Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis, host of the podcast Against the Rules, has published many New York Times bestselling books, including The Fifth Risk, Flash Boys, and The Big Short. Movie versions of…
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Early in his book tour, Michael Lewis stopped in Nashville to talk about his new book with local novelist Ann Patchett and actor/producer Reese Witherspoon. Their discussion ranged from the data raids at the IRS to revenge on science research to the challenges of depicting “real people” on the page and on film.
Get Blockers now at blockersbook.com or wherever books are sold. You can save 25% on the audiobook when you use the code BLOCKERSBOOK at blockers.fm.
Pushkin.
00:11
Speaker 2
One huge difference between making a podcast and writing a book is the book has to get printed and sent to stores and put on shelves. All that takes time, so there's a long gap after you've written the book until you go on book tour to talk about the book. It's like you have to re-enter a mental space you left months before, all fired up, all over again about the same topic. But in this case, the mental space around my latest book, Blocker's, Well, it's still all around us. Now that I'm on the road talking about the book, it feels like the audience is right there in the story.
00:43
Speaker 1
We're all trying to make sense of it together.
00:47
Speaker 2
I'm Michael Lewis, and this is the Blocker's Companion podcast from Against the Rules. At the start of my book tour, I got to do an event in Nashville at the Montgomery Bell Academy's Paschal Theater. The master of ceremonies was the novelist Ann Patchett. And up on stage with me was actor, producer, and author Reese Witherspoon. This power duo should have rendered me speechless, but as you'll hear, well, I wasn't. Still, I loved doing this event, and I want you to hear it as well. We'll drop you in during Anne's introduction, and then you'll hear a little from the audiobook version of Blockers.
01:30
Speaker 3
There are a lot of people who are talented. There are a lot of people who are smart. There are a lot of people who have great ideas. But what Michael Lewis does is he puts his talent and his intelligence and his great ideas into the service of our country. And I am so profoundly moved. Not only does this book read like a thriller, it is an important and moving book. I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
02:22
Speaker 1
That I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. Civil Service Oath of Office, Title V, U.S. Code, Section 3331.
02:42
Speaker 3
Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Lewis and his friend, Reese Witherspoon.
03:00
Speaker 4
Hi, everybody.
03:01
Speaker 5
So nice to see you guys. Michael, what was that we just listened to?
03:06
Speaker 1
That was the epigraph of the book.
03:08
Speaker 2
And it's the oath of office the civil service takes, not to a president, but to the Constitution. And when we're doing the audio book, the producer had the bright idea of getting former civil servants or actual civil servants to do it. Those were all real people. And I just started this kind of tour of the country. And there are going to be a number of events and theaters. And I want to create a little show. And so I wanted to see how that sounded. And then I was sort of, you're guinea pigs.
03:36
Speaker 1
Was it good? Yeah. You guys like.
03:42
Speaker 4
That?
03:43
Speaker 6
I think it's also really interesting to maybe ask people in the audience, is anybody a.
03:46
Speaker 5
Civil servant or do they have a family member who's a civil servant?
03:49
Speaker 1
Could anybody who is a former federal worker stand up? Any former federal workers? So we could see. There we go.
04:01
Speaker 2
Yeah.
04:02
Speaker 5
And see, they don't even want to stand up.
04:05
Speaker 2
Here's the problem.
04:05
Speaker 4
They don't even want to stand up.
04:07
Speaker 1
You've identified the problem. That's right.
04:09
Speaker 6
Well, Michael, this book is absolutely fascinating. So I want to talk to you about blockers. First of all, the word blockers. It seems like kind of a negative thing. But where does.
04:19
Speaker 4
That term come from?
04:20
Speaker 1
So I'm going to have to explain the book a little bit to explain the term. Yes, please. Can I have a few minutes?
04:27
Speaker 4
Absolutely.
04:27
Speaker 1
All right.
04:28
Speaker 5
I have an hour.
04:29
Speaker 1
All right. So....
04:32
Speaker 2
I always start with a kind of a question or it gets me going. What becomes a book really just starts as a question that ends up having such an interesting answer that it's worthy of a book. And in this case, I got interested in Trump too when they really came in and asserted that this is going to be a different kind of presidency. They're claiming a lot more power for the presidency. And among the powers they were pushing for was the power to treat the civil service as essentially employees of a corporation. It's a two-million-person workforce that, as you heard, takes an oath to the Constitution, does not serve a single person, and largely nonpartisan. Their politics are not meant to be a part of their jobs, and mostly doing stuff. And when you know what they're doing, you say, where are the politics in that? And instead, there's a push right now to turn them into a loyalist.
05:24
Speaker 1
Operation that works for whoever happens to be president.
05:27
Speaker 2
And the question was, what happens to the government when the incentives change for the people working in it? What happens to just the basic things that we just take for granted? What happens to public safety? What happens to the long-term investment in scientific research? What happens to data collection? I started to kind of list all the functions. And then I started to wander around the government and look for people who were in doing the various functions. And that's when I started to find that over and over, People who were actually kind of mission critical. People like the guy in charge of food safety at the FDA. The guy in charge of making sure planes don't crash at the FAA. One after another were either being forced out or just found it so intolerable they were leaving.
