Of congress, thank you david, the chairman of the festival, and we are going to have a little chat here just, a couple of old friends along with 1 million other new acquaintances here in the hall. Michael and i go way back and lets just start out talking youre an art history major at princeton, right, and then you go off to wall street and you do really, really well, michael, you could have been rich. [laughter] i mean, you could have your own plane at this point instead you went into the book business, tell us how that came about. So you know joe and i were classmates. This is an opportunity for joel toow express resentments he fee. Thats right. [laughter] yes. This is the project joel and michael. The fact that that, yeah. So the question is why i quit wall street . So i didnt know i i what i wand to do with my life, when i got out, you know, i didnt have any plan. It didnt occur to me. I think partly because of how i grew up. I grew up in new whar lanes where nobodyny really did anythg for a living. [laughter] it didnt occur to me that i would have to and its a place where careers go to die but it was a great place to study and i loved it. I didnt have any kind of plan. The job on wall street fell into my lap and it was a way to make a living but by the time i got it, i had figured out i wanted to write, kind of a twoyear gap in there h. How did you figure that out . You know, it was when you had to writed like i did. Basically write a book to get out of princeton and i loved it like i loved no Academic Experience and i kind of made the jump in my mind, well, this would be a good thing to do forever, if you could. The false start i had it would mean academic career and the thesis the guy who supervised, the guy who supervise it is thesis not only told me that i wasnt made for academic career but i asked him at the end of my thesisy defense, i was feeling vain about the writing, put it this way, never try to make a living at it. [laughter] revenge against william ap, if you see that man where is he now . No one has heard of him. He was great. He was a wonderful professor, archaeologist. I started just to submit wilynilly, i didnt know anybody who wrote for a living. It was a quick enterprise. Writers market, it was about that thick and it had the name and addresses of all the editors in americais and for some reasoi got it in my head that the easiest thing i might be able to breakthrough is inflight mag zeeps. I started and volunteering at a soup kitchen and i thought the street people were so interesting. I start today write pieces about homeless people. You do understand we are in the business ofke doing, we are tryg to get people to go to places and not flee them. [laughter] it took me a while to figure out the market. [laughter] but eventually i started to get things in print, an editor in washington basically gave me my start. The economist in london gave me my start but michael kensly, editor in new york public, i called him, i really want to write for your magazine, he thought he gave me a chance, hent published a couple of thin. But then i get this job on wall street and the job on wall street promises a fortune, i mean, it doesnt sound like a fortune now but it was 100,000 a year. But you put that today, a couple of hundred thousand dollars. 25, 26 . 23. 23. And i thought, this is incredible. I have to go do this just to see what it is. By then i, knew i wanted to wre for a living. I have a friend from my training class and you joke about i could have been rich, but the people in my training class pity me. They all went and actually got they hit wall street just the right time to get really, really rich. I have a friend who says, when we met the first day of class, he introduced himself and said, he start today tell me how he wanted to go into mortgage bonds and whatever and i said my name is Michael Lewis and im here to write a book and that i had it in mind that i would write about this place and i might have had at least the back of my mind and i w wrote while i was there, log answer that you t want, but this is a lot book career happened. While i was there, i started to write about b i started to write and continue today write about other things and i started to publish pieces about wall street and i put a piece on the oped of the wall street journal that had at bottom Michael Lewis and the piece argued that Investment Bankers were overpaid. [laughter] i was working in london and i came in to work the next day and the head of solman brothers europe was sitting in my desk and was great guy, happened to been be the guy that gave me the job. Do you realize what youve done. A piece in the journal, thats great. [laughter] he says, we have had a crisis meeting with the board of directors solomon brothers to how we are doing to deal with this piece because its being printed with local newspapers around the country. We are getting calls. I said, thats great. He said, no, this is a big, big problem. He wasnt going fire me, oddly, he wasnt going to fire me then yet but he said, he said, how are we going to fix this problem and i said, you tell me