Michael Lewis
Appearances
Criminal
The Christmas Fire
All right, so here's the deal. Take a former world number one. That's me, Andy Roddick. Add in the journalist who knows everything about tennis and a producer who's still figuring out how to spell tennis. You get served with Andy Roddick, a weekly podcast where we break down the game we all love.
Criminal
The Christmas Fire
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Criminal
The Christmas Fire
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Criminal
The Christmas Fire
I mean, there was never a delivery mechanism for cigarettes as efficient as the phone is for delivering the gambling apps. It's like the world has created less and less friction for the behavior when what it needs is more and more.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And that you're going to, you know, so you hop, you keep your head down because you don't want attention. So they're not out there to, they're not, they don't step forward and they've got a wall between them and people who would tell their story. And then the third thing, it's kind of like a counter narrative, right?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Like we've been living in this country with a narrative that the government's just like wasteful and fraudulent and blah, blah, blah, civil service bureaucrats they are. And so it's, You're challenging a stereotype in readers' heads to tell this story. And when you do that, you do meet resistance. Like, not everybody likes it. So I mean, those are some of the reasons.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's a really good question, because just generally, when I find something like a vein of material, it's a bit like finding a trade in the stock market or the financial markets. It's like, why does this exist? Because maybe it's just not true. Like maybe I'm finding a false vein of ore. But in this case, it's true. And it is mysterious because the literary material is just so good.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I knew you'd have something to say that I didn't say. And that's it. Sure. Imagine Arthur A. Allen at the very beginning of inventing his science. And he's out in the Long Island Sound with these mannequins, tossing them into the water and putting little gauges on them. And it costs a little money to do it. Nothing has been yielded by this work.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
At that moment, if Marjorie Taylor Greene entered into it, she could ridicule him and mock him. Like, why are we paying someone to do this? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That early science can be made to look ridiculous.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So first off, to your first point there, so I actually went and ran down another man who fell off a boat and was rescued by the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean, fell off the back of a fishing boat, and to talk to him about why he thought he was alive. And he was alive because Arthur Allen figured out how he drifted. And he would not have been alive at any other time in human history.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
They would not have known where to look. And he said, yeah, I do know why I'm alive. He said, while I was at sea, I discovered Jesus. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. So he told himself the story that the Coast Guard had found him miraculously because of Jesus. The Coast Guard had found him miraculously because of Arthur A. Allen.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Now, I think something like that repeats itself over and over and over. People build whatever narrative they want out of whatever happened. So that's a problem. The second part, your second part, remind me what your second question is here.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Correct. That's true. And how you remind people that you shouldn't take this for granted... I mean, so the answer really is this book is an exercise. It is that exercise. It's sort of like, but having said that, and this is one reason I did it this way. I didn't tell the writers anything about what they needed to do.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I mean, I wrote the first big one and the last big one, and they wrote the middle of it. And I just said, find a story. wondering what they would find. And they found over and over a version of the same story. Like it is amazing what this thing has accomplished. So it inadvertently ends up being this. It could have, the book could have turned out a lot of different ways.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I don't know, you know, when you ask like how you repair this mental mistake that the population makes, This is a small attempt. It's a book, whatever. It will introduce stories into people's minds that will make them harder for them to live with the stereotype in their head of the lazy, inefficient government worker. That's helpful.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Unfortunately, I think the only way you get to like a radical readjustment is some sort of crisis, some sort of really existential crisis. And COVID wasn't enough.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Yeah. No, it's amazing. It is amazing. And I wouldn't rush. I mean, Trump deserves some credit for it, I guess. But this was a long-term project that starts back in like the Bush administration. that then begins with a pandemic planning exercise. And seeding these companies or investing in these companies that develop the mRNA vaccines was a government mission. triumph.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And it was long and slow, not dramatic, though the result was kind of dramatic, very dramatic, and kind of a hard story for people to internalize. They use hard stories to tell. I think that's part of the problem. And I have a question for you, but you're a good person to answer this question. I thought on the back end of Trump and seeing the way he approached the federal government,
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
and the disaster that was his COVID response, that there was a chance that Democrats would engage in a full-throated, not just defense, but sort of full-throated explanation of government. That government would be, that they want to sell the government in a way, explain it. And they didn't.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
You know, it was sort of like government, sort of like something you don't want to talk about when you're running for office. And I don't know why that is.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And Republicans have the benefit of the guerrilla warfare tactics. When you know you're going to lose if you play the same game, you have to play a different game. And that's the game they've chosen to play. I mean, on the evidence of the two books I've now published on the subject,
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
there's a big market for discussing these subjects, for one, explaining what government is doing and talking about where it works, not just where it doesn't work. I mean, we spend a lot of time talking about where it doesn't work, right? Whenever anything bad happens, whenever there's a little scandal, it gets amplified. there's very little attention paid to the bright spots.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And the bright spots are just sort of taken for granted. You know, it's just like, oh, that happened. Oh, I got plucked out on the ocean by the Coast Guard, whatever. I don't know how they did that. And it's interesting to see you know, why it works, when it works.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And one of the patterns that emerges through the stories, I think in the book, is that it works better if it's at some distance from the political process. If the person is not constantly being somehow monitored by the political process. If they're on a longer leash, that's true of all the bright spots that we've written about.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's like the person was given, for whatever reason, different reasons at different places, latitude to operate kind of the way you might be given latitude to operate in the private sector. And then we don't usually do that in the public sector.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
