those get invented late 70s early 80s but the market was exploding and solomon brothers had historically been this place was kind of a sleepy backwater
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But they were really shrewd traders of bonds. And bonds were always thought to be like, that's not where the money is. Stocks are where the money is. And all of a sudden, bonds were where the money was. And what happened in that place was the best story on Wall Street.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And a crazy place that, although when I got to it, had become a public corporation. They had sold stock in themselves. They had pretty recently been just a private partnership. And the behavior in the place was like the behavior you would have in a private men's club where nobody was ever going to see what happened there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And it was literally every third day, some stripper would come in, take off all her clothes on the desk. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I hesitate. That's to come off the Coke. Because I'm pretty naive about drugs. Oh, you are. Alcohol's great. I never really need any more.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It was fueled by almost like a gambling addiction. But that's what you saw. It's this compulsive behavior. People were betting money for the firm. And when they weren't betting money for the firm, they were betting with each other. on anything they could bet on.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Dice. One thing after another. Horses, sports. It was just constant gambling. And I got my problems, but that's not one of them. I don't care about it, but it was fun to watch and fun to describe. They let in all kinds of characters. It wasn't cookie-cutter people. Former Navy fighter pilots and former professional athletes and people who just come off the street and shouted their way into a job.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Very energetic. In some ways, I love that part of the place.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It was. It was also intoxicating because I was, by their standards, kind of an intellectual. I had gone to Princeton. I had a master's. I thought all the time about things. Yeah, you knew about art. Yeah, that kind of stuff.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And so there was a training class for six months. Where it was not like teachers from out of the place. It was the actual traders paraded through. And you could ask them anything. And I was the guy who always had his hand in the air and was grilling them, trying to understand what they did. I got to master the subject because they let me do it. It's a moment I don't have anymore.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I know what goes on Wall Street a little bit. But at the time, I felt like I knew more about what was going on Wall Street than anybody.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's right. The young person is learning it and the old people don't know. It was absolutely thrilling for about a year and a half. And then I hit some cliff. All of a sudden, there wasn't that much to learn. And what I was supposed to be doing is selling people stuff they shouldn't buy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yes. I remember just going home at night and staring at the ceiling thing. I can't believe I just did that. You did a bad, bad thing. And I was rewarded for it. I was successful. I was in the loan office and my clients were people who were managing billions of dollars. It wasn't widows and orphans, but my job was to get them to do stuff they probably shouldn't do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Or sometimes they should do it, but mostly not. And in a funny way, this is a little crude. It was to get them to take the other side of bets that our own traders were making. So these were not good bets.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
With some tiny margin. Yes, that's right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah, that's right. You bet the Knicks in Los Angeles and the Lakers in New York and you're going to win. Or at least you're not going to lose. Get different point spreads in different places. Yeah. I got to a point where... I was faking it. And when I started to fake it, I started to do less work at work and started to write more articles about what was going on at work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
While I was there. At the bottom of it, it said my name. And I was an associate at Solomon Brothers in London.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
This is how delusional a 24-year-old is, though. I remember thinking, it's so cool. Everybody's going to think it's so cool. He has an article. He's so brave. I was thinking I'd come in the Boston and go, man, you have an article in the Wall Street Journal. Oh. No. That's not what they said.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I get to work. The guy who's the husband of the woman, the guy who hired me, who ran the whole Solomon Brothers, is waiting for me at my desk. I really liked him. And he looked so sad. And kind of gray. And he said, Michael, what have you done? He said, I've been up all night. And I said, why? And he said... And he said, no, we had an emergency board member meeting because of the article.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I said, oh, very oddly, there were a bunch of reasons that they didn't want to fire me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
You'd be like a whistleblower. No, that wasn't it at all. What was it? I had stumbled into the second or third most profitable client the firm had, who I didn't do anything useful for. They were just amused that I was there, and I would tell them the things I was going to write. The guy said, I don't need any advice from people like you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
The Rothschild. The Rothschild, the guys who ran his money. And they became so big that I was just a money machine. All I was was not offensive to them. I wasn't trying to sell them things they shouldn't buy. And they wanted to buy something they'd call or sell something. And they let us make money off them. They were really pretty funny because I was 24.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They refused to talk to anybody else in the firm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So in a way, they made me possible. They protected me. So the guy wasn't going to fire him. His name was Charlie McFay. Great guy. He says, we got to find a way this doesn't ever happen again. You can't write. It's what I love to do. And I'm going to keep doing it. And he goes, could you find another name?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I said, that's not a problem. And I don't know why it popped into my head. I said, what if I use my mother's maiden name? Diana Bleeker Monroe. So I wrote some things under the name of Diana Bleeker. Oh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I wonder what that does to the reception. That's what he said. He said, this is perfect, because none of these people around here are going to think a girl's a guy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Exact quote. He said, no one will think about it. It never would say Solomon. It would just say Diana Bleeker is whatever. Now... The New Republic then was a pretty hot magazine. Michael Kinsley was an editor of Genius. Michael Kinsley, who published some of my first pieces, some of them under the name of Diana Bleeker, he refused to just let it sit at that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I just walked around the corner to your local pharmacy, Al Aboud's pharmacy, and he said, what are you doing in our neighborhood? I said, I'm doing Dax Shepard's podcast. And he goes, I love that podcast. That guy's funny. And his wife's even funnier.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So he would put at the bottom of the article, Diana Bleeker is a pseudonym. One day I got home and I got a landline call. I pick up the phone and the actor Chevy Chase... His dad was named Ned Chase, and Ned Chase was a prominent nonfiction editor at Simon & Schuster.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He said who he was. I can't remember if he told me that Chevy was his son. He did. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He might have. And he said, I just figured out you're Diana Bleeker. Oh! He said, and you really need to write a book. And at that point, I thought, you'll pay me to write a book? I'm out of here. It had to be a pay cut, though. Oh, well, a huge pay cut. I wasn't even thinking that. It's as long as I can live on it. So I remember this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It would have been like September of 1987 because I realized at that point I got to stay till January because my bonus will hit my bank account in January. So I got to fake this until January. Once a month, I would fly back to New York to bring clients to the Chicago Exchange or to go hobnob with the people on the New York trading floor.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I had with me a notepad out when the stock market crash of October 1987 happened. And I was just wandering the Salomon Brothers trading floor, writing what ended up being a chapter in the book. And I was already thinking, I got a book in this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah. Funny that nobody is like, Michael, what are you writing? So that happened right before that. And then I told them I was leaving in January of 88. And the book appears in the fall of 89. There's one other funny little footnote. They were charming in their way. They were rude, crude, socially unacceptable, misogynist. But if any one of these guys was sitting here, you would like them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
You would say, Michael, you're an asshole for having sold them out. That's a real guy. You shouldn't have done that. They were not phony, slick investment bankers. They were like, Street hustlers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I was very fond of them. Not all of them were that way, but a lot of them were that way. So you've seen this chick has just written a book about Facebook called Careless People. It's just come out and Facebook has sued her. And she's not even allowed to go on television to talk about her book. Oh, no. And she signed some sort of non-disparagement agreement when she was leaving Facebook.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So she can never talk about it now. And they have to pull the book from the shelf.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Something like that. Yeah. So I didn't sign anything. And not only had I not signed anything, I told them I'm quitting to go write a book. And I'm going to write a book about Wall Street. Why not tell them, right? Yeah. And some big shots brought me into a room and asked me, what are they paying you? And I said, I think it's like $40,000 advance. They'd just given me like $160,000 bonus.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And that was like, for them, chump change. It's like, next year, it's going to be $400,000. Oh, my God. They brought me in a room and the tone was they were troubled. They were really worried about my mental health. They thought I was screwing up my life by leaving what they thought was a sure fortune to go write a book. Who was going to read a book? Yeah, yeah. They cared about my well-being.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I'm going to regret saying this because it'll come back to haunt me. I have said it a few times. I don't think I've ever said it publicly. One of the guys, and he was extremely senior in the firm, said, Michael, we think you could run the firm one day. Oh my God. And I remember thinking, you're out of your fucking mind. I can hardly show up. I can't brag myself to work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Then I run the firm one day, but they thought highly enough of me in that moment. They just cared.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Instead of going to the Knicks right away. David Robinson, instead of going right to the Spurs, goes to the Navy. Roger Staubach does the same thing for the Cowboys. Some people go on Mormon missions. Fucking Tillman. Yeah, people do that kind of thing. It's far more noble than anything I did to go and fight for your country. Yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But to be wired so that you're insisting on living your life instead of the life the world wants you to live. And that sounds like, oh, of course you live your life. But actually, there are always incentives to do stuff that you really don't particularly want to do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
This is a byproduct of first being raised with incredible privilege so I don't fear starvation. So that's a necessary condition there. But it's also a byproduct of being from New Orleans and being raised in a pretty happy, very kind of family-oriented environment where you didn't get measured by your success except in sports. But nobody knew what anybody else's dad did for a living or cared.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But also, you never walk into a dinner party and everybody just wants to talk to you. And that's good.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's unique. A value system was a little different, but I knew what happiness felt like.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
What is really rewarded is openness to other people. Openness to casual social interaction. Being entertaining is highly valued, but it isn't highly valued in a very self-conscious way. It's just appreciated and encouraged. Yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Goes right to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Wow. And I'm nobody. And I'm 28. All of a sudden, I have a career. People are telling me I'm a born writer, which comes as news to anybody who ever taught me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Or the English teachers throughout time. It was like, I'll always have problems. And so it is a curious situation to be in.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So this was a great lesson to me about how people read books. They read the book they want to read.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I got a letter after I wrote The Big Short from a very intelligent, very serious, very upset Oxford Dom of philosophy. I saved it. I don't remember his name. Saying, you were responsible once for diverting all this young talent to Wall Street. I thought you might have learned your lesson. But you've now done it again with The Big Short.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And you really ought to take responsibility for what your readers do with your books. Whoa. And I'm not unsympathetic to the criticism. Maybe I should take more responsibility for the consequences of the books. However, if I do that, the books are going to suck.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But it's not on JD's. He can't fucking decide how people are going to. And it isn't that every young person who read the book said, no, I want to go work on Wall Street. Because I've had plenty of people say, I read it and I hear what you thought it might have done and did that for me. It demystified it for me. And I thought, I don't really need to go do that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I'm going to do what I'm going to go do. So I had plenty of people say that. But I've had more people say, it's why I went to Wall Street. But those people would have found some other reason to go to Wall Street.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah, you get to play a video game with a stripper on your desk.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I think there's this other thing. Books have dog whistles. And sometimes you don't realize what the dog whistle is until you say, oh my God, look at all these dogs running because of the book. And the dog whistle for this book was, I persuade the reader, because it's true, that I don't know anything.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Art history major, yeah, I studied economics, but that doesn't teach you how to make money on Wall Street. I get to Wall Street, yeah, I learn intellectually how these markets work, but I know nothing I say to you is going to cause you to go get rich. And if I knew something, I'd go to our trader and tell him to do it and make money for the firm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
There's almost no way that what I'm saying has actual financial value, and yet the world is paying me a fortune for it. There are lots of young men sitting at American universities who think, I don't know anything. And no one's ever going to pay me to do anything because I don't know anything. But look, he doesn't know anything. Yeah. And they paid him a fortune. This is the place for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Or I'm just like him. I identify with you. And wow, it pays to be that. And so that happened a lot.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It was Portfolio Magazine. Is that what it was? It was kind of an S magazine, but the big short starts when an editor at Portfolio calls me and says, You want to revisit. And I said, nobody will talk to me. I am just toxic. If anybody sees me on a trading floor, anybody who brought me in is going to get fired.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I just thought, I'm toxic. But however... I sensed that the things that had gone wrong in these big Wall Street firms had their origins in my experience at Salomon Brothers and that this was kind of the end of a story that I had written the beginning of.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And then I started just trying, calling some of the guys who had lost all the money for the Wall Street firms. And they were individual traders who had lost like $10 billion. For me, it was unthinkable because the place I left, the Wall Street firm had such an informational advantage in the market. They seemed to just win every time. And I thought that was going to happen forever.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Somehow the Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns had become the dumb money at the table. I thought that's the story.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