because the way we could fix it is you dont write anymore and i said, no, its not going to happen, im going to keep writing and he was fond of me, he wanted me to stay,e what if you load under a different name and i said, instantly came into my mind, what if i wrote into the name of diana blinker, perfect, nobody will think a woman is a man, do theke connection. Stuff i was saying right around me under the name diana blinker and oneta day i get home from wk and dianas career is taking off. People want to read about wall street in 1987, i get off from work one day and theres a phone call and actor chase, his dad was editor, very distinguished book editorhe and its him. I found out that youre diana blinker and he said, i think you should write a book. You dont have to do it for me but you should write a book. From that moment, september of 1997 i was out the door, i knew thats what i wanted to do. Youre not going to no. Im the potted plant. Yes, yes. [laughter] youre the carrot in the school play. [laughter] so what happened next [laughter] was i went nil they gave my my bonus because i didnt want to lose thatt and, a huge pile f money and i said im leave to go write a book, and he said, what to write about and i said wall street. I wasnt sure, they took me into a room and they didnt care that i was writing a book on wall street. That wasnt what concerned them, they thought i was out of my mind. They said, you do understand, you made 250 this year and next year its like 500 and then after that millions of dollars a year, you can stay here for another decade and in ten years you wont have to work and then you can write your books basically, dont do this to yourself, they felt sorry for me but i was so out the door that it didnt even occur to me that that i was so enamored with the process, amused with myself as now [laughter] what happened when i sat down with a blank sheet of paper, 24, i was 26 then. You know, you kind of go with this will not work for everyone, this career path. But certainly being selfamused is a good personality trait for this business and no question. I have a bunch of michaels books, this is big short which everyone knows this book. [applause] tons of fans. At the end of the book is an actually heroine encounter with bojohn, may he rest in piece tel us, theres a moment where your old boss says, major career and put it in slightly different urterms, he said, and the reasoi went to go see him, it seemed clear to me when i wrote that that was ate bookend. I had come in, a lot of the forces that had led to the financial crisis had been had been set in motion while by solomon brothers and i was watching the end of a process that john had helped put in motion and the big one was turning the wall street partnerships into corporations. But is it scary though to see him . It was terrifying. And he booked a table for two at hiss favorite restaurant around the corner from his house when i sent him a note saying i would love to sit down with you. He said, yes, he didnt say much more than that. I got there on time and he did not and the table was one of tables where you sit together with your legs together like your on a date and i sat down and i start today sweat, i thought, what is this, he set this up so we are going to sit like this for two hours. He walks in and he says, first thing he says, is youre your book made the career and ruined mind. And then you had a lovely lunch after that . No, i said that seems that seems misinterpretation of history tolu me that i dont thk my book ruined your career. It didnt help but it didnt ruin your career. And when settled in and i see him from time to time after that, after that he was genial, he kept a box of book under the desk to sign for people when they came into his office. [laughter] thats a win. Im your biggest customer. [laughter] so you gave the commencement speech at princeton a few years back and you described yourself as lucky and said some people are just lucky and those of us who know you well you work incrediblyba hard, right, youra very hard worker, you have an incredible gift for telling a story, you write and, so, you know, lucky, f no, youre not lucky, what has been your secret in terms finding stories not only that people want too read but that no one else has told. The big short being the classic example, we had all been writing about the financial crisis, the Great Recession and you come in with something that no one else really had written, so how do you find this stuff . All right, so so i will answer that question, its not true that im not lucky. I mean, an incredible serendipity, the fact that i wanted to be a writer and i got the job in the very best place on earth to write about wall street in the 1980s, i was not only in the firm but the place in the firm, the you know, i was i was given the leisure by my parents to go around and if they hadnt done that i wouldnt haves become a writer. Huge advantages. Huge advantages. The point of the speech was, it ise odd odd conceit in our culture that once youve made it,ee it was inevitable becausef the virtue of you and that, in