The Blind Side | Michael Lewis | Talks at Google

All right, thank you, everyone, for coming to another edition of AuthorSoogle, New York. I want to introduce to you a very special guest. I'm personally very excited. His name is Michael Lewis, and he was actually out in Mountain View last week on September 11th in front of another large crowd as well. So let me give you a quick introduction to Mr. Michael Lewis. In football, as in life, the value we place on people changes with the rules of the game. They play the blind side. The evolution of a game focuses on a young man who will one day be amongst the most highly paid athletes in the NFL. When we first meet him, he is one of 13 children by a mother addicted to crack. He does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school, such as, say, how to read or write. Nor has he ever touched a football. What changes? He takes a football and school after a rich evangelical Republican family plucks him from the mean streets. Their love is the first great force that alters the world's perception of the boy whom they adopt. The second force is the evolution of professional football itself into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist turns out to be the priceless combination of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard a quarterback's greatest vulnerability. His blindside. Author of the bestsellers Liars, Poker, the New New thing, and Moneyball, Mr. Michael Lewis writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine and Bloomberg News. He lives in Berkeley, California. Please give a big, warm Google New YORK welcome to Mr. Michael Lewis.

Thank.

You. So today is actually our first beta at changing up the format we traditionally have at Google. And as we all know, we beta everything here. So we're gonna start off with a few preset questions from Mr. Lewis, and then after that, we'll go right into questions that you would like to ask Mr. Michael Lewis. So the first thing is the book's been described as both a sports book and. And a sociology book, that being the blind side. How would you categorize this book?

Well, both the books I wrote about sports, this one and Moneyball, I thought of as only incidentally about the sports. The sports was an excuse to write about something else. You don't want to get a book labeled sociology if you hope to sell any copies. So I was very happy for it to be called a football book, and there's a lot of football in the thing. But what energized me about the story was this kid's journey. And it's so rare that you take a child from those circumstances at the age of 15. I mean, who is not a member of the underclass. He sort of defines the bottom of the underclass at the age of 15. There are small social distinctions within the ghetto of Memphis, Tennessee. And he's at the bottom and you vault him out of there and into rich, white, kind of upper middle class America with all the trappings and that as a social experiment, it was riveting to me. So that was the kind of. That's really at the heart of the book.

What's fascinating about the story about Michael Orr, who's obviously the main character in the book, is that he's in college today. And you wrote the book even before he goes to the NFL because there's a big emphasis on, you know, identifying left tackles because they're a very valuable commodity in the NFL. Can you share with us why you wrote the book today as opposed to later down the line when he may have gone to the NFL and we might see an extended version of how things came to play?

Because if I waited to write the book, I wouldn't have two books. There really are two books here, and I wouldn't have a sequel. And, you know, the important thing that happened, the biggest thing that happened was value was discovered in him. Now exactly what that value is going to be will be determined. Although he is now, he's now a junior at Ole Miss, he's their left tackle. He's on the Dean's list at Ole Miss, which tells you something about the Dean's list at Ole Miss, but it also tells you something about him. And he is. And he spoke. I mean, linemen typically don't go into the NFL until after their senior year. Sometimes these running backs and quarterbacks will jump. But he's projected to be a first round draft choice at the end of this season. Now, you know, Maybe he makes $100 million in the NFL and maybe he doesn't. He has been established as a valuable person and to get there was the better part of the journey. And so I didn't feel like really that necessary. The other thing is that it's funny if you wait until the, until once the. I think once he gets to be a big success in the NFL, this, this story is going to become harder and harder to tell. It would be harder to tell, not easier. It would be less plausible. People always look back and rationalize whatever happened and say, oh, it was always. It was destined to be kind of thing, and it was meant to be. And if you really just know the first Half of the story, you know, that it was not meant, you know, it was nothing meant to be. There was all kinds of serendipity in this boy's story. And in fact what attracted me to it was, was the serendipity was the idea that, look, here we have this, this kid who, who everybody now sees as a multi million dollar a year NFL player and who is not only that, but he's a highly functioning member. If he doesn't work out in the NFL, he'll have a business or he'll do something, he'll do fine in life. And when he was 15 years old, he had all, many of the same traits. He had all what's most valuable about him. And no one recognized this in him, that he was totally without value to anybody. This is what kind of gets me into the whole story in the first place, is that I just kind of thought if you got this kid wandering around who's 15 and 6 foot 6 and 350 pounds and runs like a deer and you know, he's got, he's essentially basically already kind of looks like an NFL left tackle and nobody sees any value in him, what does that say about all those other people around him who have less conspicuous talent? And I wanted, so I wanted the thing to be focused really on this early part of the journey. And I think if I waited, it would have ended up being about a star NFL player and that would have been much less interesting.