06:10
Speaker 1
And a number of them told me that they'd been accused of being blockers.
06:14
Speaker 2
And blockers was Elon Musk. He said, find the blockers and get rid of them. That's what he told the little muskrats who went and did the stuff for him, the 20-year-olds. Then over and over, what I found was that what the blockers were doing were just telling them they weren't going to.
06:27
Speaker 1
Break the law.
06:28
Speaker 2
And that that was what, that was the, so I thought, you know, it's an insult coming from Elon Musk, but there's a long history of insults being turned into compliments.
06:38
Speaker 1
Impressionist painters, the Tory party.
06:39
Speaker 2
It's like, I'm going to try, I thought, I'm going to stick this on the cover of the book and we're going to turn this into a badge of honor.
06:46
Speaker 1
So that's where the title came from.
06:49
Speaker 5
Yeah, well, it's really fascinating.
06:51
Speaker 6
You found these characters that are at the center of it, but you created this framework.
06:56
Speaker 5
It almost feels like an Agatha Christie novel.
07:00
Speaker 6
Of like, they keep dropping one by one in each department and they don't know who came after them and they don't know who is checking on their work or kind of urging them to expose government secrets or personal information.
07:18
Speaker 3
Yeah.
07:19
Speaker 6
I was thinking about Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, and he's this incredible man.
07:25
Speaker 4
Can you talk about him.
07:26
Speaker 1
A little bit?
07:27
Speaker 2
So what you're pinpointing is my attempt not to bore you. It reads like a thriller. It was so much fun to write. And I'm still getting my mind around why it was so much fun to write. But it's like the big short in that it's an ensemble piece about something very big, like a big cultural event. In that case, it was the financial crisis. And once I had the frame of the thing, I actually could cast the characters of my choice. But then the question is, when you have an ensemble piece, how you subtly link the characters so it's clear it's all one story. So you sense, if I've done my job, you sense that you're getting this portrait of the whole event, but in slices.
08:12
Speaker 1
And so it adds up to the whole picture.
08:16
Speaker 2
A miniature version of this is the section on the long-term science project. And Francis Collins is the character I picked to dramatize that. And this is, you know, in this country, we have had this idea of using the government to fund basic scientific research that the private sector won't do. Dates back in a serious way to World War II. It's a guy named Vannevar Bush. He was involved in the Manhattan Project. You could see that they could see the power of the science effort that went on during World War II. And he said, look, we should be doing this in life sciences too. And there's a simple principle. The politicians don't decide who gets the money. The scientists decide what gets pursued. The politicians decide how much they get and then let the scientists decide what to pursue. And it has been an unbelievably successful machine. And one piece of this machine is the National Institutes of Health. Many studies have been done that kind of show that for every dollar that's spent there, many dollars are returned. There are arguments you could make it a little more efficient one way or another, but there isn't really a good argument that it doesn't.
09:21
Speaker 1
It doesn't function properly. It's been hugely successful. Cures for all kinds of things. So Francis Collins, I didn't know who I was going to pick for the role.
09:30
Speaker 4
Yeah.
09:30
Speaker 2
And I didn't know Francis Collins. He's the only person in the book who anybody would have ever heard of. He is a known person. He's written memoirs. He was the head of the human- Fauci worked for him. Fauci worked for him. He was the head of the Human Genome Project. And as a pup, as a young scientist, he identified the genetic source.
09:47
Speaker 1
Of cystic fibrosis. This becomes important. So I knew two things.
09:53
Speaker 2
Well, the first thing I knew was that nobody knew that Francis Collins had been fired, that after Trump came in the second time, it was just he told everybody he was resigning.
10:03
Speaker 1
And that was that.
10:03
Speaker 2
And there was no news, real news about it. And Francis was no longer head of the NIH. He'd been head of the NIH under Trump one and under Obama and I guess under Biden, too. But he was he'd he'd moved on from the job. He was just running his lab. He was just pursuing, he was doing what he does best. He was looking for the genetic sources of diabetes and a rare aging disease called progeria. He had a personal reason for wanting to investigate it, but it's sort of like if you can figure out what's going on in this rapid aging process, you might learn about aging.
10:37
Speaker 1
So I knew he'd been fired.
10:39
Speaker 2
And I got to him in his kitchen in Bethesda, Maryland. And he says, You know, the odd thing is, I don't know who fired me. And it felt like a mob hit. He said, like, I don't know who whacked me. And it was someone whacked me. I got shot in the back of the head. And I don't know who did it. But I know who it.
10:57
Speaker 1
Might have been.
10:58
Speaker 2
And at that moment, he had a list of five people. And it was like RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya, who was in Trump was, you had to at least consider the possibility of Trump. When I realized who the suspects were, and I started to dig into it, I realized that one, I had a closed room Agatha Christie murder mystery.
11:19
Speaker 1
It was six men are in a room. They were all men. The lights go out. You hear a shot.
