Transcription
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 um briefly intoxicating to think that I had value uh and someone would pay me lots of money. Once I sort of figured out how it worked, I lost interest in it and uh 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 I'm I'm really interested in that character in the situation they're in. Rather than identify with them, I sympathize with them. For me to write a book about someone where 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 I don't actually fix it. And most of the people I write about fix it. Uh so they're very different from me in that way.
Can you talk about the unwillingness to accept new knowledge? Even theoretical physics uh 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 kind of think rather think about things fresh.
Why do you think as a people we accept shallow explanations of complicated subjects? People are just generally embarrassed to look stupid. There's a fear of looking dumb. There's a fear that if you seem if you're ignorant about something that you will seem stupid to others. And I think ignorance is fine as long as you acknowledge it and you seek to, you know, you address it. That's often my pose as a writer. I walk in even when I think I know the answer. I pretend I don't because that's how you learn. I think people generally aren't that way though, especially people in kind of hot house environments in the arenas of American ambition in Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Washington or Wall Street that there's a knowingness about people. They want to have the right answer. They don't want to seem like they don't know. They think that if they don't know, they're going to seem stupid and that that leads to a greater stupidity.
You've talked about bad incentives before, lack of responsibility among elites. Why do you think the financial system encourages bad behavior? Well, so I don't think the financial I think the financial system is agnostic about behavior. I don't think it cares whether the behavior is bad or good. I think that um the moral problem such as it is on Wall Street isn't that people are kind of looking to do bad things. It's not at all what people are doing. I think people would rather do good things if they can make as much money doing the good things as doing the bad things, but they're looking to make money. The elevation of the making of money above everything else is leads to certain problems. And the nature of the problem, the moral problem is sins of um omission rather than commission.
So, for example, imagine there's a a pipeline running across America that is delivering all the oil from one side of America to the other side of America and one day the uh a meteor strikes this this oil pipeline and it creates a little hole in it and some oil starts to spill out. Not so much that the people on the receiving end completely notice. They sense something's wrong, but the oil the pipeline still works. Uh a normal business person when they stumble upon the hole, a normal person, they think they raise their hand and they say, "Let's fix the hole in the pipe, this is a travesty, all this oil spilling out is going to waste." A Wall Street person when they discover the hole in the pipeline, they think, "Oh my god, we can make some money here." They build a little village around the hole so nobody sees the hole. Maybe they chip away at the hole to get a little more oil out and it becomes it becomes a little industry in and of itself. So the problem is that there is a culture in the financial sector where it's a dumb thing to raise your hand and say there's a hole in the pipe. Let's fix the pipe. And the smart thing, the value thing and the thing that's rewarded is to say how do we get more oil out of this hole in the pipe.
I just want to switch gears and have you talk a little bit about no bless oblige and the idea that to whom much is given much is expected. I was raised in New Orleans in Louisiana and there was a sense that you were born to a certain family and if you were born to a certain a family a privilege that you had kind of responsibilities whether you actually did anything about it I don't know but the idea was in the idea was in the air it's an oldfashioned idea look we live in this society where there is an obvious problem and it's a growing problem and this problem of inequality it's a problem with people um people in privileged positions taking on more and more of the reward wards uh doing better and better for themselves uh approach the problem is to demand more from the people of privilege. I mean that for people for them themselves to realize a lot of my privilege is due to just luck. I'm lucky to have b been born in this country. I'm lucky to uh have been raised the way I was raised. I'm lucky to have got the education I got. I'm lucky that we have um a society in which a person who is very very lucky gets to keep most of the fruits of their luck. should feel at the at the when I achieve a certain status or become a success that I have an obligation to others. I have an obligation. It's a debt a debt to the unlucky that there are a lot of people who weren't as lucky as me.
And part of what's happened in our culture is that um with the rise of the meritocracy is that people come out of the they arrive at success. They arrive in a big job on Wall Street or they end up being CEO of a big corporation. uh they get to the endgame and they've persuaded themselves that they are solely responsible for their good fortune that they don't really owe anybody anything uh because they've been told over and over you know you won the competition and so you're in this place for that reason. There's a natural tendency for people to tell the story of their lives of their success forgetting all the accident that was involved all the help they got all the gratitude they should feel. I think it's worth leaning against that and sort of proposing an idea. It's a an idea that I would think in this given the state of the society should be alive and well in the culture, but it's not. That if you arrive at the top, you owe something.
So, for example, I thought it outrageous that people who run big companies think it's okay to pay themselves tens of millions of dollars. I I just don't even understand it. I would thought that the person who gets to the position where they're running a company should shouldn't be thinking how much can I justify paying myself given what my peers are being paid. They should be thinking instead I have an obligation to set the example for the company and they should say they should almost be thinking how little can I be paid to do this job happily. Um and they should take it upon themselves to reform CEO pay. It amazes me that there is this kind of momentum in the in the elites in this country to take as much as you can for yourself and that if you don't, you're stupid. You're a fool. You're not. If you don't, you're thought less well of because you instead of making $50 million, you made two. That amazes me. It amazed me there are more people sitting at top of institutions who are actively setting that example. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
We live in a society in which the elites have maybe more power than they've ever had, a greater share of the wealth than they had in the very long until But it's not clear they feel much in the way of obligation to society. I mean, this is not universally true. There there plenty of examples of people who do feel that, but it is amazing to me how few examples there are.
My name is Michael Lewis and this is my brief but spectacular take on the things that interest me.