"Michael Lewis"
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This summer, in a place.

where no one feels safe. Every once in a while, a story comes along that fills your heart. Two brothers, one canoe. This Christmas, get ready to... Oh my God, my voiceover alter egos are taking over my brain and why can't I just be myself? Will Arnett here. Welcome.

to an all-new SmartLess. I was about to say, Sean just told me in the middle of us saying something apropos, nothing told me to go fuck myself. And here's right before we logged on. And here's

It reminded me, I think I talked, Jay, did we talk about this? I hate when people, when they do pictures and people give the finger in pictures. Yeah, because it's not funny. It's not interesting. It's not funny. People think like, they get like, hey, let's get a picture. And then everybody goes, fuck you. You know, the only time it's funny is when little, little, tiny, tiny kids do it. I guess. You know, I've got one of my favorite, favorite pictures. You both will appreciate this, is a picture of Jimmy Burroughs.

looking just dead into camera with those dead shark eyes and just a flaccid old finger right at me, right at the camera. And it's one of my favorite things. I know, but here's my point. And obviously we love Jimmy. Jimmy Burrows is a director of lots of sitcoms. Every episode of Will & Grace, Cheers. I mean, he's done everything. But the message is what?

Fuck you? Well, I guess it's sort of like... No, it's people thinking they're feeling kitschy and they're feeling like, oh, this is funny. It's a bonding thing and it's saying, hey, we're so close that I can do this. I think it's in a good spirit. I always take it it's in lieu of actually something funny.

Did you just say "Lieu"? He did. Beautiful pronunciation. -Can you just say "Lieu"? -So you're saying maybe they're... What if they're a little insecure about their ability to smile in an attractive way? Well, then just say that. Hang on a second. I think Will needs to burp. Hang on. If you just rotate your chin away from the microphone next time you have a bubble... One of the great bubble...

A bubble. One of the great things about you having difficulty signing on was I hammered my food before you got on because I thought...

if he sees my fat face gorging out on this food. Yeah, I saw it. Your face has been beautifully less fat lately. I've really been. Was that fight camp or are you sick? Either way, thank you. When people say like, you know, I had a costumer once say to me, we were doing a fitting sort of mid-show, and she goes, Will, you can't get too skinny. And I said, that's what I always say. Yeah.

You know, I ran down here this morning. I'm so embarrassed. I was on a phone call. I was running late for this. And so I'm like, I go, Scotty, can you just put my... Can you hook up my computer? And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I come in to where I usually sit right here in front of this computer. And it was like 30 seconds before we started. And I screamed. I go, Scotty! He goes, yeah. I go...

Give me the plug. I don't have the plug. Like the power plug. And he walks in and he goes, it's already plugged in. And I'm like, what? And that very calm, hysterical twit voice. But this is, don't you guys have like a specific setup the way you have everything? Yeah. So he switched all my wires on all the opposite sides of my computer.

Jason, you know, there's a sexual input joke here, Will. I don't know if you want to take it. Go for it. Or you want a moment to write that? We'll come back to it. No, no, no. I was not going to make a joke there, Jason, because I'm respectful. No, me too. That's why I wasn't going to make it. I'm very respectful. I don't even think it's funny. Well, go ahead. Somebody make it. Hey, gang. Yeah. To me.

There is no better human moment than when you hear someone or see someone that you immediately feel a connection to. Sometimes that's in person, but at other times it's at an audience distance. When you hear a song they write or a performance they create or an interview you watch or a book they write, you get the sense that that person may tick like you and they put that similarity into words or action in a way that you never could. This next guest is one of those people. He is a writer.

and his talent in articulating his thoughts is matched only by his enormous curiosity and intelligence. He has written articles and books on many subjects covering sports, finance, and most recently, the pandemic. Some of his books have even become some of our favorite movies, such as...

The Blind Side, Moneyball, and The Big Short. Friends, please welcome the big brain, Michael Lewis. Wow. Kidding. There we are. Good morning. Hello, sir. Hello there. Michael Lewis. So cool to meet you. I'm so, so happy you are doing this with us, sir. We had a brief chance to talk a few months ago, and it was one of the greatest conversations ever.

I have had that, that I'm not exaggerating. I'm not puffing there. Uh, it was, it was great. So thank you for coming on and, uh, sharing your, your head and your, your thoughts with us. No, it's, it's, uh, it's a total gas. I can't believe that what I just heard. Well, I just wonder what's left. Like, yeah, it was, it was great. I've read a number of your books. Uh, so this is, it's such a thrill to meet you. And, and, um,

What I love about your books is that you hone in on subjects that are kind of right there in front of us, right under our nose. But you offer a perspective that you say, hey, look, this is right here, but actually look at what's happening. So let's say...

We'll take the blind side, for instance. I didn't understand anything. You know, I watched football my whole life. I didn't understand the importance of the left tackle. Now, of course, people in football would. But you honed in on this idea of the left tackle. And then you brought the, you told it through the lens of this young man who was an incredible talent at left tackle.

the money ball. You, you told it, you know, you, you talked about what Billy Bean was doing up in the Oakland athletics. And then you talked, told it through the lens of a guy who was a kind of a renegade who was amongst GMs and outlier, if you will, because he approached the game differently at a certain point, he changed the way he looked at the game. All of your books seem to hone in again on these, these,

ideas of, you know, subjects that are right there, but you find a different angle on it. What-- How-- A, how do you find these stories? And B, what sort of leads you towards these kinds of stories?

Let me give you a couple, I'll give you a couple examples because it is, it's a really undisciplined process. I mean, that is, it's not like a formula. And every time I finish one, I think I'll never find one again because it just, it just, everyone's seen, felt so sui generis. Like you just, you just, not repeatable. By the way, by the way, not to interrupt you, well, to interrupt you, but just to let you know, every time I finish one of your books, I always think, well, that's it. There's no way Michael Lewis is going to find another story like this that is so surprising. I'm not going to find another story like this.

I'm not kidding you. And then every time I get your newest book and I always go, wow, how surprising. - So the two examples you mentioned, so Moneyball, we'd been living in Europe for a couple of years. I hadn't watched American sports in forever. We came back and I flipped on the television and the Oakland A's were playing. And I was watching and listening to the announcers.