The idea that the Elon Musk idea, I guess it's his idea, who knows, he says something different every day, but that they're going in to find corruption, fraud in the federal government, it's insane. It's that there's so much more fraud in the private sector than there is in the public sector, that everything there is watched.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Like you can't take a federal worker out for a sandwich without them insisting that they got to pay for it. Because they know this is reflexive fear. And they are, you know, every agency has and used to have an inspector general who would get them in trouble if they did stuff they shouldn't do.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
There are mechanisms for identifying and preventing fraud in the federal government that don't exist in the private sector. So there are problems in government, but they're not the problems that everybody thinks are the problems.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
The Centers for Disease Control is a really interesting case study. I mean, this is the premonition. And it wasn't, I didn't have any, it's like, just generally where I operate is I don't come in with a big theory and try to prove it, that I'm just kind of watching and the story emerges. And people hate that about you, by the way.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I know. Sometimes it does. It's funny. But I learned long ago that editors sitting around a table deciding what the story was always yielded really boring journalism and false kind of. Like, go get this story. And you don't know what the story is until you're out there talking to people and watching. And this was true of The Premonition. But I was kind of shocked to learn
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
that the Centers for Disease Control had suffered over several decades, a decline in prestige, a decline in internal morale, a decline in a sense of its own ability to do anything except sort of observe and study disease, not control it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And that you could trace it back, according to people inside it, the old timers, to a decision made by the Reagan administration to turn the head of the center, the director, into a politically appointed position, as opposed to a career civil servant who's endured through administrations. And that this had had the effect
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
From the very top down keeping one eye on the White House in the political process and that when they made decisions and this was a very bad Influence when you were trying to control disease so the This does not mean this is a universal truth that having political influence in a problem is a bad idea.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But I think there are some problems that are best dealt with with the politicians at arm's length. Controlling the money supply would be a very good example of that. Sort of like we put the Fed on a – it's a political institution. At some point, the process, political process touches it, but it doesn't micromanage it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So that one observation is that when there are problems that they're very clear, a set of problems that are best dealt with by a permanent staff. that has, it's not completely detached from the political process, but it's on a longer leash kind of thing. But maybe there are other problems that would be better dealt with on a shorter leash. I mean, I think all problems are not the same problems.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
The bigger thing is, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So, yes, I can do this a bit, but we must be aware that I'm stealing someone else's material to do this. Because the book is, you know, I wrote about a third of the book, but I invited six other writers to do the same thing. We just parachuted these writers into the government and said,
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
find a story and it was oddball writers it wasn't normal like daily journalists it was novelists stand-up comedians and and there was a novelist slash non-fiction book writer named john lanchester when they're all my favorite writers kind of thing who who decided he wasn't going to write about a person he was going to write about a statistic and he wrote about he made the consumer price index his his subject and he makes this really interesting point that
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Thank you.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Thank you. that the gathering of statistics, the counting of things, isn't just incidental to the government. It's like they're at the founding of the democracy. You can't distribute power unless you have a census. You don't know how to distribute the power. And then he goes on to list all the things that the government counts and then focuses on this one thing.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Yeah, no, you know, in the very beginning, I had a sliver of hope that's what we were gonna be watching with him, that he could actually, the government does need work. It's not like it's all great. I mean, it's got a pay system that goes back to 1949. It's too hard to fire people. There's a lot of problems. People aren't incentivized properly.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
The problem with trying to rationalize what he's doing is that the specific things he's doing are the opposite of what he says he's doing. So let's just take them. In the beginning, he said he was going to cut $2 trillion out of the deficit, and he was going to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. That was the mission. And he focused entirely on the civil service, which is
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
like 86% of the budget is, you know this, it's either military interest payments on the debt or entitlements. So that's off the table in the very beginning. And so he's looking at 14% of the budget and of that, A fraction is the pay of these people he's trying to get rid of. So he's not going to get to his eliminate the deficit this way. That doesn't make any sense to go at it this way.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And it's diabolically difficult to do it well. And it isn't just the Department of Education in which Doge and the Trump administration has started to gut the statistical operation. It's across the board. And I mean, Consumer Price Index is a good example that they fired. There's a panel, a free panel, people who are just advising the government for free.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And then he starts by firing inspector generals. And that's the quickest way to identify the fraud and the abuse and even the waste. And so he's doing the opposite of what you would do. If you or I walk in there, we would go right to the inspector general and say, let's beef you up and let's go.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And so he's doing, it's a little hard to figure out what he's even trying to achieve because he's saying something is obviously quite different from what he intends to do. So you're in the land of guessing because.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's a funny, it's just a funny reflex we have in American life right now. And it's probably a byproduct of inequality that he has $300 billion. So therefore he's smarter than everybody and everything. And as opposed to having some narrow skill set that, because he lives in this very indulgent society, has yielded him $300 billion. It doesn't mean he's best at managing the federal government.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And it comes in knowing nothing. So no, it's not the way you or I or any sensible person would go about it. But because he is...
