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Michael Lewis (6:43)

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Al Franken (6:53)

I think the first time that we ever talked was about the fifth risk in the book. You looked at the Commerce Department. And I remember, like the biggest part of the Commerce Department, which I don't think anybody knows unless they read your book, is noaa.

Michael Lewis (7:08)

Yeah, it's three quarters of the Commerce Department.

Al Franken (7:11)

It's three quarters.

Michael Lewis (7:12)

And the biggest part of that is.

Al Franken (7:14)

The weather service, and it's the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yes, I remember that. So the biggest part is the weather service Trump wanted to put as the head of NOAA, the CEO of AccuWeather.

Michael Lewis (7:31)

Correct.

Al Franken (7:33)

Okay. Now, the AccuWeather is a company that commercializes the weather that NOAA comes up with, right?

Michael Lewis (7:42)

Yes, yes. Noah gives them all the data and the weather predictions and they do whatever they want on top of that. But yes.

Al Franken (7:49)

And they didn't end up with him, thank goodness.

Michael Lewis (7:53)

No, his nomination was frozen. The Senate stopped it.

Al Franken (7:57)

Really?

Michael Lewis (7:57)

Yeah. I mean, so I think they held it. I'm trying to remember exactly who did it. But, yes, he never got ahold of it. And the worry was that you put a private enterprise in charge of the National Weather Service, private enterprise that does weather stuff. All they're going to want to do is monetize it. And the way you do this is like Al gets his. Al, who's got a premium membership, he gets a tornado warning. But Michael, who doesn't have the premium membership, doesn't get it. So that's kind of like. And in addition, it's like it was a public good. The taxpayer paid for this whole apparatus in the first place. Why should they get to monetize it that way?

Al Franken (8:39)

So this ethos has kind of slipped into Doge, I think, which is about getting rid of people.

Michael Lewis (8:49)

Seems your judgment here would be as good as mine as what it's all about. What it is clearly not about is what they say it's about. So they say it was about waste, fraud, abuse. And everything they've done suggests it's the opposite. Like the fraud part or the waste part. There were these people inside each of the agencies, like the Commerce Department called inspector general. And this person's job, he would call you a senator or you a congressman and say he was an independent watchdog who was charged with ferreting out waste and fraud. And so they got rid of the independent watchdogs. About the first thing they did. If they were really serious about that, they would not have done that. And then the patterns to their behavior is. It's, it's, it's hard to figure out exactly what they're after, because I think they're after more than one thing. I think there's more than one cook in this kitchen. It's not just Elon Musk, it's the Heritage Foundation. It's got who got their plan. It's anything that gets in the way of Donald Trump using the federal government.

Al Franken (10:00)

Well, this is all the Project 2025 stuff.

Michael Lewis (10:03)

Right? But it's a bunch of different things going on. But, but it isn't about, like, making the government more effective or work better for the people or eliminating waste. I mean, you know, it's funny or, or the big thing they, they've said is, you know, it's to eliminate the budget deficit. And you could tell by how they just started that that wasn't what that was about because the budget, as, you know, like 86% of it is military entitlements and, and interest on the debt, 14%. Is this so called deep state or administrative state or the civil service. And of that, you know, it's a fraction of that is payroll. And they focused entirely on that. And so no matter what they did there, they weren't going to have that much effect on the budget deficit. It's clearly more about preventing the government from doing what it's meant to be doing and using it to do something else.

Al Franken (10:56)

And your new book is who is Government? It's about the people who populate the government and a number of heroes.

