Well that's the thing. The most miserable three months of my life was before the financial meltdown. I was commissioned to write a book about credit cards. I'd written a piece about a man called Richard Cullen, who committed suicide because he was out of his depth in credit cards. And so I was going into the areas of, "Is this all a house of cards? Are people too enthralled by the sub-prime market?" My publisher keeps reminding me, that if I had gone through with the book, it would have come out just then.

But I spent three or four months trying to make [the premise] interesting. All the people who worked in the credit industry, all the people I was meeting, who were so important and so controlling over the way we live our lives -- and history proved that some of them were doing really nefarious things. It was probably a weakness of mine, but I just couldn't find a way to make it interesting. They weren't colorful characters. And so that line in the book really was wrenched from my heart. I gave up writing the book. I did say this to my publisher the other day, but in a way The Psychopath Test is the book that I didn't write. It is the credit book in a way.

But yeah, what can I say? In the three or four months I went around meeting list brokers and heads of banks and hedge fund people, I couldn't find a single person who lit the page up. And I completely understand the sort of moral problems of what I just said. It's just the truth of it.