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Pod Save America
Michael Lewis on Bravery in Politics and Why Elon Musk Seems so "Disturbed"
01:10:23
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. 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.
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- [00:00]
Jon Lovett
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- [02:10]
Michael Lewis
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- [02:27]
Unknown Speaker
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- [02:31]
Michael Lewis
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- [02:33]
Unknown Speaker
Or at Lululemon Dot. Welcome to Pont 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.
- [03:22]
Michael Lewis
Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be back.
- [03:24]
Unknown Speaker
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 days, one example, DOGE has shut down the research arm of the Department of Education. This is the entity that, 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. Can you just talk a bit about this role that the government plays in and just keeping track of the numbers and how important it is and why it gets so little attention.
- [04:21]
Michael Lewis
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, standup comedians, and there was a novelist, nonfiction book writer named John Lanchester. They're all my favorite writers kind of thing, who decided he wasn't going to write about a person, he was going to write about a statistic. And he made the consumer Price Index his subject. And he makes this really interesting point 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, and it's really interesting. This kind of like the two. There are 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, that I don't cut costs, but you don't fire a free expert advice to cut costs. So that's. But, but. 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 largest thing that is just mind bending to me is, all right, what happens if we actually can't trust any government statistics, play that game. We have no portrait of ourselves anymore. 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.
- [07:31]
Unknown Speaker
This is where I kind of like, do they? Or do they just think that's a land they like to be?
- [07:36]
Michael Lewis
It's a good question, right, Because.
- [07:37]
Unknown Speaker
No, but this is. I've been this specific example that you mentioned about the panels of people that help make sure that our understanding of, of inflation and other metrics are accurate. I understand why they think they will benefit from politicizing these figures. You know, they don't mind if we live in a world where. Where, you know, every. Chocolate prices just keep falling, you know.
- [07:58]
Michael Lewis
Right.
- [07:59]
Unknown Speaker
But they also benefited from a society that was built on this reliable data. And there is something deeper here, more than just the politicization, which is our collective taking for granted of what the government does day to day. And I'm. And I'm just. I just want to open it up to you to talk a little bit about what led you to want to examine some of. Some of these sort of unsung heroes inside of the government and what you took away from it.
- [08:27]
Michael Lewis
Can I have five minutes? Because it's gonna take me five minutes. Great. It's gonna sound like I'm droning on and I don't wanna monologue, but we.
- [08:34]
Unknown Speaker
Just need enough to get to the next mattress set.
- [08:38]
Michael Lewis
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. And I thought that was. 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, 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 kind of some like something deep driving them that wanted to let them to want to serve the country, build an expertise, had nothing to do with like 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, got 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. Who had been told they were inessential and sent home without pay, but who had also been nominated, not necessarily one, but nominated for some civil service award. But it was thousands of names. And I thought, what am I going to 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 know 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 when 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 the life raft, person in a life preserver, etc. Right after he gives, he hands this over to the Coast Guard to use. Like 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. Like the progress in knowledge that had happened because of Arthur A. Allen ends up saving thousands of lives. And the moment, so the moment I thought, man, it was kind of like, it was 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 Arthur A. Allen, learning all about his life, learning how science. And I ended 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. 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, art, why'd you think I was there? 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 who would be interested in what he does, that no ability to dramatize his own story. And I thought, like, someone should be doing this. These stories are so good that someone should be doing this. And so that was the that seed was in my head a year ago when I went to an editor at the Washington Post and said, let me, let me hire some writers to go do this.
- [13:29]
Jon Lovett
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- [13:35]
Unknown Speaker
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- [13:36]
Jon Lovett
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- [13:38]
Unknown Speaker
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- [13:40]
Jon Lovett
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- [14:35]
Michael Lewis
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- [14:53]
Unknown Speaker
Just to come back to what you were saying here, that these are the kinds of stories that just aren't being told. Why you find these fascinating characters that are doing incredible and important work. Why are you talk about as A society we're more interested in politics than government. How do you explain that?
