As the three-hanky demise of the dot-coms and the floundering of technology stocks continue to hog headlines, Michael Lewis is one journalist who's telling a different story.

In his new book "Next: The Future Just Happened," the author of "Liar's Poker" and "The New New Thing" looks at the emperor-has-no-clothes effect that the Net has on many of the so-called experts in fields like law and finance and how new technologies like TiVo and Replay are undermining entire industries.

But the real showstoppers in the book aren't the technologies themselves, but the kids who are using them. There's Marcus Arnold, the 15-year-old who dispenses legal advice on the Internet to eager adults; Johnathan Lebed, another 15-year-old who roils the Securities and Exchange Commission with his stock recommendations, and buys a $41,000 Mercedes with some of the $800,000 he makes trading stocks on the Net -- a car he's too young to drive. And finally, Daniel Sheldon, a sweet 14-year-old British boy who preaches on the Net the gospel of Gnutella and freedom from intellectual property constraints. (Versions of several of the stories collected in this book have already run in the New York Times Magazine.)

On the phone from Paris, where Lewis now lives, he talked about how the right to privacy will become an expensive luxury and why we're all already older than we think.

The central characters in many of your pieces are children -- teenagers -- stirring up Wall Street and the law. Why are children in a better position to make these changes than adults?

This is a great question. It's a mystery that would be wonderful to solve.

	Next: The Future Just Happened By Michael Lewis W.W. Norton & Company 192 pages non-fiction Buy it Print story E-mail story

Twenty-nine is the new 39. We're obsolete at ever-younger ages. But the person who framed the question best was a neurologist at Stanford University, Robert Sapolsky.

Sapolsky started with the observation that there is no center of novelty in the brain. Nothing happens to the human brain as it ages that they know about that would explain why it is that older people are slower to adapt to new things than younger people.

So, he gave up trying to explain it physiologically and moved to the next level of just sociology. He wrote this up in the New Yorker a few years back.

He did this study in which he finds that if people who haven't tried a new kind of food, like, say, Japanese food, by the time they're 25 years old, there's a 99 percent chance that they won't try it for the rest of their lives. If they haven't tried a new kind of fashion by the time they're 20, like an earring or a nose ring, there's a 99 percent chance that they'll never do it for the rest of their lives.

He finds that rats show exactly the same propensity. They are born very conservative creatures. There's a brief period during adolescence when they are obsessed with novelty. They are frantic to try new things. An adolescent rat is an explorer, is an adventurer. But then after this brief period, they return to the same conservative tendencies they showed when they were very young, and the same hesitancy toward new things. He surmises that there is something wired into us, but he has no explanation for it.

What's interesting about it is that this trait in human beings now intersects with the economy in a really rich way. If you have an economy that's premised on really rapid technical change, young people, people who are willing to accommodate that change and embrace it, are going to do better than they've ever done. That trait in adolescence, that essentially adolescent trait, becomes highly prized.

And once you realize that, you start to explain a lot of the behavior of the people who were sort of in the middle of the technology world as they get older. They understand as they get older that they've got to preserve this quality in themselves, and they end up preserving an awful lot else of adolescence along with it.

Arrested adolescence.

But it's not a mature or necessarily admirable trait. It just happens to be a trait that is economically valuable now. And the reason this is such an intriguing subject is that just in the last 10, 15 years it has become accepted wisdom that a society that wants to prosper encourages rapid change.

So, young people are in an ever more peculiar position of authority. The phenomenon of the 25-year-old multimillionaire comes out of this. It is not just the norm. It was entirely a result of rapid technical change and young people being able to embrace that and exploit it in a way that older people couldn't.

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