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
got this glow of a very rich person uh it's just assumed he knows what he's doing and i'm convinced i'm convinced he doesn't but um but but back to your original point was like i think you were saying like maybe we need something like this to to jar this institution because otherwise it's unmovable uh and it's It isn't how you do it, but that idea might not be completely wrong.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And the other idea, so the other hope I had for it was one of the big problems with the federal government is it just has real trouble for reasons we've been discussing implicitly in attracting talented young people to work for it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Because like who would want to work for a place where they only slap you around when you do something bad, but don't celebrate you when you do something good and it doesn't pay very well and all the rest. And I thought like he's bringing all these young people in and they can code and like this could yield something.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But then again, one of the first things they do is fire all the probationary workers. Those are the ones that don't have the civil service protections. And who are those people? They're the young people. They're the ones who just joined. And they're the young people and the people who've been hired to handle some specific problem that is urgent now.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So he's firing exactly the wrong people if you're trying to do that. So I... Nobody thinks they're stupid. Nobody thinks they're crazy. He will, no doubt, if we sat down with him, would have a story to tell us that sounds more intelligent than what we're groping for here. But he hasn't told it. Whatever it is, it's behind closed doors.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
We haven't heard it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
professional statisticians, people who formerly worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to try to always improve the consumer price index. They just dismiss them. And it's really interesting, there's a whole bunch of questions that arise from that, but One is why? Like, why would you do this?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And who's going to be a coward.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I mean, that's a great question. It's not a question I've ever... So I'm going to be answering this on the fly. Great. My first step in answering that question is I think that people... First place, Red Badge of Courage. Danny Kahneman, the psychologist who I wrote about in the Doing Project, used to love this story as an example of what he thought was true, that behavior is so context dependent.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And the same soldier who runs away in one battle is incredibly brave in another. It's not that the person is brave the person is entirely brave or entirely cowardly, but that it's some combination of the person and the situation. And so you never know because it's not just the person you're evaluating. You're valuing a complicated thing.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
the mood they're in when they're required to make a decision or whether they're gonna be brave, how vulnerable they feel in that moment, whatever it is. So that's part of my answer is that this isn't stable. They're brave acts and cowardly acts, but it's not exactly right that they're brave people and cowardly people totally. However, I do think like one precondition for the brave behavior
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
is having a firm narrative in your head about who you are and what your life is about. And this was Charity Dean. She had insisted on this narrative for so long that she didn't know how to do anything else. Or if she did anything else, it made her very uncomfortable. And there are different ways to acquire this narrative. John McCain had this narrative in his head, right?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I mean, they can say at the Department of Education they're doing it to cut costs, but you don't fire a free expert advice to cut costs. And the other is like, what are the consequences of it? Like, what does it mean if all of a sudden the government either stops counting it or the White House just politicizes it all and kind of makes stuff up?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
If John McCain was around, he wouldn't be sucking up to Trump. He would have blown up his political career before he sucked up to Trump. And so I think narrative, personal narrative, is a very powerful thing. So what is the substitute? Or what's inside of people when they don't have? that narrative of I'm going to do what's right and I'm willing to pay a price.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
They usually have a narrative, a kind of vague narrative of personal ambition. It's like, I'm going to win. I'm going to get ahead. I'm shrewd. I'm a winner, you know, all that. And that when you, when that's the narrative, then you're really susceptible. Like it comes along, something like Trump goes along and You know, you want to win. You don't want to, there's no point.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's very easy to say, it would be no point to being brave because I'll just get plowed over and I won't make any difference at all. I'm sure that's what most of these people are telling themselves. I'm remaining relevant for the good of my country. Not saying that, in fact, they've rendered themselves a part of the problem.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Yes, and he's hostile to bravery right? Remember how hostile he was to John McCain's personal bravery He's hostile that he's hostile to I think this is a corollary. He's hostile to trust that that that I found and if you're gonna kind of try to predict what Donald Trump's gonna do next is Look for where there is still trust and assume he's going to come for it.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Our money, the dollar is a natural target. But it's like assume that where you may not even, the trust is usually assumed. Once you've got it, you don't really, it's there in there, you breathe. But be careful about taking it for granted because he doesn't like it. He doesn't like it for, I think, a really specific sort of lizard brain reason. He's so untrustworthy.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I mean, it's not even an insult to say, right? It's just a fact. He just lies all the time. He lies so much that when he says something is true, it feels like an accident. And it's just like, it's an impulse. It's almost like a reflex. Lying is better. And he cheats people. He's just like one thing after another.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So if he's in an environment, if he's in a small environment where everybody, it's trust-based, And people can trust each other. That environment spits him out very quickly. He does not succeed. But if he's in an environment where nobody can trust anybody, he's really good in that environment. He's really good at taking advantage of all his dishonesty. It works.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
He's better at being dishonest than other people. And so I think that like one way, one through line in our government is there's lots of trust that's sort of built into it. We just take for granted. We take for granted that someone's keeping our water clean and that we can take the pills that our doctor prescribes and it's safe and that we can eat the food and not get sick and whatever it is.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And with the Department of Education, you probably know more about the Department of Education than I do. But I do know that one purpose of what they count is to determine who's failing and who's succeeding across the country. It isn't to say that they're telling the school systems what to teach. It's just like, is this working?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And that those things... are in some way antagonistic to his purpose on Earth. And so watch out, because he's coming for them.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Let me just tell you a story. It's amazing how it changed. So I worked for the most powerful firm on Wall Street, Salomon Brothers. When I joined, they were making so much more money than everybody else on Wall Street. It looked like they were in a different business. It was a force. I left three years later.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
When I was walking out the door, I told my bosses I was going to write a book about Wall Street. And their response was, it didn't even occur to them they could stop me. And in addition, they weren't even worried about it. They were worried about me. Like, you're leaving all this money behind? Is something wrong with you? Like, don't blow up your career. It was their attitude.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It was sweet, in a way. The book comes out. There's a brief attempt to sort of, at a counter-narrative from a weak Solomon Brothers PR firm kind of thing. But not much. And that's it. The book just had its life. If I were coming out of the equivalent institution now, and the equivalent institution would be, say, Jane Street or Citadel. It would be a high-frequency trading firm.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I would have signed nondisclosure agreements going in. They'd be lawyered up from the moment I walked out if I was going to do anything like this. I mean, well, look what happened to the woman who just wrote the Facebook book. Facebook, yeah. Right? I mean, she couldn't get on TV all of a sudden because she had signed agreements that said she wouldn't disparage Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But the big thing is the fear of lawsuits that the publisher or whatever media enterprise I was dealing with
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
would have deterred them from publication uh and would it have stopped publication of liars poker i don't know maybe i don't know i doubt it but but it would have been harder and what happens is you know it's the equivalent of what is that timothy snyder line about uh the guy who wrote on tyranny anticipatory obedience you're seeing a lot of it now you're seeing a lot of people sort of
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Jeff Bezos, you know, it sort of reconfigure their lives and the way they go through the world so as not to run afoul of Donald Trump. There's a kind of anticipatory obedience that goes on in the head of a writer or a journalist when they know that it is going to be a huge pain in the ass and a great risk to me to write about Ken Griffin, head of Citadel.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
