Couple old friends along with 1 million other acquaintances. Weikel and i go way back. Lets start out 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 could have your own plane at this point. Instead you went into the book business. Tell us how that plays out. Guest joel and i were classmates in college. It was an accident. He thought it would be good, they didnt know we knew each other. This is an opportunity for joel to express all the resentments he feels. This is the undoing of joel and michael. The fact so the question is why i quit wall street. I didnt know i knew what i wanted to do with my life in college. You wanted to be there. When i got out i didnt have any plans. It didnt occur to me partly because of how i grew up. I grew up in new orleans. It didnt occur to me that i would have to. Hence our history. It was a place for careers to die but it was a great place to study and i loved it. When i got out i didnt have any kind of plan. 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. There was a two your gap. Host how did you figure that out . Guest you had to write a senior thesis. I immersed myself in that. I loved it like i love no other academic experience. I made the jump in my mind this would be a good thing to do forever if you could. The false start is i thought is would mean an academic career. The guy who supervised me not only told me i wasnt made for an academic career but i asked at the end of my thesis because i was feeling 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 it is revenge, one guy. William childs is his name. If you see that name. He was great actually. A wonderful professor, so i started to submit magazine pieces. Didnt know what i was doing. Didnt know anyone who wrote for a living. It was a quixotic enterprise. The writers market, about that sick and had the names and addresses of all the editors in america and i got it in my head the easiest thing i might break into was inflight magazine. I was volunteering at the soup kitchen and they were so interested i got to know the homeless people. I sent it to inflight magazines in america. I got a letter back from Delta Airlines the kind of like the piece but it what we are in the business of doing is getting people to go places. Took a while to figure out the market. Started to get some things in print. It basically gave me my start, but Michael Kinsley in the republic, it was a graduate student, want to write for your magazine, and got this job on wall street, promising a fortune. It was 100,000 a year. It is one hundred thousand dollars, 23. And it was incredible. I have to do this and see what it is but by then i knew i wanted to write something so i have a friend, you joke about i could have been rich but they pity me. They went and hid wall street at the same time to get really rich. When we met the first day of class he introduced himself telling me he wanted to go into mortgage bonds and whatever. I said my name is Michael Lewis and im here to write a book but i had it in mind i was going to write about this, and the back of my mind, when i was there, this was how the book career happened. I started continued, started to publish pieces about wall street and put a piece on the oped of the wall street journal that had at its bottom Michael Lewiss is an associate with Salomon Brothers in london and made a piece that they were overpaid and i was working in london and came into work the next day and the head was sitting at my desk, happy to be the guy who gave me my job and he was ashen and he said do you realize what you have done . You have a piece in the journal and he said we have a crisis meeting with the board of directors to talk about how to deal with this piece because of local newspapers around the country. That is great but he said no, he said this is a big problem. You are not going to fire me. A different era but he says that down and said how do we fix this problem . I said you tell me. You dont write anymore. And that happens. I am going to keep writing. He wanted what if you wrote under a different name, and what if i wrote under my mothers maiden name . No one around here will think a woman is a man, they will never make the connection. I started to write with abandon under that name. One day i get home from work and dianas career is taking off because people want to read about wall street in 1987. I get home from work and there is a phone call. Say chevy chase, his dad was an editor at simon schuster, distinguished book editor. He says i find out you are diane bleeker and i think you should write a book. From that moment, that was september 1987, i was out the door. I knew that was what i wanted to do in the money didnt matter. I am the potted plant. The carrot in the school play. What happened next, i waited until they gave me my bonus at the end of the year. A huge pile of money. And then said i am leaving to write a book. And write about wall street. They took me into the room, didnt care that i was writing about wall street. They thought i was out of my mind. You do understand you made 250 million this year and next year 500 and after that a different thing. You can stay here another decade and in ten use you wont have to work. Dont do this to your self. They felt sorry for me. I was so out the door, so in a bird, so amused with myself as now, what happened when i sat down with blank sheet of paper . When you are 2425, i was 26, you go with your gut. This will not work for everyone, this career path. Being it is a good personality trait for this business. I have a bunch of props here, this, everyone knows this book. [applause] at the end of the book is a harrowing encounter with john bit going may he rest in peace, your former boss and we read it again this morning, tell us the moment your boss a major career. In slightly different terms. The reason i went to see him, 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. We were watching the end of a process that i put in motion. The big one was her turning wall street partnerships into corporations. Was it scary . Terrifying. He booked a table for two at his favorite restaurant around the corner, he said yes but didnt say more than that and i got there on time and he did not. One of