fact, thats not how it works. Obama was write when he said, you didnt build it. That its [applause] you are so you are such the recipient of benefits to this culture bestows on you and not to and to tell the story without a high level of awareness of that, thats what im trying to get across princeton kids. Its getting harder and harder to see how lucky you are. Anyway so, yes, you had a lot of advantages and you had the freedom to look around and improvise, but, you know, you also y found these stories thato one else saw, the classic one is the blind side, tell us how you, a friend of yours told you such and such and you have an incredible book that becomes a movie. The blind side, typical of how i find stories in that you see that its just chance, a chance in the story, slightly different but the blind side what happened it started with a bottle of wine in New York Times editor jared and we were sitting in new york, i remember the restaurant. Cover story for the New York Times magazine, it was whatever it was, 2005 or 4, around there. And he was thinking important people. He was thinking jamie dimon. Never really interest me. I said, you know, if you want me to write someone important, let me write about the teacher who life. It happened to be my baseball coach but he was a teacher. He said, okay, go do it and while i was doing that i thought, well, im going to write about this personal story about this coach. I would talk to some of the people on my team. I was a pitcher on the team, sean, played by tim mcgraw the movie blind side was the catcher, so i went to see him and i didnt see him and he picks me up at the memphis airport, this poor boy, in high school he had not enough to eat. He made great good of himself, he was a wonderful athlete, drafted to play in the nba, he was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds in high school and he had gone onto make a fortune in the fastfood business. Heig wanted to show me his mansion, he took me to his mansion and we spoke for two hours or s so about our old coah and the whole time in his living room there was a 65inch 350pound black kid who didnt say a word and who was not introduced to me. He was like you were when i was [laughter] he was the character in school play and on the way back to the airport i said, sean, who is the black kid and he said, thats william, our new project and he start today get teary, we saw him standing in the bus stop in the snow in tshirt and shorts and she recognized him as someone coming to kids school, what are you doing in shirt and tshirt and put him in the car and drove him home and he hasnt turned out that he had no family, he was living on the streets, nothing to eat, illiterate and liane, rich white evangelical republican living in thell outskirts of racially divided city and said, im going to fix him and im going to make him a rich white evangelical christian. [laughter] and thats what sean was amused. Dont get in her way. Shes going to do it, shes going to do it. And i started following and i thought thats odd. I thought, i will just follow that. Can i finish how the book comes out because thats not a book, i thought, thats interesting, curious thing and i just want to know more. Flash forward, a few weeks, money ball had come out not that long before. I got to be friends with the several nfl cutoffs. The brain trust was great. Theres not a money ball story in football. Its the same story. Everybody has same amount of money to spend. Its not about thinking about how to do more with less, what it is about is figuring out to distribute your money across the field and i said, well, can you give me a history of that happens since free agency created a market and he pulled it out and it was really remarkable that you had this character on the offensive line, the left tackle who protected the quarterbacks blind side whose salary had gone from the lowest paid on the field along with yellow line to second highest after the quarterback because he was the insurance policy and most valuable asset because if the quarterback got hit, he could get hurt in a way that, he wouldnt normally. And i thought, thats interesting, flash forward, six or eight months, i had been hearing about michael down in memphis and the story of getting rich and emotional. Its not my story, my old high school, and sean calls me and said, youre not going to believe what just happened, theres a lot of that. You cannot believe what just happened. Alabama coach, he was in lsu coach, came through a school, he was looking at some players in our school and he saw michael on a Basketball Court and sean flew him and he said, sean, thats a future nfl left tackle. You can see from the way he moves hes nfl tackle. Sean, do you know what they get paid, no, thats what he was. I told him the story about the nfl financial story and i start today think, well, theres a story here and the story is because the kid the moment he was identified as the future of nfl left tackle which he, indeed, became, he went from he was like the most prized kid in the universe, he had gone from the least valued 15yearold on earth