- [15:14]
Michael Lewis
I'll take a stab. But I think you should take a stab too, because you probably thought about this at least as much as I have. 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, 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, this is the downside far outweighs the upside. And so right away you're kind of shut out. And to write these stories, I gotta live with people, 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. It's like the political process has gotten used to the idea 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. You know, nobody gets credit for that politically kind of thing. I think that's maybe one thing. The second thing is 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. But they are in an environment where they know that the likelihood that attention is going to be positive, attention is minuscule, that attention is bad, and that you're going to, you know, so you hot. 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 servants, bureaucrats. They are. And so you're challenging a stereotype in readers heads to tell this story. And when you do that, you do meet resistance. 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 or. But in this case it's true and it is mysterious because the literary material is just so good.
- [18:29]
Unknown Speaker
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.
- [18:56]
Michael Lewis
That's right.
- [18:58]
Unknown Speaker
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, that sounds ridiculous, that ultimately saves lives. And if it gets in front of the right wing press, suddenly you've got, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene waving a copy of your abstract in a congressional committee. And that's never a good idea.
- [19:39]
Michael Lewis
So there you go. I knew you'd have something to say that I didn't say. And that's it. That's 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, but nothing has been yielded by this work. At that moment. If Marjorie Taylor Greene entered into it, she could ridicule him and mock him and like, why are we paying someone to do this? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That early science can be made to.
- [20:12]
Unknown Speaker
Look ridiculous and then the Question right. Is sort of why is that good politics? And there I do wanna. 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 we pay for a lack of collective memory of what life was like before the government collected this data. Right before, you know, not a lot of people left who remember when the rivers caught fire and all the people that were old enough to know what life was like before Social Security and Medicare are now dead. Right. And so I guess I'm wondering what you've learned about how to convey and really kind of fight that stereotype to like allow the idea of government as good to re. Enter our collective imagination. And maybe it is just through a book like this.
- [21:14]
Michael Lewis
So first off, as 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. 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. Now why there's a, like, 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.
- [22:18]
Unknown Speaker
It's just that we all live like we live in a world that government has made safer, healthier, freer, cleaner. And it is so taken for granted. It is the status quo anti. And we can't imagine things getting worse again.
- [22:33]
Michael Lewis
Correct? That's true. And how you remind people that this, that you shouldn't take this for granted. I mean, so the answer really is this is this book is an exercise. Is that exercise? It's sort of like. And, but having said that, so, and this is one reason I did it this way. I didn't tell the writers anything about what they needed to do. I mean I, 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. The book could have turned out a lot of different ways. And I don't know. When you ask 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. Unfortunately, I think the only way you get to a radical readjustment is some sort of crisis, some sort of really existential crisis. And Covid wasn't enough.
- [24:00]
Unknown Speaker
Right, That's. We just did that. We just did that. And by the way, the. We created a vax. The government led the charge to create a vaccine miracle.
- [24:10]
Michael Lewis
Yes.
- [24:10]
Unknown Speaker
One of the greatest achievements in human history is the rapid scientific breakthrough that was MRNA vaccines. And the president responsible is now realizing when he's talking to his own crowds that they don't like it.
- [24:26]
Michael Lewis
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 go, this is, 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 triumph. 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. It's not that. It's just, it's. These are hard stories to tell. I think that's part of the problem. And, you know, here's a. 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 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. 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.
- [25:58]
Unknown Speaker
I don't either. There is a kind of big difference between Republicans and Democrats. And I think it is in part because Republicans have always viewed themselves as against the mainstream political establishment, inside the government, inside the media, and of course, against Democrats. And Democrats have a different relationship with those institutions. But, you know, it's not. I remember, you know, George W. Bush, maybe it was Karl Rove or one of his advisors talking about that they were in the reality just distortion business, that they were going to change reality. Remember this?
- [26:34]
Michael Lewis
Yeah.
- [26:35]
Unknown Speaker
And Republicans are much more comfortable understanding that for them to get the world to look the way they want the world to look, they're gonna have to change how they're gonna say what they're gonna say. And their job is to change the perspective, change how people see it. And Democrats are a bit more afraid of that. Right. Right. Now, poll after poll shows that people don't think the government works. They think the status quo is failing them. There's a lot of truth to that, by the way. And that's. That's one place I want to get to. Right. One part of this. Why don't people like the government? One aspect of it is they don't think the government works. And maybe parts of it, they're right, 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 there's a kind of a failure of imagination 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.
- [27:49]
Michael Lewis
Right.
