Author Michael Lewis. His most recent book is the undoing project a friendship that changed our minds. This is booktv live coverage. Can you hear me . I am hearing echoes. All good . We found out michael is supposed to do a power point presentation, takes half an hour to find the power point presentation. Thank you for being here and the library of congress. Thank you, the chairman of the festival. We will have a little chat, a couple of old friends with 1 million other new acquaintances in the hall. We go way back. Lets Start Talking about you are an art history major at princeton and you go to wall street and do really well. You could have been rich, you know . You could have your own plane this morning. Instead you go into the book business. So you know, it is just an accident, they didnt know each other. This is an opportunity to express all the resentment. This is the undoing project. So the question is why i quit wall street, you knew you wanted i didnt have any plans. And grew up in new orleans. It didnt occur to me that i would have to. That is where careers go to die. When i got out i didnt have anything. Any plans. The job on wall street fell into my it is a way to make a living. I figured out i wanted to write. It was if you had to write a scene or a book to get out, i nursed myself in that, love it like i love no other Academic Experience and made the jump in my mind this would be a good thing to do forever if you could. The false start i had was an academic career and the guy who supervises the thesis, not only made for an academic career but asked at the end of the thesis, i was feeling vain about the writing what he thought about the writing. Put it this way, never try to make a living at it. It is revenge, one guy. William ap childs is his name, if you see that and. No one has heard of him. A wonderful professor. Started to submit willynilly magazine pieces, didnt know what i was doing, didnt know anybody who wrote for a living. It was a quixotic enterprise. The writers market it was that thick and had the names and addresseses of all the editors in america. For some reason i got in my head the easiest thing i could break into was inflight magazine, i started, volunteering at the soup kitchen, the street people were so interesting, got to know the home of people and i read about new york Homeless People and sent to 12 inflight magazines and got this letter back from Delta Airlines and it said we like peace but you do understand what we are in the business of doing, getting people to go places. Homeless people it took a while to figure out the market, but eventually i started to get some things and editor in washington gave me my start. The economist in london gave me my start but michael kingsley, i called him, a graduate student, i want to write for your magazine. He gave me a chance, published a couple times but then i get this job on wall street which promises a fortune. Doesnt sound like a fortune now but it was 100,000 a year, a couple hundred thousand 25, 26, 23. I just got this is incredible, to see what it is but by then i have a friend, you joke that i could have been rich, the people in my training class. Me, they all hit wall street at the right time, i had a friend who says when we met the first day of class he introduced himself, telling me how he wanted to go into mortgage bonds, my name is Michael Lewis and im here to write a book and already had it in mind that i was going to write about it and mightve had that in the back of my mind. This is why the book career happens. While i was there i started, continue to write a lot of things but started to publish pieces about wall street and put a piece on the oped of the wall street journal, Michael Lewis is an associate with Salomon Brothers in london and investment bankers, working in london, i came into work the next day and the head of Salomon Brothers europe was at my desk and having these great guys, the guy who gave me my job was ashen, he said do you realize what you have done . And then he says we have a crisis meeting with the board of directors to talk about how to deal with this piece, in these local newspapers around the country and that is great, he said no. This is a big big problem. A different era, he wasnt going to fire me yes but he said he said how are we going to fix this problem . I sent you tell me. The way you could fix it is you dont write anymore. That is not going to happen. I am going to keep writing. What if you wrote under a different name . I said instantly, the name diana bleeker, my mothers maiden name, perfect, no one will ever think a woman is a man, they will never make the connection. I started to write with abandon under the name Diana Blakely and Diana Blakelys career is taking off. People want to read about wall street in 1987. I get home from work one day and there is a phone call, chevy chase, his dad, editor at simon schuster, very distinguished book editor, it is him. I found out you are diane bleeker and he said i think you should write a book. From that moment in september 1987 i was out the door. I knew that was what i wanted to be and the money didnt matter. You dont have to ask anyone. I am the potted plant. The carrot in the school play. What happened next was i waited until they gave me my bonus at the end of the year because i didnt want to lose a bad, a huge pile of money and then said i am leaving to write a book. Going to write about wall street but i wasnt sure, they took me into a room it wasnt what concerned me. They thought i was out of my mind. You do understand we made 250 this year unless it is 500 and after that a different thing, you can stay here another decade and in ten years we need to write books basically and dont do this to yourself. They felt sorry for me but i was so out the door it didnt even occur to me i was so enamored, so amused with myself. What happened when i sat down, a blank sheet of paper. I was 26. Then go with your gut. This will not work for everyone, this career path. But being self amused is a good personality trait. I have a bunch of my collapse books, and at the end of the book is a harrowing encounter with john deploying, your former boss. Reading that package we read this morning, tell us the moment your boss says major