And I noticed, I mean, this was what, 2001? And salaries exploded. And I noticed that the left fielder was like being paid $6 million a year. And the right fielder was being paid 150 grand. And I thought, I wonder how pissed off the right fielder is when the left fielder drops a fly ball. And it was like, sort of like, is there class resentment on a baseball team? There are now social classes on the baseball field because you've got these people getting paid so much money.

And so I started watching just the money on the field. Like, I would stop watching it, like, the money, just trying to see if they hated each other because of the money. And I couldn't detect anything. But then when you start looking at the money, you start to realize that, whoa, it's not just the players. It's like the Yankees have...

$150 million to spend on players and the A's have like 30. Like, how are they even competing? And why are the A's winning as much as the Yankees? And then so that gets you to a question you want an answer to, right? Like, that doesn't make any sense. Like in a normal if this is a market, it's a free market for baseball players. You would think that like the team that has the most money would just buy all the best ones and just win all the time. And that wasn't happening.

So, I called up Billy Bean to ask him this question. I went and went to see him. And I didn't know it was going to be a book. I thought, I didn't know it was going to be any more than a conversation. I was just kind of curious. And that day, I walked in his office, I asked him the question. He said, "No one has asked me that question and it's what I spend my life thinking about." He says, "The sports writers aren't interested in anything but like the sports and you're asking me about the money. And what we think about is like how you value these people."

So then I thought, wow, you know, this is – it's kind of cool that I'm looking at the game the way the person who's trying to manage one of these teams is looking at the game. How do you make it – like what's the story? And then it's gumbo. It's like you need these ingredients. And so the fact that, you know, it takes a while to get it out of him, that Billy Bean kind of has a motive, that he has –

He was misvalued by baseball coming out of high school. They thought he was going to be this stud, and he drafted him in the first round and dissuaded him from going to Stanford, and he'd hated him for it ever since because he never really panned out. His life had been disrupted by baseball's inability to understand the players.

But the moment, there's like a moment. I can remember there's like a moment where I said, all right, this is a book. It was like six weeks into it. And I was interviewing the players because the A's were obviously doing these things that other teams weren't doing. They had like a fat guy leading off and they had a guy playing first base who'd never played first base. And half of them looked like a beer league softball team. And I just thought like, what are the players?

The players know they don't look like other teams. And how do they feel about that? So I was moving down the cubbies in the locker room. Each day I'd take a different player. And this was like one day I was going to go see a player. It was after a game. I'm waiting for him at his cubby. And I was watching the A's come out of the showers.

And it was the first time I saw the Oakland A's naked. It's like, I never watched it. And it was the most appalling sight. It was just, it was like, there's like fat ankles. They were just like, it just, and I thought, if you line those naked bodies up against the wall and ask anybody what they did for a living, it's like,

They'd say, like, I don't know, are they certified public accountants? They would never guess they were professional athletes. Let me just say to the CPAs out there, cool it with the responses to what Michael said, okay? So I go to the front office and I said, you know, I know this is going to sound apt, but I was just watching your guys naked. And they don't look like athletes. They don't look like anything. And the guy in the number two, played by Jonah Hill in the movie, said to me, you know, that's kind of the point.

We've been using better analysis and better data to figure out who's actually doing what on a baseball field and what it's worth.

And when you find like people who are much better than the market knows they are, the kind of players we need if we're going to win because we can get them cheap, usually there's something wrong with them. They usually look wrong because if they look right, everybody knows they're valuable. If they look like a stud baseball player, people are looking for a stud baseball player. If they look like our guys, like people say, meh, he can't – and he started going down the list. They had a guy with two club feet. He was up.

He was a pitcher with two club feet. And they said, you know, people wouldn't hire him because he couldn't move very well if the ball was hit near him. But the club foot actually imparted this weird spin on his screwball. So it was like one thing after another. And I thought, oh, my God.

This is gold because it's no longer just baseball, right? It's like, all right, they're building a juggernaut out of misfit toys, out of people who nobody's seen the value in. Forget it's baseball. Think of it as like a business that you've got all these guys doing their job, same job for 100 years. People watch them on the job. Millions of people watch them on the job. There are stats attached to every person.

move they make on the baseball field, that if that person, that employee can be misvalued, who can't be? Right. So therein lied the sort of relatability, the evergreen thing that you thought would lend itself to something for mass consumption, not just baseball fans. So yeah, a stupid question like, is the right fielder pissed off at the left fielder when he drops a fly ball, led me down a rabbit hole.

to a place where I had an observation that I thought, wow, this is an important observation. But also you kind of honed in on, there's like an underdog element. I don't know if it's underdog, but it's people who are succeeding in whatever their discipline is

almost against convention. And are you drawn to that? And I think in a lot of your books, that element exists. You know, people who are doing it who don't seem like... Like, if you were to look at Sean, you know, you'd be like, there's no way that he's going to be successful. You know, look at him. He's barely sitting upright. Look at him.

You wouldn't think like comedy. You might think romantic leave. He's just miscast. He didn't even know his computer was plugged in this morning and it was right in front of him. His husband had to tell him. But wait a minute, Michael. For dumbass me who knows nothing, what is it like now? Do people, because I don't know about any of this stuff, how do they put a price on it now knowing all of this information on each player?

Well, you're much less likely to be undervalued if you're homely or misshapen. People now see beneath the surface in baseball. But I don't think – but baseball, you know, it's a –

It's a little lab. It's a very orderly universe where it's very easy statistically to assign credit and blame and figure out who did it. It's not like life. Most of life is much harder. So it's just telling you that in life, this stuff is going on too. And it's very hard to... It's much harder to see below the surface. What made you become like...

obsessed with finance and money and like want to explore all facets of it because I am too. I think, you know, when you're lucky enough like me or us or whatever to have made a few extra bucks in your life because you got, I got lucky and, you know, most Americans, most citizens don't have the time, energy, resources, anything to learn about

about or educate themselves about how money works because they have families, they gotta go to work, they come up. So once you start to force yourself to learn a little bit about it, you go, wow, this is really complicated. It's almost like it's built on purpose to be complicated to keep everybody confused. - It is built on purpose to be complicated. What got me interested in it was, I mean, I think it was an odd thing.