- [27:49]
Unknown Speaker
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. Anyway, I don't know the answer, but.
- [28:22]
Michael Lewis
You may have expressed part of it. And it's. Republicans have the benefit of the kind of the, of the guerrilla warfare tactics. If they, if they. They're operating when you know you're going to lose if you play the same game, you have to play a different game. And that. That's the game they've chosen to play. But it's. There. Is there? I mean, on the evidence of the two books I've now published on the subject, there's a big market for, just for discussing these subjects, for, 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. 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. It's true. Of all the bright spots that, that we've written about, 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. 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, 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, in the public sector that everything there is watched. 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're. And they're. They are. You know, every agency as an. Used to have an inspector general who would get them in trouble if they did stuff they shouldn't do. There are mechanisms for identifying and preventing fraud in the federal government that don't exist in the private sector. So they're problems in government, but they're not the problems that everybody thinks are the problems.
- [31:03]
Jon Lovett
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- [32:08]
Michael Lewis
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- [32:30]
Unknown Speaker
Fun, but TaxAct can help you get them done.
- [32:34]
Michael Lewis
Taxact, let's get them over with.
- [32:41]
Unknown Speaker
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, not going to fund pepfar. And I remember when, when, 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 going to do is we're going to stand this up outside so it can be efficient and effective and move quickly. It's going to 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 an attention can help and make things happen. And. And I think that comes back to the kind of a problem from both directions, which is you catalog in 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.
- [34:20]
Michael Lewis
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 the way 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.
- [34:38]
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, people hate that about you, by the way. It really irks a lot of reviewers.
- [34:45]
Michael Lewis
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 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 had suffered over several decades a decline in prestige, a decline in internal morale, a decline, a sense of its own ability to do anything except sort of observe and study disease, not control it. 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 Centers to the director into a politically appointed position as opposed to a career civil servant who endured through administrations. And that this had had the effect from the very top down, keeping one eye on the White House and the political process. And that when they made decisions, and this was a very bad influence when you were trying to control disease. So this does not mean this is a universal like truth, that having political influence in a problem is a bad idea. But I think there's 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. It's a political institution at some point. The process, political process touches it, but it doesn't micromanage it. So that one observation is that when there are problems that they're very clearly 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 problem. The bigger thing is that the government is dealing with all the problems the private sector can. It's like when the private sector has no interest in a problem because there's no money to be made, but the problem needs to be addressed, it winds up in the government. It's a bit like President Obama told me when I went and wrote about President Obama, he said, this job is a decision making job and all the decisions that get to my desk are horrible decisions because anybody who any easy decision got made way below me. And the government's a bit like that. It's like all the problems that are really hard, problems that the private sector can't make a fortune off of, end up in the government. So no wonder it's tough, right? Already you're dealing with a set of problems that are very tough problems and that they're hard to find the financial incentive to deal with them. So it's a thorny and difficult subject. And, and my, if there's, I mean, I'm coming at it not as a intellectual or a theorist, I'm coming at it as a writer and an observer. But the one big observation of who is government of the book is there's so much to learn from the things that work and all we do is look at the things that don't.
- [38:13]
Unknown Speaker
So let's talk about that, too. So in the fifth risk, you mentioned this earlier, there's that basically at the Department of Energy, they've set up desks for the, for the incoming Trump administration to sit at because they assume somebody's going to show up and nobody comes. Right. And I wonder, like thinking back, like, is the fifth risk at this point almost like, like naive about how bad this could get? I'm wondering, like, what, what lessons you take from the fifth risk. Fifth risk about their kind of carelessness about what government does or doesn't do and how that is now being applied sort of in the extreme by Doge under Trump.