11:24
Speaker 2
The lights come back on. Francis Collins' body on the floor. And there are five guys. One of them did it.
11:30
Speaker 1
And when I moved.
11:31
Speaker 2
Through those five people, it did what I hope the whole book does for the government, for the law, the science, the attack on the science project.
11:37
Speaker 1
It's not just one thing that's coming for it. It's many different things.
11:41
Speaker 2
And each of the suspects was a different, like at a different motive. And so you could paint the portrait of the whole problem. But in addition, like Francis Collins, even Francis Collins, who plays to an audience like this all the time, he doesn't know how good his material is.
11:58
Speaker 1
Like an example. So I'm trying to figure out what his relationship with Donald Trump is. Because maybe Trump did it.
12:04
Speaker 2
And if Trump did it, Trump usually brags about firing people. So that already is a tell.
12:08
Speaker 1
You're fired. He has a line.
12:10
Speaker 5
He had a whole show about it.
12:11
Speaker 1
Trump didn't say anything. Trump didn't say anything.
12:13
Speaker 2
I said, like, what was your relationship with Trump like? He goes, saw him twice after he interviewed me for the job and gave me the job. So tell me about it. He says, well, the first time, it all went like this, kind of, he says. Trump gets to be president the first time. And Jared Kushner calls me. and says, the president wants to see you come over. Can you come over right away?
12:35
Speaker 1
What's it about? Jared says, I don't know. Just come on over.
12:39
Speaker 2
And Fred Scalise is used to getting calls from Obama because Obama would like want to lecture about genomics. And he would prepare whatever the lady, he'd come bring a cool science presentation and the president would sit there and ask him questions. Francis Collins gets to the Oval Office and Jared Kushner is outside and says, let me tell you something.
12:58
Speaker 1
Don't talk to him about science. He has no interest.
13:00
Speaker 2
Like he just none. He'll just shut down. And it was like, well, why am I here? He says, he'll tell you why you're here. And so this is actually the beginning of COVID, the very beginning of COVID. And Francis walks in and Trump says, man, have you seen my poll numbers? They're unbelievably good. But they'd be so much better if we had a cure. And Francis said, well, we don't have a cure. You know, we're trying here. And he said, no, no, we have a cure. My friend Jack Nicholas just called. And he had a bad case of COVID. And he took some hydroxychloroquine and it went away. And you just need to tell everybody that that works. And Francis says... We know we've actually studied that, and it doesn't work. And he says, Trump says, that's bullshit. He says, get me Jack Nicklaus on the phone. And so on the speakerphone comes Jack Nicklaus. And he says, Jack, got Francis Collins here.
13:58
Speaker 1
Tell him the story. Jack Nicklaus tells him the story. End of story. He says, Trump goes, see? See, it's the cure for COVID. So that was.
14:07
Speaker 2
The kind of thing he was dealing with.
14:09
Speaker 5
And he didn't- And he was like, and I got past that.
14:12
Speaker 4
And he kept me and he didn't fire me.
14:13
Speaker 1
He didn't fire me, but he also, he didn't know how funny that story was. It's like, he just like, he threw that like by the by. We're going to take a quick break.
14:23
Speaker 2
When we return, I try to change the topic and talk about something other than my book.
14:27
Speaker 1
But Reese Witherspoon won't let me.
14:30
Speaker 2
So we talk about a showdown at the IRS. We're back and talking blockers at the Paschal Theater in Nashville. This almost never happens to me. I bet it happens to Anne.
14:50
Speaker 1
Anne's an artist.
14:51
Speaker 2
Anne probably the thing happens and she goes, oh my God, it came to me and it was You know, it just out of the blue and the story spoke to me. I go get the stuff and I kind of know what's going to be on the page. And I kind of know, I lay it out really carefully. Measure six times before I, I sometimes know the end last sentence of the book.
15:09
Speaker 1
Before I write the first sentence.
15:10
Speaker 4
That's incredible.
15:11
Speaker 1
I mean, I have to, I just have to know you have to, you need a map.
15:14
Speaker 4
You need a map.
15:15
Speaker 1
You need to know where you're going. Right.
15:17
Speaker 2
And this, I was writing this section and I got to the end and The last line was something like, there was almost nothing Francis Collins couldn't understand except for cruelty. Like it was just the pure cruelty of this thing. And I thought, the book has progressed emotionally. It's dialing up the emotion as you go through it. It's getting more and more disturbing. Even as it's fun to write, it's hard to explain that. But I got to that and I thought, God, this book just ended. There was a whole other character I was going to go to. And I even explained this to the reader at the end. Sorry, I had this other story. It was great, but we're done here. There was nowhere else to go. And I kept thinking, why did that, in addition to being very convenient, because I was late, so all of a sudden my deadline, all of a sudden I was going to hit my deadline.
16:05
Speaker 1
But why did I have that? That almost never happens to me.
16:09
Speaker 2
Like, why did I realize this whole thing just fell away and I didn't need it? And I realized that this was this.
16:15
Speaker 1
Thing, this cruelty thing.
16:16
Speaker 2
This imposing suffering on others, which is going on throughout the book.
