Plain English with Derek Thompson - Michael Lewis on How the Global Financial Crisis Explains Trump, Crypto, and Everything Else

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Bestselling author Michael Lewis joins the show to talk about how bubbles happen, the legacy of 'The Big Short' and the global financial crisis, 'Moneyball' and how the data analytics revolution conquered sports and entertainment, the difference between being a good investor and being a good investigative journalist, and the craft of writing. Listen to the new audiobook of Michael's hit 'The Big Short' ⁠HERE⁠! If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Michael Lewis Producers: Devon Baroldi and Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up? It's Todd McShay, host of the McShay Show at The Ringer and Spotify. We're building this thing up and I couldn't be more excited to be back, talking college football and everything NFL draft with the most informed audience out there. That's you. My co-host, Steve Mention, I will be with you three times a week throughout the football season with all the latest news, analysis, and scouting intel from around the league. For even more insight, subscribe to my newsletter, the McShay report, to access my mic, drafts, big boards, tape breakdowns, and other exclusive scouting content you can't get anywhere else. It's going to be a great season. And I hope you'll be with us at the McShea Show every step

of the way. Today, Michael Lewis. In the last few days, I've been reading a book by a great writer who is not today's guest, the short storymaster George Saunders. The book is called A Swim in a Pond in the rain. In the book, Saunders shares several classic stories from Russian authors like Tolstoy and Chekhov, and then after publishing or printing those stories inside the book, he takes readers' hand and explains to them how these stories work, how they work us over, how they fill us with meaning. It's a really beautiful and deeply engaging book, and if you want to learn to love Russian literature or maybe even more instrumentally, if you want a really lovely meditation on creativity, I'd highly recommend it. But there's a line from a line from

one of the first chapters that really straightened my spine when I was making coffee this morning. The line is this, quote, no worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception. And quote, this is apparently something Einstein said or something he got close to saying, but the sentence has been translated and butchered and paraphrased so many times on its way from Einstein to us that it's not entirely clear what the original quote was. In any case, it's a very beautiful idea. No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception. There's a few ways to read this, I think, or since this is a podcast, I should say, there's a few ways to hear it.

You could take the perspective of the creator. When you are working on a hard problem, it's hard, almost by definition. It can't be solved on a first pass. If you're writing something important, making something important, the initial struggle is not a sign of failure, perhaps, but a sign of the project's worthiness. I think what Saunders is telling us here, via Einstein, is that it's natural for the creative process to include a moment of frustration,

or even a bit of hopelessness. Another way to see it is to take the perspective of the audience. If you read or hear a piece of art that seems simple, there's a tendency to think that it was simple to make. But simple isn't easy, as they say. Simple takes work. making something that seems simple is very, very hard. To the extent that the best stories seem natural, inevitable, perfect in their completeness,

that's an artist taking a rugged piece of marble and carving, polishing, carving, polishing, until something beautiful and complete, maybe a human face emerges from the marble block. One of the real masters of making the complex simple, making faces emerge from that marble block, is the author Michael Lewis. I've been an enormous fan of his for many decades, Liars Poker, Moneyball, the Big Short, and so many others. Today, Michael is my guest. I try to get many things out of him in the next hour,

including his reflections on economic bubbles and how he finds such great and unforgettable characters. We spend lots of time today talking about how the global financial crisis never really ended, how we're still living in the world that it built, or maybe even the world it destroyed. We spend lots of time talking about Moneyball, the data analytics revolution, and how it's transformed sports outside of baseball and entertainment. But the theme we return to over and over again here is Kraft.

How does Michael make the most complicated stories so indelibly simple in his books? What's the secret to telling a good story in the first place? How do you know when you're in the possession of one? I really love today's conversation. and I think you will too. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Michael Lewis, welcome to the show.

It's a pleasure to be here. You have many gifts as a writer, and one of them, I think, is being at the right place at the right time, or maybe more appropriately, being at the wrong place at the right time. You were a young trader on the Solomon Brothers Bond desk during the 1987 crash. That experience led to your book, Liars Poker. You were there to write the big short on the House

and crash, you decide to tag along with this guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, just before that company goes infamously belly up. It seems to me like you have seen the human face of financial exuberance up close and personal in so many different ways. Do bubbles and financial crashes share some fundamental underlying characteristic that you've sussed out? Or are they like Tolstoy's unhappy families where each is unhappy in its own way and every bubble crashes really its own organism, its own specimen. So each is its own specimen. So, I mean, you drill down far enough. It's going to be, you can find things distinctive about it. And I did this exercise just recently with Andrew Ross Sorkin, who has written a book about the crash of 29. Like, just pretend these are two

pictures by, you know, one by Rubens, one by Rembrandt, the 1929 crash and the 2008 crash, compare and contrast. But you can find things in common. I mean, I think of it, I mean, what is in common, like they all seem to have in common, is risk either gets misunderstood or hidden. The financial system is always trying to hide risk. You know, it's a funny, it's a funny situation, right, because it's put on earth to expose it and price it accurately. But in fact, it's really valuable to be able to hide it. And so that's one thing that I think goes on like before. every financial crisis. So maybe, I wonder if incentives,

they're asking me a question I'd actually thought about, but I wonder if before every financial crisis incentives get screwed up. People are effectively paid to do really dumb things. They're paid in the short term to ignore a longer term risks. That was certainly true.

That was fuel for what happened inside the big banks. It was fuel for what happened inside the bank's lending operations back before the 1929 crash. So maybe that's partly it too, that somehow the financial system, whatever it is at the time, gets itself twisted into this place where people are doing really well for themselves, creating what will be obviously, like in the end, a catastrophe. But I don't know. I don't know.

I certainly wouldn't pretend to be able to predict these, like, when these things are going to happen. And I would go one step further and say, anybody who tells you that they know when the crisis is coming, you should just not listen to them about anything. These are unpredictable events. And so don't like characters in the big short, they knew that there were these problems and they knew that there was as a really positive, expected value trade to do. none of them would have pretended to know like when this is going to happen. Maybe one with one slight exception. So that like it's just like

it's a foolish game to pretend that these things are like so knowable, they're predictable. I want to return to one thing you said, which is that financial crises and bubbles tend to have this quality of the protagonists are hiding something. And what I thought of is that, you know,

as individuals, we hide our misdeeds and we call it shame. But as companies, we sometimes hide our bad bets, and we call it finance. And in many ways, the people who are best at sussing out these bubbles are those who are best at sussing out, what is essentially like corporate shame. Like I was having a conversation with someone recently about fears of artificial intelligence being a bubble, which I want to get your mind on in just a second. And they said, what really scares me is that these companies often aren't building the data

centers themselves. They're creating special purpose vehicles. They're creating this black box, and they're putting money in the black box, and private capital is putting money in the black box, and that black box is actually going out and building the data center. But they're trying to hide this stuff off their balance sheet. That's what makes me scared.