AIG too. They were selling the credit defaults. They were selling, all these people were selling insurance.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Now, what incentive does that create?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I want your house to burn down. That's an insane product. There is a wonderful New Yorker writer named Casey Sepp who wrote a book about Harper Lee. And in this book, she creates the book that Harper Lee was trying to create when she got blocked. And it's about a minister in the South who bought life insurance policies on other people and then murdered them. Of course. Yes, yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And made a huge living doing this. You should not be able to buy insurance policies on things you don't own.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's right. However, Wall Street creates this product where you can buy insurance policies on securities you don't own.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It's pennies on the dollar. I can buy a billion dollars insurance for a few million dollars on these bonds that are never going to go bad.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's right. So they create all these incentives to destroy all these companies.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And you buy a shirt on them even if you didn't own the things. And so I wander back into Wall Street for Portfolio Magazine and I start calling some of these traders and they want to talk to me. That's when I thought, Christ, I might be able to do this because I can get that side of the story. And it turned out they wanted to talk to me because Liar's Poker was why they were on Wall Street.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And it was like after about 10 of these, it was like I created the financial crisis with this book. Stories need structure. And there were two aha moments. One is, oh, they were the dumb money. Who's the smart money? Michael Burry. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But you probably had the same experience I did. You went into a class and you went, oh my God, this is interesting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
There was this cliche on Wall Street when I was there, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And he was actually the one-eyed man who was king in the land of the blind. And there's this other thing about him. It wasn't until the movie came out that I understood it. Christian Bale plays him in the movie. Christian Bale nailed him so unbelievably exactly on the screen.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I had the thought... I could not have described to Christian Bale what he needed to do to play that role. How did that happen? So Christian Bale finally confessed to me what he'd done. Michael Berry said, Christian Bale called me up and said he wanted to spend the day with me. And that was the weirdest day I've ever had in my life. Christian Bale came and studied him for a day.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So I did too. I not only had the freedom, I had a father who said, don't you dare waste your Princeton education trying to figure out what you're going to do for a living. How to make money. Yeah. He said, don't go study economics because you want to work on Wall Street or that kind of stuff. He says, such a waste.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He was you on the training floor. That's right. and asked for his clothes at the end of the day. So Michael Bay shipped him his clothes, so he wore his clothes. But Christian Bale figured out that all the weird mannerisms, he said it all came from him breathing in the wrong places in sentences. If you try this, if you do this, all of a sudden you're herky-jerky in all kinds of odd ways.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And he's told Adam McKay, the director, as long as I'm breathing in the wrong place, I will reproduce this guy's physical...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
There's something about when someone is really good at what they do. There's a simplicity to it. Everything slows down for them. When he said that, I actually thought, first, I'm ashamed that I spent a year with Michael Berry, and I did not notice that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I get paid to notice things, and I never noticed that. But yes, it's true. And then I thought, when I go write about people, I'm going to try to spend a little time pretending I'm Christian Bale and asking myself, if I'm Christian Bale, how do I play him?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Spend a couple hours with you just to tell me how to describe you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yes. More than happy. I was shocked he pulled it off. I thought it was undoable. I didn't say how you made it. People buy stuff all the time they're never going to make. I thought this is one of those.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And he nailed it. And it's got real relevance now. I think that event, the financial crisis, speaks to this moment in our politics right now. The anger it created, and it was a justifiable anger. All of a sudden, we go from a society where everybody's at least willing to at least pretend to believe that it's capitalism and we're all living by the same rules. It's fair, but it's harsh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Then all of a sudden, no, these rich people are not playing by the same rules. If I fail, I fail. If they fail, the government comes in and not only bails them out, but enables them to keep paying themselves huge sums of money when what they did caused enormous harm to me. They should at least be out of business.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
it radicalized a lot of people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But if you think about what came out of that event, the Tea Party, which morphs into Trump.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah. And Bitcoin, which is a reaction to the mistrust of the institutions and the governments. I remember when I was reporting the book, one of the obstacles I faced was that the smart people who'd been on the right side And it often tried to do the right thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He ran a law firm. He's still alive. He's still great. Good for you. My parents are still living in the house I grew up in. I'm going to go back in two weeks. You know you're going to live to 100. What a freedom you have.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They didn't just make the bet, or in one case, before they made the bet, they went to the Wall Street Journal, they went to the FBI, they went to the SEC, and nobody wanted to hear about it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They made the bet sort of more in sorrow than in greed, but they were terrified that the society's gonna wake up and it's gonna have to turn on someone, and they're gonna turn on me because I made all this money out of it. And getting the subjects comfortable with me coming in and talking to them to write about them in a way that was gonna make them very prominent made them very nervous.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Those two guys were the most sensitive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Two young guys in the garage in Berkeley.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Now, what wasn't in the book, it was the one time in my career I regret allowing a subject to tell me, we'll tell you everything, but there's one thing you have to keep out. Don't know if he's ever done it to me before, but I thought in this case I should do it. It was worth it. His father was the vice chairman of Lehman Brothers. He and his father had this argument while they were making the bet.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Because the father had funded the firm. Like, the father would say, Lehman Brothers would never do such things. And Lehman Brothers would never be in this position. And the son's saying, no, your firm's actually corrupt. It got very heated. If you were ever going to turn this into a different kind of drama, that father-son thing, it killed me I couldn't use it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I hate the feeling that I haven't told the reader everything I think is important. It was the one time I felt this is kind of important. The reader should know this. But that was the only time. I have moments like that in my life. I remember I stopped blurbing books like 20 years ago because someone I had a social connection with asked me to blurb the book. I didn't like the book.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I could not do it. So I was lying on the back of the book. I said, I'm just never doing this again. So I'm never going to do this again either. If I can't include all of it. It was worth it, but uncomfortable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I still stay in my bedroom from when I was six years old. So I had not only the freedom, but also a dad who had said, don't screw it up by succumbing to this pressure. I knew that it wasn't a path to fame and fortune, but I didn't know what it was. But you were on fire for it. I was so excited. I lived for that feeling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So this is very funny you say this because universally, when I write a book, the main characters are a little upset with me because I don't give anybody any editorial control and they read it when it comes out and they call. We have a conversation. They don't feel betrayed exactly. That's not right. They feel like I have exposed them. They feel very vulnerable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They feel naked and they're upset that they're naked. And then what happens is people appreciate them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And their best friend calls and says, that's you. And they realize my best friend knows that's me and still loves me. And so everything's okay. And then they forget that they were ever naked. And then they forget they were ever upset. I don't write books about people I don't feel some sympathy for. This is not a hostile act. Yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you're saying.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
People don't know how other people see them, and they think they're managing the situation, and they aren't. I know that you are seeing me right now in some way that's slightly different than I would see myself if I was sitting there describing myself, and it would make me uncomfortable to know what you were saying. Of course. But it's okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So we took on sports gambling as a way to talk about the society, really. But it's a really interesting situation. And it's an awkward thing to take on because everybody who might take it on is being paid by the sports gambling companies. There's not a lot of honest stuff about it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I've had friends who gamble on sports or who are friends with the people who own DraftKings and FanDuel or whatever, whose opinion about the industry has changed because of the podcast. So that I've noticed. And I was just at, this past weekend, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It's like the Moneyball Conference. And it's 3,000 nerds in a room and a lot of GMs of sports teams.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And it's been overrun already by DraftKings and FanDuel. And so there are all these people from DraftKings and FanDuel. And it felt like I was the stink bomb in the room. They didn't have any panels on the subject, but it's clear that this is an uncomfortable... It's kind of like exposing CTE. Or smoking and cancer. People get pissed off because there's a lot of money at stake already.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Those two companies are $30, $40 billion companies. It is... sinister what we're doing to young men right now. It's not just with sports gambling. We're creating young male anger at a fantastic rate. If you were going to set out to create as much young male anger as you could, we're doing a great job.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
A little bit. You did some homework. Well, I tried to. To get out of Princeton, you have to write a thesis.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Let's tell them they're evil from the minute they walk in the classroom when they're in first grade. And then let's create an industry that preys on young male overconfidence.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yes. And that has, with unbelievable precision, the ability to identify people who don't know what they're doing and get them to do as much of it as possible. Yes. At the same time, they can, with great precision, identify the very, very, very few people who actually know what they're doing when they're betting on sports and kick them out of the casino. Yes. It's diabolical.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He actually is making edge bets, the bets that have positive expected value. He knows something about golfers that we don't know. We can't take the bet. And he's gone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah. We got a pro gambler who knew what he was doing to give us his bets to place. And we participated a little bit so it was legal. And we got booted out everywhere in a matter of four or five bets. Even where we'd lost money because they could identify that the bet, even though the bet lost, it was a smart bet.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It was like 60,000 words. It's like a book. It was narrow. I really cared about it. It was about the way Donatello used classical sources. And serendipitously, I had... access to unpublished research about what Donatello would have seen. We know all kinds of stuff that's been dug up since then that he didn't know.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
No, they're socially engaged, but they are not rational.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I mean, it's motivated reasoning. You will systematically think your team is going to do better than you should think or your favorite players. You got one half your brain in a really irrational space already because you are a fan.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
When you introduce gambling into this mind, it's already a mind that thinks it knows things it doesn't know. He gets into the superstition. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It's funny what gets studied by academics and what doesn't. And as he points out, the fan was just sitting there waiting to be studied. It's such an important character in American life. But pinheads like me generally don't like sports. People were just turning a blind eye to it because they thought it was not worthy of attention.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And for our podcast, it's worthy of attention just to establish the brain space in which this gambling industry is going to enter.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
There are some who do that. And they're kicked off. Right. Overwhelmingly, they are fans.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So what happened in this country is that back in 1992, Senator Bill Bradley, former New York Knick, had passed a federal law that forbid states from legalizing sports gambling that didn't have it already. And that grandfathered in Nevada, for example.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Then what happens is because Atlantic City is not granted for it, they don't have it. New Jersey gets upset. They can't do it. And Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, launches what seems to be a quixotic and futile lawsuit to try to overturn Bradley's law. It succeeds in 2018. In 2018, the Supreme Court says this law is unconstitutional. It's up to the states.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So I could recreate the picture he had of what Romans and Greeks were doing and think about what he saw and how he used it in his sculpture. And it had this feeling like I'm doing something no one's done before. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Any state that wants to legalize sports betting can. Since then, 38 states have legalized it. Wow. Which created all kinds of weird natural experiments like Alabama doesn't, Mississippi does, and suicide rates go up in Mississippi and savings rates go down in Mississippi. You can see the effects of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And he's the lawyer Chris Christie hires to argue the Supreme Court case. Oh, wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
You make a very good point in asking that question because I had dinner with him too and we interviewed him. I really, really liked him. He's damn likable. He's from the South. He died. He died? He died three months ago. Oh, I didn't know that. And he died right after I had dinner with him, like two weeks after I had dinner with him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But I asked him, I was just curious, you're the most famous constitutional. Most successful. Argued the most cases before the Supreme Court. What's the strategy here? You're not just taking anything that comes in the door. And he would say that one is, I don't want to argue something I don't myself believe. But also, if I think this is a non-starter, it's a waste of time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
When I got so immersed in something i became a different kind of student i was a mediocre student when i had to do lots of shallow stuff when it was just deep dive and get it down on paper i became excellent and for the first time really in my academic career and i thought oh means i want to be an art historian and that is when the archaeologist who supervised the project said they know jobs yeah
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So he's also picking cases. He's looking at the Supreme Court. He has the Supreme Court wired. He knows what they think about things. He's picking the things that he thinks are going to succeed. And he had an odd premonition that sports gambling would work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