to the most valued 17yearold in a flash and i thought theres a story that can be organized along the lines, what are the forces in this kids life that changed his value and one of those forces is stuff happened in nfl strategy, but one of those forces is a mother and once i realized that, i had a story and this always happens, i had it for six months before i had the nerve to say, yeah, im going to write, i thought, i kind of thought, i often think that theres someone better to write this, someone who actually has empathy or someone who actually knows emotions or someone who or someone who knows about psychology or someone who knows theres always some thats alien to me, so i really shouldnt be the one to do it but the truth is, the fact that its alien too you is why you should do it because enables you to get across to other people to whom its alien the stuff about it is interesting. So what pushed me over the edge when sean came out and he was a commentator for the memphis grizzlies, they were playing the warriors and went to dinner and start today telling my wife and i some of the stories. Hewi mentioned to my wife and it was interesting when michael came into the house, because we took him into the room and he showed him the bed and he staired at it, ive never had a bed. He was 15 years old and never had a bed and my wife started crying anddg she got in the car and said afterwards, youre an idiot if you do anything but write this book and so i started to write the book. But it sounds like a oneoff kind of thing but that happened in various forms over and over and over. You have a common theme of unrecognized value in several of books. I mean, is that a conscious thing you shoot more and think toed yourself, this book, every business person in america is going to buy the books at the next flight because what youre sort of saying with money ball, blind side, the big short, you know, and really with the new book, undoing project, seems differently about this, theres value out there if you can recognize it, is that a conscious theme you have . No, it is a theme what does seem to happen a lot and i dont quite know why, i mean, i can guess why but the books come to market a lot and the way markets dont function sometimes very well. Markets are miraculous in a lot of ways but so value comes from market, the value into the market and so we do have market angles of them and i say ive always been since i left new orleans and always been bemuised amused of what gets valued and why because i came from a place that was very charming place to grow up, it was really rich interesting childhood, i loved it and i loved the culture, i loved thegr people ad the place and it was a failed place. It was not valued. And so the fact that you see this over and over. People who are special who dont get valued properly and people who are distinctly not special who get valued very highly and that so that has always interested me since i was a little kid, really interested me. He introduced me to the stock market which i never had an interest and still dont have much of ann interest but hes obsessed with it, he likes to watchch his portfolio, just wath it and [laughter] i dont get that, but so hes watching the portfolio and say i am going to give you 10 shares of raw stock so you can learn how to watch it too and i was 13 or 14, black book in which to keep theit record of wt i saw when i was watching it and he gave me 10 shares which was a Restaurant Company and he gave it to me because new orleans restaurants were own and 20 a share but he paid 220 and i said, well, 10 shares is 12 a share, so 200, whats the other 20 bucks, thats what we had to pay to buy the stock and i said, im going to get this, thats outrageous, he charges 20 bucks for us to go buy, how does that happen . And i remember having outraged of the value assign today that role even back then. So you invented online trading, right . [laughter] we should talk just as a novelty about your new book. [laughter] the undoing project. So tell us how you got into that, a little bit different from your other books. Its more about psychology, its more academic, is it really fundamentally a friendship book, its about friends. A love story. Love story. Sure it is, you think bull shit. But it is a love story. It was being sold for a movie, the Hollywood Reporter called me and asked me whats the one line elevator pitch for the book, about two academic sitting in a room throwing ideas of how the human mind works, how do you turn into a movie, he said whats your pitch and i said, well, its broke Back Mountain but they fuck each others ideas. [laughter] thats what it is. Okay. And thats what it is. We can delete that line somehow, right . [laughter] this isnt on the internet or something . Okay. Youre right. Okay, okay. Nobody will be offended by that word. And the so what happened was, the way this story came about like two israeli psychologists, i dont like to talk about when im working on it, its amazing how quickly my books can be described in a way that people dont want to know anything more about them. [laughter] really. So