So you've written books about Wall street and large, poker, Silicon Valley, baseball and football. The people you write about within these books are be considered innovators like perhaps like Billy Bean or Iconoclast. How do you come to discover these people? Or how do you determine what to write about? Or maybe what's the next book you're going to write about?

You know, that's funny, there's no science to it. And I can't tell you how many people who think of themselves as innovators in one way or another get in touch and want me to write a book about them. I mean, I spent part of yesterday with a billionaire who should have much better things to do with his time than to try, tried to talk me into writing his memoir, basically. And he said I invented private equity. Well, that's great. Good for you. You have a billion dollars. But I don't find anything particularly interesting about him. And what typically happens, and now I know I'm repeating myself and I hope none of the people here were in Mountain View because they asked me that same question and so the answer hasn't changed in a week. What typically happens is there's a lot of little. I have a lot of R and D projects in the form of magazine pieces or even screenplays where I kind of go out and I'm learning about things, about some little thing that interests me. And it mushrooms. It mushrooms on me while I'm learning about it. And it becomes richer and more complex and layered. And I can see that it's wasted in a magazine piece. And when I have the nerve to call up the editor and say, it's basically the magazine editor and say basically it's too good for you, that's when I know that it's a book. And that's happened. It's happened four times where I did it just as a book and didn't proceed it by dumping things into magazines first. And in this case, it was a very odd combination of events that occurred. I was kind of wandering around NFL front offices because Moneyball had gotten me introduced to other pro sports. When Moneyball, which is about how the Oakland A's won lots of games on a low budget and how they did it, was the way was by finding inefficiencies in the market for baseball players. When Moneyball came out, I was a pariah in professional baseball. To the extent anybody understood that I had written the book that people thought they were kind of hostile to me and I was not welcome in front offices. But interestingly, virtually every other professional sport, I mean, I can't think of one that didn't kind of get in touch one way or the other. And the NFL people were obsessed with it and they said, you know, maybe we can apply some of this. So it got me into these front offices and I started giving me a chance to ask people questions who could actually give me interesting answers. And the first question I had for them was, you have obviously a different problem. You are unlike the baseball teams where they're rich teams and poor teams, you all have exactly the same, basically, exactly the same amount of money to spend on players. So your question is, how do you allocate that over those 40 guys on your roster and quickly found out that there was this very odd fact, and that was that the left tackle on the offensive line, who nobody knew was obscure, was not asked to do endorsements, was never carried the ball, was never on tv, really, that that person had gone from being the least, the lowest paid to the second highest paid player on the field since free agency. So there were market forces at work to raise the value of this position. And I want to know what that was. And so I started to think I was going to write maybe something for Sports Illustrated about this, got into it and found that you could kind of unravel the modern history of the game, of the strategic history of the game through this one position. And it seemed a little too good for a magazine, but not quite good, big enough for a book. And I had it in the back of my mind when I stumbled upon Michael Oher. And that was totally accidental. I was writing a magazine piece about my high school baseball coach. I was in Memphis giving a speech and I thought, I'm in Memphis giving a speech. And the guy who was closest to my high school baseball coach lives here. And I hadn't seen him since high school. And it was Sean Tuohy. Sean Tuohy is the white father who adopts. Michael Orr went over to see sean in his McMansion outside of Memphis. He was a poor boy, kind of made himself good. Made good. And in his living room was this enormous black kid who didn't say a word when you talked to him. And what was that kind of thing? What's he doing here? And Sean said, well, my wife is taking an interest in him and he's sleeping on our sofa and she's talking about wanting to adopt him. And don't tell me, don't ask me why this is happening, but it's happening. So I started to follow it. And three or four months later, Sean calls up and says Michael has been identified as a future NFL left tackle. And the two things, it was a who put chocolate in my peanut butter? Moment. It was these two things came together and it seemed to me that they fit. And there was a book there.

Football or baseball?

Would I prefer. Yeah, as a game or to write about.

Game and write about.

If I, you know, baseball is very dear to my heart. I played, I never played really football beyond 100 pound football. I didn't. I never understood how anybody enjoyed getting hit. It was, I remember I was a quarterback on the 100 pound team and the first time I got hit, I thought, this is just not my sport. But baseball, I love to play, but my feelings are polluted a little bit by actual direct contact with the people who play the game. Both games and the football players are much greater delight to deal with, to interact with. The baseball players are very chippy. When you walk in a baseball clubhouse, it's a very uncomfortable and kind of unhappy place. I think it's because there's an awful lot of status issues in A baseball clubhouse, and people aren't quite sure what the pecking order is sometimes. And it is also true that.

