The Tim Ferriss Show - #427: Michael Lewis — Inside the Mind of the Iconic Writer

Episode Date: May 1, 2020

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” — Amos TverskyMichael Lewis is the best-selling author of many books, including Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. Both of his books about sports became movies nominated for Academy Awards, as did The Big Short, his book about the 2008 financial crisis. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.His critically acclaimed podcast, Against The Rules, returns with season two on Tuesday, May 5. Last season, Michael explored the attack on referees in sports, financial markets, newsrooms, courts of law, and the art world.This time around, Michael focuses on coaches: why the role of coach has expanded beyond sports in American life and why everyone seems to love coaches. Each episode examines a different kind of coach. From money coaches and voice coaches to college coaches and even the one who changed his own life, Michael delves deep inside the vast world of the coach. Can a good coach level the playing field? What is the secret to effective coaching? What role do coaches have in creating unfairness? Can everyone be coached or are some people beyond help?Please enjoy! ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests.For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by ReadWise. ReadWise is one of the cooler things I've found in the last year or two,

sent to me by one of my best friends. It is an app that helps you remember significantly more of what you read. In fact, on average, their users report remembering 84% more of what they've read and highlighted. And it can take a few different forms. You can sign up for the service, that's readwise.io forward slash Tim and get a daily email, which I do. So I've got in front of me one example with highlights from Fooled by Randomness, Sapiens, Priceless, and a bunch of other books. And it has a bunch of advanced features on top of that. But we've all had the

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out. Go to UCAN.co and use promo TIM for 25% off and free shipping. That is US only on your first order. And when in doubt, just try the chocolate anytime energy bar. It is simply fantastic. Youcan.co, promo code TIM. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole

food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types. My guest today is someone I have wanted to have a long conversation with for decades. In fact, Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of many books and several of my favorite books, including Liar's Poker,

Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. Both of his books about sports became movies, excellent movies, nominated for Academy Awards, as did The Big Short, his book about the 2008 financial crisis. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and three children. His critically acclaimed podcast, Against the Rules, returns with season two on Tuesday, May 5th, 2020. Last season, Michael explored the attack on referees of all different types in sports, financial markets, newsrooms, courts of law, and the art world. This time around, Michael focuses on coaches, why the role of coach has expanded beyond sports in American life, and why everyone seems to love coaches. Each episode

examines a different kind of coach. I loved episode three on the inner coach, but I'm cheating and got a sneak peek. From money coaches and voice coaches to college coaches and even the one who changed his own life, Michael delves deep inside the vast world of the coach. I really enjoyed these episodes and I highly recommend that you check out Against the Rules. And he tackles questions such as, can a good coach level the playing field? What is the secret to effective coaching? What role do coaches have in creating unfairness? Can everyone be coached or are some people beyond help?

So check it out, Against the Rules, new season right now, I recommend. And to this conversation, I had a blast. I had so much fun in this conversation. We cover a lot of ground, creative process, formative experiences, his mentors and coaches. We go all over the place. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with none other than Michael Lewis. Michael, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. And I have a secret to confess.

It's not much of a secret, but it's some backstory that makes me smile. And that is, when I was just out of college, this is 2000. I had moved to the Bay Area for my first job, this entry level stuck in the middle of a fire exit desk job. And I had volunteered at an organization called the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, S-Vase. I don't know if it even exists anymore. And I finally got myself the ability to recruit speakers for an event. And I reached out to you. This was in 2000 through the Princeton Alumni Network. And you very, very kindly declined. But it was so well delivered. It was so diplomatic that it always stuck with me. And I've wanted to have a conversation for 20 years now. And so I thought I would just share that and thank you for being so kind

to someone who really had very little to offer at the time. Well, you know, you were in the majority. I tend to kind of hide. And to the extent I can hide, I do hide. But I think probably with time I've become a little bit more abrupt in explaining to people that I just don't want to do it. So I'm glad you caught me at a sweet-natured moment of my career. Well, I thought we could start very early in your career, although this may predate your writing career by a little bit, and to discuss one of your lesser known pieces of writing. And this is a,

let's call it a book review of Johnny Tremaine. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Could you please tell this story? So this is very funny you bring this up because just two days ago, I called my mother and asked her if I could interview her for my podcast. And she said, no, she's no interest in it. And I said, I just want to ask you about what you remember about all the trouble I got into when I was kind of sixth grade through 10th grade. And she said, I don't remember anything.

And I said, oh, come on, you remember me almost getting thrown out of school. And she says, oh, is that the time when you copied the back of the book and handed it in as your own work? And she remembered that. And so what had happened was we were, I was, I must've been in the seventh grade, possibly eighth. And we were given the assignment of writing a book review of Johnny Tremaine. And I remember taking it home and looking at the back of the book and thinking, there's an excellent review just here on the back of the book, summarizes it exactly as it is, saved me the trouble of reading it. And so I just copied it out and I handed it in. And I swear to you, I know it's going to be very

hard for you to believe this, but I swear to you, I had no sense I was doing anything wrong. I thought I was doing something that was kind of efficient, that the teacher would be very happy to have such a cleanly written thing, that it saved me all kinds of trouble so I could go out in the front yard and play basketball and baseball, and that nobody would mind. And it comes back to me with an A, or I can still remember, it was in red, and then in red ink, see me. And I went to see the teacher, and the teacher said, where'd you get this? And I said, I got it off the back of the book. And he said, that's plagiarism. And I said, what's, and I swear to you, this is true. I said,

what's plagiarism? I had no native sense that this was some sort of theft. And he was so outraged, he went to the principal. And the principal, the middle school principal, was so outraged, he actually threw me out of the Isidore Newman School, K-12 school that my parents had gone to, my grandparents had gone to. I mean, it was really shocking. And only with the intervention of the headmaster was I allowed to stay in school. And my punishment, this is actually where it gets even better. My punishment was to go home and write 300 times, I will not plagiarize, copying something that the teacher had given me. So that was the, I suppose the punchline to it all is that piece of writing was the first thing I ever handed in that ever got any particular attention.

I got through the eighth grade without anybody noticing that I could write one thing or another. And it wasn't until I copied the back of a book and handed it in as my own that anybody really noticed that I could write. Well, let's talk a little bit more about noticing your writing, evaluating your writing. If we flash forward to Princeton undergrad, and your interactions, maybe at the tail end of that period of time with your thesis advisors, in the process of doing homework for this conversation, I found, and I don't know if this is an exact transcription, you can't always rely on the internet, but that you asked him, what do you think of the writing and the thesis? This is for your senior

thesis. And he said, never try to make a living at it. So could you, is that true? And if so, can you perhaps flesh that out a little bit for us? It's entirely true. So as you know, as a Princetonian, the senior thesis is a really big deal. Huge deal. And mostly not appreciated by anybody else who went to any other kind of college because they think of it, oh, it's a paper. It's not a paper. It's a book.

And you've got to essentially write a book. It's a short book, but it's a 40,000 or 50,000-word book. It's a short book, but it's a 40 or 50,000 word book. And to this day, I have a recurring nightmare that it's May or April, and I forgot I was supposed to write a senior thesis. Up to that point in my life, I had no particular sense of myself as a writer. I did not write for any school newspapers at any point in my career. I did not study literature. I wasn't in the English department of the creative writing program. Nothing like that.

But when I started working on this thesis, I became fully absorbed. I mean, just passionate about it. And I really cared what I was saying and how I said it. What was the subject matter? Sorry to interrupt. The subject matter was in the art history department, for instance, and the subject matter was the way the Italian sculptor Donatello had used classical sources, which sounds arcane, but it's actually getting at the question of what the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance, thought it was doing. Because it was very early creatively in the Renaissance, where they were starting to actually refer back to Greek and Roman precedent.

A lot of things had been dug up, and the artists were noticing it. And the question was, were they just admiring it technically, or were they self-consciously recreating antiquity? And Donatello was a really interesting way to do it, and there were interesting resources, new resources available to study the question. There was a professor at Columbia who had just compiled, it was just on microfiche in Manhattan, something called the Census of Antique Work Known to Renaissance Artists. So you could sort of recreate what Donatello had seen. And then you could see how he had used it in his various works. So anyway, for me, I was absorbed.

It was actually, from the point of view even of the art historians at Princeton, a pretty original project. And I handed it in, and then I went to defend it. And I remember going through the defense and waiting for the professor. His name was William Childs, William A.P. Childs IV. He was a classicist, and he was a fabulous professor. I loved him. But I kept waiting for him to say, Michael, this thing is just beautifully written.

And he wouldn't say it. And so finally I said, it was the biggest mistake, I said, what did you think of the writing? And he said, put it this way, never try to make a living at it. And I was undeterred by that. I don't know why, but he didn't make me feel like, oh, I really shouldn't be doing that. But it was the first moment where I thought, I now know what I'd like to do for a living if I could. And I misconstrued it a bit. I thought what I wanted to be was an art historian and I wrote books about art history. He persuaded me that there would be no jobs in art history and I should go find something else to do with my life. And so that left me with, well, I'll write

books. How do you do that? But that's just as I'm walking out the door of Princeton without any particular preparation for the career. When did you graduate? 1982. 1982. All right. So we're going to talk about 1989 in a little bit. But I wanted to ask you about your formation as a writer or a thinker who puts prose down on paper, at least, and how you developed the ability to write without studying it directly. I've read that your father was an expert storyteller, or at least inveterate storyteller. I don't know if that had any impact, so I don't want to lead with the question, but how did you come to be able to express yourself clearly in writing? So this is reconstructing it after the fact, and God knows how true it is, but I'll give

you my best shot at it. The ingredients, I think, are, I did grow up with a father who, he wasn't just, he wasn't a yarn spinner, but a wonderful storyteller and a very sophisticated storyteller and very, very, very smart. So he didn't tell dumb stories. He told smart stories. So I grew up listening to, and he's funny, like really funny. So I grew up just, and we were very close, just listening to really good stories. And he was also, in his own way, a superb writer in that he'd sort of internalize E.B. White and Strunk and the omit needless words part of that and be as pithy as possible.