moneyn ball, a book able baseball. No one asked another question. [laughter] but if you want to just stop a dinner party, what youre working on, a book about two israeli psychologists, that just stops it, nobody wants to know anymore, but thats what this book is about, the way it came about was, it grew out of money ball,s money ball, book about misvaluation of people, happened to be Baseball Players but very interesting Baseball Players getting misvalued the way they did and they got misvalued by people making intuitive judgments about their value. The book comes out and gets reviewed, distinguished legal scholar and economist. And they say in the new republic and they say nice story, missed the point of own story, basically, that these what hes told is a kind of its a case study, hes giving case study in the way the human mind leads us astray when its operating from the gut, human intuition and the way in which the human mind leads us this way were mapped by the two israeli psychologist in the late 70s and i went, oh, shit, my missed the story. I never heard of it. You get one bad review or questionable review, you got an entirely new book. Its more complicated than that, obviously. But i never heard of these guys even though the year money ball wass being written, won nobel prize in economics and didnt know economist, thats impressive. [laughter] he he it bothered me that i missed the trick. I like to think i would like to think, people say that an explanation is where the mind comes to rest and the books are explanation and what you do with your story is where the mind came to rest and i like they got exhausted material. No one else came behind me and do it, find something really great t that i didnt find. But this was something really great that i didnt it didnt even occur to me that theres somethingin that were wired in certain ways and people have actually figured out how they were wired and explain it is whole money ball story. It just bothered me for years i and the way my father watched the stock market. He said, danny lives half a mile from your house, go talk to him about this and get it off your chest. Thats what ii did. I knocked on his door and we developed a relationship. Weve gone on long walks through the hills and he talked about hisve now dead colleague, his lover, not his physical lover, in any other way they were passionate with each other and involved with each other and i thought, i dont know when this penny drops, strong words but it was called the clash. I didnt do a good job. One of my favorites, one of my favorite students was a kid and very quickly i saw i had access and the material i kept saying, im not the one to write, this is really interesting,g, i dont know, im not jewish, the story takes place in israel, a lot of it, the backdrop is the birth of israeli state and israel, i didntos even take psych 101 and no interest in psychological up to that point. So i was all alien, it took me forever to talk myself into a place where i thought i should be the one to do it and what caused me what led me to this point, eight years after i first started walking in the hill with danny, is that the people who knew the story were starting to die and it was getting clear that if i didnt tell it, it would be gone, it wouldnt be and il thought, i think its an incredibly important story. I think their work is incredibly important, its for the ages and very emotional story between these two men and i thought it was an unusual story. So at that point, i turned to danny and said its going to seem odd to you because i dont know anything. I said, you guys, your work is too important, somebody is going to write a book about it and in your view itll be a bad book, a but if anybody write a bad bok about you it should be me because i spent all these years walking through the hills with you and so thats how it started. [laughter] did you ghost write the book for him . At the beginning of the book you mentioned that you thought early chapters of the book became a bestseller. I thought on the way to garbage can. When i met him along the first things out of histe mouth, you come at a good time because ive decided theyve asked me to write this bookou and its such garbage its going to ruin my reputation so its going to go in the bar damage can where it belongs, i said can i see a chapter twor and he gave me a chapter, dont throw in the garbage can and i watched him and this is this is the quality in danny thats peculiar that he has to a degree, i have never seen in other human being is doubt, doubt about everything around him including his own thoughts. So he got to a point after throwing it away and pulling it out of garbage can four to five times, i know what we are going to do because he didnt trust my judgment of manuscripts. Im going to give money to a friend ofo mine who is a specialist in my field and have him distribute this money to three people he likes, hes not going to tell me who they are and their job is to trash the book. To write a negative review for me so i can see how bad it is. His own book. Paid 5,000 for shitty reviews of his own