Motley Fool Money - Michael Lewis Returns

Episode Date: November 10, 2017

How did two Israeli psychologists change the way we understand the human mind? What is the future of Wall Street? What did Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane really think about Moneyball? And who is responsible for keeping geese off airport runways? Before a live audience at FoolHQ, best-selling author Michael Lewis answers those questions and shares some insights from his newest book, The Undoing Project. 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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That's why they call it money. The best thing in life are free But you can get them... From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. It's the Motley Fool Money Radio show. I'm Chris Hill, and we've got something special for this episode. Earlier this week, bestselling author Michael Lewis came to Fool Headquarters. I got the chance to talk with him in front of a live audience

about a range of topics, including the state of Wall Street, Moneyball, and more. His latest book is The Undoing Project, A Friendship That Changed the World. That friendship between... Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tiberski led to discoveries about how the human mind works. And I kick things off by asking Lewis where he got the idea for the book. So mostly when I write a book, I stumble onto a subject, get excited about it after a few months, spend a year, year and a half reporting it and write it in six or nine months.

And it's a very self-contained thing. I don't usually nurse along subjects for a long time. And if I, to the extent I've ever done it, like there was going to be a sequel to Moneyball. I sold Moneyball as two books. The first book was Moneyball, and the second book was going to be about the kids, the A's had drafted in 2002. And I was following them through the minor leagues. And I spent three or four years following them through the minor leagues and gave up. I mean, I nursed it a long, because I've had subjects like that.

If it takes a long time, it usually dies on the vine. And this was an odd case of nursing it along for a long time and it kind of just refusing to go away. Moneyball came out, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, our Nobel Prize, recent Nobel Prize winner in economics and a legal scholar who write together. They wrote a book called Nudge together. They've written a couple books together. reviewed Moneyball and said that the book had missed a trick, that, yeah, all these biases happened in a marketplace for baseball players, but these biases were recognizable to anybody who read the work of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, because they showed why a baseball scout might overvalue some vivid skill and undervalue some subtle skill,

or why a guy who looked like some former great major league baseball player might be overvalued, and a guy who looked like no one anybody had ever seen before might be undervalued. And so on and so forth. And I'd never heard of Connman Tversky. Now, as I worked on Moneyball in 2002, came out in 2000, maybe came out in 2002. That's the year that Conneman won the Nobel Prize in economics, even though he really didn't know any economics. Nobody ever says anything about that.

The idea of a psychologist winning the Nobel Prize in economics. It's kind of an incredible thing. One of the things that is very clear in the book is for all of their similarities in their professional life and their backgrounds, these are, if this were a man and a woman and you were observing them on a first date, you would turn to your wife and say, there's no way they're going to last. There's no second date because the personality clashes were. pretty considerable to the point where one wonders how they work together at all. No one who knew them in Israel could imagine why they would want to spend time with each other.

People were bewildered by the fact they were attracted to each other. Danny was this dark, brooding, constantly self-doubting, difficult person. Amos was this pretty sunny, pretty insistently upbeat. I mean, actually theoretically upbeat. Amos would say that pessimism is a, a stupid emotion because if you're pessimistic and the bad things happen, you experience them twice, once when you worry about them happening and the second time when it happens. It's no time for dark brooding artist types.

With a couple of really interesting exceptions, his first girlfriend turns out to be one of the great poets in Israel and killed herself. and Danny. Those were the two depressives he led into his life. And so he made an exception for ones that were really, really, really interesting. Danny was a slob. Danny's, people say you go to Danny's office and Amos's office. And you couldn't find anything in either office. In Amos's office because there was nothing in his office except a pad of paper and a pencil squared to the

to the paper on the desk, and otherwise the office was always entirely spare and clean. And Danny's office was this chaos that was so bad that his secretary tied his scissors to his chair because he got tired of trying to find them. And Danny never finished anything. Amos really never started anything he didn't finish. The dynamics of the relationship, I think, were

Danny, Amos thought when he was young that he really wanted to be a poet or a literary critic. He was intellectually a scientist, a logician, really. All the bright boys in Israel were given a choice, science track or humanities track. And, I mean, all the boys were, all the kids were. None of the bright boys went on the humanities track except Amos. He fought, even though he was the best scientist in his class. He fought the world's notion of how his mind was for a while, and then finally gave into it. But he always wished he had this other thing, this kind of artistic imagination.