career and ruin mine. Guest he put it in different terms. The reason i went to see him was it seems clear to me that was a bookend. A lot of the forces that led to the financial crisis had been set in motion while i was on wall street and we were watching the end of a process that put it in motion and the big one was turning wall street partnerships into corporations. Host is it scary . Guest it was terrifying. He booked a table for two at his favorite restaurant when i set him a note. He said yes but didnt say much more than that. I got there on time and he did not and it is one of those tables you sit with your legs together. I sat down and started to sweat. What is this . Said like this for two hours . He walked in and first thing he says is you are a fucking book, made your career and it ruined mine. And a lovely lunch after that. That seems misinterpretation of this. But i dont think my book will end your career. It didnt help but didnt ruin your career and then we settled in and i see them from time to time, very genial, and october came out and took a box under his desk to sign them for people when it came to his office. Was the biggest customer. Host you gave a commencement speech at princeton a few years back and you described yourself as lucky, some people are just lucky, those of us who knew you well you work incredibly hard, very hard worker, an incredible gift for telling a story, you write in the vernacular, you are not lucky. What has been your secret in terms of finding stories not only that people want to read but no one else has told . A classic example, writing about the financial crisis, the great recession, you have something no one else how do you find this stuff . It is not true that i am not lucky. An incredible serendipity in my career, the fact that i wanted to be a writer and i got this job in the best place on earth to write about wall street, not only in firm but place in the firm, i was given for leisure by my parents to go around for two three years after college and if they hadnt done that i wouldnt have become a writer. Host you had some advantages, huge advantages and before that speech, this odd conceit in our culture that once you made it it was inevitable because of the virtue of you and in fact that is not how it works. Obama was right when he said you didnt build it. [applause] you are such the recipient of the benefits this culture bestows on you. To tell the story without a high level of awareness of that, getting harder and harder to see how lucky you are. So you had a lot of advantages and freedom to look around and improvise but you also found stories no one else saw, the blindside. A friend of yours told you such and such, an incredible book. It is typical of how i find stories in that you see it is just chance. The big story is slightly different but the blindside started with a bottle of wine, New York TimesMagazine Editor and we were sitting in new york and trying to decide what to write next, whatever it was, 2005, 2004, around their, important people, he was thinking jamie gaiman, never really interests me you want me to write about something, let me write about a teacher who changed my life. Happened to be my baseball coach, said okay, it is and i got to write about a personal story, talked to several people, the picture on the team, played by tim mcgraw in the movie the blindside is special so i went to see him. I havent seen him since high school and he picks me up at memphis airports. He made great good of himself. A wonderful athlete who played in the nba, the Cincinnati Reds in high school. He went on for fortune, willing to show me his mansion, took me to his mansion and we spoke for two hours about our approach and the whole time there was a 6. 5 inch, 355 pounds black kid who didnt say a word and was not introduced to me. On the way back to the airport i said sean, the black kid, he said that a new project, got to study in the snow, in tshirt and shorts, recognizing someone who came to the kid at school, put him in the car and go along and he has a life. It turned out he had no family, was living on the streets, nothing to eat, was still literate, leanne, rich, white, evangelical, republican living on the outskirts of a racially divided city, said i will fix him and make him a rich white evangelical christian. Dont get in the way. She is going to do it. I started following that is odd. Pygmalion. I will follow that. I just thought that is interesting, curious thing. I heard no more. Flash forward a few weeks, came out not that long before, got to be friends with brain trusts such as they were, several nfl cut offs. Somewhere brain trusts, some you wouldnt trust their brains. The brain trusts was great, he and i sent a conversation about football and said there is not a moneyball story, it is a frame story. Everyone has the same money to spend, not the rich and poor team, not about how to do more with less. What it is about is how to distribute your money across the field. If you get me a history since free agency created a market and he pulled it out and it was really remarkable you had this character on the offensive line who protected the quarterbacks blindside whose salary had gone from the lowest on the field to the second highest, the insurance policy, the quarterback got this on that side and got hurt in a way he wouldnt normally. That is interesting. Flash forward six or eight months hearing about michael or, not my story, my Old High School sean calls me and said when did this happen . Theres a lot of that. Nick sabin, alabama, lsu, came through, looked at the entire school and saw michael, the Basketball Court and sean do that and he said sean, that is a future nfl left tackle, you can see by the way he moved he is an nfl left tackle and he says no, that is what he was and i told him the story of the nfl financial story and started to say there is a story here and the story is the moment he was identified which he became, he went the most prized kids in the universe, gone from least valued 15yearold i know to the most valued 17yearold in a flash and a story can be organized along these lines would have have forces in a kids life to change his values and one of those was stuff that happened in nfl strategy and below the