Tell Me More with Kelly Corrigan

[Theme music playing] Kelly Corrigan: Something I say to myself before every interview is, "Look closer."

I realized just this morning I may have learned that 15 years ago when I met Michael Lewis for the first time; we were at lunch with a guy who ran a children's hospital we both wanted to help, and Michael Lewis was starved for story.

I never heard someone ask so many questions.

His forager's curiosity has led to some of the best characters on the page or on the screen in decades: Michael Burry from "The Big Short," Michael Oher from "The Blind Side," Billy Beane from "Moneyball."

He's also found a new medium, podcasts, where he's exploring two observations about American culture that we'll talk about today.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, this is "Tell Me More," and here is my conversation with bestselling author, old-fashioned New Orleans raconteur, and family man Michael Lewis.

Kelly: Hi.

Michael: Hey.

Thanks a lot for saying yes.

Yeah.

Great to be with you.

Good to be with you.

I thought, with our little bit of time today, that we could talk about 3 characters and, in light of these two ideas that you've got going on your podcast, which is we're obsessed with fairness as a culture, and that we are slightly dismissive of expertise.

And authority.

And authority.

Yeah.

So the first person I want to talk about is Dr. Michael Burry from "The Big Short."

Right.

So this is a guy with a glass eye.

Yeah.

Loves heavy metal.

Yeah.

Went to Vanderbilt, was going to be a neurosurgeon.

Uh-huh.

Why was he the person that could call the short?

Basically, if you look at what happened in the financial crisis, the run-up to the financial crisis, a giant bet was made in the financial world, and it was on subprime mortgage bonds.

And most of Wall Street was on the wrong side of that bet, and when I went looking for characters to tell the story through, that are going to have any authority at all, I had to find the people on the right side of the bet, and when you walked around Wall Street and asked people, like, who was doing this, you came up with a pretty short list of people, and his name was on the list.

And why he was so...interesting to me was that he was the one character who had kind of dug into the mortgages themselves, which were obscured by very complicated financial instruments, like, nobody was looking at the actual loans.

All these loans have been taken out by people who can't afford to repay them the minute the interest rate goes up, and they were all going to reset on a certain date, and you ask, "Why him?"

You know, like, "Why not other people?"

He really was socially isolated.

Most of Wall Street was kind of talking to each other all the time and persuading each other that this is all fine.

He didn't talk to anybody.

All his interactions were by email.

He was out here in California.

Right.

He wasn't in New York.

The social stuff never got to him.

And the groupthink.

That's absolutely right.

Right.

Right.

The kind of loner quality to him that...

Yes.

actually predisposed him to being able to see what other people didn't see.

And he was sort of dislikable, like, there's something about Cassandras, these people that kind of have the gift of prophecy, but no one will listen to them, is that they're slightly unpleasant or they're-- they make you uncomfortable in a way.

The mere fact he was staking out this extreme position at the time alienated him.

Sure.

I mean, implicitly, he's saying, "You're all idiots."

Right.

All right?

So that wasn't great, but he also--he just had an odd social manner, and it--there was a really funny moment.

I don't think I completely captured it in the book, but Christian Bale, when he played him in the movie... Unbelievable.

When I saw the movie, I asked Christian Bale, like, "How did you do that?

"You had to have seen things that I didn't even register in the book."

And he said it wasn't that hard.

I watched him for the day, and I noticed that there was something, like, off-putting about him.

He was just kind of herky-jerky and...

Yes, never still.

A little odd?

And he realized that when Michael Burry spoke, he breathed in all the wrong places, like, he didn't take a natural pause.

He'd talk, and in the middle of the sentence, he'd take a breath.

Oh.

And he said, "If you do that--try doing that.

Yeah.

"It just--it changes your thing," so when he played him in the movie, he told the director, he said, "Just make sure I'm breathing "in the wrong places, and everything else will take care of itself."

It's unbelievably observant, but it was actually true.

He's so used to thinking of himself as not the popular person... Mm-hmm.

that he said, "Well, if I'm not going to be the popular person, "I'm going to be the best not popular person.

I'm not gonna go along"...

Right.

"with whatever you all are doing."

Well, I mean, after that call, he'll never go along because it was so validated.

That's a problem, too, though.

Just 'cause you're right once doesn't mean you're right all the time.

Yes.

And I think the future is pretty hard to predict.

Yeah.

And it's intoxicating to have predicted it once and to delude oneself into thinking that you're going to do it again.

Well, part of what deludes you into thinking that you're going to do it again is that you're now in this feedback loop where it's like whatever Michael Burry says must be right because now he's an expert.