The.

Baseball players aren't as bright as the. They really aren't. I mean, they. It is. It is true that you can't be too stupid to play baseball and. Or for that matter, run a baseball team. And it's a. I mean, if you think about the sport, it's a sport that typically is taking kids right out of high school who did so. They didn't even brush up against a college. And the sport itself is very simple. It's a very simple game to play, whereas football, they've all usually marinated in some sort of college program for a few years, so they've at least been around books and things. But it's also a really complicated sport. You can be too stupid to play football, and it's actually pretty easy to be too stupid to play football. And so this, combined with the fact that everybody. There's a sense for the football players, they're much more comfortable in their own skins, make football players just a delight to deal with compared to baseball players. Baseball players, very unpleasant experience, generally interviewing baseball players. But football players, when you're in their locker room, oddly, you think it would be the opposite. There's no intimidation. It's much easier to have an open conversation with them. And the game, being more complex in some ways, is more interesting to watch. And the more I've learned about it, the more I've enjoyed it. So he's kind of said, I think if you said to me I had to watch one game, would it be a football game or a baseball game? It would be a football game. But if you had to say, if you said to me you had to eliminate from this earth one of the two sports, I'd probably eliminate football.

So before we open up to the floor, there's a question that's always asked of every author that comes to authorsoogle is what advice would you give to aspiring writers? And we have many here.

Don't do it. I mean, seriously. Actually, I think that. If you're determined, a lot of people think they want to write and they actually don't want to write. They want to have written and they want to be a writer.

And they.

Want to publish a book. And an awful lot of books that get published are published because someone wanted to publish a book, and that's a bad reason. I mean, a lot of people come to me and ask me this question, and a lot of times they actually don't want to sit down and write. That's the last thing they want to do. They want to talk about being a writer. They want to complain about how they're blocked. They want to whatever it is. So figure out whether you're actually gonna do this first. Are you just phony about it? It's just something that like I'm gonna learn Spanish right now, but I've actually taken. I was been learning Spanish for the last year and I've done one hour of my audio course in a year. So do I really want to learn Spanish? I don't really know. But if you are someone who's actually gonna do it, do it. Sit butt in the chair. Write first. Don't figure out who you need to know to write. Don't figure out the best way to kind of wire the system. Write. Write what you want to write. If it is interesting, I promise you, you'll have no trouble publishing. I mean, at the very least you put on the web. But you'll have no. There's a dearth of interesting things. And it says start small. Don't sit down to write a book because that could be an agonizing and miserable experience if you're actually not equipped to do it. The market actually give you some sense of whether you have any business doing this. Start small. Magazine pieces, little pieces of fiction. Send them to magazines. That's how I started is very naively. I mean, I wouldn't be as naive about it quite as I was. I started when I got out of college. I graduated from Princeton with a degree in art history. Had no idea what I wanted. Thought I wanted to be an art historian. But my thesis advisor said that young man, you're never going to be an art historian. So I was stuck. I didn't have anything to do. And I really loved to write. And so I just started writing what I thought were interesting magazine pieces and shipping them out cold. And there's a book called the Writer's Handbook. It's not a handbook. It's more like a leg book. It's about that thick and it's got a list in it of every magazine in the country and the names of the editors and so on and so forth. And I was naive enough to think that working two weeks in the Bowery Mission, ladling soup for homeless people and writing it up as this about this moving story about working with the poor would be of great appeal to in flight magazines. And so I sent them out to all the in flight magazines and that didn't work. But I did get but people do read this stuff. I mean, even my early crap, people read it. And I get a letter back from the Delta in Flight editor saying, look, we're not going to be running homeless people in the Delta in Flight magazine, but you might have some ability here, keep trying kind of thing. You get that kind of feedback. And I sent out cold probably seven or eight these sorts of things that didn't find their way into print. And then finally it happened. For me, it happened actually. The Economist. There are lots of little points of entry into the writing business, but the Economist in the science and technology pages still has. Every year there's a little box they put an ad in. They say, if you're interested in working for us, in getting a year long internship with us, submit a piece that's 600 words long and you enter this competition. And I had been living in England, I was then in graduate school and noticed that the British medical health care system was, you know, generations behind the American one in terms of kind of this technology. So I just, next time home, I went into a hospital and said, what's the newest gizmo? Found the newest gizmo, knew they never would have heard it or even imagined such a thing could exist in England and wrote about it for the Economist. And I got a call and they said, come on in, you're on a short list of 3 people for this job. And I had not a word in print at that point. And I show up for the interview and the other two people have both published books and they're physicists at Oxford. And the guy I still remember, the editor at the Economist, said, look, you're a fraud. He asked me what my science background was and I took physics for Poets at Princeton to get through. And I'd flunked it and I took it pass fail and I dodged one too many labs and I flunked it. And he said, you're a fraud, but it's kind of impressive that you even got this far. He said, we're going to publish the piece and just keep freelancing for us whatever section you want. And so I published a dozen pieces and then I had a little stack. And this is how you build it. It builds. And then I would send it off to editors. Look at my little stack. And my name's not on it because it's in the comics, but trust me, I wrote it. And Michael Kinsley, who was then the editor of the New Republic, published the first piece I wrote with my byline. And I did four or five of those and before long, I was getting calls from book editors saying, you should write a book. So there's a demand pull. You just gotta force the words out.

