Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Buffett, Bromance, and Behavioral Economics

Episode Date: June 30, 2017

On this week's show, we revisit two of our favorite interviews from 2017. Award-winning director Peter Kunhardt talks about his documentary, Becoming Warren Buffett. And best-selling author Michael Lewis talks about his new book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. Thanks to Harry's for supporting The Motley Fool. Get your Free Trial set - go to Harrys.com/fool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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of Motley Fool Money. Get your free trial set, including a razor handle, five-blade cartridge and shave gel, go to harrys.com slash fool. Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money. From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. It's the Motley Fool Money radio show. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for joining us this week. As we hit the midway point of the year and as Independence Day is just around the corner,

something a little different this week. We are revisiting a couple of our favorite interviews of 2017 so far. A little bit later in the show, author Michael Lewis has been called the best nonfiction writer in America, and for good reason. With classics like Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short Under His belt, it seems like pretty much everything Lewis produces turns into a bestseller. His latest is The Undoing Project, a friendship that changed our minds. But up first is Peter Kuhnhart, who tackled a well-known subject and somehow managed to surprise audiences with what he learned about

Warren Buffett. Peter Kuhnhart is an Emmy Award-winning director. His latest documentary premieres on HBO on Monday, January 30th. It's entitled Becoming Warren Buffett. Peter joins me now from New York. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Chris. I'm glad to be here. I have to thank the nice people at HBO because of their efforts. I was able to watch an advanced screening of your documentary last night. And I was, I have to say, I was surprised at how personal this film is. It includes home movies of Warren Buffett and his children and his wife. And And that leads to my first question, which is, how did you get this level of access to someone like Warren Buffett, who has to have been in huge demand over the last 25 years in terms of people wanting to tell his story? He gave me an hour to come in and speak with him.

But I then asked him for a follow-up, and he granted me that. And over two years, we ended up going to Omaha five times. And so the trust and the relationship grew over that time. And about halfway through, I told him that we just didn't have the visuals to tell his full story. And he said, I'm going to give you everything I've got. And his daughter, Susie, is the keeper of the family archives. So we took two cars over to her house, and she pointed to the closets and the drawers, and we just emptied everything and scanned everything they had.

all the albums, all the pictures, all the headlines, and transferred all the home movies, which hadn't been seen before. And there was no, to Warren's credit, there was no filtering. There was no saying, let me look at this first to make sure this is okay for you to see. He just said, whatever you want, you can use. And we spent a week scanning it all, and I think that's what brings kind of that visual difference to this film that people have not seen before.

There are a couple of key influences in this film that are really brought to light, one on the personal side and one on the investing side. And let's start with his late wife, Susie, because she is as much at the center of this film as Warren Buffett is. And I was thinking about, you hear often that, well, you can't really change who people are. But after watching your film, it's clear that she changed Warren Buffett. And I'm curious if you could share a couple of thoughts on the ways in which she changed him. He was 21 when they married. She was 19. And he was totally fixated on his work.

and uh just um he was all brain and no social skills he had a very hard time uh get getting along with with with with kind of the regular things in life she was all heart and i think she she said warren was my first patient and i wanted to help him become kind of a more well rounded human being and she just molded him and helped him and taught him how how to respond to people and how to trust people. By the end of the film, after we've heard the story of Susie Buffett and Warren, he says that he never would have been able to be as successful as he was without Susie, that she was the reason Berkshire Hathaway has become what it's become. So he gives her as much credit as he gives himself. And I think that's one of the reasons Warren is pleased

with the film is I don't think that's really come out before. I think people have loaded him with credit. And he's always known that Suzy deserves a good part of it. The other person on the investing side is Charlie Munger. And I guess I had never really clued into the ways in which Charlie Munger has not only been an amazing business partner for Warren Buffett over the decades, but the way in which he appears to have changed Buffett's investing approach. when they meet, Buffett is really a guy as an investor who's going after the so-called cigar butt stocks, the companies that are on their last legs, but they've got one more tiny bit of value out of them. And Munger comes along and really seems to open his eyes to a larger world of

investing. Completely right. And so for years, Warren made a lot of money on these small companies that weren't very interesting or glamorous or even profitable. But as you say, they had a few more tokes of smoke out of these little cigar butts. What Charlie did was open his eyes to good companies at decent prices instead of medium companies at great prices. And he taught him that over time, by investing in franchises and brands that were trusted and part of the culture, that Warren could do much better. And Warren credits Charlie with opening those eyes. And if you look at the spike in Berkshire value, it's an upward movement, and then suddenly, when they shift philosophies in investing, it just spikes upwards. So