Michael Lewis (11:06)

It didn't set out to be that. So what happened was when I wrote the Fifth Risk, which you and I have talked about, I was so struck by the caliber of the person inside the federal agencies. And the couple of times I went, I looked more deeply into who these people were. They were natural subjects for some piece of writing that they. And there was a reason for this. They tend to be very mission driven. They tended not to attract. Want to attract attention to themselves, which makes them better. The opposite. They're there in spite of being able to make more money outside in the private sector. They're there for a purpose, and nobody knows what they do. So I thought, like, if I ever come back to this material, I want to focus on those characters. And then I thought, if it's just me doing it, whatever comes out of it will naturally be responded to as, oh, that's just Michael writing what Michael writes. And I thought this material was. So here's what almost never happens in writing life. It never happens that you find something that's really surprising to the reader, that's also kind of typical. That actually is. And it's surprising to the reader that these federal workers are amazing characters doing amazing things. But it's really typical in the government that they are, and their stories just haven't been told. And I thought, to avoid the charge that I was just like Michael was cherry picking a few people, I found six writers who are very different kinds of writers. And I just said, here we're dropping you into the federal bureaucracy. Write about whatever you want to write about. And they don't have to be heroes. They can be whatever you want. If you want to find waste, fraud and abuse, you can find waste, fraud and abuse. All but one of the writers, there was one exception, came out with basically the story. The story that I saw was. The story was, these people are amazing, and what they're doing is amazing. The one exception wrote about the consumer price index, which in itself is an amazing accomplishment. But he picked as a character the consumer price index. So there was no, like, rules about what they could write about. But all these very different writers came with this, came out with the same conclusion that, oh my God, look at this. What we have there is precious.

Al Franken (13:23)

I want to talk about how you found these people and go over the two that you write about. Can you tell me about in terms of how you found these people, who Arthur A. Allen is.

Michael Lewis (13:35)

Yes. Arthur Allen was the first name on an alphabetized list of thousands of civil servants who had been furloughed who had been furloughed as unnecessary during the first Trump term when he closed down the government. And Arthur A. Allen turned out to be. So I grabbed him because he was the first name on the list and I called him up and he was the only oceanographer in the Coast Guard search and rescue division. And I went and spent a few days with him in Connecticut, where he lives, and found that he'd done a whole bunch of things in his 30 something year career in the Coast Guard. But the coolest thing he'd done was he'd basically invented a science. And the science was the science of how objects drift at sea. Americans have like an incredible ability to get lost at sea. We do it better than everybody else, really. Oh my God. It's, it's like, it's because we're rich and we have all these boats and people get, people think that they're safe and they're not safe and went to the Coast Guard rescues like huge numbers of people every year. But it had a problem when Art Allen arrived at the Coast Guard if they knew that your boat had capsized at 2 in the afternoon on the Chesapeake Bay because the storm had come up and they didn't start looking for you till four, you would have drifted from where you capsized. And if they could presume you were on an upside down sailboat, you would drift at a different, in a different way than if you were just in the water. A body that drifts. Different objects drift differently and so differently.

Al Franken (15:06)

So to find you, they had to.

Michael Lewis (15:07)

Know, you had to know how the, how the you or the object you were on drifted. And no one had made these calculations. And Arthur A. Allen starts throwing stuff into the Long Island Sound and measuring how it drifts depending on what it is and classifies a couple of hundred object, different kinds of objects. And just, I know it's a crazy thing to dislike do, but like no one else is going to do it. And a huge number of lives end up being at stake. But the cool, the wild thing was that when he finally finishes his list of mathematical equations of how Various objects drift like weeks after that. Coast Guard has this in their arsenal how to look for people. A 350 pound man goes off the side of a carnival cruise ship 80 miles east of Miami and isn't discovered.

Al Franken (15:58)

Missing for like off a Carnival cruise ship?

Michael Lewis (16:00)

Yeah, just like off the side of the ship. He's like cannonballs off the ship in the middle of the night. And, and the cruise ship can go look at his cameras and say, oh, we see the object going off three hours ago, but he will have drifted. And in any other time in human history, any other time, he's just dead. Like finding him is impossible.

Al Franken (16:20)

But because of Arthur A. Anderson, they.