those tables where you sit with your legs together, i sat down and started to sweat. Set it up and sit like this for two hours, he walks in and says your book made your career and it ruins mine. You had a lovely lunch after that. I said that is the misinterpretation, i dont think my book ruins your career. It didnt help but didnt ruin your career. I would see him from time to time after that and he was very genial. Always kept me a box of books under the desk for people who came to his office. That is a win. Your biggest customer. You gave the commencement speech at princeton a few years back and described yourself as lucky, some people are just lucky. Those of us who know you well, you working credibly hard, very hard worker, incredible gift for telling a story, you write in the vernacular. You are not lucky but what in terms of finding stories not only that people want to read but no one else has told. We were writing about the financial crisis, the great recession, you come in with something no one else had written. How do you find this . It is not true that i am not lucky there is incredible serendipity in my career. The fact that i wanted to be a writer and got this job in the best place on earth to write about wall street, the place in the firm, i was given the leader by my parents two or three years after college and if they hadnt done that i doubt i would have become a writer. You had some huge advantages. People this odd conceit in our culture that you have made is it was inevitable because of the virtue of you. A fact, that is not how it works. Obama was right when he said you didnt build it. You are such the recipient of benefits of this culture. To tell the story without a high level of awareness of that, it is getting harder to see how lucky you are. You had a lot of advantages, the freedom to look around and improvise, you also found a story no one else saw. Tell us suddenly got an incredible book to the blindside. It is typical of how i find stories, in that you see it is just chance. Maybe slightly different but blindside, what happened was it started with a bottle of wine and the New York Times magazine editor, we were sitting in new york, trying to decide what i am going to write next. Whatever it was, 2005, 4, important people, jamie diamond, never interested me, you want me to write about someone important, a teacher who changed my life. He happened to be my baseball coach but he was a teacher. I thought i will write a personal story about the coach, i will talk to some people in my team. On the blindside it was a catcher, i havent seen him since high school and he picks me up at the memphis airport, full athlete, drafted in the nba, he had gone on to make a fortune in the fast food business, really showed me, took me to the mansion and we spoke about our own coach. And was not introduced to me. In the school play on the back of the airport, i said a new project. Standing in the bus stop on an empty shirt and recognized some and stop is a leader in the car. Nothing to read, illiterate, and a rich white evangelical republican living on the outskirts in a racially divided city, make a rich white evangelical christian and dont get in the way, and going to do it. That is odd. I thought i will follow that and how the book comes out, that is interesting. Curious thing. I just want to know more. Flash forward a few weeks. Got to be friends with a brain trust such as they were in several nfl front offices, some were brain trusts, you wouldnt trust their brains but the brain trust was great and it was a conversation about football. There is not a moneyball story, football is the same story because everyone has the same money to spend. It is not rich teams and poor teams, how to do more with less. It is about how to distribute your money across field. Can you get me a history how that happened once free agency happened . He pulled it out and it was remarkable you have this character on the offensive line whose salary had gone from the yellow line to the secondhighest insurance policy on the most valuable asset. So you get hurt in a way you wouldnt normally. I thought that is interesting. Forward 6 or 8 months, hearing about michael or, the stories getting rich and emotional, something odd. Sean calls me and says there is a lot of that. Neck sabin, alabama coach, looking at some players and saw michael on the basketball court. Sean knew him and he said that is a future nfl left tackle. You see this from the way he moved. You know what they get paid . That is what it was. I told the story and then started saying he was going here and the kid, the moment he was identified as future nfl tackle which he became, the most prized kid in the universe. He had gone from least valued 15yearold on earth to the most valued 17yearold in a flash. In a story that can be organized along these lines, forces of the life to change his value. One of those forces is stuff happening in nfl strategy and what is a mother. Unless i realize that i had a story, this happens, had it for six months and kind of thought i often think theres something better, someone who has empathy or someone who knows the emotions or someone who knows about psychology or there is some part that is alien to me so i shouldnt be the one to do it. The truth is why you should do it, you could get across other people, the stuff about it. So sean came out, a commentator for memphis, we went to dinner and started telling my wife some of the stories. He said to me it was interesting when he came in the house and took him into a room and just stared and said what . I never had a bed. He was 15 years old and never had a bed. My wife started crying. When she got in the car she said you are an idiot, if you do anything but write this book so i wrote the book. It has happened in various forms over and over. You have a common theme of unrecognized value in several of your books. Is that a conscious thing you shoot for . This book every business person in america is going to buy my book because the saying is the blindside, a bit short, with the new book, think differently about this, there is value out there. Is that a conscious theme you have . No. What does seem to have a lot and i dont know why, i can guess