Morning Brew Daily - Author Michael Lewis on 10 Years of “The Big Short," AI Bubble, and Sports Gambling

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Episode 711: Neal and Toby chat with author Michael Lewis to talk about the 10th anniversary of “The Big Short” movie and the lines drawn from the 2008 financial crisis to today. Then, Michael shares his take on the AI industry and whether or not we’re actually in a bubble. Plus, a dive into prediction markets and the proliferation of sports betting. Finally, Neal and Toby put on their casting director hats and re-cast “The Big Short” as if it was being made today. Learn more at usbank.com/splitcard  Get your MBD live show tickets here! https://www.tinyurl.com/MBD-HOLIDAY  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brewAI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today Michael Lewis revisits the big short 10 years later. What did he really think of the movie? Would he recast anyone?

All that and more. It's Tuesday, November 11th. Let's ride. Good morning on Veterans Day. Like many of you, we are off for the federal holiday, but this podcast never sleeps in. You were about to hear a fascinating interview with one of the leading storytellers of our time. The author Michael Lewis has written

more books that become movies than most authors have written books. He coined the term moneyball and protected the blindside. But when Michael joined us in the studio recently, the conversation topic was about his third book adapted into a film, The Big Short. This winter marks the 10th anniversary of the big short movie starring Ryan Gosling, Christian Bailey, and Steve Carell as the traders who saw the financial crisis coming before it happened and got really rich from Shorty and the housing market. We also talked sports betting. He's got strong thoughts on that. How he comes up with his titles and gave him some thoughts on how we'd recast the big short. Spoiler alert, we're getting Jack Black involved. Such a fun combo and cannot wait for you all to hear. But first, a word from

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Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Further ado, here's Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis, thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure already. All right, so many people listening to the show don't remember 2008. Heck, Toby over here just learned how to walk. So as you revisit the book and the movie now in 2025,

Can you describe to people who may not have experienced the financial crisis firsthand, how it's impacting their lives today? All right. So you've first got to know a little bit about what happened very broadly, the big Wall Street banks, which were at the time exciting places to work. You know, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and all the rest were like thought to be the smart places in the financial world. and these places made hundreds of billions of dollars of really stupid bets. You can think of the world back then

as having organized itself around a bet. And the bet was on subprime mortgage bonds, which was in turn a bet on what was going to happen to house prices. And the Wall Street firms were all, almost all, really heavily on the wrong side of the bet. They owned a lot of this stuff.

And not only because they had lent they had bought the actual loans, they used derivatives to replicate the absolute worst of them. So it's like the stupidest loans. In theory, replicate them infinitely. And so not only did we have like hundreds of billions of really dumb loans, but you had possibly infinite number of similarly stupid bets all kind of concentrated in the heart of the financial system. On the other side of this were a handful of smart people who took the other side of the bets. And my book, The Big Short, tells the story of the financial crisis through the eyes of the people who were on the right side of the bet.

All right, the market wakes up to how bad these loans are. The banks all basically would have failed. Even the ones that didn't go all in on it where they were so tied to the other banks. The whole financial system was going down, like bankrupt. If it happened in 1929 before the Federal Reserve grew up it would have been just depression. It would have been 35% unemployment.

It would have been, it would have been cataclysmic. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government steps in and guarantees, basically, I mean, this is crude, think of it as they guarantee all the loans. They say, we're going to make everybody a whole. We're going to take these off. Banks will take some haircuts, but we're going to take all these loans off your balance sheets,

and we're going to make all the banks stable and it calms it all down. The effect of this is to infuriate both the left-wing, and the right wing. So this is where we're getting to why you need to know about now. You can draw a direct line from that event to Donald Trump. You can draw a direct line from that event to AOC. If you've heard of Steve Bannon or Elizabeth Warren, their careers were actually created by this event, their political careers, on either side of the political spectrum. But what happens is one side becomes the Tea Party is infuriated that the government

has walked in to save these Wall Street jerks from the mistakes they made. And it's a populist. Both sides are populist movements. But the correct idea they had is that, like, well, we in America live by capitalism, and we all suffer when we make stupid business decisions. How come the richest people who went to the best schools who made the most stupid decisions? Why do their banks get propped up and they still get bonuses? This pissed off people just enormously and rightly so.