book to talk him out of publishing it. This is a peculiar character. Even better, he thinks hes normal. [laughter] the best characters, you know this, the best characters theabt doe their characters. The minute they know character, they lose at tuild in the page. He sored all the way through. He was a different person and had lots of different thoughts and never would have had the thought ifs he didnt have the love affair. You have a lot of opportunities probably offered to you about, you know, writing a movie or, you know, i think did you write a novel once . You played around wit . So people think how brad pitt is really like. Do you really want to know . Yes. Before we get into the movie thing i dont want to create the impression i had anything to do with the movies. I think they are great, but the this gathering that the parttime in hollywood prefer that authors be dead. [laughter] all the living author does is cause trouble. [laughter]be he wants to hang around with you. They just dont want you live. They convey this, the odd thing about hollywood is they are polite. Everybody is almost challenging each other to be the first one to be rude when youre in a conversation. Everybody is showing off how gracious they can be even while sticking a knife on your back. Its not like wall street that way. [laughter]a they pretend to be interesting in what you have to say . [laughter] you pretend to believe it. And as long as nobody thinks theres something genuine there, thee relationship can be quite lovely. [laughter] thats what happened to brad pitt. The relationship was quite lovely. I dont know if we are ever going to be together again. I hope we are but i will tell you a story that encapsulates a part of brad pitt. When you meet him, you are supposed to think hes dumb because beautiful, hes not dumb,t hes surprisingly shockg normal. But this is brad pitt story. Nothing to do with the movie to the point where he refused to go to the set. When they said they were going make the movie after i told him he could sell his life rights without any fear of him ever making the movie, they called me up and said, you bastard, hes angry, he said brad pitt just called and hes coming to my house and my wife is putting on makeup. [laughter] and the baby sitter is wearing a dress. [laughter] you bastard, boom. So in the middle of making a movie, the movie people who want you to engage in this false relationship where you pretend to believe you care what they think, we are very getting uncomfortable. He wasntsh coming to the set, e wasnt returning phone calls, he didnt want anything to do with it. They were filming in his office. Oakland coliseum and he refused to come down. One day hi calls me. Everybody is upset, can you get billy to the set. Come down for ten minutes, nothing bad will happen, just say, hi, smile, be charming, you can leave, he said, you promise youll be there. I said yeah, i will be there. I driveve out to the set and you have seen the movie, theres night scenes where they recreated a game between the oakland as and kansas city royals, 8,000 people in the seats that may move around to make thehe stadium look full. I go out with my daughter dixie who is 9 years old, 10 years old, they have just finished one of the things where brad pitt is moving around in the field and nobody in the stand, he comes over and gets down on one knee and starts talking to dixie and i leave them alone for ten minutes, ten minutes later, billy dean is coming out of one door and dixie is around my leg and i looked down, a look of terror in her eyes, who is the weirdo guy. [laughter] billy comes over, brad pitt vanished. A Production Assistant with the head gear and hes got a folder with a book in it, comes running over and he says, mr. Bean, mr. Bean, thank you for coming for the set, we have been waiting all of the time. Youre my hero, your book changed my life. Billy looks at me and says its his book. Yeah, my book. No, no, the guy refused. No, your book, mr. Bean changed my life. Your book. Would you please sign my book . So there were two billy beans in professional baseball, one spelled with an e at the end and the other without. The other bean came out of coming out of the closet and wrote a book of coming out of the closet. [laughter] hes like, theres no right answer at that point, right. [laughter]de over in dugout, brad pitt is laughing, he set this up as practical joke and thats the only reason he wanted billy bean to come to the movie. Thats brad pitt. [laughter] thats a brad pitt story. Im glad i asked. [applause] we have microphones, dont make a speech about how much you love michael. We know how much you love him. Thats better than the reverse. Yeah. I read several of your books and it im sorry to me that you have a fairly consistent technique where you strongly personalize sort of a theme, so youre rroig the emerge ains of the left tackle and restructuring of the economics of the game and you drill down on michael, its billy bean, you do with the big short, you have a coupleom of main characters bt still very strongly personalizing these larger themes. Talkrl