And so there again, it's sort of like, you know you're in trouble. You know the system understands itself to be flirting with danger when it begins to hide. Hide things. That's right. And as to it,

this thought, Pat, fleeted across my mind a few days ago. So I'll voice it since it's a podcast. for voicing fleeting thoughts. But think about the whole incentive issue right now, on a big scale. I think for the first time in history, we have a president who's, it's not the first time in history of the president wants to seize control of the money supply, right? That's happened before.

It hasn't maybe succeeded all that well, but that's not an original ambition. But we have a president whose personal family fortunes are mostly tied now. to crypto. And what's the way you make crypto go up? You debase the dollar. You create chaos. So that we have someone in a very powerful position who's got an incentive to a personal financial incentive to create a financial crisis, especially a debasing the dollar kind of financial crisis. that's just weird. I mean, I think if whatever happens, it's possible we will look back and say, well, that was odd that we allowed the president not just to get a hold of the money supply, but

at the same time he's a long $5 billion Bitcoin or whatever he's got, and that he can make the Bitcoin go up just by screwing with the money supply. There's an incentive that's big. Maybe he would never think like that. But as a basic matter of incentives, The incentive structure has changed, and nobody's really pointed it out. So you've got to be really careful about the incentives because they do tend to lead to behavior. I want to attach some of these thoughts to your work on The Big Short, which we are now celebrating the 10-year anniversary of that great movie.

Can you take me back to what you were doing when you stumbled onto the story of The Big Short? What project were you coming out of? How did you first catch wind of these renegade traders sniffing around the collapse of the financials? system. Like, what was Michael Lewis's life like in 2005, 2006 when you first started to sniff around this? It wasn't 0506, because I just, so I'd finished the blind side in 06, and I'd moved in 07, my family for six months down to New Orleans. The kids were really little, put them in schools down there, New Orleans where I'm from, because I thought I was going to write a book about New Orleans. And it was going to be, it was going to be a memoir, but more than a memoir.

and it was going to grow out of a piece. I went into New Orleans for Katrina for the New York Times Magazine, and I wrote a big piece about it, and I thought, this is the beginning of a book. And I still think that. While I was in New Orleans for these six months, gathering string for the book, I realized I couldn't really write this book

while my parents were still wandering the earth. That it was just, and it was just like I would be pissing in their drinking water. You know, it was just that, and I didn't know, there was nothing specific. It was just, it felt wrong to write the book that they would then suffer whatever social consequences for. And they're still alive and happy and healthy. So I was sitting there frustrated that I'd done this thing,

moved everybody to New Orleans, and oh no, I maybe don't have a book that's not, and I don't even really want a book because I want my parents to be around. So like, it's going to be a long time, I hope, before this book get written. When I noticed Meredith Whitney talking, I was shocked that Meredith Whitney had made these calls about, I think it was Citibank. I can't remember who it was, but the losses. And I got her, and she had predicted or anticipated the market and the losses they were going to have from their subprime portfolios.

And I thought, that's really strange. She was able to do that. I got her on the phone, and she said something like, you know, this is more interesting than you know. And the person you should talk to if you, beyond me, is this guy, Steve Isman. And I just started, at that point, I just started watching it. And I went and visited Isman. And I had thought, my state of mind up to that point about Wall Street, so this is 2007, I'd written Liar's Poker in 1989, but I'd been more or less, I'd felt like I was more or less persona non-grata on Wall Street because of Liars Poker.

That you made a lot of people angry. I was regarded as a little dangerous. I saw friends on Wall Street, but when I would visit them to have lunch, they wouldn't let me up under their offices. It was like all that. So I thought, I did think, like, how would I ever do this? Like, nobody won't want to talk to me. and then Eisenman wanted to talk to me, and that was fine. But Kyle Pope, editor, was at Portfolio Magazine,

and he called and said, you should write about this. And I thought, well, I can do a little magazine piece. So with that, it wasn't a book. It was like, oh, it'll be a little magazine piece. I started making the calls. I started calling, like, the people around, Morgan Stanley had just announced, like, it had lost $10 billion on what was obviously.

basically a single trade, and it just blew my mind. And it already kind of figured out that someone was on the other side of that, and it was not a smart Wall Street person for the most part, or rather it was a, it wasn't a big institution. It was like one of these oddballs. And I called the, and the Morgan Stanley people, several people from Morgan Stanley, right around the trade, said, I'll love to have a beer with you. I'd love to tell you what's going on. It would be all, be kind of on background. And so I came up to New York, and I did this tour of the institutions. Merrill, City, Morgan Stanley. I found the people of relevant people.

It was all kind of like, I'll tell you, you know it, but you don't know it from me. And in every case, I swear, in every case, it was someone who was a generation younger than me, about, and who said at some point in the conversation, like the reason I was happy to talk to you is Liar's Poker is why I'm in the business. and at some point I thought, Jesus Christ, I created this crisis. Like all the people who were making these stupid bets got into the business because of my book. And I had this thought, but then I had the other thought, which was, oh my God, the story is open to me. It's not closed to me because of Liars Poker. It's open to me because of Liars Poker.

And I don't know, you have this experience. Maybe you do, maybe you don't have this experience. But I require so much access to do the one of the story I want to. I hate to be. I really feel uncomfortable when I'm flying by radar. And when I realize, oh, my God, I'm going to get in, then I thought, I wrote the thing for Kyle, but then I called, actually, while I wrote the things, you were taking me back down memory lane. While I was writing the thing for Kyle, I thought, shit, this is a book.

And I know how to do the book. I know exactly how to do the book. I know what the frame is. I know, I have to find some characters, but I know what this is. and the phrase popped into my mind, The Big Short, and I thought it's too good to stick on the magazine article. So we called it, whatever we called it, end of wall. I don't know what they called it.

And I called the publisher. I said, I got a book. It's going to be called The Big Short. Now, what's even weirder is that I found out later that David Vineyard, who was, I think the CFO at Goldman Sachs, wrote a memo about the Big Short. Called it the Big Short. at roughly the time that I was thinking of the title, he had had the same phrase pop into his mind.