Danny, from a young age, conceived of himself as a scientist when he was incredibly sloppy, incredibly disorganized, And his mind was not a linear mind. He did not think logically. But stuff just came out of it. I mean, one of the things that Danny said, he didn't even realize it was interesting about himself. But that when he was a child in the Holocaust, being chased around southern France with his parents

by Nazis and hiding in barns and living in chicken coops and what is he, five, six, seven, eight, nine years old, developed this very vivid and he realized he had an unusually vivid imagination so that he would imagine all kinds of scenarios to get out of that in his head and when he came to Israel he discovered that his imagination was so vivid that he had to stop himself from imagining the things he wanted like he wanted to be first in his class he'd imagine what it would be like to be at the school valedictorian because if he imagined it he

He got all the satisfaction of having achieved it, and he then lost his motivation to achieve it. And that's a very funny. I mean, he said this once, and the throat, we were just walking, and he says this, and I say what? And stuff just comes out of Danny that constantly tumbles out of him. Ideas for him are worthless, because he generates so many of them. And he doesn't know which are the good ones and which are the bad ones.

And Amos sees this is what he lacks. I mean, this idea generating machine. And Amos picked the good ones. And he not only picked the good ones, because Amos was the smartest person anybody knew, including Danny. There's the famous Tversky test, the one line, the shortest intelligence test ever devised by the Michigan psychologist Richard Nizben. And the Tversky task is the longer it takes you after you've met Amos to figure out that Amos is smarter than you, the stupider you are.

Amos had this ability to walk into people's worlds and see things and frame it in such a way that was smarter than the people who were in the world. And Amos was utterly self-con. I mean, there's not a shred of self-doubt in Amos Tversky. Danny needed that confidence. Danny, what Danny lacks, confidence. And Amos gave him confidence. What did he say? He said, you know, he didn't put it quite this way,

but with Amos, he felt like he was playing ahead, that he was winning the game. He wasn't playing from behind. He said, when I was myself, I was always in a defensive crouch. Amos allowed him to go on offense. And so when Amos said, no, that idea, The idea of, I don't know, the idea that the human imagination abays rules, and we can explore the rules of the human imagination, or the idea that one of the things that drives decision-making is regret, particularly the anticipation of regret. And we can actually study, measure how regret influences decisions. Or these ideas that the mind has these kinks in it, these cognitive biases. and we can classify the cognitive biases.

Amos says, that's gold. Let's figure out how to do it in a way that's persuasive to an academic audience. I'll take this rough diamond and I'll start to cut it. Gives Danny the confidence to say, yeah, I'll follow through on that idea. I think Danny's biggest problem alone was he didn't know what to do once he had the idea,

and Amos knew what to do. And when the two, when Danny would talk about the golden years of the relationship, Which is one of the gifts to the writer about their relationship they gave was that the relationship was so rocky. I mean, the relationship had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it was like a love story. But when Danny would talk about what it felt like in the room, the one thing I kept coming back to in my head was I once did a a seminar, I didn't teach it. I took it as a student at Second City, the improv comedy place in Chicago.

I actually took my daughter who says no to everything, where she did when she was seven. I thought I'm going to fix her. I'm going to make her go to the place where you're not allowed to say no. You have to say yes, yes and. Right. And we're going to do it together, and she's going to go into the kid program. I'm going to the grown-up program. It's going to be a whiz for me because it's easy for, you know, I always say yes. and it's going to be hard for her, but she'll break through. And after the first day, she came out and said, that was easy, and I came out and I was drenched and sweat. But it's felt like the rules of improv comedy,

that with each other, for some long period of time, Danny said whatever he said, and some of it was crazy, but Amos always said yes. And there was never a bad idea. It was always, as one of Danny's students said, about Danny once said in a seminar, are when someone says something, don't ask if it's true. Ask what it might be true of.