And he would edit my school papers. And so I began kind of internalizing his criticism. So I was get to the point kind of thing, which is a very useful thing to internalize. But then, you know, then what happened when I got out of Princeton, it really, it shows you how accidental and haphazard careers can be. I had no idea of how to go about being a writer. I didn't know any writers. I didn't know anybody who knew any writers. There was no one in my family who could kind of provide guidance.

It was really as crude as I walked into the bookstore, like some bookstore, and said, is there anything in here that tells you how to write for magazines? And there was at the time like a big fat reference book which listed like the 8,000 then magazines in America, along with the addresses and phone numbers of the editors of the magazines. And right out when I got out of Princeton, I started to submit full on pieces,

magazine pieces to willy nilly to journals. And I would get responses. All the responses were no. And I didn't know what I was doing. I had this sense that I should go have lots of experiences in life, and then I would have things to write about. And so I was working at a fancy art dealership in New York right when I got out, but I was also the head soup ladler at the Bowery Mitchin and Young Men's Home for the homeless people when they came through to eat their lunch and dinner. And so, I got to know the homeless population in New York

for over a stretch and I wrote a long piece about them and about how they weren't just one thing. They were all these different characters. And I,

but I sent it, I can remember sending it off and I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to the in-flight magazines, like Delta and American. And I remember the Delta lady, whoever was editing the Delta in-flight magazine wrote back and said, you know, it's really interesting what you did, but you do realize we're trying to get people to go to New

York, not flee New York. And it just doesn't, it didn't fit. And so I kept doing that, though. I kept sort of writing stuff and sending it in. And the first hit I got is what got me off the ground. It was kind of two years, year and a half after I got out of Princeton. I noticed in the back of The Economist magazine a little advertisement for the science and technology pages. And it said, write a 600-word article. And if your article wins the competition, you'll get a job at The Economist. And it might have just been an internship kind of job, but it was a job. And so at that point, I was living in London and going to graduate school at the London School of

Economics. And I'd experienced the British medical system. And I realized that if I just went home to New Orleans and went to our fanciest hospital and asked them whatever the newest thing was, the British would think it was like 22nd century stuff. It was so archaic in Britain. So I did that. I found this breast cancer detection device in the Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans, wrote 600 words about it, sent it in, and got a call from a man whose name you might recognize. His name is Matt Ridley, now a well-known author and also a lord, Lord Matt Ridley. But at the time, he was the deputy science editor of The Economist. And he says, we'd like to have you come in for an interview.

And I came in for the interview and they said, you're on a short list of three finalists for the job. And they started to ask me, what's your background in science and technology? This thing seemed like you know a lot. And I said, well, I never actually took any science. I had to take a science class to get out of Princeton. And I took a class called physics for poets and I took it pass fail and I, and I flunked it and I flunked it because I'd, I played racquetball instead of going to the lab. But, but any case, I had an F on my transcript at Princeton and it was physics for poets. And when I, and I was telling this, I thought they would think this was a jolly tale and they're, they're like jaws on the floor. And at I was telling this, I thought they would think this was a jolly tale.

And they're like jaws on the floor. And at the end of this, they say, what are you doing here? And I said, I want to write. And they said, but you don't know anything. They said the other two finalists for this are studying for their doctorates in physics. One was at Cambridge, one was at Oxford. And I remember what Matt really said.

It was great. He said, you're a fraud, but you're a very good fraud, and that's a journalist. I mean, he said, you've sort of fooled us with this piece. And so he said, we're not going to give you this job because you don't know anything, but I would encourage you to keep submitting things to the Economist. And so, for over a period of about a year, I must have published 20 articles in the Economist in the different sections. And I go to them with ideas and they were a delight. And that's how they gave me my start. That's how it's... And from there, how I go from there to writing long form narrative nonfiction is a different story,

but that's sort of the thing that gets me going. What was it about writing or publishing, what did that do for you? What did that feed or what feeling did that evoke that kept you going through all these rejections and inflate magazine letters and so on? This is the truth is, and the truth to this day, is that what I realized when I was writing my Princeton thesis, and continued to sense when I was writing these magazine articles that nobody wanted to publish,

is that the thing itself gave me enormous pleasure. I mean, subsequently, I've had people, my children and my wife, who have been in the same room when I've had headphones on and trying to concentrate and write something. They said, do you realize that when you're sitting there writing, you're laughing the whole time? You're laughing at your own jokes. And in their view, it's kind of pathetic. You're sitting there laughing at your own jokes. And there's a point to that. But the bigger point is, I just took enormous pleasure in doing the thing. And so it never felt like, oh, I shouldn't be doing this

because I was having so much fun doing it. And it was just like, I just got to get better. I just, I'll keep doing this because I, this is just fun. So the distinction between rejection and acceptance and, you know, seeming failure and success was, was a very blurry distinction to me because I was already getting pleasure out of the doing of it. I was already excited by it. Now, I can remember when the first thing hit print. It was that little breast cancer detection piece. They did run it in the science and technology base. They fact-checked it 800 different ways because they wondered where the hell it came from. But they ran it.

And I can just remember going, and The Economist doesn't even run byline. So my name wasn't even on it. But I just went, yeah. I mean, this is, I was just, yeah, this is right. And once my name started going on things, and it was things in The New Republic, or oddly, the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal started to invite me to write for them, all while I was still a student. I thought it was just, it was, you know, it was sort of kerosene on a bonfire that was already, you know, that was already burning down the neighborhood because I

was so excited by what I was doing already. I didn't, I was sort of like, I didn't really need any encouragement. And so getting the encouragement was just gravy so if we if we flash forward that I mean you're writing you're publishing I'm looking at a paragraph from brainpickings.org which is run by Maria Popova who I'm very fond of and there was a there's a piece on your writing process. She may have been quoting a different source, but I just want to read something quickly and then we can discuss. These are your words. Before I wrote my first book in 1989, the sum total of my earnings as a writer over four years of freelancing was about 3,000 bucks. So it did appear to be financial

suicide when I quit my job at Salomon Brothers, where I'd been working for a couple of years and where I'd just gotten a bonus of $225,000, which they'd promised they'd double the following year to take a $40,000 book advance for a book that took a year and a half to write. Was that a hard decision or was it something you'd just been biding your time for? You put it very well. It was something I just been biding your time for? It was, you put it very well. It was something I'd been biding my time for. That I, when I went into Solomon Brothers, I knew that this was a temp gig. I'd be there for a few years. And I was there more out of curiosity about how this world worked than I was to advance a career. In fact, aside from the money, which I liked, I didn't think really much about the career at Sullivan Brothers because I knew

I could only hang on, my interest would only last for so long. And I was intensely interested in it as I was learning about it. But when I kind of figured it all out and got a sense of how it all worked and there weren't any more questions I had that needed to be answered, I really started to get bored. But the whole time I was there, I was writing. Um, and I, I, I was, I got myself in, in trouble because I naturally tend to write kind of about what's around me. And so I started to write things about this great boom that was happening on Wall Street was really the beginning of what we still live with this notion of 22 or 23 year olds rolling on and being and making a fortune. This the sums of money being made on Wall Street and the share of the economy it occupied was expanding rapidly, and no one

quite understood why. So there was a natural market for me to sort of try to explain it. And so I mentioned the Wall Street Journal asked me to write op-eds for them. I wrote an op-ed arguing that investment bankers were overpaid, and in the bottom of the op-ed, it said Michael Lewis is an associate with Salomon Brothers in London. Oh, God. Well, but, you know, I tell you,

I must have, like, a blind streak, right? Because I did, my reaction was, wow, great piece. Like, when I saw it, I saw, you know, when they sent me the galleys or whatever it was, I said, this is fabulous.

And I didn't even think, like, what are the people at Salomon Brothers going to think? Except maybe, wow, they're going to be so, they're going to be thinking it's so cool that I wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal. I got to work the next day, and there's a fellow who was, who ran all of Salomon Brothers International. Delightful guy. He was the guy who had hired me in the first place.

And he was ashen-faced sitting at my desk with this little newspaper on his lap. And he said, Michael, I mean, it was really written sad, not in anger. And it was more in sadness. He says, Michael, you have no, no idea of the damage you've done. And I was kind of like, what do you mean? He said, he said, this thing is being picked up all over the United States. And we've had a crisis meeting overnight of the Solomon Brothers board, what to do about it. They couldn't or wouldn't have fired me because I had just flukily started to generate a whole lot of money for them, like a whole lot of money. I was essentially a sales

person. And I had at that point, the second biggest money generating account in the entire firm. And the person would speak only to me, even though I'd only been there a year and a half. And it was basically the most sophisticated hedge fund sort of manager in Europe. And so they wouldn't fire me because they didn't want to lose him. So he said to me, my boss said, what are we going to do about this? And I said, I don't really want to do anything about this. And he said, well, we need you to stop writing. And I said, I'm not going to stop writing. It's what I love to do.

And he had the bright idea. He said, could you write under a different name? And I said, no problem. I can do that. And he said, what name are you going to use? And I actually just popped into my head, I'll use my mother's maiden name. So I wrote under the name Diana Bleeker for maybe the next nine months or year, maybe not quite that long.