Because this is the beginning of my career. You have a degree in economics, don't you? Yeah. Yeah, but I have a half-assed degree in economics. That's not half-assed. And he worked at Salomon Brothers. Yeah, you worked at Salomon Brothers. That's right. Yeah, but that's what I was going to say. I'll explain it. So I grew up in New Orleans. Right. And I grew up in this culture. I call it Nolens. Nolens. That was, it was a really strange place to grow up. It was like, it was not like the rest of the United States. There's that, it's a line that if you...

to understand New Orleans, you have to stop thinking of it as the southernmost city in North America and start thinking of it as the northernmost city in South America. And it really was... It was not a... It was not a...

a successful place. It was like, it was in permanent decline and people define themselves not by what they did or how much money they made. It was really like family. And it was, but it was pretty happy. Like it was like, and when I left, I was shocked when I went east to college. I was shocked

by the connection between success and unhappiness. I would not have put it that way at the time, but there were all these people who came from New York money, all these kids in my class who were going to go to work on Wall Street, and they were kind of miserable. And I didn't even see the value of it. Like, what is this Wall Street thing that everybody's obsessing about? I was an art history major in college. At the end of my college career, I thought...

Actually, the world is a conspiracy of people who speak this language that Sean is so buffled by. I got to go learn the language. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. So I went and got a master's degree at the London School of Economics and got a job on Wall Street and ended up writing about it. But I think what drew me to it was that original feeling like,

There's something screwed up about American culture. And the epicenter of the screwed upness is this place. And I'm going to understand this place. And then, you know, I mean, my first book was Liars, called Liars Poker. It was this little memoir of me working on Wall Street. Which is, by the way, being made into a film now, right? It's always being made into a film and never being made into a film. It's one of those things. So...

Warner Brothers bought it and it's been sitting inside of Warner Brothers for 30 years. We'll get it made. After the interview, we're going to make some calls. But let me ask you this then. So I would imagine at that time when you went to, when you worked at Salomon Brothers and you went to an Ivy League school,

And those, that people who were in that sort of world whose parents worked in finance and then they went and worked in finance. And now, of course, we have an entire, talked about class in the baseball field. We have an entire class of finance here, especially on the coast, Los Angeles and New York. If you want to send your kid to school, you got to, it used to be you had to be worried about sending your kid and be worried about, you know, showbiz people, too many showbiz people at your school. Now it's too many finance people.

And they're kind of everywhere and they've dominated. And of course, there's lots of stories. Of course, they've increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots. And there are all these people who have ridiculous wealth. Were you ever worried seeing those people, especially with an art history degree, do you have a healthy dislike for people in finance and for kids who now are in the position where they have inherited or about to inherit vast sums of wealth and have

no discernible talent for anything. And because this is something that's how we used to call them gold card, you know, Rostas or whatever back in the day. And now these kids, there's an entire class of people who don't know how to do anything and they're given everything.

You must be exposed to lots of that. So I have been throughout my life, but it's case-by-case basis. Some people are great and some people aren't. But there's a really goofy system. And that's the thing that is sort of despicable is the system. And the system revealed itself to me immediately because...

Like you get a degree in economics, you don't know anything about money. You don't know like what to do in the stock market or you don't – that's not what they teach you in economics class. It's much more what? Theory. It's theory, yes. And so I didn't know anything about money.

And within 18 months, I was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to talk people into doing things with money that they shouldn't have been doing. And professionals, I mean, like they're not moms and pops, but people who are managing hundreds of millions of dollars. And it was clear I had no value to the world, like probably negative value to the world. I was getting people to do things they probably shouldn't do half the time. And we made money by moving the money around.

And it was that original observation that like there's no connection between what I'm extracting for myself and what I'm putting in. Like I'm not being rewarded for making the society a better place, for adding value to the society. I'm just like taking rents out of the economy. And I think that is a pretty good description of much of Wall Street.

And what's happened is it's just grown and grown and grown. That it's – when I got there in the late 1980s, the Wall Street was twice as big as it had been in a generation before in relation to the rest of the economy. It's now twice as big now than it was then. And so it's become this machine. The other thing about it was like the Wall Street – there was a thing about old Wall Street.

where the kind of people who went to work there were either sort of the C students at Yale, not so bright, but like, you know, everybody thought they were a nice guy. Or, you know, Vinny from Staten Island, who had a high school diploma. And Vinny could do really well. There was a way, it was a kind of partly an engine for social mobility. And now it's become, you have to be so highly credentialed up front

Are you wearing underwear? I'm wearing shorts. Listen. Oh, my God. Listen, I'm wearing shorts. Listen, that's your next. Sorry, sorry, sorry. You just like flashed me in the middle of. It's a lot of thigh, Will. It's a lot of thigh. All right. But now it's sort of like you need your physics degree from MIT to go work at Wall Street. And it is not an engine for.

for social mobility. It's kind of an engine for ossifying the existing social relations. Rich kids get to go to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and then they go to the Wall Street firm where they get paid a lot of money doing things that aren't really very useful for everybody else. And you want to know why our politics are the way they are. A lot of people are justifiably pissed off. Yeah, of course. And you have people, right, all those kids, they graduate and they all get, they all become associates at Goldman or wherever, and they get

fed into that machine. And I think you're right. That used to be a thing. I guess those guys, people who would come in as, you know, you...

You said sort of the guy from Staten Island, whatever. Those were the people who were the traders on the floor, right? There was a class system within Wall Street that existed. They're gone. They're gone. Wall Street is, oh, yeah, they're all gone. The machines have eliminated their jobs. Right, right. So now it's MIT and now you're creating the perfect black box, the thing that's going to predict what the market does, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Or the thing that's going to rape you when you go into the stock market to do your trade. Right. The most efficient way. It's not all bad. No, no. You got Dan Dees out there keeping up the good side of the ledger. We got a good guy. There's a good guy we know. Dan Dees. He's a friend of the podcast. We'll be right back. Back to the show.

Michael, so, you know, we touched on just the politics of it. I'm always fascinated with, well, I'll just cut to the chase and ask the question. What is your prediction in the next election how it will affect finances? Because I'm always fascinated about how that works. It seems like every election cycle, something happens where, you know, it goes up or down or something shifts kind of like glacially, but it happens.