So take it and build on it rather than rejecting it. And they did this with each other. And that two of the greatest minds who ever walk the earth, and they're doing it together, and they produce this stuff, it's miraculous research, that for the first time really opens a genuinely scientific window onto the human mind. And that neither one of them could have done by themselves. So there's several things running through the book, but one of the things that's running through the book is the power of collaboration.

It's like, what happens when two people open themselves up to each other in the way these two people did? And sometimes magic occurs. Coming up, we'll talk Moneyball. This is Motley Fool Money. If you're looking to get a mortgage, here are a couple of tips. For one thing, boost your credit score before applying. The better your credit score is, the less your loan is going to cost you. you. And here's another tip. Check out Rocket Mortgage. Getting a mortgage or refinancing your

existing home loan, it is not a walk in the park. And when you're making a big financial decision, you want to be as confident as you are in your life in general, at your job. Anywhere you're confident, that's where you want to be when it comes to getting a mortgage. And Rocket Mortgage gives you that same level of confidence. It's simple. It allows you to fully understand all the details and be confident you're getting the right mortgage for you. To get started, go rocketmortgage.com slash fool. Equal housing lender licensed in all 50 states, NMLS, consumer access.org, number 3030. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Now back to my conversation with Michael Lewis. When you meet Connemon, as you said, he is dressed like a

slob and he's in the process of trashing this book, which begs the question, what was his reaction to your book? So it doesn't beg the question, but you're asking the question. And that's all right. Thank you. I appreciate that. You can take ownership of that question. You don't have to say Danny is asking that question in some way. His reaction was volatile.

This is true. By the way, I should just say, everyone I've ever written about, anyone who's had a prominent role in one of my books, I'm still in touch with and friends with. I've never had a falling out over someone I've portrayed. So the prelude to this is that every person I've ever written about has this disturbed reaction. And it's the disturb, if you can remember what it felt like the first time you heard a recording of your own voice. It doesn't sound like you.

And then you realize, well, it is me, and I'll figure that. Let's just assume I'm getting it right. If I get it right, I get that reaction. And that's the kind of reaction I got from Danny's. Like he was very volatile about it. He was first grateful that the book turned out, the way it turned out. Then he thought there were things he didn't like about it. Then he thought, forget that I said there were things I didn't like about it.

It really is wonderful. Then he said, forget I said it was really wonderful because there are things that are wrong about it. And I think where we ended up, we're friends. And he knows that it's a loving portrait of a person who deserves a loving portrait, but there are things about it that he doesn't particularly like. And what is he probably dislike most? Now, if you were listening to this, or are you sitting here? He'd be shaking his head.

Say whatever Michael's about to say is false. He says, he wouldn't allow me to have control over what he liked or the reasons he disliked what he disliked. But my interpretation is that his interpretation of his relationship with Amos is so fixed in his head and it matters so much to him. It was the most important relationship in his life. And I think Danny was the most important relationship in Amos's life that for me to give the reader the option to see Amos's point of view was disturbing. Billy Bean's reaction to Moneyball similar or a little bit more? volatile Billy Bean is a different character so Danny never settles so there there will never be a point where Danny and I Danny has just agreed not to

think about this anymore Billy Bean is an athlete and the game is intense and short but then it's over and you move on to the next game so Billy Billy Billy is complicated by the fact that who when he when he picked when he was sent the book at which point it's too late for him to do anything about it he didn't know the book was about him he knew that they were in the book but he just didn't realize exactly how central he was going to be in this book and in part because I didn't realize took so quite late and by the time I realized there was no point telling him and

and there was no upside so he gets the book and he calls right away. He's in spring training in 2003. And he's, the sound I remember coming out of the phone was very loud. Humana, humana, humana, humana, humana. I mean, it's like upset, but not articulating what it was about,

why he was upset with me. I read this, you did this, you did, and I said, well, what's bothering you about this? And what I thought was, I really thought I was, I did feel sneaky, Not just because I had made him a bigger character than he knew I was going to make him, but because the whole time I was working on that book,

I thought these guys are going to, when they figure out that I'm writing a book that tries to tell everybody else their secrets and find out as many of their secrets as I can, that it's going to destroy their, you know, it's going to undermine their business, that everybody else is going to imitate them, and they're not going to have an edge anymore. So I thought that's what was going through his head.