I mean, it even happened to you, like after you published "Liar's Poker," and then, after you did "The Big Short," people wanted your opinion about what was going to happen to the stock market, and you kept saying, "Why are you asking me?"

So it's a funny thing.

People actually don't-- when they're looking for expert advice, they don't actually evaluate other people very well.

Why do you think people are so eager to identify an expert that they're sloppy in the pursuit?

People are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.

What they want from experts is certainty.

Almost always, the person who's pretending to be certain is exactly the person you don't want to listen to.

Part of the problem, I think, with experts is that the nature of expertise has changed.

I wrote a book called "Moneyball" about a new kind of baseball expertise that was statistically based.

Your expertise was not rooted in any kind of obvious experience.

Your expertise is rooted in an analysis of sometimes arcane statistics that come out of a baseball player's performance.

The statistics suggest there is a 75% chance he's going to make it in the big leagues, or the statistics in-- to move to another sphere, suggest that there is a 80% chance that Hillary Clinton is going to beat Donald Trump.

Uh-huh.

But there's an awful lot of expertise that is essentially probabilistic in nature, and people don't understand probability.

Be very wary of people who express certainty because we live in an uncertain world.

So one of my favorite episodes of "Against the Rules" was when you identified the L-6 person, which is the person who is proximate to the work, and it sort of reminds me of Michael Burry, which is to say he got closer to the way they were writing these subprime mortgages.

So this is another way people get deceived about experts.

They think the important person is the person who knows.

You want to know what's going on in the state of California in the government, you go to Gavin Newsom.

You don't go to Gavin Newsom.

It's a vast enterprise, and there's some nobody who's 6 levels down from Gavin Newsom who actually knows what's going on.

Inequality sort of exacerbates this problem.

When the person on the top is that much better-paid, that much more important, that much more prominent than the person 6 level down who actually knows... Mm-hmm.

it can get very hard for that person to be heard by that person... Mm-hmm.

when what experts really are, most of the time, are people who are obsessed with some narrow thing.

Right, and that's the way that we as a public go wrong, which is to say that what you are expert in is what it's like to be a young trader at Salomon Brothers in a certain time period.

But what got extrapolated is, "He knows all about money.

Get him on the TV."

Yeah.

And the same with Michael Burry, as you corrected me, which is what he was an expert in is recognizing that subprime mortgage loans were a bunch of crap...

Right.

and that they were destined to fail.

Yeah.

He is not an expert writ large.

All you got to do is get on television.

TV producers, when they call you up and ask you to come on TV to talk about the financial crash or what's going to happen tomorrow, they don't want "I don't know" or "I'm not sure" or, you know, "This isn't really my area of expertise."

What they want is someone who'll go on and say, "I know."

Yeah, "I know and I'll be bold"... Mm-hmm.

"and make bold statements."

So same thing we want in political candidates.

So, almost by definition, if you're on the television set talking about stuff, almost by definition, you're probably not the person who should be talking about it.

The person who should be talking about it told the producer, "This is much more complicated," "You can't do it in 2 minutes," and all that.

Exactly.

So there are all these kind of barriers between the experts and our ability to use them.

I'm sort of thinking about the Milgram experiments and how willing we were to defer to authority if they were tall, if they had a white coat on, if the building they walked into had a certain height of ceilings as being, like, a new version of television, like, if you're on television and you're wearing a suit...

Right.

and someone's asking you a lot of questions, that equals-- It's so bad.

Looking the part is such a powerful force... Mm-hmm.

that it even infiltrates professional sports, where--where, um, you would think it would be nothing but pure meritocracy.

You find people who are in roles who don't look the part, you probably found someone who's really good.

Does Charity Dean look the part?

In the opposite way, no-- a doctor who decided that she'd walk away from a lot of money being a doctor to make not so much money being a public health person and fighting disease, really, with a view to-- of, like, fighting pandemics.

That's what she was-- always been interested in.

So she is a public health official in Santa Barbara, and the story in "The Premonition" begins with this TB case.

So this is Christmas holidays, like, 7 or 8 years ago, and a woman had died in a hospital in Santa Barbara County.

They'd found tuberculosis in her--in her brain.

Tuberculosis apparently can go anywhere in the body.

It's very odd that way, and whenever there's a tuberculosis case, she gets called, and she says, "Well, I need to know "if the tuberculosis is in her lungs, because that's the only way it becomes contagious."

