Author Michael Lewis on 10 Years of “The Big Short," AI Bubble, and Sports Gambling
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Michael Lewis revisits the big short 10 years later.
What did he really think of the movie?
What insights does Michael Lewis share about the 10th anniversary of 'The Big Short'?
Would he recast anyone? All that and more. It's Tuesday, November 11th. Let's ride.
Good morning on Veterans Day. Like many of you, we are off for the federal holiday, but this podcast never sleeps in. You are about to hear a fascinating interview with one of the leading storytellers of our time. The author Michael Lewis has written more books that become movies than most authors have written books. He coined the term money ball and protected the blind side. But when Michael joined us in the studio recently, the conversation topic was about his third book adapted into a film, The Big Short.
This winter marks the 10th anniversary of the Big Short movie, starring Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, and Steve Carell as the traders who saw the financial crisis coming before it happened and got really rich from shorting the housing market. We also talked sports betting. He's got strong thoughts on that, how he comes up with his titles, and gave him some thoughts on how we'd recast the Big Short. Spoiler alert, we're getting Jack Black involved. Such a fun convo and cannot wait for you all to hear. But first, a word from our sponsor, U.S. Bank. It's no secret that the economy is a little rocky right now. You're already budgeting carefully, so the last thing you want is to have to pay for an unexpected vet bill or laptop repair completely out of pocket.
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Bank split card. Learn more at usbank.com slash split card. That's usbank.com slash split card. Now, without further ado, here's Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis, thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure already. All right. So many people listening to the show don't remember 2008. Heck, Toby over here just learned how to walk. So as you revisit the book and the movie now in 2025, can you describe to people who may not have experienced the financial crisis firsthand how it's impacting their lives today?
All right, so you've got to know a little bit about what happened. Very broadly, the big Wall Street banks, which were at the time exciting places to work, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and all the rest were thought to be the smart places in the financial world. And these places made hundreds of billions of dollars of really stupid bets. You can think of the world back then as having organized itself around a bet. And the bet was on subprime mortgage bonds, which was in turn a bet on what was gonna happen to house prices. And the Wall Street firms were all, almost all, really heavily on the wrong side of the bet. They owned a lot of this stuff. And not only because they had bought the actual loans, they used derivatives to replicate the absolute worst of them.
So it's like the stupidest loans, in theory, replicate them infinitely. And so not only did we have like hundreds of billions of really dumb loans, but you had possibly infinite number of similarly stupid bets, all kind of concentrated in the heart of the financial system. On the other side of this, were a handful of smart people who took the other side of the bets. And my book, The Big Short, tells the story of the financial crisis through the eyes of the people who were on the right side of the bet. All right, the market wakes up to how bad these loans are. The banks all basically would have failed. Even the ones that didn't go all in on it, where they were so tied to the other banks.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:11
2
What insights does Michael Lewis share about the 10th anniversary of 'The Big Short'?
0:11–10:00
3
How does Michael Lewis connect the 2008 financial crisis to today's economy?
10:00–35:33
4
What parallels does Michael Lewis draw between the AI industry and the 2008 crisis?
35:33–36:41
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Morning Brew Daily
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