Charlie was right, and Warren, that's now what he does and what he's famous for. One of the things that Buffett is famous for in investing circles is his temperament. He has said before that when he mastered his temperament, that was a huge turning point for him as an investor. And yet, I was struck by something that is illustrated wonderfully in your documentary, about his acquisition of Berkshire Hathaway. And it appears, if I'm understanding correctly, it appears to be based on a very emotional moment in his life where he's a shareholder of the company. The company's management is trying to squeeze just a tiny, like an eighth of a share extra out of him. And he reacts pretty emotionally and decides, you know what,

I'm just going to acquire more shares and get these guys out of here. Exactly. He was uncharacteristically Buffett at that time. He did what he preaches not to do, which is to bring emotion into his business dealings. And Charlie Monger comments that it was just – he couldn't understand what he was doing, and that eighth of a point didn't make any difference. But Warren, during his interview, said, you know, as I think back to that moment, I realize it was five days after my father died, and that must have had an impact on me. He was very, very close to his father. He's still very close to this day. He sits at his father's desk.

He hangs his father's portrait behind his desk. He lives and breathes the principles and ethics and morals that his father taught him. So he's extremely close to his father, and I can imagine the impact his death had on him. So when I asked him if he could talk about the last conversation he had with his father, he just said, no, I can't. What that illustrates to me is that Warren Buffett is hugely emotional right beneath the surface. He's able to keep his emotions out of business, but just beneath the surface, He's a very human, very emotional guy, and I think showed some of that in this film. The documentaries you've made before this have largely focused on political figures in U.S. politics.

What got you interested in making a documentary about Warren Buffett? Well, I think Warren has the same largesse that many presidents have, or social activists have, that we've covered in the past. I was just struck by the human story, and I'm not a finance guy, I don't know much about finance, but I was intrigued, how could he grow up to become who he became? So we really base this film on exploring his childhood and the changes he forced himself to undergo to become who he became. And like these other characters we've covered in the past, he has a heroic story in a way. I find it very moving when somebody can change who they are. And Warren has changed who he is a few times, and has really grown with the times. He's a very different man now.

Carol Loomis from Fortune actually said she was lucky enough to be with Warren when he was becoming Warren Buffett. That's where we got the title from. And she said he's just a much bigger and better man than he was before. Coming up, Peter Kuhnhardt talks about why Warren Buffett decided to give away his vast fortune. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. All right, got to say thanks to our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. Chances are you're confident when it comes to your work or your hobbies or your life in general.

Well, Rocket Mortgage gives you that same level of confidence when it comes to buying a home or refinancing your existing home loan. Let's face it, this is something you're not going to do all that many times, so you want as much confidence going into that process as you can get. And with Rocket Mortgage, you can apply simply and understand fully so that you can mortgage confidently. To get started, go to rocketmortgage.com slash fool. Equal housing lender licensed in all 50 states. NMLSconsumeraccess.org, number 3030. As always, people in the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about,

and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's get back to my conversation from earlier this year with Peter Kuhnhart. We're talking about his latest documentary, Becoming Warren Buffett. Well, one of the ways that it seems like he has not changed, though, is his attraction to numbers, which right out of the gate, just as a kid, he was drawn to numbers. And as a businessman in his 20s and 30s and really finding his footing as an investor, He was a numbers geek at a time when it was a lot harder to be a numbers geek.

You had to do a lot more work. There's a lot more reading. There's a lot more work just with a pencil and a pad of paper. It's much easier now when you can get an Excel spreadsheet and let the computer do the work. But it appears as though that attraction to numbers and literally shutting the door to his office so he can just sit and read and focus, that appears to have not changed at all. That's not changed a bit. But, you know, his son Howie said to me, my father's like a computer, his mind's like a computer, but the hard drive never runs out. And Warren reads constantly and keeps adding data to his brain.

And I asked him, I said, I know you kind of think in terms of numbers. What does it look like to you in your brain? What are you seeing? What are you visualizing that the rest of us aren't? And he didn't have an answer for that. But clearly he's seeing something very clear, and shortly before we aired the film at the premiere in New York last week, I sent it to Warren to look at beforehand, and he spotted that on one of the charts I had left three zeros off of the total value of Berkshire Hathaway. So we had this typo, and there were a lot of zeros in it, and it looked pretty zeroed out to me. But Warren's, you know, his eye went right to that, and that was the only comment he made.

