Michael Lewis teases new Wall Street book: Youll learn all about crypto

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Author Michael Lewis is being co-about his next project.

But, he says over a video call from his home in Berkeley, California: I will lift my skirt alittle, but not a lot here.

He then gets more animated: I really don’t want to reveal exactly what Im writing about, he tells Financial News. But Ifound a character through whomI can write about it weirdly linksup Flash Boys, TheBigShortand Liars Poker.

I guess it is possible it will be framed as a crypto book, but it wont be a crypto book. It’ll be about this really unusual character. Youll learn all about crypto and youll learn about what screwed up market structure intheUnitedStates and so on.

As is typical for Lewis non-fiction tales, the story will be character-driven.

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At just 29 years old in 1989, he made his debut with Liars Poker, which lifted the curtain on life as a young bond salesman on Wall Street and firmly established Lewis as a celebrity in the financial world.

He has had many hits since, most notably The Big Short, the 2010 story of a half-dozen or so Wall Street insiders who built up bets against the US housing market before the global financial crisis.

For his latest book, he surprised himself by getting won over by a character in the cryptocurrency industry. Hesays that at least once a year for more than adecade, Ive had some serious entreaty from someserious person inside of the crypto world for meto write about crypto.

And I have, with declining degrees of enthusiasm, engaged with these people, thinking, Seems like it is sort of important. Maybe theres something there. And it takes me about six hours togocold and have no interest.

That was until recently, when he was introduced by a mutual friend to a man in the crypto industry. He declined to give more details about his identity, but said all he took was a hike together.

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At the end of the hike, I said, Holy s***. All of asudden, I got interested in crypto, he says.

I got interested in financial structure, or the structure of financial markets, all over again and the distribution of rewards inside the financial system. And it was entirely because of the person.

Interesting characters and interesting situations will generate a story for you. You dont have to worryabout it too much. Im essentially over the next year going to be at this persons hip. I dont know what the story looks like yet.

Hes also busy writing a script for a series onstreaming service AppleTV+ that is based on his 2008 Vanity Fair article about Cuban baseball players, in what might be his first foray into successful scriptwriting.

Im one of the greatest failures as a screenwriter in the world, he jokes. This is the sixth TV show I’ve sold. And Im zero for five so far in getting them on the air. And Ive written a couple of movie scripts, one with someone else. Neither of those have been made.

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His book-to-movie adaptations where he had little to no involvement have a higher success rate. Oscar-nominated Moneyball, and Oscar-winning The Blind Side and The Big Short, were all Hollywood hits.

The people in the movie business, if theyre adapting a book, would so much prefer the author to be dead, he says.

And you sense that. And you sense that they know what they’re doing. And if they dont know what theyre doing, you shouldnt sell your book to them.

Lewis says he’s niche, but in everything. To financial types, Lewis writes about finance. But hes more prolific and doesnt tend to stick to any one genre many of his dozens of articles, podcast appearances and columns have nothing to do with finance at all.

Home Game was a 2009 riff on fatherhood. Playing to Win, a book he wrote for Audible in 2020, follows the rise of competitive youth sport inAmerican culture.

His latest book, last years The Premonition, isabout the US governments blundered response tothe Covid-19 pandemic.

He laughs at how he is often cornered into genres. I had an excessively self-centered view about how my literary career was going to unfold, he says. When I started, I knew I wasnt a financial writer. Wall Street was an accident. I just happened to start my life there.

I thought about it as: Im going to move from America arena of ambition to America arena of ambition. Im going to go from Silicon Valley to Washington to professional sports to the financial world. And then the audience will follow me.

But thats not how it turned out.

Its: Oh, you write financial books, Oh, you write about sports or Oh, I love your book aboutpsychologists.

They dont know about any other book. Ididntthink it was going to play out that way.

An Audience With Michael Lewis will be in the 15August edition of Financial News

To contact the author of this story with feedback or news, email Trista Kelley

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