Michael Lewis (16:22)

Pull Allen, Arthur A. Allen. The Coast Guard plucks him out of the sea alive. This happened. This is, I mean, thousands of lives have been saved because of Arthur A. Allen. But here's the thing that triggered this particular. Who is government? This particular book that was the last piece of the fifth Risk I wrote, was the story of Arthur A. Allen. After I'd spent three days with Arthur A. Allen in his home, interviewing his wife, his kids, going, learning all about the science of drifting objects. I'm going back to the airport and he calls my cell and he says, he says, hey, you're a writer. And I said, I said, yeah, yeah, I'm a writer. He says, man, like, my son just told me that you, like, some of your books have been movies and you, you write books. And, and, and, and he said, are you going to write about this? And I'd had a notepad out the whole time. I'm sure I told him like when I came, I was interested in writing, but he had just, and I said like, yeah, like, why did you think, why did you think I flew across country and spent three days talking to you? And he said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift. And I thought, you know, this is the public servant he likes. He was willing to spend three days teaching me, a total stranger, what he knew because he thought it was so important without having the faintest idea that he was going to get attention, was worthy of attention. You know, all that. And I thought these people, they're so bad at telling their own story. They just don't dramatize themselves that this is an opportunity for people who can dramatize other people that they need to be dramatized because our country has forgotten what these people do.

Al Franken (17:54)

Well, it's interesting how you come up with each of them. The first one that you write about is Christopher Mark.

Michael Lewis (18:01)

Christopher Mark.

Al Franken (18:03)

He is a guy who ends up computing, figuring out how to prevent the roofs of mines. Coal mines, coal mines, Coal mines from collapsing. Especially long wall mines. Is that what they're called?

Michael Lewis (18:17)

All mines, but long. They're two basic kinds of coal mines. Long wall mines and room and pillar mines. And no one but you or me needs to know what the difference is. But he walked into a situation. Christopher Mark. It sounds like, oh, trivial problem, small problem. Who cares about the ceilings of coal mines?

Al Franken (18:36)

No, but, no, but, no.

Michael Lewis (18:37)

It's killed 50,000American workers over the last century during the Vietnam War. It was more dangerous being a coal miner than being in the Vietnam War. It's an incredible. Because of this, because it's the most common way they die. And he works this out. He starts his life working in a coal mine and is almost killed and he backs his way out of it.

Al Franken (19:03)

And you're attracted to his story because at first, because you say this is a coal miner who came up with.

Michael Lewis (19:08)

Yeah, so I saw the. Again, I got another list of thousands of names and I was looking for some hint of human drama. And it said he'd solved this problem. And it said, a former coal miner. And I thought, you know, I imagined a story like he grew up in West Virginia, like someone died who he loved, you know, whatever. There was some reason a former coal miner went and solved this systematic problem. And I got him on the phone and within like 15 minutes, he's told me the following. First thing he says, I said, like, tell me your story. He said, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey and my dad was a professor at the university. And I thought, oh no, I don't know where this is going, but it's not nearly as interesting. It's not nearly as interesting as I imagined. And it turned out, it turned out to be way more interesting because.

Al Franken (19:52)

Right.

Michael Lewis (19:53)

His dad was a guy named Robert Mark. You can Google him. He was very famous for an engineer. Robert Mark had invented a technology that enabled him to stress test things like Air Force fighter planes. Before they built them.

Al Franken (20:08)

He built models of them, built models.

Michael Lewis (20:11)

Of them, and then subjected them this stress process. And, and he applied this technique to Gothic cathedrals in France. And no one really knew how the Gothic cathedrals were built because there was left no record. And they're built over like a long period of time. He showed what was actually keeping the roofs of Gothic cathedrals up. And he was so good at it that before he went over to France to visit the cathedrals, he'd say, the stone's going to be eroded here. There's going to be weakness in the structure here. And it was all true. He, he really diagnosed the buildings. The son, Christopher, my subject, had rebelled against the father in high school. He said, I'm not going to join. He started throwing around words like bourgeois in the family house. And he said, I'm going to join. I'm not going to Princeton, I'm not going to Harvard, which he could have done. He said, I'm going to join the working class. And he goes out and he works in a auto factory and works in a UPS warehouse. And then it finally ends up at a coal mine with several other young radicals. And the other young radicals lasted, he said, exactly a day. The coal mine was so awful. But he liked it.