All right, thank you. We're gonna open it up to the floor. So there are mics in the aisles and if you have any questions, please go to the mic and ask away. So what I really wanted to ask was if you think the jets left tackle debrikashaw Ferguson is gonna be a bust or not.

This is interesting because debrykashaw Ferguson, great name. He was named for the character in the Thornbirds. His parents had read the Thornbirds when he was. But De Berkishaw Ferguson is an odd duck to be playing left tackle because he was a. The jets took him in the first round last year and I actually got to know him a bit. I thought he was going to be part of the Blind side. Then I kind of forgot about him. I decided he didn't fit in the book. And he was coming out of college supposed to be God's gift to the left tackle position. And the problem with him was that his natural weight was about 260 pounds and he didn't. And when they bulked him up, he got slower. So he's a really smart, interesting guy. He's kind of a student of the position. I've not seen the jets games this year, but I understand he's been overwhelmed, that the hostility coming from the other direction is too much for him to deal with. And the quarterbacks have been getting hit and all the rest of the. So I haven't seen it. And I haven't actually talked to any of the jets coaches, so I don't know what they're thinking. However, I remember thinking when I was talking to his agent, there's a reason why the ones who are really good are 320 pounds. Almost naturally that they're that big. And he isn't actually the prototype for the position. And so he may just be physically overmatched. And if he is, God help the quarterback. Jabrisha will be fine. The quarterback's all gonna be dead.

So. I was just kidding. I had a real question.

That was a real question. That was just not a Google. It was not a Google standard question. Is that right? I found it's not a sports book, so I shouldn't ask a sports question. This is more about Moneyball.

Do you think that.

How do you think front offices are as far as. Do you think they're going to start moving to more analytic methods in general? They moved so far since I started working since I wrote the book, they were moving. A couple of them were moving already while I was working on the book, while I was working on Moneyball, I spent time with other front offices, but the A's and the new owners of the Boston Red Sox at the time, John Henry took me out to lunch when I was interviewing his people and asked me not to publish it because he said, this is our advantage against the Yankees. We're not going to have as much money as the Yankees, but we are going to use. We're going to use exactly the same methods that Oakland does with more money. Don't blow it for us by making the market efficient because the market is really screwed up. You're right, the market screwed up. Yes. It's a great story. Please don't write the book. And so there were already a couple of front offices moving in that direction when I wrote the book. And since then there's been this tsunami of essentially nerds entering the profession. And the new, obviously the new model, new GM is not an ex baseball guy. It's someone who's very comfortable with quantitative analysis and who's about 28 years old. It's a change very similar to this change that happened on Wall street. When I was on Wall street, this intellectualization of the business. And as evidence of the change, there were a pair of economists who did a study of. And they published it, I think the Journal of Econometrics. It's not something I normally read, but someone sent it to me and measuring what had happened to the value, the price of on base percentage, just that quality in a baseball player. Since Moneyball was published, Moneyball made a big deal about how important it was. And the A's had made a big deal about it because it was the. It was the biggest inefficiency in the market for them to exploit that it was undervalued. And the article showed that indeed it had been undervalued before Moneyball was published. And since the book, it had actually gone and become overpriced. So everybody, the game has changed. And that's a problem for poor teams because if there are no inefficiencies to exploit, the rich will win. I think, well, that's good if you're a Yankee fan. It's good if you're. Oh. If you're a Yankee fan, it's perfect. What I understand about Yankee fans is they behave. They behave as if they're always so aggrieved too, and you can't figure out what the hell they're aggrieved about. They're the ones who are. They're the ones who are victimizing everybody. But what I don't understand about the Yankee fans is I think they think they'd be happy if they won every game. Every game. And if they could just buy it and buy it, too. They buy it, have the best players win all 162 games, sweep everybody in the playoffs every year, and that would make them happy. And the team has run a bit that way, this kind of. And if that happened, it would get so dull so quickly, I would think, for an ordinary person, but perhaps not for Yeti fan. But anyway, I digress. I wanted to go. Thanks. I wanted to go back a few years and actually hear more about your Wall street experience that led you to write Liar's Poker. It's a book that I loved, and.