So he's skilled at looking at numbers. What leads him to decide, I'm giving away my money, 99% of it, and I'm going to give it to the Gates Foundation? It's going to some other foundations as well, but largely it is going to Bill and Melinda Gates for them to spread out across the world. What leads to that decision? I think it was, for many, many years, it was a rational planning process that he went through. He formed a foundation in the 60s. He always intended to have his money go back to society. He fought with his wife, Susie, about when to do that.

She wanted to give it away sooner. He wanted to keep hold of it longer so it could compound and make an even bigger impact. And when Susie died unexpectedly, all his plans were extinguished. And he thought, what am I going to do now? And he came up with what he thinks is the perfect solution, which is to turn to his great close friend Bill Gates, who thinks a lot like he does. and is one of the best people alive who knows how to give away money. So Warren wanted to continue to make money

and turn to somebody who he could trust to give it away. And I think the catalyst was the death of Suzy because one year afterwards he made the announcement. It really does seem like their partnership, even though they remained married for many years, They were living apart for decades, but there was something connecting the two of them that enables him to continue to grow emotionally. It really seems like that is the catalyst that leads him to Bill Gates. Completely.

And, you know, when Susie got mouth cancer in San Francisco, and Warren, who doesn't, you know, he, for the most part, he sticks to his routine. But he got out of the plane and every week spent the weekends with her as she recuperated. He learned how to be there for her and how to just kind of sit and hold her hand and comfort her. So that same Warren wouldn't have done that 40 years ago. That's a new and very different Warren. And so she was, I think it's a sweet end to a love story. And I do see this film as a love story more than a business film. It's just a sweet way to see how much he had changed and how much he had grown.

Last question, then I'll let you go. One of the things that his daughter, Susie, mentions about her father, and she's the oldest of the three kids. One of the things that she mentions is him singing to her and singing, in particular, the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The closing credits of your documentary include Warren Buffett singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Where did that recording come from? Because that couldn't have been stuck in a closet somewhere. Well, actually, it was. Susie told that story to us, and when we got into the editing process, I told her we were going to use the story, and by any chance had Warren ever recorded it. And she said, you know, he once sang it to me in a karaoke bar, and we did make an audio tape, but it was decades ago, and I'd have to look for it. And I said, that would be very important to us if you could find that.

So she dug through her stuff one weekend and came upon it, and once we heard it, we knew it was the way to end the film. Now we know what his karaoke song is. That's right. The new documentary, Becoming Warren Buffett, premieres on HBO on Monday, January 30th at 10 p.m. It's fantastic, so watch it. Peter Kuhnhardt, thank you so much. Thank you. I enjoyed it. Peter Kuhnhardt has earned five Emmy Award nominations, his first coming in 1993.

His most recent win was in 2016 for directing the documentary Jim, the James Foley story. You can find Becoming Warren Buffett amid HBO's collection of documentaries on HBO Go. They do great stuff over there at HBO, so definitely worth checking out. Hey, a couple of quick housekeeping notes before we get to our next interview. If you want to keep the conversation going, there are a few ways you can do that. You can follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at Motley Fool Money. If you're on Facebook, you can join our Facebook group.

It's simply called Motley Fool Podcasts. You can connect with other listeners like you. You can share your investing experiences, fire off any questions, and a lot more. It's Motley Fool Podcasts on Facebook. And as always, you can drop us an email, radioatfool.com. We love questions about stocks, industries, trends, and whenever possible, we like to dip into the Fool mailbag and try to answer your questions during the show. So, drop us a note, radioatfool.com. Coming up, we'll talk with bestselling author Michael Lewis about bromance and behavioral economics. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

Some folks didn't see my worth, didn't know where I fit in. 40 years I kept singing before the money started rolling. A quick word of thanks to Harry's for sponsoring this episode of Motley Fool Money. I love Harry's. I've been a customer of Harry's for years. I love their products. That's why I'm a customer, because I love what they do. And Harry's is so confident that you're going to love their blades,

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You just cover the shipping to get your free trial set, including a razor handle, five-blade cartridge, and shave gel. Go to harrys.com slash fool right now. That's harrys.com slash fool. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Michael Lewis is the author of such bestsellers as Liars Poker, Moneyball, and The Big Short. His newest book is The Undoing Project, a friendship that changed our minds.