- [38:56]
Michael Lewis
Now, the indifference that Donald Trump had to the federal government he was meant to run was breathtaking. And at the time I remember thinking, I understand why he never had in mind that he was going to be running the federal government because he never had in mind he was going to win, that he was running as a marketing stunt in the beginning. And it just kind of. The dog caught the car and so that's Trump 1 Trump 2 the dog's trying to drive the car. And that's a different story. But Trump won. So there was. What does it say about a man that he is given this awesome responsibility of managing this 2,3 million person workforce by surprise, and his response is, I don't need to know about wasn't just negligence. It was negligence. It was actually a feature of his way of moving through the world that he didn't want to know and not wanting to know. It's sort of like when you don't accept the responsibility of having to know, of acquiring knowledge, of learning, it puts you in a different position in relation to the institution. You can say and do anything without any kind of responsibility because you don't have anything in your head saying, oh, I shouldn't do that. So I think the lack of knowledge was sort of feature nut bug of his M.O. of running things. Like, he really didn't. It wasn't that he didn't know, it was that he really didn't want to know, which is so is such an odd way of moving through the world. But I thought Trump won. I thought, as I said, I kind of thought comedy at first. Like, that he doesn't care enough to go and really screw it up, that he'll just. It will be neglect kind of thing, and we'll see the consequences of neglect, but we can recover from that. Where I didn't jump to in my mind right away, but eventually did, was that if he doesn't care enough to pay any attention, there are lots of other people who do care who will attach themselves to him and do what they want to do with this enterprise. And he won't care about whatever they do. He'll be indifferent to it until it affects him in some personal way. So Project 2025 is that I think these people at the Heritage foundation dreaming up a whole new plan for how we govern or don't govern ourselves and insinuating themselves into his world in various ways. And then he doesn't care enough to stop them. And so there they are. And then, I mean, now it gets more. I mean, the fifth risk, I didn't feel like I was watching an autocrat take over an enterprise and try to bend it to his will. I felt like I was watching a doofus who didn't have any idea what he was doing, letting all kinds of unqualified people into to maybe do nothing. Appoint Rick Perry to the head of the Energy Department when Rick Perry didn't know what was in the Energy Department kind of stuff. And this time it feels like no, this is a purposeful warping of the enterprise to reduce it to nothing more than an instrument for Donald Trump's personal ambition that instead of taking an oath to the Constitution, the millions of federal workers are basically supposed to take an oath to Donald Trump, and that anything that impedes anything he wants to do scratch whatever itch he wants to scratch will be eliminated.
- [42:32]
Unknown Speaker
One note before we go to break big news for Love it or Leave it listeners. If you want every joke, rant and moment of live show mayhem without the interruptions, now you can get it subscribe to Friends of the Pod for ad free episodes of Love it or Leave It, Pod Save America and Pod Save the World. Plus for the month of April, you can test drive it all with a 30 day free trial when you subscribe. You'll also unlock ad free episodes, gain access to our Discord community chat and exclusive content like Polar Coaster with Dan. Your subscription helps power everything we do here at Crooked. So thank you in advance. Please sign up. It's a great community. We're really grateful to everybody who's a part of it. It's helping us build this company. So sign up today@crooked.com friends or right here on Apple podcast to start your 30 day free trial. And don't forget to catch Love it or Leave it every week on on YouTube.
- [43:26]
Jon Lovett
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- [44:32]
Michael Lewis
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- [44:45]
Unknown Speaker
USA There's a way in which this is sort of a kind of traditional first term, second term dynamic playing out, but in this sort of bizarro evil version, which is, I think a lot of presidents in their first term feel like they work for the White House, and then in the second term they've gotten their bearings and now the White House works for them, right? When Donald Trump became president, there was a fear in him. I think there was a fear in how Donald Trump was going to operate, right? He had all these sort of he wanted good press and he wanted the stock market to do well, and he wanted to get credit for being the best president ever. But when what they call the deep state pushed back, they were cowed by it, right? There's a lot of things the Trump administration was stymied from doing, and this time they feel like they're not willing to be stymied. And yet they still don't know what the government does. They are still people who don't seem to know what it does. And I'm wondering, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are different people. Elon Musk is not as stupid as Donald Trump, and he's done real things in his life. He is genuine mastery in his life. And yet he has now spent months going inside of the government and seems to have learned nothing about it. And I'm wondering how you explain someone who clearly has moments where he's able to understand the deep functioning of a rocket ship, a car company, whatever, approaching this in such a cavalier way.