The reason we have two huge corporations in the middle of this business that are not Las Vegas casinos, DraftKings and FanDuel, preceding the legalization of sports gambling, there was a fight to legalize fantasy sports. And they were two fantasy sports companies. And fantasy sports looks a lot like gambling. You're entering competitions and you buy in and you win money.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And they went state to state, these two companies, with very shrewd lobbyists and persuaded a lot of states that this was not gambling because it was a game of skill.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yes, so is blackjack. It's a slippery slope and where they had success was especially where there weren't Native American tribes to oppose them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
California and Florida are both places where the tribes were very powerful and they had the right to have gambling on the reservation. They didn't want anybody doing anything like gambling off the reservation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And the states are starved of revenue, and they're looking for new sources of revenue. They want to believe. And FanDuel and DraftKings lead the charge and legalize sports gambling in lots of places with state regulation. But if you interview the state regulators, they basically say they're running circles around us. The state regulator in Ohio was very funny. We interviewed him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He said, my teenage son is getting pizza boxes with free sports bets attached to it from these companies, and I'm the regulator. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
With your Uber ride, you get a free sports bed. And so they're enticing young people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's probably right. So I live in a state, California, where sports betting has not been legalized. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the boys in my son's high school class are betting on sports. So they are both underage and in a state where it's illegal. He was like, yeah, I can do this. Here's the app. You find ways to get around the restrictions and you just do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So we actually did an episode where I gave him $5,000 and put a GoPro on his head, basically, or a wire on him and said, let's go see how smart you are. And we're going to learn why you shouldn't be doing this. I inoculated him. It was like handing him a box of cigarettes and saying, you got to smoke the whole box or a fifth of whiskey. You don't get to get up until you finish it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And it was really interesting to see him figure out what was going on. For me, it's obvious, right? I was on Wall Street. I know a lot of people in that world. I know that if DraftKings or FanDuel are trying to get me to do something, I shouldn't do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It's true in all markets. If you're going to teach a trader, someone who's going to trade anything, one thing, you teach them the idea of adverse selection. That if someone is finding you to trade with you, it's quite likely that person knows something you don't know. Or to expand on this, if there's a market price for something, there's all this information in that market price.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And a bet, like a money line or a point spread, is a market price on a sporting event. Unless you know something that the market doesn't know, and you better know why you know something the market doesn't know, because the market knows a lot. You are at a disadvantage that the market knows stuff you don't know. So the person on the other side of the bet likely knows something you don't know.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Actually, in the thesis meeting, I must have been thinking, oh, I'm a good writer. Because I said to him, what did you think about the writing? He said, put it this way, never try to make a living at it. Like, you're not that good a writer. That's where I was in my head when I got out of college. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. The professor says I'm not a very good writer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's your baseline. So there are, I know them, professional sports gamblers who know that golfer A is better on this kind of course than the market knows and is going to overperform at this tournament because this kind of course suits him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Or fraternity brother knows that his fraternity brother who's on the basketball team has just agreed to miss the first free throw in the basketball game this weekend. There is inside information that is useful. If you have that, go for it. I mean, it's not a box. You're endorsing it. I'm endorsing it. If you have to gamble. If you have to gamble, try to know something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah, you should know something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Vegas was not ready for the change. FanDuel and DraftKings has this huge advantage over the Las Vegas casinos who have sports books. Their business model was more like a tech company. The FanDuel and DraftKings was more like a social media company. They knew everything about the behavior of their fantasy players.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They knew what their weaknesses were, what vices they could be encouraged to indulge in, who would make what kind of bet. And the fantasy sports companies knew everything. That was their business model. knowing about their customers. That's a new idea for Las Vegas. I mean, they know the high rollers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They know it in a very general way, but they don't know how to take someone who is engaged in two-legged parlays and turn them into someone who will make even worse three-legged parlay bets. It is nefarious. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It's like payday loan type shit. Imagine prohibition ends in the 1930s, and there's a liquor company that actually has incredibly detailed information on how to get addicts to drink.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah, that's right. They have every drink you ever had.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's right. And they show up on your doorstep.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And start to get you going again.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That liquor company has this huge advantage. And that's the advantage that FanDuel and DraftKings have.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Once I found my character, the professional sports gambler, Rufus Peabody is his name. He's among the smartest sports gamblers on the planet. He's been making a very good living out of it for 15 years.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Millions of dollars a year. Millions of dollars. Oh, I thought you said billions. And he works his ass off. He really does have edges in the marketplace and it's not easy. But part of his problem is that in the old world, the Vegas casinos would take his bets. In the new world, FanDuel and DraftKings won't. They figure out he knows what he's doing and they don't want the bets.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He thought I was a thinker, which was funny, because I never thought I had a thought. I wasn't aware of that. If you caught me there, Age 21, graduating from Princeton. You just said, poor Michael, he has no plan. People have said, oh, he's charming. We like having him around. I have a lot of friends who are going to be successful.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So to get his bets down, he has to hire networks of people like his mother. They're professional people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He has to trust them and they have to be smart at disguising the bets so that if you're actually a professional mule, you're actually placing these bets for Rufus. You do things like make stupid bets occasionally so that they don't detect.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
You got to trick the algorithm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
You live in New York, you bet on the Knicks. You do that for a little bit so that they classify you as dumb better. And then you come in a bunch of smart bets. So our producer in the podcast, Lydia Jean Cott, who, one, doesn't know the difference between a basketball and football, and two, is such a nervous nelly around money and risk, would never go into a casino. That's too scary kind of thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah. Rufus gave Lady Jean $100,000, $150,000. I can't remember. Lots of dollars to place bets with. And she was running.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Her bank shut off her credit cards because they thought someone had stolen them because there was all this money coming through the bank account. She has been banned from, I think, every sports book in the country and has been told, you're never welcome here again. The funny moment was there was one sports book, MGM, so one of the Vegas sports books, took her first bets, the smart bets.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
The bets actually lost. So she lost a bunch of money right away on golf, like tens of thousands of dollars. They thought, oh, dumb high roller. They misidentified her. They weren't good at figuring out those bets were smart. They wanted to make her VIP. They got in touch with her, and they gave her free tickets to Charlie XCX. Oh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And she calls and she says, this has been the most miserable experience of my life. I don't want to be doing this. When can I stop?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Those bastards. Those bastards. Oh, my God. Those bastards. Broke her heart. I should have bought her tickets. Well, I was just going to say, you wealthy, you should have bought her tickets. It's so funny. I should have bought her tickets, but I was thinking, this is such a great end to the story. I just want to leave it at that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
If you get to be a VIP, you have a problem. I was talking to a bunch of people who manage large sums of money for like university endowments and pension funds and all the rest. People who are giving money to Wall Street people to invest for them. And they asked me, if you were interviewing a Wall Street investor to decide whether to trust them with your money, what question would you ask?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I said, I'd ask, have you ever been a VIP at a sports book? Because if you're a VIP at a sports book, you're exactly the kind of person who should not be investing money. They have identified you are bad with money. You are going to be a long-term cash cow for them. Make a lot of stupid bets. And yeah, we'll all frame it as I can afford to lose this. It's just fun for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It's recreational for me to lose a million bucks. In this pool of VIPs are lots of people who can't afford to lose the money.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And they don't make the distinction. One of our sports gamblers wanted to see how badly the big sports books would behave. He started to behave like an addict and would say things like, I just need another line of credit that my wife doesn't see. Let me in in the game. And they would say things like, you can't put this in writing. Just tell me over the phone and we'll get you the line of credit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I would say that if you manage to get yourself designated a VIP, it's an embarrassment. It's not a compliment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It was like I captured some people's imagination, but no one saw use in me. But I got in my head, shit, if I'm not going to be an art historian, I want to write books. I want to do that again.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It's one of the couple of states that have moral objections.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Do you think if you said what you were maybe about to say that you would get sued?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
No. I'm not a huge boxing guy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I don't like seeing people get hit. I remember when I was a kid, I went to a camp where you were forced to box. And I remember the first fight I got in and I wailed on some kid. I hated it. Like, I just stopped. I don't want to beat him up. And then the second fight, someone got in and wailed on me. And I thought, I like this even less. Yeah. Exactly. So where is the fun?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Wildenstein. You know the Wildenstein Gallery?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I don't know. The tribes have succeeded in preventing gambling from being legalized. But as I say, my son, 17 years old, and he's on the apps and he's gambling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Young men who take to sports gambling become addicts at a rate of about 8%. Charlie Baker, former governor of Massachusetts, is the new head of the NCAA. When he became head of the NCAA, he went and did a kind of listening tour of colleges because he wanted to see what was going on in sports on campuses. And he thought he was going to find one thing and he found another.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
You know it because of, they call it the tiger lady or the lion lady who had all the plastic surgery. She was Jocelyn Wildenstein. She was the wife of the heir to the gallery. Oh. And I actually knew her or had met her. I was the stock boy at Wildenstein. It was just like, get the pictures from the vaults and bring them out to show the clients.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He found an epidemic of athletes being harassed by their fellow students, gamblers. And the harassment was like death threats. You miss this free throw or you're dead. Or just tell me now something that I know that I can bet on. It was so bad. that he did a survey and found that 60% of the boys on college campuses were sports gambling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah, but it's a machine for creating lots and lots of addicts.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It leads you to oblivion. It leads you to the end. It leads you to ruin. And I kind of thought one way that reform is going to happen, it's going to be some high profile person's child.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Because that's happened in England. I don't want to tell you who it is, but I do know a person who's very prominent there whose son has just not committed suicide, but close, who's bankrupted himself, and the dad realizing this is outrageous and is going to work politically to constrain the gambling industry.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They're way ahead of us. And they're much less prone to making stupid bets. It's interesting. We are uniquely stupid. We're not inoculated. It's like smallpox just hit us.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I might be wrong about this. Maybe this is all just going to go away and this new vice will be assimilated into the culture and we'll all be fine. But I do think it's more likely that we're going to be living with an epidemic. It's silent. You don't see it. With drug addicts, you see them. This, just someone on his phone doing stuff. You've got a casino in your pocket.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So I think we're going to wake up and go, what have we done here to a half generation of young men? The question is like, what do you do then? Yeah. You have a child. What do you do? It's a question I think a lot of parents ask themselves about a lot of things. How do I protect my child from this thing? He's out there in a predatory environment. It's essentially a predatory business.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And this place, it might still be the world's most valuable private collection of art. When I was there, I mean, they had 64 Fragonards. They had 10 Cezannes no one had ever seen. It started as Jewish rag merchants end of the 1800s and on the streets of Paris would trade rags with Impressionist painters. And then they smuggle all this stuff out. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
As was the mortgage thing. As was the mortgage thing. But my child was not going to buy credit to false swaps.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's right. I actually do think that if you have a boy that you need to have not just the sex talk, you have to have the gambling talk.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Or an Oakland A. But I said first, here are this thing sports gambling. He goes, yeah, we're all doing it. He was not yet, but all of his friends were. He was circling. I went and taught his English class and there were like 30 kids there. And he asked during the class, can you raise your hand if you're gambling on sports? All but one of the boys did. None of the girls.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But he said, yeah, I'm tempted. I think I know some things here, especially with Hoops. He's a Hoops player. He knows about the Golden State Warriors. So I said, here, I'm going to give you $5,000. And you're going to wear a wire. And we're going to just follow you. I'm going to stay out of it. I'm not going to parent you. The producers may a little bit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But you're going to just explain why you're doing what you're doing. And you can keep the winnings. What I thought was going to happen... is he was going to vaporize the $5,000, and it was going to be humiliating, and the humiliation would be the antidote.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He would learn how little he knew, and that the things he thought he knew, he didn't know, and how complicated this market was, and how this market was trying to get him to do stuff he shouldn't do. Yeah. That's not what happened.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I don't want to ruin the episode for the listener. The episode, it turned out so beautifully. What actually did happen, he got the lesson and he got the money. And how that happened, I would rather people just listen to the episode.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I got really interested in the federal government during Trump won. I thought it was just comic material. Trump had fired his whole transition team the day after the election, 500 and something people. There were a thousand people inside the Obama administration who had spent six months preparing sort of a course on how the federal government works for whoever won.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And Trump said the course is irrelevant. He literally said, I can learn everything I need to know in two hours.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Beautiful mind. He's a beautiful mind. But I thought this is comic material. I'll go get the briefings. Starting with how the nuclear weapons are run. The people who were going to give that briefing, they couldn't give me all the classified stuff, but they were kind of grateful. It's like, we worked so hard. We didn't get to do it. We wanted someone to read this. Could someone just hear this?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But the reception, it was called the fifth risk, to that book was so positive that I thought I might want to do more of this if it proves useful. Another thing that happened was at the very end of the book, I did one deep dive into the life of a single civil servant. And the story was literature. The material was so good. I thought I should have done more of that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So a year and a bit ago, I was on a hiking trail with the then opinion editor of the Washington Post, David Chipley. And I said, you know what we should do? I can't do it. It's too complicated an institution. The government is huge. It's massive. They're 2.3 million employees. I said, let me go hire six writers I love, people who just, I know, make everything fun on the page.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I, along with the six of them, will parachute into the government. Everybody can find their story. And you can run it as a series running into the election, just to remind everybody what these people do. And the series was called Who Is Government? The pieces were so good and things you just wouldn't expect. I'll give you one that's not mine.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