But the minute, I find that the minute I have the concept and I have a basic sense that the characters are available to me, and then I had like a title I thought was just, I love that title. I was just like off and running. And what I've learned since is that the Wall Street that kind of, I felt shut out from, not that I was banging on a lot of doors,

but I was shut out from. If I go and try to write a book, Wall Street in 1992, I'd get shot. But it's changed so much. It's become very fragmented and that there are big parts of Wall Street that actually I will always have access to. There are little pieces that I don't. Like getting into Jane Street is very, very hard.

But there are lots of people who will just talk to me now. I want to ask a follow-up question about Kraft. How do you know when you found the right, character or the perfect story. You said this little thing in that answer that I was latching onto, this idea that there was a moment where it felt like you could almost see the shape of the thing. You had the title. You had the character. You could imagine like the contour of like the rising action, falling action, how to set up drama, how to release drama. Can you take me into your process when you think about like the way that you, Michael, think about realizing that you have

a book that you have the next story, is there a process or formula that holds across projects that you now recognize to be the thing you're looking for in that next great character, next great story? I tell you what, in the early stages, it's always the same. It's the sound and feeling of banging my head

against the wall. I sense there's something on the other side of the wall, and it's worth banging my head on it. But usually this was a little bit of unusual case how quickly it came together. Moneyball was too. But the opposite end of the spectrum was the undoing project, which took eight years to come together. But I'm just thinking like, I got to bang my head against that wall and something will happen. And that takes the form of like just talking to a lot of people. But which the, so let me just tell you the what popped into my head in the big short while I was working just on the magazine piece.

was, oh, so this is an incredibly complicated story. I'm going to have to explain to not just myself, but my mother, what a CDO square is. This is not basically almost impossible, right? It's that complicated. It's that complicated a story. The crisis is, it's just like, the financial engineering was not just a separate, a bug.

It was the feature. Like, it was extremely important that they had found ways to not just make all these bad subprime loans, but to replicate them using derivatives. And so they were, no one knew how many of them were. No one knew where they were. It was, you know, it was possibly infinite losses. So, complicated story. However, it can be reduced to a really simple sentence. There was a giant bet being made in the financial system. Almost all the big financial firms where supposedly the wisdom resides were on the wrong side of the bet.

there was a constellation of mostly oddballs who were on the right side of the bed. Simple. What enabled someone to be on the right side of the bed, which is another way of saying, what were they doing that Wall Street wasn't doing that it should have been doing? Can you go and interview? And this is what I did. This is where it got exciting for me. And when I realized that, oh, there's a pool of people, and you can get to them,

you can get to them through Greg Lipman, who sits in the middle of the whole thing, the Ryan Gosling character, but you can get to all of them. You can get all their names, and you can figure out the ones who really went all in, as opposed to the ones who dabbled, and then you can go interview every single one of those

and determine how they did their thing, and figure out the different ways you got to the right answer, that were interesting ways. Not an interesting way was as Greg Lipman told you to do it, and you did it, and you didn't really understand it. Never mind those people. but that you actually thought about the world in some way that led you to the right answer.

And it turned out to be kind of three ways to get to the right answer, kind of intellectually. And then it was a matter, and there were people in each of the buckets, more than one, picking the character who could either best teach or was most fun to write about

in that bucket. So it was very deliberate. It's one of the, I'm trying to, to think of it as another time I'm engaged in a book now that's the closest thing I've ever written to the big short where I realized that there was a that was a there was a kind of conceptual frame like that and I had a choice of characters like I could have written I could have used him or I could have used him and and that it was really at that point it becomes incredibly fun because it's

almost all upside there's so many ways to do it that you're not you're not at the mercy you know that sweaty that's sweaty feeling if they don't call me back I don't have a you're almost like a you're like a casting director with a script in hand, right? Like, you have the script and here's all these great actors who are coming up to read the sides and read their lines,

and you're like, I am so lucky because I know what the script is, I'm happy with the script, the question is who plays these roles? That's right. That's really cool. Let me just say who, give you an example of what I mean by the buckets.

So Charlie Lettley and Jamie, Jamie May, the Cornwall Capital guys. They got made fun as the Cornhole Capital guys. that the only reason they found this trade, this problem, is they had a view of the world, correct view, that Wall Street was systematically underpricing disaster insurance, out of the money, way out of the money options, on everything. And so that they went looking for just way out of the money options, disaster insurance,

on everything. Like, what's the likelihood the stock market's going to fall by 20%? They think it's like, you know, one, percent. Wall Street thinks it's 0.1 percent, so you can buy the option cheap. And you build this huge portfolio of all these insurance on disasters, and some of the disasters happen. And then they, with that frame of mind, they discover this thing called a credit default swap on subprime mortgage bonds, which is a way out of the money option on something that no one on Wall Street thinks will ever happen. Housing market collapses. And they start to dig and they think, oh, it looks like a nice

bet. Then they start to dig and they go, oh, my God, this isn't a bet, this is almost a certainty. Oh my God, this is criminal. And so that it was a predisposition that led them to the right answer, and each of the characters had that thing. And so it's just different things. So it wasn't, I wasn't casting, I wasn't casting exactly for person, it wasn't personality traits that separated the people from bucket to bucket, or not really. It was, it was a, it was a path to the right answer. And you're right, I was like a casting director in that I had choices, like active, I was conscious of him or him. And really, the truth and the sad truth, would it really boil down to is like, who am I going to have the most fun writing about? Because if I'm having

fun, the readers having fun. I want to get back to crafts in a second, but just to continue the story, the crash happens, the global financial crisis ensues. I loved your book, Boomerang, your follow-up to the big short and the global consequences. of the GFC. And I think some people now are very familiar with the most direct consequences of the crash, the bankruptcies, maybe Dodd-Frank, the regulations. In my work, I focused a lot on how the crash

decimated the construction business and led us ironically to this housing shortage today, which might have surprised people who thought the housing bubble was all about an oversupply of homes, now in many places we're dealing with the exact opposite, an undersupply of housing.

How did the global financial crisis shape the world in ways that you understand because of your reporting, but you think many people today might not understand or might have taken their eye off the ball of because this event, again, happened so long ago. It's a hairball of a question because there's so many ways to go with it. But like, what are the consequences of the financial crisis? Let's just list some rather than conceptualize it too much.

Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin comes out of the financial crisis, according to Satoshi. Maybe he was making it up. But so what is Bitcoin? What is crypto? I see it as an expression of mistrust of institutions, government institutions and banks, which is not that people trusted the government in 2007 or people really trusted banks, but they did more than they do now.

So Elizabeth Horne and Steve Banks, Bannon, those are two political careers on either end of the political spectrum that are supercharged. And Bannon would tell you that, again, it's not as simple as his story, but he would tell you that, and he told me, that he was politicized and radicalized by the financial crisis. Elizabeth Warren, that's more public and everybody knows that. Do you know, by the way, this is just a weird side note, that Steve Bannon is the person who bought the movie rights to Liars Poker? Oh my God. I found this out just by doing this podcast season. I knew he actually, I knew he was involved.

I just didn't know quite how involved. And this time he came clean with me. He'd just come from his job at Goldman Sachs. People forget Ben and worked at Goldman Sachs. And went to Hollywood where he made a bunch of money because he, among other things, was an investor in Seinfeld. Right? And he had this group of production company with two guys,

Norman Twain and Tom Mound. And they bought the rights for Warner Brothers, but it was their deal. And what he told me in, when I was just talking to him, was he was so upset. It was his idea to do it to buy the rights. He was so upset by how bad the script was when it came in that he went into a dark room by himself and he wrote a liar's poker movie. And that he couldn't get anybody to take it seriously because he was just like the guy from Goldman's sex. But Bannon is, I mean, they're these, I mean, I think he thinks, and I think too, you can draw a line

from the financial crisis to Donald Trump. I mean, this is where this feeling that the world is rigged by elites really gets, gets ahead of steam. And it's not wrong. You know, it's like, it's like, oh, wait a minute, these bankers did this and they get to survive. And, And, you know, if I make that kind of mistake, I'm doomed, that we, I have capitalism and they don't. The government's going to be socialistic towards the elites. I mean, that is, it makes your blood boil, right? So that, I think the anger that's in, that's sort of the defining emotion of American political life now, I think that's, you trace it back to that. It's more than just that, but it has, that fueled it.

In finance, you know, that I'm still kind of noodling on like, what the broader financial consequences were of the financial crisis. But one obvious one was, rightly, the banks got made more boring. They got higher capital requirements. You can't do this. You can't do that. You don't get to do all. You're going to contort yourself in all these interesting positions. So the interesting jobs on Wall Street moved out of the banks. They moved into these new things called high frequency trading firms. So where more money has been made than ever was made in a bank, Jane Street, jump trading and Virtue Capital and Citadel and and on and on, and they moved into what we're called private equity firms, but why they're called

that anymore, I don't know, because they're these massive banks. They are, you know, it's Apollo, it's Ares, it's Blackstone with trillions of dollars of corporate loans, and the loans that the banks used to make. So the too big to veil institution may be those right now. So that's a, like, so the risk and prestige got redistributed on Wall Street because of the financial crisis. crisis. Last thing, I mean, Popston, because you mentioned Boomerang. And Boomerang, I make sure it was conceived of as a book. I plotted it as a book. Boomerang was a series of articles for Vanity Fair and just stapled together as a book. And I like the articles, but it was not conceived of as a book. And one of the things that just runs right through the reporting there, but maybe actually

didn't find its way under the surface of the page as much as it should have, is that across the world, American credibility took a hit. It was no question that we were the originators of, if not the actual demise of a lot of these places, the ideas behind, that led them to their demise. It was, it was, they thought we were good with money. And now that, and it's like, no, actually. And we thought we could trust them. And no, actually, we can't. And I think that's, that's, you know, when someone comes and writes the story of the decline of the American Empire, I mean, I think They'll look at that. It'll be a small piece of the story, but it's a piece of the story. Like, our credibility took a huge hit.

I think it's a compelling case that the global financial crisis never ended. I mean, you mentioned Trump. You mentioned cryptocurrency. You mentioned declining faith in institutions. America's declining role in the global stage. I mean, these are all tributaries entering the Delta of 2025. These are the most active stories in the world. And I think you were right that at the very least, the headwaters for a lot of those. started in 2007, 2009. So I wonder if you sense, I have two questions for you that actually as I was coming over here to talk to you,

I actually want to remind myself to ask you and put a pin in abundance because I want you before, I'm going to ask you a question on your own podcast about abundance. I want you to explain it to me. But this, since you covered, you did a lot of writing about COVID, and you said it's a chance to think about like,

what happened. We know we didn't perform very well there either. isn't it, do you find it as odd as I do, that there seems to be some pretty decent lessons to have been learned from the financial crisis and from COVID, and that clearly the society has not learned them. So from the financial crisis, I mean, I hate to say it because it makes everybody angry, but the importance of having an independent federal reserve and a strong federal government with a strong balance sheet, I mean, that was the reason you could put the fire out was you had those firefighting institutions. And we are so playing right now with like

dismantling them. And so the mechanism for stopping the next financial, I mean, there's going to be another financial crisis. There always is, right? So when that happens, whatever it is that causes it, the mechanism for dealing with it has been so weakened. And you would have thought that in a rational society, that people would look at what happened to say, okay, we're pissed that, the government bail out the bankers. But we have to acknowledge it's better that we didn't have a great depression. And so at the very least,

these institutions, you know, let's at least keep those, you know, functioning. But that's not where we are in our head. Just like we're not in our head about COVID, it's like what worked and what didn't. I mean, I think it's like, the next thing that comes along,

if you can't shut schools for a few weeks, it's going to result in many, many, many more deaths than, than preventable deaths. But I don't think you can shut schools. I mean, it's, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe in some states the lesson has been learned.

But I think most people come away from it saying, you don't lock anything down. That was a travesty that they locked anything down. I think the deepest irony with COVID is that it's very hard to look around the U.S. and look around the world and point to one behavioral intervention that clearly worked everywhere. Right.

Where can you say that closing the schools clearly worked everywhere for months and months? Eventually parents get angry, eventually kids need to go back to school. Where can you say that lockdowns for months and months truly worked? You can say it worked in some places, but in other places, there's an exception.

The one thing that clearly worked everywhere were the vaccines. Yes. You could take the vaccine in Mississippi. You could take the vaccine in Moldova. You could take the vaccine in some other M country. I can't, Mongolia, just to be alliterative, It worked everywhere.

It's the same molecular effect in the body. And the Trump administration, to its enormous credit, had this program, Operation Warp Speed, that took the land speed record for vaccine development from nine, ten years to ten months. It was a miracle. A miracle. I'm glad we said it at the same time.