Instead, when I say, what's bothering you, he says, you have me saying fuck all the time. And I said, you do say fuck all the time. And he says, you don't understand. My mother's going to be really upset. And he's deadly serious. Deadly serious. But I started laughing.

And I said, Billy, I thought, I'm relieved actually. I thought that you. you were going to say, everybody in baseball is going to read the book, and we're done. And he's like, long pause on the end of the line. And then he laughs. He says, you don't think anybody in baseball is going to read your book. He says, nobody's going to read your book. He says, my mother's going to read your book, and she's going to be furious.

And the truth is, his mother was furious, and at me, and never forgave me. Never forgave me. I mean, maybe she has now, but I saw her months later. She came to her reading just to stare daggers at me. came up afterwards. He said, my son does not talk like that. And I said, let's just go out to dinner and agree to, like, get over this. And she was, like, mean and angry the whole dinner.

She just said she didn't want, she was upset that her son had a potty mouth in my book. Coming up, Michael Lewis discusses Brad Pitt and the Department of Agriculture. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Full Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's get back to my conversation with Michael Lewis. And more about Oakland A's general manager. Billy Bean's response to Moneyball.

The funny thing that happens, though, is that now the book comes out, Billy is incredibly brave about it. But if you'd say, are you glad this thing happened? It's a while before he would ever say that. It was like, I didn't ask for this kind of attention. He's very suited to it, but he didn't ask for it. And so a few months after the book comes out, he calls, he says, you never believe what just happened.

And I said, what? He says, Columbia Pictures called and said, could they buy my life rights? And I said, yeah, that's going to happen. Whenever one of these books comes out or a magazine article, I've always sold the movie rights. They never make the movie. I said, they never make the movie. I've never had a movie made in one of my books.

I said, it's just a really stupid business, the movie business. They buy whatever is kind of out there, thinking, oh, it must be a movie. And then they don't make it. And he didn't believe me, of course, but then I listed the 15 things I'd sold. including Liars Poker, that had never been made, and showed him the sums of money that had come out of this. And he went, really, I just signed this thing, and it says free money.

And I said, yeah, that's what happens. And it was an 18-month option. And every 18 months for the next six or seven years, he called me and say, this is genius. This is freaking genius. They sent me another check. They re-up the option. It's like, what a stupid business.

And then one day he, he said, call me and he said you bastard he said Brad Pitt just called and my wife is putting on makeup he's cut and Brad Pitt says he's coming over our house my wife is putting on makeup and the babysitter's wearing a dress and and they made the movie and he was just again uh irritated all over again because he couldn't stop this thing he refused to go visit the set like they're making Brad Pitt is playing him and they're shooting all over the place, including his own office. I mean, not his office, literally,

but his office is right on the side of the Oakland Coliseum, and they're shooting all these night scenes in the Oakland Coliseum, and Billy is refusing to acknowledge this is going on. He let Brad Pitt come over. That was kind of it. And so the movie people call me and say, he's making everyone uncomfortable because he won't visit the set.

You know, like, if we're feeling this hostile vibes coming out of, you know, like nobody wants to be him to be upset. You know, the movie comes. out and he says it's awful or and could you get him to the set just so to ease the tension so I go to Billy and I'll say I say I'm going out to the Coliseum they're filming these night scenes just come on down and make everybody feel comfortable just come down for your office from your office for 20 minutes he goes he says you're going to be there I said yeah I'll be there says all right then I'll come down but you got to be call me when you get

there so I drive out and I've got my then, what is she, maybe 10-year-old. We just come from soccer practice, Dixie, and I go out, and they're filming this scene. One of the many scenes where Brad Pitt is brooding in a hoodie and nobody else is in the stadium. He's walking back and forth and, you know, cut, it's over, we walk in. And I got to know Brad Pitt a little bit, so he comes over. He never met Dixie. He gets down on one knee and very sweetly starts to talk to Dixie, and I leave them.