During World War II, there's a whole story about collaboration with the Germans to get their stuff out. So that stuff was in there, and I was the stock boy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Casey Sepp, New Yorker writer. found a character in the Veterans Administration named Ron Walters. No one's ever heard of him. No one would have ever heard of him. Who took over the National Cemeteries 20 years ago. And the National Cemeteries is where we bury our veterans. And when he took it over, they had kind of mediocre customer satisfaction.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
The families of the people who were burying their dead had mixed feelings about how the operation was run. There's now at the University of Michigan that measures consumer satisfaction across our society. Like it's not just private companies, but also government agencies. And so you can find out how the Department of Agriculture is doing, but you can also find out how Amazon and FedEx is doing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Ron Walters turned this enterprise into the enterprise with the highest customer satisfaction in the entire country. And you think about why do we have a country? What are the things the country does? Mostly we're better off in a country because it helps keep us safe, but it preserves certain values. And if we don't honor our war dead, it's ugly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And that this man has come in and honored the war dead. It's quite moving. And not ask for a dollar more than like his civil service pay and not ask for anybody to write an article about him. He was very wary. It's story after story like this. And the idea of some know nothing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
rolling in with a chainsaw and saying, you're all waste, fraud, and abuse, when some of these people are the best among us. And have dedicated 20 years of their life to making this thing. It's obscene. So it turns out that the book is very timely. I wrote the last piece of it after the election, but all of it mostly was written last June.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And it's Dave Eggers and Kamau Bell and John Lanchester and Casey Sepp and Sarah Vowell. You've seen The Incredibles? She was the voice of Violet in The Incredibles. She's a wonderful... historian too, and Geraldine Brooks, the Australian novelist. Really gifted writers. Each piece is so different from the next. That's fine. It's a way to have a conversation about this. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I've really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
con artists there's got so many people that sell art they don't actually own it's a very willy-nilly world right i feel like it needs an expose i've thought that for a long time that's more true of the contemporary art world than it is of the world of old master paintings or even the impressionists but still there was a whole class of person who would come in and look at what might be a raphael to say it was a raphael and they were paid by the gallery
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
to determine what it was. And all the incentive in the market is to say it is, it is, it is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And you saw with this Leonardo that sold for $400 million two years ago. You must have seen this. This picture, it was found by a New York dealer in a Louisiana auction house and bought for like $4,000. And it had been in a house six blocks from where I grew up for like 50 years. A New Orleans family had bought it at auction in England. Is it real?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
It ended up being bought by the bad dude in Saudi Arabia for, I think, $450 million and instantly discredited. And it's sort of like maybe Leonardo might have seen this at some point.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Did they get their money back? No, because it hasn't been so totally discredited. There's enough to be in a court case. There's a difference between a fake and a forgery, right? A forgery is something that is consciously pretending to be something, like you and I went and painted a Leonardo and tried to pass it off.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That's fraud. There's intention. This is misattribution. It's probably like school of, but the Louvre at a Leonardo show, the guy at the Louvre is sort of like the man, declined to include it in it. And it's just vanished. Nobody knows where it is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
So that kind of thing happens quite a bit. And of course, when the buyers are Russian oligarchs and they're sticking in shipping containers and nobody's going to see them again, they're just marks. Because yes, you may get shot if they find out, but nobody's going to know what you did.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But if you have a stolen work of art, you've got something that really is inventable. You're not going to be able to sell that. Right. You get the pleasure out of it, but that's all you're going to get out of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Because this was an amazing story. The question at the time when I was there, I was only there six months. But I had free run of the whole place because I was a stock boy. So I spent all my time looking at paintings no one knew existed and sculptures.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
There was a time when Daniel Wildenstein, since deceased, the grandson of the guy who founded it, comes rolling in from Paris and he says, bring me the Houdon. Now, Houdon was a very famous Enlightenment sculptor. He did the busts, you know, of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire. He managed to get all the leaders of the day.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They're these magnificent, realistic things. And everybody thought they were all known. You'd open a book on a houdon, you'd see all of them. And to our knowledge, we did not own a houdon. And so nobody knows what he's talking about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And finally he gets really upset and he marches into the elevator and motions everyone to come with him, goes down to the basement, pulls out this massive, shitty plaster bust of his father, of George Wildenstein, I think his name was, takes a hammer and a chisel, goes boom, it opens up, and inside is a houdon of Mirabeau, who was the triple agent in the French Revolution and who had smallpox.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
His face was all scarred. And this thing was unknown to anybody. They had smuggled it out of Paris. And gotten it to New York. Whoa. Now it's known. It's sold. I don't know who bought it. But it was like he put a $10 million price tag on it and eventually it sold. Yeah. There was that kind of stuff going on.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
There was nothing to do all day because the only people who came through every now and then, a billionaire would come through. And every now and then, the other people who would come through were the museum directors. And there was a guy named Tom Hoving, who was a very famous director of the Metropolitan Museum, and another guy named Everett Fahey, who ran the Frick Museum.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
They were just world-class observers of paintings. And they would come through, and I'd be left alone with them. I was told, show them whatever they want to see. Fahey, I loved him. Both of them have died since. But Fahey came through, and I got to kind of know him because he came through a few times.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And one time he looks at me, he goes, do you have any friends who are interested in Renaissance painting? I said, yeah, actually, my dad is. He's obsessed with it. He says, this isn't very expensive. They have a couple of pictures here. I don't think they know what they have. Really?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Oh, wow, insider trading. Wow, I love that. Well, I mean, they sold it knowingly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He said, these are gems. These are interesting pictures. They're not very expensive. One was $40,000. I mean, they cost something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He has a Saint Jerome in the wilderness bashing himself in the chest with a rock. The idea is to ward off sexual thoughts.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Not an obvious thing to go and take a rock to yourself. But it's by Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, who is the master of Perugino, master of Raphael. And it's an amazing picture. He bought it for, I don't know, $100,000 or something, and it's a million-dollar painting. Anyway. That's great. That's so cool.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Here's the problem. The original point, this seems like this should be a good book in the art market, and I'm sure for someone else there is. I have so much trouble caring about the people. The people who are the victims are billionaire collectors. It's just so hard to get worked up about the characters.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah, kind of rooting for the guy who ripped him off. Did you ever want to steal one?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
You know, that's very funny you say that because I swear to you, that thought never crossed my mind. No.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I mean, it's so funny. They must smell that and keep people like that out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
But that thought never crossed my mind. What did cross my mind, this is a strange story for whatever reason, My father told me two things growing up about careers. He wasn't unhappy with being a lawyer exactly. It just wasn't a passion project. What he was was a very gifted administrator. And so he ran the law firm. He would also end up running businesses that the law firm were entangled with.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
He did a lot of different kind of administrative things. He ran a big hospital for a stretch. But he said the problem with the law, unless you're a litigator, litigators love their jobs. They're performers. They're actors in the courtroom. He said, you're dealing with other people's problems and other people's problems are just not that interesting. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
You're catching families that are fighting over money and it's nasty. So he kind of scared me off the law and things like the law. But for some reason, he said, never take a job where you have to wear a blue suit. I think what he was thinking was banking. I don't know what he was thinking. But he had something in his head about if you have to wear a blue suit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I thought, well, that's never going to happen. But when I got to the Wildenstein Art Gallery, the rule was the stock boy had to wear a blue suit. And all I had was like seersucker from New Orleans. And I just wore it. And they started yelling at me, go get a blue suit. And I said, I don't own a blue suit. It was a knock-down, drag-out fight.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And finally, they took me by the hand over to the Bloomingdale's young men's department and bought me a blue suit. And so the one thing I did do that was kind of squirrely was when I quit, I went in the morning before they opened and I left the blue suit on the sidewalk in front of the place. Wow. As an act of like, I don't know what. Define. Upper middle class protest. Sure, sure, sure, sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
That was a bank shot, because I had a girlfriend at the time who was getting out of college, and she really wanted to go to the London School of Economics.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
Yeah, so I followed her. And I also had the thought, the world is a conspiracy of people who understand the language of economics. All these classmates of mine in college seemed to throw away their college lives studying something they didn't care about. But in exchange, they got a pass. They got a pass to wander the halls of Goldman Sachs. They could talk that language.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
And I thought, I'm going to learn that language just to go learn that language. I was suspicious. And I had one class in microeconomics when I was a senior that I took pass, fail, so I didn't have to do very much work so I could focus on my thesis. And I remember thinking, why didn't I realize this was interesting?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Michael Lewis (on the gambling epidemic)
I stayed away from it because all these people I disapproved of were studying it rather than going and seeing what it was. And actually, some of this is really an interesting way to see the world.
Criminal
The Christmas Fire
All right, so here's the deal. Take a former world number one. That's me, Andy Roddick. Add in the journalist who knows everything about tennis and a producer who's still figuring out how to spell tennis. You get served with Andy Roddick, a weekly podcast where we break down the game we all love.
Criminal
The Christmas Fire
We cover the biggest stories, talk to the sport's biggest stars, and highlight the people changing tennis in ways you might not even realize. Whether it's grand slam predictions, coaching changes, off-court drama, or the moves shaping the future of the sport, we've got it all. This podcast is about having fun, sharing insights, and giving fans a real look at what makes tennis so great.
Criminal
The Christmas Fire
Catch Serve with Andy Roddick on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen, or watch us on YouTube. Like, subscribe, follow, all that good stuff. Let's get started.
Criminal
The Christmas Fire
I mean, there was never a delivery mechanism for cigarettes as efficient as the phone is for delivering the gambling apps. It's like the world has created less and less friction for the behavior when what it needs is more and more.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
In 2018, there was a Supreme Court decision that completely, totally, wildly changed the way Americans engage with one of their favorite pastimes, sports. The decision removed the federal ban on betting on games.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
So now you can be sitting at the bar with your friends watching the Philadelphia Eagles, go birds, and pick up your phone, open an app like DraftKings, and bet all your money on the Eagles winning or losing. And this is really new. It's this huge sea change. And it's the subject of a recent episode of Michael Lewis's podcast, Against the Rules. Hi, Michael Lewis.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
Thank you for joining us. This is such a fascinating phenomenon that kind of didn't exist six years ago.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
The market has changed. It's harder and harder to find an edge to beat the house, especially if the house keeps changing the rules on you or otherwise finding ways to overwhelm and outsmart you. And Michael Lewis says these companies are now everywhere.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
And when I see those advertisements on my television from FanDuel, et cetera, it does seem like I should do it, right? Like they are offering me this kind of free bet. They're offering me free money basically, right? Shouldn't I just do it?
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
Oh, that's interesting. I wonder how far they can push that. Yeah.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
A huge thank you to Michael Lewis and to Pushkin Industries for sharing this episode with us. Michael Lewis's podcast is called Against the Rules. This season is all about the sports fandom. And it's really fun. Our version of their episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Martina Castro. It was fact-checked by Ciara Juarez and engineered by Sina Lefredo.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
And now, all of a sudden, 39 states have legalized sports gambling. And the sports leagues themselves are encouraging it.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
And I'm Mary Childs. Today on the show, Michael Lewis' show about the power of being the house and beating the dealer. About how the world of sports betting got more and more complicated and how that changed who wins. Michael, what will there be?