What is the legacy of Operation Warp Speed today? RFK Jr., the head of Health and Human Services, under Donald Trump 2.0, is trying to ban synthetic MRNA medicine from the entire medical apparatus. No one in the Republican Party talks about Operation Warp Speed. Too few people, I think, in the Democratic Party, talk about Operation Warps Speed because they don't want to give Donald Trump credit for doing anything. But in this case, something extraordinary was accomplished.

I think, to your point, the same way that a rational country would have a kind of programmatic response to financial crises that was learned from 2007, a rational country would look at Operation Warp Speed and say, how do we build an OWS for everything? What can we Operation Warp Speedify that we haven't done so already? Where's the OWS for Alzheimer's and for Parkinson's and for pancreatic cancer and for SSRIs? God knows, there's so many needs and there's no conversation. And ironically, the president who's responsible for this, who, by the way, we just learned a week ago, actually got his COVID booster, wants to preside over.

over an administration that is trying to gut America's trust in all vaccines, specifically the COVID vaccine, and MRNA science entirely. It's pretty unbelievable. And if it existed in some kind of, you know, Shakespearean drama or movie, it would be almost too on the nose to have the details be what they are, but the details are what they are. So that's my, that's my reaction. I think it's crazy that we didn't look at one of the great public policy successes of the last 70, 100 years in American history and say, God, how do we replicate this a thousand

times over? We didn't. We've basically forgotten it. No one talks about it anymore, except for me every fifth podcast or so. So we share a bewilderment at the country's ability to learn the correct lesson. Yes, you're more familiar with the right way to be bewildered by the aftermath of the GFC, and I'm more familiar with my bewilderment with COVID. I want to talk a little bit about extending the lessons that you took from the Big Short and following the housing bubble. You know, the beats of this housing bubble story, speculation, a sudden increase in a certain kind of investment. A, we were talking to this a few minutes ago, financial opacity and interest in disguising investments. A lot of that applies to the artificial intelligence story right now.

I mean, private companies are spending more on AI, really, than any group of private companies have spent on any projects in human history. But we do know how much they're spending, they tell us. They do. They report a number, whether that number is the full picture, I think, is a secondary question. But let's assume that they're telling us what they're spending. And so there's a little bit of clarity there. I guess I'm just interested to get your mind on what's going on in AI right now.

Are you writing the AI book? Or if not, how are you following this story? No, I want to quote Amos Tversky, one of my subjects. I'm far less interested in artificial intelligence than I am in natural stupidity. I'm interested. It's not that I'm not interested. It's just like everybody's interested, so why bother? You know, I mean, I have, I guess it's funny, the financial crisis is an example where I did bother when everybody was interested. And Trump's Washington is something that everybody's interested in I have bothered. I just don't feel I have much to add.

And I have, so everything I say, what is it, happy Gilmore when the guy got up and gave us, he said before I speaking, everybody in here, everybody in here is stupider for having listened to you. There's a risk of this. So there's a risk that everybody will be just a little stupor for what I'm about to say. The first thing that I just suspicious of is that any of this investment will be justified by the financial returns. All that I just, you know, it's like the internet

that it was really obviously socially disruptive. It was a big deal. AI is a big deal. But it doesn't mean necessarily that you're going to make a lot of money from it. Maybe a few people will. But it's just like, it feels kind of indiscriminate. And nobody has a very persuasive story

to tell about how the money is going to be made. I just don't, which they do, where they're very persuasive. about when you talk to the big companies that are developing the technology. One, they're very persuasive that it's going to eliminate a lot of jobs. And they don't have an answer to the question, like, okay, what happens in this already very angry society when you eliminate 25 million, you know, like ordinary jobs held by ordinary people. I mean, it's going to explode. That's not our problem, is that kind of thing.

And so that, that's a thing that interests me. It's like, nobody's planning for like what the social consequences of this are. They're all thinking it's like, it's this financial bonanza, when what it's going to be is socially really disruptive. And I don't hear any real plan. You're not going to resettle all those people into higher value jobs. That's not going to happen. So that's a second thing. The third thing is I'm just a little suspicious of the intelligence itself. I don't feel, I mean, this is, I may really sound stupid in five years.

I don't feel threatened by it. Like it only knows, it could not write the, big short the moment before I wrote the big short because it would never have heard of Michael Barry or Steve Eisman or Charlie or Jamie or Greg Lipman. It wouldn't have had any of the information. Now, after I wrote it, it might be able to do something that undermine my ability to sell my book, but it's not going out in the world and finding new things in the way that I do when I write something. And I only write something when I, now if I were just like an appendix, writer, I don't know, maybe that would be different, but it does feel limited to me.

And it feels useful for some things, but feels very limited. So if I'm not a genius, if I don't feel threatened by it, and I'm right not to feel threatened by it, that's like there are limits here that they're not acknowledging. They're basically very bluntly saying it's going to replace you. And I just don't believe that. I just don't believe it. I don't see how. It won't. It won't replace you.

And that's for many reasons. But one of them is that there's something that nonfiction journalists, especially nonfiction journalists who write original books and tell original stories, have to make a core part of their job that is currently a core weakness of generative intelligence, generative AI, which is having the agency to ask the right first questions. Right. Genitive AI is very good at answering questions. If you ask it, give me a 15,000 word history of the 1987 stock market crash so that I can apply its lessons to the next crash in the 2020s. It'll do a really good job writing you a history of 1987. But you had to think of that question in order to make the connection to the 2020s. And it seems to me like your job, and we have, you know, I'm a nonfiction journalist too, but we have very different remits, I think.

Your job is to begin from this place of absolute, like, you know, sorry if I'm misconstruing, ignorance. Yes. You have no idea what your next protagonist is going to be. You've no idea what your next story is going to be. There's no formula that says, oh, the guy who just wrote about left tackles is next going to take on credit default swaps. Like there's just no formula on the planet that says that's the right way to go from nonfiction project, nonfiction project. So it emanates entirely from within you. You begin from ignorance.

