Michael Lewis, author of “Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball” and “The Big Short” went from working on Wall Street to becoming one of its biggest critics. This is his Brief But Spectacular take on what the wealthy elite often overlook.
(This episode was first published in 2015)
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Brief But Spectacular is an Emmy-nominated interview series that airs weekly on PBS NewsHour. These short-form episodes present an in-depth look at a variety of compelling guests and ideas. Since 2015, the serie...
Questions asked in this interview
3
1:25Can you talk about the unwillingness to accept new knowledge?
1:56Why do you think, as a people, we accept shallow explanations of complicated subjects?
2:45Why do you think the financial system encourages bad behavior?
It was an accident that I got a job on Wall Street. Once I got it and they started paying me huge sums of money to give financial advice when I really shouldn't have been doing it, it was briefly intoxicating to think that I had value and someone would pay me lots of money. Once I sort of figured out how it worked, I lost interest in it and built on the side a career as a writer. I would write at night and on weekends, and it reached a point where it was clear someone would give me a book contract. And when I realized that would happen, I thought, well, it's what I want to do. Wasn't that hard to leave.
So, when I pick a character, it isn't because I identify with them. It's because I'm really interested in that character and the situation they're in. Rather than identify with them, I sympathize with them. For me to write a book about someone, or with someone at the center of the narrative, I have to spend so much time with them that if I sense I'm not going to like them or feel some sympathy towards them, it's not worth it. It's just miserable. So I've dropped projects just because I found the people who would be the subjects basically offensive. On the flip side, the projects I've done, the books I've written, in part have been because I find the characters sympathetic and I enjoy spending time with them.
Most people I write about are actually doing something in the world. I am the last person to do something in the world other than write. But you know, if there's a problem, like if I get a flat tire, I call somebody. You know, I don't actually fix it. And most of the people I write about fix it. So they're very different from me in that way.
Even theoretical physics requires old people to die — all physicists to die — for the new ideas to be accepted. There's a pattern in the world: old people cling to the ideas of their youth and are very slow to change their minds about them, and they tend not to. There's a tendency in any industry or any business, any walk of life, for people to have a kind of accepted views rather than to think about things fresh.
Lewis, M. (2025, May 28). Michael Lewis on what he learned by studying the elites (EXTENDED) [Interview transcript]. Brief But Spectacular. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3061511/
MLA
Michael Lewis. "Michael Lewis on what he learned by studying the elites (EXTENDED)." Brief But Spectacular, 28 May. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3061511/.
BibTeX
@misc{lewis2025_3061511,
author = {Michael Lewis},
title = {Michael Lewis on what he learned by studying the elites (EXTENDED)},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Brief But Spectacular. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3061511/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