I'd love to get the backstory to.

It and how you met these characters and kind of got into their world. Well, I worked. Obviously, I worked. I worked with him. And this is extending my biography here, but all right, art history. Didn't have a job, didn't know what I wanted to do. I went and did a master's. I decided I was kind of infuriated when I got out of college. And I realized that everybody didn't want to hire me. And I didn't really see anything I actually wanted to do. But I decided that the world was a conspiracy of people who understood kind of economic stuff in the language and the speaking. That was mostly bullshit. But I wasn't be buffaloed by this. So I was going to get a master's in economics, so no one could talk to me that way anymore. And so I went and got my master's in economics at the London School of Economics. They had a special program for people like me. In a lot of ways, it was for special people who came to school on a little bus, you know, and they. Anyway, so I got hired flukishly out of that program to work at Solomon Brothers. And by this time, I had my little literary career up and running. And it presented a problem, actually, because I wanted to keep writing, but I didn't see I could make a living at this point. I hadn't written the six pieces in the New Republic. I wasn't getting book offers yet, but I was able to publish in several magazines. And so I kept writing while I was there. And I had for the first year there. I mean, I go home at night and write nights, write weekends, and I'd do it under My own name. And a crisis ensued because about a year into the job, I wrote an op ed on the Wall Street Journal's op ed page. And it was about half the page. It was huge. And I could see why they played it big. I was actually a little naive about this, but I wrote a piece basically saying investment bankers are grotesquely overpaid. And at the Bott. Michael Lewis is an associate with Solomon Brothers in London. And I got to work and I just thought, great, I'm in the Wall Street Journal. And this hit the New York office like a train. And the next day, after it had been published, I showed up at my desk in London and the head of the all Salomon Brothers International was waiting for me. And he said. And he had circles under his eyes. He said, we've been on this meeting with a board of directors about your piece for the last hour. And John, good friend, the head of Salomon Brothers, is furious. And the PR guy. And great was that they syndicated it. So it kept coming out. Indonesia, languages. It was all over the place. And every little paper in America carried it. Michael Lewis is an associate salman president. And it was a public relations disaster. And I hadn't even thought about it. And so he says, but by this time, I was making a lot of money for Solomon Brothers. I lucked into this customer who basically said, I'll only do business with you. And he quickly became the second biggest customer of all Solomon Brothers, the whole company. And he refused to speak to anybody but me. And this was because he basically hated investment bankers. And he was kind of playing a joke. I'm going to pick this little pipsqueak and I'm going to make him a king kind of thing. And so I had. I just knew they weren't going to fire me. They just fired me if they were going to fire. But I knew it was going to be a complicated conversation. And so he says, michael, this really tears me up. This is really awful. We can't let this happen again. What can we do? And I said, well, I'm not going to stop writing. I'll quit before I start writing. And he said, what? You don't have to stop writing. He said, but what if you used to different name? And I said, that's all right. I'll start using a different name. And in fact, the first book contract I got offered was offered to Diana Bleeker. And that's my mother's maiden name. And I wrote under Diana Bleecker. And I wrote the most hostile things about investment bankers. Dinah Bleecker. And they would circulate on the trading floor around me in London. You see this piece. And I'd be watching it, nobody would connect it because. And the idea was that it was such a chauvinistic environment. No one would imagine that a woman was a man. But it became clear that Diana Bleecker could make a real living. And so when that became clear, actually it was interesting, the inciting incident when I left the front, when I knew I was basically going to hand in my resignation. Chevy Chase, the actor. Chevy Chase, his father. His name is Ned Chase.

And.

And he was an editor at Simon and Schuster. And he found out Diana Bleecker was me. Somehow I got my phone number in London, and he's the one who first called and said, you got to write a book. And I said, really? A book? And the.

Such as.

I mean, you were all about the age I was when I did. I was 27 when I quit and wrote the book, or 26 when I left. The last paycheck was about a quarter million bucks. And it was pretty clear it would have been double or even triple the next year. It was just. Money was big. My contract from W.W. norton was $40,000. And I thought, this is incredibly great. I was leaving it. This is just fantastic. And I could. There's no way on earth I could do that now. But it was so easy to do because I was so clear in my head that this is what I should be doing. But it was. I didn't pause out the door. I mean, I was out the door in a flash, even though the money was like that. And that contract was for Liars Poker. That was live poker. Yeah. That's great.