- [46:20]
Michael Lewis
I haven't spoken to him and I'm guessing I'm flying by radar here, but there are a couple thoughts pop to mind. The more reasonable interpretation is that he comes from the private sector and his one experience of really reforming an institution is Twitter. It's funny, he didn't found any of the companies he's famous for founding. He didn't found Tesla and presumably someone else is mostly managing it, but in a great public way took over Twitter and clearly thought that if you got a. He wanted to reduce headcount. The way you do it is this traumatic way. You just basically fire everybody and hire back who you need and which may or may not work in the private sector. Certainly doesn't seem to have worked for Twitter. It's hard to know, but I before he just sold it to himself at a. At it looks like an inflated price to me. I know people who invested alongside him who had felt they lost half their investment. So I'm not sure even that was a smart way to do that. But he has that metaphor in his head, like run it like the private sector. In the private sector you're ruthless to the employees and all that. It's not really true. I don't think there's a whole lot of smart managerial types in the private sector who think the best thing to do is traumatize your workforce first and insult them and condescend them and all the rest. And I don't think. I think there's this halo thing that goes on with Elon Musk because he's got a lot of money and he's been present and involved in marketing things very well with startups. He's. He's a good frontman for businesses that he has some managerial gift and I'm not sure he's ever really displayed that managerial gift, but he may think he has it and other people do. So the polite explanation is this is his model for how you do it in the private sector and that's better than the public sector. And he's just going to impose this. So maybe that's one explanation. It doesn't really ring completely true to me. I think he gets off. I think there's some psychological. I think he's a disturbed person and mentally not stable. And he's clearly kind of addicted to controversy and to back and forth on little duels on Twitter and all the rest. And so anything he does that provokes those kind of gets him high. It's like a drug and this is a way to do it to the opposition. And no one immediately around him comes back at him on it because he's got like minded people just around him. And so the actual controversy is what he's after. And that may be part of it. But I mean Donald Trump's letting him do it, the other part of it is like Trump, he may be seeking to eliminate anything that gets in the way of his personal ambition. And one thing that gets in the way is regulators. I mean they essentially seem to be gutting regulation everywhere they turn. And the refereeing function of the federal government, another thing gets in the way is law. So it's congruent. What he's doing is congruent with his own narrow interests, but seems to be, but, but, but isn't fully explained by it. I, I think that in some, to some extent you can explain it that you're dealing with someone who's not, he's kind of unhinged and he's got screw loose and, and so he's doing things just because he can do them. And the, the, when you get upset, he, it makes him happy. Literally you, when you literally, you know, when you all get upset, you are. He thinks, he thinks that works, that, that shows it's working. He's owning.
- [50:10]
Unknown Speaker
Right. Well, there, there's. The reason I ask about it is there's a, I don't know if you would agree but to me there is some kind of a through line here. You look at people who, for various differing motivations, some good, some not look at a consensus in an industry, inside an institution and decide that they see a better way to do it and they're willing to take a risk, whether it's risking their professional lives or risking financial success in order to pursue something that a lot of people are telling them is either dumb or wrong or going to hurt them in some way. And I'm wondering if you like, look, I'm not. High frequency traders with like a Pepsi Rolex are not the same as charity Dean. You know, these are, these are not the same kinds of people. But I'm wondering if you see a connection between the kinds of people that are willing to say hold on a second, the way we're doing things doesn't make sense. I see a different path yet.
- [51:02]
Michael Lewis
No, you know, in a funny, in the very big time, in the very beginning, I had a sliver of hope that's what we were going to be watching with him that it would, 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 got, it's too hard to fire people. There's a lot of problems. People aren't incentivized properly. The problem with trying to like makes 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 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. 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. And so. So he's doing. It's a little hard to. To. 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.
- [52:59]
Unknown Speaker
Right. Well, there's the. It's guessing, but then it's also like, even if you look, it's. I think there's like sort of an original sin here, which is thinking that one person can do any of this. Right. Like, forget going to the inspector. Like, if you were trying to go in and say, let's cut, we need to cut a trillion dollars from this budget, you would go to the department heads and you'd say, you have a month.
- [53:19]
Michael Lewis
Yeah, there you go.
- [53:20]
Unknown Speaker
Come to me with cuts.
- [53:21]
Michael Lewis
Yes, there you go.
- [53:22]
Unknown Speaker
You know your agency better than me. I don't care how you do it. I need to see results.
- [53:26]
Michael Lewis
Yep.
- [53:26]
Unknown Speaker
But he doesn't do any of that.
