As a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite providers. Now on book tv we are live with bestselling author Michael Lewis. Mister lewis has written many books including liars poker, moneyball, the big short and most recently the undoing project, a friendship that changed our minds. Michael lewis, you are the author of more than a dozen bestselling books, what makes a good story in your mind, what do you look for . There is no formula. The question you just asked me, ive never really asked myself exactly. What lead me to want to write a book, you have to have a level of passion about it. Itsfinding usually, what it is , its finding an interesting person in an interesting situation that will allow me to work in an interesting idea. B. I feel like i just had to do this if i dont do it wont get done and it should be done because the story should be dealt with. In terms of like you asked me to go to lack a class of Journalism School students and give them a formula for how to write a good story, i would know how to begin. Host when did you decide you want to become an author . Guest my career path, they should be something in the bottom of the tv screen that says do not try this at your own home. It really didnt come i dont think you can grab the model onto a literary career. I was at art history major in college and so what i first one to do was an art historian. I kind of stumbled out of College Without any particular direction and landed with that and accept on wall street. I got that job on wall street and became the first book liars poker, very excellent that great deal of intention. What happened was while i i was working on my princeton thesis which was effectively a book, may be a 50,000 word book i became engrossed with the writing of it. I had never written for newspapers. I never conceived of myself as of right. I was a reader. I like to read that i didnt have anybody telling me you are a born writer. Just the reverse. When i finished my princeton thesis and i had to did in to my professor and he came back with a great and we had a defensive thesis, i had been vain. In the course of this exchange i said, what did you think of the writing . He said, put it this way, never try to make a living at it. But i tried. When i got out of college i thought i would want to write. I want to write books. I started willynilly submitting things to magazines and it was haphazard process and thing started to get published and one thing led to another. The advice i would give someone, the practical thing that happened to me that was really very useful for my career was doing something other than right. Right. It was hugely useful, given my subsequent career that he spent two and half years at a wall street firm. I had something to write it. It gave me material that you wouldnt get in a normal journalistic life, to be on the inside of Something Like that. That put kind of attached engines to my ambition, to have that as an experience to write about. Host with a lot to talk about but it want to ask you which are currently working on, what are your upcoming projects . Guest at any given time i have come if you were to come to my office you would see a row on a bench of folders of like might want to do this. There are dozens of things there which inquiries states of neglect. The thing thats got me kind of jazzed right now, its going to sound boring, but im writing the federal government. When trump was elected i watched the transition with appalled assassination. There were bits and pieces in the newspaper about how essentially the obama administration, administration are my law required to prepare for the transition. Too many employees, but a political boss level of 4000 who wrote an offer not knowing very much and have to quickly cram and figure out whats going on in these places like the Treasury Department and the department of energy or department of agriculture and sometimes they know a lot about it and sometimes they know nothing. In any case the, from the point of the outgoing administration, preparing for this is to educate the people who come in about how one of these enterprises work. The obama administration, because were so grateful to the Bush Administration for how they are prepared for the transition in 2008 during a time of crisis, obama had directed his government to Pay Attention to this in a big way. They had prepared a cost the government, may be the best course ever created and how the federal government works, an agency to Agency Briefing books and people smart, people waiting to teach. The Trump Administration largely just didnt show up for. In some departments really didnt show up for it. I thought that was a missed opportunity. Its crazy. Even if they disapprove of everything obama stood for you can store an awful lot from outgoing people about how this enterprise works. The truth is the amount of overlap between the two administrations is much greater than the typical noise would have you believe. A lot of what our government has is not ideological. I went to go get the briefing. Calling up career Civil Servants and former obama people and say look at, can you give me the talk with the briefing book that you were going to give whoever was supposed to show from the Trump Administration so i could figure out how it works, because i dont know, and what they might not know. It might kill us. I picked almost arbitrarily i started with the Energy Department because its always been mysterious to me. I wonder what the hell they did in there. Like a lot of departments it is misnamed. Its really a department of nuclear weapons. The neglect of that was very frightening and i wrote about in vanity fair couple of months ago. The second one which i picked as a kind of test case. I said to myself, the Energy Department, everybody wants to read about that because nuclear weapons, it seems alarming that a new administration would come in and be so haphazard about the nuclear stockpile. Lets pick a department of the seam sleepy nothing