Thank you.

Ended up making much more money from Liars Poker than I ever would from songs. But anyway, that ruins the story. So, Michael, thank you again for coming. Huge fan. Moneyball was all about using data to analyze players. And I've been a huge fantasy nerd for many years. My apologies if those in the audience don't share that, but I was just curious to know what your thoughts were on fantasy sports in general. You know, using data to analyze players simulated. And perhaps its effect on major sports, especially football, which is. Clearly, you can't watch a football program without seeing some kind of fantasy element to it. I don't have any interest in fantasy sports. And I think the reason is that most of these leagues are. I mean, they create artificial goals. So, you know, in baseball, I mean, in baseball, your team does. Well, if your players have lots of rbi. And that's not a. That's a circumstantial stat. So the leagues aren't getting the fantasy game. Generally, there are some exceptions. Isn't getting to what's to measuring. It isn't about measuring what's actually valuable in a player. It's what's valuable given the rules of the fantasy league. So that's not that interesting to me. The exception is things like pro trade. If you go into pro trade, they are in the business of trying to create a fantasy game that exactly simulates the actual game so that if your player does well, it would have turned into a real victory on a football field. And they're coupling the fantasy league with all this basic research into what is valuable about players in sports. And it's so sophisticated that they're hired by NBA and NFL and Major League Baseball teams because they want the. They want this research that interests me, but generally I've never taken an interest in. Falls into this category that I feel like really intelligent people sometimes get siphoned off mistakenly into along with crossword puzzles. And, I mean, it's just Sudoku, whatever that. It's okay, but it doesn't interest me that much.

So, first of all, in defense of Yankee fans, you have to give Steinbrenner credit for building a team where there are such expectations to succeed. Whether or not it's good or bad in terms of, you know, players getting that stress and whatever is another interesting question entirely. But my main question, I don't have.

To give him credit, but thank you. You've given him credit. Okay, okay. But back. Go ahead.

But back to Moneyball. I mean, there's a lot of fascinating things about the book. And, you know, thank you for writing it. One of the things I found kind of most fascinating is reading about these players and of course, seeing them grow up on the field at the same time, you know, the Jeremy Browns, the Nick Swishers in particular, and so on and so forth. Seeing Chad Bradford now traded beyond many more teams and stuff like that, I guess your interactions with Joe Morgan have been kind of famous. So that discussion has been there. But one of the things I was curious about was, have you heard back from some of the characters, some of the other players in the book? And, you know, how has the book affected their lives? Like, does Nick Swisher get pulled into interviews and, like, compared to his profile on Moneyball or this or that or whatever? And that was one of the things constantly.

The ones who I'm still in touch with gotta be friends with Scott Hatterberg, the first on the Reds, and everywhere he goes, he's gone for the last four years. People want to talk to him about his chapter in the book. And Bradford Hatterberg is actually funny because Hatterberg is really. He's an interesting person and an intelligent person, and. He was the only one, I think, who completely got what I was up to, front office or in the clubhouse. So he's a little bit of an exception. Bradford is more typical in that he freely admitted that he only read the eight or nine pages that he was on, and he did such. It was so charming because it didn't occur to him that he should have done otherwise, that it wasn't like, oh, I'm sorry, I only read the parts about me. It was. I read the parts about me. As if he should get a prize for having even done that. And he's a delight, but a simpler character. And so I don't think. I think that it took. People take different levels of effort to get to. Hatterberg was like turning on the spigot and getting a drink. I mean, he was just easy. Bradford was like trying to get a drink out of a cactus. I had to spend a lot of time with him just to. Just to get his kind of story out of him. It's a riveting story. I mean, I forget what I write, but I do remember. I mean, here's this guy.

Who is.