You seem susceptible to hearing false wisdom. Thank you. It's nice meeting you too. You're asking me to tell you something no one knows. You said that nicer than Will and I ever have to him. It's such a sweet question because you're sort of like, oh, you must know. Yeah, right. I know you don't know. I know nobody knows, but I like to hear people's opinions and predictions anyway. No, no, no, no, no. I think it's fascinating how elections affect money.

Yeah. Is this sort of the common thought that, to oversimplify things, if Republicans are in, stock market goes up. If Democrats are in, stock market goes down. But hang on a minute, because if it goes up with the Republican side, it may burst. The Democratic, it may go down, but at least it's a true down and it'll slowly creep up in a legitimate way. Can I answer a different way? Yes, please.

I think it's sort of like a train that's on a track and it's not going to go off the track unless there's a big catastrophe. And I think there's one – so I mean like the market is just – in the end what it is is it's giving you your little percentage of corporate earnings. And I don't really see forces in our society that are going to undermine corporate earnings. It seems like the forces for corporate earnings, political, et cetera, keep getting stronger and stronger unless there's a revolution of some sort. Some sort of – so –

I can imagine that happened in a couple of ways, but the way I think about like the one thing I watch and think about, oh, I ought to take my money out of the market if that starts to happen.

is the solvency of the country. Like, will the U.S. government honor its debts? Like, do you trust the Treasury? Do you trust these things called Treasury bonds? Because the whole global financial system is premised on Treasury bonds, U.S. Treasury bonds, being viewed as a riskless asset. But what do you think about the idea of the myth of the deficit? Did you read that book? I just got it. What's her name wrote? I haven't read it.

It's not a myth. Okay. So, so yeah. So I haven't read the book, but I understand that we can print as much money as we want to pay off our debt. Right. But if people, it's a matter, this is a matter of faith that if, if the Chinese government just,

just decides that, oh, and other, that we're not going to actually pay back our debts and they don't want to hold these pieces of paper. There's a vicious cycle that would, that would kick in. And what I kind of imagined Trump was going to do, and he never did it, he never did it because our debts never really became a huge problem. We haven't gotten to the point where like we're cutting federal programs because we need to service the debt, but that's not that far away. That if, if, if I would imagine Trump was going to get up and say, you know, who do we owe this money to?

We owe it to the Chinese of $2 trillion of these pieces of paper. How do they get that? Raw trade deals. We're just not going to pay them back. The minute you start to whisper that kind of thing, or the minute that Congress and the society proves incapable of handling its finances, that's when I would start to think, I'm not sure about this. But

To answer your question, like what's going to happen, I got no idea. And I don't actually – And that's our time. I don't actually take action based on like some future events that are unpredictable. Let me ask you your opinion about this thing. There's this interesting article about – when you talk about the –

Corporate earnings and that is potentially sort of the lifeblood of this country and how we maintain health and to be quote unquote number one in the world and all that stuff. They were talking about the existential risk and crisis of what is potentially happening right now, which is everybody kind of quitting their job.

because of the, everyone kind of got used to being able to live with a little bit less and not chasing, you know, not on the hamster wheel as much through the pandemic because everyone was home.

And the article went on to kind of talk about how what if people stopped buying into this race for dog-eat-dog and being better than your neighbor and this capitalism sort of rush to acquire everything and to be the richest and have the most bling and all the creature comforts and everything.

all that's what if people started living a little bit more like some of the number two or number three countries, you know, that take all of August off and they have these four day work weeks and they just like talking about Denmark or France or any of these other places that are comfortable not being number one there because they're older and more mature and they're not like trying to show off. And like, what if America just kind of found that place and,

And all the corporations were like, uh-oh, they're not buying it anymore, that they need to be better than their neighbor. I think about that all the time. So that's something a big brain like yours could probably really get your arms around and write a really compelling book about just everybody kind of going, yeah, we're good with less, and what would the corporations do about that? Are you pitching me a book idea or asking me a question?

Open up your email. Can we talk offline about that, please? So, you know, what I was hearing you say is what if America became a sane place instead of the moronic inferno? And it's – I don't know. Can our culture change that much? Maybe. One of the things that is happening –

that is sort of maybe behind all this is demographic change, right? That the new people coming into the workforce, it's smaller numbers than we've seen forever compared to the size. So the reason you're going to see kind of a tilt, I think, in negotiating power towards employees is there are fewer of them. That seems to be kind of happening. And maybe, yeah, I'm all for it. So this gets back to how people lived in New Orleans, right?

So American materialism

when I collided with it for the first time, just shocked me. It jolted me. Because I hadn't really grown up with it. And it was, and it seemed so unhappy. Don't come between us and our stuff. I remember once seeing a documentary about a guy and he followed, I forget what it was called, and he was, his parents were immigrants, I think from Hungary, and his dad hadn't been back there in sort of 30 years. This was maybe in the 80s or 90s anyway.

He goes back to Hungary with his dad and his dad sees his family there and they all sit out and they have this huge meal outside. And he starts talking to his family and his dad's crying with his brothers and the extended family, etc. And then he interviews his dad after the dinner and he says, how is it being back? What's the difference? His dad says, you know what, I forgot. He says, when I'm in America, people say, what do you do?

But when I'm back here, people, the first thing they say is, are you happy? And that's the difference. And I think that that's a cultural... Jason, to answer your question, I don't know, I'm not answering it, but my sort of feeling on that is there needs to be a major cultural shift. And it's something that doesn't necessarily exist in this country. And frankly...

I mean, you look at New York, you look at these places, they were built on this idea of, you know, trade and, you know, always at the heart of it. Michael, I'm not telling you anything you don't know. I mean, famously, New York didn't have a lot of great churches because it wasn't a religious center, which...

at the time, was unusual for a founding of a new city. They were always, that was kind of the centerpiece. New York wasn't about that. It was always about trade. It was always about commerce. And that is at the heart of the, when people talk about the American idea, they always talk about getting ahead, getting all the things you want. And it's about degree, but the white picket fence, the house, all that stuff is stuff.