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
And we will learn how this world has evolved to a place where I might lose my life savings taking advice from an ad on TV. Today, we are hearing from Michael Lewis all about the evolution of sports gambling. The story starts in the old school world in the 1970s in Las Vegas, Nevada, the only state where people could legally gamble on sports.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
We're about to meet a person who will discover that he can outsmart the system and become one of the biggest players in sports gambling.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
Rufus wanted to see if he could take things a step further than Roxy had ever gone and use people's own biases against them. That's after the break. We are about to hear what happened in the aftermath of the 2018 Supreme Court decision that opened the door to legalizing sports gambling. The world we live in now, where online sports betting companies like DraftKings and FanDuel are dominant.
Planet Money
How sports gambling blew up
They are the new house. But back before all of that, Rufus Peabody was going to take a step in that direction, using more powerful tools and better information to refine the odds. And he tells Michael Lewis about some new ideas he had about how to use all of that.
Pod Save America
Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And that you're going to, you know, so you hop, you keep your head down because you don't want attention. So they're not out there to, they're not, they don't step forward and they've got a wall between them and people who would tell their story. And then the third thing, it's kind of like a counter narrative, right?
Pod Save America
Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Like we've been living in this country with a narrative that the government's just like wasteful and fraudulent and blah, blah, blah, civil service bureaucrats they are. And so it's, You're challenging a stereotype in readers' heads to tell this story. And when you do that, you do meet resistance. Like, not everybody likes it. So I mean, those are some of the reasons.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's a really good question, because just generally, when I find something like a vein of material, it's a bit like finding a trade in the stock market or the financial markets. It's like, why does this exist? Because maybe it's just not true. Like maybe I'm finding a false vein of ore. But in this case, it's true. And it is mysterious because the literary material is just so good.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I knew you'd have something to say that I didn't say. And that's it. Sure. Imagine Arthur A. Allen at the very beginning of inventing his science. And he's out in the Long Island Sound with these mannequins, tossing them into the water and putting little gauges on them. And it costs a little money to do it. Nothing has been yielded by this work.
Pod Save America
Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
At that moment, if Marjorie Taylor Greene entered into it, she could ridicule him and mock him. Like, why are we paying someone to do this? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That early science can be made to look ridiculous.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So first off, to your first point there, so I actually went and ran down another man who fell off a boat and was rescued by the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean, fell off the back of a fishing boat, and to talk to him about why he thought he was alive. And he was alive because Arthur Allen figured out how he drifted. And he would not have been alive at any other time in human history.
Pod Save America
Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
They would not have known where to look. And he said, yeah, I do know why I'm alive. He said, while I was at sea, I discovered Jesus. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. So he told himself the story that the Coast Guard had found him miraculously because of Jesus. The Coast Guard had found him miraculously because of Arthur A. Allen.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Now, I think something like that repeats itself over and over and over. People build whatever narrative they want out of whatever happened. So that's a problem. The second part, your second part, remind me what your second question is here.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Correct. That's true. And how you remind people that you shouldn't take this for granted... I mean, so the answer really is this book is an exercise. It is that exercise. It's sort of like, but having said that, and this is one reason I did it this way. I didn't tell the writers anything about what they needed to do.
Pod Save America
Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I mean, I wrote the first big one and the last big one, and they wrote the middle of it. And I just said, find a story. wondering what they would find. And they found over and over a version of the same story. Like it is amazing what this thing has accomplished. So it inadvertently ends up being this. It could have, the book could have turned out a lot of different ways.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I don't know, you know, when you ask like how you repair this mental mistake that the population makes, This is a small attempt. It's a book, whatever. It will introduce stories into people's minds that will make them harder for them to live with the stereotype in their head of the lazy, inefficient government worker. That's helpful.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Unfortunately, I think the only way you get to like a radical readjustment is some sort of crisis, some sort of really existential crisis. And COVID wasn't enough.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Yeah. No, it's amazing. It is amazing. And I wouldn't rush. I mean, Trump deserves some credit for it, I guess. But this was a long-term project that starts back in like the Bush administration. that then begins with a pandemic planning exercise. And seeding these companies or investing in these companies that develop the mRNA vaccines was a government mission. triumph.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And it was long and slow, not dramatic, though the result was kind of dramatic, very dramatic, and kind of a hard story for people to internalize. They use hard stories to tell. I think that's part of the problem. And I have a question for you, but you're a good person to answer this question. I thought on the back end of Trump and seeing the way he approached the federal government,
Pod Save America
Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
and the disaster that was his COVID response, that there was a chance that Democrats would engage in a full-throated, not just defense, but sort of full-throated explanation of government. That government would be, that they want to sell the government in a way, explain it. And they didn't.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
You know, it was sort of like government, sort of like something you don't want to talk about when you're running for office. And I don't know why that is.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And Republicans have the benefit of the guerrilla warfare tactics. When you know you're going to lose if you play the same game, you have to play a different game. And that's the game they've chosen to play. I mean, on the evidence of the two books I've now published on the subject,
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
there's a big market for discussing these subjects, for one, explaining what government is doing and talking about where it works, not just where it doesn't work. I mean, we spend a lot of time talking about where it doesn't work, right? Whenever anything bad happens, whenever there's a little scandal, it gets amplified. there's very little attention paid to the bright spots.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And the bright spots are just sort of taken for granted. You know, it's just like, oh, that happened. Oh, I got plucked out on the ocean by the Coast Guard, whatever. I don't know how they did that. And it's interesting to see you know, why it works, when it works.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And one of the patterns that emerges through the stories, I think in the book, is that it works better if it's at some distance from the political process. If the person is not constantly being somehow monitored by the political process. If they're on a longer leash, that's true of all the bright spots that we've written about.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's like the person was given, for whatever reason, different reasons at different places, latitude to operate kind of the way you might be given latitude to operate in the private sector. And then we don't usually do that in the public sector.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
The idea that the Elon Musk idea, I guess it's his idea, who knows, he says something different every day, but that they're going in to find corruption, fraud in the federal government, it's insane. It's that there's so much more fraud in the private sector than there is in the public sector, that everything there is watched.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Like you can't take a federal worker out for a sandwich without them insisting that they got to pay for it. Because they know this is reflexive fear. And they are, you know, every agency has and used to have an inspector general who would get them in trouble if they did stuff they shouldn't do.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
There are mechanisms for identifying and preventing fraud in the federal government that don't exist in the private sector. So there are problems in government, but they're not the problems that everybody thinks are the problems.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
The Centers for Disease Control is a really interesting case study. I mean, this is the premonition. And it wasn't, I didn't have any, it's like, just generally where I operate is I don't come in with a big theory and try to prove it, that I'm just kind of watching and the story emerges. And people hate that about you, by the way.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I know. Sometimes it does. It's funny. But I learned long ago that editors sitting around a table deciding what the story was always yielded really boring journalism and false kind of. Like, go get this story. And you don't know what the story is until you're out there talking to people and watching. And this was true of The Premonition. But I was kind of shocked to learn
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
that the Centers for Disease Control had suffered over several decades, a decline in prestige, a decline in internal morale, a decline in a sense of its own ability to do anything except sort of observe and study disease, not control it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And that you could trace it back, according to people inside it, the old timers, to a decision made by the Reagan administration to turn the head of the center, the director, into a politically appointed position, as opposed to a career civil servant who's endured through administrations. And that this had had the effect
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
From the very top down keeping one eye on the White House in the political process and that when they made decisions and this was a very bad Influence when you were trying to control disease so the This does not mean this is a universal truth that having political influence in a problem is a bad idea.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But I think there are some problems that are best dealt with with the politicians at arm's length. Controlling the money supply would be a very good example of that. Sort of like we put the Fed on a – it's a political institution. At some point, the process, political process touches it, but it doesn't micromanage it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So that one observation is that when there are problems that they're very clear, a set of problems that are best dealt with by a permanent staff. that has, it's not completely detached from the political process, but it's on a longer leash kind of thing. But maybe there are other problems that would be better dealt with on a shorter leash. I mean, I think all problems are not the same problems.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
The bigger thing is, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So, yes, I can do this a bit, but we must be aware that I'm stealing someone else's material to do this. Because the book is, you know, I wrote about a third of the book, but I invited six other writers to do the same thing. We just parachuted these writers into the government and said,
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
find a story and it was oddball writers it wasn't normal like daily journalists it was novelists stand-up comedians and and there was a novelist slash non-fiction book writer named john lanchester when they're all my favorite writers kind of thing who who decided he wasn't going to write about a person he was going to write about a statistic and he wrote about he made the consumer price index his his subject and he makes this really interesting point that
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Thank you.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Thank you. that the gathering of statistics, the counting of things, isn't just incidental to the government. It's like they're at the founding of the democracy. You can't distribute power unless you have a census. You don't know how to distribute the power. And then he goes on to list all the things that the government counts and then focuses on this one thing.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Yeah, no, you know, in the very beginning, I had a sliver of hope that's what we were gonna be watching with him, that he could actually, the government does need work. It's not like it's all great. I mean, it's got a pay system that goes back to 1949. It's too hard to fire people. There's a lot of problems. People aren't incentivized properly.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
The problem with trying to rationalize what he's doing is that the specific things he's doing are the opposite of what he says he's doing. So let's just take them. In the beginning, he said he was going to cut $2 trillion out of the deficit, and he was going to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. That was the mission. And he focused entirely on the civil service, which is
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
like 86% of the budget is, you know this, it's either military interest payments on the debt or entitlements. So that's off the table in the very beginning. And so he's looking at 14% of the budget and of that, A fraction is the pay of these people he's trying to get rid of. So he's not going to get to his eliminate the deficit this way. That doesn't make any sense to go at it this way.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And it's diabolically difficult to do it well. And it isn't just the Department of Education in which Doge and the Trump administration has started to gut the statistical operation. It's across the board. And I mean, Consumer Price Index is a good example that they fired. There's a panel, a free panel, people who are just advising the government for free.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And then he starts by firing inspector generals. And that's the quickest way to identify the fraud and the abuse and even the waste. And so he's doing the opposite of what you would do. If you or I walk in there, we would go right to the inspector general and say, let's beef you up and let's go.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And so he's doing, it's a little hard to figure out what he's even trying to achieve because he's saying something is obviously quite different from what he intends to do. So you're in the land of guessing because.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's a funny, it's just a funny reflex we have in American life right now. And it's probably a byproduct of inequality that he has $300 billion. So therefore he's smarter than everybody and everything. And as opposed to having some narrow skill set that, because he lives in this very indulgent society, has yielded him $300 billion. It doesn't mean he's best at managing the federal government.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And it comes in knowing nothing. So no, it's not the way you or I or any sensible person would go about it. But because he is...