You know, I'll hear from the lawyers right away. I don't want to do it. And why is this? Why has this changed? It's changed because we all of a sudden have not millionaires among us, but billionaires who use the law as a weapon. And it makes it really hard. Tip for the truth about... people like Elon Musk to come out.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Are kids learning how to read and write and add and subtract and stuff? And so when you lose that ability, you, of course, then lose the ability to go in to figure out even what the problem is that you need to fix. The larger thing that is just mind bending to me is what happens if we actually can't trust any government statistics? Play that game. We have no portrait of ourselves anymore.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Elon Musk might not be the best example, but it's just that, so it is a harder environment to do this sort of, to get transparency about the most powerful people in the society.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So when I think about taking on subjects, one of the things I ask is, what can I add? It's highly unlikely that I'm going to add anything to high-level discussions about artificial intelligence. I can't code a computer. I don't know what's going on in there. I do know that it's pretty clear that the people who are the leaders of the movement, they don't know either. Yeah.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
That nobody seems to know anything. It feels like what people used to say about Hollywood. They say lots of stuff about where this is headed. A lot of what they say is connected to their financial interest. And so it's very hard to know what to think. And so my response to it, my literary response to it, I have one. I mean, I have all kinds of other responses.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It bothers me some that they're stealing my books to train their models and that kind of thing. But I've enjoyed my interactions with Sam Altman. I think he's a really interesting person. And I had a dinner with him, that's like two years ago. And I thought, there is a great book to do if you want to do it. I said this to him, that all kinds of people want to write his biography.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And he's asking me about who might do it. And I said, don't let anybody do it. Let's let, when you are comfortable with your machine, with chat, GPT, whatever, writing your biography, let me supervise it. Let me let it write your biography and let me write the biography of it while it's writing your biography. So I can watch because this is what interests me.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I want to understand how it thinks and how it's different from how I think. And because I don't think it'll ever be the same. I think it's powerful. It can replicate functions that humans do and it will replace jobs and all the rest. But I don't think it's going to replace human thought. And so it's like, what's the gap there?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And like between what I'm doing when I'm telling a story and understanding the world around me and what it's doing. And he was interested, but he did say it's not good enough to do it yet. So when it's good enough, let's revisit.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I'm hoping he just kind of picks up the phone at some point, calls and says, let's do this because it would be, I think it could be really useful to have someone who doesn't think like it coming at it, trying to analyze what it's doing when it's trying to do what I do when I think.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
People can just, all of a sudden you're divorced. You're in like a fantasy land. You could say anything, which is of course a land they like to be in.
Pod Save America
Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Because it's going to take me five minutes.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
All right, it starts because I got interested way back in the first Trump administration, right in the beginning when he fired the transition team. And so there are 500 and some people who are supposed to go in and receive from the Obama administration, the briefings across the government.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And he told Chris Christie that we're so smart, we can figure out what goes on inside the federal government in an hour. And I thought that was just like a great comic premise. I was going to go in, wander around the obscure parts of the government, get the briefings. And the reader would have this weird experience of knowing they knew more about the government than the administration.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And so it started that way. So that's what gets me into the government. And then what happens is over a year, I'm just shocked by the quality of the characters I'm meeting, these permanent civil servants. I mean, over and over, story after story that I'm not actually even using for what I'm writing.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But it's like you go into the National Weather Service, like the extreme weather forecasting unit down in Oklahoma. It's in Norman, Oklahoma. And it's filled with these smart young people, all of whom were traumatized in youth, but like a tornado taking their house away. And that they got into it because I don't want bad things to happen to other people.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
So people who had something deep driving them that led them to want to serve the country, build an expertise, had nothing to do with self-promotion or making money. They walked away from the fame and the fortune that every other American wants. So I just thought, I started getting interested in the characters. And then I found this character at the end of the fifth risk.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
I just picked him basically out of a hat. I picked him off a list. It was a list of thousands of civil servants who had been furloughed during the government shutdown in 2019, early 19. And who had been told they were inessential and sent home without pay. but who had also been nominated, not necessarily won, but nominated for some civil service award. But it was thousands of names.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I thought, what am I gonna do with this? I'll just take the first name on the list. It was alphabetized. His name was Arthur A. Allen. And Arthur A. Allen turned out to be the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Division. And I went and visited him, spent a few days with him. And what he had done, he created a science of how objects drift at sea.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
This is important because if you know when a person fell off a boat, and you're looking three hours later, you need to know how they drift to predict where even to look. And he had done this in response to watching people die because nobody knew how to do this in the world. His work, it was so dramatic that he spent years and years and years doing this.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But when he built mathematical, basically algorithms for like 300 different kinds of objects, you know, person in a life raft, person in a life preserver, et cetera. Right after he hands this over to the Coast Guard to use, A 350-pound man goes off the side of a cruise ship 80 miles east of Miami. They don't discover him gone for several hours.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
They go to the cruise ship cameras so they can see where he fell off the ship. The Coast Guard just goes right to the spot and plucks him out of the water, like never in human history. The progress in knowledge that had happened because of Arthur A. Allen ends up saving thousands of lives.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
the moment so the moment i thought man it was kind of like a combination of oh here's why nobody's writing about them and oh here's kind of why we should i'd spent three days with author a allen learning all about his life learning i has science and i end up writing him up at the end of the book i'm on my way back to the airport and he calls me and he says hey, you're a writer.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm a writer. Of course I'm a writer. I thought, I'm sure I told you that when I called you in the first place. And he said, no, my son said like, you write books that could turn into movies. And like, he said, are you going to write about that? All this stuff we were talking about? And I said, yeah, you know, why'd you think I was there?
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And he said, I just thought you were really interested in why objects, how objects drift. And at that moment, it's like, that's the civil servant. He has no idea that anybody could make a character of him or that anybody would be interested in what he does, that no ability to dramatize his own story. And I thought, like, someone should be doing this.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
These stories are so good that someone should be doing this. And so that seed was in my head a year ago when I went to an editor of the Washington Post and said, let me hire some writers to go do this.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
But from the perspective of not just me, but the other six writers, all of whom have clever, diabolical strategies for getting inside people's lives, this is what we discover. One is that our government, compared to other democracies, is politically very top-heavy. The White House appoints 4,000-something people to run this administration. And all the communications people are political people.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And they're all answering to the White House. And those communications people have just got a reflex instinct that anything that gets written is likely going to be bad. Like, if a reporter shows up, if a writer shows up, the downside far outweighs the upside. And so right away, you're kind of shut out. And to write these stories, I got to live with people.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
And I can't go talk to them for 40 minutes in their office with a communications person present, which is what they would do naturally. So every one of us had to go get through that phalanx of communications people. And it was not pleasant. It was not easy. So that's one thing.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
It's like the political process has gotten used to the idea that that we just need to minimize the story because the story ends up can be used against us. And there's not a whole lot of upside to any given administration. to good stories about permanent civil servants. A lot of downside if they find disaster, but not a lot of upside if, oh, this guy's just saved thousands of lives.
