The Strategist
The long view, patient, analytical, playing several moves ahead.
Michael Lewis is a renowned author and journalist known for his insightful explorations of financial systems and human behavior. This interview reveals his strategic approach to storytelling, where he seeks to understand and articulate the underlying dynamics of his subjects, ultimately aiming to provoke thought and discussion about the future.
“Yes, this is Kahneman's insight. That life has this horrible feedback loop, this lesson it teaches us that we get response to our punishment, but not to our praise, because you're praising someone when they're naturally performing better than usual and you're punishing them or criticizing them when they're naturally performing worse than…”
“In and of itself, that's not the problem. The big problem was I did have a sense with these two characters, Connem and Taversky, that I was writing about people who were so much smarter than I was that I was never going to be able to get my mind around them, that it was going to always feel like the B student writing about the A student.”
“Know that even the smart people on Wall Street didn't really know what they were doing. I took the biggest mistake I had in my head when I left Solomon Brothers was that the people at the top of Solomon Brothers, the people, the people in the middle of the trading had... Some mystical knowledge that I lacked.”
“And it's for this reason that if I had been all aflame about the evils of Wall Street instead of just kind of funny about it, nobody would read the book as a how-to manual. No one would have read the book anyway, but they wouldn't have read the book. It'd have been tedious. Like, who cares what you think?”
The Rest Is Politics: Leading — 106. Michael Lewis: Donald Trump, Sam Bankman-Fried, and the future of the USA
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