Michael Lewis

They made a killing on the collapse of the society.

How do you feel about that?

And if I'm throwing around a lot of outrage, you're not leaving the reader the room to jump one way or the other.

You don't know how to feel about it.

And what complicates it even further is all of the characters as they get into the big short, as they get into this, oh my God.

First, I think I'm making a kind of interesting trade against Wall Street.

This looks like a good bet.

They're giving me 25 to one odds that nothing bad's gonna happen here.

And they dig in, they realize this is not just a good bet, it's a great bet.

Wait, wait, this is almost a sure thing.

I'm getting 25 to one odds for it's gonna happen.

And that starts to feel criminal.

Like there's some sort of criminal, and they start to realize that all the people on the other side of the bet, the people whose institutions are gonna lose money and those losses are gonna be possibly foisted upon the taxpayer, the individuals have all made a fortune generating these crappy loans, and it starts to look really sinister.

And all the people on the right side of the bet went to various, it was either law enforcement or media.

They tried to, or they went to Washington Post,

They went to the FBI.

They went to the Wall Street Journal and tried to, like, look at this.

Like, this is a problem.

And all of them thought, in fact, when I was approaching them to write about them, their trepidation was, if my name is in your book, I might get lynched because this society might be going down.

And the fact that the government came in and calmed it all down and it wasn't a depression, it was a recession,