Yeah. I wonder if it's still just sort of like a long tail to the fact that we're young and that we're just starting out. We're trying to prove it to the world that this country can make it. We're only, what, a few hundred years old. I mean, you can buy cigarettes in a building that's 600 years old in any part of Europe. I'm very young. That should be, sorry, this is an aside, but I'm very young. So anyway, that's, I guess, watch this space. We'll see how our country does. Watch this space.

Change directions for one second. Your podcast, Against the Rules, is in its third season now? Yeah. And so with this, do you have...

You really like exploring these subjects deeper, more fully through conversation as opposed to kind of just with your singular prism of just you in front of a screen typing away. Tell me about that. The answer to that is no, because it's not like this. It's crafted content.

storytelling. It's essentially taking my magazine life into audio. And what interested me was audio. It was the different kind of muscle you have to use with an audience when you're writing for the ear as opposed to on the page.

And I just wanted to see what that felt like. And I felt like from the beginning of my career, I found that was after I finished a book, the best thing to do is not write another book and find something else to do. So, and, and I used to do is write screenplays. And that was, it was almost like, like literary cross training that, you know, I'd spent all this time running marathons and I was going to take the off season swimming and lifting weights. It was just like a different thing. You're using different muscles and I wasn't very good at it. Uh,

But even though I wasn't very good at it, the kind of – the nature of the medium, how compressed it is, how you're forced to visualize what you're putting on the page, which you're not when you're like writing just prose. It just – it brings something out. It improves you in ways. And so I got into the – I did the podcast in the first place just to see if it would do the same kind of thing. Mm-hmm.

And the nice thing about the podcast is that you don't need really anybody to make it. I mean, it goes out there. And it's been an education how different the form is and the kinds of things it rewards a writer for doing.

And it's fed back into the books, like the screenplays have. I think it's made me just a better prose writer. And so one of the things that you're exploring with the podcast is the subject of expertise, like sort of the notion of how many things can you really be expert at, great at? How many should you try to be great at? Or should you just focus on one or two things in your whole life? Or is everyone just sort of spreading themselves too far?

too thin and they should just focus on not your lane, but I don't know, there's this sort of the sense of too much ambition maybe in this world or I don't know, help me out.

What interested me in this subject was sort of like the status of the expert. What's happened to that person in our society? The pandemic is like an incredible example of the problem, that there was like a smart way to approach the pandemic. There were people who actually knew what to do. We never accessed them.

And we still to this day kind of people don't know who they are. And so the kind of question was like, why are we, this country has this unbelievable ability to generate expertise, knowledge that there are, we lead the world in Nobel prizes. We, you know, the government, the US government filled with people who know more about some subject than anyone in the world. Sean knows the fastest route to Chin Chin from every point in Los Angeles. Can I pick something up? Yeah. Yeah.

Can I give you one example? This is one of the episodes. I have a friend. His name is Max Steyer. He runs something called the Partnership for Public Service, and he's trying to fix the U.S. government in a nonpartisan way, just trying to make it work better. And he figured out that one of the problems is the morale of the employees because every time they do something bad, they're publicly humiliated. Every time they do something good, nobody notices. Right.

So he tried to create a kind of Oscars, like create an award for really good government, federal government workers. Calls it the Sammies. Nobody's paying any attention to it. But he's managed to get like thousands of people nominated for the Sammies. And he was reading to me for this list of his Sammy Award nominees one day. And I realized like what this really is, is a list of unbelievable experts.

everybody on this list has done something extraordinary with a very narrow expertise that would bore you to tears if you had to listen to it for very long. So, but I want to take, so in the show, I want to take one of these and just sort of dramatize how we aren't valuing, how we don't even know this sort of stuff exists. So randomly off this list, I picked the guy who was, he was just, it was an alphabetical order who was at the top. His name was Arthur A. Allen. And what Arthur A. Allen had done in his career in the Coast Guard as an oceanographer was,

was figure out how objects drift at sea. So if you fall off a boat, you know, if any of you fall off a boat in the middle of the ocean. One of us will sink. One of you will sink. But you will all float in slightly different ways. And you'll float in a different way if you're on a capsized sailboat or if you're on a raft or you're in a life preserver. No one had ever bothered to try to figure out how different objects drift at sea.

Arthur Allen had watched some people die early in his career, a mom and a little girl die on the Chesapeake Bay because the Coast Guard couldn't figure out how the boat they were on was drifting when it was lost. And he said, I'm going to figure this out and spent years.

Fifteen years dropping objects into the Long Island Sound in his free time, measuring how these things drift and putting it into mathematical equations so the Coast Guard could identify where you might be if they knew where you started. Wow.

So in the history of people lost at sea, up until very recently, nobody even bothered to look for them because once you were lost at sea, you were lost at sea. The U.S. government doesn't even bother thinking about this until World War II and pilots are shot down over the Pacific Ocean. And even then, they're not very good at it. It sounds like something I was almost going to do, but I just got super busy. So in 2007...

He's finally finished his work. He's taught all the Coast Guard search and rescue people about how objects drift. A few weeks later, a 350-pound man runs out of his cruise ship window 75 miles off the coast of Florida into the Atlantic Ocean. And they don't discover he's gone for hours.

When they realize he's gone, they can look at these ship cameras and figure out where he went over. But normally, again, a person in the ocean, you would just never bother. But this guy's equations...

them right to where he was in the ocean. They pluck him out of the ocean. And since then, thousands of people have been similarly rescued at sea because of what this guy did. That's crazy. So one of our episodes is just an example. And this is sort of like written stuff, but it

It's the story of this guy, Arthur Allen, and this other guy, another fat guy who went off the boat of a fishing boat off the coast of 14 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. And eight hours later, they find this guy. And this guy, the question is sort of like, do we understand what we just did? Like, but in fact, there are no articles about Art Allen. There's no newspaper articles about how they did it. It's sort of like a miracle. They found a guy. Yeah.

And the guy himself who's pulled out of the water, when you ask him what happened, he says, it was a miracle. I found Jesus while I was on the water and God saved me. So, and it's sort of like, so it's, there is, this is just one of the episodes, an example of like how we don't get our minds around the value of the expertise we've created. Like we're incredibly good at creating all this knowledge and really dumb. What's that? And he didn't even win a Sammy. Yeah.

