Best selling books. What makes a good story, in your minding . What do you look for . Guest so theres no formula. I dont actually think that. The question you just asked me ive never really asked myself exactly. What leads me to want to write a book, because theyre a pain in the neck to do. You really have to have a level of passion about it. That its finding, usually what it is if i look back on it, its finding a person, an interesting person in an interesting situation that will allow me to explore some interesting ideas, and thats it. And what almost always happens is that ive got lots of little projects bubbling along, magazine pieces or things im investigating, and something becomes so interesting, it consumes me, and i get to the point in my head where i think, wow, this is such a good story, i have an obligation to tell it. And thats the point its a book. I feel like i have to do it, it really should be done because this story should be told. But in terms of, like, if you asked me to go to a class of Journalism School students and give them a formula for how to write a good story, i wouldnt know how to begin. Host when did you decide you were going to be an author . Because you were making money on wall street working for solomon brothers. Guest yes. My career path, there should be something on the bottom to have the tv screen that says do not try this at home, because i dont think you can graft the model on to a literary career. I was an art history major in college, and what i first wanted to do, i thought, was be an art historian. I kind of stumbled out of College Without any particular direction and landed, by accident, on wall street. I got that job that became the first book, liars poker, really very accidentally without a great deal of intention. By then what happened was while i was working on my princeton thesis, which was effectively a book, maybe a 50,000word book, i became engrossed with the writing of it. Id never written for school newspapers, id never conceived of myself as a writer. I was a reader because i just liked to read, but i didnt have anybody telling me, oh, youre a born writer. Just the reverse. When i finished my princeton thesis and i handed it in to my professor and he came back with a grade, i had gotten at that point very vain about how it was written. I looked anywhere for him to have said, wow, this is nicely written. He hadnt said it. So in the course of this exchange i said, whatd you think of the writing . He said, put it this way, never try to make a living at it. [laughter] but i tried, i mean, when i got out of college, i thought, i want to write books. So i started kind of willynilly submitting things to magazines, and it was a haphazard process, and things 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 useful for my career was doing something other than write. It was hugely useful given my subsequent career, was because it gave me material you wouldnt get in a normal journalistic life. To be on the inside of Something Like that. So that, that put kind of, attached engines to my ambition, to have that as an experience to write about. Host and we have a lot to talk about, but i want to ask you what youre currently working on, what are your upcoming projects. Guest well, at any given time if you would come to my office, you would see a row on a bench of folders of i might want to do this. And so there are dozens of things there which in various states of neglect. The thing thats gotten me kind of jazzed right now, i mean, its going to sound boring, but im writing about the federal government. When trump was elected, i watched the transition with appalled fascination. There were bits and pieces in the newspaper about how potentially the Obama Administration and administrations are, by law, required to prepare for the transition. We have this very period enterprise called the federal government, but a political boss level of 4,000 who roll in, often 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 the department of agriculture, and sometimes the people who roll in know a lot about it, and sometimes they know nothing. In any case, from the point of view of the Outgoing Administration preparing for this is to educate the people who come in about how one of these enterprises work. And the Obama Administration had gone to because they were so grateful to the Bush Administration for how they had prepared for the transition in 08 during a time of crisis, obama had directed his government to Pay Attention to this in a big way. And they had prepared across the government maybe the best course ever created in how the federal Government Works from agency to agency. Of briefing books and people, smart people waiting to teach. And the Trump Administration largely just didnt show up for it. I mean, in some departments really didnt show up for it. And i thought, well, that was a missed opportunity. Its crazy. Even if they disapprove of everything obama stood for, you could still learn an awful lot from the outgoing people about how this enterprise works. And the truth is, the overlap is much bigger than they would have you believe. So i went to go get the briefings. I started calling up career Civil Servants and former obama people and saying, look, can you give me the talk with the briefing book that you were going to give whoever was supposed to show up from the Trump Administration so i can figure out what they how it works . Because i dont know. And what they might not know that might kill us. And i picked almost arbitrarily. I started with the Energy Department because thats always been mysterious to me. I wondered what the hell they did in there. Turns out, like a lot of departments, its kind of misnamed. The neglect of that department was very frightening, and i wrote about it in vanity fair a couple of months ago. And the second one which i picked as a kind of test case. I said to