There was some evidence, sketchy, that cutting into the lung of even a dead person with tuberculosis might be a dangerous thing to do, that the doctor might actually be infected, so the coroner refused to do it.

She got an order from the sheriff requiring him to do it, and he said, "It's too dangerous.

I'm not going to do it myself.

"If you want to come check out the lung, you can come do it yourself."

So she drives over to the county morgue, and the coroner has sort of staged what she thinks is going to be her humiliation.

The sheriff is there with all his deputies, the coroner.

They're in, basically, full-on hazmat suits.

Heh!

The body of this woman is laid out on a-- on a picnic table, and they've not even given her a scalpel.

All there is to cut her open is a pair of garden shears.

And they think, "Oh, she's going to come and she's going to go-- she's not going to do it."

And she actually picked up the garden shears and cut the torso open and reached in, grabbed the lung, tossed it in a bucket, put the bucket in the car, and drove it back to the local public health office, and she didn't have tuberculosis.

When you are hearing this story, I mean, are you like, "This is gold"?

When I find a really great character, one of the marks of the great character is she doesn't know she's a character.

This stuff just spills out of her, and she doesn't realize that what she just told me is just magic.

And that story was--was-- she didn't present that as, like, "a story" and "Look at me."

It was, like, one of a hundred stories she told.

She doesn't look like how she is, but how she is has guided her into a very unusual role, sort of like disease warrior.

Charity Dean, as she says, when she walks into a room, if it's a room full of men, she gives them, like, 20 seconds to just adjust to her appearance, because for 20 seconds, they're struck dumb.

And she says, "If I've got something important "I need to relate to, say, the Fire Chief "of Santa Barbara County about some disease outbreak, "he's not gonna even hear me for the first 20 seconds, so I wait for 20 seconds, then I deliver the news to him."

That's amazing.

Well, she thinks it works against her.

Right.

She doesn't get taken as seriously, and one of my favorite lines of hers just kind of spilled out of her when she was--she was on a rant, on a tear about men and how dumb they were.

[Chuckles] And--and she said, "The problem with them is they all think "my spirit animal is a bunny, and my spirit animal is a dragon."

Ha ha ha ha!

The other thing about "The Premonition" is that there's this little, tiny tale about Charity Dean, that in second grade, she kind of looked at her teacher and said, "You're pregnant."

She had a premonition.

Teacher was pregnant and couldn't figure out why, and the teacher's jaw was on the floor.

"How did you know?"

She's shaped a view of herself that she's that way.

And maybe it's somehow self-fulfilling.

It's totally self-fulfilling.

She's--has this deep sense that she knows things without knowing why she knows them, So it has a kind of mystical quality to it, which is an odd quality in a scientist.

But she's always had this thing where... she senses things.

We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

We all have some narrative.

I mean, she must be famous county to county.

So another mark of a character, and it was really true in her case, is that wherever I went in Santa Barbara County and I was talking to other people when she wasn't there, they would often say, like, "I'm not surprised you're here.

Someone was eventually going to come write about this woman."

She's not normal, you know.

This isn't what a public health officer usually looks like or how a public health officer usually behaves.

She's not normal and she doesn't know it.

That's right.

The opposite is if you have some-- a character who's sort of very self-conscious or, like, thinks of themselves "as a character," they just lose altitude on the page.

It just doesn't-- it just doesn't work.

I lose interest in them.

It's the contract between reader and writer, similar to the contract between writer and character, that if the character is trying to just muscle you around into thinking how you should think about them... Mm-hmm.

it's just deadening.

If the character is just leaving spaces in their being for you to walk into and understand, it's magical.

So they're unguarded and they're guileless.

Not necessarily that.

They can be wary of, like, the interaction because you're going to expose--you're going to write about them.

They don't know.

It's a strange process.

Right.

Eventually, they have to be completely trusting.

You don't seem like you have a poker face, so, like, I feel like if you were interviewing Charity Dean, you'd be smiling the whole time, and she'd know that you admired her instantly.

I mean, you don't seem like a guy who's coming to take her down.

Well, the Wall Street characters would-- like, Michael Burry would be more examples of people who might be worried about that kind of thing.

They figure out what the book is when they read the book.

They maybe have guessed stuff from what I'm asking and all the rest, but they don't really know.

What does have to happen at some point, and this conversation I've had with, you know, dozens of people now is, "Look, if I'm going "to put you in the middle of a story I'm writing, "I can't feel like they're parts of your life "you're just walling off.

"I can't feel like I don't know you.

"You may deceive me into believing I know you "when I don't know you.

Try it, but-- "if you really want to do that, but I've got "to feel like I've got total access.