And that anger was never slaked. Anger that anger is, you see American political life now, and you kind of wonder, why is everybody so angry? They say they're angry at different things. It starts there. So why wasn't your book angry? Because I was listening to a conversation with you and Adam McKay, the director of the big short movie. You told him that the movie was angrier than the book. Why wasn't your book angry? And was that on purpose? So that's a really good question. And it was, and when I saw, when I watched what Adam did with the movie, quick answer is the movie is five years after the book the book comes out in 2010 i had not fully digested what had happened i didn't know that no one was going to go to jail so that's one thing um but that's a cheap answer because i think the deeper truth is that adam's just capable of moral moral outrage than i am he just has it in him and i just don't and like i have a hard time getting

outraged. I'm more amused as a wrong word. But I was, I was just delightfully interested in the human folly. I thought it was kind of funny that all the Wall Street firms were stupid. And I thought, and I was so interested in the, and I was focused on these characters who had done the, basically the smart thing. And there was, I did think, this is, this is, I, it wasn't outrage, but I did leave, I think best books, I find, when I try to write my books, you sort of leave room for the reader to decide how they feel about it. So if you're bringing a lot of outrage, bring it thunder to it, you don't give them any choice. It's like, oh, you've got to feel this way. It screws up the story. It just, it's bad writing. But in this case, in particular, I had this

thing that I wanted the reader to feel uncomfortable with and have them figure out where they were going to go with this discomfort. And the thing was, the heroes, so in quotes, the protagonist of this book who would, you would naturally be lionizing because, oh, wow, they're so smart. They figured out what was wrong and they made a killing. They made a killing on the collapse of the society. How do you feel about that? And I wanted to, if I'm throwing around a lot of outrage, you're not leaving the reader the room to jump one way or the other. That's the most disorienting thing about all this. I was just watching the movie yesterday. And the fact that these guys, As you build to the climax, the fact that these guys know they're standing to make an insane amount of money as the world economy collapses at the same time, you don't really know exactly how to feel about that.

You don't know how to feel about it. And what complicates it even further is all of the characters as they get into the big short. As they get into this, oh my God. First, I think I'm making a kind of interesting trade against Wall Street. This looks like a good bet. They're giving me 25. to one odds that nothing bad is going to happen here. And they dig in and you realize this is not just a good bet. It's a great bet. Wait, wait, this is almost a sure thing. I'm getting 25 to one odds for it's going to happen. And that starts to feel criminal. Like this is, there's some sort of criminal. And they start to realize that all the people on the other side of the bet, the people whose institutions are going to lose money and those losses are going to be possibly foisted upon the taxpayer, the individuals have all made a fortune generating these crappy loans. And And it starts to look really sinister.

And all the people on the right side of the bat went to various, it was either law enforcement or media. They tried to, or they went to Washington, they went to the FBI, they went to the Wall Street Journal, and tried to like, look at this. Like, this is a problem. And all of them thought, in fact, when I was approaching them to write about them, their trepidation was, if my name is in your book, I might get lynched because this society might be going down.

And the fact that the government came in and calmed it all down and it wasn't a depression, it was a recession. It still people were angry, but not that angry. And not angry enough to go lynch the people who met, but they were worried about that. And so the complicating factor is they themselves were kind of trying to do something about it once they figured out the real implications of the situation. I'm going to try to ground it in present day again because right now we have seen mentions of the word bubble kind of spike in the media specifically tied to AI.

Do you see any current parallels between the current AI moment that we're in right now and 2008? I mean, the big feature of the 2008 crisis was the disguising of risk. All the complexity in the financial instruments disguised with these people were doing. And so it was hide the risk. Nobody, you know, it took a while, it took some digging to see just how, sort of unstable the situation was. This is right out in the open. You know how much people are spending on AI. It feels more like the internet boom, right? Like everybody, they're saying, the world is changed. It's going to be completely new. This is transformative and everybody's

going to make a fortune off of AI. We need to pour all this money into AI. It's a bet. But it's a bet we all know they're making. And that, it feels like, I mean, my, I, who knows what's going to happen? My instinct is that like they're all they're all optimistic about the financial returns of AI and probably underselling the social disruption of AI. A lot of people are gonna lose their jobs. So more pissed off people in our country. Anger gets just goes, ratchets up in our political process.