Your job is asking good first questions. And this is the thing that AI is worse at doing. AI is a specialist. It's sitting in the genie chair and taking incoming prompts from people who have the agency to ask the first question. So in a way, I think you are right to fear the social dislocation of millions of jobs that might be vulnerable to this kind of technology. And you are right that this technology does not threaten the you or the many might

Michael Lewis's of the future, they'll be writing nonfiction books, because I think in many ways their jobs are most insusceptible to this kind of technological intelligence. With the exception of really talented conspiracy theorists. With the exception to the talent conspiracy theorists. We'll see if we keep that one. All right. So I want to keep you talking for just one more minute, because I don't want to forget this. I want you to explain the origin of your abundance book. I just want you to explain it to me. Like where this comes from, it's been obviously a huge hit. I started to read it and I decided I wanted, and I knew I was going to be talking to you. I thought, I'll just have him

explain it to me. Could you just give me the, like, you're talking to your mom explanation, what this is? Sure. I'll tell you first where it came from. Speaking of COVID, I was standing in line in Washington, D.C. to get a COVID test or a box of COVID test from family in 2020. And COVID tests were being rationed at that time. And so we had to queue up. And this queue was going around the corner of Mount Pleasant outside of the local library. And as I'm shivering there, I just got really mad. I was like, we are now multiple years into this pandemic and we are rationing tests. How can we not produce enough tests for the population of the richest country in the world? And as I was thinking about the fact that there was a scarcity

of tests, I got thinking more about the problem of scarcity during the pandemic, that there was a scarcity of medical equipment. There was a scarcity of masks, which got Anthony Fauci to say that people shouldn't wear masks. They didn't do anything. And that was partly borne out of the fact we worried about it running out. There was a scarcity of vaccines in the early innings of there being rolled out. And I just thought, God, this, and of course, there was the scarcity of actual stuff. If you were trying to order a couch or a chair in the middle of, say, 2021 when the supply chains are being snarled. I just thought the whole experience of this pandemic just feels like one scarcity after another. And as I got thinking about the rest of my work and the rest of my columns for the

Atlantic, I thought, you know, scarcity isn't just the story of the pandemic. It's the story of the American century. Right now, one of the most important macroeconomic trends is the shortage of housing in the places where Americans most want to live in California, in on the coasts, in many in many places, home prices were surging at that time in practically every single metro. And then it wasn't just a shortage of housing. It was a shortage of clean energy. I care a lot about the environment. I care a lot about climate change. And it was astonishing to me that states like California and Massachusetts were falling so far behind states like Texas, where the political leaders don't really give a shit about climate change, but Texas was building all the solar and wind

and California and Massachusetts weren't. So they would scare shitty and clean energy. I just thought, you know, what's the antidote to what seems like a century of scarcity, punctuated by a crisis defined by scarcity, it's an abundance agenda. And sort of from that little seed, I tried to grow this idea of how can abundance heal what is hurting us. And so that was the origin of the book, but it doesn't explain why the book caught on the way it did. So, I mean, just to take you, to fill out the story, I suppose, Ezra was writing about his own ideas about supply-side liberalism, moving the future of liberalism from caring just about demand, taxing and spending to supply what we actually build.

And so when we realized that we were basically going to be writing the same book around the same time, we figured that it would be easier on our lives and on our wives' lives for us to co-write the book rather than race each other to the finish line. So that was the theory. But then let's fast forward to 2025. We write the book, writing a book, I think it's a total pain in the ass. I'm glad we did it, but God, it's hard to write a book.

We wrote the book. it comes out, and it comes out in a really specific period where the brand of the Democratic Party bottoms out. And Democrats have never as a brand, as a party, been less popular, at least according to this Gallup time series that goes back many decades. And so this book that we originally, that we wrote as an investigation of things that are true

about the material sectors of America that we care about the most. Why aren't there more houses and how do we build them? Why isn't there more clean energy and how do we build it? why doesn't government work well and how do we make it work better? Why is it so hard to come up with scientific breakthroughs in medicine and why are scientific breakthroughs in many cases and by some analyses becoming rarer and more expensive? Those are the core questions we were trying to answer and those aren't inherently political questions. But the book landed in an environment in 2025

where there was a vacuum of self-identification for the Democratic Party. What does the Democratic Party stand for? And what in particular, I suppose you could say, does the center left the Democratic Party stand for, right? The Bernie Wing has known for years, decades, you could say, what it stands for. What does the center left stand for? And so the book provided, I think, for a lot of people, this opportunity to self-define what the future of center-left liberalism is about. It's about the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and getting back to those basics as a party, housing, energy, affordability, good governance, and scientific breakthroughs that make our lives better and healthier and longer. That's what politics should be about. That's what policy should be about.

And let's stop with this bullshit over authoritarianism and worrying about sort of whose identity is better and worse. Let's get back to the fundamental basics, the lobby of Maslow's hierarchy. Let's get back there. And I think that's part of what's made the message appealing at a time when there's a certain group of people who are looking for that kind of self-definition. That would be, I probably wouldn't go on that monologuegy to a parent or grandparent, but that's

my effort to do so. It was extremely useful, and I have lots of follow-up questions and I'll just keep them to myself because I don't want to ruin your podcast by talking about you the whole time. We'll save a follow-up question for email. I do, I want to end on Kraft, and we can talk back and forth to each other about craft.

I mean, so 10 years ago, the Big Short comes out as a movie, awesome movie, not the first movie or only movie that has been made of your work. You've got the blind side, you've got Moneyball. You know, my sister works it for Netflix. So I understand at a really high level abstraction just how different movies are from writing. And I guess I would summarize that difference as being writing is sort of intensely and necessarily solitary. And movies are not solitary at all. They are. They're team sports.

They're the ultimate team sport. Do you like turning your books in the movies? What do you like about it? So I don't do it. You know, I sell the book. I sold everything to the movies. My cupboard is empty. They've magazine pieces, books.

I've sold more things to the movies. And for the longest time, I just assumed that they just gave me money for free. They would never make any of my books. And if you told me they were going to make Moneyball and the big short into movies, I would have said that's not going to happen, especially the big short. But even Moneyball. It's a little wonky in places. And so you're asking me, do I like doing it, but I don't do anything?

You don't do it. No, what happens is it's really, this transaction occurs, and it's a pretty simple transaction. First, it's money for the book. And at that point, I think it's theirs. It's theirs to break it, remake it. And if it's bad, it's their problem. if it's great, they get credit for it. And I tell them that whoever they are,

it's usually a director, or a writer. Like, it's yours. I'm not going to complain. You're not going to hear a peep from me, no matter what you do. And they refuse to believe that I feel that genuine detachment. So they, and they,

it is absolutely true that Hollywood would way prefer for authors to be dead. Because what they have in the back of their mind is this guy is, going to cause me trouble at some point. And he's going to complain, I ruined his work of art, whatever it is. And so they feel like they need to keep you close. They can't, they just don't believe, they don't just go do it. So a social relationship in each case developed, very close ones with the directors, where, and it was based on, it starts with them pretending to be interested in what I

have to say, because they feel they need to do that. And me, intending to believe that they're actually interested. When we, I mean, at some level, everybody knows that these conversations are pointless. But out of that, so this is where it gets fun. Out of that, some friendships developed. Like, it's not true, you can't build a friendship on a lie. It starts with a lie.