16:22
Speaker 4
And throughout life right now.
16:24
Speaker 1
Throughout life right now.
16:24
Speaker 6
I feel like the standards for how we treat each other has rapidly diminished in every aspect.
16:31
Speaker 5
And this is sort of an example of.
16:33
Speaker 1
It as well.
16:33
Speaker 2
But I was asking myself, what's this about? Like, why do they need to make Francis Collins suffer? And I was reminded, I can't remember the exact line, but there's a line in 1984 in George Orwell's novel. where one of the characters says, how do you know you have power? How do you know you have power? It isn't that when you tell people what to do, they do it, because they might have wanted to do it anyway. That's not really proof. You know you have power when you can make people suffer. And I think that that suffering is a feature of this current moment, because this current moment is really about power. Anyway, I feel like I've gone on too much about my book. I have read this book sitting next to me. And it's like a bad date. Maureen Dowd had this great line. She wrote a piece about dating Washington men. And she opens with a date. It's a guy, a Washington guy. And he talks about himself for the first half hour of the dinner.
17:30
Speaker 1
They've never met. And then he says, enough about me. Let's talk about my book.
17:39
Speaker 2
And so I think I'm getting really close to creating that kind of environment on this.
17:45
Speaker 1
Stage, and we don't want to do that.
17:46
Speaker 4
Well, enough about blockers.
17:47
Speaker 5
Should we talk about another one of your books?
17:48
Speaker 1
We could talk about.
17:49
Speaker 4
I'm just kidding.
17:51
Speaker 1
We could talk about.
17:52
Speaker 2
There are many things we can talk about, and you are leading this conversation, but at some point we ought to get to movies.
17:58
Speaker 4
We should talk about movies.
17:59
Speaker 6
I do want to say you pull off another magic trick in this book, which is taking someone who works the IRS and making them an absolute hero.
18:06
Speaker 1
Oh, my God.
18:07
Speaker 2
Yes.
18:08
Speaker 5
Do you know what I'm saying?
18:09
Speaker 2
Yes.
18:10
Speaker 6
And you also, there's another thing I feel like is really interesting, too, that you reemphasize to all of us how much we rely and depend on the systems that we don't see and that we don't think about.
18:23
Speaker 4
But we operate under this sort of blind.
18:28
Speaker 6
that things are just going to happen for us, right? And I think this has been a real... The whole book is such an illuminating read because it's terrifying to see things, the systems.
18:40
Speaker 4
That have been upended.
18:41
Speaker 1
Taken for granted.
18:42
Speaker 6
Taken for granted and also dismantled. And now we're seeing sort of, I think, after the results of Doge, right?
18:51
Speaker 4
Now we're starting to.
18:52
Speaker 5
See the problems like vaccines and.
18:56
Speaker 1
Lettuce. Lettuce. The bad lettuce. Yeah, the bad lettuce. That was actually a direct result of cutting the inspectors. But I do want to talk.
19:04
Speaker 6
About Kathleen Walters and the IRS.
19:05
Speaker 2
Should I just quickly tell who she is and why? So I told Reese this earlier, that it is true that no one's ever heard of her. Her story never hit the newspaper. She was the chief.
19:19
Speaker 5
How did you find her?
19:22
Speaker 1
All these people the same way.
19:23
Speaker 2
I started thinking that, oh, that person might be a character, and I go have lunch with that person. I get bored with that person, and that person tells me about another person.
19:34
Speaker 1
And it's speed dating. It is speed dating. It is speed dating.
19:38
Speaker 6
And can you tell in an interview when people are going to have a compelling story or if it's going to go nowhere?
19:44
Speaker 1
It isn't their fault. It's it's not.
19:46
Speaker 5
That they're boring?
19:47
Speaker 1
No, it isn't.
19:48
Speaker 2
They're not, it's not even that they're, it's like, can they teach? I need people who can teach people. All my characters, all I have in common is they, they're great teachers. I need someone who's lighting up my brain because they're teaching me stuff.
20:00
Speaker 3
Okay.
20:01
Speaker 5
That you don't know about and you're like, tell me more about this.
20:03
Speaker 2
And, and, but I'm seeing like connections between things. So can I meet Kathleen Walters if Someone's introduced me to someone, introduced me to someone else, and that person says, you ought to meet Kathleen Walters.
20:14
Speaker 1
Who's Kathleen Walters? Chief Privacy Officer. Okay, I'll go meet her.
20:17
Speaker 2
So she's a small town girl from Pennsylvania whose dad was Atticus Finch in their town, who she just wanted to be her dad. She went into the law, but the corporate law was all about money, so she found it soul-sucking. She just wanted to serve and comes to the government this way. Great student, went to Georgetown, UVA Law, very by-the-book kind of person. No one had a bad word to say about her. She was a superstar in government. No one knew her politics. And now she's in this job. She is the human being between your tax return and a White House that might seek to use it to damage you.
20:54
Speaker 1
And she takes the duty very seriously. So I finished with her, but I'm going to explain why she was so useful to me.