I could see that happening. I don't think AI is gonna come kill us all. They like to say that. It's kind of funny how the AI people, they don't pause to talk about the actual really plausible social consequences of this because they can't do anything about it and we if we actually stop and thinking about it, we might hate them, they say we want to stop A.A. from killing us all. Like they go right there and it makes them feel, it makes everybody,

it kind of distracts everybody from the real problem and also makes them feel very important because they're in the middle of something that might kill us all. But when I think about what is a connection between 08 and like what might happen now, I don't think that. I think something else. And what I think is, in 08, even though the systems, the institutions we had in place, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, performed a miracle. I mean, it really said they saved us. I mean, you can be upset that nobody went to jail and be upset that they bailed out the banks, but the alternative was so bad that they saved a lot of pain. Yet, the country's takeaway was we hate those institutions.

Like, we don't trust them. We trust them less and less. The Federal Reserve's independence right now is being threatened as it's not been threatened maybe ever in its history. I don't know, you can argue, but I think that's true. The federal finances are so out of control.

I mean, seemingly, not only are we running these huge deficits, but we seem incapable of addressing them. That's the thing. It's like we just had an exercise exercise, the Doge exercise, which was the most dramatic attempt to cut the deficit that we'll ever see again, probably. And the deficits have gone up. So you've got this really unstable, the grown-ups in the room in 2008 who could stabilize a financial crisis are no longer grown-ups. And the institutions that might come in and make everything calm down are getting less and less capable of doing it. So I worry about not like, sure there's going to be a financial crisis. I'm not sure there's going to be a financial crisis. financial crisis somewhere. It happens all the time. Every 20 years or 30, it'll happen. I don't know it will trigger it or why. There are other stories but AI that out there that might lead. But it's,

it's like, what do you do when there is one? We were talking before the show how the titles of your books seem to just encapsulate exactly the idea and the moment that you were trying it to capture. So money ball, big short. If you were to write a book about our current moment, maybe it's the AI fancy. Maybe it's about no one. You want a title? I want a title from you. I want to put you on the spot. You just told me before we go on there, your mom wants you to write a book.

And now you're getting me to give you the title. I think you almost gave us one. It was like no grown-ups in the room or something like that. Something there. Oh, that's not bad. I know, yeah. That's not bad. It's from you.

How long does it take you typically to come up with a book title? It usually arises organically from the writing of the book. And it usually is agony. If you saw like the fall starts, you'd be horrified. You would be horrified. Wait, scare us a little bit. I want to hear about what was the big short before? No, Liars Poker.

The title on the book proposal was fast and loose in the golden years. It kind of sounds like a 70s. That sounds like a six. Yeah. No, it was like it was horrible. It was never going to last. And then there were, there were 74 others like that. The big short, the big short was a little different because I came into the story to Snails' Pace.

I was reluctant to get into it in the first place because I thought Wall Street, Wall Street was so pissed off about Liars Poker. I did not think they would let me back in and that I just wouldn't be able to get the story. So I went in, I stuck a toe in the water and did a magazine piece during which I figured out, I realized, oh my God, I can get this. And when I realized it was about this simple bet and it was about the people who were on the right side of the bet and the bet was a short. The big short, that phrase just popped into my mind.

And I remember thinking, I'm not going to tell the magazine about that because I want to save it for the book. It was too good of a title. And then what happened, this is creepy. After I published the book, this came out somewhere else. And roughly the, almost exactly the same time

I was working on the magazine piece, the CFO of Goldman Sachs, a guy at the time named David Veneer, wrote a memo about what was going on in the markets, and he called the trade, he said the trade here is the big short. If the big short is shorting the housing rights, so he came up with the title. It's one of my favorite titles. It's great.