But I wrote half a dozen pieces that were, they got better and better. I was getting better and better because I had better and better editing. So Michael Kinsley, who was then editing the New Republic, had walked into my life. And he was teach giving me writing lessons, basically, in the way he edited the pieces. But the pieces Diana Bleeker was writing, I mean, I really felt off the leash because nobody could trace it back to me. You know, I was almost describing the trading floor around me in pieces. And people were circulating. It was really great. I was sitting in London at my desk doing my business. And I would watch people Xeroxing articles I'd written in the New Republic under Diana Bleeker and pass them out on the

trading floor. And so I had a sense that like, God, people are hungry for this. People are laughing. People are, it was just working. Now the money part of it, what happened was I came home one night to my house in London, picked up a phone call and it was a man named Ned Chase

who happens to be Chevy Chase's dad who was a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. And he said, I figured out who Diana Bleeker was, and I got your number. I never found out how he did that. And we think you should write a book. And at that point, I thought, I'm out. If someone will publish a book by me, I'm not hanging around the Wall Street firm any longer. I did hang around an extra three months to get my bonus. But the minute I saw the money hit the bank account and I knew they couldn't take it back, I left.

And not because I disliked them. It was just, I loved a lot of the guys there. Mostly, it was almost all guys. I really liked my bosses, generally. I just was bored with the work, and I had this other thing I love to do. And it was not the only, you know, I had two conversations in which people tried to say,

oh, don't do that. Don't walk away from a sure fortune to go take a flyer on writing a book. One was my bosses, who took me into a room. And this tells you just how innocent an age it was. I mean, these days you'd be in a room with lawyers, right? And you'd be told you signed this nine disclosure agreement and you're writing anything about anything. They didn't care about it. They were worried about my sanity. They were actually worried about my career. They couldn't believe that I was going to walk away from this really cushy situation and go and do that other thing. So they were trying to help me. I just said, you know, I got this feeling I got to do this. And my father, my father said, you know, you really could just wait. You really could just collect some millions of dollars and then write your books. But the problem was, I was what,

27 at the time. I looked ahead of me and I looked at people who were 35 or 37 and they seemed ancient and they seemed completely stuck. Like they made so much money and their lives had adapted to the making of money. They depended on the making of money. And I just thought, there's no way I'd spend a lot of time here and still even want to do this. I'd be trapped, and I don't want to do that. So I ignored all that advice and just went and did it, and it worked out.

You know, that was liar's poker. The liar's poker, at least I've read, was intended to be a cautionary tale of sorts it's not not how everybody took it I mean it's a very exciting

exciting book you know it was it was the thing is it's a it's like a funny book it was a funny story

it's a very very funny book and it's and it's also an incredible story because you're seeing this this transformation of this industry and the effect on all these young people. But I thought of it, I had only one kind of moralistic thought in mind when I wrote it. Because I really just thought my models that I had in my head when I wrote it were education of Henry Adams and Rousseau's Confessions.

The model was just tell the world what happened exactly as you remember it, and that's enough. You don't need to layer on an interpretation of what happened. What happens, good enough. And the extent I wanted kind of to push the reader in any direction, it was just really young readers, like people in college, that I hoped would read it and would say, yeah, I now know what this is. Yeah, there's money there. But a lot of it's kind of silly.

And I have these other things I want to do with my life, and I'm going to go do them. So I'm not going to be seduced by Goldman Sachs when I'm walking or, or, or have, you know, Goldman Sachs prey on my anxiety about my future when I'm walking out of my college, I'm going to, I'm going to go do what I'm meant to do. And I felt that way because I had watched classmates at Princeton just naturally drift, um, into the arms of the investment banks because they really couldn't, they felt they couldn't resist the money and they were anxious about not being successes. Now, of course, then what happens is the book comes out and the book makes it seem,

because it was, as business goes, incredibly colorful and entertaining and lucrative. And I had, I had this, I mean, like dozens of letters a day from young readers saying, dear Mr. Lewis, um, I really loved your how to book about wall street, about how to make money on wall street. And I'm hoping that there's some tips in there that you didn't put in there that you could let me know, so I have an edge. And it just fueled the desire of young people to want to do it more. And I didn't see that coming. And that's something, I don't know, anybody who writes books, I think, learns that you write a book, but the reader reads a book. And the reader may read a book that's entirely different from what you thought you wrote. And you can't really do that much about it. How do you think about, if you do, ambition?

And this may not be a good question, but it seems like, from what I've read, the overt ambition that people wear on their shirt sleeves in certainly many parts of wall street you find off-putting or maybe in bad taste but you certainly don't shy away from ambitious projects right uh how do you think how do you personally think about ambitious not and i don't want to put put words in your mouth either no. It's an interesting way to frame the question. How do I think about ambition? Well, I could tell you I thought it was so comical that I was going to be in this ambitious money-making world. The week before I went to Salomon Brothers,

I went into Paul Stewart, this men's store, because I saw it through their window. I saw they had red suspenders with little gold dollar signs on them and i thought this is a way this is like a way to make fun of the whole thing and and nobody thought it was funny nobody thought it was like you can't wear that shit around here you know until you you can't wear that shit until you are a big enough deal to wear that that shit you know you can't and. But it was, I've always thought, I've always been enormously ambitious in a way. I've always wanted my life to be great, like really great. I mean, at this very moment, every evening I tell my children we're going to win the pandemic, that I'm competitive,

like very competitive. And I love competitive sports. I love winning. I don't particularly like losing. But I don't, I guess, number one, I don't accept money as an accurate measure or any kind of real measure of whether you're winning or losing. So money doesn't hold that, doesn't have that hold on me. Fame a bit more. I mean, I would say a lust for attention and fame is probably closer to a vice of mine than a lust for money and fortune.

But even that, even that I get, I find I get tired of and, uh, and it just doesn't interest me that much. Um, so I, I don't, I'm not a, I don't think I'm a maximizer in that I'm not trying to like, I'm not, I'm trying to, I'm not trying to get a lot of a thing. Uh's more, if I'm trying to maximize anything, it's a feeling. And it's a feeling that, like, that was a kick-ass book. That was just, I could look at something and just say, that is a great piece of work. That feeling is what I'm kind of always gunning for, and it's a pretty private feeling. And I think over time, I mean, you must have found this too,

that the response that I have to external validation has become muted and numbed. And when I got a glowing review for Liar's Poker, and it went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It's like dancing all over my kitchen. I mean, I was just happy as a clam. I couldn't believe, I mean, I've just, that it was like I just won the Super Bowl. And now I don't read the reviews. I sometimes forget whether a book is on the New York Times bestseller list or not. I mean, I'm not paying as much attention to it. And it's not a, because it's not able, it doesn't, it doesn't gratify me in the same way, but the gratification I get from looking at something that I think I've done that's really

good, uh, is, is, is, is at least as great as it was back then. So I think that's, I think I'm tapping into that. It's, I think I'm tapping into like the pleasure I got when I was just all by myself in a room laughing at my own jokes. It's sort of like maximizing self-satisfaction, which is maybe not the, maybe not the most attractive trait that my ambition is to maximize my self-satisfaction, but maybe that's, maybe that's my ambition. Well, let's jump into the process associated with maximizing the self-satisfaction. You mentioned laughing at your own jokes. I have read that you sometimes write late at night, say midnight.

You put on a headset and play the same soundtrack of, say, 20 songs over and over again. Is that something that you still do? Yes. In fact, I did it yesterday. Kids screwed up my natural writing rhythm. My natural rhythm would be to kind of start about four in the afternoon and write till three in the morning, uh, and, and sleep until noon, but you can't do that with kids. So, so I now, I'm not as likely to be found late at night at my desk, though it happens sometimes. Um, but whenever I'm writing, I have headphones on and I have, um, a soundtrack I write to, and the soundtrack, um, changes, but it changes book to book. And it's got to the point where both my wife and my kids will, will recommend songs for the soundtrack and for whatever the next project is. And I'll build a soundtrack out of, out of intentionally. And the

music is, you know, it's all over the map. It tends to be very up, but it tends to be music that, um, that I just stop hearing. And I noticed something really funny, uh, just, just the last couple of weeks. Um, because I'm working on something now, the second season of my podcast, where I have a different relation to music. The, the, the podcast is about coaching and the last episode, which I have a different relation to music. The podcast is about coaching, and the last episode, which I have still not written, it's the only episode I haven't written, is me getting coached in something I'm incredibly uncomfortable doing.

And it's singing. I've been doing voice lessons an hour every day for the last three months. And there's a song I sing, and I'm not going to tell you which one it is, that I'm going to have to sing, that I've been practicing, that happens to be on my soundtrack. And now I realize I have to remove it because it kicks my brain into a different space. All of a sudden, I hear it, and it's like Pavlovian. I've got to belt out the tune.

I've got to worry about hitting a high note. And it screws up my writing. And so I've got to worry about hitting a high note and it screws up my writing and so I've just been hitting skip because I've been reluctant to change but I'm just going to have to remove it and it's the minute so it puts me the music puts me the purpose of it is

to shut out the possibility of interruption I can't hear knocks on the door phones people dropping packages on the front porch anything it's just I'm just in my own space and I just hear knocks on the door, phones, people dropping packages on the front porch, anything. It's just, I'm just in my own space. And I just, and I kind of ceased to hear the sound.

Could you, there's part of me that really hopes to God that that song is a whole new world on the Aladdin soundtrack, but I don't know why. I was just, I can't wait for that episode. Oh, you wouldn't rather it be Let It Go from Frozen? I'll take Let It Go. I will also take Let It Go. Do you remember the soundtracks that you used for specific books? I mean, if we were to pick, or could you give an example of some of the component tracks from any book that you've worked on? You know what's funny is I bet if you just asked me that way, the answer is no. I could make stuff up.

But if a song comes on that I wrote, say, The Blind Side to, I'll remember that was on the soundtrack for The Blind Side. Got it. And so I don't have a, I mean, it's almost the point of them is that I'm not really listening to them. So there are songs that I would have listened to a thousand times, and I don't know the words because I'm not really paying attention to them. I'm paying attention to something else.

