I retired from nasa. But i help out in certain aspects when there are launches and missions and things. T im still an advocate and supporter of helping our space program. How is your 90acre Serenity Farm in lynchburg . The farm got sold. Im doing other things involved in kids getting outdoors and believing themselves. In here is the cover of the book. Called, chasing space, an astronaut story of grit, grace and second chances. T the author and our guest is leland melvin. Booktv live coverage of the is 7th annual book festival now continues. Well hear from bestselling author, michael lewis. His most recent book, the undoing project. A friendship that changed our mind. This is booktvs live coverage. Can you hear me . Im hearing an echo. Its all good . We just found out michael is supposed to do a power point presentation. That will take us half an houred to find the power point presentation he forgot to bring. Thank you for being here. Thank you to the library of congress. Thank you to david rubenstein, the head of the festival. Well have a chat, a couple of old friend, along with one million other new acquaintances in the hall. Michael and i go way back. Well Start Talking about you were a art history major at princeton, right . Then you go off to wall street, you do really, really well at saloman brothers. Michael, you could have been rich, you know . You could have your own plane at that point. Instead you went into the book business. Tell us why you did that . How did that come about . So you know, joel and i were classmates in college. It is a actually, just an accident he was asked to interview me. They thought he would be good together. They didnt know we were good to each other. This is opportunity for joel to talk about the resentments. Yes. This is the undoing project. Yes. The question is why i quit wall street. So i didnt know i wanted what i wanted to do when i was in college. Unlike you, you wanted to be a journalist and writer. When i got out, i didnt have any plans. I didnt, it didnt occur to me, partly because of how i grew up. I grew up in new orleans where nobody really did anything for a living. It didnt occur to me that i would have to. So, hence our history, right . It was a place where careers go to die. And but it was a great place to study and i loved it. I did it because i loved it. When i got out i didnt have any plans. The job on wall street fell into my lap and it was a way to make a living but by the time i got it, i had figured out i wanted to write. It was a twoyear gap in there. How did you figure that out . What made you you had to write a senior thesis to princeton. You basically had to write a book to get out of princeton. I emersed myself in that. I loved it like i loved no other academic experience. I kind of made the jump in my mind. This would be a good thing to do forever, if you could. The false start i had i thought it meant an academic career and the thesis, the guy who supervised me, the guy who supervises the theses not only told me i wasnt made for an academic career but asked him at the end of my thesis defense, i was feeling a little vain about the writing, what he thought about the writing, he said, put it this way, never try to make a living at it. So this whole life is revenge against this one guy. William childs is his name. If you see that man where he is now . No one is hurting him. He was great, wonderful professor, archeologist. So i got out, i started just to kind of submit willynilly magazine pieces to magazines. I didnt know what i was doing. I didnt know anybody who wrote for a living. It was a six so thetic enter quiottic. The book had names and addresses of all editors in america, the r thing i thought easiest to break into was in flight magazine. I was volunteering on the soup kitchens in bowery. I thought the street people were so interesting. I started to get to know homeless people. I wrote a piece to homelessrk magazines and sent it all the inflight magazines. I got a flight from delta air lines, we kind of like the piece, were in the piece of trying to get people to go to place, not flee them. We dont publish pieces about homeless people. It took me a while to figure out the market. Eventually i started to get some things in print, an editor in washington, basically gave me my start. The economist in london gave me my start, michael kinsley. Editing the new republic. I cold called him, graduate student in london. I really want to write for your magazine. He gave me a chance. He published a couple things. But then i get this job on wall street and the job on wall street promise as fortune. Doesnt sound like a fortunes now, but it was 100,000 a year the first year. Oh, my. Put that in todays that is couple hundred thousand dollarsw youre 25, 26. I was 23 when i got the job. I just thought, this is incredible. I have to go do this, just to see what it is. But by then i knew i wanted to write for a living. Ii have a friend from my saloman brothers training class. You joke about i could be rich. The people in my saloman brothers training class pitied me. They hit wall street the right time to get really rich. My friend introduced himself, told me how he wanted to go into mortgage bond and whatever. Fr i said my name is michael lewis. Im here to write a book. I already had it in mind. I would write about this place. I might have had that, at least in the back of my mind. I wrote while i was there. This is longer answer than you want. This is why the book career happened. Mi while i was there i started to write i continued to write about other things but i started to publish pieces about wall street. I put a piece on the oped of the wall street journal that had at the bottom, michael lewi is an associate with salman brothers in london. The piece argued that Investment Bankers were overpaid. I was working in monday done. I came in to work the next day. The head of Salomon Brothers europe was sitting at my desk. He was a great guy. He gave me my job. He was ashen. He said, do you realize what youve done . I got a piece in the journal. It is great. He says, no, no. He says, we have had a crisis meeting with the board of directors at Salomon Brothers to talk about how well deal with this piece because it is being reprinted in all the local newspapers around the country. Were getting calls. I said, thats great. He said, no, he said, this is a