And two things happen. Billy starts, I call Billy, and he comes down from his office. He's coming in from one side of the stadium, and then Dixie is all of a sudden clinging to my leg. And I looked down, and she says, who is that weird old guy? She had no idea. And Billy comes up, and we're all standing there, and the moment Billy arrives, a production assistant shows up. And he's got the clipboard, and inside of the clipboard he's got in his notebook, he's got a book. And he says, Mr. Bean, Mr. Bean, Thank you so much for coming to the set.

You've been my hero since I was very young. And could you please sign your book for me? And Billy goes, it's not my book. He wrote the book. And the guy says, no, please, it's your book. Could you please sign my book? And he's so insistent and, like, pleading and pathetic that Billy says, I'll sign your book.

Now, there were two Billy Beans in the major leagues who played in the big leagues. And oddly, they played at the same time. they played in the same outfields in for the twins and the tigers I think the other Billy Bean spelled his name without an E on the end but the other Billy Bean was gay and wrote a book like about coming out of the closet right after yes it was like hitting from the other side of the plate or I don't know what he had that kind of title on it and the guy opens the notebook and there's the gay Billy Beans memoir and Billy's just like

There's no right thing to do, right? And he's like, unbelievable. I mean, he's sweating. And Brad Pitt is sitting over in one of the dugouts at this point, rolling around laughing. Because he had had the production people call me to get Billy to the set so he could do this practical joke. He'd set the whole thing up.

The whole thing set up. So what you've been interested in lately is the bureaucracy of our government with the Vanity Fair article earlier this year about the Department of Energy and the one that just came out about the Department of Agriculture, which having read it, there were a number of fascinating things, one of them being your admission in the article that essentially the Department of Agriculture is so big and so vast in all the things that it does that there's no point in me, Michael Lewis, trying to explain to you the reader, all. all the things in which it does, and probably best illuminated by the drinking game that goes

on into the USDA, by people who have worked there for years. That they, and it's essentially, here's a thing, does the USDA cover this? And if you don't, if you don't know whether it does, if you get it wrong, you drink, right? And so people don't, people who work in the USDA don't know that at every airport, there's a USDA person wandering around making sure the geese aren't living near the runway so they don't fly into the engines of the airplanes and in the end we'll go shoot these geese that they run the National Park Service that so they're in charge when you see wildfires being fought that's the USDA when you there's a private eye there's a small army of private eyes there's a small army of

private eyes there's a bee colony on the roof where they study bees I mean just up there their fingers are in so much part of that story a big part the reason it opens the way it opens this, it opens with a character where I just find, I mean, maybe I find him more interesting than the reader, but I just got very absorbed by him. Name Ali Zaidi, who starts his life, his parents move him from Karachi to Boondocks, Pennsylvania when he's five or six years old. They're devout Muslims and they're now surrounded by Christians and Republicans. He grows up a Republican, becomes very devoted to the idea of small government, if any government.

Help yourself. Pull yourself up by your boot reps. Parents are dirt poor. He gets through school on school lunches and so on and so forth. It's not until he's made up both a political transformation and ends up as a grunt in the Obama administration in the Office of the Management Budget, where he's given the job of translating the numbers that the department's

going to put out for their budget. for the Department of Agriculture, that he realizes that the Department of Agriculture paid for his school food, his school, the firehouse in his town, the electricity, the water, the internet connections. That his whole infrastructure was provided by a department. He didn't basically know, and if you'd asked him what this department did, he would tell you they paid farmers not to grow crops. that he had that so that one of the things is running through the piece is we do not appreciate what our government does for us even the people who are benefiting from it and that causes weird political behavior but the conceit that underlines this series Trump has made this series possible the combination the curious combination of Trump and Obama because because Bush had been fairly very conscientious about the way he handed over the government to Obama and Obama was sensitive to how much more efficient everything ran because the Bush people had their hands in when the Obama people came in to show them what was going on in the Department of Agriculture or the Treasury or wherever. In many cases, they kept Bush people on much longer than you might have just to stabilize. I mean, we were in the middle of a financial crisis. But during the