It's a device for shutting out other interruption and for creating kind of an emotion, a feeling. So the answer is I don't. But I tell you what, I have saved. In olden times, there was a thing called a CD that you had to have to play music. And in those olden times, I would save the CD and just toss it in a folder

and put it away in a keepsake drawer. So I have the old soundtracks. Oh, boy. Well, that could be a tremendous bonus if you want to get anyone to any website of your choosing. If you were to dig those up. The soundtrack to Moneyball.

Oh, my God, my favorite. Yeah, but it's like Johnny Cash. It would make no sense. Right, right. Yeah. You mentioned coaches. I want to talk about, and we'll see if we can get into specifics, maybe, maybe not, but you mentioned Michael, was it Kinsley? Is that right? The editor? The editor of the New Republic, yeah. What made him a good editor or what did you learn from him? Can you remember anything that he helped tighten or improve?

So Michael Kinsley had a gift for creating writers. There are dozens of people who were young writers then who he had profound influence on and careers that he just launched. I mean, and it's an odd assortment. And I was one of those people. And what he – so I think what happens with writers who come up in a conventional way like through creative writing programs or by writing for their circle of friends, is they get treated too politely. Their work gets treated too politely. And so they don't hear a really withering critique of their work. And Michael Kinsley could not help himself. He delivered the most withering critiques of your work. And so if you,

the kind of throat clearing, phony first paragraph, which was totally unnecessary, it would come back and it'd be just a big X through it. Why did you even write that? Start here. It would be, I can remember I learned a word that was just a completely obscure word. And I even remember the word, but I don't know how to pronounce it. It's Chthonian. It starts C-H. And I think it means of the underworld. And I remember working it into the piece and like a big circle around it saying, you fucking phony.

You know, what do you do? What did you do? Go into the thesaurus? It was just like making merciless fun of me. And even with my byline, at the very beginning, I thought it sounded good. It was

for it to be Michael M. Lewis. My middle name is Monroe. I thought a middle initial kind of fancied it up. And he put a big circle around it and he said, don't do that. Don't be one of those people. You're not Michael M. Lew. You're Michael Lew. He was all the preposterous things that you naturally tend to do when you're putting words on paper. He identified all of them as vices and stopped you from them. And so that was, in addition, he was unbelievably gifted at seeing what a good story was.

So you saw what was kind of, you started to learn what was interesting and what wasn't just talking to him, just by how he responded to what you said. It was a kind of feedback that everybody should get, but that most people are too tender and sensitive to deliver. It's a funny thing. I think that this happens in speech too. I think that there's lots of inefficiency in human conversation. That people do all kinds of things they really shouldn't do.

And that other people make fun of them for doing. People are endlessly telling stories about what some other person said, making fun of them. And the reason, and it shouldn't be that way. We should be very efficient conversationalists because we do it all the time, but we aren't because we don't get feedback, because people are too polite. And I think people are too polite with other people's writing.

And what Michael Kinsley, his great gift, in addition to be a kind of genius, was he just couldn't be polite. He was just so blunt. And so as a real, I mean, I'm now, I'm Michael Lewis on my books instead of Michael M. Lewis because of Michael Kinsley. Yeah, that's, I remember in one of my freshman, it wasn't freshman, it was a seminar though, at Princeton, and not to imply that it in any way hold a candle to McPhee, but took this seminar with John McPhee. And he, I remember when he returned the papers, our initial writing assignments

to the 12 students in the class, he effectively had to preface it by saying, I don't want you to be shocked. And I'm paraphrasing here. You're all decent writers or good writers. So don't take this as constructive feedback feedback and i got back my two pages it was really short and there was more red ink than the black ink i'd used to type it up and uh there's a just an incredible piece uh or it's i think a series of interviews in the the paris review on the art of non-fiction where he talks about you you know, describing things as pea soup. And it's just like a big circle that kind of points out the obvious, right? And so the benefit of impolite feedback has just been so tremendous in my life as well.

Yeah. And people, it's nice just to have people not tiptoe around the problem. And then once it's said, you know, you know that that little middle initial in my byline, there was a little phoniness there. And I just did, I just hope nobody would notice. They just take me as more important. And, well, that's interesting that you were in McPhee's writing class because I was a big McPhee fan when I was at Princeton, but it never even occurred to me. I just assumed I could never even get into that class. So I didn't apply.

It was because that was a hard class to get into. It was. I mean, I will say that I, maybe this is, I mean, it's certainly been advantageous to me, I suppose. When I feel like I don't have any chance of getting into something, it removes the performance anxiety, if that makes any sense. It makes total sense.

And therefore, I was just completely unattached to outcomes because I assumed that I would get rejected. And the literature effect, I still have my notes from undergrad, my binders full of notes from two classes, the literature of fact and high-tech entrepreneurship with a professor named Ed Hsiao. I still have my notes from those two classes. They've traveled with me for 20 years. I mean, now there's draft number four and other books that kind of describe McPhee's methods. So I refer to them

less, but what a, uh, it was a real gift. I mean, uh, yeah, no, I, I, I, I, it, part of me is glad I didn't take that class. Cause I think, I think he might've, he might've persuaded me that I wasn't a writer. I don't think I was ready for it. Uh I had to kind of find my own way. But, but because he was an intimidating figure and he's so good at what he did. But the, but I, I wished with McPhee, I wished he spent more time writing about people because he did it so well. That book he did on Brad, Bill Bradley was an incredible piece of work. Yeah. Sense of where you are. Great book. Uh, but anyway, so he does, he does spend a lot of time writing about oranges and rocks and canoes and all manner of other non-human objects. You know, it's, it's an impressive, he pulls it off, but he's so good. He was so good about people. I wish there was more of it. Um,

anyway, I have a question for you about, maybe this isn't the right word, but productive laziness. I was looking at an article that talked about a speaking gig from 2017, Qualtrics. You might know where this is going, but the quote that stuck out to me was attributed to you, people waste years of their lives, not being willing to waste hours of their lives. And I don't know if that prompts any memories, but is that something you could elaborate on? Sure. That wasn't a quote for me. It was a quote from one of my characters, Amos Tversky. He's one of the main characters in the Undoing Project and he

but that it resonated with me what he meant was that that people don't back away from their work and especially the need to always seem busy or be busy stops people from

from finding things that are really worth doing and sifting the ones that are worth doing from the ones that aren't worth doing. So it resonates with me because I am not a person who always has to be doing something. And in fact, my natural state is probably inert, that I can really just lay around and screw off and procrastinate with the best of them. And it's partly because of how I grew up. I mean, I grew up in New Orleans, and there was not a whole lot of value attached to either ambition or career achievement. You

were who you were because of how you were and who your family was and what neighborhood you grew up in and where you went to school. You were always so well-defined by your environment that trying to change it by doing stuff didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. And I, you know, my father used to tell me, and it was, he would tell, and I believed this until I was about 20, that on our family coat of arms, there was a motto in Latin.

And the motto was, do as little as possible, and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task. And he would just say that like, you know, just keep that in mind. We live by these words. And so that's my, you know, kind of where I was coming from just generally. And I found this thing that didn't feel like work. So it didn't feel like an attempt at achievement, not that achievement was bad. It just, that's not why I was doing it. Um, but, but having said that, you know, I do find that, um, being able to back away and get yourself, myself in a state of mind in which I can say, uh, it's okay if I never write anything else.

It's okay if I never write another book. It's okay if I don't do anything for six months. And I can afford that now, and that's nice to be able, it's a luxury to be able to afford it. But I think a lot of people who can afford it don't actually take advantage of the luxury because I think that doing that, putting yourself in a state of mind where,

all right, I've got to make an argument about why I need to write another book because I don't have to, changes your relationship to potential stories and potential material. It requires the material to rise to the level of interest where you feel obliged to engage with it. So you're not doing it just because you got to write another book. You're doing it because how can I not write this? And it serves my own sloth and indolence, serves as a kind of filter. And the filter is, you know, I don't, you know, no, I don't have to do that. So I'm not going to do that. I don't particularly want to do that. So I'm not going to do that. I don't particularly want to do that.

So I'm just not going to do that. And even if you tell me that, oh, it's got big bestseller written all over it, I'm not interested because it keeps me off that path. And that, I think it's been very useful because it does two things at once. One is it raises the level of the bar that the material has to jump over to get to me. So the material is going to have to be really good if I'm going to engage with it. And two, it stops me from doing the same thing over and over again just to be successful.

It enables me to, it almost encourages me to move around and do surprising things. And I think readers and audiences really appreciate, um, and, and will engage with, um, the writer who's willing to take risks that, yeah, they like their writer. Some of their writers to just keep doing the same things over and over again, but they'll follow you if you take a brave risk. Since I'm not doing it, I'm not trying to create the next sure-fired bestseller. I'm led to other and sometimes unlikely material. And the books are kind of, so the books end up being about a lot of different things. What are some of the questions or thresholds that indicate the material has risen above the necessary hurdles? I found one question. I don't know if this is you or not, so feel free to confirm or deny, but would I be sad if this story didn't get told? Yeah, that's funny. That is one. And it's a really good question because there's not a

clear-cut rule that I follow except feeling. And there are a couple of feelings that I associate with the desire to write a book. One is a feeling that if I don't do it it won't properly get done because I have some privileged access to the story and there are lots of different ways you can have privileged access to the story but the sense that yeah this book really should be written and someone needs to do it

and that someone is clearly me and so the second and related feeling is I have an obligation to the material. It isn't the material has an obligation to me as a writer. It's I have an obligation to this material. And once I have that feeling, I have a motive. I have a motive. And whether I'm fooling myself or not, it's a motive that's a deeper and more inspiring motive than, oh, I got to make a living or, oh, I got to get a book on the bestseller list. Or, you know, oh, I got to have something to tell my friends when they ask me, what are you doing? It's a motive that, like, it's the highest motive. It's I have an obligation.