And then what does happen is I become useful, and this has been increasingly so, useful to them in the selling of the movie. So I get roped back in for, for the Oscars and the junkets and all that stuff. And that's a gas. I mean, my God, it's just so much fun. Because it's not really your thing,

so you don't take any of it personally. It's like if somebody doesn't like it. I mean, I found this when I was watching The Blind Side. The first time I ever saw anything of mine on the screen, it was a screening of the Blind Side before the movie was released for charity. It was for Goodwill. And the movie company allowed the thing to be screens,

so the Goodwill could raise some money, and I chipped in by coming. My job, it was really foolish in retrospect, was to watch the movie for the first time and get up and talk about my feelings about it right after. And I'd seen nothing, like nothing. They could have done anything. And midway through, I leaned over Tabitha to my wife,

and I said, I don't know if I like this. And she said, don't say that. Like, just shut up. Like, whatever you say, whatever you think. And I sat and I thought, but there was something really weird going on because I actually cried during the movie and I laughed a lot. And I thought, when have I done? How often am I doing that into movies?

Not really often. So I could see that it worked and it did what it was supposed to do. And I realized what I was doing is I watched it. And then after this, I've never done it since. I was taking credit for everything I thought worked. And I was blaming them for everything that. that I thought didn't. And once I realized that, I just stopped.

I just stopped judging, and I just let the things happen. And I've been, think about how lucky I've been. I mean, these three movies, all Oscar nominated, Sandra Bullock won the best actress. McKay got a, you know, it's just like, it could have fallen into such worse hands, all of them. And it's just, I, history is littered with writers who think that the movies ruin their books.

And in every case... Well, some of them are right. I mean... Some are right. You're one of my favorite writers. So is Stephen King. The batting average for Stephen King movie and like short story adaptations is very uneven.

Like Shawshank, wonderful, the shining, incredible. There's a lot of stuff made of Stephen King movies. He has so many plate appearances that he is just going to... He's going to get the... he's going to get the average result. He's got too many play. I have three play appearances. And in each case, I got extra base hits.

You're like Kirk Gibson, right. Comes up to the plate, it hits an important home run. Once or twice and it all worked out. Eventually, it's not going to work. Something's going to happen because eventually, these things are complicated to pull off. If other ones happen, eventually something is going to get made that's not good. But I would say the other thing is that the combination of,

so I don't think what is the movie when I'm going to, going and writing a book. I never, I would, I, in fact, my personal experience has been the things that are sort of the least likely to become movies end up becoming movies. So the dumbest thing I could do is look for a movie, uh, that my job is to do a really good book. And if the book is great, you know, maybe it speaks to some person who wants to break it and turn it into a movie. I think, but I think the one thing that the books have going from that Stephen King's don't, is that Stephen King's books, you can see the movie in the books.

They're much more just pure narrative. And so mine are hard enough that if anybody's going to bother to make them, they have to really care about something. They aren't doing it gratuitously because, oh, it's a Stephen King, you might just make the movie because it's a Stephen King book.

And how wrong can you go? With these stories, you could go very, very wrong, So it's taken in each case, someone with kind of a passion for the thing, and that ends up taking them to places that they might not otherwise get. I think that's the only thing I can, only thing close to a secret to the movies I can find is that. It's like it's tracking people who just, they're driven by something. Two last questions. You write books.

You make podcasts. You've written columns and magazine features. You've done the Hollywood thing, which includes everything from those early meetings with the director's screenwriter to the Oscar circuit. What is your peak experience, like as a maker of nonfiction media in every possible format? When are you in the highest possible state of flow? When I'm four chapters into a book and I know how it all goes. You know, and I, and the narrative is, the train is on the tracks and I'm all by myself. And I have a few months left, four or five months left.

and I don't have any interruption. And it's just, I know it, you know, for me, obviously, some people aren't going to like it. But it's singing for me. I can kind of hear that. I get so excited. I mean, I get so excited that I don't need anything, I don't need anything in the world.

I don't need companionship. I don't need food and exercise and sleep. That's it. Nothing else. No TV, no nothing. I get such pleasure from that moment. Now, there's a lot of kind of trouble getting to that moment, but it's when I know I have the material in the bag, and it's a big, long narrative.

So, easily, there's nothing close. There's nothing close. Do you find that other nonfiction writers feel the same way? Or do most writers, you know, have a tortured relationship with the actual writing of the book, where they do it, maybe they do it very well and they do it very often, but they find the actual writing of the book to be a kind of self-prescribed torture? Almost all the writers I know, including very close friends, kind of came up in life as writers. Like, they were identified. In their minds, they were writers pretty young. And they were

indoctrinated by a system that teaches you that writing is supposed to be miserable. It's supposed to be torture. There's an agony of the artist kind of thing. That it's supposed to be really hard. And if it's not, hard is the wrong word. It's supposed to be painful kind of thing. And so I think it's, I think most of the rights I know regarded as an embarrassing admission to say, oh, no, this was easy. I love this. That's a sign that they're shallow. They're not suffering enough.