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Nobody gets credit for that politically kind of thing. I think that's maybe one thing. The second thing is,
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Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
these people don't tell their own story like not only are they the kind of people who don't tell their own story the kind of person at the dinner party who doesn't speak up and at the end you realize they should have been talking the whole time because they're more interesting than everybody who spoke they're like that uh but they are in an environment where they know that the likelihood that attention is going to be positive attention is minuscule that that attention is bad
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The opposite. I mean, they're waiting to they're waiting to do the president's bidding when he if you just tell them what it is they want him to do. But mostly they're engaged in pretty long term missions that everybody's agreed like we need, like we need nuclear weapons not to go off when they shouldn't go off.
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That's exactly right. We need to know. It's amazing. I tracked down one of the dudes who had been plucked out of the water. It was a separate fat guy who fell off a fishing boat.
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No, that's not what's going to happen. They're going to fall off and die because when you're fat, you survive. Oh, no one knows how they float. No. No, they know how they float. But when you're fat, you can survive forever in cold water. If you're skinny, you're a goner. So being fat is a huge advantage if you fall into cold water. Hypothermia gets to you if you're skinny.
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Fat people have a huge advantage. I mean, it's kind of great that Americans get lost at sea a lot and are also fat.
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That's right. You start with a buffet and then you end in the drink. But I found one of these people who had been plucked from the ocean. This was the Pacific Ocean. And I asked him, do you know why you were saved? You were floating there for hours in the dark. And in human history, when a human being goes off the side of a boat, you just can't find them.
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It's like finding a soccer ball in the state of Connecticut. And he said, yeah, he does. I do know it was Jesus Christ. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior while I was in the water. And then I was saved. And I said, no, it was actually Arthur A. Allen. It wasn't Jesus Christ. It was Arthur A. Allen. And Arthur A. Allen figured out how to find your ass. And that's why you're alive.
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And he was like, oh, no one told me that kind of thing. And that's the problem. No one tells anybody that. So people don't know kind of what their taxpayer dollars are doing for them because no one explains it.
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You know, the whole idea that the place to go find corruption, like financial corruption, is a federal agency is insane. Like I can remember working on Wall Street. And if you took like there are a thousand things that would happen every day on a Wall Street firm or in a Wall Street firm that if you did it in a federal agency, you'd be in jail.
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There's so many eyes on you, you can't buy them a sandwich when you take them out to lunch. They're so sensitive to, oh, we have to be careful because if we put a foot wrong, we're going to be hauled in front of Congress and we're going to be in the newspaper.
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Used to be, except Trump fired all the inspectors.
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Yeah, that's right. So it's kind of wild that they say they're coming in to get corruption and waste, and they fire the person who's eliminating corruption and waste. I mean, there's no question we're now in a situation where it's much easier to be corrupt and wasteful
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So what do you make of the claim? I mean, it's kind of interesting that they come in saying that's what they're trying to do when they do the opposite. It's not even that they're not doing it well. It's that they're doing the opposite.
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So out of the corner of my eye when I was walking through the bedroom and Tabitha was watching it.
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I think that's just the delivery system for their larger- But that the American public would begin to accept the delivery system is kind of amazing. I mean, and this is what got me interested in the first place. It wasn't like, oh, Trump's going to destroy this, so you've got to protect it. It's, oh, my God, these stories are incredible.
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And when you hear them, you're just moved and inspired and you're proud of your country and all the rest. These people still exist. And we've kind of built a mechanism. I don't know how far back it goes. Maybe it goes forever. But the mechanism that prevents the stories from getting out and the mechanism is the elected officials.
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The elected officials, the political class that comes into the government to run the government has has something. It's kind of convenient for them. If something goes wrong, they can haul one of these people out and say they were to blame. But if something goes right, they can take credit for it. And they have no incentive to celebrate the work of the permanent federal workforce.
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And so as a result, there's no kind of cultural recognition. And it's actually pre-Trump. This is a problem. It's like who... What business runs well if the employees only get punished, if nobody gets rewarded for doing good stuff? And I think you can track that, you know, to some extent that when there's government failure to this, to like people are not allowed to stick their necks out.
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They're not incentivized to stick their necks out.
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Yeah. The minute he blows up the first rocket, he's fired and never allowed to work again.
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The whole Silicon Valley celebrating failure and risk-taking and all that, it is the opposite.
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Let me think about this. So there's eight stories in the book. I did two of them. And the other writers did the other six. And the characters that I have dealt with
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they're not they don't celebrate the structure they're in they're aware that oh this is a it's a pain in the ass to do what i'm doing it's more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be everybody agrees with that right and you know what they also agree with is that by the time i get to them so i was able to get to arthur a allen because he was furloughed because he was not employed at the time and so there was there was no communications officer to stop me from getting to him
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But with all the other ones, every story in this book, there was a little phalanx of political people. And this was the Biden administration, you know, kind of prevent us basically from telling the story. So they were very aware that like, kind of amazing, we're now in this situation where I can actually talk to you. It took a lot of persistence to get to them.
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But once you get to them, yeah, they'll say that, you know, so I'll give you one concrete example.
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yeah the last story in the book is actually a story of government failure but kind of personal heroism this woman her name is heather stone she may be gone today they're firing all these people in the fda but but she's in the fda and she noticed a problem and that she tried to set out to solve with a colleague and the problem was um pharmaceutical companies have no interest in developing drugs for really rare disease there's no market for them they're rare disease
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So you get something really horrible somewhere in the world and no one's developed the drug for it. And you're going to die. And doctors will experiment. You're going to die anyway. Let's try this. Let's try that. And there's no formal record keeping of these experiments. So if something works, you might not hear about it. And if something doesn't work, you might not hear about it.