Michael Lewis, welcome back to Motley Fool Money. Thank you, Chris. The Undoing Project focuses on the relationship between two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who created the field of behavioral economics. What should investors know about the work of Kahneman and Tversky? You know, if you go back to the beginning of what is one of the great secular changes in investing, which is away from stock picking and towards indexing, you find the people who are writing about that referencing them because they're saying at the same time you're

saying uh you know stock pickers are no better than throwing darts at the wall street journal why is it these experts get these wrong get things wrong and and commenters you're explaining that so they they're they're woven into the history of wall of wall street in addition i'd say i'd say that since what they were doing was showing you the way your mind makes systematic misjudgments when it's dealing with uncertainty. You are in the markets constantly dealing with uncertainty, and your mind's constantly making these sorts of mistakes they describe. So it's nice to be aware of them. These are two very different people. Amos Tversky is an extrovert, very self-confident, very comfortable being the center of attention. Danny Kahneman is not just

an introvert. He is, as you go through this book, he is plagued with self-doubt. I'm sort of tempted to ask, how in the world did these people deal with one another? They're just so different. Well, it's funny because their colleagues, when they met at Hebrew University, asked the same question. Nobody could understand why they'd have time for each other. And I think the answer is that they're both actually totally original, totally interesting minds, and were able to see the interest in the other person's mind right away and operate on a level with them in a way that two really great tennis players who never play with anybody as good as themselves

but might enjoy playing with each other, they enjoy just the play. And I think that beyond that, Kahneman was constantly like a snake eating his own tail. He was constantly tearing up his ideas as soon as he had them because he was so doubtful about himself and them. And I think that the richness in the work grows out of Tversky giving Kahneman the confidence to think his thoughts and stick with them and to see the value and help him see the value in the thoughts. So it starts, I think, just with pure pleasure.

They're like, oh, my God, this person is as good at thinking as anybody I've ever met, And I can play with him in a way I don't play with anybody else. And it ends with, oh, my God, we're going to play in the field of the mind. We're going to figure out how people think. And we keep stumbling upon insight after insight after insight that we both find interesting. So it must be interesting. You have visited full headquarters here in Alexandria a few times. One of those times was after the book Moneyball was published.

And you said that one of the central lessons of Moneyball went largely ignored. And the lesson was that essentially be careful what you measure because it can become fetishized. Do you think there's a lesson from Kahneman and Tversky's work that is being ignored or misinterpreted in some way? Well, yes. The big lesson is the big misreading of their work is that people are stupid. That's not what they were saying. What they were saying is that the mind is wired to make certain kinds of mistakes. the fellow who were hardwired for certain kind of fallibility

there's different from stupidity it's not like smart people won't make these mistakes fakes and stupid people will if we will all make these mistakes it's part of human nature uh... so it's wrong to demonize uh... the era it's funny because you say that you know it is true that one of the federal weapons of moneyball people ignored

that they just held this week misleading statistics were baseball before people started to think about the rigorously vividly you know batting average become fetishized uh... and it's actually not a very good indication of your value to an office uh... davis actually took it further in their work by showing that any kind of number that you introduce into a discussion numeric discussion uh... will completely discord distort the discussion

if u it where they did if you have people spin a wheel of fortune with the numbers 1 to 100 on it, and then ask them what percentage of the countries in the United Nations come from Africa. If they spot a high number, they guess a high number, and if they spot a low number, they guess a low number. I mean, we get anchored in numbers and statistics in a way we need to be really wary of. Did your work on this book change the way that you think or the way that you make

decisions? Because part of my reaction to this book is it's a little unsettling just to think of how, as you said, how the brain is wired and how there are just far more mental traps out there that we have inadvertently set for ourselves. So the answer is yes. And the answer, and there are, there's some specific examples I can think of that i had now kind of adjust for mistakes i know my mind is making that i just for one one example is um they show very clearly how the mind thinks in stereotypes beyond even if you don't think you're racist or sexist or whatever and you aren't at some deep level you still think of stereotypes if you've never seen a woman in a certain role you don't think you don't think of a