about the pluses and minuses of that approach . Of writing through people . I dont know any other way to do it. I was the main character. I found myself very easy to sympathize with. [laughter] i i felt everything the felt. Ter i approved almost everything that he didnt say. Very quotable. I get interested through complete and accurate efers and through people but what almost books have aside from a market angle is their characters interesting characters to me in interesting situations. If you can attach the reader to character, they will follow the character anywhere. Trust me the that theres no one in america that would write to readad the description of collateral debt obligations but once you realize the lives of these people that you come to know, turn on knowing what that is, you want to know. What would be the my my minusesu can argue that you are playing undo emphasis on a Single Person when youre dealing with i dont i usually pick my characters who deserve that emphasis. Billy dean deserves to be the face of the transformation in baseball. I just we wanted to thank you on flash boying on wall street and the effect that had. I ended up reading that. I went to role with Ronnie Morgan that was a coin saidence. I got involved in the whole battle, fidelity ended up closing my account because i kept insisting that i should be directly to connect to iex, maybe you can talk a little bit aboutng that but thank you very much they never die. Problem is revealed in the sony hack, the hack of the sony, emails back and forth about how impossible it was to make a movie with agent lead. Problem is they have gotten to the point where they are nervous the agent guy a white guy, decades ago they werent. Its well enough known asian male actor which i think is crazy but its crazy because the whole point is unknown in real life so you echoed it in the movie, you could create a person but the story to me is still very, very much alive, its not sorted out. There is a war going on at the wall street and it isnt going to be properly regulated. Its not. Nor row narrow vested interest that causes taxes to be levied on the rest of us, right now they are. The single greatest force shedding the light on the whole problem and trying to fix it and i think hes canadian but american hero. I found the story very moving. 60 minutes did their piece. There was a lot of screaming and yelling about it. A lot of people shouted that i got it all wrong. No nobody demonstrated that what they are saying is not true. Its shocking the problems that have been prepared. I dont know. The gentleman over here. Sure, michael, what are you working on now . Well, politics has gotten interesting. [laughter] and i was struck after the president ial election with who got elected president and but it was interesting to me, i kind of got interested in maybe march, april, the vast yawning gap between the effort that the Obama Administration had put into the transition and the Trump Administration had put the transition, and that the Obama Administration had created inspired by bush, obama had been grateful to bush for how much effort he had put into handing the government over to him and obama had recruited 2 or 3,000 people in his administration to essentially create a short course in how the federal government works, so that in our crazy system when all of these people roll in who dont know very much about whats going on and the department of energy say, say tmcan quickly get up to speed. And the day after the assumption was in past handovers that the day after the election there would be 30, 40 people from the new administration rolling in to every Government Agency and cramming for 70 days until inauguration because once the inauguration happens, a lot of people who know a lot scatter andhe are actually forbidden by law for getting in touch with old agencies, so you have very weird need for thorough quick education and really a lot of missioncritical things. And the trump people basically didnt show. The Parking Spaces were empty. They had offices that were set aside for the education this is not nonideological briefings. I think this is we are going to pay a big price. This problem is a bomb with a very long fuse, but the ignorance and mismanagement even aside the mismanagement of the government that results from this iss a big, big deal, but happily its made the material really interesting. [laughter] il mean, trump has electrifid the federal government. Who would want to leave the department of energy a year ago, you wouldnt. But guess what, they preside over the Nuclear Arsenal and you have a guy on top who doesnt even know that. [laughter] and t and its kind of incredible, right, you really cant make this up, its Hollywood Comedy after Hollywood Comedy wait to go happen. So what im doing right now, the Trump Administration didnt bother to get the briefings, im getting the briefings, so i did this months vanity fair, 12,000 words whyth i run around the department of energy, i didnt know, but i went and got the briefings that the trump people didnt get to figure out what this place does because we