Morning Brew Daily
Author Michael Lewis on 10 Years of “The Big Short," AI Bubble, and Sports Gambling
11 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: 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?
Chapter 2: 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.
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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.
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Chapter 3: How does Michael Lewis connect the 2008 financial crisis to today's economy?
Do you see any current parallels between the current AI moment that we're in right now and 2008?
I mean, the big feature of the 2008 crisis was the disguising of risk. All the complexity in the financial instruments disguised what these people were doing. And so it was hide the risk. It took some digging to see just how sort of unstable the situation was. This is wide open. This is right out in the open. You know how much people are spending on AI.
You know, they're making, it feels more like the internet boom, right? Like everybody, they're saying the world has changed. It's going to be completely new. This is transformative. Everybody's going to make a fortune off of AI. We need to pour all this money into AI. It's a bet. It is, but it's a bet we all know they're making.
And that, it feels like, I mean, my, I, who knows what's going to happen? My, my instinct is that like they're all they're all a little optimistic about the financial returns of AI and probably underselling the social disruption of AI. A lot of people are going to lose their jobs. So more pissed off people in our country, anger just goes, ratchets up in our political process.
I could see that happening. I don't think AI is going to come kill us all. They like to say that. It's kind of funny how the AI people, they don't pause to talk about the actual really plausible social consequences of this because they can't do anything about it and we And if we actually stop and think about it, we might hate them. They say, we want to stop AI from killing us all.
Like, they go right there. And it makes them feel, it makes everybody, it kind of just, it kind of distracts everybody from the real problem. And also makes them feel very important because they're in the middle of something that might kill us all. But when I think about what is the connection between 08 and like what might happen now, I don't think that. I think something else.
And what I think is, in 08, even though The systems, the institutions we had in place, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, performed a miracle. I mean, they saved us. I mean, you can be upset that nobody went to jail. You can be upset that they bailed out the banks. But the alternative was so bad that they saved a lot of pain. Yet the country's takeaway was we hate those institutions.
Like we don't trust them. We trust them less and less. The Federal Reserve's independence right now is being threatened as it's not been threatened maybe ever in its history. I don't know, you can argue, but I think that's true. The federal finances are so out of control. I mean, seemingly, not only are we running these huge deficits, but we seem incapable of addressing them. That's the thing.
It's like we just had an exercise, the Doge exercise, which was the most dramatic attempt to... to cut the deficit that we'll ever see again, probably. And the deficits have gone up. So you've got this really unstable, the grownups in the room in 2008 who could stabilize a financial crisis are no longer grownups.
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Chapter 4: What parallels does Michael Lewis draw between the AI industry and the 2008 crisis?
A couple of just tips about titles. Yes, please. Don't riff on your old titles. Or anybody else's title. You don't want to be a subset of someone else. You want it to be completely original. And the other thing is, to a very large extent, the book makes the title. I can't tell you how many people told me Moneyball sucked as a title. Everybody, including all the characters in the book.
Like, oh, that's a shitty title. And that title is now fantastic. So the books kind of will take care of the title. And the other little tip would be, Shorter is better than longer, usually.
Big shorter, gosh. All right, I'll stop there. Michael, that's all the time we have. Thank you so much for joining us. This was absolutely awesome. Everyone listening, make sure to go check out The Big Short audiobook narrated by Michael Lewis. And listen to Against the Rules, your podcast, which is all about The Big Short this year, this season. So a lot of good material coming out.
And thank you so much for jumping in the studio with us.
Totally fun. Tell your moms that they raised you well. Thank you. We will. You're getting that, Mom?
Thank you.
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