big, big problem. He wasnt going to fire me, oddly. Different era, he wasnt going to fire me, yet, but he sat down, how are we going to fix this problem . H and i said, you tell me. The way we could fix it, you dont write anymore. I said, nah. That isnt going to happen. I will keep writing. He was fond of me. He wanted me to stay. He said, what if you wrote under different name. What i wrote under the name of diana bleaker. My mothers maiden name. That is perfect. No one around here will ever think a woman is a man. Do the connection. In i started to write with abandon, including stuff i was seeing around me under the name of diana bleaker. I get home from work and diana bleakers career is taking off. People want to read about wall street in 1977, 1987. I get home from work one day. There is a phone call. Ro the actor chevy chase, remember him . His dad, ned chase was an editor at simon schuster, very distinguished book editor. It is him. I found out that youre diana bleaker. He said, i think you should write a book. Dont have to do it for me. I love it if you came here. You should write a book. From that moment, that was in september of 1987, i was out the door. I knew that is what i wanted to do. The money didnt matter. What happened next was kind of funny, you dont have to ask no. I am the potted plant. Yes. Yes. The carrot in the school play. And so, the what happened next was, i waited until they gave me my bonus at the end of the year, because i didnt wantt to just lose that. U it was a huge pile of money. I then said, im leaving to write a book. And they said, what are you going to write about . I said im going to write about wall street. They took me into a room. They didnt care i was writing a book about wall street. That didnt concern them. They thought i was out of my mind. You make 250 this year. Next year is 500. Year of that a Million Dollars a year. You can stay here anotherer decade, you wont have to work and basically write a book. D they said, dont do this to yourself. They felt sorry for me. S i was so it the door, it didnt occur to me to listen to it. I was so enamored, amused with myself as now. What happened when i sat down and wrote with a blank sheet of paper. When you are 25 or i was it 6 26 then, i kind of wrote with my gut. This wont work for everyone. This kind of career path. Being selfefused is good personality trait for this opinion. I have a couple of props. This is the big short. Michaels book. [applause] at the end of the book is an the actually incredibly harrowing encounter with john good fine . May he rest in peace. Your former boss. Rereading that passage. There is a moment where your old boss said liars poker made your career and ruined mine. To put it slightly different terms, he said, the reason i went to see him, the reason i h wrote that, that was book end, that i had come in, a lot of forces led to the financial crisis had been set in motion while, by Salomon Brothers in some cases while i was on wall street. We were watching the end of a process that John Goodfriend help the put in motion. The big one, turning wall street partnerships into corporations. And he led was it scary to see him . It was terrifying. He booked a table for two at his favorite restaurant around the corner from his house, i sent him a note, love to sit down with you. He said yes. Didnt say much more. Said meet me at the table. I got there on time, he did not. The table is one of those tables you sit together with your legs together like youre on a date. I sat down i started to sweat. I thought, what is this. He set this up so well sit like this for two hours. He walks in and he says, first thing he says, yourbook, your your your book ruined my. That is dirt interpretation ofk history. It didnt help but it didnt ruin your career. We would settle in and i see him from time to time, he was to genial, he said that always kept a box of books under the desk to sign them for people that came to his office. So that is a win. Thats a win. He said, im your biggest customer. You came to princeton and described yourself as lucky. Some people are just lucky. Those of us who know you well you work incredibly hard, rightw youre like a very hard worker. You have an incredible gift for telling a story. You write in the vernacular. You, lucky, youre not lucky. What has been your secret in terms of finding stories, not only that people want to read but that no one else, has told . I mean the big short. Being classic example. We were all writing about the financial crisis, the great recession. You come in with something no one else really had written. How do you find this stuff . I will answer that question but it is not true that im not lucky. I mean it is incredible serendipity in my career. The fact that i wanted to be a writer and i got this job in the very best place on earth to write about wall street in the 1980s, i was not only in the firm, but a place in the firm. You know, i was, i was given the leisure for my parents to fart around two or three years after college. If they hadnt done that, i doubt i would have become a writer. You had some advantages. Huge advantages. The point of that speech was, there is this odd conceit in our culture that once you have made it, that it was inevitable because the virtue of you and that in fact, that is not how it works. Obama was right, when he said you didnt build it. [applause] you were so, you were such the recipient of benefits of this culture bestows on you, and, and to tell the story without, a high level of awareness of that, i was trying to get across to the princeton kids. E i think it is getting harder and harder to see how lucky you are. Anyway, so the story realize the question. So yes, you had a lot of advantages. You had the freedom to look around and improvise but, you know, you also found the stories no one else saw, the classic one the blind side. A friend of yours told you, suddenly incredible book become as movie. So the blind side. It is typical how i find stories, in that you will see it is just chance, a chance into stories. The other was slightly different but the blind side. It started off with a bottle of wine with a new York Magazine writer, jerry maserati. We sitting in a restaurant. Cover of New York Times magazine. It was whatever it was, 2004, 5, around there, thinking important people. He was thinking jamie dimon. He was thinking