and added to that, during the Obama administration, a law was passed that required the the existing administration to prepare for the transition as they never had before. So Obama used that as an excuse to create essentially the best course ever created on how the federal government runs. Every department, every agency had groups of people who spent the better part of a year building the briefing books, creating the briefings, getting ready to explain what goes on in the Department of Agriculture. So you've got this essentially professorial presidency filled with professorial people building a really great chorus and then

the student doesn't show up that literally does not show up for the class. Human beings were supposed to be there in droves the day after the election and you know instead of 20 people showing up the Department of Agriculture the next day after the election one guy rolls in six weeks later and is actually contemptuous and doesn't want to listen. So The fact that I could go and get this course because no one's taken it and use that as the conceit to drive it, all of a sudden makes the material,

Trump's electrified the material by being indifferent to it. And when you actually go into these places, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, it's riveting what goes on there, especially if you're worried that it might not go on anymore or it might be disabled by just neglect, never mind like some ideological agenda to destroy the federal government,

just like neglect and ignorance. So that's what fuels the series. The Department of Agriculture was a party trick to me, in my mind, in that after I'd picked the energy department basically out of a hat. I said, where am I going to start? I don't know. I don't know what the energy department does. Let's go do that.

And that ended up being the Department of Nuclear Weapons. So that was easy. You know, I thought, oh my God, they're in charge of the nuclear weapons and there's nobody there kind of thing. after that I thought, well, that was so easy. I mean, I wrote it by the Department of Engineering as like the most red thing in Vanity Fair in the last year on the website.

The most attended to, so they measure how many minutes people spend with a piece on the web, by twice the most attended-to piece ever run on the Vanity Fair website. People want to know, like I wanted to know. So I thought, well, let's just see how robust my conceit is.

Let me pick the most. boring department. Let me make a little effort here to pick the thing nobody could possibly be interested in and see if it's interesting. Then I went with agriculture and it was a close it was a close it was a close call between labor, commerce, agriculture, and I picked agriculture. And from this I've decided there's no place I can't go. And but some I keep going. I'm gonna go find other ones and now I'm not gonna just pick it because it's boring. I'll probably start picking because it's interesting. But that's good because you're not

to get more boring than the Department of Agriculture. But that piece is not a boring piece. Not at all. Because the people are interesting. People will read about people. And the people who, the spirit of public service at the heart of the core missions of the Department of Agriculture is breathtakingly moving.

People who could make lots more money doing other things, making sure poor people get fed. And they're doing it and devoting their lives to this. And then being shat upon by an administration that comes in for doing it. it. This is a story. And I think there's a narrative waiting to flip. This whole narrative that the government is our enemy, it's this other thing that has nothing to do with our society. It's the core of our society. We're responsible for the government. You can't, as a citizen,

wash your hands of responsibility for the government. And it's amazing, given the attacks on government that have gone on for 40 years now, that it does its job as well as it as it, as it does. It is horribly inefficient in places. There's a built-in dysfunction, just the structure of the thing, but, you know, let's fix it. Let's not just, let's not to say, oh, that's not us. Because if it doesn't, if it doesn't work, the society crumbles. Coming up, Michael Lewis talks about the state of Wall Street. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I want to say thanks to Harris for supporting this week's episode of Motley Full Money. I've been a customer of Harry's process. for years. Well before they started sponsoring this podcast, I love Harry's products. It is the smoothest

shave I have ever had, period. And Harry's is so confident that you're going to love their blades. They're giving you their trial set for free. Just cover the $3 shipping. That's it. Have you noticed when you go to buy razor blades at a drugstore or a grocery store that a lot of times they're actually under lock and key? That's how expensive those brands are. The stores are worried about shoplifting. So it's essentially like you need a permission note from your mother that you have to carry up to say, can I get the, yeah, can you go in the little box because I'm actually going to buy those razors. That's how expensive those razors are. Harry's offers you a great shave at a good price and they make it easy by shipping right to your door. So