21:03
Speaker 2
After the inauguration, she starts to get enormous pressure on her to release 7 million tax returns to ICE, to the Department of Homeland Security. And it's a database inside, it's a very sensitive database inside the IRS of tax returns of undocumented workers. And they wanted this information so they could raid the homes, actually in the dead of night and pull people out of their beds.
21:28
Speaker 1
And she said no. So she said no and was in such got so.
21:36
Speaker 2
Crosswise with the Doge people who were in the IRS that there was a day when the 25-year-old, who was the Doge person, was literally running around the IRS in a game of hide-and-seek trying to find her, to fire her.
21:49
Speaker 1
And she had the keys to all the offices.
21:51
Speaker 2
And she locked herself in this conference room and turned off the lights and just sat there for like seven hours.
21:56
Speaker 1
And she says, I know these 25-year-old boys.
22:00
Speaker 2
They lose interest quickly, that if I get out of here at six o'clock at night, he'll forget.
22:06
Speaker 1
And sure enough, it happened.
22:09
Speaker 2
So she is the human being between these seven million people and the people who want to go rails, get them out of bed in the middle of the night. And she fights a valiant fight, but eventually she loses her job.
22:21
Speaker 1
She leaves.
22:22
Speaker 6
You know, having read the book, Blockers, how do the people inside of it feel about seeing themselves represented in do they feel like these are accurate portrayals of who they really are?
22:33
Speaker 4
Or do they feel very seen?
22:35
Speaker 6
Or do you ever have a situation where somebody has come back to you and said, that's not representative of me?
22:41
Speaker 1
All right.
22:43
Speaker 5
It's a delicate dance.
22:43
Speaker 1
It is a very delicate dance.
22:45
Speaker 6
I know that just from playing real people, it's delicate, you know, and you want to do everything right, but you also can't make people something they're not.
22:52
Speaker 1
Yep.
22:53
Speaker 5
You also can't show one side of their personality.
22:57
Speaker 4
You have to show the Both sides. You know what I'm saying?
23:00
Speaker 6
You're not trying to create art characters that are.
23:05
Speaker 4
Yeah, I mean, you have.
23:07
Speaker 1
To show the truth.
23:07
Speaker 2
If you're going to distort them in any way, distort them in a way that's true.
23:11
Speaker 1
Yeah.
23:13
Speaker 5
And I would think sometimes it would be easy to paint people.
23:18
Speaker 6
In a villainous way or in a super altruistic way, but you manage to paint real portraits.
23:25
Speaker 2
The problem I get into over and over, it's too raw. And so what happens is there is always a little speed bump in our relationship right when they see the book.
23:35
Speaker 1
And they see the book a week before it comes out.
23:36
Speaker 2
And the speed bump, it's a bit like what I've done is I've made them listen to the sound of their own voice for the first time.
23:43
Speaker 1
It's like alien to them.
23:45
Speaker 2
And not until people who know them and love them, who they know know them and love them, read it and say, that's you.
23:51
Speaker 1
Do they feel comfortable?
23:52
Speaker 6
I can imagine, too, this type of person doesn't want to be centered or focused.
23:59
Speaker 2
The civil service is almost designed to suppress story. It's designed to never tell the narrative. You just reminded me of something. So when Moneyball came out, Moneyball, you say, what could Billy Beane possibly object to?
24:15
Speaker 1
Like Brad Pitt's going to play him in a movie.
24:16
Speaker 4
Brad Pitt is playing you.
24:17
Speaker 1
It transforms his.
24:19
Speaker 4
Like why are you upset about that?
24:20
Speaker 1
He reads the book. And he calls me. He is apoplectic. Apoplectic. It's hard to describe. He's not even saying words.
24:29
Speaker 2
This is like this noise coming out of the phone at me.
24:34
Speaker 1
And he doesn't want to insult me exactly, but he's so angry. And I said like, all right.
24:41
Speaker 2
Because this was one of the more dramatic examples, but a version of this happens all the time.
24:46
Speaker 1
He says, I thought, what I thought was.
24:48
Speaker 2
Going on was they're all, this is always a little bit of a sneaky thing going. You're trying to understand people and sometimes they don't want to be completely understood. But in his case, I thought, oh my God, he's going to be so furious because I found the secrets of the Oakland A's. I've put them in print and all the other baseball teams are going to know. And he's angry because I've just blown his competitive advantage.
25:08
Speaker 3
No.
25:09
Speaker 2
I said, Billy, why are you upset? He says, you have me saying fuck all the time. And I said, you do say fuck all the time. And he says, you don't understand. My mother's going to be furious. And I said, I said your mother? Like, Billy, I thought you were going to be angry because I've just given your secrets to every other baseball team in the country.
25:33
Speaker 5
He didn't care about that?
25:34
Speaker 1
He says, he gives us like this long pause on the other line.
25:37
Speaker 2
He goes, you don't think anybody in baseball is going to read your book.
25:43
Speaker 1
Nobody's going to read this thing.
