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By Seung Lee
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In 2000's The New New Thing, his hit book about the dot-com boom, Michael Lewis wrote that "Silicon Valley in the late 1990s was the closest that business has ever come to resembling a child's chemistry experiment."
Fifteen years later, it seems Lewis's opinion of Silicon Valley's maturity hasn't changed one bit.
The New York Times best-selling author, also known for the hit book Moneyball, his paean to the sabermetric-loving Oakland Athletics baseball club, went on Bloomberg TV to throw some punches at techie culture.
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"It's basically a bunch of autistic people wandering around," Lewis said, to the stunned reactions of the adjacent TV anchors.
He prefaced this bombshell quote by saying that The New New Thing was the single hardest book he has written in his career—which began with Liar's Poker, his semiautobiographical account about selling bonds on Wall Street in the '80s—because it was about the intricacies of Silicon Valley. "It's a hard place to write about, because there's a lack of emotional content. It's a cold place," Lewis said.
Lewis was on Bloomberg TV to discuss if there is a tech bubble in Silicon Valley, the million-dollar question every journalist wants answered from every conceivable source. He also took a question on what to advise former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo on as he begins writing for the new season of HBO's hit show Silicon Valley.
But even Lewis couldn't give a straight answer on this. He said he needs an emotional connection to write his books, and at times with Silicon Valley, he was grasping at straws.
With a finishing uppercut, Lewis took jabs at Palo Alto—the heart of Silicon Valley—as a soulless town that's a "nice place to visit." He said he prefers Berkeley, his city of residence on the other side of the San Francisco Bay, because it has character and is "funky."
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