Adam McKay is Still Angry About 2008

Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion

Pushkin Industries

Business, Society & Culture, Sports

4.6 • 9.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Adam McKay decided to make a movie based on The Big Short, he was mainly known for his comedies. But he managed to get a bevy of star actors — among them Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell and Margot Robbie — to sign on and bring the intensity and arcane financial jargon of Wall Street to life. Michael Lewis sits down with McKay a decade after he made the Oscar-winning movie version of The Big Short to learn about the challenges of getting the film made — and why he’s still making movies about societal collapse.

Get The Big Short audiobook, now narrated by Michael Lewis, on Audible, Spotify, Apple Books, pushkin.fm/bigshort or wherever you get audiobooks.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin
0:07.0	Most of 2006 and early 2007, Dr. Michael Berry had experienced as a private nightmare.
0:18.0	In an email, he wrote, the partner partners closest to me tend to ultimately hate me.
0:25.4	This business kills a part of life that is pretty essential.
0:29.6	The thing is, I haven't identified what it kills.
0:33.9	But it is something vital that is dead inside of me.
0:36.8	I can feel it.
0:40.3	I'm Lydia Dean Cott, a producer here on Against the Rules,
0:43.9	and what we just heard is an excerpt from the big short,
0:47.4	a book that Michael Lewis wrote in 2010.
0:50.0	He's now releasing it for the first time as an audiobook, narrated by him.
0:55.0	Yep, and I'm here too. So, LJ, I'm going to tell you what I want you to do. You're an innocent
1:00.3	outsider with no particular interest in the global financial crisis. It is like one of these
1:06.0	huge events in American history. And it's really useful to me to hear what you're curious about. And also
1:15.1	for me to explain to you why the people who were interviewing are the people we're interviewing.
1:21.2	Why they matter now. So I haven't thought about the 2008 financial crisis since it happened, which is when I was in high school.
1:29.8	And I'm going to be honest, I actually didn't even really think about it that much when it happened.
1:34.8	Why would you?
1:35.3	I was thinking about high school.
1:37.5	Why did you want to revisit it?
1:39.9	Why look back at it now?
1:42.5	It has never lost its relevance.
	...

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