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
got this glow of a very rich person uh it's just assumed he knows what he's doing and i'm convinced i'm convinced he doesn't but um but but back to your original point was like i think you were saying like maybe we need something like this to to jar this institution because otherwise it's unmovable uh and it's It isn't how you do it, but that idea might not be completely wrong.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And the other idea, so the other hope I had for it was one of the big problems with the federal government is it just has real trouble for reasons we've been discussing implicitly in attracting talented young people to work for it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Because like who would want to work for a place where they only slap you around when you do something bad, but don't celebrate you when you do something good and it doesn't pay very well and all the rest. And I thought like he's bringing all these young people in and they can code and like this could yield something.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But then again, one of the first things they do is fire all the probationary workers. Those are the ones that don't have the civil service protections. And who are those people? They're the young people. They're the ones who just joined. And they're the young people and the people who've been hired to handle some specific problem that is urgent now.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So he's firing exactly the wrong people if you're trying to do that. So I... Nobody thinks they're stupid. Nobody thinks they're crazy. He will, no doubt, if we sat down with him, would have a story to tell us that sounds more intelligent than what we're groping for here. But he hasn't told it. Whatever it is, it's behind closed doors.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
We haven't heard it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
professional statisticians, people who formerly worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to try to always improve the consumer price index. They just dismiss them. And it's really interesting, there's a whole bunch of questions that arise from that, but One is why? Like, why would you do this?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And who's going to be a coward.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I mean, that's a great question. It's not a question I've ever... So I'm going to be answering this on the fly. Great. My first step in answering that question is I think that people... First place, Red Badge of Courage. Danny Kahneman, the psychologist who I wrote about in the Doing Project, used to love this story as an example of what he thought was true, that behavior is so context dependent.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And the same soldier who runs away in one battle is incredibly brave in another. It's not that the person is brave the person is entirely brave or entirely cowardly, but that it's some combination of the person and the situation. And so you never know because it's not just the person you're evaluating. You're valuing a complicated thing.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
the mood they're in when they're required to make a decision or whether they're gonna be brave, how vulnerable they feel in that moment, whatever it is. So that's part of my answer is that this isn't stable. They're brave acts and cowardly acts, but it's not exactly right that they're brave people and cowardly people totally. However, I do think like one precondition for the brave behavior
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
is having a firm narrative in your head about who you are and what your life is about. And this was Charity Dean. She had insisted on this narrative for so long that she didn't know how to do anything else. Or if she did anything else, it made her very uncomfortable. And there are different ways to acquire this narrative. John McCain had this narrative in his head, right?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I mean, they can say at the Department of Education they're doing it to cut costs, but you don't fire a free expert advice to cut costs. And the other is like, what are the consequences of it? Like, what does it mean if all of a sudden the government either stops counting it or the White House just politicizes it all and kind of makes stuff up?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
If John McCain was around, he wouldn't be sucking up to Trump. He would have blown up his political career before he sucked up to Trump. And so I think narrative, personal narrative, is a very powerful thing. So what is the substitute? Or what's inside of people when they don't have? that narrative of I'm going to do what's right and I'm willing to pay a price.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
They usually have a narrative, a kind of vague narrative of personal ambition. It's like, I'm going to win. I'm going to get ahead. I'm shrewd. I'm a winner, you know, all that. And that when you, when that's the narrative, then you're really susceptible. Like it comes along, something like Trump goes along and You know, you want to win. You don't want to, there's no point.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's very easy to say, it would be no point to being brave because I'll just get plowed over and I won't make any difference at all. I'm sure that's what most of these people are telling themselves. I'm remaining relevant for the good of my country. Not saying that, in fact, they've rendered themselves a part of the problem.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Yes, and he's hostile to bravery right? Remember how hostile he was to John McCain's personal bravery He's hostile that he's hostile to I think this is a corollary. He's hostile to trust that that that I found and if you're gonna kind of try to predict what Donald Trump's gonna do next is Look for where there is still trust and assume he's going to come for it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Our money, the dollar is a natural target. But it's like assume that where you may not even, the trust is usually assumed. Once you've got it, you don't really, it's there in there, you breathe. But be careful about taking it for granted because he doesn't like it. He doesn't like it for, I think, a really specific sort of lizard brain reason. He's so untrustworthy.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I mean, it's not even an insult to say, right? It's just a fact. He just lies all the time. He lies so much that when he says something is true, it feels like an accident. And it's just like, it's an impulse. It's almost like a reflex. Lying is better. And he cheats people. He's just like one thing after another.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So if he's in an environment, if he's in a small environment where everybody, it's trust-based, And people can trust each other. That environment spits him out very quickly. He does not succeed. But if he's in an environment where nobody can trust anybody, he's really good in that environment. He's really good at taking advantage of all his dishonesty. It works.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
He's better at being dishonest than other people. And so I think that like one way, one through line in our government is there's lots of trust that's sort of built into it. We just take for granted. We take for granted that someone's keeping our water clean and that we can take the pills that our doctor prescribes and it's safe and that we can eat the food and not get sick and whatever it is.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And with the Department of Education, you probably know more about the Department of Education than I do. But I do know that one purpose of what they count is to determine who's failing and who's succeeding across the country. It isn't to say that they're telling the school systems what to teach. It's just like, is this working?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And that those things... are in some way antagonistic to his purpose on Earth. And so watch out, because he's coming for them.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Let me just tell you a story. It's amazing how it changed. So I worked for the most powerful firm on Wall Street, Salomon Brothers. When I joined, they were making so much more money than everybody else on Wall Street. It looked like they were in a different business. It was a force. I left three years later.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
When I was walking out the door, I told my bosses I was going to write a book about Wall Street. And their response was, it didn't even occur to them they could stop me. And in addition, they weren't even worried about it. They were worried about me. Like, you're leaving all this money behind? Is something wrong with you? Like, don't blow up your career. It was their attitude.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It was sweet, in a way. The book comes out. There's a brief attempt to sort of, at a counter-narrative from a weak Solomon Brothers PR firm kind of thing. But not much. And that's it. The book just had its life. If I were coming out of the equivalent institution now, and the equivalent institution would be, say, Jane Street or Citadel. It would be a high-frequency trading firm.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I would have signed nondisclosure agreements going in. They'd be lawyered up from the moment I walked out if I was going to do anything like this. I mean, well, look what happened to the woman who just wrote the Facebook book. Facebook, yeah. Right? I mean, she couldn't get on TV all of a sudden because she had signed agreements that said she wouldn't disparage Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But the big thing is the fear of lawsuits that the publisher or whatever media enterprise I was dealing with
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
would have deterred them from publication uh and would it have stopped publication of liars poker i don't know maybe i don't know i doubt it but but it would have been harder and what happens is you know it's the equivalent of what is that timothy snyder line about uh the guy who wrote on tyranny anticipatory obedience you're seeing a lot of it now you're seeing a lot of people sort of
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Jeff Bezos, you know, it sort of reconfigure their lives and the way they go through the world so as not to run afoul of Donald Trump. There's a kind of anticipatory obedience that goes on in the head of a writer or a journalist when they know that it is going to be a huge pain in the ass and a great risk to me to write about Ken Griffin, head of Citadel.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
You know, I'll hear from the lawyers right away. I don't want to do it. And why is this? Why has this changed? It's changed because we all of a sudden have not millionaires among us, but billionaires who use the law as a weapon. And it makes it really hard. Tip for the truth about... people like Elon Musk to come out.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Are kids learning how to read and write and add and subtract and stuff? And so when you lose that ability, you, of course, then lose the ability to go in to figure out even what the problem is that you need to fix. The larger thing that is just mind bending to me is what happens if we actually can't trust any government statistics? Play that game. We have no portrait of ourselves anymore.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Elon Musk might not be the best example, but it's just that, so it is a harder environment to do this sort of, to get transparency about the most powerful people in the society.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So when I think about taking on subjects, one of the things I ask is, what can I add? It's highly unlikely that I'm going to add anything to high-level discussions about artificial intelligence. I can't code a computer. I don't know what's going on in there. I do know that it's pretty clear that the people who are the leaders of the movement, they don't know either. Yeah.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
That nobody seems to know anything. It feels like what people used to say about Hollywood. They say lots of stuff about where this is headed. A lot of what they say is connected to their financial interest. And so it's very hard to know what to think. And so my response to it, my literary response to it, I have one. I mean, I have all kinds of other responses.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It bothers me some that they're stealing my books to train their models and that kind of thing. But I've enjoyed my interactions with Sam Altman. I think he's a really interesting person. And I had a dinner with him, that's like two years ago. And I thought, there is a great book to do if you want to do it. I said this to him, that all kinds of people want to write his biography.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And he's asking me about who might do it. And I said, don't let anybody do it. Let's let, when you are comfortable with your machine, with chat, GPT, whatever, writing your biography, let me supervise it. Let me let it write your biography and let me write the biography of it while it's writing your biography. So I can watch because this is what interests me.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I want to understand how it thinks and how it's different from how I think. And because I don't think it'll ever be the same. I think it's powerful. It can replicate functions that humans do and it will replace jobs and all the rest. But I don't think it's going to replace human thought. And so it's like, what's the gap there?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And like between what I'm doing when I'm telling a story and understanding the world around me and what it's doing. And he was interested, but he did say it's not good enough to do it yet. So when it's good enough, let's revisit.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I'm hoping he just kind of picks up the phone at some point, calls and says, let's do this because it would be, I think it could be really useful to have someone who doesn't think like it coming at it, trying to analyze what it's doing when it's trying to do what I do when I think.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
People can just, all of a sudden you're divorced. You're in like a fantasy land. You could say anything, which is of course a land they like to be in.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Because it's going to take me five minutes.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
All right, it starts because I got interested way back in the first Trump administration, right in the beginning when he fired the transition team. And so there are 500 and some people who are supposed to go in and receive from the Obama administration, the briefings across the government.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And he told Chris Christie that we're so smart, we can figure out what goes on inside the federal government in an hour. And I thought that was just like a great comic premise. I was going to go in, wander around the obscure parts of the government, get the briefings. And the reader would have this weird experience of knowing they knew more about the government than the administration.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And so it started that way. So that's what gets me into the government. And then what happens is over a year, I'm just shocked by the quality of the characters I'm meeting, these permanent civil servants. I mean, over and over, story after story that I'm not actually even using for what I'm writing.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But it's like you go into the National Weather Service, like the extreme weather forecasting unit down in Oklahoma. It's in Norman, Oklahoma. And it's filled with these smart young people, all of whom were traumatized in youth, but like a tornado taking their house away. And that they got into it because I don't want bad things to happen to other people.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So people who had something deep driving them that led them to want to serve the country, build an expertise, had nothing to do with self-promotion or making money. They walked away from the fame and the fortune that every other American wants. So I just thought, I started getting interested in the characters. And then I found this character at the end of the fifth risk.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I just picked him basically out of a hat. I picked him off a list. It was a list of thousands of civil servants who had been furloughed during the government shutdown in 2019, early 19. And who had been told they were inessential and sent home without pay. but who had also been nominated, not necessarily won, but nominated for some civil service award. But it was thousands of names.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I thought, what am I gonna do with this? I'll just take the first name on the list. It was alphabetized. His name was Arthur A. Allen. And Arthur A. Allen turned out to be the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Division. And I went and visited him, spent a few days with him. And what he had done, he created a science of how objects drift at sea.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
This is important because if you know when a person fell off a boat, and you're looking three hours later, you need to know how they drift to predict where even to look. And he had done this in response to watching people die because nobody knew how to do this in the world. His work, it was so dramatic that he spent years and years and years doing this.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But when he built mathematical, basically algorithms for like 300 different kinds of objects, you know, person in a life raft, person in a life preserver, et cetera. Right after he hands this over to the Coast Guard to use, A 350-pound man goes off the side of a cruise ship 80 miles east of Miami. They don't discover him gone for several hours.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
They go to the cruise ship cameras so they can see where he fell off the ship. The Coast Guard just goes right to the spot and plucks him out of the water, like never in human history. The progress in knowledge that had happened because of Arthur A. Allen ends up saving thousands of lives.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
the moment so the moment i thought man it was kind of like a combination of oh here's why nobody's writing about them and oh here's kind of why we should i'd spent three days with author a allen learning all about his life learning i has science and i end up writing him up at the end of the book i'm on my way back to the airport and he calls me and he says hey, you're a writer.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm a writer. Of course I'm a writer. I thought, I'm sure I told you that when I called you in the first place. And he said, no, my son said like, you write books that could turn into movies. And like, he said, are you going to write about that? All this stuff we were talking about? And I said, yeah, you know, why'd you think I was there?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And he said, I just thought you were really interested in why objects, how objects drift. And at that moment, it's like, that's the civil servant. He has no idea that anybody could make a character of him or that anybody would be interested in what he does, that no ability to dramatize his own story. And I thought, like, someone should be doing this.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