myself, the Energy Department, Nuclear Weapons is really it is, seems alarming that a new administration would come in and be so haphazard about the nuclear stockpile. Lets pick a department that seems so sleepy, nothing could go wrong. So i picked the department of agriculture. I dont really know what goes on in there. And spent several months going and getting those briefings, and it was riveting to me, the kinds of people that were there, the things they had to say, the range of activities this place did. So i wrote about that. Im going to move around the government and keep doing it. And exactly where it leads, i dont know. But as i suggested in my answer to your first question, i grope. I kind of feel an excitement about the material, and i feel an excitement about this material. Host and if you take your book about moneyball, for example, it became a really interesting story about people and personalities and americas pastime. How do you weave all of that together . Guest well, first, how because it start . How does it start . I dont look and say, oh, theres a book here. It starts like with this thing im doing now, very small, with an observation. I was watching my local Baseball Team, the oakland as, when money was really starting to happen in baseball. Free agent salaries were starting to go through the roof. And i looked and said, thats odd. It used to be all the people on the field were close to each other, and now we have a left fielder whos getting paid 150,000, and a right fielder whos paid 6 million. And i wondered just how ticked off when the right fielder dropped the ball. [laughter] i thought maybe there was class resentment going on. So i watched the money on the field for a while and then realized, no, no, no, the storys not only that, its how much money the team has. If the team has my team is a poor team. It has a fourth 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 is win 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 so riveting, it takes about a month to figure out this isnt a magazine piece or a little article, that this is a book. Into this stew is tossed the really interesting character of billy beane played by brad pitt in the movie who i realize at some point can be the engine for the narrative. And then its a question of, like, how you put it together in a way that the reader will keep turning pages. I, at the bottom, that in an odd way is the easy part once i start writing, its figuring out what the story is about. And in that case, what i thought the story was about was not baseball. I mean, baseball was going to be what we were going to be reading about. But underneath it, the fact the market of any people in any labor market could be so inefficient, much less for Baseball Players, i thought, well, thats incredible. You have these forget the Baseball Players these corporate employees who are doing what they do on the job with millions of people watching them do their job. Statistics attached. It wasnt that people werent counting things, there were statistics attached to a lot of what they did on the field. If those people can be so misvalued, you can build a juggernaut of a Baseball Team out of undervalued parts, who cant . That was at the bottom of it. Once i had that energy, thats an important story, that transcends the immediate subject matter, its just a matter of, like, laying out the things that interest me and trying to figure out how they line up. Guest of course, they were explaining to me that strategies and players are misvalued because people are using their intuition as opposed to better Statistical Analysis, which were doing. And i at one point said to billy beane, what do players think of that . Your team is kind of odd when you start to look at it, they dont look like most teams. Youve got a leadoff hitter whos slow, a first baseman whos never played first base. All the stuff youve been asking me about, he says, we dont tell them because it just confuses them. But i thought this is the start of a conversation or with the players. Theyre in the middle of a science ebbs peopler. You could talk to the science experiment. You could talk to the lab rats. I was at that point thinking i had a long magazine piece. The penny hadnt drop for me. So i went to go systematically get to know the players, and i really just moved down the clubhouse, the lockers. The first time i was in there after a game, it was a night game in the Oakland Coliseum u and i was waiting more my for my player who had agreed to meet me after the game, and i was looking around, and the players were all nakedded. It was first time id seen the oakland as naked, and it was an unpleasant sight. There was a lot of body fat where it shouldnt be, misshapen parts, and i had the thought if you line those naked bodies up against the wall and asked anyone what they did for a living, no one would guess they were professional athletes. Booktv interviewers maybe, but not professional athletes. And i ran [laughter] what i realized was how they didnt look right, i mentioned in the next day to billy beanes second in command, and he said thats, you know, thats a funny thing you say that, because we talk about that. He said when a player looks wrong is when, thats one of reasons the market misvalues them. If we see a player and he looks like a famous baseball he looks like someone whos played before or the idea of an athlete, the market will get that hes a good player because they see him and they say, oh, thats a player. But if hes short or fat or has two club feet, they say somethings off about him, and the markets put off. And he said were essentially in the business of finding people who have defects, and the more obvious and glaring the defect, the better it is in a way because the defect will distract the baseball experts from seeing the real value of what that persons doing on a baseball field. And thats when i thoughting, oh, my