I have a duty. And so I've had that feeling with every book I've written. And how it gets to that point, I mean, there are different paths to that point. But it obviously is some feeling in myself that this is an important story. Could you give an example of the feeling, a duty or obligation to the material? Uh, you mentioned the undoing project. You could give an example from any of your books, but what, what, concretely, what is, what might that look like? Um, the obligation or duty to the material? Well, um, really could take any book, but let's take Moneyball just to mix things up. So Moneyball starts not as a book.

Moneyball starts as a question that in the end isn't even a good question. And the question was, how pissed off is the left fielder of the Oakland A's when the right fielder drops the fly ball? Because the right fielder is now making four times as much money as the left fielder. I was wondering about the effects, sort of the class dynamics on a professional baseball team now that salaries had blown up and there were some people getting paid huge sums of money, and there was huge inequality inside of a baseball team. And that caused me to watch the games kind of watching the money, not just watching the games. And then I saw the inequality that was interesting was not between the players. It was because they didn't seem to be resentful of each other at all.

It was between the teams and that you had this poor team in my backyard, the Oakland A's, and they had to play against teams that had four or five times the sums of money to spend on players. And how are they winning more games than those teams? And then it becomes a magazine piece in my mind because I go to see Billy Bean, the general manager of the Oakland A's, and he says, huh, you know, you're asking me the single most important question in my life, and no one has asked me that. He says, that tells you something about sports journalism. He says, nobody's asked me how we're thinking about distributing the money over the players and how we're making these sort of investments in assets and how we're thinking a lot like Wall Street traders.

And he started to fill my ear, and I thought, this is really interesting, really interesting, but it's a magazine piece. It's like a magazine piece about how a general manager thinks. And I started to spend time with him. And where it rose to the level of, not magazine piece, but this is a long story worthy of a book, was when I began to realize that what the Oakland A's were doing was looking for value in people that the people, sometimes even themselves, did not appreciate, and the market certainly didn't appreciate. And that was why these people could be acquired cheaply. People happen to be baseball players, but they really could be anything.

And the moment, it was really a moment, and sometimes there are these moments, the moment when I thought, oh my God, this is a book, was when I had, I was interviewing the players after games. I would pick a player after every, I'd say, Scott Hatterberg, I'll meet you after the game at your locker. And he'd say, okay, I'll

give you 20 minutes then. Barry Zito, you know, one thing, I was moving around the clubhouse and, and the player, I was watching the players come out of the showers. And I'd saw, it was the first time I really noticed them naked and they were so appalling. They were so unpleasant to look at. They were fat. They were misshapen in various ways. They did not look like professional athletes. They look like they really, they just, you would never guess they were professional athletes. And, but I say this to the, to the front office of the A's. I say the next day, I said, you know, I was just watching the bodies of your guys. It's awful. And Paul DePodesta, who was the number two, said that's kind of the point. He says, we go looking for people who the market doesn't value, doesn't appreciate.

And one of the things that blinds the market to the value of a baseball player is the physical appearance of the player. An ugly player is likely to be cheaper than a handsome player. A guy who looks like a professional athlete is likely to be valued. People are going to see his value. What blinds the market is they don't look right. So we're looking for players who don't look right. And I thought at that moment, the reason it's worthy of a book and the reason I have an obligation to the story is this isn't about baseball anymore. This is about, this is a universal truth about the way markets value people.

That you have this market, it just happens to be baseball, where of all markets on the planet, you would think would value people properly. They've been doing the same job for 100 years. They've got statistics attached to every move they make on a field. They've got millions of people watching them on the job, most of who think they know exactly what a good baseball player is and what isn't. If those people can be so misvalued that a baseball team is running circles around other baseball teams by picking up the ones who look wrong, then who can't be? It became a very universal story about the mistakes we make when we look at another person. And at that point, I thought it was gold. I just thought this is just the most magnificent. It's a truth I know in my life. I've watched

people be misvalued my whole life. I've watched people get paid way more than they deserve. I've got people get paid way less than they deserve. I've seen people in teams go entirely unappreciated who are extremely important to the team and people who took all the credit and they actually weren't that important. And I've seen this through preparing for this. And that is the comment that Michael is one of the happiest people I know. And I... Who said that? Let's see here. It was the author of a Washington Post piece I have. Oh, I bet it was Walter Isaacson. You know what? It might have been Walter Isaacson.

Yeah. And so I'd be curious if you agree with that. And if you do, is that something you kind of deduced your way into being, that is, a happy person? Or was that sort of hardwired from genetics and upbringing in family oriented new orleans how do you uh how would you comment on that statement so there are two there are two answers one is i really have always been a a conspicuously happy person even in even in the gloomy years of my life when I was kind of like in middle school and causing trouble. And I can remember the headmaster at the Newman School who prevented me from getting thrown out of the school. A couple of years later, I was in his

office again because I had insulted the English teacher. And I'd actually planned my insult. I thought it was such a clever thing to say. She was notoriously unpleasant to students. And she said something kind of sharp to me. And I said, Dr. Francis, are you always so pleasant to be with, or is this just an especially good day for you? And she said, she like just pointed to the door, like, go to the headmaster. Here's a note, you know, and, and, and, and I got, and, and when I repeated what I'd done, it was like in the ninth grade at this point. Um, so I was 13 or 14. Um, the headmaster, you could see he was like cracking up. He was just like, he knew he was supposed to punish me. But he just started laughing

because he had the same feelings about the English teacher. And he could not, and he said, you know, he said, come Michael Lewis, he said, I've been watching you around this place for like 10 years and you're like one of the happiest people I have ever met, but you can't be doing this shit. And he said, you know, we have to agree. We've got to control it in various ways.

The spirit is high in you, but we've got to control it. And when he said that, you're like one of the happiest people I've ever met, it hadn't occurred to me, because I think when you're happy, you know it when you're unhappy. I think you don't know it so much when you're, but when you're happy, you just kind of take it for granted. But that was, from that moment on, I didn't take it for granted. I thought, you know, he's right, that I am basically really happy, even when things aren't going so great. And I like that. I like that self-definition.

So I sought to preserve it. Now, as I've gotten older, I would say starting in kind of my mid to late 20s, I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people, if you just sit and listen, you'll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves. If you listen to people, if you just sit and listen, you'll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves. There's the kind of person who's always the victim in any story that they tell, always on the receiving end of some injustice. They're the person who's always kind of the hero of every story they tell, the smart person. They deliver the clever put

down. There are lots of versions of this. And you got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are in the way you craft your narrative, kind of crafting your character. And so I did at some point decide, I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative that I'm the happiest person anybody knows. And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is. And it also, you know, there is this, I don't know if you notice this in your life, but lots of intelligent people, when they start a conversation with you, if they're trying to be sensitive. Sort of like, how are you doing? I mean, this must be a – I know you're in the middle of finishing a book

or your kid just got punished at school or I saw you had a fight with your wife or whatever it is. I know that something must be wrong. A lot of people open to conversations by giving you an opportunity to complain. And they don't even do that with me anymore. So we don't even start there. All my friends, they wouldn't even bother because they know I'm not going to go there. And it's terrific.

It's just terrific. It starts every conversation off on a delightful, cheery foot. And so it is partly hardwired and partly self-conscious, partly a kind of a personality trait and partly a trait that I've just tried to really encourage in myself. Well, let me dig into the friend exchange because there might be something I can emulate here. So if they've been trained not to give you the floor to complain by giving these very common prompts, what type of question would they open with? Like, is it a good or a great day, Michael? Or do they ask?

No, this is something that I would like to practice. Not that I'm bitching and moaning all the time. I would like to think I'm not. But how do you guys start your conversations? Something entirely differently. Like, let's go have an adventure. Or what's the last great idea? When I think about my friends who were just in my life here in Berkeley,

it would be, it's like, all right, what's the cool idea you're working on? Or they start. It's just the conversation instantly launches into something substantive. It's not about how I'm feeling because how I'm feeling is never interesting. So it's a great way to take how I'm feeling off the table. Now, there may come a time in my life where I would like to talk about how I'm feeling, and I'm sure they'll be open to it, but we're not just naturally drifting into that. We're drifting into something like, you know, just what happened that day. It just starts on a different footing.

And I'm usually pretty bored with people who want to talk about how they're feeling. I hate to say that. So by taking it off, it's strategic, right? By taking it off the table for me, I'm taking it off the table for them too. I mean, they want to talk about how they're feeling. They can talk to someone else. Unless it's really important. I'd rather, there's other things I'd rather talk about.

So it's always, if it's always a sunny day, the weather ceases to be interesting. There's so many questions that I could follow up with and would love to. I'm sure that there are a million shrinks out there who think if I could only get my hands on him, I would scratch below the surface and I'd find the agony. But I swear to God, they could scratch for a million years and they would not find anything but joy and delight. Well, there goes my plan also for the next 30 minutes to just give you a confession of all of

my deepest insecurities, but for round two, perhaps. just give you a confession of all of my deepest insecurities but for round two perhaps we're talking a bit about friends and you mentioned a name earlier and i might get the pronunciation wrong here but amos uh amos taversky taversky and uh the undoing project so we have amos and and Daniel Kahneman, Danny Kahneman. After, and maybe you could provide just a bit of context for people who don't know who they are and what the book was about. But my question is, if that informed how you think about friendship or change how you approach your friendships in any way. So let's start by explaining who these guys are. So Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky could plausibly be credited

with creating the whole Moneyball phenomenon. And I didn't realize this until after I had written Moneyball. They were the psychologists who collaborated on essentially a lifelong project for both of them, exploring the various ways that human beings, irrational is a word they would not have liked to use, but the mistakes that people make when they're making judgments under conditions of uncertainty. That even when you kind of create a situation where there is a statistically correct answer, that people make, systematically make the same mistakes. They misvalue risks in all kinds of ways. And they explore the ways they misvalue risks.