These stories are so good that someone should be doing this. And so that seed was in my head a year ago when I went to an editor of the Washington Post and said, let me hire some writers to go do this.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But from the perspective of not just me, but the other six writers, all of whom have clever, diabolical strategies for getting inside people's lives, this is what we discover. One is that our government, compared to other democracies, is politically very top-heavy. The White House appoints 4,000-something people to run this administration. And all the communications people are political people.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And they're all answering to the White House. And those communications people have just got a reflex instinct that anything that gets written is likely going to be bad. Like, if a reporter shows up, if a writer shows up, the downside far outweighs the upside. And so right away, you're kind of shut out. And to write these stories, I got to live with people.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I can't go talk to them for 40 minutes in their office with a communications person present, which is what they would do naturally. So every one of us had to go get through that phalanx of communications people. And it was not pleasant. It was not easy. So that's one thing.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's like the political process has gotten used to the idea that that we just need to minimize the story because the story ends up can be used against us. And there's not a whole lot of upside to any given administration. to good stories about permanent civil servants. A lot of downside if they find disaster, but not a lot of upside if, oh, this guy's just saved thousands of lives.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Nobody gets credit for that politically kind of thing. I think that's maybe one thing. The second thing is,
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
these people don't tell their own story like not only are they the kind of people who don't tell their own story the kind of person at the dinner party who doesn't speak up and at the end you realize they should have been talking the whole time because they're more interesting than everybody who spoke they're like that uh but they are in an environment where they know that the likelihood that attention is going to be positive attention is minuscule that that attention is bad
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
The opposite. I mean, they're waiting to they're waiting to do the president's bidding when he if you just tell them what it is they want him to do. But mostly they're engaged in pretty long term missions that everybody's agreed like we need, like we need nuclear weapons not to go off when they shouldn't go off.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
That's exactly right. We need to know. It's amazing. I tracked down one of the dudes who had been plucked out of the water. It was a separate fat guy who fell off a fishing boat.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
No, that's not what's going to happen. They're going to fall off and die because when you're fat, you survive. Oh, no one knows how they float. No. No, they know how they float. But when you're fat, you can survive forever in cold water. If you're skinny, you're a goner. So being fat is a huge advantage if you fall into cold water. Hypothermia gets to you if you're skinny.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Fat people have a huge advantage. I mean, it's kind of great that Americans get lost at sea a lot and are also fat.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
That's right. You start with a buffet and then you end in the drink. But I found one of these people who had been plucked from the ocean. This was the Pacific Ocean. And I asked him, do you know why you were saved? You were floating there for hours in the dark. And in human history, when a human being goes off the side of a boat, you just can't find them.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
It's like finding a soccer ball in the state of Connecticut. And he said, yeah, he does. I do know it was Jesus Christ. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior while I was in the water. And then I was saved. And I said, no, it was actually Arthur A. Allen. It wasn't Jesus Christ. It was Arthur A. Allen. And Arthur A. Allen figured out how to find your ass. And that's why you're alive.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And he was like, oh, no one told me that kind of thing. And that's the problem. No one tells anybody that. So people don't know kind of what their taxpayer dollars are doing for them because no one explains it.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
You know, the whole idea that the place to go find corruption, like financial corruption, is a federal agency is insane. Like I can remember working on Wall Street. And if you took like there are a thousand things that would happen every day on a Wall Street firm or in a Wall Street firm that if you did it in a federal agency, you'd be in jail.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
There's so many eyes on you, you can't buy them a sandwich when you take them out to lunch. They're so sensitive to, oh, we have to be careful because if we put a foot wrong, we're going to be hauled in front of Congress and we're going to be in the newspaper.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Used to be, except Trump fired all the inspectors.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Yeah, that's right. So it's kind of wild that they say they're coming in to get corruption and waste, and they fire the person who's eliminating corruption and waste. I mean, there's no question we're now in a situation where it's much easier to be corrupt and wasteful
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So what do you make of the claim? I mean, it's kind of interesting that they come in saying that's what they're trying to do when they do the opposite. It's not even that they're not doing it well. It's that they're doing the opposite.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So out of the corner of my eye when I was walking through the bedroom and Tabitha was watching it.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
I think that's just the delivery system for their larger- But that the American public would begin to accept the delivery system is kind of amazing. I mean, and this is what got me interested in the first place. It wasn't like, oh, Trump's going to destroy this, so you've got to protect it. It's, oh, my God, these stories are incredible.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And when you hear them, you're just moved and inspired and you're proud of your country and all the rest. These people still exist. And we've kind of built a mechanism. I don't know how far back it goes. Maybe it goes forever. But the mechanism that prevents the stories from getting out and the mechanism is the elected officials.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
The elected officials, the political class that comes into the government to run the government has has something. It's kind of convenient for them. If something goes wrong, they can haul one of these people out and say they were to blame. But if something goes right, they can take credit for it. And they have no incentive to celebrate the work of the permanent federal workforce.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And so as a result, there's no kind of cultural recognition. And it's actually pre-Trump. This is a problem. It's like who... What business runs well if the employees only get punished, if nobody gets rewarded for doing good stuff? And I think you can track that, you know, to some extent that when there's government failure to this, to like people are not allowed to stick their necks out.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
They're not incentivized to stick their necks out.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Yeah. The minute he blows up the first rocket, he's fired and never allowed to work again.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
The whole Silicon Valley celebrating failure and risk-taking and all that, it is the opposite.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Let me think about this. So there's eight stories in the book. I did two of them. And the other writers did the other six. And the characters that I have dealt with
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
they're not they don't celebrate the structure they're in they're aware that oh this is a it's a pain in the ass to do what i'm doing it's more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be everybody agrees with that right and you know what they also agree with is that by the time i get to them so i was able to get to arthur a allen because he was furloughed because he was not employed at the time and so there was there was no communications officer to stop me from getting to him
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But with all the other ones, every story in this book, there was a little phalanx of political people. And this was the Biden administration, you know, kind of prevent us basically from telling the story. So they were very aware that like, kind of amazing, we're now in this situation where I can actually talk to you. It took a lot of persistence to get to them.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But once you get to them, yeah, they'll say that, you know, so I'll give you one concrete example.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
yeah the last story in the book is actually a story of government failure but kind of personal heroism this woman her name is heather stone she may be gone today they're firing all these people in the fda but but she's in the fda and she noticed a problem and that she tried to set out to solve with a colleague and the problem was um pharmaceutical companies have no interest in developing drugs for really rare disease there's no market for them they're rare disease
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So you get something really horrible somewhere in the world and no one's developed the drug for it. And you're going to die. And doctors will experiment. You're going to die anyway. Let's try this. Let's try that. And there's no formal record keeping of these experiments. So if something works, you might not hear about it. And if something doesn't work, you might not hear about it.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So the rare disease that the center of this story is balamuthia. Oh, my God. It's a brain eating amoeba. And in and of itself, it's a kind of a wild thing. Wasn't discovered until in the 1990s in the San Diego Zoo. Someone discovered this thing. And there's a whole long story, backstory about it.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But she built this app to encourage doctors from all over the world to, if you have a case, just say what you did and what happened. And so if you have balimuthia, if you treated it, all right, so you gave them X and it didn't work. What's nice is it'd be good for other doctors to know that.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Well, there was actually at UCSF, a researcher six or seven years ago, his name is Joe DeRisi, actually found a drug that worked in his lab that worked on valimuthia called nitroxylene. And it's a drug that's used to treat urinary tract infections in Europe and China. What? Yeah, weird.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
What he did was he took the Balamuthia in the lab and he took the 2000 something approved drugs anywhere in Europe or America. He bombarded the Balamuthia and he found this one thing killed the Balamuthia. Jesus.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But this is what Heather Stone at the FDA was responding to was that he had done this because he watched someone had their brain eaten before him and he figured out it was Balamuthia and that person died. He went and made this discovery. The next time a patient walked into UCSF with this, they tried it and it worked. And I said to Joe DeRisi, I said, well, this is great. You found the cure.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And he says, we don't know that. It's one person. But even though I've done that, no one will know it. If you're lucky enough to walk into the UCSF hospital with Valimuthia, yes, they may think of using this, but no one else will have heard of this. And because medical journals tend not to write up single case studies, so on and so forth. So this woman at the FDA had identified this problem.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
and said, I'm going to market this app. I'm going to let everybody know the FDA is a safe place to come tell your stories. And every doctor in the country will know that if they've got a Balamuthia case, they hit the button and they can see that 50 times someone's done this. And she's unbelievably frustrated because the FDA doesn't have the funds to market it. There's no money.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
There's a kind of nervousness about, well, what happens if someone gets a bad recommendation off the site? It's all risk averse.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So what happens in the story, which is kind of amazing, is that in this particular case, Jodorowsky, the scientist, managed to write up a paper about how this person had been cured and thanked Heather Stone at the FDA for getting him the nitroxylene, the drug, even though it wasn't approved in the United States, really fast.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And there's a little girl who's alive in Little Rock, Arkansas right now. Come on. The Queen's Arkansas. She's six years old. Her name is Elena Smith, who was dying in the Dallas Children's Hospital because the mom, her mom saw this paper on the web, saw Heather Stone's name, called her up and Heather Stone got the drugs to the hospital and the girl was saved. But
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But at the same time, there was another six-year-old girl in Davis, California, whose doctors never saw this and who died. And so Heather Stone would tell you, if she were here, she'd say, we are the mechanism. The government is the only place that's going to do this. We are the mechanism for getting this information out to people.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And I am in somewhat stifled because people are risk averse, because we don't have resources. And you see this and you're just like, you it breaks your heart because you just know that there's so many tragedies that could be avoided.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Can I stop you for one sec?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
What you just said, What personal relationship does that remind you of?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And being extremely harshly critical when there's any kind of little error.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
That's right. It's exactly right. You just put your finger on it. That we are, as a country, we treat our government the way we treat our mothers when we're like 14-year-old boys. That's the country right now. And it's over and over and over. Right. And you ignore all the good things mom has done because it's just assumed that mom's going to do the good things. That's right.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But if mom screws up and puts a bologna sandwich in your lunch instead of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, mom, you don't know me. You're a horrible mom.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So this is, I mean, I have a less dramatic version of this that just happened. I'm here in New Orleans in my childhood bedroom, and I did a favor for my mother and went and talked to one of her community groups. And she said, could you go talk to this group? And I got on stage and I talked for whatever. And she drove me over there and drove me home.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And she didn't say a word on the way out until we got in the car. And she said, when we got in the car, she said, you and your father have one thing in common. And I said, what? She goes, you both do go on quite a bit. It's like, all right, all right.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Thank you. Thank you.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Thank you. Thank you.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. that just is naturally sort of fuel for story. I'm telling you, it's not a party trick. It's like every time I've gone in... It's the foundation of it. It's the foundation of it, yeah.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So if I could answer this in a way that fully satisfied you, I should be president. Hey, I'm fine with that. Whatever you want. I don't care. I'm happy. But my first thought is, and when you look at the things that work in our book, how Chris Mark fixed the problem of roofs falling on coal miners, he was given a lot of rope.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
He was so superior intellectually and in his mission, Griffin, that everybody around him just said, let him go. Like, let him just do what he needs to do. Even within the government, they understood, like, this dude's something. Even within the, this dude's something.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So where the government, I bet, I'm just guessing here, but I bet if you and I wandered through the government looking for bright spots, like things that worked, Ezra's looking for things that don't work. And there are plenty of things that don't work. But if you were looking for things that work, you'd find that over and over. And it's where there's some distance from the political process.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
You depoliticize it. So for example, the Centers for Disease Control was gold standard for health agencies in the 50s, 60s, 70s. And Americans adored it, like thought it was just the bee's knees. Reagan, in his first term, I think, changed the head of the CDC from being a career person who the president could not fire
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
was who was there for longer than an administration to a political appointee who had to keep looking over his shoulder at what the white house thought of whatever he did right and and if you go in the cdc um and interview people they will say this place has deteriorated since then we've gotten more risk averse less able to do our mission more more politicized and i think that
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
I would systematically go through the government, I think, and try to put some distance between politicians and the people doing the job, which is the opposite.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
