Michael Lewis (Who is Government: The Untold Story of Public Service, Against the Rules, The Big Short) is a best-selling writer, journalist, and podcast host. Michael joins the Armchair Expert to discuss his dad’s advice to not waste his education to figure out what he wanted to do for a living, incredible insider art stories from being the stock boy of the Wildensteins’ private collection, and learning that the world is a conspiracy of people who understand economics. Michael and Dax talk about diving headfirst into the bleeding edge of Wall Street in the 80s, getting in trouble (but not fired) for writing an article in the Wall Street Journal claiming that everyone in his firm was overpaid, and how Chevy Chase’s dad convinced him to write his first book. Michael explains being wired to live the life you want versus one the world wants you to, hating the feeling of not telling the reader everything that’s important regardless of the consequences, and taking on the predatory sports gambling epidemic with his podcast Against the Rules.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Expert's on. Expert.
Oh, wow. That was kind of a cheerleading move you did.
Thank you. I'm Randy Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padme.
Oh, okay.
It's an honor to announce our guest today, one of our radical favorites. Thinkers.
Yes.
Michael Lewis. Michael is a bestselling author and podcaster. His books, The Fifth Risk, Flash Boys, The Big Short, read it, loved it. Moneyball, The Blind Side. He has a awesome podcast out currently. You could listen immediately called Against the Rules. And this season is all about this pretty troubling gambling epidemic among young men.
And we talk at great length about that in addition to, you know, all of his other great work.
I mean, this person wrote Moneyball and The Big Short, two of my favorite movies of all time.
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Chapter 2: How did Michael Lewis start his career?
So you have a circuitous path to writing, which is you are from New Orleans, yeah? Yeah. And you go to Princeton and you do art history. And when you started that major, had it not occurred to you, there's no employment after. Like I majored in anthro, but I knew I'll never be employed as an anthropologist.
But you probably had the same experience I did. You went into a class and you went, oh my God, this is interesting.
Yes. And I had the freedom to do that. A lot of people don't.
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.
And your dad was a lawyer. He was. Does he fit the form of most lawyers where they absolutely hate their fucking job?
Yeah.
Yeah.
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.
We'll knock on wood for you.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Michael Lewis have about Wall Street?
You're just writing. Yeah. I have a great friend in Britain who's a journalist, and yeah, he didn't go to—and he's incredible. No one cares if you wrote for the school newspaper. All they care about, does the piece work? Okay, so the writing started then. That's where it started. So then you go and you trade bonds or you sell bonds. I mean, there's a wild story.
You have a cousin in London who's kind of aristocracy.
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.
I never understood this.
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.
That's a cool one.
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?
Is the Queen Mother just the queen?
The Queen's mother.
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Chapter 4: What are the impacts of sports gambling on society?
That's among the most interesting stories I've ever read. It's such an amazing personal story encased in this kind of world event. But the notion that you have a man who has a wandering eye or a lazy eye and believes that's why he's a glass eye, even better. And that's why he's not social. And that's why he explains all of his awkwardness with all of his relationships through this glass eye.
And then he's a fucking surgeon. Training to be a neurologist. And then starts trading. And he's the only person willing to sit down and read the actual loan applications and then wins and has a son who clearly is autistic, then takes the test. And as he's saying, my son does not have autism and he's getting a hundred percent. I mean, what a fucking story.
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.
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.
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.
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...
He is the best living actor. I'll be on record saying he's impossibly good.
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.
You wouldn't have been able to pinpoint that. It was his breathing that was wild.
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Chapter 5: Why is the gambling epidemic concerning for young men?
Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from the gambling industry?
We'll get to California, but that has a lot to do with California, right?
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.
That's right. And anyone who lives in California, every time these props come up, you see these are very heavily funded because you have casinos on one side and you have the tribes on the other. You see more of those commercials than anything else. That's right. Okay, so the Supreme Court says states can't.
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.
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.
And now I got to go, okay, no more on pizza boxes. They're guacamole.
With your Uber ride, you get a free sports bed. And so they're enticing young people.
I bet it's not a lot on the salads. The quinoa bowl probably doesn't have free.
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.
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