Michael Lewis
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Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso · Author Michael Lewis (‘The Big Short’) Pulls Back the Curtain
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Can a Crisis Make People Bounce Back?
Michael Lewis says the part of the book about living together is not only about Trump. Trump is both a cause and a symptom. People, he says, are going to have to think hard about how they live together and take care of each other. Sam Fragoso asks whether people even want to. Lewis repeats the question and agrees it is the real one. Fragoso says he does not know if people do. Lewis says he does think politics has gotten way out of touch with the culture, and he does not think politics looks like how people really are.
The nastiness, the cruelty, and the tribalism are not, he says, how people live their lives. Lewis says we are famously philanthropic and capable of building communities, that
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Why Does Michael Lewis Put the Reader Ahead of the Subject?
Michael Lewis says time with a subject is not a little time. It is eighteen months, or whatever the book takes, and then he moves on. A book has a limited ability to change a life. When a movie gets made, the person becomes the character on the screen, and the role changes the life around them.
Sam Fragoso asked whether the aftermath changes how Lewis works. Lewis says he still does not write books so they will become movies. Some became movies by accident, with his consent. The books get sold, and the movies almost never get made. He has been selling them for decades.
A thought he dislikes still comes in, and he tries to bat it aside. He does not spend much time on consequences for the pe
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What Is the Blind Side About?
Sam Fragoso asked why Michael Oher pressed for the money, given that Lewis had gotten to know him. Lewis says he can understand why Oher would feel a dollar in Sean Tuohy's pocket is a dollar out of Oher's pocket. Oher had an incredibly tough first fifteen or sixteen years. Beyond the hardship, Lewis says he does not know, and it is not his place to answer. The sad part is that, in the moment, it was beautiful to watch people seem to love each other and have the arrangement work.
Asked what the story is about, Lewis says it is about character and situation. People tend to attribute to a person what is really about a situation. Change the situation and the whole future changes. He describes
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Did the Tuohys Steal Michael Oher's Movie Money?
Five years ago, Michael Lewis says, Michael Oher called wanting more money from the book and time on the road to talk about it. Lewis called Sean Tuohy. Strange emails and texts were arriving: if the family did not pay, Oher would destroy their reputation. The lawsuit first said the Tuohys stole the movie money. Lewis says they did not. The contract was his, so he knew the money. Writers are paid net profits, which do not show up no matter how much a film brings in. The advance was something like two hundred and something thousand dollars. Lewis gave the Tuohys half, they signed away their rights, and the sum was split into four or five shares, with a share for Oher. He calls the share not v
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How Did Michael Lewis Find Michael Oher for the Blind Side?
Sam Fragoso asked about the controversy around The Blind Side and Michael Oher, the football player who lived with Sean Tuohy in a conservatorship. Lewis and Tuohy grew up together and played baseball. On a Moneyball stop in Memphis, Lewis was also writing Coach, a short book about their high school baseball coach. Tuohy's father had a stroke in high school, the coach replaced his dad, and Lewis wanted Tuohy's thoughts. In the car Tuohy asked who writes the books and would not believe Lewis writes them. They had sat in the back of English class.
At the house Lewis saw a large Black kid on the sofa. Nobody made an introduction. At the hotel Lewis asked who the kid was. Tuohy said Leigh Anne
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How Does Michael Lewis Get Close Enough to Draw Someone?
Sam Fragoso read from the New York Times Magazine essay Michael Lewis wrote in 1999, after writing about his friend John McCain. The essay is I Liked a Pol. Lewis says he watched McCain, got to know him, and wrote him from the inside, the way a novelist writes a character. Most people liked McCain, so the effect was strongly positive. McCain told Lewis the piece was the most important thing ever written about him, because it opened eyes in the press corps.
Lewis reads the argument. Most writing about Clinton, and about other big-time politicians, came from a strange distance. Reporters seemed content with bleacher seats, a useful place to analyze and pour doubt, and a poor place to know any
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Why Did Michael Lewis Wait Until Sam Bankman-Fried Was in Jail?
Sam Fragoso said critics attacked how Michael Lewis does the job. Lewis says the attack is dumb. The job is to get to know the person. If he had drawn a grotesque caricature that encouraged the people who hated Sam Bankman-Fried most, the portrait would fail to explain how Bankman-Fried happened. There is a reason people gave Bankman-Fried money, a reason people wanted to work for him, and a reason politicians wanted to be with him. Lewis says the reader has to feel the reasons, or the shock of the story disappears. He would be more open to a critique that named facts the reader needed and that he had left out. When the critique is only that he was too nice, he says he was describing Bankman
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Was Michael Lewis Too Close to Sam Bankman-Fried?