Now, what attracted me to this story was, one, there was a body of knowledge that I thought was incredibly important and that had explained why the market for baseball players, for example, was so inefficient that the Oakland A's could mop up inside of it. It explained why Danny Namus, in their own way, explained why players who did not look like baseball players would be misvalued. And players who look a lot like baseball players might be overvalued. They explained why vivid traits like foot speed or power would be

overvalued and subtle traits that were hard to see would be undervalued. So their work was interesting, but what captivated me and what created that sense of obligation, I've got to write this book, was the essential love affair, platonic love affair between the two men. They were opposites in many ways. Danny was this gloomy pessimist, and Amos was this very optimist. Amos actually had a line

that he would say sometimes to Danny that pessimism was stupid because when you're pessimistic, you live it twice. Once when you're worrying about the bad thing happening and the second time when it actually happens.

Why do that? So the book explores their relationship and their dynamic and, and explores, um, the power of collaboration. Like two people, it was intriguing to me that two people could produce work that was so one, breathtakingly important and two completely different than what either one of them would have done on their own so that's the backdrop to the book and what your second what was your other question what was the my question was if if the process of writing that book getting to know oh change my attitude towards friendship oh Oh, well, that's funny. So I did, you know, their friendship was very fraught. It was like a tempestuous love affair.

And on Amos' deathbed, Amos said to Danny, no human being has caused me more agony, more misery on the planet than you. And Danny said, even though Amos was dying, Danny said right back to him, I feel the same way about you. So their friendship is not a friend. Their relationship they had is not a relationship I've ever had with another person, uh, that my own, um,

friendships tend to be a lot more stable that they were incredibly stable. Actually, I have close friends from when I was 12 and 13 years old who are still some of my closest friends in the world. And they aren't a lots of ups and downs in them and throwing of plates and it just doesn't happen. So I don't think I'm wired in a way that would kind of tolerate that kind of friendship. And to some extent, Amos wasn't. It drove Amos crazy. I saw a lot of myself in Amos, just temperamentally. And what happened with Amos was he discovered that Danny was the golden goose, that the ideas that they hatched together were so valuable that he could tolerate

the drama of the relationship with Danny. But otherwise, he had very limited tolerance for drama in his friendships. And I do too. And it's not that I don't engage with my friend's problems or engage with their ups and downs, but we tend not to have ups and downs between us. So I can't say that the book actually has informed any particular friendship of mine. What it has done is make me appreciate the few friendships I have where the interaction is leading me to a much better place as a writer. I have a few people who I talk to about stuff I'm working on and it just, it ends up so much better because of it. And it makes me appreciate that it's like,

I'm never, these books that I write, I'm never really just doing them myself. That it's not just me, that it's this very complicated collaboration between me and friends I talk to about it and me and my subject matter. The subjects I write about are often kind of co-conspirators in this stuff. They give me ideas, sometimes without knowing it.

So it has sort of watching, knowing about the relationship between Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman has sort of informed me about the way the creative process works. With that small group of friends you share work with, what types of prompts or questions do you offer them in the sense that what is the request? How do you phrase your request? Usually, I mean, sometimes. So Jacob Weisberg is one of them, who is the founder of Pushkin Industries,

the podcast company. But we go all the way back to being joint disciples of Michael Kinsley at the New Republic. Oh, no kidding. Didn't know that. Jacob can point to Michael as the person who kind of shaped him as a writer. But with Jacob, I'll just say,

all right, here's this idea I have. What do you think? And I'll lay it out in five or 10 minutes on a hiking trail or over the phone. And what he does, and his great gift is not to say, I like it or I don't like it. He does this thing, and all the friends I consult are this way. They're all improvisational. They all, they all obey the kind of the rules of improv comedy in conversation. That their first step is never, no, that's stupid. Uh, I have a smart thing to say that puts this thing you just said in its place. Their first step is to try to take what I've said and build on it or find what's good in it. And Danny Kahneman had this wonderful line, and it's one of my favorite lines of the book, when he is with his graduate students in a seminar, he's the professor at Hebrew University

in Jerusalem. And the students at Hebrew University are famously caustic, kind of one-upping each other all the time, always trying to seem like the smart kid in the room. And he says to the students at his first seminar, he says, when someone in this room says something, don't ask if it's true. Ask what might it be true of. What value might there be in that thing that was said? Don't try to show me how smart you are by showing how stupid everybody else is. Show me how smart you are by showing me how smart everybody else is. And my closest friend collaborators, the people who just listen to me, the sounding boards, are often showing me how smart I am in that they're sort of taking something that I said and they go, ah, and, yes, and it leads me some other place. So that's the way the conversation usually sounds. And I'll go, oh my God, I hadn't thought of it that way um or i was

thinking of it that way i'm glad you find it interesting uh that it's it's um but it's that's the nature of it um and that's that's it's just have you ever been have you ever done it tried to do improv comedy i have and uh it was many years ago in San Francisco and it was surprisingly difficult. I found it surprisingly difficult. Me too. I found it surprisingly difficult. Exactly. And, but it felt like a muscle that you could exercise. And I think everybody should exercise it because it is amazing what happens if you listen to people in a generous way and you're looking for the thing they're saying that's useful. Where that leads you is often just magical. And when you're watching really good improv

comedians, what they do seems like magic. And sometimes I feel like with my friends that they kind of introduce that magic into my mind. Well, let's talk about, you mentioned Pushkin, the name. So you have a critically acclaimed Pushkin produced podcast, Against the Rules. And you have a new season, which I'll leave it to you to describe, but maybe we could use as an entry point, an episode which I was able to listen to in advance, this is episode three, Inner Coach. And my question is, what was it like having a long conversation with Timothy Galway? And maybe who is Timothy Galway for those who don't know? And then what was it like having a long conversation with him?

Because I only heard snippets, which were fantastic. Yeah. I'll let you take it from there. So first, so the episode. So the season is, this is the second season of Against the Rules. The first season was about referees and the role of referees in American life. The second season is about coaches and the role of coaches in American life. And the general idea of the podcast that is cooked up with Jacob Weisberg is to look at,

to take various authority figures in our lives and figures that authority figures whose status role use has changed, uh, in some way and to kind of explore why that change has happened and, and what it means. And, um, so the episode you're talking about is,

is about this whole idea of the inner game of things, the whole notion that when you coach something, what you really should be coaching is states of mind. And Tim Galway is really the founding father of this idea. He was a tennis pro at a kind of upper middle class tennis club in California who notices that it kind of in an accidental way that when he doesn't give instruction, people are learning more rapidly how to play tennis than when he does give instruction, that when he doesn't tell them where to put their racket or when to hit the ball or where to hit the ball, that they're kind of getting it quicker just by emulating him, just by watching him. And to the extent he's giving them instruction, he's telling them to focus on their core strength or their breath or something away from the end result. And when he sees this, when he sees the effect of this sort of instruction,

he starts to kind of build a program of instruction around it. And he ends up writing a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, which is a very famous book now. It's sold millions of copies. But when it was published, it was published in whatever, 1972, 1973 by Random House. They told him it was going to sell 20,000 copies because that's what tennis books sold. applies to coaching anything. That if you can redirect a person's attention away from things, they're going to kind of cause them to freeze up or tense up and towards things that sort of let them flow as they're doing the thing, that it has amazing effects.

And right after he publishes his book, he's invited to the Houston Philharmonic. The Houston Symphony brings him in with the idea of exploring whether the principles in the inner game of tennis might be used to make musicians play better. And the conductor is very skeptical of this, but everybody's kind of interested in his book. And so he gives a little talk about his book, and they give him a little round of applause, and then the conductor says, anybody want to be coached by Tim?

And Tim doesn't know anything about music. I mean, he's just nothing. He's kind of got a tin ear. He doesn't know. He can hardly name the, he's just nothing. He's kind of got a tin ear. He doesn't know. He can hardly name the instruments. But the tuba player raises his hand and he asked the tuba player some questions like, what are you doing when you're playing the tuba?

And the guy says, I'm trying to hear the sound so I know that I've hit the note. And there's a particular note he had trouble hitting. And he said, it's hard to hear the sound and I'm straining. And Galway says, to himself, he says, that's like the tennis player who's thinking too much about when the ball hits the racket or where the racket is when he's bringing it back.

So he says to the tuba player, he says, what's going on in your body when it tends to go well? And the tuba player says, it's my tongue. When my tongue is moist, the note tends to be cleaner. And so Galway says, okay, first play something. And he plays something. And then he says, all right, now we're going to focus just on your tongue. I don't want you to think about the notes you're playing. I just think about the tongue and keeping it moist.

And so the guy then belts out his tuba song again, and the whole orchestra stands up and gives him a standing ovation. And Galway said it was funny because he couldn't hear the difference. He said it was just like, it's all tuba. I know, I couldn't tell whether it was good tuba or bad tuba. But the musicians could completely hear the difference. And so I spent a few hours with Tim Galway talking about him, talking to him about this beginning of an approach to coaching things, the inner game of stuff where you aren't, you're almost explicitly avoiding criticism or praise,

anything that makes the performer feel self-conscious and directing their attention to something else. And then just explore the spread of this in all kinds of odd directions. And in this particular episode, one of the things I do is take someone who is already young, but pretty accomplished as a, they're now called performance coaches, a performance coach. And I hire him to coach my then 17-year-old daughter to play softball. She's a softball player, but she's got, as she says, I'm in my head a lot. She's playing at a very high level, and he just starts kind of working with her.

