Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 65)

write it down and get it on paper, it’ll just be forgotten how weird it was. I wrote it in that spirit. It was kind of message in the bottle. Stick it away and if people want to know what it was like to be on Wall Street a hundred years from now they can read this book. But I did think that if it was going to have any kind of social consequence, it would be to deter young people. People who were coming out of college and want to do meaningful things with their lives would read it and say, “Ah, it’s not for me, now I know what it’s about, I don’t want to do it.” Then there might be some moral outrage. But the chief social consequence of Liar’s Poker was to create a stampede onto Wall Street of young people. Sartisky: He made the devil so attractive. Lewis: I got a thousand letters if I got one from students at Ohio State University and they went like this: “Dear Mr. Lewis, I read your book about how to get ahead on Wall Street and I think I’ve absorbed all the principles, but I was wondering if you had any more tricks you could teach me because now that I’ve read the book I really want to go there now.” That was the main effect of it. Trying to control the effects of the thing you write is pointless. People read the book they want to read. No matter what you say, they bring to the party what they’re going to get out of whatever they read. Sartisky: He’s describing in the American financial world a period of transition. He talks at one point about how the bond market had been — as your father’s profession had been — as staid and traditional and risk adverse as any financial activity could be, and he’s very clear on that distinction. Then he talks about the era of Milliken and Boesky and this transformation of financing. You’re also talking about a point at which government oversight and restriction on the financial markets has for all intents and purposes evaporated. But what you’re writing about is this transformational moment had consequences, and one of the consequences was the kind of thing that happened to your father’s firm and to your father, as it trickles down through the culture in all of its respects. By the same token, in these other books where you write about the Internet, you write about the future. You’re writing on the edge of cultural transformation. You started in the financial sector. You move into the informational sector. And then sports. What attracts you to those transformational moments? Starting with finance seems almost coincidental. Lewis: It was. Sartisky: But at that point you seem to become addicted to writing about cultural transformation. Lewis: It is true that in the books and in most of the stories someone’s changing something. Not true of all my magazine journals, but most of the books. So what appeals about all this? It’s very easy to do. Sartisky: We’re back to the New Orleans theory of indolence. Lewis: It really is. When someone’s trying to change a culture or when a culture is changing, you see the culture in a different way. You need a point of comparison with any culture to understand the culture at the moment. The change gives you the point of comparison. So it’s like art history. You look at one picture and you can’t say that much about it. But if you put it up beside another picture, all of a sudden things start to occur to you. It gives you the second picture, when change is occurring. So that’s partly it too. Disruption is generally appealing to me and I don’t know why that is. I don’t know if I was a troubled child but I did like to cause trouble and people who cause trouble are interesting to me. So this is a hard question to answer. I can’t tell you exactly why that runs through all the books but it runs through most and I do come back to the fact that there’s no escaping that it really makes it easier to write about when there’s some action going on. Sartisky: And you find these characters. For example, tell us a bit about Jonathan Lebed. Lewis: Jonathan Lebed was a New Jersey kid whose father was an Amtrak ticket taker and at the age of 11 he started watching CNBC, and decided that he was smarter than the stock market. He had a couple hundred bucks in a savings bond that his mother had given him to start with and he went online, masquerading as an adult, and started to speculate on the stock markets. He built his two hundred bucks up to $600,000 or $700,000 by the age of about 14. His parents were oblivious. He’d go into his room, close the door, get online and start doing his thing after school, and the parents had no idea until one day he takes his mother down to the Mercedes Benz dealership because he’s just bought a Mercedes SUV but he’s not old enough to drive it and he needs her to drive it back. Where I got interested in the story was a little note in the New York Times which revealed that the SEC — the Securities and Exchange Commission — was coming after the kid for market manipulation because what he was doing, in the later stages of his speculation, was buying a stock and then telling everybody how great the stock was on the Internet and they should buy it too. He’d create these little bubbles Michael Lewis (second from left) poses with friends and his father, Tom, at a 10th birthday party football scrimmage, 1970. LEWIS FAMILY COLLECTION Winter 2007-08/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 65

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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