god thought, oh, my god, how they look in baseball is having an effect on how theyre valued . How could that be . And thats when i started thinking, oh, this is a story about markets and how screwed up they can get when theyre valuing people. And it was about not just Baseball Players. Women in the workplace. Look like a woman, and youre thought to be less valuable. It applies to a lot of things. Its about the way wester or yo type when we we stereo type when we look at people and how that effects the value and how that becomes selfreinforcing. So then i had, i thought, this is a universal subject. And then it was really just a question of how on earth, you know, how i lay it out. But at that point i had a book. And billy beane would say, if you had him sitting here, i tricked him into writing a book about him, and hes right. At that point im saying this is a little magazine, piece for the New York Times magazine, and he was fine with that. And when i rolled after six weeks and said, you know, this might be a book, you could see his, you know, his expression change. He did not want a book written about him, but it was too late. Hed spent so much time with me, he kind of thought i cant quite get out of in this now. Out of this now. And so finish but thats how it happened. For those in the eastern or central time zones, three hours, the first sunday of the month, and our guest is Michael Lewis. Well get to your calls. This is from 2011, lets watch. The journey for me started when i stopped playing, and a gentleman through a pamphlet to me. I read that, and that was my eureka moment. I sort of went back and find out bill james stuff i could read, read all those, and and it just made sense for me. And once i had access to that, once i had sort of seen that, it was really no turning back for myself. But as far as the, you know, the last ten years it really starts for me, i think, when Michael Lewis walked in our office. We were just trying to survive as a business, trying to find a way to compete in a very challenging situation. And i dont think we ever sort of envisioned that the organization itself would, you know, be put out front in Something Like this with sports analytics. So its a bit surreal. Host your reaction. [laughter] guest well, i told you. He didnt ill tell you, it gets even funnier because he got, he kind of got tricked into the book getting written about him. Not that it was a bad thing. And even when the book was done, you know, i understand that they were what they were doing was different. I couldnt just spend my time with them. I had to go see other baseball organizations and see what they were doing so i had a point of comparison even though much of that material, virtually all of that material ended up on the cutting room floor. I was down with the texas rangers, saw the Seattle Mariners and talked to various people affiliated with the organizations and realized, yeah, this is really different. Billy beane saw me doing this and thought, well, maybe its not just about us. Hes writing about baseball. And i tend not to clue in my subjects too much about what im doing, i dont want them the become too selfconscious. So he gets the book and reads it, basically it was too late for him to change anything, and he calls me and hes just horribly upset but wont hes not shouting at me exactly, but hes kind of shouting at me. [laughter] and i said is i was thinking, and if i felt sneaky about it i thought its not totally in his interests for me to write this book because theyre doing things that other people arent doing, and theyre gaining a market advantage, and if i expose it to the world, the other teams will start doing it, and hell lose his edge. And i thought thats what he was upset about. I said, what are you upset about . He says you have me saying i cant say the word on tv, an expletive you have me cursing all the time. And i said, what . You do curse all the time. And he says, you dont understand, my mothers going to be really upset. My mothers going to read this book, and shes going to be upset. I said, your mother . I said, you know, i thought i was relieved. I thought if thats all youre worried about, i thought you were worried, i said to him, that ive exposed your secrets to the other major league Baseball Teams, and theyre going to steal them, and youre no longer going to win baseball games with less money. And theres this long pause, and he says you dont really think anybody in baseballs going to read your book . [laughter] he said nobodys going to read your book. [laughter] people do can read the book, and he kind of goes the thing goes crazy, and his life just i blew up. P and to his credit, he could so easily have said Michael Lewis does not know what hes talking about. We gave him a few interviews, yes, but he got it all wrong. He could so easily have just thrown me under the bus, and he didnt do it. He fought back on my behalf. So then flash forward. Oh, a few months and a movie studio wants to boy the book to buy the book to turn it into a movie. This was 2004, 2003, and nothing had ever been made into a movie. They send you some money for an option for a thing, and its great. Free money, but they never make the movie. They say theyre going to make it, and they never make it. So billy calls me and says, youre not going to believe who called me. Some movie studio, hes laughing like this is preposterous. And id sax i said, whatd you say . I dont want a movie. I said, youre thinking about it all the wrong way. They just give you money. They never make anything. They just buy all this stuff, they give you money, and you can take the money and put it in a drawer, and theyll never make it. I listed all the thing from liars poker and to magazine pieces, and hes listening, and he goes, wow, if i just sign it, theyll give me the money . He signs it, sends it back in. And every 18 months for six years . He would g