And maybe this is an easier question, maybe it's a harder question. If you were the director and the big short was in development now, who would you cast? I mean, all the same actors could still do it. So Ryan Gosling as Greg Lipman, I cannot improve upon that. I just can't. I just can't even, I wouldn't, I wouldn't even know where to. start and Christian Bale as Michael Berry, I can't, I just can't do any better than that. So I would cast those two, they could still do it, and I'd cast them. I love Steve Carell's performance, but I could,

I could think of, like, what actor, you help me, what actor when you see him is fingernails on chalkboard, like is so upsetting, like irritating? Yeah. His job is to irritate. Well, we had a list. We recast this. Oh, you did? Okay. So that was, you don't, What's called? This is called Boomer Asking. You ask me a question you want me to ask you. Okay, so tell me, fellows, if you were going to cast my movie now, why don't you tell me who should play who? I agree that Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale are top tier, but we just had a little fun with it. So we're going to put, you know, for a new generation, Toby's generation. So we did Timothy Chalomey as Michael Berry. We did Glenn Powell as Jared Bennett, Ryan Gosling's character.

That's good. We're going to keep Margot Robbie. She's good. We're going Jack Black as Brad Pitt's character. Oh, yeah. We like that one. Jeremy Strong stays the same. He's perfect. He's an incredible actor. We've got to get Miles Teller in there somehow so he can be the quant or maybe

the dumb mortgage guys. And then here we go. We'll talk Mark Baum, Steve Krell. We're going to go Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler, uncut gems. He'd be great. He'd be great. He could do it.

He could do it. You're right. So that's good. Well done. If it doesn't work out for you, if it doesn't work out for you in podcasting, you're can be casting directors. We're going to take a quick break and come back with more Michael Lewis right after this. Wireless can feel like a world of traps, but not with Visible.

It's one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot. Powered by Verizon for $25 a month, taxes and fees included. Plus, for a limited time, new members pay just $20 a month for one year on the Visible plan. Using the code Fresh Start. Refresh your wireless with Visible. Tap the banner to switch today. Apply limited time offer subject to change. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. I want to talk a little bit about your process for finding out what to write about,

though. Sometimes it seems like the story just finds you. Other times, maybe you go out searching for it. How do you know what's the next rabbit hole that you want to dive down? It starts usually with just idle curiosity, like some question. I mean, with a big short, it was like, how did those firms get so stupid? I just didn't understand it. Because I had worked inside Solomon Brothers when the part of Solomon Brothers it was making its proprietary bets. And I knew that like back then, if you were on the other side of those trades, you were in trouble. They were making the smart bets. They had better information.

They were just a better position. And how that place in the firms had become stupid, that was my question. And it just led to Moneyball. I had this team that was winning games and had no money. Like just you start thinking about this as markets like a team, the teams have. If a home baseball team has five times more money than another baseball team, you would think that they'd buy all the best baseball players and just win all the time. Why wasn't that happening? Sam Beckman-Fried.

He walks into my life, and this was a really broad question. He was so bizarre, and it was so crazy what was going on. He was the richest person in the world under 30 when no one knew who he was, and it had all happened in 18 months, and presidents wanted to hang out with him, and Tom Brady wanted to be his friend, and all. all the Wall Street heads wanted to be with him, and he was just like he was the center of the universe. It was like, what the hell's going on and where is this going to end? It was like, I want to just watch this. And when it sticks, I mean, I do it with, it doesn't always work out.

I got to, I starts things and it just, I lose interest. But when it sticks, it's like that question gets me into a place where I'm seeing a character, seeing scenes, situations, seeing that the, that, let's continue with Sam Beckman-Fried. After initial astonishment and then also awareness that he was going to let me just follow him around some a lot, I started thinking like, what could I do with this character? And I realized he could take you into Jane Street. He could take you into American politics and money in politics.

He could take you into crypto. I didn't know where else. I didn't know if he could also take you into bankruptcy in prison. You didn't follow him that. But I followed them bankruptcy, though. It was like he can light up these systems. And so I'm thinking like, what can you do with this material? And is it a story?