"Doesn't mean I'm going to abuse it.

"I may learn stuff about you "that has no business being in a book, but that's gonna be my judgment."

Whenever I'm, in fact, leaving something out, I think, if the reader were to find this out about the character after they read the book, their response should be, "That makes total sense."

They shouldn't be, "Oh, my God, this completely changes my view of this person."

Right.

I don't feel comfortable sitting down and really writing someone unless I feel like I really know them.

What are some of the harder questions to ask?

It isn't questions.

It's doing things with them.

I will contrive adventures with the characters that may or may not end up in the book just so I can spend time moving through space with them, watching how they interact with the world.

Charity had always made a point as a public health officer, trying to kind of identify people on the streets who were really at risk and just trying to take care of them.

And she had one person in particular who was constantly in her life with various ailments, a homeless person, and he died, and it was devastating to her.

She'd always wanted to visit his grave, but she didn't know where it was.

So I went and found out where the grave was, and the grave was a 4-hour drive from Santa Barbara, near Joshua Tree, and I made her get in a car with me and go to visit his grave.

I did it because I wanted to do something with her that was meaningful to her and just watch her go through it.

You know, the book is about the pandemic, sort of, but what I really thought about it, it was a story of our country's inability to take care of its people.

The pandemic was just a symptom.

It arrived at a moment when life expectancy in this country had declined for 3 straight years for the first time since the pandemic of 1918, when World War I was going on, and that's really extraordinary.

We're sick in some way.

Do you stay in touch with everybody forever?

They're so sick of me... Ha ha!

while I'm writing the book, like, "Really?

We got to meet again?

We got to go have another adventure?"

Ha ha!

You know?

It's like, "Really?

I've got work to do.

I've got this.

Do we have to talk?"

They get to that point only halfway through, and then I'm-- there's another half to go.

They're thinking, "God, I hope I never have to see him again."

And then, like, a year later, they miss it.

They miss having someone trying to understand them that way... Yeah.

because as we go through our lives, that really doesn't happen.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, it's a really peculiar relationship.

Even with your spouse or your best friend, you're not usually constantly, kind of questing to figure out... Mm-hmm.

who they really are.

It's a really unusual relationship.

[Girl laughing] Kelly: So the third character I want to talk about is Dixie Lewis.

Tell me about her.

Well, Dixie Lewis was my daughter.

She was our middle child, and she was killed, uh, May of last year in an automobile accident.

Her boyfriend was driving, and they were up in Tahoe, and nobody knows exactly what happened, but they had a head-on collision and they were killed.

Of all of our 3 children, her archetype was the easiest to identify.

She was the princess warrior.

She was a girl who'd get up at 5:30 in the morning before a softball tournament to spend 2 hours putting makeup on and then go rip the opponent's throat out.

[Both laugh] She-- she was predictably, insistently beautified and ferocious, worked her butt off at everything she did, was really kind of committed to getting someplace great.

I loved her.

I love her, and I miss her every moment now.

This feeling, these feelings of grief, that's really the price you pay for love...

Totally.

you know?

If you don't feel this, it's 'cause you didn't feel that.

People want kind of off-the-shelf responses to explain life's uncertainty.

I have found that this experience so defies any off-the-shelf kind of advice about how to go through it.

It's so peculiar to... our own circumstances-- who I am, who she was, what our relationship was-- that nothing anybody has said has been helpful, which isn't to say there aren't things that are helpful, but that I feel I can't be advised.

There are no experts.

There are no experts.

That's exactly right.

Now, of course, there are plenty of people who will advertise themselves as experts, the grief consultants, the therapists.

There are a gazillion books on the experience of the loss of a child or-- Those other parents.

There's Ross's parents, her boyfriend's parents.

You know, they went through as close a thing to what we went through as you can imagine.

None of their experiences speak perfectly to mine.

None of them are completely alien, obviously, but none of them match, so that I find myself having emotionally to deal with this in a very private way.

I've been kind of dropped into a jungle, handed a machete, but no map, and I've got to find my way through this jungle.

And as long as I kind of remain aware of that, that there aren't any really easy answers, I'm better off.

The coping mechanism that I find the most soothing is the coping mechanism of an improv actor.

Someone on stage just handed them something horrible to respond to, but they can't say no.

They've got to say yes, "yes and."

So, yes, she's dead.

Yes, I'm going to miss her forever.

Yes, I'm going to feel the way I feel, and there will be parts of every day that are going to be deeply sad, and we're going to build things, we're going to create things.