why but the way markets dont function sometimes very well, they are miraculous in a lot of ways but value comes from the market so there is a market angle. Since i left new orleans i have always been bemused by value, i came from a place that was very charming to grow up, really rich, interesting childhood. I love the people, i love the place, it was a failed place. It was not valued. You see over and over people who are special dont get valued. People who are distinctly not special valued very highly. That has always interested me. Since i was a little kid, really interested me. My father told me not long ago he introduced me to the stock market, still dont have much of an interest. He is obsessed with it, likes to watch his portfolio, just watch it. I dont get that. He is watching his portfolio, going to give ten shares of stock and you can learn to watch it too. I was 13 or 14 years old, a little black book in which to keep the record that i thought watching it. He gave me ten shares of chart house which was a restaurant company, gave it to me. I looked at him like he paid 220. I said ten shares was 200. That is what we had to pay to buy the stock. I said i will hang the towels. That is outrageous. He charges that much, how does that happen . Outraged at the value assigned to that role way back then. Then you invented online trading. We should talk as a novelty about your new book. The undoing project a friendship that changed our minds. Tell us how you got into that. A little different from your other books. It is more about psychology, more academic. Fundamentally a friendship book. I think a love story. Sold the movie. It is a love story. When i finished it it was being sold for a movie, Hollywood Reporter called me and asked me what is the one line elevator pitch for this book . It is about two academic sitting in a room with ideas how the human mind works. How do you turn that into a movie . What is your pitch . I said it is broke Back Mountain but they screw each others ideas. That is what it is. That is what it is. We can delete that line somehow. That is not on the internet, is it . Nobody will be offended by that word. What happened is the way this story came about it is about two israeli psychologists working on a book. I dont like to talk about my book. Amazing how quickly they can be described in a way people dont want to know anything more about them. Working on a book about baseball, ask another question. If you want to stop a room cold, what are you working on . Israeli psychologists. Nobody wants to know anymore. That is what this book is about. The way it came about is if you had moneyball, moneyball is about miss valuation of people if you happen to be baseball players, and they got missed valued by making intuitive judgments about their value and i thought that was the story. The book comes out and gets reviewed by richard saylor. 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 the i did never heard of these guys even though he won the nobel prize in economics. It wasnt that impressive. [laughter] but i mean it bothered me that i had missed his trek. And people say an explanation is where the mind comes direct and the book is your explanation. What you do as a story is where your mind came to rest. I think ive exhausted the material. Ive mind out the material. Theres nowhere else to go behind me to find something really great that i didnt find. It didnt even occur to me thats something that is wired in certain ways and people have figured out how we are wired that explains all the stories. Expl it just bothered me for years. I thought about it. Every now and then and i mentioned it to my psychologist friend that he said danny lives have come out from your house. S. You need to talk about this and get it off your chest. Thats what i did and i went and knocked on the door and we developed a relationship. We would go for long walks in berkeley and he would talk about this now dead colleague. He was his lover. He was in his physical lover but in every other way. They were passionately involved with each other in tumultuously involved with each other. I taught for a term. It was called a class at cal to teach writing. I didnt do a very good job of it that one of my favorite students it turned out he was a missing puzzle the sun. Very quick read access to both sides of this collaboration and the material, i kept saying im not going to write this. This is really interesting. Im not jewish and the story takes place in israel, a lot of it at the back top is the birth of the israeli state in early israel. I had been mean to take psych 101 and interesting psychology up to that point. Interesting it was all aliens so it took me forever to talk myself into the place right but i should be the one to do it. And that led me to this point eight years after i started walking the hills with danny condon is the people were starting to die and it was clear if i didnt do it would be gone. I think its an incredibly important story. Their k their work is incredibly important. Its a very emotional story between the two men. Its an unusual story. So at that point i turned to danny and i said its going to seem odd to you but i want to write a book about this. He hemmed and hogg ended like a the idea of it. I said your work is too important. Someone has to write a book about it and its probably int your view going to be a bad book and if anybody has a right to write a bad book about you should be me because i spent all these years with you. He himself wrote a book or did you ghostwrite that book . At the end of the book you mentioned the early chapters about book. When i met him one of the first things out of his mouth was to come at a good time. They asked me to write this book and its going to ruin my reputation so its going in the garbage can where it belongs an i said could i see a chapter to . He gave me a chapter and i watched him and the quality that is peculiar to the degree that ive never seen in any otherth human being is doubt, doubt about everything around him including his own thoughts. Hes constantly chewing up what he created before it ever gets out the door. He got to a point after throwing it away and pulling it out of the garbage can and pul