So it's very organic and very feel your way through it. Just like what you're interested in. Yeah, and if it gets boring to me, it's going to be boring for the reader. So I'm out if it's boring. And three of your books have been adapted into movies. Moneyball, Big Short, The Blind Side. That's three more than 99.999% of nonfiction writers. So what is about the stories you tell that are so cinematic?

You know, if we were doing this interview in 2008, you might say, like, have you ever sold anything in the movies and I'd say I've sold everything to the movies and you said well how come you know how many movies made you know that it was it was not clear to me that my things I wrote were natural movie material until they started making them and it was you know decades into my career so I don't think of the things I write as particularly suited to the movies and in fact let's just take the big short I don't think anybody read that book and said oh that should be a movie. Really hard to do as a movie. I think something like this happened. I think, so the blind side, it is true, had this family drama in the middle of it, although an awful lot of football history

and strategy. And they ditched the football history and strategy, and they just took the family drama. It got made by an accident. It got all the Hollywood studios turned it down. And, well, actually, Fox had bought it for Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts didn't want to play the part. Fox dropped it. No one else wanted it. The writer-director, John Lee Hancock, went all over town. Nobody, zero people wanted it. The guy, a rich guy who lived down the street from the Tui family,

the main family in the book, Fred Smith, FedEx guy, said, he said, I don't, this is basically a direct quote. I saw that. I saw that happen. That's a really cool story. I'll pay for that to be made. I'll just do that. And so he paid, his daughter had a little production company.

He said, but he also said, I'm not paying anybody. Like Sandra Bull can do it, but she gets, she gets equity. You know, she gets, you know, when I pay it like, so they made it on a shoestring. So that thing gets made in a kind of accidental way. It is the, it's, if you Google it, it's like the biggest grossing sports movie after Rocky. It's $300 million of the box office and another $200 million after that,

and it's just a money machine. So what does that do? Oh, Michael Lewis's books. You know? So money Ball was sitting there not made. Brad Pitt really wanted to do it. All of a sudden, that becomes plausible. So I think that's how it started, and there's been no flop. So I think that's it.

And I'd say that if they've been good, it's because they're kind of unlikely movies. And when people are making them, they're making them because they have a real Jones for the subject. They really care about it. The Michael Lewis Cinematic Universe, essentially. So the current season of your podcast is about revisiting the big short. The last season of your podcast was all about sports betting.

Just five months ago, six months ago. I'd love to get your thoughts on. How do you see this all shaking out? We've had an increasing number of gambling scandals across sports, some signs of scrutiny from regulators. And now prediction markets seem poised to shake the whole thing up. What is the end game here? I think that you put me in a room with a senator who says,

what do we need to do about this? Like, what's the problem? First, you'd say, it's a new Senate Senator who knows nothing. Someone who was like, what do we shape? First is, like, this was illegal up until whatever, five years ago, six years ago, and that it was basically illegal outside of Vegas. Sure, there were people doing it on the streets, but it was not easily accessible. There are a lot of obstacles between potential sports gamblers and big bets. Supreme Court decides that the federal government's law is unconstitutional, and so every state can do what it wants to do, and we now have 38 states or something and have legalized sports gambling. For people, supposedly for people 21 and over.

In fact, and I do this with a podcast, I gave my 17-year-old son five grand and said, have at it. We're going to put a GoPro on your head and a mic on you, and we're going to see what happens to you. And he had accounts up and running, and he could have bet hundreds of thousands of dollars within a nanosecond. 17 years old. And he was living in a state where it's illegal, California. So there's no, there's no barriers. Like, it's even more permissible than it, than the laws would suggest now. Wait, so you gave your son $5,000 just to go see what happened? To make a podcast episode. What happened? Yeah, I want to, first it was, so you, I don't want to ruin the story.

But the point was, actually, his mother was, my wife was upset because he has kids around him who have gambling problems. in his high school class. And he is, you know, she saw that he might be the kind of person who would develop a problem. And I said to her, like, this is like giving a kid a pack of cigarettes when he's 10, making him smoke them all and he never wants to touch him again. We're going to, or put it another way, I'd rather teach him what it is rather than hear from his friends, get on his phone.