One of the crappiest athletes in his high school class in Byron, Mississippi, who gets pulled because he has to fulfill the athletic requirement onto the baseball team is useless because he's not an athlete who gets shown how to throw in a way that, as a pitcher, how to deceive the hitters to throw. Kind of throw a sidearm instead of over the top. And it works. And at each level, in order to ascend, he finds that, well, that doesn't work when he goes from high school to college. So he goes a little bit lower and a little bit lower until he gets to the Triple A when his knuckles are scraping on the ground and he throws. And he has this incredible one gift. He can throw underhand at 89 miles an hour, and it goes kind of where it wants it to go. And it is so weird for a major league hitter that it. It completely works. All right, so this happens to this person. He doesn't even. Until it's teased out of him, he himself does not see, oh, that's why I went down. It was kind of this Darwinian thing. But then, oh, yeah, that is what happened? And then I have to actually go to his house. I go spend three or four days with him in Byram, Mississippi, in the off season, and I find his father in a wheelchair. And Chess says, oh, yeah, he had this accident when I was little, and he couldn't. He was partly paralyzed. And so when I was a little boy, when we played catch, he couldn't throw overhand. He threw underhand. And he said. And so we would go back and forth like that. And you say, oh, my God, that's why. Did it ever occur to you that this is why you can do anything you do? And. Oh, wow. Yeah, I never thought of it that way. You know, so he's not. When he roams, yes, he gets feedback, but he doesn't ever give anything back, so he never goes anywhere. Swisher revels in it. Swisher is just made. You know, it's like there's no amount of attention that's too much. And the book is just part of this grand celebration of Nick Swisher. When I sold Moneyball to the publisher, I sold it not as one book. I sold it as two books. I said, I think I have not just a book here. I have two books. And one of them is what happens to these kids that they drafted much later down the line when we know what happened to their careers. And so I've been working on that, and I spent time with Nick Swisher, a lot of time with Nick Swisher, to work on that book. And I remember two spring trainings ago, I sat down with him. He just arrived in Phoenix, and I just arrived in Phoenix. We met in a bar, and I sat down and I said, you know, swish, first I thought you were kind of probably not a huge character in the second book, but I'm now going to think you might be right at the center of this book. He looks at me and says, no shit, Mike? It took you that long to figure out that I'm your subject? You know, so he's just. I mean, this constant. It's for better or worse. A lot of these guys find themselves defined by the book. Swisher, not so much because he's now kind of a big league, legitimate kind of star almost. But so, yeah, it's in their lives.

I will just add a footnote that as an engineer here, I can truly appreciate the cerebral approach Hatterberg takes, and the exchange between him and Moyer was one of the great points in the book, in my opinion.

I agree. It was a great story. Great story. Thank you sure?

So a couple of weeks ago. A few weeks ago, you actually wrote what I think might be the final chapter on the subprime market. And I wondered if you could share something.

And I wondered if you could just.

Share some of your thoughts from that commentary that you.

Well, this was. This was a piece of satire. I wrote two columns. I wrote a column occasionally for Bloomberg News, and I just got irritated by this. I got irritated by the absence of a voice I knew was there that I wanted to hear from. And it was the voice of the Wall street trader himself, who had lost a bunch of money from the subprime portfolio. His subprime portfolio collapsed. I pretended to be a Wall street hedge fund manager who had lost all this money, who was now going to deduce the lessons he learned from this business collapse. And I wrote it in the voice of this character and tried to imagine what his outrageous views might be. And I first started by saying that obviously the problem here is you don't lend money to poor people. And then I said that now I've had this exposure to poor people. I've learned all these things about poor people. And I explained all the things I learned about poor people, and none of them were very flattering. And then I said that there's gotta be how come these people aren't working harder to pay me back kind of thing. And I said, and I think that probably debtors prison is a little retro and we shouldn't have that, but maybe all these people could be gathered up and shipped to Greenwich, Connecticut to work on the sports cars and the front lawns of the hedge fund managers who lost all this money. And at this point, the satirical piece works. Satire only works if you're not sure it's satire, if it's kind of sitting on that knife edge. But at some point, you clue in the reader at the end that actually the author may not completely believe everything he's writing. And I thought I'd done it because when it got about two thirds in the piece, I said, you know, actually, a lot of these poor people probably don't have skills. So the ones who don't have skills, we could dress them up as clowns and have them work at rich kids birthday parties, and they could have this act where they could see how many clowns could fit into my Lamborghini kind of thing, and it would be like a circus, only better. And I just thought, well, at this point, everybody's going, oh, he's just making fun of Wall street people. He's not, you Know. And no, that's not what happened. You know, you are. One of the things writers learn, is that the piece that you spent 45 minutes writing ends up being the piece that defined you for the rest of your life. You work for years on a book and nobody pays attention, and you dash this thing off and you think it's kind of funny. And everybody. Something happens. And in this. What happened was an awful lot of people took this thing seriously. And most disturbingly, many of the people who took it seriously approved of it. And so I had two. I was just. There was this wave of email come in to me, and half of it says, you scum. You Wall street pawn scum. You're the reason that everything's wrong. Everything is wrong with America. You should be lynched from the highest lamp. They believed I was a hedge fund trader, and they hated me for it. The other half said, you got to run for president, dude. I mean, nobody's saying this stuff out here now. Someone, yeah. Dress up them up as clowns, you know, and so I thought, oh, my God, that. Actually, I wasn't quite sure who I was making fun of in the first one. I thought I was kind of making fun of the hedge fund trader who's sort of suffering in his miasma of bad bonds. But I thought, no, I'm going to write a second one. And it's making fun of the people who don't get that the first one is a joke. I'm going to blow it up. It's going to be even more preposterous. So I wrote a second, and the second one was, this hedge fund manager comes back. He says, see how happy he is by the response to this first piece he's written? So he's going to take some time away from his busy life to write yet another piece of journalism. And he says this time he's going to address the important subject of taxing the rich and this business of raising taxes so unjustifiably on hedge fund managers and private equity people. And it suggests. It starts by suggesting that the problem here is, from my experience in Washington lobbying senators, is democracy itself. That the problem is one man, one vote, that rich people should actually have a lot more votes than poor people. And if that happened, then the whole place would work better. And it gets more and more preposterous now. Everybody will get it. Everybody will get. This wasn't serious. No, it's gotten bigger and bigger. And I've retired this character because I figured there's nothing I can say that will Persuade people that what I was writing was satirical. So I'm just gonna leave it be. And it's a little scary what's out there, let me tell you. But anyway, I'll let it go.