Al Franken (21:15)

And why did he like it?

Michael Lewis (21:17)

He thought what, the way he put it was, you know, you're in a place other people are going to be afraid of and can't tolerate and all the rest, and you're not afraid and you can tolerate it and it makes you feel special kind of thing, like I, I can hang here. He was just interested in it, but, but pretty soon he sees like, this is a treacherous environment. He gets himself out. He goes, he gets a PhD undergraduate and a PhD at Penn State and has a 30 year career solving this problem. And the solving of the problem is really interesting. But the father son thing is also really interesting because I'm on the phone with him, he's telling me this story and I say, like, oh, you just reprise your dad's career. He figured out why Gothic cathedral roofs don't collapse. And you figured out how to stop coal mine roofs from collapse collapsing, of course. And on the course, and he goes, no, he goes, not of course. He goes, that's outrageous. It's completely not true. I had nothing to do what I did. Had nothing to do with what my father did. He was so, he was so defensive about it. I thought this is, there's, this is, there's a drama here, right? And it turns out it just was a beautiful story. It, it turned out that indeed that, that he had basically reprised his father's career. Not, not really thought about it that way. But in like the year I think it was like 2001, the federal government figures out that the National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down like that. One of the towers is subsiding and there's a real fear that this thing is structurally unsound. And someone from the government calls Chris, Mark's dad, because he's the Gothic cathedral guy, come over and figure out what's wrong with this building. And he gets over there and he realizes that whatever's wrong with it is not above ground, that they designed the foundation before they really designed the building. And the building was built over 100 years and the building's too big for the foundation. He needed to understand what was going on underground. So he calls his son and he says, I need your help. And together they figure out what's going on, prevent the National Cathedral from falling down kind of thing. But again, I found this with these people. Once you're in a purpose driven life, once you're in a mission driven life, it's amazing how story follows. It's different from, you know, if you go. If you got a character who's just interested in money, it's just not very interesting. But interest follows People, people.

Al Franken (23:38)

You've written about them.

Michael Lewis (23:39)

Yeah, I've written about them, but. But they're not. They aren't story machines in the way people are who got a purpose, who've got something they really want to do, and it isn't about themselves. That combination just seems to lead to really cool stories.

Al Franken (23:57)

So even after working with his father to make sure the National Cathedral didn't fall down, he didn't sort of wasn't saying to himself, I kind of did the same work.

Michael Lewis (24:10)

No. In fact, I went for a hike a couple months ago with him and his wife, and he got ahead on the trail for a bit. This was after I'd written the piece. And his wife says, you know, you got him thinking about his father for the first time. He said, she's a psychiatrist. She's kind of funny about it. She says, finally someone said it to him. But two, you know, you get just a little distance from the situation. And you see that like he's. I mean, he had all this aptitude, kind of the apple didn't fall far from the tree. He. He used it for a different purpose.

Al Franken (24:45)

And has saved untold number of lives. Lots of lives.

Michael Lewis (24:49)

Lots of lives. And not just in this country. I mean, people. What he learned about how to design a coal mine has been borrowed by everybody else, of course.

Al Franken (24:59)

We'll be right back with Michael Lewis on his book who is governor. Let's talk about Heather Stone.

Michael Lewis (25:10)

All right.

Al Franken (25:11)

Okay. And she was in the fda or is in the fda.

Michael Lewis (25:15)

She as of today? I think so. But it's, you know, touch and go there. They're letting people go left and right. So this goes back. I wrote a book about COVID called the Premonition. And while I was working on this, a character in the Premonition, a UCSF mad scientist named Joe derisi, who I was writing about him for other reasons, but he mentions that in his lab, he has just gone looking for cures for a brain eating amoeba called Ballamuthia. I'd never heard of it. No one had ever heard of it until the 90s. It was discovered in an animal in the San Diego Zoo, but it turns out, starts turning up in peaks.

Al Franken (25:53)

It eats your brain.