25:44
Speaker 2
He's like, my mother's going to read this thing and she's going to be furious. She's going to be absolutely furious. And the truth was, she was absolutely furious. I took her to dinner and tried to charm her. At the end of it, she was still furious. Like she stared at me for an hour and a half and almost wouldn't speak to me.
26:01
Speaker 1
And like my son doesn't talk like that. She just kept saying that. You never know. You just never know what's going to upset people.
26:09
Speaker 2
When we return, I turn the tables on Reese and ask her about portraying real people in the movies.
26:24
Speaker 1
I'm back with Reese Witherspoon in Nashville.
26:28
Speaker 2
I've got to ask you a question. This has been way too much monologue. Do we have any I know, I know, I know. But this problem, your problem, when you're playing someone real, how do you deal with it?
26:41
Speaker 1
How do you come out the other end and look them in the eye?
26:45
Speaker 6
Well, I've had two different situations where I had people who were really, really, really happy about it, in the case of Cheryl Strayed and the movie Wild. And Cheryl was part of that film, and she was there every day, and we shot very close to her home.
26:59
Speaker 4
But then I also did.
27:02
Speaker 6
a movie, Walk the Line, about Johnny Cash.
27:05
Speaker 1
Yeah, we know.
27:07
Speaker 5
And June Carter Cash. It was a while ago. But the family wasn't happy about it.
27:12
Speaker 3
Oh.
27:12
Speaker 4
They really weren't happy about it.
27:14
Speaker 5
And it was really a tough situation, too, because.
27:21
Speaker 4
You have a lot of feelings.
27:22
Speaker 6
Like, you want to represent people in a truthful way, right, and not make them look different than how they are. But also, their children have a right to to feel how they feel about their.
27:33
Speaker 4
Parents' memories.
27:34
Speaker 5
So there's a legacy piece, too, that I think is.
27:37
Speaker 2
Was the unhappiness directed at you and your performance or the film more generally?
27:42
Speaker 6
The film in general and Johnny Cash's abuse of his first wife.
27:47
Speaker 4
Right. And I think that.
27:48
Speaker 1
You couldn't do anything about that in your performance.
27:51
Speaker 6
Not in my performance, but, you know, maybe that's stuff that people don't really want in a movie.
27:56
Speaker 3
Right.
27:56
Speaker 5
You know, played by Hollywood actors. I understand that side of it, too.
27:59
Speaker 6
Right.
28:00
Speaker 4
So it's complicated when you're dealing with real people. But I think.
28:04
Speaker 1
It's incredibly complicated. I've watched my character's lives be turned upside down.
28:08
Speaker 5
You just keep doing it over and over again.
28:10
Speaker 6
But you and I were talking about backstage, the big short, which I know a lot of people are big fans of that movie and the book. I think I'm so fascinated how you found these characters that had been almost Oracle-esque, understanding that.
28:29
Speaker 4
Stock market was going to collapse.
28:31
Speaker 6
The subprime mortgage bond market was going to collapse.
28:36
Speaker 5
I know you started out in Wall Street.
28:39
Speaker 1
I did for three years.
28:40
Speaker 6
Is that how you had enough connections to start to understand that financial collapse in 2008?
28:47
Speaker 1
That's funny you ask. That's a good question.
28:48
Speaker 2
That's a really good question, how I was able to tell that story. Because my first book, Liar's Poker, it blew up the bridge to Wall Street for me.
28:56
Speaker 1
I mean, I thought it was never... It infuriated people.
29:01
Speaker 5
And you said it also inspired a lot of people to want to.
29:03
Speaker 1
I mean, it had a lot of odd effects.
29:05
Speaker 2
But I just thought, when I wrote it, I didn't know I was going to be... I knew I wanted to be a writer.
29:09
Speaker 1
I didn't know. Wall Street, the job landed on my lap.
29:12
Speaker 2
And that was just an odd thing that the first book happened to be about Wall Street.
29:15
Speaker 1
But I thought, well, I'm done with this. I threw the match over my shoulder and it was done. It blew up.
29:19
Speaker 2
And I was never going to be welcomed back. And I never thought that the story would never be so good again. So I wouldn't have access and it wouldn't be that good a story. What happened was with the big short, well, Bear Stearns collapses, Lehman Brothers collapses, the financial crisis happens.
29:35
Speaker 1
And it's clear that the whole story is a story a single bet, the bet on the subprime mortgage market.
29:43
Speaker 2
And that on one side you had the dumb money, and the dumb money was weirdly.
29:48
Speaker 1
The big Wall Street firms.
29:50
Speaker 2
And the question, my initial question was, when I was there, that was a smart money. If they were making a bet for themselves, you didn't want to be on the other side of that bet.
30:02
Speaker 1
You were sure to be screwed in some way.
30:04
Speaker 2
And that all of a sudden, the smart thing to be doing was taking the other side of the big Wall Street firm's bet.
30:10
Speaker 1
That was odd.
