Pod Save America
Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
Sun, 6 Apr 2025
Michael Lewis, acclaimed author of The Big Short, Moneyball and The Fifth Risk joins Lovett to discuss his most recent book, Who is Government? Lewis and his coauthors profile the civil servants whose thankless and unglamorous work prevents mines from collapsing, castaways from drowning, and rare diseases from killing people. He and Jon talk about why it’s so important to break down the “bureaucrat” stereotype right now, why Lewis is convinced Elon Musk has no idea how to run DOGE, and what leads the people he writes about to stand up to Trump or succumb to their personal ambition. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast. To enjoy ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, and more, subscribe to our Friends of the Pod Community now at crooked.com/friends or directly on Apple Podcasts! For a limited time, start your 30 day free trial today.
Chapter 1: What is Michael Lewis's book 'Who is Government?' about?
Welcome to Pond Save America. I'm John Lovett. For this week's Sunday show, I'm sitting down with author Michael Lewis. Michael's most recent book, Who Is Government?, showcases the thankless, unglamorous work of doctors and engineers and civil servants inside the government at a time when the government is under attack.
We'll talk about that and what he's learned by looking at industry contrarians and brilliant freaks. Michael Lewis, welcome to the pod. Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be back. So... There's something that you've been talking about as you're sharing stories from this book, which is about how good the government is at counting things.
Right now, in just the past couple of days, one example, Doge has shut down the research arm of the Department of Education.
This is the entity that collects all kinds of data, including data that presumably you would want if you were studying government efficiency, because it collects data on what kinds of schooling are effective, what kinds are ineffective, including a bunch of longitudinal data. So this is data that's collected over years that that that is basically now being flushed down the toilet.
Chapter 2: How does the government play a crucial role in data collection?
Can you just talk a bit about this role that the government plays in just keeping track of the numbers and how important it is and why it gets so little attention?
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,
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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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Chapter 3: Who is Arthur A. Allen and why is his work significant?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Chapter 4: Why are government stories often untold?
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, well, what I'm also interested in, the ways in which the reaction that you're dealing with when you're trying to get these stories are fair, a reasonable reaction to how the government is covered, because there is a bias on the part of mainstream press towards negativity and scandal. That is usually why, if the government is calling about the FAA, it's because planes are touching.
That's right. And so that is a reasonable result. The other is government. Somebody that's not trained in politics is going to be a little less savvy about how to engage with a reporter may say the wrong thing. Right. And they don't trust correctly that that that interesting but poorly phrased sentence won't be taken out of context.
And then the other piece of it is there's a lot of scientific research that sounds silly and. that sounds ridiculous, that ultimately saves lives. And if it gets in front of the right-wing press, suddenly you've got Marjorie Taylor Greene waving a copy of your abstract in a congressional committee, and that's never a good idea. So there you go.
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.
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.
And then the question, right, is sort of why is that good politics? And there, I do want to, we like to take a moment to blame Democrats here when we can. And some of it, right, is just viewing a lot of what the government does as self-perpetuating, that you don't have to defend it because it's what the government has always done. But in a deeper way,
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Chapter 5: How do political narratives shape public perception of government?
But they look at that and they say, oh, people don't want me to defend the government. They want me to say, I hate the government. I think the government's bad but what we are but but there's a kind of a failure imagination I
to think about what it would look like if Democrats collectively decided to try to persuade people, and not just on the margins on a specific policy question, but to have a vision that fundamentally alters the perspective the American people have on an issue.
Republicans have been much more willing to do that, in part, I think, because Republicans understood that some of their positions were far more unpopular, right? Like being pro-life,
was unpopular being for tax cuts for the rich is deeply unpopular being against environmental regulations are fundamentally unpopular they they know they start from behind they may you know dissemble about the media or blame bias or whatever it may be but then on some level they know that they're fighting for unpopular policy and democrats are just i think more afraid to do that and also i think some of them it's just not there they are institutionalists they are kind of establishment types and they don't like bucking the trend you know you think about you
Anyway, I don't know the answer, but I do think that's part of it.
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,
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.
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.
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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Chapter 6: What are the misconceptions about government corruption?
I do think there's a nuance because you're right, right? The examples that you're talking about are people that are able to operate outside of the kind of evil eye of politics. But then I also think of moments when government has worked well or better because of politics.
And what I always I remember when, you know, right now there's a bipartisan fury at the idea that we're not going to fund PEPFAR. And I remember when Bush was setting up PEPFAR, he stood it up outside of USAID because they understood that USAID was a bureaucratic mess, had tons of problems.
And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna stand this up outside so it can be efficient and effective and move quickly. It's gonna be more political. You look at what happens when the Biden administration goes to implement the CHIPS Act. They look for a bunch of exemptions to a bunch of government rules so that it could be run quickly and move quickly, right?
Sometimes political passion and attention can help and make things happen. And I think that comes back to the kind of a problem from both directions, which is you catalog... this is in the premonition, this is in the fifth risk, and you and your fellow writers in this book, these sort of heroes inside of a machine, but there is often a machine, right?
There is often a slow moving kind of feckless bureaucracy that they're trying to fight against. And I'm just wondering if you have any reflections on not the heroes, but the water they're swimming against.
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.
It really irks a lot of reviewers.
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
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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