How could it be art if they're not suffering? and I because I came to it late and all by myself without a whole lot of encouragement I've I'd ever had that what I had instead was I'm laughing at the letter I'm writing to my mother home from London and it's going on and on and it's starting to look like something you could publish and and and it gave me what drew me to it was the pleasure of it so I didn't learn that I was supposed to suffer and and I think that I think that helps me. I think it helps me because I think when you think you're suffering, even if you're not, but if you're telling yourself you're suffering, you kind of inflict the pain on the reader one way

the other. It's, it's no, you're, you're, you're angry, you know? I don't feel that way. I feel like when I get, it isn't that there isn't a lot of hard work or that there isn't a lot of trouble getting to the point. But when I have a point, when I'm at a point where I have the story and I'm writing it, I am in such a state of pleasure that I just want the reader to feel that pleasure. And I think that's a benefit. And I haven't, I don't, I can't say I have, I have really great writers who are close friends. I've never heard any of them talk about it that way. I think the closest might be, there's one exception. I don't know what Dave Eggers would say. I think Dave Eggers feels the same way. I think he feels the same way. But I don't know that. I've never asked him

the question. There's certainly a lot of joy in his writing. I mean, for all of the sadness in a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, which I think is Eggers' first book, there's no way the person writing that book didn't love writing it. There's a joy that emanates from the book that's like, I kind of felt that way about when I read Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Shavin, like, there's no way that Michael Schaven, who I don't know at all, there's no way he had a bad time writing that book is how I feel about someone I don't know. That's true. That's just such a That's not a nonfiction writer, though. That's a novel. Last question. I want to ask you about your legacy and the degree to which you think about

it at all. You mentioned the funny experience of interviewing investors as you were beginning to report out the big short and realizing that they all got into this business because they read and loved liars poker, in which case you, I think, a little bit self-deprecatingly said that you felt somewhat responsible for the global financial crisis, which obviously I don't think anyone is exactly pinning on your shoulders. But I think about this with the legacy of Moneyball as well. You didn't invent the concept of analytics in sports. You wrote about it.

You popularized it and you put a word to it. But I'm very interested in the fact that Moneyball has been seen as making baseball more boring, right? Three true outcomes. Everything is a walk and strikeout and home run. And I wrote a piece that I was really proud of a few years ago. called the, I think it was called something like the dark side of money ball and everything. They talked about how the, it had nothing to do with my disliking you. It was basically about how the analytics revolution hadn't just come for baseball.

It had obviously come for basketball with what is now called Mori ball, the three-point revolution. I think to a certain extent it's come for football. The last five years have sequentially been the year of the shortest average completed pass in NFL history. The game has gotten, the passing game has gotten much shorter. You see this in Hollywood, the rise of sequels adaptations in reboots, you see it in television. These entertainment companies have access to way more analytics than they ever have before. And it's my little pet theory that the smarter the entertainment companies becomes, sometimes the dumber the content becomes, because they hold up a mirror to audience preferences.

And the reflection in the mirror just says make something just like the last thing that you made. People love familiarity. And so that's not to ask you to respond to this particular theory, but it is to say that the concept of moneyball of analytics and sports and entertainment has has become absolutely huge. It dominates a lot of culture. And I wonder, you know, your books have a way of seizing on these sort of these seismic cultural trends read at an inflection point in their history.

I wonder how you think about the legacy of your books years after they're published. Do you think about it or to a certain extent is it like, you know, pushing a bottle out into the ocean and saying, I hope someone gets the message, but it's not my bottle anymore. it's more of that. In fact, the message in the bottle is that's a metaphor that often occurs to me. I don't think I don't think I have any real responsibility to it once the book is written. I don't, I mean, books obviously come up. You know, I don't, the kid doesn't walk away from them entirely.

I never reread them. I, I just, so I don't, I just don't think of it this way. I guess it's because I'm still, you know, like working. So I'm not reflecting on any, I'm not thinking about reflecting on a career. It is, I got to say, it is kind of great that when my child starts her Wall Street job, that someone hands her liars poker to say, if you want to understand Wall Street, read this book without having any idea, she's my child. That is just, I just love that.

I love, and I love the way, when the books have real effects, it's just kind of fun. Even when, but when Moneyball came out, it was incredibly controversial. I mean, you wouldn't have maybe seen the controversy, but, like, I could not turn on a baseball game without someone saying something rude about the book or me or Joe Morgan especially was just going on about it constantly. The old time baseball people hated it, and it threatened their jobs. So I love that. I love it when people get all worked up. that's how you know the book's alive. Like, it's worth people getting angry about.

So I like that part of it. The moneyballification of everything would have happened without the book. Like, this was inevitable. I would say, I just want to respond to the thing he was saying about sports. It is true that Moneyball made baseball more boring. That approach, because basically, as it turns out, the smart way to play baseball is to move as little as possible. It's like, don't swim.

don't steal bases, position the infielers so that everybody catches the balls hit right to them. It's like one thing after, don't bunt, all the rest. And so it becomes less kinetic. That just so happens to be a deep truth about baseball. And baseball needs to respond to that by doing things like making the bases bigger and not letting the position infielders and so on so forth. Someone's asked me, how would I fix baseball? And I said, put a live lion on the field.

that if you had a lion that was actually hungry, and that that would start to get the, you wouldn't get the full excitement of an NFL game, but you'd get some of that thrill of like someone might die. And people would have to run for all sorts of other reasons than the ball being hit. But I don't think it's really true that analytics has made football or basketball more boring.

I think basketball. I don't think so. And if you go back to really the original use of football, I mean, going forth and fourth down, the passing game, as opposed to the three yards in a cloud of dust, this is an analytics. So it is true that right now, the passing game is getting shorter, but even that game is much more fun to watch than just handing the ball off to the running back. So I think that it's case by case whether an analytic, the more data-driven sort of efficiency-oriented approach makes things more fun or less fun. makes it less fun in the entertainment industry. But it's almost like a poor use of analytics.

It's not clear to me the entertainment industry has gotten smarter. I don't know. I'd love to see if people are actually making more money. I doubt it. So I just don't know. So the short answer is I don't really think, oh, like I have a legacy. I don't think about that way. I think I put messages in the bottle, and I think it's really cool

when someone in some distant land gets the bottle, opens it, and reads it. Well, I have to disagree with you on the last point, which is that you don't have a legacy. You do have a legacy, and the legacy is Lewis Ball, the new professional game being released by Major League Baseball in 2027,

in which a lion or tiger is released in the middle of the game in the six or seventh inning. No one knows exactly when the lion or tiger is coming out, but it has to be released. It has to be released at some point during the game, and then we just let the players fend for themselves. What if each manager, each manager is given a choice,

lion or tiger, and the choice when to release it and can leave it on the field a couple of innings? Yeah, it's like, Shohei Otani, we know you can pitch, we know you can hit. Can you outrun a tiger? This is the next stage that baseball has to move into in order to get back its audience. But you have a bat.

You have a bat. He does. He does. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you can even store certain equipment like under the larger bases that you can open up and then fend off the lines and tigers. All right, next time I have you in the podcast, we'll work out Lewis Ball. We'll trademark it.

We'll make a bunch of money that way. Michael Lewis, thank you so much. This is a blast. Thanks for having me, Derek. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Beraldi, and we are back to our twice-a-week schedule. We'll talk to you soon.