30:11
Speaker 2
And so the way that book starts is I didn't think I was going to be allowed to tell a story. I needed to get into the Wall Street firms to figure out what had happened. So I started just making some calls. I got names of people. For example, there was a guy at Morgan Stanley who lost $ 10 billion on a single trade. And I got to him and to the people around him. And I had a similar experience at Merrill Lynch and Citigroup and all the other places. And it would always be a beer. I'll meet you for a beer, which surprised me. I was surprised they even returned the call. And what they would all say when I sat down with them, they all said two things. They all said, one, I didn't do anything wrong. That everybody made this bet. And so you can't really, I mean, it was just the bet everybody made. So the fact that there was a feeling of safety in numbers kind of thing going on. But the other thing they said was, the only reason I'm talking to you, it was all on background, the only reason I'm having this beer with you is your book, Liar's Poker, is the reason I got into the business. And after the fourth time I heard this, I thought, Jesus Christ, I created this crisis. I led all these people who should not be trading into the market, and they're doing stupid things now. And they kind of let me in. But the main character is, of course, the people who are on the right side of the bet. And that was easy. Once you found where they were making the bet, there was one trader on Wall Street who was kind of running the casino. And he kind of like just showed me everybody who had made the bet in a big way, like blockers.
31:41
Speaker 1
I just did a casting search. I went and interviewed all of them.
31:44
Speaker 2
And I became clear that what was going on was there were different ways to get to the right answer.
31:50
Speaker 1
These were the people who got to the right answer. And that you could kind of classify them. Michael Barrett, well, he was.
31:56
Speaker 2
He was the most important character because he was the one who figured it out first.
32:00
Speaker 3
Yeah.
32:01
Speaker 1
And he figured it out too early. So movies. You know, it's Michael.
32:06
Speaker 5
Was he excited that Christian Bale got to play him in a movie?
32:09
Speaker 4
I mean, that's pretty exciting.
32:11
Speaker 1
So this business, what you people do is diabolical. It's. No, no. You're in this business with me. No, hold on, hold on.
32:19
Speaker 2
What you people do is diabolical because I have now watched Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock, all these people in the big short nail the people on this. I'm watching and I'm thinking, oh my God, they've just basically replicated him.
32:32
Speaker 1
And Michael Burry is not easy to replicate.
32:35
Speaker 6
I actually did a movie with Christian Bale when I was 20 years old.
32:39
Speaker 4
It was called American Psycho.
32:41
Speaker 1
Oh God.
32:42
Speaker 4
And you guys... I have.
32:45
Speaker 6
Never in my whole history of my career seen an actor as committed as Christian Bale in American Psycho.
32:54
Speaker 5
I was acting.
32:57
Speaker 2
He was in.
32:59
Speaker 6
Scenes with me, and I would try to have conversations between takes, and there was no conversation to be had.
33:05
Speaker 4
It was just nothing.
33:07
Speaker 6
And he was so deeply in character and deeply committed. I mean, he's really a magician. But he has to disappear. He has to create a whole new thing to disappear. But it's incredible, his concentration, his focus. But I was really interested, too, because I went back and watched Big Short before we were having this conversation, and the two other main characters.
33:25
Speaker 1
Wanted their name.
33:27
Speaker 5
Not Brad Pitt.
33:27
Speaker 4
Not Brad Pitt.
33:28
Speaker 6
But Steve Carell's character and then Ryan Gosling's character, one of their names changed.
33:34
Speaker 1
Yes.
33:35
Speaker 2
And then I've spent the last 10 years explaining to everybody, that's them.
33:40
Speaker 1
They had a view. They had a view, the characters in the big short.
33:47
Speaker 2
A few of them, that the society might turn on them. There would be a moment where everybody said, wait, those guys made a fortune out of the collapse of the society or the collapse of Wall Street.
33:56
Speaker 1
That's evil. And they were afraid of that. But when the movie came out, they were like, no, no, no. Could you put my name back on there? It doesn't really work.
34:05
Speaker 5
No, I am Ryan Gosling.
34:06
Speaker 1
I am Ryan Gosling.
34:07
Speaker 4
Ryan Gosling is me.
34:08
Speaker 5
I know they've changed the names, but it's really me.
34:10
Speaker 2
And so there is this kind of like, contortion they're now in where like, you know, that is me. And so writing a book about someone has a certain effect. When a movie gets made about.
34:22
Speaker 1
You, your life changes.
34:24
Speaker 2
It is so hard to not be the person people expect you to be. It takes great inner strength. And some people can do it, but most people can't. And when the movie comes out, they start to become the character. The person who has actually defied the movies is Billy Bean.
34:41
Speaker 1
Billy Bean.
34:42
Speaker 2
And I can remember when Can we close on a Billy Bean story? So Billy Bean, after he got stopped being angry at me about the book and the book did create this huge.
34:52
Speaker 1
Storm in his life, like all baseball was angry at him.