And so I get to kind of watch the process in real time. And her softball coach sounds, to me at least, like the verbal equivalent of the written feedback from Michael Kinsey. Yes. So this is exactly right. So this is exactly right. It's,

and, and it's, I come to, to the extent that podcasts, it really is seven different stories, all kind of, it's, it's like a,

it's like a symphony. It's seven different instruments, uh, on the same theme. And it, but it's, um, but I come to the conclusion that I think maybe Galway isn't

completely right, that there is a role for some kind, for more than one kind of coaching. But it is true that my daughter has a female big time softball coach. She's playing for one of the best teams in the country. And it is, and we wire up her coach. And what comes out of the coach's mouth is, you know, you suck. If you suck, you'll be on the bench. You know, explicit instructions. Just kind of the opposite of, but the curious thing is my daughter says, I got a lot out of working with the performance coach and the inter-game stuff,

but I also get a lot out of working with the performance coach and the inner game stuff, but I also get a lot out of this other kind of coach too, that, that, that she's kind of, this other kind of coach has gotten me caring more. And now what I need to do is get kind of through that voice that's in her, my head that she's put in my head to push me and, and start to ignore it, ignore it when I'm at the plate facing a 70 mile an hour fastball, uh, thatan-hour fastball, that I've got to kind of be in a different headspace. So watching her wrestle, kind of trying to fuse these two, was very interesting. I found the form, it's essentially long-form radio storytelling,

a really intriguing form it's been it's been a fun experiment that has in in in funny ways informed come back and informed my writing it's it and you reach as you know a different audience than you reach with a with a piece of prose when you produce one of these podcasts it is uh incredible and disheartening in some ways to look at the, well, I mean, I guess in my case, I'll speak just for myself, that, you know, your books have been blockbusters. My books have done decently well. But the reach with the podcast at a point is, it's just incredible to see what can be imparted to how many people on a weekly basis. And for that reason, you know, there was part of me that was wondering, as you were just talking, you know, have we lost Michael to the dark side? Has he stepped into the void of audio where the allure of the written word will just lose its luster? Maybe that's not even something that you're thinking about.

I don't know. I think of it as literary cross-training, that I'll be a better prose writer because I'm working out these other muscles. And I'm still writing books. I'm still going to write books and maybe fewer long-form magazine stuff. And that's partly because there's just fewer places to do it. But the books for sure are going to happen just like they've always happened.

But being made more sensitive to sound, the sound of the words on the page, the different ways you might read a particular sentence is a really healthy exercise. So it's just an addition rather than a substitute. And if something has to give, like if I'm doing less of something, it may be slightly fewer long-form magazine pieces and slightly fewer film scripts, which I was also always doing, which is another way to exercise kind of muscle and kind of cross-train as a writer.

I think it's really useful for writers to write different forms. I think that it would probably be good for me to make myself try to write poems every now and then, and it would probably be good for me to make myself try to write poems every now and then. And it would probably be good for me to try to force myself to write some fiction every now and then. Good for the thing I do best, which is the long form, book length kind of storytelling, nonfiction storytelling. And so nothing wrong with doing new stuff. And it's the other side of it. Again, it's not a substitute.

It's just an addition. It's really a different experience playing a team sport than playing an individual sport. Writing a book is an individual sport. You're basically on your own. You have coaches. You have fans. But you're kind of out there pole vaulting on your own. And making a podcast, the kind of podcast I make, it really is more like a basketball team.

And I have an incredibly gifted, like, editor and producers. And, I mean, Malcolm Gladwell sits in on my table reads and Jacob Weisberg. I've got, I've got the like ingenious people giving me feedback at every level of the process. And that's, that's fun. It's, it's fun because it's educational and everybody's, they're not rude, but they're pretty blunt with how they feel about things and pretty withholding of praise. So I'm getting like the straightest criticism I ever get. And it's cool. It's just fun. It's fun to do. It sounds like fun.

I'm mostly, although I have a very good team in support, I do not have as much of a table read like component as you do so there is a level of jealousy that I have about that it's just different right because your form is different from this form it is

your form is a conversational form the form we're playing with is it's more like I mean on the page it looks like a film script and there are these different all these different voices and sound effects. There's stuff coming together. And there's no straight conversation. And there's a part of me that would like to just take, say, the two hours I spent with Tim Galway and just release it.

Because a lot of it was really interesting. But he had a narrow role to play in that particular story. Suffice to say, if you need an outlet for these longer-form interviews with people like Galway, there may be an avenue. You know, it's interesting to know because we've got two years of this stuff, and I've interviewed at length. There have been some really interesting interviews that just got, you know, I used just little snippets from. And there are some interviews where we didn't use any of it and where I thought the interview was fabulous, but it just didn't, you know, it didn't serve the piece.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, I may be option C if needed. No, option B. So we'll figure that out. Yeah. So we can bookmark that. I have just a handful of additional questions for you, and then I can let you get back to your day. The question of exercise, it seems like you exercise regularly. I would love to just hear you speak to how you exercise, when you exercise, if it is in fact an important element of your days or weeks. My wife and children make fun of how much I exercise.

And it is one of those addictions I've encouraged in myself. It just, because it seems to me, it's a magic pill, right? It's the closest thing there is to a magic pill. And it makes me, it not only makes me feel just better all the time, but it makes me think better. So an exercise for me is I'm usually kind of working while I'm exercising. All kinds of ideas are popping in my head. And so it's useful. So what I do, I mean, pandemic exercise is a little different from non-pandemic exercise. But in a non-pandemic world, I try to do something different every day. Like never do the same two things back to back. And the portfolio of activities is long bike rides, like really long

bike rides or Peloton rides. I have a Peloton in my house. Long hikes. I used to run, but I stopped running four or five years ago because it was just, my joints didn't like it. Swimming. I have, I suck at it. Like I, when I jump in the pool, I drown. I just, I really, I just have a, my body just goes to the bottom of the pool. And I've never been, I've always been able to kind of keep myself afloat, but it's never been something I'm good at. But I have this incredibly gifted female swimming coach who screams at me for an hour as I go back and forth in the pool. And she's actually, we've, she, she, and she keeps pushing me to do crazy things. Like we swam Alcatraz. Well, that seems aggressive for somebody who is not good at swimming. Yes, I'm not a swimmer.

I'm really not a swimmer. And so I play tennis. I used to play a lot of basketball. That's something also I gave up just because the basketball games were starting to look like scenes from a war. Where, you know, that every day you went out, you knew someone was going to, there's going to be a casualty. It was just a question who in the unit was going to go down. And it was like a hamstring or a knee or, and I just thought, you know, I just can't do this anymore. So the injury, the cost of the injury got too high.

Tennis is the last competitive sport I think I really play. But basketball, I do go one-on-one with my 13-year-old son, which is great. I can play half court. So I do all those things. And I always try to do, I do, I'll do at least 45 minutes of kind of intense cardio a day, but usually more than, usually substantially more than that. And, and others, you know, some weights, weights and stuff like that. I have an, and I have a trainer who I meet with two or three times a week who makes me move my body in ways that I don't normally move my body. Oh, and the last thing is once a week, non-pandemic, I'll do a Bikram yoga class, again, just to kind of stay flexible. So yes,, I do a lot of stuff, and I wished, you know,

I had a 25-year-old body and I could still do the stuff I really used to do. I mean, I used to love long runs, and I used to love basketball. That was just, like, the best, but I can't do it anymore. It seems like you're still putting in due mileage, uh, in the best way possible. And I feel, I feel, I don't know about you, but I feel if I go a day without working out in some way, I feel rotten. I mean, I just feel like crap. And so it, this, my body is forcing me to do it. And I'm glad that my body is forcing me to do it. Um, does, it's like I assume that's the way you're supposed to live, that you're supposed to be, especially since a lot of the rest of my life is sedentary.

I mean, I'm at a desk. It's funny how when you bump up against people who don't do it, how weird they think it is. But for me, it's just like therapy and I sort out all kinds of literary problems. If I have a problem with anything I'm writing, if I just go for a bike ride or, or go walk up a mountain, the problem is resolved by the end of it. It just resolves itself.

And so it's, it's like central to my existence. And it's also, I would say, I have this in common with almost, I would say, all my close friends. All my close friends are people who can hop on a bike and go 40 or 50 miles and just like doing it. Or go for, you know, 20-mile hikes. And they all do it. So I guess it does sit in the middle of my life. And it's sort of replaced, you know, sports was the middle of my life until I was 19 years old. You know, growing up, I was identified as an athlete, and I played lots of sports. And those eventually, you know, you're no longer able to play.

But this is sort of the next best thing. So just a few more questions. And if these lead us to dead ends, then I'll take full responsibility. But the first is, what books outside of your own have you gifted the most to other people? Are there any books that you have given more than once as oh yes i've got i've got in fact it's funny because i've just sent a couple of friends a pair of novels and one of the novels i've sent to a dozen people and it's a rant it will seem like a random choice to you but it's like one of these books that it's just a miracle of a book it's called the long ships and it's by a Scandinavian historian. It's a novel by a Scandinavian historian who only wrote one novel. I think his name is Franz Bengsten. And it is a,

he was a Viking historian, and he packed everything he knew about the Vikings into this wonderful comic novel. And at the end of it, you feel like you were a Viking for 400 pages. And it's just a piece of history that he just brings to life in this story. And I hand that out all the time, partly because it is just

an incredible, pleasurable reading experience, and partly just to illustrate a point that you never know where great books are going to come from. It's not like, you know, there are lots of examples of people, even very late in life, like a book just pops

out of them and it was their one book. The other book that my pandemic reading gift I've been giving to people because it's a perfect pandemic novel is Amor Tolles' A Gentleman in Moscow. And it's about a Russian aristocrat who, during the revolution, he's the kind of guy who was supposed to be shot, but because of certain qualities, he isn't shot. And instead, they lock him up in the Metropole Hotel in Moscow, and he doesn't leave for the next 50 years. And so you're stuck inside this place. And it's sort of Eloise for grownups and just beautifully done. But it makes you, I mean, in this moment, it makes you see the possibilities of resourcefulness in a confined space. But there are a bunch of books that I give to people, but those are the two that I've just recently in the last week sent to people. Do any, I'm going to check out the long ships, was it?