I'm going to write, still write things, I'm going to raise two wonderful children, and...the solace is in thinking Dixie Lewis and the experience I had with her will inform all those things I create.

That's sort of how I'm approaching it.

It's not easy.

I remember when I was in cancer treatment in my 30s that I felt so lucky that I was bald because everyone would know that I had a reason for being a little off today.

Mm-hmm.

You just said something that is also, I think, an important ingredient to enduring loss.

You had cancer, but you were grateful.

It's very hard for someone with cancer to get to gratitude.

It's very hard for someone who's lost a child to get to gratitude.

It's a radical act that really there is a great deal to be grateful for.

I'm grateful she lived as well as she did.

How would Dixie describe you?

Pain in the ass.

Really?

Ha ha ha!

Yeah, I mean, so, what would she--how would she describe me?

She would say that I was a surprisingly good softball coach.

I was her coach for the whole time, so she was-- she put up with it for much longer than most girls do.

I mean, I was her coach to the end.

She wanted to go out and work with me on the field.

I think everybody loves their children, not everybody likes their children.

Yes.

I'm very lucky to like my children.

They're a gas.

Since she died, I've written little things here and there, but I haven't sat down to write a book.

There's a part of me that wonders what it's gonna feel like when I go to that place I go to when I write-- it's a private place-- whether I'll still-- I'll be in the same place.

If I'm not, it's all right, but I don't know.

Do you ever get lost in the unfairness of it?

Not that way.

I was always aware of life being radically unfair in my direction.

I felt so ridiculously lucky for how my life had worked out up to that point.

I have a hard time thinking about life as being unfair towards me.

It is horribly unfair to her that she didn't get to live a long life.

I wake up every day and I can't believe she's not here, but I'm not--I haven't been really dwelling on life being unfair towards me.

I think it's very important the story you tell yourself about yourself, and I am not willing to tell a story about myself as a victim.

At "Tell Me More," we give everybody a chance to shout out what we call a plus-one, which is somebody that has been instrumental to your thinking or your well-being.

Who's your plus-one?

At the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, Louisiana, a history teacher named Arthur White, Dr. Arthur White, who literally kicked me into awareness that-- we'd sit at these desks, that little--each kid had his own little desk, and freshman year, I was so tired every day 'cause I was a boy who was growing.

I'd just put my head on the desk and go to sleep while he was talking.

Ha ha!

And the moment I went to sleep, he would come and kick the desk and send me and the desk flying across the room.

Ha ha!

I had him 3 years later as a senior, and he was the first person who ever said, "You can write" ever in my life.

He said, "You can really write."

And I remember thinking, "Oh, man, like, maybe this-- maybe--maybe I can write."

It was green paper I wrote my--my paper on, and I remember getting the green paper back.

On the top, it was this little thing about how-- what a writer I was.

It would never have crossed my mind until then.

We become this accretion of, like, the way the world has responded to us.

Yes.

When we get to be older people, you forget when-- what you were like when you were 14 or 15 or 16 years old...

Yes.

and how, when someone said something to you, it could actually completely change the way you saw the world, like-- Forever.

Forever!

OK, are you ready for the speed round?

No, but go ahead.

Heh!

What's your first concert?

Kiss.

What was your first paying job?

I started, um, a...kind of handyman business when I was 14.

Last book that blew away?

Actually, the one I just finished two weeks ago blew me away.

It was called "Ministry for the Future."

It was by a guy named Kim Stanley Robinson.

Do you have a celebrity crush?

Probably not like you have a celebrity crush.

Ha ha ha!

Right?

I can already see in your eyes-- Ryan Gosling.

There you go.

Ryan Gosling.

Ha ha ha!

What do you wish you had more time to do?

I used to just be able to just sit down and read, like, all of Hemingway.

When I was, like, 17 years old, I could just-- without--and just suck it in.

Now, I have to read so much for work.

What's something big you've been wrong about?

The implicit kind of assumption I had that my life would be unpunctuated by, uh, bad luck.

If your mother wrote a book about you, what would it be called?

"He Does Go On."

If you could say 4 words to anyone, who would you address and what would you say?

I'd say to Dixie Lewis, "I'm proud of you."

Thanks a lot.

Yep.

[Sings indistinctly] If you enjoyed today's conversation, you'll love our episodes with Nick Hornby and Dave Eggers.

If you're grieving the loss of someone, you might find special value in our conversation with Dr. George Bonanno of Columbia.

You can listen to every episode on my podcast, "Kelly Corrigan Wonders," or watch anytime on pbs.org/Kelly.

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