Once upon a time, Michael Lewis was a City trader, one of those people who would get a price on his grandmother if she could be sold. His relaxed charm belies a brain that is still just as sharp. Yet even he shakes his head at some of the people he met while researching The Future Just Happened (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99), which also has an accompanying, though separate, series on BBC 2.
"It's unnerving," he says, "being 40 years old and watching a 15-year-old running circles around you." He shakes his head. He doesn't look 40, and has also kept a young outlook. That has let him go where few aged over 30 would dare, to meet those "kids": the people who are really using the internet to reshape society, rather than dressed-down new media executives sipping lattes in Islington or Silicon Valley.
There are rock stars, too, and executives, but the heart of the book is his travels to meet teenagers living in New Jersey, a desert town called Perris (south of LA), and Oldham. What he saw was a disruption of the way society works, or has worked until now. "There's a genuine thread in the book that the disruption is between older and younger people," he says. "The internet means grown-ups are at an increasing disadvantage to children... People over 35 have a big sense that they're washed up at an earlier age, that they're at the mercy of younger children."
The children aren't doing it on purpose, but because the Net allows it through the access it provides to software, and information, and to millions of other people who might be smarter (so you can work with them) or stupider (so you can exploit them). That tends to worry adults, such as those at the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US. It demanded that a 15-year-old, Jonathan Lebed, pay back half a million dollars that he had made through boosting and trading stocks online. It wasn't clear that Lebed had done anything wrong, but the SEC took the view that pumping and dumping stocks is properly a job for people in Wall Street.
Lewis knows all about that, of course. He rose to fame with his 1989 book Liar's Poker, an insider's account of a trader's life during the heady days before the 1987 crash. He knows about the Net and its reality, too, having spent more than a year shadowing Jim Clark, the man who essentially created the browser company Netscape, just as its star was waning. The result was his 1999 book The New New Thing, a fascinating insight into the thinking of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Researching this book was more like discovering the truth of that New Yorker cartoon: on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Lewis argues that "kids" - his generic term for children and teenagers - don't have to fit into the social order, because they aren't yet part of it, and often dislike it. And the rapid change the internet can generate leaves adults floundering. It is "an uncivilising force in life. To have something that discredits you as you get older..." He shakes his head. "A lot of our mental infrastructure is built on the belief that experience matters. When that falls away, all is lost."
The book can be seen as a voyage through some places where that infrastructure is being torn down. He first visits Lebed, whose grasp of the principles that knowledge is king in the money markets reminded Lewis, "rather scarily", of himself. Then he meets Marcus Arnold, whose legal expertise flowed entirely out of his own confidence. Would you want a 15-year-old as your lawyer? Since they didn't know his age, lots of people did. They couldn't tell the difference between him and a trained attorney - except the guy on the Net was free.
For Lewis, seeing real lawyers furiously fighting off Arnold, the newcomer, mirrored his own childhood. His father was a lawyer, in a firm where they would argue about the pronunciation of Latin phrases. Lewis saw him upended by the new types, who advertised, chased ambulances, and took nothing for granted. Now, Marcus Arnold and others like him are doing it to them.
The third person is Daniel Sheldon, aged 14 (when Lewis saw him), who lives in Oldham and is deeply involved in swapping software, regardless of trivia such as "ownership". His intimate knowledge of the systems that give the music and film industries nightmares suggests, to Lewis at least, that he will be worth a lot of money in a few years.
He's still in touch with these kids: "They're all friends. Daniel is the most... evolved of them... he's just very mature, wise beyond his years. "Lawyer kid" (his shorthand for Arnold) "is genuinely weird. He has no compass, no reference point. He thinks it's normal to say things like 'I was born with legal knowledge'! But Jonathan Lebed - parts of him remind me of me. But he's a cooler customer than I ever was. There's a cold, calculating quality which I was never capable of."
Lewis started researching last May, when the financial markets had begun their downward slide. He didn't start writing until November, when they were well into a death spiral. And he didn't finish it until eight weeks ago, by which time it was pretty hard to detect a pulse in many internet investments. "It was interesting trying to get my head around the question of 'When the [stock market] bubble has burst, what's left?'" Which makes this, he thinks, the perfect time to produce a book about the Net.
He wrote it in Paris, despite owning a home in Berkeley, California - ground zero for the dot.com bubble. Was Paris relevant, or an escape? "We moved there because we bought a house in Berkeley that was uninhabitable." Now the house is done, so he'll move back with his wife and daughter.
Since Lewis is, according to the rumours, pretty rich in his own right - through his Wall Street existence and now his books - he can afford to write only where it interests him. His effortless style is, of course, the result of hard work; he doesn't entirely enjoy it.
"I know people who have had their lives ruined by having a book they have to get written," he says. "It hangs over them and they can't get out from under it. I find writing such a pain in the ass that I don't want to do it unless I'm really interested... I took the same length of time to write this as the other ones: about eight months of actual writing. It took months and months to research The New New Thing." Liar's Poker, of course, was researched mostly by turning up for work.
So is he sure that his principals represent what's really going on? "You know," he grins, "This isn't science. It's journalism." True enough - but it's journalism that gets to the heart of the issue. If you don't feel disrupted now, you may do when you've finished it.
Michael Lewis, a biography
Michael Lewis was born in 1960 in New Orleans. He received a BA from Princeton University and an MSc from the LSE. He worked for three years as an investment banker before leaving to write the book Liar's Poker. That and its successor, The Money Culture, spent more than 70 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. The New New Thing (1999) has so far been translated into 20 languages. He lived in London for eight years, where he was a columnist for . Formerly a senior editor for The New Republic, he is now a contributing writer to theNew York Times magazine and writes a column for the electronic news service Bloomberg. The Future Just Happened is now published by Hodder & Stoughton; the BBC 2 series begins on Sunday 29 July. Michael Lewis is married to the television journalist Tabitha Soren. They have a daughter, and live in Paris and California.