- [53:27]
Michael Lewis
No.
- [53:27]
Unknown Speaker
He fires the people that do that.
- [53:29]
Michael Lewis
Right. And he thinks he's smarter. 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 thing. 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. And it comes in knowing nothing. So, no, it's not the way you would go. You or I or any sensible person would go about it. But because he has got this glow of a very rich person, it's just assumed he knows what he's doing. And I'm convinced he doesn't. But back to your original point was like I think you were saying, maybe we need something like this to jar this institution because otherwise it's unmovable and it isn't how you do it. But that idea might not be completely wrong. 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 good, for reasons we've been discussing implicitly in attracting talented young people to work for it. 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. But then again, one of the first things they do is fire all the probationary workers. Those are the ones they can 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. So he's firing exactly the wrong people if you're trying to do that. So I I there he's got, 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, than what we're trying to, what we're groping for here. But it's, but he hasn't told it. Like, whatever it is, it's behind closed door. We haven't heard it. Right.
- [55:53]
Unknown Speaker
And it's not clear.
- [55:54]
Michael Lewis
Right.
- [55:54]
Unknown Speaker
It's not clear when he makes up stories about how the Democrats are using Social Security to bribe people to become voters. It's not clear whether he genuinely believes that or if he believes that that's valuable, a valuable way to describe what would be ultimately seen as a deeply unpopular gutting of the federal government. I think the reason I was asking about that, though, is putting musk aside. You write about People that go inside of institutions and say, I'm gonna do this a different way. And I look at the Republican Party and if you would have gave me a list of a hundred Republicans in 2007 and said, hey, ten of these people are gonna blow up their lives because they believe Donald Trump is a threat and 90 of them are gonna go along, I probably would have picked the wrong people. You know, but like you write about people that are.
- [56:42]
Michael Lewis
Let me stop you on that. Who would you have picked?
- [56:44]
Unknown Speaker
I have no, I have no idea. I have no idea. But I don't think I would have expected like Bill Kristol to be applauding Bernie Sanders. Right. And I, and I would have been, I think surprised by the number of politicians that acquiesced and the number of consultants who actually showed great courage. Right. There's been a number of Republican right wing political consultants that have refused to go along while all the kind of politicians have caved. I probably would not have picked Dick Cheney.
- [57:09]
Michael Lewis
Yep.
- [57:10]
Unknown Speaker
I wouldn't have picked Liz Cheney. When Liz Cheney ran for the Senate in Wyoming, I thought she was disgusting. Cuz she was campaigning against what they called the Ground Zero Mosque. Right. Like she was to me, the Republican Party at its worst. And then here she is campaigning with Kamala Harris, which obviously worked pretty poorly. But you never know who's gonna be.
- [57:31]
Michael Lewis
Brave and who's gonna be a coward. Yeah.
- [57:34]
Unknown Speaker
Right. And I'm curious what you've looked, but like you, you know, Charity Dean had post it notes. Right. About how to be brave. Right. And that's a shameful thing. Right? It's shameful for a system to require bravery in order to do the right thing. That's a problem.
- [57:50]
Michael Lewis
Yeah.
- [57:51]
Unknown Speaker
But I'm wondering what you learned about what? Like why are some people brave in these moments and what do we do to encourage that?
- [57:59]
Michael Lewis
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.
- [58:05]
Unknown Speaker
Great.
- [58:08]
Michael Lewis
My first step in answering that question is I think that people first place Red Badge of Courage Danny Kahneman used to love 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 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 evaluating a complicated thing, the mood they're in when they're required to make a decision, or whether they're going to 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 is not exactly right that they're brave people and cowardly people. Totally. However, I do think one precondition for the brave behavior 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. 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. If John McCain was around, he would not have. He wouldn't be sucking up to Trump. He would blown up his political career before he sucked up to Trump. So I think narrative is a personal narrative is a very powerful thing. And when your narrative. 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, 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, all that. And when that's the narrative, then you're really susceptible. It comes along, something like, Trump comes along and you want to win, you don't want to. There's no point. 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.