Yep. Do any nonfiction books come to mind or do you gift mostly fiction? Mostly fiction, mostly fiction. Memoir. There are memoirs that I've given more than once to people. Clive James's unreliable memoirs, Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, essentially comic memoirs. I mean, just really funny books. They're books that I just found moving in all kinds of ways

that are odd books that I'll go grab and send to people. There's a book that I've, you know, I've never seen anybody talk about it or write about it. But when I read it, I thought, I mean, in a funny way, it was helpful for Liar's Poker. It was a book called The Innocent Anthropologist. Do you know this book? I don't. All right. Nigel Barley is the author. And Nigel Barley was a graduate student doing his PhD in anthropology at Cambridge. And he's got the naughty problem of what he's going to write his thesis about. And he goes in to meet with his advisor and what normally people were doing, and this would have been in kind of the mid-70s, they were finding, you know, tribes that had not been described. You know, people in remote parts of the world who had not been visited by an anthropologist, and you go do your anthropological PhD about this tribe. But the advisor says, there are none left.

Like, there's nobody left to write about. That old trick of finding some tribe and going in and doing their anthropology, it's not going to work. But then the advisor says, I take that back. There's one, but they're so boring, nobody wants to write about them. And it's a tribe called the Dewayo people in northern Cameroon. And he goes and lives with the Dewayo people. And he's told the only things they do, there's some mating ritual, and there's also they drink beer all the time. And other than that, they don't do anything.

And that that's why he should not write his thesis. But instead, he writes this wonderful travel book, memoir, anthropological study of these incredibly interesting people in northern Cameroon who have disguised how interesting they are by seeming only to drink beer and mate. And they sort of shielded themselves from anthropological inquiry. And this book, it was just, you know, books, I'm very responsive to people who can make me laugh on the page. And that was one of the funniest books I've ever read. And every now and then when I can find it, I give that away. Because again, it's sort of like a surprising book. You have mentioned a number of quotes from, say, Amos and others that are very sticky in the course of this conversation. If you could put a message, a quote, a question, anything at all on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, that would reach billions of people. Does anything come to mind, non-commercial, that you might put on a billboard?

A saying, a mantra, something you remind yourself of, anything at all? All right, well, so let me just, it's going to be, it's going to sound trite, whatever I say. And let me just, let me just say, let me just say that I live in the world's capital of bumper stickers. At Berkeley, California, there are more bumper stickers per automobile than anywhere else in the world. It's been scientifically proven. And you can walk down the street and people, and it's mostly political stuff, but it's just like people getting their point across in bumper stickers. And I have never had a bumper sticker on my car because it's not one thing I've ever wanted to say over and over forever. I'm not a bumper sticker or quote guy. However, if you say I got to put it up on a billboard, I would take the mantra of my high school baseball coach, one of the greatest men I've ever known,

who is actually the subject of one of the podcast episodes. And he would just say it routinely, and he just kind of became part of you. He would say, don't be good, be great. And he'd say it to you as he handed you the ball to go out to pitch a game. He'd say it to you when you were working out. And you just, having that in mind, it's the kind of thing I try to keep in mind when I'm working on something. Good is not okay. It's like, if you're going to do it, be great. Like push yourself. And, uh, and it's hard and, you know, don't just stop when it's good enough.

So that, that's what I would stick on a billboard. It's the sort of on the, it's one of those things that's in the billboard of my mind. Don't be good, be great. I love it. That's Billy Fitzgerald, Billy Fitzgerald, episode two. I have loved my sneak peek of this new season of Against the Rules. I encourage everybody to check it out as you've done a wonderful job. The whole team has done a great job on it. It's available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you might find your podcasts.

You can find more information at atrpodcast.com. That's as in Against the Rules, atrpodcast.com. Michael, are there any other websites or any other resources, social media handles, anything that you would like to mention if people want to learn more about what you're up to or wave hello through the ether of the internet? I wish I could say yes, but I don't do social media. So the answer is no. I feel so inadequate. No, I have no way to be found. Except through my work.

Look to your boot soles. That's the Witton line, right? That I'm just, there's not much of me on the internet. Oh, what a, what a, what a gift to you and to yourself and your family. I think it's, it's a rarity. I remember when I asked Laird Hamilton, this big wave surfer once, I said, where can people find you? And he said, the Pacific ocean. So, so you're in, you're in a rarefied company rarefied company

yeah and so you got people typing in www pacificocean.com looking for laird hamilton where is he he said he's gonna be here well michael this has been uh such such a pleasure and uh i really appreciate you carving out the time. I've really enjoyed our conversation. So have I, Tim. Thanks for having me. Of course. And to everybody listening, everything we discussed, including of course, Against the Rules,

atrpodcast.com, all of the books, everything can be found in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday.

Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets

and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one.

And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by UCAN. That's U-C-A-N. I was introduced to UCAN and its unique carbohydrate super starch by my good friend and listener favorite, Dr. Peter Attia. A lot of you know who that is. And he said there is really no carb in the world quite like it. And just as context, Peter has spent two to three years at a time in ketosis. That is effectively with a diet absent of carbohydrates. But Peter has written about how he stayed in ketosis while using UCAN regularly and how there is almost no insulin response. It's very odd. It's very unusual. And there's a cool story behind it, which I'll tell you about. As Peter has written,

it does not behave like a carbohydrate with respect to insulin secretion and ketone suppression. So I have since included it in my routine using UCAN's powders to power my workouts and the bars also as great snacks. Specifically, the chocolate anytime energy bar at just 180 calories has been a lifesaver. It helps me to stay sharp, even if I start to fade at the end of the day. And I suppose that isn't surprising when you consider that super starch has been shown in studies to improve accuracy at the end of a soccer game and improve cognition when you are exhausted. The company backstory is really interesting. It was founded with a mission to help children with a rare metabolic disorder that prevents the body from producing

glucose on its own. UCAN's discovery of a patented carbohydrate that, as mentioned, is called SuperStarch now, helped those children sustain glucose levels to keep them alive. Now, in the world of performance, UCAN is regularly purchased by more than 400 pro and college teams that have won every imaginable championship, keeping their athletes energy steady in the weight room, on the field, and elsewhere. Extensive scientific research and clinical trials have shown that SuperStarch provides a sustained release of energy to the body without spiking blood sugar. UCAN is the ideal way to source energy from carbohydrate without the negatives associated with fast carbs, especially sugar. So you can avoid fatigue, hunger, cravings,

loss of focus, all of that with this technology, whether you're an athlete working on your fitness or you need efficient calories to get you through your day, you can is an elegant energy solution. So check it out. This stuff is very, very cool. And you guys, my listeners can save 25% on your first UCAN order by going to UCAN.co. That's U-C-A-N.co and using promo code Tim. That's UCAN.co and promo code Tim. You also get free shipping if you are in the US. So check it out. Go to UCAN.co and use promo TIM for 25% off and free shipping. That is US only on your first order. And when in doubt, just try the chocolate anytime energy bar. It is simply fantastic. Youcan.co promo code TIM. This episode is brought to you by Readwise. Readwise is one of the cooler things I've found in the last year or two,

sent to me by one of my best friends. It is an app that helps you remember significantly more of what you read. In fact, on average, their users report remembering 84% more of what they've read and highlighted. And it can take a few different forms. You can sign up for the service. That's readwise.io forward slash Tim and get a daily email, which I do. So I've got in front of me one example with highlights from Who Am I Randomness, Sapiens, Priceless, and a bunch of other books.

And it has a bunch of advanced features on top of that. But we've all had the experience of reading a book or article, looking back a couple of weeks later to realize that you don't remember anything from it or next to nothing. Readwise solves this problem by integrating Kindle, Pocket, iBooks, Instapaper, and more to send you a daily digest of all your highlights. So it helps you to build a fun daily habit. I love getting these emails, which I can't believe I'm even saying because I hate email, but I love getting these. So you get a daily email in simplest form, and you can review and actually use the hundreds or perhaps even thousands of highlights that are just sitting in your reading devices collecting cyber dust.

And this simple habit of reviewing your highlights daily can dramatically improve how much information you retain through spaced repetition and actually use. And quite frankly, it's just fun. It's really fun to see what you've highlighted over the years and forgotten about. Some of it's really good. I mean, these are things that ostensibly you want it to remember. Readwise also provides tools for organizing your books, articles, and highlights. So tagging, searching, adding notes, creating flashcards, all that kind of stuff. You can even tell Readwise to automatically export your highlights to Evernote. This is a big deal for me. I've had to do this manually in the past, but Readwise makes it painless and super, super simple. And it just takes seconds to sign up.

I was astonished by this. I thought the importing from the Kindle would take a really long time. It takes no time at all. And believe it or not, you can also use Readwise with paper books. That is, if you have a paperback or something, you can automatically get the top popular highlights for your books simply by adding your titles. And you can also create your own highlights with the app's camera highlighting feature. This stuff is super cool. So there's no reason not to try this out. I think it's incredibly, incredibly useful, incredibly cool and very fun. Sign up at readwise.io slash Tim. That's R-E-A-D-W-I-S- I-O slash Tim for a two-month free trial offered

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