He didn't even win a Sammy. He got beat by someone else. The guy on the cruise ship, he had like 50 Sammys. And then...

Let me ask you, and when they... By the way... It's also a good word for where your tax dollars go. You know, like you never realize, well, I'm paying all these taxes. But Michael, this goes right into, again, where we started, which is like you are finding, kind of finding value where it has not been assigned properly is obviously something that...

interests you and I think is such a great sort of... Well, you stay curious, which is so great. And you did an incredible example of this with the premonition, right? With the expertise, the experts you found there and followed them. I mean, for the listeners out there that aren't familiar with the book, the concept of it, the subject matter of it, speak just a little bit about that, please. As an exercise, it was a little different for me because I realized before...

even the pandemic happened, I realized that like the best things I'd done were character driven. And it was where I, and where I was weak in the books I'd written, where the books felt weak was where I didn't have a character who was, who could quite hold the story. And it was, and that the ideas kind of overwhelmed the story. So I thought next book I do, I'm just going to go find the characters and let the story take care of itself. But I didn't know what it was going to be about.

And then the pandemic starts. And the thing, and there was a question in the beginning of the pandemic, like four months in, five months in,

there was this stat that remained stable up until the time we had vaccines. And it was that the United States had fewer than 5% of the population in the world, and we had more than 20% of the deaths. And at the same time, there had been like a ranking done at the cost of millions of dollars and lots of research before the pandemic.

of how prepared each country was for a pandemic. And the United States came out number one. So it was like the Texas Longhorns ranked number one in the beginning of the football season and they went 0-11. It was like preseason, it was something really wrong about our understanding of ourselves and our ability to deal with this particular threat.

So I thought I'm gonna try to figure out not the pandemic. Cause it's going to go on forever. I'm going to write about like how we screwed up all leading into the pandemic. Like what happened? Uh, that, that we were supposed to be so good. We obviously had more resources than anybody. And, and it went so badly at the price of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of American lives. If we just performed as well as like the average G eight country, several hundred thousand people would be alive now who are dead. And, um,

But I did it with like, okay, I'm gonna find characters and they, they have to be obviously relevant to the story, but, but like, I'm gonna start with people I'm just interested in. And I'm only gonna write a book if I find people I'm interested in. And,

It took a while, but the three people who were at the center of that book are the three best characters I've ever had. And they are like unknowns. I mean, I'll give you one quick example. I mean, Charity Dean is a local public health officer who has been like fighting disease on the ground for the last 20 years, who –

Let me leave her to one side because the guy who's easiest to describe is the guy who wrote the pandemic plan for the United States, who invented basically an idea of how to respond to a pandemic. And his name is Carter Mesher. He was a ICU doctor by his whole career. He was really good at...

He said he had like ADHD, he doesn't pay attention, he kind of had to fake his way through medical school. But when he got in a place, in a situation where life or death really had to focus, he was really good. And so he was a brilliant ICU doctor who had risen up in the Veterans Administration to run whole hospitals and had been plucked by the Bush administration.

to answer the question like, what do we do if there's a pandemic? Bush, George Bush had been traumatized by Katrina, Iraq, he had like 9-11, he had all these bad things going on. And he read a book about the 1918 influenza pandemic. And he said, what's our pandemic plan? And they told him, we don't have one. So he said, find some people who can put together a pandemic plan. And one of these people they bring in is this Dr. Carter Mesher.

And Mesher starts to, there's a conventional wisdom at the time that until you get a vaccine, you can't do anything. That all the, like, the attempt to like social distance, what they call non-pharmaceutical interventions, closing schools, all that stuff didn't work in 1918. Right.

And he just doesn't believe it. And he goes back and looks, he recreates the history of 1918. He goes and looks like what happened in different cities? How many people died? What did they try to do? And he figures out that like St. Louis had, you know, half the death rate of Philadelphia because St. Louis actually did do things like distance earlier in relation to the arrival of the virus. He completely changes the world's opinion about what you should do in the beginning. Manages with colleagues to write it into a plan

persuades the CDC to adopt the plan as the official plan, the CDC persuades the rest of the world that actually all your kind of beliefs about social distancing are wrong.

And along comes a pandemic. And these truths are uncontroversial. And like Australia, you ask Australia, like how they've done so well, how they've kept people alive. They said, we use the US plan. We ourselves didn't use our own plan. It had not been accepted in the way it had been accepted other places. And all tracks back to this one guy who has this passion for saving human life that he developed and cultivated in ICUs.

And so I found like the seeds of why we were a mismanaged team, like why we were this really talented team that just didn't perform well once the thing happened and built it around these characters. It was a total gas. I mean, it's horrible to say, but it was like the most fun book I ever wrote was a book about the pandemic, but it was the most fun book I ever wrote. We will be right back. And now back to the show.

Michael, I just want you to read us your new book right now, just to us. I'll just sit here. I'm going to block out the day just to have you read it so you emphasize the right words. It's so mesmerized. Yeah, yeah, it's so, so good, man. I love it. But as you, like, you all have no's for, like, audiences. As you can imagine...

It's very hard to get people to want to read a book about the pandemic. It's been interesting that when you deliver a message is as important as what the message is. And some books have really good timing, and some books have really shitty timing. Well, when and how also, you know, what it is. And again, you're telling the story through the lens of that story of that guy, that Dr. Mesher is fascinating. What a fascinating figure, a guy who, you know,

And you said that all of this was done pre-pandemic. So it's kind of void of any political influence, etc. It is what it is. He's just simply doing his job based on the facts of a previous pandemic. And I think that this book, if I'm right, is another one that's possibly headed to the big screen. And so those who are not great at reading, like myself, might have a chance to read

Is that true? Is it headed for a movie perhaps? So you know this better than I do, but nobody knows whether a book is going to be turned into a movie. Yes, Universal bought it. Yes, they say they're going to make it. It's got more – it's funny. I mean, like Moneyball took seven years between the time they bought it. The Blind Side, nobody wanted to make that movie. And it only got made because Fred Smith, the chairman of Federal Express, said –

I live next door to that story in Memphis and, and I was too good a story not to get made and we're going to make that movie. But so this, I think this is kind of as much momentum behind it as anything I've ever had, but who knows? Yeah.