34:55
Speaker 2
And he was incredibly brave. He could have just thrown me under a bus and he didn't do it. And I saw his character at work all over again. And I find it so moving. I find so moving when people when the easy thing is not to fight and you fight. Cause you know, it's the right thing to do. And it's like, I want to be in a foxhole with that person. And Billy Bean is that guy. And so he got over it. He didn't need the attention. He'd been a professional athlete. He's like the most handsome man in the world. He doesn't need any attention and didn't want it. The book just happens. It's an accident in his life. We're moving on. Then he calls me. He says, I want you to know that Sony pictures just called me and asked to buy my life rights. I see you're selling the movie rights. He says, I just want to, you know, I'm not gonna let it happen. It's not gonna be a movie. And I said, this is before any book of mine had been made. And I said, Billy, you're thinking about it the wrong way. I said, they never make the movie. They just give you some money, say how excited they are. Everybody's enthusiastic for six months. And then they move on to the next shiny object and it never gets made. And I gave him a list of all the money I'd made selling things to the movies that had never been made. And it was like a dozen things at that point. And he was, and Billy was like money. And so one day he calls me up and he says, you bastard. He said, Brad Pitt just called me and he wants to come over to my house and my wife is putting on makeup and the babysitter went home to get a dress.
36:15
Speaker 1
And he was, and so we had the whole, we had the thing all over again of I'm angry at you.
36:21
Speaker 2
And he was seriously, and so he refuses. I mean, making it awkward for everybody. He doesn't get in the way, but he refuses to visit the set. He refuses to be helpful in any way. They're filming in the Oakland Coliseum where his office is and he's refusing to show up. And I get a call from the producer saying he is making everybody extremely uncomfortable.
36:42
Speaker 1
Could you just call him and get him down? They were filming scenes. It was a night game.
36:47
Speaker 2
They had 8,000 extras. They were recreating this game that's towards the end of the book. And he said, there'll be chaos.
36:53
Speaker 1
Just bring him down.
36:54
Speaker 2
Let everybody see him for a bit and everybody will be fine. So I call him and he said, You're going to be there?
37:00
Speaker 1
I said, yeah, I'll be there.
37:01
Speaker 2
He says, if you're going to be there, I'll come down and I'll hang for like 20 minutes. But he says, I do not want to seem like I'm into this. This is kind of his attitude.
37:09
Speaker 1
And so I said, OK. So I'm there.
37:12
Speaker 2
Brad and Angelina are on the field. Everything's going on. 8,000 people are being moved from one side of the stadium to the other. There are two replicas. They're replicas of the Kansas City Royals and the Oakland A's. They look more like the players than the players themselves. It's a wild scene.
37:25
Speaker 1
And Billy walks out, could not care less, walks up to me. All right, I'm here. You happy? And a young production assistant comes running over.
37:33
Speaker 2
He's got the headgear and he's got a binder and there's a book in the binder.
37:37
Speaker 1
The book is inside his binder. And he comes, Mr.
37:40
Speaker 2
Bean, thank you so much for coming to this ad. I've been waiting for the six weeks for you to do this. You are my hero. Your book changed my life. And he looks at them. He goes like, it's not my book. Like he read the book.
37:50
Speaker 1
And he says, no, no, Mr. Bean, this is your book.
37:53
Speaker 2
And Would you just please sign it for me?
37:55
Speaker 1
And Billy's like, okay.
37:57
Speaker 2
So it turns out there were two people who played Major League Baseball named Billy Bean. And they actually were played at the same time. And they played in the same outfields. They played for the Twins and the Tigers together. And the other Billy Bean, spelled the name slightly differently, came out of the closet at the end of his career and wrote a book. It was called like Hitting from the Other Side of the Plate or whatever. And this kid goes like this and it's the gay Billy Beans book. And so there is nothing, there's nothing, there's no right answer here.
38:29
Speaker 1
There's nothing Billy Bean can say, right?
38:31
Speaker 2
And so he's looking there, he's going, his face is all contorted. And I look over and in the dugout, Brad Pitt is rolling around laughing.
38:40
Speaker 1
He set the whole thing up.
38:44
Speaker 2
He said, including calling me to say everybody's being made uncomfortable.
38:48
Speaker 1
That he's not here. Yes. Just to torture the real Billy Bean.
38:52
Speaker 4
Oh, my God.
38:53
Speaker 5
That's a great story. Oh, my God. I think we're done with Michael. I just want to say thank you.
39:01
Speaker 1
This book is amazing.
39:02
Speaker 5
I hope everybody loves it. And thank you for coming here to Nashville. We love having you.
39:15
Speaker 1
Thank you so much to Reese Witherspoon and Ann Patchett.
39:18
Speaker 2
Who has a fantastic bookstore in Nashville, by the way, Parnassus Books.
39:23
Speaker 1
Great crowd.
39:24
Speaker 2
I'll be back here next week with more from the media side of my book tour, so don't go anywhere. Against the Rules is hosted by me, Michael Lewis. It's produced by Lydia Jean Cott. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our theme was composed by Nick Brattel. And our engineer is Jake Gorski. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Owen Miller, and Sarah Bruguere. Also, to Nicole Optenbosch, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela Lawrence, and the rest of the Pushkin Audiobooks team.
40:04
Speaker 1
You can get.
40:05
Speaker 2
Blockers now at blockers.fm or wherever audiobooks are sold. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to listen ad-free and learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin.fm slash plus or on our Apple show page.
The Host