Sam Fragoso asked about Going Infinite and the early assault on the Sam Bankman-Fried book. One critique was that sympathy, and the time spent close to Bankman-Fried, kept Michael Lewis from a clear-eyed evaluation. Lewis says no. The evaluation matched any other subject. What differed was that many people already held a hard opinion. Bankman-Fried went from everybody's favorite crypto boy toy to everybody's favorite villain: the it kid worth thirty billion dollars, venture capitalists wanting to hand him money, politicians wanting to be his friend, and then a crook. Lewis says the turn embarrassed people who had had their hands in his pockets and then needed to distance themselves. He had w
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Why Does Michael Lewis Say the IRS Could Not Fix a Water Fountain?
Michael Lewis says the water fountain was more like the Internal Revenue Service's technology, and a lot of what remained of the US government, than like the apps an employee had created. Forces beyond the control of any one person governed the fountain. It existed inside a web of rules and beneath layers of authority, and it required a certain kind of person to make sure it worked.
A plumbing-looking man heard about the fountain on the fifth floor and said the working one was on the seventh floor. The employee said he worked on the fifth floor. As the elevator doors closed, the man shouted that a fountain was also on the fifteenth floor. Every day, the employee checked the fountain and pre
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How Does Michael Lewis Keep His Daughter Present?
Michael Lewis says the way to make something useful of his daughter's death is to keep her present. Keeping her present is the opposite of moving on or getting through grief. She is still part of his life.
It took a while to click in as a father: her coach, then her consultant and helpmate when she was 19 and a college softball player, then her student. He is still learning from her. She had more courage than he did. She was extremely brave, morally brave and physically brave, and she gives him nerve. He talks about her all the time, is not shy about the subject, and has written about her. Lewis thinks a lot of people would benefit from feeling liberated from the rules of grief. People are
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Why Did Berkeley Resist Fire-resistant Homes?
Michael Lewis says wooden fences running through a community are the way fire moves from house to house. Protecting a community against fire requires a collective approach, much like a collective approach to disease and very similar to a pandemic. A community is only as strong as the weakest link.
In Berkeley, California, up at the top of the hill where the town meets the forest, the law already makes people make their homes fire resistant, because if one goes up, they all go up. Even in Berkeley, the rule caused blowback. Sam Fragoso calls the place liberal, woke Berkeley, and Lewis repeats the label. Lewis says Americans do not, as a society, do collective stuff. The country is highly ind
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Why Does Michael Lewis Say Cutting Two Trillion From the Deficit Was Impossible?
Michael Lewis says the stated goal is to cut the deficit by two trillion dollars out of a seven trillion dollar deficit. Seventy-five percent of the spending is either interest payment on the debt, the military, or entitlements, and none of the interest, the military, or the entitlements is being addressed. Cutting two trillion dollars out of the debt just by attacking the remaining spending is mathematically impossible.
What actually gets cut is a few billion dollars, which ends up being almost nothing. Paying people who have been laid off for two years ends up probably costing more than the amount cut. He says the result has not been good business.
Seen from Mars the way Elon Musk would
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Why Do Federal Civil Servants Stay for Less Pay?
Michael Lewis says dedicated federal civil servants are not anomalies. They are easy to find inside a two million person workforce, easy enough that the book was available five times over with five different casts of characters.
Lazy people work in government, and Lewis says the same kind of people show up in the private sector. What strikes him about the federal government is how many workers can make twice their government pay outside it and still stay. They work not forty hour weeks, not sixty hour weeks, but a hundred or eighty hour weeks. Sam Fragoso asked why they do not leave. Lewis says the jobs are so meaningful. They see the purpose, they see how important the work is, they see kn
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Why Did Michael Lewis Turn Blocker Into a Compliment?
Michael Lewis says the people Elon Musk called blockers were doing their job beautifully. They were not partisan, no one would ever accuse them of incompetence, and they were dedicated to the country. Blocker was a new insult. Before January 20th, 2025, they went by civil servant.
When Musk went into the government with his team at Doge, he said the same thing he had said when he went into Twitter. People already there will want to stop you, so find the blockers and get rid of them. The six main characters in his book never called themselves blockers. Musk would have described them that way. Lewis says they are mainly trying not to break the law. He lines the word up with impressionist and
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How Did Michael Lewis Pitch Trump's Second Term?
Michael Lewis says he has no interest in writing the same book twice. The Fifth Risk, his book on Trump's first term, was a story about the price of ignorance and the risk of radical neglect, and he had imagined that book was the end of his time in the federal government.
The second term arrived with a different plan. After the election and the inauguration, Project 2025 sat in the background, a plan to radically remake the federal government that Trump had disavowed. Lewis says it stayed unclear whether Trump cared until he reached the White House. Then the story reversed. Trump went from not managing the government to asserting powers presidents previously had not had. Lewis calls the mov