I know, I know, I know. You politicize it, you're going to make it less effective.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And so they've got to be able to fail some. They've got to have just some flex. And they can't be always looking to some senator who's making a snap judgment.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Correct. But so many of the problems the process is trying to the government's trying to address are long term problems or are longer projects kind of thing. And there's a mismatch there between the incentives of the people who are ultimately bossing the operation and the people and the operation.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So, you know, you look at institutions that kind of work in our government, the Federal Reserve works pretty well. I mean, you know, we can argue about whether they should have raised or lowered by half a percent, but basically they've kept us in a situation people trust the dollar.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But it's like they do make mistakes, but no one thinks the president's controlling the money supply. And, and the minute they do, right. The minute he does, it's a catastrophe. It's going to be done worse. It's going to be, everybody's going to know it's going to be done worse.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Well, that's an interesting question. Do they want to live in a world where there is actually no objective truth? They seem to.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Yes. And I can understand. I agree with you.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But you're going to pay a huge economic price if nobody trusts anything.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
I mean, the whole society runs on trust. Now, Trump is like a trust-destroying machine.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
He's like Bitcoin. Right? Right?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
He's a meme coin. He's Bitcoin because he's got more faith than a meme coin. But it's still basically when you're trying to predict the future of this, it's like predicting the future of Scientology. Like, are people going to continue to believe in this? Who knows? Like, it's because it is faith.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
All right. So you remember Trump won. I got interested in the government, Trump for the first term. What caught my attention was when he fired his transition team right after he was elected. There were 500 and something people who were supposed to go in and get these briefings from the Obama administration.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And it's shocking what's on that list. You know, it's shocking how much it's charged with, say, preventing. You just take for granted an awful lot of what does. You know, you turn on your faucet and you can drink this water that you can drink and not worry that you're going to get sick. There's a kind of miracle there going on.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Yeah. Yes. So the question that pops into my head after you said what you just said is like, what does it take for the society to wake up and realize it needs to be better at governing itself? It needs to allow our government to work and give it some room to operate kind of thing.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And I keep coming back to it's going to take some sort of existential crisis, like that people are going to have to actually fear. Americans turn to the government in a nanosecond when there's a tragedy or a crisis, like they just assume FEMA is going to show up kind of thing.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Yep. So COVID wasn't bad enough. Oh, no. Please don't say that. No, I think that the moment everybody realized it just kills old people, they got that in their head. No, really.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
No, no. No, that it was – if you had flipped it and it was more like the 1918 pandemic.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
You're right. I think there would have been a different reaction. That's one thing. But the second thing, I mean, we still have not as a society answered the question, well, what should we have done? You know, like, okay, you're angry about what happened. Either you think there was not enough government action, but more likely too much government action.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And by law, the outgoing president is supposed to prepare so that the incoming administration can hit the ground running. And Obama had deputized a thousand people to spend six months like preparing the best course ever prepared about the federal government, how it worked. And Trump just didn't show up for the briefings.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
There's not been a commission to like figure out, satisfy us all that there was some stuff that should be done.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
That's right. That's the problem. So it was not enough of a crisis. that the society is demanding a depoliticized response. Right. That in a real crisis, what's going to happen is people are going to lose patience with politics, with the politicization of things and say, just get me a guy who can fix it or a woman who can fix this.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Yeah. Right. But he's, yeah, it's the wrong.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But there's a, we should have learned some things from COVID. Our response was bad. We had a disproportionate number of deaths and we should have had, we should have done better than the rest of the world. We did worse than most of the rest of the world. And like, why? I mean, I think there's answers to that question, but we don't, we've not grappled with that.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And I think we've not grappled with it because most people weren't all that scared of it after they were scared right at the beginning. And when they went, oh, it's just, it's just old folks homes or whatever they said. Now, New York, New York had its own. New York is the one place.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And why did it happen in New York? Because it hit there early before they learned how to treat it. The numbers are something like if you went into hospital with COVID in April, you were like four times more likely to die than if you went in in late June. And the difference was just it took a couple of months to figure out how to handle the patients.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
He told Chris Christie that in an hour we can learn everything we need to know about how the federal government works. And I saw that in the paper and I just thought it's just a great premise. Like I thought it was a comedy. I thought I can go in and I can wander this place and figure out how it works. And the reader will know they know more than the president about what's going on in whatever.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Probably someone has done this work, but it would be really interesting to see what the different psychological after effects are in New York versus the rest of the country. Like if you went to New Yorkers who were there when they watched this wave of death, if they would be more or less likely to say, oh, just let it run the next time. No, really.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
They saw what happens when you let it run right at the very beginning.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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Right. But I think that it terrifies me, but I can't it's hard for me to imagine anything but all of us being on the receiving end of a tornado to to wake up. We need that to wake up and say, well, we actually need to run it, run this place better. But well, and we're about to get a lesson in what the government does because they're disabling it. I don't know how long it's going to take.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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And Trump is certainly aware of that, right? I'll be gone. I'll be gone. That's exactly right. I'll be gone. It's all charging the future for present political benefits.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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It's come up and it's come up now. I mean, the coal mine ruse is not just a metaphor. They just fired the inspectors who make sure that the standards that Chris Mark created are being abided by. So what will happen now is that coal mine companies will cut costs by not doing what they need to do to keep the roof up. I mean, this literally will happen. So another example.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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Geraldine Brooks wrote a piece about a guy in the IRS, kind of badass, sort of black belt in something, who runs the cyber crimes division or works in the cyber crimes division. And this is a profit center. I mean, they've collected billions of dollars of crypto and they just kept it for the federal government.
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They've gone in and gutted that operation and it just can't work in the way it worked before. So you like these fuses all over the society. And there's a bomb that the spark is eventually going to get to. And function to function, the length of the fuse is different. But the bomb is there everywhere. But you're right. Many of the fuses are very long.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And so I started as a challenge. I just thought, pick the places that nobody knows what nobody knows anything about. Like you probably, I'm surrounded by people who just are always inflicting their political opinions on me. But if I ask them, what does the Department of Energy do? They have no idea. And so I picked energy, agriculture, commerce. And I just wrote about these places.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And it's hard to know when the explosions happen. And you're also right that when it happens, that he may be gone, they may be gone, and some poor schmuck who had nothing to do with it is in the White House and gets blamed for it. And even if it happens now,
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
at the at the thank you at the very least it creates cognitive dissonance in the minds of someone who's just trying to live with the dumb stereotype right it's like oh gay people are evil oh but my cousin's gay and i like him right you know it's that and uh so it causes that just causes a bit of hesitation and it leaves you a little less susceptible but that room man that room that little hesitation that little piece of room yeah that's everything because i'm convinced most people
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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Kit, the kiss poster.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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The book was called The Fifth Risk. And while I was there, The thing that shocked me the most was the quality of the person who was inside. I don't know what picture I had in my head of bureaucrats, but I had bureaucrats, right? It was like I had this lazy stereotype in my head. And I kept meeting these people.
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who were just like smarter than the bankers I worked with at Salomon Brothers, devoted to their mission, like counting the paper clips before they bought another one. You know, it was insanely driven, interesting people who didn't think of themselves as characters. So I realized at the end of that, that I'd sort of missed a trick.
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And it was, I should have focused less on the institution and more on the people. And so I thought if I ever come back, it's gonna be with the people. And what was the awareness was, I mean, I gotta tell you about the guy I met. The guy I met that triggered this. All right, so I was at the end of the fifth risk. I had to write an afterword for the paperback.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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The government was shut down because Trump had shut down the government, 2018, 19. There were all these people who were furloughed. Like two thirds of the civilian workforce was sent home, no pay, told they were inessential workers. And I got a list of, like, thousands of people who had been furloughed who had also been nominated for some civil service award.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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And, like, someone thought whatever they'd done was good. But it was thousands of people. And I didn't know what to do with it, so I just took the name. It was alphabetized. I just took the first name on the list. It can't be this easy. It is this easy. Arthur A. Allen. I call up Arthur A. Allen, and Arthur A. Allen is the only oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Division.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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I call him and I say, he's in the middle of Connecticut. And I call him and I say, can I come visit and talk to you? And what do you do? Like, what's this inessential work that you do kind of thing? And he had all the time in the world because he wasn't working. And so I went across country. I spent three days with him.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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And it turned out that this guy had, over a course of about 25 years, had basically created a science. And the science was the science of how objects drift at sea. What? So if you go overboard in your sailboat and you're just floating, you will move differently in the water than if your sailboat turns over and you get on top of it. or if you're in an inner tube, or if you're on a life raft.
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And if the Coast Guard doesn't know how your object drifts, even though it might know when you got in trouble and how long you've been in the water.
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They won't know where you are. And he had seen a mother, a young mother, and a daughter die on the Chesapeake Bay. He had seen it. He'd been there when they got the bodies. Oh, wow. Because they couldn't predict how their overturned sailboat drifted. And he set out to say, he said, I'm never going to let this happen again. And it took him forever, but he like classified 300 different objects.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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And it was like a magic act. The minute he gave the Coast Guard his algorithms for objects drifting at sea, like a week later, a fat guy fell off a cruise ship 80 miles east of Miami. What? And like fat guy off cruise ship is like a problem. It happens. It happens. And Americans, like we have an incredible talent for getting lost at sea. We are just doing it all the time. Really?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
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So the fat guy, any other time in human history, he's dead. But they realized like a few hours later, oh, he's gone. They looked at the cameras on the ship and they could see when he went off. And the Coast Guard flew over and plucked him out of the sea like seven hours after he had fallen. Alive? Alive. What? And so since then, thousands of people had been saved because of this guy.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Here's your inessential worker. But here's the kicker. So I spent three days with him. And I thought, my God, it's an incredible story. I wrote it up at the back end of The Fifth Risk.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But on the way to the airport, after I'd spent three days with him, interviewing his wife and his children and going to work in his office and going out on the bay with him and all that stuff, he calls me on my cell phone and he says, hey, you're a writer. And I said, I'm almost sure I said that when I called you. Yes, I'm a writer.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
He goes, no, my son just told me that you wrote a book that became a movie. And he said, are you going to be writing about me? And I said, yeah, Art, why do you think I spent three days talking to you? And he said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drifted. And at that moment, you will get this. You will get this.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
At that moment, I realized these people don't know their characters. And that makes them great characters.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
They're just so in the weeds with the thing they're doing. They're so about service, like helping others. It does not occur to them to like promote themselves, to sell themselves, to market themselves, to talk to journalists in a certain way. So their story gets out. His story just never would have been told. And I just thought like there are thousands of people like this in the government.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
If I ever come back, come back with that in mind. And then the second thought as we approached the, I mean, it was a year ago now.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
When I curated, I hired six writers who I thought were great writers. And they weren't like normal journalists. They were novelists.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Kamau Bell is a stand-up comedian. Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks is a great group. But I wanted people with different voices. But I wanted some protection from the charge that, oh, this is just Michael Lewis making things up or spinning it a certain way. Why were you concerned about that, Michael? Because if it's just one writer, it's easy to attack them.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
It's easy for someone who wants to make the other argument. You made it more resilient. I made it more resilient. It was like, okay, seven people are dropping in and they can do whatever they want. Right. And all of them, like in a moment, found some story and usually some person that was just incredible. And I'm telling you, you could do this.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
We could do 10 of these and you wouldn't run out of material. And so what does that say about what's going on right now? I mean, so to answer your second question, I had no idea. I mean, I knew that Trump didn't give a shit, right? He's just like, what is this?
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So I would think of it slightly differently. Yeah. But it's – and it's that where I get really jazzed is if I find something that is clearly – that is clearly – if I find a person or a situation that is radically different from what general opinion is about it, I mean – The book before was about Sam Bankman Free.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
I got unbelievable amount of shit because I described him actually how he was rather than how everybody wanted him to be. But I started writing it when he was in jail. I knew everything he had done. he was not a deeply sinister character. He was a kid who did something wrong. Right. It was closer to that.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And everybody around him understood that even the people who hated him, but there was, it got me excited to know that like crypto Twitter was out there saying this guy was like evil incarnate. Without knowing him. And there was a story that was just true and different that just didn't match with what people thought they knew. And this feels the same way.
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It's sort of like people think they have this lazy stereotype in their head of what a federal worker is. And that lazy stereotype enables Doge. Like if everybody knew who these people were, they would be outraged on their behalf.
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Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Totally. No, I mean, it's a bit like you can demonize federal workers in the same way you can demonize trans people and immigrants. You know, we've created this category in people's head that, oh, they classify it as, oh, bad or wasteful or corrupt.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And then you can do whatever you want to the individuals because actually no one knows any of the individuals. It's a bigotry.