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So the rare disease that the center of this story is balamuthia. Oh, my God. It's a brain eating amoeba. And in and of itself, it's a kind of a wild thing. Wasn't discovered until in the 1990s in the San Diego Zoo. Someone discovered this thing. And there's a whole long story, backstory about it.
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But she built this app to encourage doctors from all over the world to, if you have a case, just say what you did and what happened. And so if you have balimuthia, if you treated it, all right, so you gave them X and it didn't work. What's nice is it'd be good for other doctors to know that.
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Well, there was actually at UCSF, a researcher six or seven years ago, his name is Joe DeRisi, actually found a drug that worked in his lab that worked on valimuthia called nitroxylene. And it's a drug that's used to treat urinary tract infections in Europe and China. What? Yeah, weird.
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What he did was he took the Balamuthia in the lab and he took the 2000 something approved drugs anywhere in Europe or America. He bombarded the Balamuthia and he found this one thing killed the Balamuthia. Jesus.
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But this is what Heather Stone at the FDA was responding to was that he had done this because he watched someone had their brain eaten before him and he figured out it was Balamuthia and that person died. He went and made this discovery. The next time a patient walked into UCSF with this, they tried it and it worked. And I said to Joe DeRisi, I said, well, this is great. You found the cure.
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And he says, we don't know that. It's one person. But even though I've done that, no one will know it. If you're lucky enough to walk into the UCSF hospital with Valimuthia, yes, they may think of using this, but no one else will have heard of this. And because medical journals tend not to write up single case studies, so on and so forth. So this woman at the FDA had identified this problem.
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and said, I'm going to market this app. I'm going to let everybody know the FDA is a safe place to come tell your stories. And every doctor in the country will know that if they've got a Balamuthia case, they hit the button and they can see that 50 times someone's done this. And she's unbelievably frustrated because the FDA doesn't have the funds to market it. There's no money.
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There's a kind of nervousness about, well, what happens if someone gets a bad recommendation off the site? It's all risk averse.
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So what happens in the story, which is kind of amazing, is that in this particular case, Jodorowsky, the scientist, managed to write up a paper about how this person had been cured and thanked Heather Stone at the FDA for getting him the nitroxylene, the drug, even though it wasn't approved in the United States, really fast.
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And there's a little girl who's alive in Little Rock, Arkansas right now. Come on. The Queen's Arkansas. She's six years old. Her name is Elena Smith, who was dying in the Dallas Children's Hospital because the mom, her mom saw this paper on the web, saw Heather Stone's name, called her up and Heather Stone got the drugs to the hospital and the girl was saved. But
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But at the same time, there was another six-year-old girl in Davis, California, whose doctors never saw this and who died. And so Heather Stone would tell you, if she were here, she'd say, we are the mechanism. The government is the only place that's going to do this. We are the mechanism for getting this information out to people.
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And I am in somewhat stifled because people are risk averse, because we don't have resources. And you see this and you're just like, you it breaks your heart because you just know that there's so many tragedies that could be avoided.
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Can I stop you for one sec?
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What you just said, What personal relationship does that remind you of?
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And being extremely harshly critical when there's any kind of little error.
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That's right. It's exactly right. You just put your finger on it. That we are, as a country, we treat our government the way we treat our mothers when we're like 14-year-old boys. That's the country right now. And it's over and over and over. Right. And you ignore all the good things mom has done because it's just assumed that mom's going to do the good things. That's right.
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But if mom screws up and puts a bologna sandwich in your lunch instead of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, mom, you don't know me. You're a horrible mom.
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So this is, I mean, I have a less dramatic version of this that just happened. I'm here in New Orleans in my childhood bedroom, and I did a favor for my mother and went and talked to one of her community groups. And she said, could you go talk to this group? And I got on stage and I talked for whatever. And she drove me over there and drove me home.
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And she didn't say a word on the way out until we got in the car. And she said, when we got in the car, she said, you and your father have one thing in common. And I said, what? She goes, you both do go on quite a bit. It's like, all right, all right.
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Thank you. Thank you.
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Thank you. Thank you.
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Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. that just is naturally sort of fuel for story. I'm telling you, it's not a party trick. It's like every time I've gone in... It's the foundation of it. It's the foundation of it, yeah.
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So if I could answer this in a way that fully satisfied you, I should be president. Hey, I'm fine with that. Whatever you want. I don't care. I'm happy. But my first thought is, and when you look at the things that work in our book, how Chris Mark fixed the problem of roofs falling on coal miners, he was given a lot of rope.
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He was so superior intellectually and in his mission, Griffin, that everybody around him just said, let him go. Like, let him just do what he needs to do. Even within the government, they understood, like, this dude's something. Even within the, this dude's something.
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So where the government, I bet, I'm just guessing here, but I bet if you and I wandered through the government looking for bright spots, like things that worked, Ezra's looking for things that don't work. And there are plenty of things that don't work. But if you were looking for things that work, you'd find that over and over. And it's where there's some distance from the political process.
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You depoliticize it. So for example, the Centers for Disease Control was gold standard for health agencies in the 50s, 60s, 70s. And Americans adored it, like thought it was just the bee's knees. Reagan, in his first term, I think, changed the head of the CDC from being a career person who the president could not fire
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was who was there for longer than an administration to a political appointee who had to keep looking over his shoulder at what the white house thought of whatever he did right and and if you go in the cdc um and interview people they will say this place has deteriorated since then we've gotten more risk averse less able to do our mission more more politicized and i think that
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I would systematically go through the government, I think, and try to put some distance between politicians and the people doing the job, which is the opposite.
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I know, I know, I know. You politicize it, you're going to make it less effective.
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And so they've got to be able to fail some. They've got to have just some flex. And they can't be always looking to some senator who's making a snap judgment.
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Correct. But so many of the problems the process is trying to the government's trying to address are long term problems or are longer projects kind of thing. And there's a mismatch there between the incentives of the people who are ultimately bossing the operation and the people and the operation.
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So, you know, you look at institutions that kind of work in our government, the Federal Reserve works pretty well. I mean, you know, we can argue about whether they should have raised or lowered by half a percent, but basically they've kept us in a situation people trust the dollar.