could go wrong. Topic the department of agriculture. I dont know what goes on there, and spent several months going into news briefings. It was riveting to me the kinds of people who were there, the things they had to say, a range of activities this place did. So i wrote about that. Im going to move around the government and keep doing it. Where exactly late i dont know but as i suggested, your first question, i group, i feel an excitement about the material, i feel excited about this material. Host take your book moneyball, a book about algorithm, it became an interesting story about people and personalities and americas pastime. How do you weve all that together . Guest well, first how does it start . I dont look at and say theres a book here. It starts like with this thing im doing now, very small. With an observation i was sitting there watching my local Baseball Team, the oakland as, when money was starting to happen in baseball. Free agent showers were starting to go through the roof. I looked at it and i thought thats odd. You see all these people, they were not paid the same but they were close to each other. Now we have all that field is getting paid 150 grams and right field is deemed paid 6 million and a water just got ticked off the left fielder was when the right fielder dropped a fly ball. I thought maybe there was class resentment going on so watching them the money on the field for a while, and then realized the story is not that. Or its not only that. Its how much money the team has. The team has, my team is a 14. It has onefourth the payroll of the new york yankees and yet its winning as many games as the new york yankees. How does that happen . In an efficient market the team with the most money would buy the best players and when all the games. How come thats not happening . So it starts with a question. I go see the management to ask them about it. Their answer is a riveting, it takes about a month to figure out that this isnt a magazine piece or little article, that this is a book. Into this stew is tossed the really interesting character billy dean, played by brad pitt in the movie, but who i realize at some point can be the engine for the narrative. It is a question of like how you put it together in a way the reader will keep turning the pages. The bottom of it, that an odd way is the easy part. Once i start writing. Taking out what the story is about and in that case what i i thought the story was about is not baseball. They spot was going to be what were going to be reading about and think were going to be. But underneath it, the fact the market of any people at any labor market could be so inefficient and much less the market for Baseball Players i thought thats incredible. Forget their Baseball Players. These corporate employees who are doing what they do on the job with millions of people watching them do their job. Statistics attach, it wasnt people were telling what youre doing. Statistics attach what youre doing on the field. If those people can be so miss valued that you can build a juggernaut of a Baseball Team out of a miss value, undervalued, who cant . It was not the way markets misdiagnose people. Once i have that energy, like thats an important story, that transcends the immediate subject matter, its just a matter of like a length out that interest me and figure out how to line up. Host when did you get to the point . Was there and aha moment that this is going to be the story . Guest yes. I can always answer that question with every book but in the case of moneyball it was funny. I groped. I was trying to get how this operation renter i started with the front office at of course they were explained to me strategies and players i miss valued, people are using intuition as opposed to better Statistical Analysis which we are doing, and i one point said to the front office, billy beane, what do the players think about . Its kind of odd, your team wn you look at it, they dont look like most teams. You have a leadoff hitter who is slow, you have a first baseman has never played first base, that kind of thing picky set the players, we dont tell if theres anything. All the stuff you been asking about we dont tell them because it confuses them. So dont you go tell them. But i thought this is a start of the conversation with a player. They are in the middle of a science experiment, the lab rats. You can talk to the lab rats. I was thinking at the point thinking i had a long magazine. I, the pain he had not dropped for me. I went to go, i went to go to systematically get to know the players and i really just moved down the clubhouse, the locker. The first time after a game, it was a night game in the Oakland Coliseum and i was waiting for my player to come back from the showers. Looking around and all the players are coming back from the showers so they are all naked. The first ahmed releasing the oakland as naked and it was really an unpleasant site. It was just like the baseball uniform like these suits cover up a lot. Theres a lot of body fat what should nothing. The worm is shaped parts and i have thought, even among those naked bodies of the against the wall and has anybody what you do for living nobody would guess they are professional athletes. Booktv interviewers may be, but not professional athletes. And when i realize just how they didnt look right, really didnt look right, i mentioned this the next day to billy beane secondincommand and he said thats a funny thing to say that because we talk about that picky said when a player looks wrong, is when, what are the reasons a market miss value to we see a player and it looks like a famous baseball, tortuously before or he looks like an idea of an athlete, the market legate he is a quickly because they seem and they said thats a player. But if you short or fat or has to club feet, one of players had to collect feed, they just Say Something is off about them in the market is put off. He said were essentially in the business of finding people who have