- [60:57]
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's. And I think there's something deeper to what you're saying, too. Right. Because implicit of what you're saying is I don't live in a society that rewards bravery anymore. You can't win by being brave. Right. And I. And that does seem to be part of what Trump is doing as well. Right. When you fire the inspectors general, when you fire. When you. When you shut down the CDC's FOIA office. Right. When you make accountability, something you'll never have to face. Right. When there's no price to doing the wrong thing, suddenly it becomes an advantage. And he wants everyone to think, people think and act like him. And one way you do that is making bravery a bad investment.
- [61:35]
Michael Lewis
Yes. And he's hostile to bravery. Right. Remember how hostile he was to John McCain's personal bravery? He's hostile to that and he's hostile to. I think this is a corollary. He's hostile to trust that I found. And if you're going to kind of try to predict what Donald Trump's going to do next, look for where there is still trust and assume he's going to come for it. Our money, the dollar is a natural target. But it's like assume that where you may not even. The crust is usually assumed. Once you've got it, you're not 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. I mean, it is, it's not even an insult to say. Right. It's just a fact. Like you have to like. He just lies all the time. He lies so much that. 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. I just. Lying is better, is sort of how. And he cheats people. You know, it's just like one thing after another that. 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, it works better. He's better being dishonest than other people. And so I think that 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 and that those things are in some way antagonistic to his, his purpose on Earth and So watch out, because he's coming for him.
- [63:42]
Unknown Speaker
One aspect of trust in a society is journalism. And I was thinking about how much the ability to report on powerful figures has changed since you wrote say Liars Poker. Right. And I'm wondering if you feel that change, right? Like today there would be non disclosure agreements. Today you'd be getting phone calls from lawyers.
- [64:08]
Michael Lewis
It's really changed.
- [64:10]
Unknown Speaker
And do you feel that, do you feel that when you're doing that?
- [64:12]
Michael Lewis
Let me just tell you a story. It's amazing how it changed. So I worked for the most powerful firm on Wall Street, Solomon Brothers. I worked. 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, it was a force. I left three years later. When I was walking out the door, I told my bosses I was going to write a book about Wall Street. And they, their response was, it didn't even occur to them they could stop me. And in addition, they weren't even worried about it that they were like, they were worried about me. Like, you're leaving all this money behind. Is something wrong with you? Like, like don't blow up your career was their attitude. 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 publicity PR firm kind of thing, but not much. And that's it. The book, 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. I would have signed non disclosure 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, we'll look what happened to the woman who just wrote the Facebook book. Facebook, right. I mean, she couldn't get on TV all of a sudden because she, she had signed agreements that said she wouldn't disparage Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook. But the big thing is the fear of lawsuits that the publisher or that whatever media enterprise I was dealing with would have deterred them from publication. And would it have stopped publication of Liars Poker? I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. I doubt it. But it would have been harder. And what happens is it's the equivalent of what is that Timothy Snyder line about 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 Jeff Bezos. 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 had to sit it down. 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. 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.
- [67:08]
Unknown Speaker
Last question. And I have, I have no known knowledge, but I was thinking about this before the interview and if I were a betting man, and I am, I'd bet you're interested in artificial intelligence. I just have a. That would be what I would bet you're interested in. And I'm wondering if that's true. And I'm wondering if you have questions about the way artificial intelligence companies are kind of recklessly putting this technology into the world while behind the scenes lamenting that it may lead to the destruction of humanity. And what, whether it's flash boys or going infinite leads you to wonder about what these companies are doing.
- [67:44]
Michael Lewis
So when I think about taking on subjects, one of the things I ask is what can I add? Like, 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, 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 have one. I mean, I have all kinds of other responses. 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. And he was asking me about who might do it and. And I said, don't let anybody do it. Let's let. When you are comfortable with your machine, with ChatGPT, 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. 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 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. 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 understand, 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 fascinating.
- [70:19]
Unknown Speaker
The book is who is Government? There's a lot we need to do to figure out how to kind of repair trust, especially in institutions and people. I think one good place to start is throw in Jail. Anyone who asks Michael Lewis who should write my biography, I think that's a good starting place. Michael Lewis, thank you so much for your time. It's been great to talk to you, John.
- [70:38]
Michael Lewis
Totally enjoyed it.
- [70:39]
Jon Lovett
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- [71:53]
Michael Lewis
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- [71:58]
Unknown Speaker
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- [72:01]
Michael Lewis
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