And you've been so blessed with such great filmmakers and screenwriters that are taking on your material. I imagine that your fear of execution is somewhat mitigated by their talent. Or do you even worry about that? You've done your medium and whatever they want to do in their medium with your IP is up to them. Or do you like to be in there and try to maintain its quality, its perspective, its themes?

or you just kind of sign off? It's really funny, this relationship between the author and the movie. It's true that, I think it's true, that on balance, movie makers would much prefer the author to be dead. A living author is just like a nuisance. All they're thinking is like, this guy, the author's going to run around saying they ruined my work of art, you know, that kind of stuff. And I took the view right from the beginning that

Like I'm the least well suited to take this thing that I made and break it and remake it into something else that I made too many decisions that I'm wedded to that need to be undone for a movie to be any good that someone as fresh as going to have to come in and just own it.

And what's funny is I say I said that to each of the directors in the who've taken the projects on John Lee Hancock with The Blind Side, Bennett Miller with Moneyball, Adam McKay with The Big Short. And in each case, they refuse to believe me. They're like, yeah, yeah, he's saying that he doesn't want anything to do with it. And it's all mine, but I don't believe it.

So there's this dance, like ritual, that's happened in each case where they pretend to be interested in what I have to say and solicit my views about how to do the thing. And I have to pretend to believe that they're interested.

And it's a total lie, like nobody's interested in anything, I have to say. And I know it. But it's not true that you can't build a great relationship out of a lie, that I love these people and the relationship started in a completely wholly dishonest way. So, you know, I've kind of gotten to be friends with all the people who have made the stuff without having any influence whatsoever on how the thing got made. And it's been, I think it really works that way because among other things, if you persuade them that they have ownership,

They also have the fear of the ownership. Like it's their fault if it sucks. And it's not my fault. The book's the book. And I don't, you know, does it mitigate the, I have had unbelievable experiences, right? I've been unbelievably lucky in how good these movies have been. And I have, I do have kind of zero fear that, but the worst they can do is make a bad movie. And it's not gonna, that won't do any damage to the book. It'll just like be a bad movie. Right.

Well, you humbly say that they may not be interested in what you have to say, but I think you're wrong. And you're certainly wrong with us and with me. And particularly in this next subject, before I let you go, I want you to...

You know, in my intro, I talked about your unique ability to articulate complicated thoughts and subjects. And I heard you discuss grief on Andrew Sullivan's podcast. And I was just...

knocked out by how incredibly generous you were with sharing the tragedy that you and your wife, Tabitha, have gone through with the loss of your daughter, Dixie, your boyfriend, Ross Schultz. With all the grief that the country and the world are experiencing through this pandemic, I was just wondering if you could share with this podcast audience some of the insights, the discoveries about grief that

that you guys have perhaps experienced that, that might be of, of some help to them. Cause it was, it's just amazing to, to, to hear. Sure. Um, I'm just gonna, um, lather on a little bit about this, um, without any particular structure to my thoughts. Uh, uh, our daughter Dixie was 19 and Ross was 20 and they were killed in an automobile crash last May. Um,

both just like incredible kids. And I had a couple of realizations after Dixie died. And this is going to sound awful, but one is there was no one who could really help me in that what does help me is the love of my community and love of friends. They can help you in that sense.

But there's nobody who's gone through what you've gone through. It's such a particular experience. It's so particular to your relationship with the person you lost. It's so particular to your feelings about death and life. It's so particular to the way they died. And

I had a lot of people, a lot of people come to me telling me that, oh, I went through the same thing and here's what you're going to feel or here's what you're going to experience. And it was very well-meaning. And I didn't mind it, but I found it was never true.

One example, a lot of people, parents who lost children said, you're going to live with the guilt forever, which is not something you should say to anybody. But but it's like they were living with guilt about something in their relationship with their child. And Dixie and I loved each other. I mean, it was just she was very well parented and she was very loved. And there was there was no one to be angry at.

or angry and nothing to be guilty about. So the fact that we didn't have these toxic emotions of guilt and anger meant that it was just, in our case, it was a kind of pure sadness.

But the broader thing I realized was don't go looking for people – don't force a kind of pretend similarity identity with other people who have gone through the same thing because it's all – it's so particular to the circumstances. You're going to have to kind of work through your particular –

journey on your own you are you won't you don't have a map you've got to get from one side of the jungle to the other side of the jungle you have to pick your path with machete by yourself and I mean people may not want to hear that but I that's how I've come to think about it the other thing was you know what it's been I mean it is I've never had any experience like this in my life um

It's just it's so disturbing and upsetting and so exhausting and disorienting. And it took me a while to figure out why I felt so tired every day. Like, what is going on there? Why am I so, you know, why can't I remember where my keys are? And I realized that my mind was empty.

had just presumed, and I think this is how your mind works, it presumes a reality. Like I was taking for granted a future without even thinking about what that future was. And now I had to rewrite that, my brain had to rewrite that reality without living Dixie Lewis in it. And it was busy doing that on one track, like humming in the background all the time, especially for like the first three or four months.

it's doing it less and less. Like the reality has started to sort of, the brain is sort of like figured out that I'm not going to have her. And, and as a result, I'm finding myself feel more myself every day. But it was like the cognitive thing was I hadn't any, anybody kind of described this, but I thought like, that's what, that's what's going on is that I am trying to

I'm trying to break a story and remake it because the story just, we just lost the main character. But it's, it's been extraordinary. I tell you the other thing is that, I mean, this, I don't want to bore you with a subject. Not at all. The things that the most emotional moments came when people just insisted on being there.

Like, you never know. What do you say to someone whose child has just died? My instinct probably would be to hide. Like, I feel so sad for my friend whose child has died. I don't know. There's nothing you can do to make it better. I'm not going to show up on their doorstep and bother them. I think my instinct before I had this experience would have been leave them alone because I don't know what to say and there's nothing to say. I have...

I'll give one example. You know the writer Dave Eggers? Yeah, sure. Wonderful writer, wonderful friend, wonderful friend. He lives across the bay. Dixie Dot, I got the news in the morning. An hour later, he's sitting on my doorstep with food. He just went and bought food and he's crying. And he says, I'm not leaving. I'm not going to buy, I'm going to sit outside in my car and I'm not leaving.

