The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Stephen Medcalf, and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club.

This month we'll be talking about Michael Lewis's The Big Short Inside the Doomsday Machine.

I'm joined today by Dan Gross, business columnist for both Newsweek

and Slate and Troy Patterson, the television columnist, critic for Slate magazine. Dan, nice to see you.

Good to be here. Troy, wonderful to see you. How you doing, Steve?

By way, a very quick introduction 20 years ago, a young man with a BA and nothing more than art

history from Princeton University, stumbled upon the great

1980s bull market and thereby one of the great financial stories of all time, really.

He wrote a very engaging, fetching memoir.

I think it completely still holds up, having recently reread a lot of the supposed business

classics of the 1980s.

Liars Poker is still a delightful book from beginning to end.

20 years later, Michael Lewis was inspired to write about how shocked he was.

A situation that he perceived is completely unsustainable, managed to sustain itself quite handsomely for the subsequent 20 years.

The Wall Street boom, he felt, was discredited on its face by the fact that it was willing to reward him for giving advice to people twice his age on a subject he knew nothing about.

Troy, before we dig in on the book, let's talk a little bit about possible conflicts of interest because Michael Lewis was once affiliated may still be with Slate Magazine.

He was indeed. And in fact, the big short is dedicated to Michael Kensley, who is the founding

editor of this magazine. And the big money, our sister site, ran an excerpt of the book.

And he has been a slate contributor.

I'll further note on a slightly different topic that the first sort of big glossy magazine feature I ever wrote was a profile of Michael Lewis.

Ten years ago when The New New Thing, his book about Jim Clark, the Netscape founder Jim Clark, came out, and he was a good interview. All right, we'll bear all that in mind when we discuss his book, I'm sure, very frankly. I think we can begin this in two parts. Part one, let's consider the facts that went into the creation of the book, the story behind it. And, Dan, you're invaluable for that. And then we'll move on to our

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