Michael Lewis on Stock Market Overconfidence and Revisiting Moneyball

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4.4 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

One sign of a true expert is they often say “I don’t know”.

Best-selling author Michael Lewis wrote classics like The Big Short, Liar's Poker, and Moneyball. He also hosts the podcast Against The Rules. Chris Hill talked with Lewis last year for an episode we published on May 20, 2022. Due to time constraints we had to leave some parts of the conversation out of that episode, so we're bringing them to you now! Hill and Lewis discuss:
- Unintended consequences of Moneyball
- Why single men fare worse in the stock market
- How Iceland responded to the Great Recession
- How to spot true experts

"Boys Will Be Boys" paper: https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/papers/gender/BoysWillBeBoys.pdf

Host: Chris Hill
Guest: Michael Lewis
Producer: Ricky Mulvey
Engineer: Dan Boyd

Transcript

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0:00.0	But I think you're right. I think it's sort of like if I were running a big organization,
0:04.6	thank God I'm not, I would be really alive to this problem that a lot of what I need to
0:11.7	know doesn't find its way to me naturally. There are all these barriers coming up the chain
0:17.0	before it gets to me and I need to find ways to open up those barriers. You could just
0:22.0	call it flattening the organization whatever, but the truth is, especially in corporate
0:28.6	America. The way we behave does not, does not encourage this.
0:37.9	I'm Chris Hill and that's best-selling author Michael Lewis. I caught up with him for an
0:42.5	episode in May of 2022 talking about his excellent podcast against the rules, but there was stuff
0:49.4	from that conversation we had to leave out last time that we wanted to share today, including a
0:54.8	closer look at his book Moneyball and the takeaways that were lost. It's Michael Lewis telling
1:00.3	stories. There's no one better. I like the fact that I think the first episode of season three,
1:12.9	you you plan to audio clip of a radio interview from when you're on a book tour for Liars poker
1:19.9	30 plus years ago and you're you know you were getting these questions sort of demonstrating.
1:24.4	It reminded me of a friend of mine who's a financial analyst and he had done a
1:31.3	television live hit of some sort and I asked him how it went and he just sort of smiled and said,
1:38.2	you know it was great. Do you know why? And I said no why. And he said because they called me an
1:44.9	expert. It's the only place in my life anyone ever calls me an expert. He's like my wife doesn't
1:50.8	think I'm an expert. My kids don't think I'm an expert, but if I go on television, they call me an
1:55.5	expert. And you're on TV because you're an expert. You're on TV even too for two actually contradictory
2:02.0	reasons. Your the ability to hold you for the television people to hold you out as an expert
2:09.0	and your willingness to be sound completely certain about something you don't know anything about
2:13.4	or or something that you could be completely certain about something that you know maybe you
	...

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