Michael Lewis (25:54)

It eats your brain. And up until pretty recently, it would eat your brain. They'd take you into the emergency room and you couldn't stand up and you were seeing triple and all that. And they knew it was something in your brain, but they didn't know what. And people were dying, not in huge numbers, but when people died, they just said, unidentified encephalitis. Something happened in the brain, and we don't know what, but now you can test for it and you can discover this thing. And this mad scientist had watched someone die. It was a horrible death. And then watched someone else, even though it's pretty rare, come in and be brought in. And in between, he had taken this brain eating amoeba balamufia into his lab and bombarded it with every known approved drug in Europe and the United States. And he found that, weirdly, a single drug used in Europe for urinary tract infections, it's called nitroxyline, killed the amoeba. And so he said, next time this happens, let's at least try to treat it. And they use this drug. They got FDA approval from Heather Stone at the FDA to treat a person with ballamouthia, and the person survived. So I learned about this way back when I'm working on that book, and I say to Joe derisi, I say, well, you solved the problem. No one's going to die of ballamouthia anymore. You've got a cure at least, maybe a cure. He goes, no. He goes, I know about it, and maybe a few doctors at UCSF know about it, but if you're dragged into a hospital in Chicago and you have ballamouthia, the odds are pretty good they don't know about this. And I said, like, why isn't someone. When you do, when you have a kind of discovery like this, why isn't there some bank of discovery where you can go find what people have done in these cases? And he said, it's funny you should say that. There's a single woman named Heather Stone in the FDA who has got a B in Urban about this and is trying to build. She's got an app called Cure id, and the app is for doctors.

Al Franken (27:48)

Cure id, Cure id, Cure ID and.

Michael Lewis (27:51)

Cure ID doctors anywhere in the world, when they're dealing with a rare disease and they try stuff, they can report what they did, and it's useful to know what didn't work as well as what did work. And of course, this is a problem that the government needs to kind of be on because the private sector has no interest. Like, pharmaceutical companies don't care about really rare disease because there's no money in disease, not enough customers, and you can't do science on it. It's sort of like you can't do a randomized control trial about. With people who've got ballamuthia in their brain, right?

Al Franken (28:23)

They're not two groups at.

Michael Lewis (28:25)

They're not two groups at one time. And if you had anything that might work, you can't withhold it. You know, it's so. So you're. So what you've got is story. You've got a series of anecdotes. Tether had this. She, who had been the victim of a rare disease, she realized that, like, we need to have a place where people can report these anecdotes. And it's a story. It's the end of the book. And it's really a story of government failure because the FDA doesn't really get behind her. She's not. She's not able to market it. We obviously have problems now with trust in the US Government. It never really gets off the ground. But what's the story I tell is it's about a little girl, Elena Smith, in De Queen, Arkansas, who contracts Ballamuthia. She's dying. The doctors don't know that there is this treatment. Heather Stone is thanked in the back of a technical paper by Joe derisi. It's just a preprint. It's just gone on the web. The mom finds the preprint, calls Heather Stone, and Heather Stone fast tracks the drug to the little girl, and the little girl survives. And it's a story. It's this drama about this little girl. And you kind of say, oh, well, that's great. It all worked. But at the same time, this little girl survived. Another little girl, the same age in Davis, California, died because the doctors never heard of the cure. And it's sort of like the story of how the Stone is a story of a really smart, dedicated person with a really good idea trying to do something in the government. The government should do and we've kind of lost the will to do it. That's what the story is and how tragic that is.

Al Franken (29:59)

Now going forward, will people with Ballamuthia know where to go?

Michael Lewis (30:03)

I think because of the book and the story, Yes. I think that now you Google Ballamouthia and this article will be the first thing that comes up. So. Yes, but what about the other 6 billion rare diseases? What really needs to happen is we need to empower and fund Heather Stone so that we have this resource. But instead, what's happening is the FDA is being gutted. So, I mean, it's all moving in the wrong direction right now.

Al Franken (30:34)

So because of the book, no one has financed her project.