defects, and the more obviously glaring defect, the better it is in a way because the defect will distract the baseball expert from seeing the real value of what the person is doing on a baseball field. Thats when i thought all my god, how they look and baseball is having an effect on how they are valued . How could that be . Thats when i started thinking this is a story about markets, how screwed they did when they value people. Not just Baseball Players. Women in the workplace, look like when your thought to be less valuable. It applies to a lot of things. Its about the way we stereotype when you look at people and how that affects the right of the people who are being stereotyped and how that becomes self reinforcing perk that had come this is universal subject and that it was really just a question of how i lay it out. But at that point i had a book. Billy beane would say if you had him sitting here, i tricked into writing a book and hes right. Because at that point kind of six weeks into relationship and im saying a little magazine for the New York Times magazine, he was fine with that. When i rolled in after six weeks and said you know, this might be a book, you could see his expression changed. He did not want a book written about him. But it was too late. I spent so much time, i cant quite get out of this now. And so, but thats how it happened. Host 202 7488201, three hours of first sunday of the month indepth and our guest Michael Lewis. Well get to calls in a moment. He mentioned billy beane. This is from 2011. Lets watch. The journey for me started when i stopped playing and worked under sandy and he threw a pamphlet at me by jehovah named eric walker. I read that and that was my eureka moment. Then i sort of went back and found all the builtin stuff i could read, the abstracts and read all those and it just made more sense for me. Once i access to that, once id sort of scene that, there was really no turning back for myself. But as far as the last ten tens i really start to mistake when Michael Lewis walked into her office and were just trying to survive as a business trying to find a way to compete in a very challenging situation. I dont think we ever sort of envisioned that the organization itself would be put out front, Something Like this with sports analytics. Its a bit surreal. Host your reaction . Guest i told you, he didnt, ill tell you think its even funnier because he kind of got tricked into the book get written about them. Not that it was a bad thing. Even when the book was done, to understand what they were doing was different, i could just spend my time with them. I had to go see other baseball organizations. I had a point of comparison even though much of that material, virtually all of my tour would end up on the cutting room floor. The Toronto Blue Jays and the boston red sox, i was down with the texas rangers. I i went up and saw the Seattle Mariners and talk to various people at philly with the organizations and realize yes, the certificate billy beane saw me doing all this picky thought maybe its not just about us. Hes writing about baseball. I tend not to clue in my subjects too much about what im doing. I dont want him to become too selfconscious. He gets the book, and read it, basically, is too late for him to change anything. He calls me and he just is horribly upset. Shouting at me, not shouting at me exact of the kind of shouting at me. And i said, i was thinking, if i felt sneaky about it i thought its not totally in his interest for me to write this book because they are doing things that of people under doing and again in market advantage. If i expose it to the world the other teams will start doing it and he will lose his edge. And i thought that was what he was upset about. So i said what are you upset about . He says, you had me think i can say the word on tv, and expletive, cursing all the time, and i said what . I said you do curse all the time. He said you dont understand, my mother is going to be really upset. My mother is going to read this book and shes going to be upset. I said, your mother . I said, you know, i thought, i was released. I thought if thats all you worried about, i thought you were bored, i said to them, i expose your secret to the other major league Baseball Teams and your stupid and you no longer be able to win baseball games with less money. There was a long pause on the other end of life and he said you really dont think anybody in baseball is going to read your book . He said nobody is going to read your book. So then people do read the book. It kind of goes, the thing goes crazy. His life just blew up. To his credit he could so easily have said Michael Lewis does not know what hes talking about. We gave them a few interviews but he got it all wrong. He could so easily have just throw me under the bus. He fought back on my behalf. So then flash forward, a few months, a movie studio once to buy the book ordered into a movie. To that point, 2443, ive had a lot of movie studios buy things ive written nothing a been made into movies. What did you send us the money for an option and its great, free money. They never make the move. They say they will make it but they never make it. So billy calls and he says youre not condoleezza called me. Some movie studio the ones to buy my life raise because theyre going to make a movie. Hes laughing like this is preposterous. Thats just not going to happen. And i said what you say . He said though, i didnt want a buck. I dont want a movie. I said no, you are thinking about all the wrong way. They just give you money. They never make anything. They just buy all the stuff, give you money and you can just take them and put it in a drawer and it will never make it. I listed all the things from liars poker on, does a magazine pieces that they bought and the amounts they pay for the sphinx and is listening and goes wow, thats good deal. If i just signed they would give me the money . So he signed it and sends it back in. And every 18 months for six y