I see that Tom Wolfe has followed your lead and started writing about sports. And in my name is Charlotte Simmons.

I don't think Tom Wolf. If anything, the situation is reversed. I think he wrote. I'm trying to think, when he published that, did that not precede Moneyball?

It followed it. But he sometimes takes a long time to write, so he may have started earlier, but I was wondering if you consider yourself a exponent of his, what he calls the new journalism.

Yes. I mean, he's been a huge influence on me. When I was a little kid, I read all his books and I thought, these things are wonderful. I don't know if you've ever read Radical Chic or Mao. Maoing the Flat Catchers. The Right Stuff is a masterpiece. And yes, essentially bringing novelistic techniques to nonfiction. I mean, he's had a huge effect. More than that, he's become. I mean, he's really. He's been very sweet to me in my career. When Liar's Poker came out, he got in touch. And I've had a kind of a conversation with him ever since. In fact, before I wrote the Blind side, I was really agonizing about. About how to do it and whether to do it. And I happened to give the Tom Wolf lecture at Washington Lee, for which he shows up every year, and I had to drive him back to the airport. And it was a four or five hour conversation with him on the way back. We ended up lost in West Virginia or something. He persuaded me that this was worth doing. He's a genius, I think. I mean, he's one of a kind and he picks some. I mean, every now and then I think he's a little off his rocker in the fights he picks and the arguments he makes. But as a. I mean, it's just. I don't think there's ever been a better writer of narrative nonfiction. The novels I quite like a lot, but I can understand people who have complaints about them, too. The novels are a little more problematic, I think, than the nonfiction, but the nonfiction is just absolutely masterful. Thank you.

One last question. Based on the fact that men like Schwarzman are coming to you to maybe write novel or write memoirs and, well, people in private equity, and.

He's right. Steve Schwarzman is.

No, no, no, no. I said men like him. People are coming to you.

That's a horrifying thought.

Just the kind of attention in that field and then the fact that you're writing satire on Bloomsburg and getting all the attention. Two questions. One, how connected are you to that story of Liars Poker in its present day form? And then two, if you are connected to it still and are following it and those characters and people like them, what differences among the newer generation of Masters of the Universe and bsds do you find most interesting?

That world has changed so much. And the. I'm not that connected to Wall Street. I mean, I have. I still have friends from when I was at Solomon Brothers, believe it or not, who I stay in touch with. But so I hear, you know, and I've got a Bloomberg machine and I get people email me stuff all the time. So I'm connected, I guess, that way. But as a, as a place to set a story, it's much less appealing. It's become so much more corporate and so much more kind of buttoned down and frightened and more narrowly just about the money. Everything has been shed except for the financial ambition. And so there's much less color and honesty. Much less honesty too. So generally I don't have much literary interest in Wall Street. However, having said that, I just wrote a big piece. There are markets that really interest me. I just wrote a big piece about catastrophe bonds in the New York Times. And it's interesting to me how risk gets priced and distributed. And so I'm interested that way. But the characters don't interest me as much anymore. And the specific characters in Liars Poker mostly are gone. I mean, they mostly aren't on Wall street anymore or if they are, in very peripheral kind of jobs. So there's no sequel to. Right. I mean, it kind of was what it was. I was saying earlier, I'm surprised the book still gets read because it's so different now than it was then. I think it gets read as a kind of nostalgia piece, or at least our fantasy piece that people want, who are going to work on Wall street, kind of hope it's as exciting as this. And they quickly find out it's not. So the book is kind of, you know, it's fantasy. It enables them to romanticize what they. What they do.

All right, well, thank you, Michael.

Thank you very much.