Michael Lewis (30:40)

You know, I will tell you what she has told me. She suspects she still has her job because of the book, though she doesn't know that to be true. But she's sitting in a traumatized environment where it's very hard for her to do her job because so many people who she works with have been let go.

Al Franken (30:58)

Jesus.

Michael Lewis (30:59)

Well, this is our world we're living in right now. It's just indiscriminate gutting of the federal government, as if it doesn't do anything, we can just kind of get rid of it.

Al Franken (31:11)

And why do you suppose Musk came to this conclusion?

Michael Lewis (31:15)

I think if you're a private sector, a certain kind of private sector businessman, that this is how you would cut. You go in and you just do it really fast and you cut a lot. He did this at Twitter, right? You just drop everybody. And the people who are really necessary, you can hire back. It didn't work at Twitter. It's not like Twitter became a successful business when it became X. And if you would. I mean, the last, I had a friend who invested alongside him, so who told me that three months ago, his stock in X was worth half of what he'd paid for it. So that it's not clear that it's actually a smart management philosophy, but it's an idea that's alive in the private sector. So I think that's one thing going on. The second is just this. I think that there's a faction in the Republican Party that has said so often the government is all wasteful and we don't need it, that they actually come to believe it without knowing anything about what the government's actually doing.

Al Franken (32:15)

They've done some horrible mistakes already, Doge. By laying off the guys who keep track of the nuclear weapons and stuff like that.

Michael Lewis (32:26)

I know, it's crazy. They've made mistakes that even they acknowledge are mistakes, but they are their mistakes. Like cutting the, I don't know, basically shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a really bad idea. Cutting the Department of Education is not a good idea. USAID is a really bad idea.

Al Franken (32:42)

USAID is unbelievably stupid.

Michael Lewis (32:44)

Unbelievably stupid. And we're leaving ourselves exposed, essentially. So a lot of the risks that the government manages are kind of long term risks. Or put it another way, you know, the government's filled with all these, or the society is filled with all these bombs and fuses attached to the bomb. And the government's job is to prevent the fuse from being lit. And when you remove that function, the fuse gets lit, but it might be a while before the spark gets to the bomb. So you don't experience necessarily the cost of mismanaging or cutting or whatever the federal government right away. It's down the road. One answer to your question, why are they doing what they're doing is they can, like nobody sees it right away. They don't feel it right away, but they will and we will. And then the question is, when some horrible thing happens, as it will, will people realize it's because they did this?

Al Franken (33:42)

On Wednesday, I'm going to be speaking with Atul Gawande who ran usaid. And you know, he'll explain to you, right? I mean, a couple million people will probably die because. Yeah, because of that.

Michael Lewis (34:01)

Yeah.

Al Franken (34:01)

And it's the richest man in the world doing that to the poorest people in the world.

Michael Lewis (34:06)

That's right. He himself is immune to most of the consequences of his actions. Yes, that's right. And he's, you know what, I've, I've had trouble like remembering, but it is definitely true. You just assume that someone in that position must know a lot. Like if you're going to go do that kind of thing, you must have made a great study of this place and really thought it through. But it's pretty clear, like he knows a lot less than I know about the federal government and I wouldn't dare do anything like this. It's an amazing arrogance that he thinks that he's got this kind of universal competence because he made some money. It's like, I'm rich, therefore I must be smart. And everybody around me tells me I'm smart and no one contradicts that.

Al Franken (34:55)

I'm the richest man in the world and therefore the smartest man in the world.

Michael Lewis (34:58)

And therefore I can do whatever I want Here, Michael.

Al Franken (35:03)

Thank you, Al.

Michael Lewis (35:04)

It's always a pleasure.

Al Franken (35:06)

Well, I hope you enjoyed listening. That beautiful music is by Leo Kotke, the great Leo Kotke. I want to thank Peter Ogburn for producing this podcast. We'll talk again next week.

Michael Lewis (35:33)

If you like the Al Franken Podcast, you can listen to all episodes ad free right now by joining Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey@wondery.com survey.