So we had an actual marital spat about me doing this, and it's in the podcast. It's like you can tell she's pissed. And and and but so what happens is it was kind of beautiful. I'll ruin it. I'll ruin it a little bit. It was kind of beautiful. He did it. I had him do it with a friend who was an older kid, a few years older, a high school,

friend from high school, who's high school basketball team. And they, they do all kinds of idiotic stuff. Like they think they're smart and they're not smart. Walker, my son, comes to realize just how badly stacked. the odds are against them. They go in thinking they know like if the warriors are going to win. You know, they have, and they come out thinking like, oh, this is way, way more complicated than we knew. And we were idiots to think we could win. But the weird thing is they win. So he comes out with a sack of money and a lesson. And he actually has never touched it again and he's not

interested in it. So that was that was a happy ending. The truth is not happy. The truth is not happy. truth is, to me the wild thing was, Fanduel and Draft Kings. So we worked with professional sports game, people who knew what they were doing. And the people who know what they're doing, I mean, who actually get the odds slightly in their favor, and there are not many of them, really are many of them, their bets can be identified. The smart bets, the smart better, can be identified with three or four bets, even if they make losing bets. Like, they can tell that you just made a positive, expected value bet, and they boot you out. And what they do on the other end is if they can see if you're really stupid and you're a little

addicted to it, and they cultivate you. You become a VIP. So, of course, Las Vegas has always booted out card counters and so on and so forth. But this is like everybody has a casino in their pocket, and a casino instantly figures out if you're really prone to having a problem, and they encourage the problem. them and it's with you all the time. And there's no, they're no, they're no, they're no snags. It's just really too easy to do. Now, the shocking thing to me is we reveal all this in the podcast. I, I and my producer working with, I mean, she had hundreds of thousands of dollars going with a professional, we used her as, we call, as a mule, he called him a mule to place

the bets of the smart, smart gamblers so that to disguise them, because she didn't know what she was doing, but she was making smart bets, but she's a, you know, 30-year-old woman. We thought, they wouldn't notice. They noticed. And so we thought when we put all this on the air that they'd like protest, argue back, nobody's argued back. Nobody has anything to say. This is what it is. It's so predatory. And the question is like, all right, if you expose all, you know, teenage boys in America to this and let them do it, how many of them are going to become addicts? And I don't, 5%. There's some work that's been done on this, but it's a ticking bomb. It's like, it's a, it's It's like a social problem.

It's like smoking. It's like it's a predatory industry. And now everything seems like it's financialized with the rise of prediction markets, polymarket policy. You can bet on everything. So I did not see that coming. I thought, oh God, we're all going to be the mercy of Fanduel and Draft Kings. And it turns out that this big beautiful bill, this recent tax bill,

disadvantages them in relation to prediction markets. The prediction markets got themselves classified as commodity exchanges. So you can't deduct all of your losses on Fanduel. but you can deduct all of your losses on Cali. So it would move the intelligent gambler off of Fandul and onto Calci. But there's no house anymore then. There's no one's setting lines. It's just the masses there.

So I guess you're just betting against this. Is that out of careful? Is that out? Yeah, because there's no house at all? It's whatever the market is saying is most likely to happen. Like wherever the money is, that's how like the odds change. So I'm not sure that's right. So I'm not, I'm just telling you what I've heard recently.

My understanding is that the prediction markets basically that their businesses are evolving, I think. It's happening all so fast. But I think they make all those markets outsourcing the market making to like high-frequency traders. So you're on the other side of your bets is, you know, Susquehanna or jump trading or one of these places. And Kalshi is missing. I mean, at some point Kalsi is going to figure out we should be making these markets. I think. But I don't know.

I don't know. It's the next season of your podcast right there. We just got to it. Switching gears a little bit, you've written a lot of beloved books. We've read a lot of beloved books from you. And I listened to a podcast you were on a couple of years ago where you say you write every book to a unique soundtrack where it's filled with songs that you just listen to over and over again.