need to know and ii moved to the government and thats the project [applause] nice. Yeah, i have a quick question on undoing project and behavioral economic issues, you have been out of wall street, we make rational decisions, what are your thoughts about the impact on the whole business as more realized that we are driven by irrationality and we are not rational as so many people think we are . So what do i think the impact of behavioral economic on wall street . Yes. If you lived in a sane much of what wall street does it wouldnt be doing. Shortly after my father explained to me that the guy charged me 20 bucks to buy the stock, he explain to me that wall street floats on bull shit. And it really still does. Its amazing, amazing in this day and age that people will give the kind of Financial Advice they give with a straight face. People will claim to know where things the prices of things are going or have some insight into it and actually direct peoples money on the basis of insight whend they have no ide. They will construct the story o about their investment career that seems to demonstrate that they predicted things that were inherently not only did they not predict them they were inherently unpredictable. Essentially random prophesies are being construed as patterns and patterns divined by priests an priests get paid a lot of money for it. That is crazy. Economists would have a lot to say about it but the truth is that people dont like taking responsibility for managing making their own financial decisionss and so theyll always pay these priests, i think, just to get rid of the problem, they cant get in their heads that not only is that person not an expert, theres no such thing as the expertise. He was a bad expert, he lost my money, they cant get in their head they shouldnt be listening to anybody and, now, so the damage that the intellectual work rose out of economic can do to wall street, i think it was minimal because wall street is its responding to a psychological deep need that has nothing to do with realism. You cant argue it away. So in short, i think the answer is a very little. Rwhere do you invest your money, just curious . In the mattress . So if say you think wall street flows on bill shit is not saying you dont think the American Economy is incredible miracle and engine of wealth creation. The economy ise wonderful. The American Economy is one of the great miracles of Human History and i invest in it but i dont invest in it under the direction of some street guru. I buy i think the two smart things to do, broad thing is, you decide how much you want to put in thehe stock market and hw to put somewhere else and then after that, how you put it in the stock market either by very low costs index funds, basket of stocks or i give it to warren buffet and i do this by buying burkeshire hat away. This is a basket of stocks, hes thend one person on the planet whose capital has got a different value assigned to it. People pay more for his money because of his reputation and he gets deals that no one ever gets. So i long lambasted him for being in. This situation and i just gave up and i surrendered. Im so happy i surrendered. I own a bunch of berkshire hat away stocks. Hi, i wonder approximately what percentage or to what degree you two have prepared or practiced this interview and the response. [laughter] she asked how much we prepare tomorrow night we are in new york. The next night the boston. Where were we last night . We did this before at politics prose up the street. This is a slightly larger crowd. So i had interviewed joel on stage about his books. I dont know if youve ever table talk today me about his books. This is fake news. S. Ive always asked he read a book about george washington. And read it. Y it we have a minute. Youre still the baseball commissioner, softball commissioner for your daughters league . I retired a year ago because she outgrew me. In the bay area. That might have been a heavy thing. Half off my life it was in this. It wasfe a fantastic social experiment. We have to wrap ittuwa up, but e i live in berkeley which is filled with liberal people who dont believe in competition and [laughter] and so the Softball League is a recreational of Softball League, its wonderful. And the rule is if you coach in this league, you have to lose half of your games. [laughter] so if you the perfect coach goes 500, however, someone years ago realized that some people had a competitive streak so they allowed an organization on the side that after the league concluded allstars were picked and they would go out into the wild of california and play republicans. [laughter] and this was always a miserable, it was every gave was custers last, the girls would be sent off and get mutilated by red tooth and claw republicans. I took over the operation seven created liberal warriors. Liberal [laughter] everyone in this room has the same thought. This is his next book. [laughter] and we went out and we really kicked some republican ass. It was really great and earned their respect for the first time. Soso my 15yearold now when she was 10, her