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But it's like they do make mistakes, but no one thinks the president's controlling the money supply. And, and the minute they do, right. The minute he does, it's a catastrophe. It's going to be done worse. It's going to be, everybody's going to know it's going to be done worse.
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Well, that's an interesting question. Do they want to live in a world where there is actually no objective truth? They seem to.
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Yes. And I can understand. I agree with you.
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But you're going to pay a huge economic price if nobody trusts anything.
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I mean, the whole society runs on trust. Now, Trump is like a trust-destroying machine.
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He's like Bitcoin. Right? Right?
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He's a meme coin. He's Bitcoin because he's got more faith than a meme coin. But it's still basically when you're trying to predict the future of this, it's like predicting the future of Scientology. Like, are people going to continue to believe in this? Who knows? Like, it's because it is faith.
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All right. So you remember Trump won. I got interested in the government, Trump for the first term. What caught my attention was when he fired his transition team right after he was elected. There were 500 and something people who were supposed to go in and get these briefings from the Obama administration.
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And it's shocking what's on that list. You know, it's shocking how much it's charged with, say, preventing. You just take for granted an awful lot of what does. You know, you turn on your faucet and you can drink this water that you can drink and not worry that you're going to get sick. There's a kind of miracle there going on.
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Yeah. Yes. So the question that pops into my head after you said what you just said is like, what does it take for the society to wake up and realize it needs to be better at governing itself? It needs to allow our government to work and give it some room to operate kind of thing.
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And I keep coming back to it's going to take some sort of existential crisis, like that people are going to have to actually fear. Americans turn to the government in a nanosecond when there's a tragedy or a crisis, like they just assume FEMA is going to show up kind of thing.
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Yep. So COVID wasn't bad enough. Oh, no. Please don't say that. No, I think that the moment everybody realized it just kills old people, they got that in their head. No, really.
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No, no. No, that it was – if you had flipped it and it was more like the 1918 pandemic.
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You're right. I think there would have been a different reaction. That's one thing. But the second thing, I mean, we still have not as a society answered the question, well, what should we have done? You know, like, okay, you're angry about what happened. Either you think there was not enough government action, but more likely too much government action.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And by law, the outgoing president is supposed to prepare so that the incoming administration can hit the ground running. And Obama had deputized a thousand people to spend six months like preparing the best course ever prepared about the federal government, how it worked. And Trump just didn't show up for the briefings.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
There's not been a commission to like figure out, satisfy us all that there was some stuff that should be done.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
That's right. That's the problem. So it was not enough of a crisis. that the society is demanding a depoliticized response. Right. That in a real crisis, what's going to happen is people are going to lose patience with politics, with the politicization of things and say, just get me a guy who can fix it or a woman who can fix this.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Yeah. Right. But he's, yeah, it's the wrong.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But there's a, we should have learned some things from COVID. Our response was bad. We had a disproportionate number of deaths and we should have had, we should have done better than the rest of the world. We did worse than most of the rest of the world. And like, why? I mean, I think there's answers to that question, but we don't, we've not grappled with that.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And I think we've not grappled with it because most people weren't all that scared of it after they were scared right at the beginning. And when they went, oh, it's just, it's just old folks homes or whatever they said. Now, New York, New York had its own. New York is the one place.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And why did it happen in New York? Because it hit there early before they learned how to treat it. The numbers are something like if you went into hospital with COVID in April, you were like four times more likely to die than if you went in in late June. And the difference was just it took a couple of months to figure out how to handle the patients.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
He told Chris Christie that in an hour we can learn everything we need to know about how the federal government works. And I saw that in the paper and I just thought it's just a great premise. Like I thought it was a comedy. I thought I can go in and I can wander this place and figure out how it works. And the reader will know they know more than the president about what's going on in whatever.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Probably someone has done this work, but it would be really interesting to see what the different psychological after effects are in New York versus the rest of the country. Like if you went to New Yorkers who were there when they watched this wave of death, if they would be more or less likely to say, oh, just let it run the next time. No, really.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
They saw what happens when you let it run right at the very beginning.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Right. But I think that it terrifies me, but I can't it's hard for me to imagine anything but all of us being on the receiving end of a tornado to to wake up. We need that to wake up and say, well, we actually need to run it, run this place better. But well, and we're about to get a lesson in what the government does because they're disabling it. I don't know how long it's going to take.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And Trump is certainly aware of that, right? I'll be gone. I'll be gone. That's exactly right. I'll be gone. It's all charging the future for present political benefits.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
It's come up and it's come up now. I mean, the coal mine ruse is not just a metaphor. They just fired the inspectors who make sure that the standards that Chris Mark created are being abided by. So what will happen now is that coal mine companies will cut costs by not doing what they need to do to keep the roof up. I mean, this literally will happen. So another example.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Geraldine Brooks wrote a piece about a guy in the IRS, kind of badass, sort of black belt in something, who runs the cyber crimes division or works in the cyber crimes division. And this is a profit center. I mean, they've collected billions of dollars of crypto and they just kept it for the federal government.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
They've gone in and gutted that operation and it just can't work in the way it worked before. So you like these fuses all over the society. And there's a bomb that the spark is eventually going to get to. And function to function, the length of the fuse is different. But the bomb is there everywhere. But you're right. Many of the fuses are very long.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And so I started as a challenge. I just thought, pick the places that nobody knows what nobody knows anything about. Like you probably, I'm surrounded by people who just are always inflicting their political opinions on me. But if I ask them, what does the Department of Energy do? They have no idea. And so I picked energy, agriculture, commerce. And I just wrote about these places.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And it's hard to know when the explosions happen. And you're also right that when it happens, that he may be gone, they may be gone, and some poor schmuck who had nothing to do with it is in the White House and gets blamed for it. And even if it happens now,
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
at the at the thank you at the very least it creates cognitive dissonance in the minds of someone who's just trying to live with the dumb stereotype right it's like oh gay people are evil oh but my cousin's gay and i like him right you know it's that and uh so it causes that just causes a bit of hesitation and it leaves you a little less susceptible but that room man that room that little hesitation that little piece of room yeah that's everything because i'm convinced most people