And I would never have thought that would be something I wanted. In retrospect, it's like it was just such a gift just to feel that feeling of being connected. Someone insisting that I can't help you, but I'm going to be there anyway. It's so interesting when you said that about like, because I think a lot of people feel that way about like,

do I impose, do I not impose? Nobody knows exactly what that person wants because that person isn't being vocal about what they want. - They don't know what they want. - Yeah, exactly. - They don't know what they want. What they want is love. That's all they want. And even if they don't know it. And I didn't know that's what I wanted. And Dave has a gift for living and feeling, and he's just got a gift for being a human being.

And he taught me something in that moment. And it was like, force it. Like you love this person, let them know. Right. Let them know right there because, because the essence of loss is the feeling of the loss of love. And, um,

you got to insist that that emotion is going to be there for that person. And it still moves me just thinking about like that. It's like a heroic act, not an easy thing to do. It's not what you want to do. Go sit on someone's front porch whose child has just been killed in the car crash, but you go do it. That I think I hope that I remember it for the rest of my life. Michael, that's the most,

well-articulated description of of somebody's experience with loss that i've i think i've ever heard and um and i don't look at but i'm 51 so i've been around for a long time i i honestly that that was incredible man it was really really beautiful what a really beautiful yeah and so i'll never ever forget that story actually yeah it's incredible it's inspiring yeah and and uh

We and our listeners are not as fortunate as Dave in that we're not as close to you, but know that we would like to be. And we think about you and we are fans of yours. I'm sure any and all of us that heard about the tragedy immediately thought about you.

you, your family, your wife, your other kids, um, and would hope that, uh, you would somehow in some miracle get through it, come through the other side or take with it everything you possibly could to, um,

carry on Dixie and become an even stronger family in some odd way that probably only somebody like you and Tabitha could. So I was just so obviously thrilled to hear you say that, yes, you would come talk to us because we hadn't talked for since that one discussion. And

And I'm just so thrilled that you are back out talking with everyone and I'm sure writing again and thinking again and don't go. Keep coming because we're all incredible fans of yours.

are thinking about you and your family and wishing you guys the best. Yeah, Michael, what a treat. What a pleasure to meet you and sending you and your family so much love from us. Thank you so much. Incredible having you. Thank you so much. Thanks, pal. Thank you, pal. All right. Our best to you and your family and patiently awaiting your next contribution. Yeah, come on. Can we get advanced copies? Is that possible? Because I always have to... And audio for Jason. Oh, yeah, and audio for Jason. Jason needs an audio.

Yeah, I'll need you to read it to me. Thank you so much. Thank you, pal. Very much. It was an honor to meet you and thank you for all of that. Beautiful. Take care. All right. See you. Bye, bud.

Well, that's the first time my eyes leaked on this podcast. Yeah, what a man. I mean, that's an incredible, you know, it's such a relatable thing. I think so many people don't know what to do when there is loss or tragedy. They just don't know because so you end up just doing what you believe is right. And it sounds like Dave Eggers is right.

It just was a perfect kind of reaction. Yeah. And it's funny, it's like that thing you were saying about people saying you're going to have this and you're going to have that.

Really, it occurred to me in the moment that it probably is so much more about that person and what they're feeling than it has nothing to do with him. That's right. It's all about their experience. That's right, yeah. And I'm not blaming them. I'm saying that that's how they're continuing to evolve and move through that loss. And by doing that, they say, you're going to do this and you're going to do that and you're going to do that.

And, you know, when you meet those people in life, people do it all the time when they sort of not give you advice, but they'll tell you things like, this is going to happen, blah, blah, blah. And you're thinking, yeah, for you. Yeah. Well, what an incredibly amazing and thoughtful and just, you know, connected guy. And how amazing was it for you?

For him to share that with us, that was pretty special. I have so much respect for that guy, and he takes what he knows to do so well, which is form a thought and articulate it in a way that people can digest it in something as complex as all of these emotions and challenges that he and his family are going through. To share all that with us in the way that he did, that was...

Pretty generous. The only thing for me today, I guess, that I feel particularly bad about is the fact that I guess I flashed everybody and you guys all got to peak my unit. Jason, I feel like the last time you saw my privates was when we were on that camping trip. Oh, I sure do. I woke up. Let's talk about this for a second. The shorts thing and the legs. You know, okay, let's take a look. How...

Or he's standing up now, everybody. Yeah, that's good. Sit back down, please. They're not that bad. Thank you. Just go ahead and sit back down. They're not that short. No, you've got good legs. You've got to show off the assets. I've got great... He does have good legs, everybody. Thank you. Great legs. I've been lucky. My mom said that she married my dad because he had good legs.

Excellent. You know, I think I have noticed that your dad does, he's a nice, slender, tall man, right? Very slender. Yeah. Jim Arnett's a very slender man. Me, I'm better in wind, you know, high wind. I've got the shorter legs. Still not bad in short pants. Your legs? I'm trying to think of your legs. So, listener, if you're wearing pants now, so basically everybody except Will is wearing pants.

If you look down, your pants, where they hit your shins, it's kind of on the outside of your shins. It's not on the inside of your shins. It's on the outside. I've noticed that I've lost all that hair. Yes, I do too. I have too. Where my pants have been rubbing against my leg. I have all kinds of...

kinds of hair on the inside of my shin, like from my knee to my ankle on the inside of both legs. But on the outside, nothing. Like I've shaved because I'm a bike rider or something. You guys are getting old. That's what happens. You see that thing with old men where they've got those shiny legs and you're like, did that guy shave his legs? No. No, he just used a lot of moisturizer. You know, I was always wondering that. Are these shorts too high or anything?

Oh, no. Uh-oh. Listener, Sean has his pants pulled up just underneath his breasts. Yeah. But I've been noticing as I get older, you know, I can go to the gym, I work out and do all this stuff, but I'm still able to maintain pretty good muscle on my biceps. Biceps! Smart. Wills. Smart.

SmartLess is 100% organic and artisanally handcrafted by Rob Armjarv, Bennett Barbico, and Michael Granteri. If you like SmartLess, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.