woman in that role and uh and so um in my life when i'm choosing people for roles in my life i lean against that now that if i see someone who's looks exactly like they belong in the role i'm suspicious and if like i don't know if someone who's going to be my doctor doesn't look like a doctor i feel better because i figure that if they don't look if they don't look the part maybe their only reason they are the part is they're good at the part um i do you know danny had this observation um while he was training uh israeli fighter pilot instructors uh that the the instructors told him how criticism was much much more like valuable as a as a teaching tool than praise because and he said why he said because when they do something really great when they're

flying and we praise and they get worse and when they do something really when they're flying and we praise and we criticize and they do better and they point out how you know that's just regression to the mean it's an illusion your praise your praise and your criticism is not why they're regressing to the mean um so in my actually my life with my kids and when i coach all my kids teams um i i have i've started to lean against my tendency to criticize because i know the world is trying to tell me that my criticism is more valuable than my praise there are lots of little things like that the bigger thing that they did for me is just give me a lens you know that i look through the world where i look at the world i sometimes think what

What would Amos and Danny think of this? And that often leads to interesting answers. So when you look through the lens of Kahneman and Tversky at the presidency of Donald Trump, what do you see? Oh, my God. Well, in the first place, he's like a lab rat for them because he's pure intuitive judgment. He has no sense of, like, needing to check his gut instinct. And so he makes all the mistakes that they would predict someone would make who is not checking their intuitive judgment. um is that watching the election through their lens it was really interesting to see

the way all sorts of people who never predicted that donald trump would win the election afterwards had very detailed explanations about why he won the election so as if it were predictable all along which it wasn't even donald trump didn't think he was going to win the election i know for a fact his whole family like making vacation plans afterwards and then oops he won So Danny Amos were very good at showing the way people kind of cover their mental mistakes, the tracks of their mental errors, by making up stories, explaining, either explaining them away or explaining why they basically could have seen what they didn't see all along. So essentially eliminating the uncertainty in the world, making the world seem more knowable than it is.

And I'd say that's a big thing I see when I'm watching Trump, is that what he's done is introduce a whole new level kind of degree of uncertainty into our lives, which is why it feels so unsettling. You never know what he's going to do next and what's possible seems to have expanded. And people are constantly kind of covering this up or trying to rationalize it. And when it's not rational at all, it's just pure uncertainty. I mentioned Moneyball before, and one of the things that comes up in Moneyball and other books of yours, including this one, including The Big Short, there's this theme of

the role that confidence plays for better and for worse. What separates people who are able to successfully harness their confidence from those who are just blinded by overconfidence and end up paying the price? Well, I'd say the big difference is an ability to know at a deep level when you're dealing with an uncertain situation, some judgment you have to make, some risk you have to take, that all you can control is the process, that the outcome is inherently unpredictable.

and so what you do is you bring that spirit of confidence to the creation of a really good process you don't bring it to oh I'm going to promise an outcome the manifestation in the markets of overconfidence is people trading too much people make way more decisions

than they should make because they think their decisions are good. And that's the deadliness of overconfidence is making decisions you don't need to make. Coming up, Michael Lewis talks about the business of writing. Stay right here. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's get back to my recent conversation

with Michael Lewis about his latest book, The Undoing Project, a friendship that changed our minds. I want to ask you a couple of questions about writing before we wrap up with a round of buy, sell, or hold. When you pitch this book, the relationship between Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky to your literary agent, to your publisher, was there any pushback at all? Because sort of on the surface, other than the fact that you're the one writing it, on the surface, this doesn't seem like a book that a publisher is rubbing their hands together with glee at. It's funny you say because the reverse was true i i i was the one who was um i i i i created my own pushback my publisher when i told them what i wanted to do was riveted by it uh and pushed me um and said

don't worry about it being a little bit of an unlikely subject for you so was moneyball when you took on baseball. And I thought that being innocent to the field of psychology and being only partially informed about the state of Israel and having a dead subject in Amos Tversky was going to be debilitating. And that made me very nervous, so that I dragged my feet for six or seven years before I actually got to the book while I was gathering strength. The publisher said, don't worry about it. This touches so many aspects of human life. If you do it well, lots of people will be interested. It seemed like a little bit of Danny Kahneman's self-doubt creeped in. Yes, that's also the problem. This is absolutely true. And I'm a bit of a chameleon,

and I take on the colors of the people I'm writing about. And Danny Kahneman does not give one confidence. Well, and not to give too much away from the book, but there's a part where he's trying to get friends of his to convince him not to publish a book. He pays them. He pays them the right hatchet jobs of his book to persuade him that he shouldn't publish it. So that's the spirit in which he engages in his literary life. I can't afford to be that way. And I'm not that way. But a bit of him did indeed rub off on me. And he was dubious enough about the project that he contributed to the speed at which I moved. So I think this question is not so much about your writing, but maybe about your emotions around your writing.