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Kit, the kiss poster.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
The book was called The Fifth Risk. And while I was there, The thing that shocked me the most was the quality of the person who was inside. I don't know what picture I had in my head of bureaucrats, but I had bureaucrats, right? It was like I had this lazy stereotype in my head. And I kept meeting these people.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
who were just like smarter than the bankers I worked with at Salomon Brothers, devoted to their mission, like counting the paper clips before they bought another one. You know, it was insanely driven, interesting people who didn't think of themselves as characters. So I realized at the end of that, that I'd sort of missed a trick.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And it was, I should have focused less on the institution and more on the people. And so I thought if I ever come back, it's gonna be with the people. And what was the awareness was, I mean, I gotta tell you about the guy I met. The guy I met that triggered this. All right, so I was at the end of the fifth risk. I had to write an afterword for the paperback.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
The government was shut down because Trump had shut down the government, 2018, 19. There were all these people who were furloughed. Like two thirds of the civilian workforce was sent home, no pay, told they were inessential workers. And I got a list of, like, thousands of people who had been furloughed who had also been nominated for some civil service award.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And, like, someone thought whatever they'd done was good. But it was thousands of people. And I didn't know what to do with it, so I just took the name. It was alphabetized. I just took the first name on the list. It can't be this easy. It is this easy. Arthur A. Allen. I call up Arthur A. Allen, and Arthur A. Allen is the only oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Division.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
I call him and I say, he's in the middle of Connecticut. And I call him and I say, can I come visit and talk to you? And what do you do? Like, what's this inessential work that you do kind of thing? And he had all the time in the world because he wasn't working. And so I went across country. I spent three days with him.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And it turned out that this guy had, over a course of about 25 years, had basically created a science. And the science was the science of how objects drift at sea. What? So if you go overboard in your sailboat and you're just floating, you will move differently in the water than if your sailboat turns over and you get on top of it. or if you're in an inner tube, or if you're on a life raft.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And if the Coast Guard doesn't know how your object drifts, even though it might know when you got in trouble and how long you've been in the water.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
They won't know where you are. And he had seen a mother, a young mother, and a daughter die on the Chesapeake Bay. He had seen it. He'd been there when they got the bodies. Oh, wow. Because they couldn't predict how their overturned sailboat drifted. And he set out to say, he said, I'm never going to let this happen again. And it took him forever, but he like classified 300 different objects.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And it was like a magic act. The minute he gave the Coast Guard his algorithms for objects drifting at sea, like a week later, a fat guy fell off a cruise ship 80 miles east of Miami. What? And like fat guy off cruise ship is like a problem. It happens. It happens. And Americans, like we have an incredible talent for getting lost at sea. We are just doing it all the time. Really?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So the fat guy, any other time in human history, he's dead. But they realized like a few hours later, oh, he's gone. They looked at the cameras on the ship and they could see when he went off. And the Coast Guard flew over and plucked him out of the sea like seven hours after he had fallen. Alive? Alive. What? And so since then, thousands of people had been saved because of this guy.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Here's your inessential worker. But here's the kicker. So I spent three days with him. And I thought, my God, it's an incredible story. I wrote it up at the back end of The Fifth Risk.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
But on the way to the airport, after I'd spent three days with him, interviewing his wife and his children and going to work in his office and going out on the bay with him and all that stuff, he calls me on my cell phone and he says, hey, you're a writer. And I said, I'm almost sure I said that when I called you. Yes, I'm a writer.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
He goes, no, my son just told me that you wrote a book that became a movie. And he said, are you going to be writing about me? And I said, yeah, Art, why do you think I spent three days talking to you? And he said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drifted. And at that moment, you will get this. You will get this.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
At that moment, I realized these people don't know their characters. And that makes them great characters.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
They're just so in the weeds with the thing they're doing. They're so about service, like helping others. It does not occur to them to like promote themselves, to sell themselves, to market themselves, to talk to journalists in a certain way. So their story gets out. His story just never would have been told. And I just thought like there are thousands of people like this in the government.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
If I ever come back, come back with that in mind. And then the second thought as we approached the, I mean, it was a year ago now.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
When I curated, I hired six writers who I thought were great writers. And they weren't like normal journalists. They were novelists.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Kamau Bell is a stand-up comedian. Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks is a great group. But I wanted people with different voices. But I wanted some protection from the charge that, oh, this is just Michael Lewis making things up or spinning it a certain way. Why were you concerned about that, Michael? Because if it's just one writer, it's easy to attack them.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
It's easy for someone who wants to make the other argument. You made it more resilient. I made it more resilient. It was like, okay, seven people are dropping in and they can do whatever they want. Right. And all of them, like in a moment, found some story and usually some person that was just incredible. And I'm telling you, you could do this.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
We could do 10 of these and you wouldn't run out of material. And so what does that say about what's going on right now? I mean, so to answer your second question, I had no idea. I mean, I knew that Trump didn't give a shit, right? He's just like, what is this?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
So I would think of it slightly differently. Yeah. But it's – and it's that where I get really jazzed is if I find something that is clearly – that is clearly – if I find a person or a situation that is radically different from what general opinion is about it, I mean – The book before was about Sam Bankman Free.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
I got unbelievable amount of shit because I described him actually how he was rather than how everybody wanted him to be. But I started writing it when he was in jail. I knew everything he had done. he was not a deeply sinister character. He was a kid who did something wrong. Right. It was closer to that.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And everybody around him understood that even the people who hated him, but there was, it got me excited to know that like crypto Twitter was out there saying this guy was like evil incarnate. Without knowing him. And there was a story that was just true and different that just didn't match with what people thought they knew. And this feels the same way.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
It's sort of like people think they have this lazy stereotype in their head of what a federal worker is. And that lazy stereotype enables Doge. Like if everybody knew who these people were, they would be outraged on their behalf.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
Totally. No, I mean, it's a bit like you can demonize federal workers in the same way you can demonize trans people and immigrants. You know, we've created this category in people's head that, oh, they classify it as, oh, bad or wasteful or corrupt.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis
And then you can do whatever you want to the individuals because actually no one knows any of the individuals. It's a bigotry.