forces of the mother. Once i realized that, i had a story and that is what happens. I often think there is someone better to write this, someone who has empathy or knows the motions or someone who knows about psychology or someone who knows it is alien to me, i shouldnt be the one to do it. The fact that it is alien to you is why you should do it because you get across the stuff about it. So he was a commentator for memphis business, we went to dinner and started telling my wife and i some of those stories and he mentioned it is interesting, we took him into a room and he stared and she said what . Never had a badge. He was 15 years old and never had a badge and my wife started fine, you are in idiot if you do anything but write this book. It sounds like a 1off kind of thing but that happened in various forms. You have a common theme of unrecognized value in several books. Is that a conscious thing, it every business person in america will buy this book, sort of saying the blindside, with the new book, think differently about this, there is value if you can recognize it. Is that a conscious theme . Guest what does seem to happen a lot and i dont quite know why but i can guess why, coming back to markets and the way markets dont function very well but miraculous in a lot of ways so value comes from market of the value of the market. I have always been be mused by what happens and why, very charming place to grow up, rich interesting childhoods, love it and love the people, the culture, the people, the place and it was a failed place. It was not value. You see this over and over, you dont get value properly, they get value very highly. So that has always interested me. He introduced me to the stock market. We dont have much interest and he is obsessed with it, watches portfolio, just watch it. I dont get that. He is watching his portfolio, give you 10 shares of a stock so you can learn to watch it too. I was 13 or 14 years old, give him a little black book to keep a record of what i saw when i was watching it. He gave me 10 shares of chart house, a Restaurant Company and gave it to me i looked at the share, he paid 220 and 10 shares, 200, that is what we had to pay to buy the stock and i said i will hang the towels. That is outrageous. Outrageous. He charges 25 to buy a phone call. How did that happen . Outraged at the value assigned to that role even back then. Host you invented online trading. Guest we should talk as a novelty about your new book. The undoing project. Tell us how you got it. It is different from your other book, more about psychology, more academic, is it fundamentally a Friendship Book . Guest love story. You love it when i finished it, sold for a movie, the Hollywood Reporter called me and asked me what is the one line elevator pitch, two academic sitting in a room turning up ideas how the human mind works, how you turn that into a movie, what is your pitch and i said, i said they each others ideas, that is what it is and that is what it is. We can delete that line somehow. Just a trend here. Nobody will be offended by that word. What happened was the way the story came about, it is about two israeli psychologists, working on a book, i dont like to talk about it but amazing how quickly my books can be described in a way that people dont want to know anything more about them so baseball certificates, no one asked another question but if you want to stop a room cold, stop a dinner party, think about two israeli psychologists nobody wants to know anymore. That is what this is about and the way it came about was the moneyball, moneyball talking about missed valuation of people that have to be baseball players, the way they did, they get miss valued by people making intuitive judgments, what the story of the book was, it gets reviewed by richard thaler, distinguished legal scholar, they say in the new republic nice story, he missed the point of his own story. What he told is a case study, case study in the way the human mind leads us astray when it is operating from intuition and the ways in which the human mind described were mapped by these two psychologists in the late 70s but i missed the story. You get one bad review or questionable review in the new republic, a new book, more complicated than that. I never heard of these guys. Won the nobel prize in economics, that is impressive but it bothered me that i missed this trick. I would like to think people say an explanation is where the mind comes to rest. Books are explanation. What you do is where your mind came to rest. It got exhaustive material. I mind out the material. No one came behind me to find something great that i didnt find but this was something really great the didnt occur to me, something we are wired in certain ways and people figured out how we are wired that explain the story. It bothered me for years, i thought about it. My father watched the stock market but i mentioned it to a psychologist friend in berkeley where i live. He said danny, and limbs half a mile from your house. Get it off your chest. I went and knocked on his door and developed a relationship. Walk through the hills in berkeley, he talked about his now dead colleague, his lover, not physical over but in every other way they were passionately involved in each other and to multiply involved in each other, then i thought i wonder when this penny drops. I tossed and turned, strong words but it was called the clash. Supposed to teach writing, didnt do a very good job. One of my favorite students turned out to be his son and very quickly i had access to collaboration and not the latest to write this. That is the backdrop opposed to the israeli state and early israel. In no particular interesting psychology. It took me forever to talk myself, a way to do it. And for people who knew the story were starting to die and it was clear that i didnt tell that it would be gone, it wouldnt be. It is an incredibly important story. Their work is incredibly important for the ages, very emotional story between the two men. An unusual story. At that point, i said it is hard to you but you know i dont know anything but i will write a book about this and he didnt like the idea of it. I said your work is too importance, someone has to write a book about it and