never really interests me. You know, if you want me to write about someone important, let me write about a teach theyre changed my life. Nobody knows who he is. Put him on cover of new York Magazine. He happened to be baseball coach but he was a teacher. He said, okay, go do it. Im going to write about thiska personal story about this coach. I ought to talk to some of the people on my team. I was a pitcher on the team. Sean tooey played by tim mcgraw in the movie was a catcher. I went to see him. I hadnt seen him since high school. He picked me up at memphis airport. He was this poor boy. In high school you thought he didnt have enough to eat. He made great good of himself. He was wonderful athlete. Drafted, played in the nba. Drafted by the cincinnati redsho in high school. He had gone on to make a fortune in the fastfood business. He wanted to show me his mansion. He took me to his mansion. We spoke for two hours or so about our old coach and the whole time in his living room there was a 6foot 5inch 350pound black kid, did not say a word. Was not introduced to me. Like you were when i was monologuing. He is a carrot in the school play. On the way back to the airport, i said, sean, who is the black kid . He said, oh, that is louanns project. Her new project. Started to get a little teary. We saw him, standing on the bus stop in the snow, in a tshirt and shorts, she recognized him as Somebody Just come to kids school. Stopped what are you doing out there shorts and tshirt. Put him in the car and drove him home. He hasnt left. Turned out he had no family. He was living on the streets. Nothing to eat. Was illiterate. Leanne tooey, rich white, evangelical republican, living on outskirts of a raciallydivided city. I will make fix him. I will make him a rich, white, evangelical christian. Sean was, dont get in her way. She is going to do it, she is going to do it. I started following. I thought that was odd. It is pygmalian. Can i finish how the book comes out . Wi i didnt think this was a book. It was interesting. I just want to know more. Flash forward a few weeks. Moneyball had come out not that long before. I got to be friends with the brain trust, such as they were, several nfl front offices. Some of them actually were brain trust. Some of them you wouldnt trust their brains. The brain trust at the 49ers were great. He and i started having moneyball conversation about football. There is not a moneyball story in football, it is same story. Everybody has same amount of money to spend. Not about rich teams and poor teams. It is not thinking about how to do more with less. What it is about, figuring out to distribute your money across the field. Can you give me a history how that happened since free agency created a market. And he pulled it out. It was really remarkable you had this character on the offensive line, the left tackle, who protected the qbs blind side, he was had gone from the lowestw to the second highest other than the qb. He was insurance policy from the qb. If he quarterback got hit from that side he would get hit in other the way normally. Flash forward. Six months, i was hearing about michael orr. They are rich and emotional. It is not my story. My high school friend. You will not believe what happened. Nick saban, alabama coach, but then lsu head coach. Came through school, looking at players through school. He saw michael on basketball coach. Sean knew him. He said, sean, who is that kid . That is future nfl left tackle. You can see the way he moves he is an ntl left tackle. Re sean, do you know what they get paid . You said that is what he was. Told him story about nfl financial story. I started to think, well, there is a story here. The story is, because the kid then went. Moment identified as future nfl left tackle, which he indeed became, he went from, like most prized kid in the universe. He had gone from the least valued, 15yearold on earth, to the most valued 17yearold in a flash. I thought there was a story that can be organized along these lines, what are the forces in this kids life that changed his value . S and one of those forces is stuff that happened in nfl strategy. But one of those forces is a mother. Once i realized that, i had a story. This happens, i had it six months before i had the nerve to write it. T i often think there is someone better to write it. Someone has empathy or knows emotions. Or someone who knows about psychology or someone who knows, there is always, something, it is alien to me, so i really shouldnt be the one to do it. But the truth is, the fact that it is alien to you is why you should do it. Because enables you to get across to other people with whom it is alien, stuff about it that is interesting. He pushed me over the edge. Sean came out. He was a color commentator for the memphis grizzlies. They were playing warriors. We went to dinner. He started telling my wife and i some of the stories. One he mentioned, had not said to me it, was interesting when michael came into the housee because we took him into the room, louian showed at bed. He stared at it. She said, what . I never had a bed. S he was 15 years old. He never had a bed. Ve my wife started crying. She got in the car, said afterwards, youre an idiot if you do anything but write this book. So i started to write the book. It sounded like a oneoff kind of thing. That in various forms over and over. You have a common theme of recognized value in several of your books. Is that conscious thing you shoot for . This book every Business People in america will buy my book at the airport for the next life. Because what youre sort of saying, with moneyball, the blind side, the big short. With the new book, the undoing project there is value out there if you recognize it s that a conscious theme you have . No. What does seem to happen a lot, i dont quite know why, i can guess why, the book come back to markets a lot and way markets dont function very well. Markets are miraculous in a lot of ways. Value comes from the market assigns. The bottom stories have a market angle to them. I think i always been since i left new orleans, always been bemused what gets valued and why. Ee because i came from a place was very charming place to grow up. It was at that really rich, interesting childhood. I love people, i love the culture, i love the people, i love the place. It was a failed place. It was not va