get started shaving with a free trial set that includes a razor handle, five blade cartridge, and shave gel. That's a $13 value for free. Just cover this. shipping. Go to harries.com slash fool. That's harries.com slash fool. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Here's more from Michael Lewis on the Department of Agriculture, the subject of his latest piece for Vanity Fair. Well, that was one of my reactions in reading it that for all the talk these days of at some point Google might need to be broken up or Facebook might need to be broken up. One of my takeaways from that article was it might actually serve the interests of the Department of Agriculture and the

nation if it was in fact seven or eight smaller departments which got a little bit more attention so people actually did understand all the things that it does but that's true several of these departments are just giant holding companies you know who knew the department agriculture has a 220 billion dollar bank inside of it to make loans to rural america uh that insult that's one you know there's i do give you the reader i i i i I do give them a summary of what it does. To add to my conceit of I'm going to go get these briefings, in order to deal with such a monster,

of an enterprise, I basically poked around asking people, knowledgeable people, inside, where was it vulnerable? So, less than 10% of the Department of Agriculture's budget has to do with farming. You think of it as farming, but less than 10%. And the farm programs are the obsession of a bunch of farm state senators. When they think of that department, they're like hawks on that. That's, Trump's not going to be able to do anything to that. The farm subsidies or the way that, I mean, they may be fiddling around the edges with that, but that,

that's not a, when you worry about what might happen, it's the places where people aren't paying attention. So you can narrow it, that you're able to narrow it down that way from my point of view. It's maybe true that if you broke it up into smaller things that people would pay more attention, but I don't think so. I don't think people would pay attention anyway. And if you go around the government, I mean, the Department of Health and Human Services, that's even bigger and more complicated. It's a bigger holding company with lots of little pieces inside of it,

like the Center for Disease Control or the NIH or the, I mean, so the, I don't know if breaking it up would make much of a difference. What it would make a difference, but it won't happen, is if the government could promote itself and explain itself. If there was a budget for like government branding that was bigger than it is. When you look at Wall Street these days, what stands out to you? The continued absence of women in critical jobs. It was breathtaking to me that a financial crisis that felt, the tenor of it felt very male. There was a lot of male overconfidence in the middle of it all. That the first response afterwards is to decapitate

all the women in senior positions. Like so many women took falls after that. And I'd have thought one response would be don't let men run these institutions, put women in charge. It is amazing that it has not been more movement, gender movement on Wall Street. Also, with the Harvey Weinstein wave crashing on the world,

who'd have thought NPR would be swept up in a sex scandal before Wall Street? I mean, my God! I mean, there's like that much testosterone in all of it. NPR and and you couldn't this room couldn't hold the testosterone on Wall Street and and it's so I assume that this is to be continued and we will be hearing about Wall Street so that strikes me the I think the bank should have been broken up that you can say

that very blithely and I understand I'm very aware of the good arguments for why they weren't broken up but that they just sit there as these institutions that seem, never mind if they actually are now capable of failing, if they actually aren't too big to fail, people don't really think that. They seem to be playing by a different set of rules than everybody else. And like if it works out, great for us, if it doesn't work out bad for you. And that's corrosive. I mean, I think, and that's part of the reason we have Donald Trump,

It's feeling like the system's rigged. It would have been very cathartic to see failure at the top rather than the elites being bailed out. As a subject, the only thing that's really caught my attention was the Flashboy story. And that caught my attention because, not because the high-frequency traders were doing bad things because I thought, well, that's what people do on Wall Street,

but that someone really wanted to fix it from inside. And the possibility of entrepreneurial disruption is beguiling. I like the idea of it. And I think that they, that business, IEX, I know you look at the thing to say, especially if you're a lobbyist for the high-frequency trading industry in one way or another, I always look, it's not really working. They're only 2% of the market, whatever it is. Watch out.

I think they could be really big. I would not be shocked if 20 years from now IEX is the New York Stock Exchange. I would not be shocked. There's a power there that has not been fully appreciated. Michael Lewis's latest bestseller is the undoing project, a friendship that changed the world. And it is now out in paperback everywhere books are sold. As always, people on 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. That's going to do it for this week's show. Our engineer is Steve Broido. Our producer is Mack Breer. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.