A number of your books have been optioned for movies, The Big Short, The Blindside, Moneyball, and I know that you are largely not involved once that happens. Once the book gets optioned, you get your money, and then the studio does what it does. I am curious, though, does it affect your emotions when you start to hear news of who's involved in a movie, when you hear that Brad Pitt is the one who's championing Moneyball, or that Aaron Sorkin's going to write the script, or that Adam McKay is the one who is at the helm of the big short? Do you get more excited, or are you detached from the moment you get the check? Well, so all this happens well after the book is done, so it doesn't affect how I'm working on the book.

I regard it all as entertainment, and I don't take much of it that seriously because I get told a lot of things that end up not being true. So you never know. When the movie actually starts to get made, it's great. It's fabulous, especially if you feel like it's in the right hands, and I've never felt it was in the wrong hands. So you think, oh, this story is going to get out in a different way

to a much bigger audience. So from my point of view, the movie business has basically been pure pleasure. All right. We'll wrap up with a buy, sell, or hold. This is a private company with embattled leadership. Buy, sell, or hold the future of Uber. Hold. Why?

I mean, the idea is conquering the world. I'm more worried about who's going to – the guy who's running the place clearly has some issues, and that's a problem. They do have competition. That's a problem. I don't think the political pushback from taxi cab companies is going to be a problem in the end. The consumers are going to get what they want. So I worry they're going to find just competition in the marketplace. They do have first mover advantages, but those aren't insurmountable.

If people get really pissed off, they move to Lyft or wherever. And so Uber is, I feel okay about it, I'd hold it, but I wouldn't go buy more. Next week, the SEC is expected to decide on a proposed rule change that would clear the way for a first-of-its-kind ETF, buy, sell, or hold Bitcoin. So you're asking, do I think Bitcoin, the value of Bitcoin is going to go up? That's what you're talking about. Do I buy Bitcoin? Well, I never have, and I could.

I guess, here's the problem. So I say sell, and I tell you why. That Bitcoin at its heart is basically a libertarian enterprise. It's basically anti-government, anti-central authority, so on and so forth. And money to really work requires some central authority behind it. And I don't believe Bitcoin is going to be socialized. I don't believe that we're going to have – I don't believe that the society is going to organize itself around it or behind it. That's not to say it's going to pop up a little bit here and there, but I just not – I wouldn't buy it.

I wouldn't buy it. I don't trust it. This is the next big thing, unless, of course, it isn't. Buy, sell, or hold driverless cars. Buy. I think one day, but this is a long-term buy. One day people are going to look back and say, how on earth did we ever let people behind the wheel of an automobile?

They read Kahneman-Tversky's work. I mean, the carnage in the world as a result of human drivers is spectacular. Do you know a million people die every year in automobile accidents worldwide? A million people. I mean, with driverless cars, there will be people who will die, but it won't be anything like those numbers. So I think one day it will be illegal for a person to drive a car. And finally, Las Vegas bookies give them the second worst odds to win the American League pennant

by Seller Hold, the Oakland A's, going to the World Series in 2017. Ha! So that's just a, you're not even giving me odds, you're saying 50-50 shot? Well, that's a, you don't, you sell that. Come on, the Cubs, the Cubs last year. If you gave me the bookies odds, I'd take them. Right now they're going off. I think they always underestimate the A's. But you'd have to give me the odds.

Right now I think the odds are about 90 to 1. I'd take them. Absolutely. I'd take that. The New York Times calls The Undoing Project one hell of a love story. It is available everywhere and it is a bestseller because it's written by the best nonfiction writer in America, Michael Lewis. Always great to talk to you. Thanks for having me, Chris. What is Michael Lewis working on next? Well, all indications are the next topic he tackles is going to be President Donald Trump. You can check out past episodes of Motley Fool Money and

all of our podcasts simply by going to podcast.fool.com. You can also test drive our investing services like Stock Advisor, Hidden Gems, Rule Breakers, Inside Value, and Income Investor. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page of our podcast center. That's podcast.fool.com. That's going to do it for this week's edition of Motley Fool Money. Our engineer is Steve Broido. Our producer is Mac Greer. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.