How did that become part of your writing routine? The first time I remember doing this was I was sent on the road by the New Republic to write to cover the 96 presidential campaign. And for the first time, I'm like writing in motels and hotels and riding with people around me. And I needed to shut the world out. And the easy way to do was just put headphones on and listen to music. And then I found that was really not just soothing. Because what it does for me, it does a couple of things. I find it isn't just distraction that's a problem when I write. It slows me down. It's the possibility of distraction, like the possibility you're going to be interrupted. So early in the mornings and

really late at night, night great times, because no one's ever gonna knock on the door kind of thing. And this created this like nobody can interrupt. And so create that space where I'm just gonna do the work. But the other thing that happened, and this is really true that I developed this Pavlovian response to the songs. And I hear the song, I think, right, you know?

It has this effect of like, wanna work. And what kind of songs are we talking? Oh, it's just pop song? It's pop. Taylor Swift. It's some country and some pop. So you're a sleep. for agent. We can get you to start writing. It's up. It's kind of upbeat. Yeah. Uh, my daughter sends me,

like, constant, the way it gets refreshed is her. She sends me, try this, try this, try this, and one out of eight works, and you'd be shocked what's on it. Your next book is going to be written to Addison Ray. That's going to be great. Deal listens to literal white noise. It's a storm. So you do, you do a thing. But what do you listen to? Rain. Like rain. Yeah, he listens to rain. That puts me to sleep. And he's done that for six years now. They're going to study my brain. They're going to find some weird things because I do listen to that a lot because I get distracted by music, especially with lyrics. You know, I understand. It's funny. It's not every song I can do this too. It's a certain kind of song where you can just become background noise. And so it can't be saying to anything too deep that I understand because that would be disruptive.

But the rain and waves and all that just put me to sleep so I can't do that. All right. So we know your next book is going to be set to Addison Rain, maybe some other pop star. What project are you exploring, if any? I'll tell you just broadly that I've spent two of the last three books. And I've kept the premonition, three out of four have been, I mean, I found myself surprising to myself, drawn to government, that was happening in the federal government. I would normally, I think, on almost any other time in my life, have thought, whatever happens there in the end, it's all going to just be fine.

And it's, it's, you know, it's like swat and an elephant. You can't move it in any direction. I actually think the turmoil in Washington is really important now. It's just become a different thing. And I found an unbelievable material, like the fifth risk. And I did that thing in March, we published a book called Who is Government, which I curated and wrote about a third of. And I got writer friends and I just parachuted them into the government to find a story. And it was, they proved to me that it wasn't just me that they're like amazing stories in the federal government.

There's a narrative that's organizing itself now in my head about what's going on. And, and I have the same feeling about, I have very similar feeling about what's going on now in Washington as I had about the big short. It's this huge hairball of a story. It is a genuine crisis. It's a gut check for the culture kind of thing. And there's, there's a way to kind of cast, find the cast of characters to tell the story through. The big house. God, I'm trying to try to get it.

I'm really trying. We know it's coming. Two movie theaters. So can I get a 2040 starring Shalema? A couple of just tips about titles. Yes, please. Don't like riff on your old titles. Like, or anybody else's title.

You don't want to be like a subset of someone else. You want it to be completely original. And the other thing is, to a very large extent, the book makes the title. I can't tell you how many people told me Moneyball sucked as a title, everybody, including all the characters in the book. Like, oh, that's a shitty title. And that title has now fantastic. So it's, the books, the books kind of will take care of the title.

And the other little tip would be shorter is better than longer, usually. Big shorter. Gosh. All right, I'll stop there. Michael, that's all the time we have. Thank you so much for joining us. This was absolutely awesome. Everyone listening, make sure to go check out the big short audiobook.

narrated by Michael Lewis. And listen to Against the Rules, your podcast, which is all about the big short this year this season. So a lot of good material coming out. And thank you so much for jumping in the studio with us. Totally fun. Tell your moms that they raised you well. Thank you.

We will. You're getting that mom? Thank you. You know that.