← The Bulwark Podcast
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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Hey, guys, just a couple programming notes. There are two news stories that me and my colleagues have our hair on fire about, and I did not get to them on this podcast. I want to direct you to where you can find our scorching hot takes. For me, it is the continued revelations around the men that we have sent to this barbarous El Salvador prison camp and the fact that according to their lawyers, at least a few of them actually had not done anything illegally, were here legally under the Venezuelan temporary protected status, and were sent wrongfully based on a misunderstanding of their tattoos or a government that doesn't care or that's being intentionally cruel. You know, we will find out the reasoning, but it is just so sick and so un American. I did a 11 minute rant about this when my blood was boiling hot last night. You can get that either on our YouTube feed or now we're turning these into a podcast as well. Search for Bulwark takes in your podcast feed. Subscribe to that feed and then you can see it's under the headline breaking the New News about the El Salvador deportations. So in addition to that, Adrian Carrasquillo, in his newsletter for us huddled masses, writes about this tattoo issue and gives you some historical examples of how the government has screwed this up before, misunderstanding the tattoos of the people that they're detaining. So please go read that as well. One other thing. George Conway, his hair was on fire over Paul Weiss. This law firm's capitulation to Donald Trump. Trump extorted them. It's a complicated story, but essentially they had an executive order that was gonna target the firm because of their work on some of the investigations against Trump. The head of Paul Weiss went to the White House, groveled, cut some deal where they're gonna do 40 million in pro bono services for Trump. It's an absolutely insane. George Conway knows all the players. So we taped an emergency episode of George Conway explains it all together. So go check that out on that podcast feed or also on YouTube. So those are the news stories. We got a good one coming for you next. It is Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame and Sarah Vowell. They have a new book out about who is government, which is very relevant right now given everything that's happening with Doge. So stick around for that. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Could not be more delighted to welcome today the pride of Newman High School right around the corner from me. His many books include the Big Short, Moneyball, and the Blind side. He's the editor of a new collection of essays, who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, which came out this week. We'll have one of those essayists, Sarah Vowell, join us in segment two. But first, it's Michael Lewis. What's up, Michael?
- [02:50]
Michael Lewis
Good to see you, Tim. I don't think this is maybe the first interview I've ever done where the host is in New Orleans.
- [02:55]
Tim Miller
Well, there you go. Proud to do. Walter's never interviewed you.
- [02:58]
Michael Lewis
Not from there. Not from there, no. Walter has interviewed me, but in person in New York.
- [03:04]
Tim Miller
All right, Well, I could hit your high school with a three wood from here. So we're right in the hood. I've got another brag on you first before we get into the book. So when I was writing why We did it, which is kind of my reflection on how the Republican Party got to where it is, the editor asked me what book to model it. I wanted to model it after, like, style wise. What books? I gave him two. One of them was Losers, your 1996 campaign book that is maybe the least acclaimed of all your works. But I loved it because you did not get boxed in by the conventions of political reporting and treated the characters as three dimensional people. And it's just delightful. So people are looking for a political book that is from a time when the stakes were much lower. Losers is a good one. But anyway, what are your reflections on that book?
- [03:53]
Michael Lewis
The way it happened was I didn't set out to write a book. I got sent off by the New Republic to cover the 96 campaign, the center of things. Dole versus Clinton was so dull and so controlled that I needed to find a way to kind of come at it with a different voice. Like just doing it conventionally was gonna be deadly. And I just called him. I said, let me just do this as a, as a kind of a travelogue and let me just go where I think it's interesting rather than where the campaign tells me to go. And it rocked in the New Republic. It was like, great. I mean, I made the main character, Maury Taylor, and also ran in the Republican primary. And the conceit was like, nobody actually gives a shit about Clinton or Dole. There's no, like, passion around either one of them. But there's all this passion around all these kind of marginal candidates. I mean, some were not so marginal, you know, Pat Buchanan. And you could get to kind of where political passions were in the country through these candidates better than through the main campaign. And of course, it's also more Fun. So it works so well. And it was basically coherent because it was just my travel as a political travelogue that we brought it out as a book. But you're right, it was very hard after the campaign to, to sell a book.
- [05:03]
Tim Miller
I mean, it wasn't Alan Keys and.
- [05:05]
Michael Lewis
Maury Taylor, but also about just that event. Like, nobody wanted to read about the 96 presidential campaign. But I love doing it, man. It was so much fun. I don't want to go on too much about it, but I got to say, it was one of those moments in my writing life where I realized that you could invest anything with importance just by observing it. You could take the reader who came to it thinking they wanted to read about Clinton and Dole, wherever you wanted to take them if you were compelling enough. If I didn't write about Maury Taylor one week, people were disappointed. It was kind of funny.
- [05:41]
Tim Miller
Also with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight and Trump, I guess, 20 years between 96 and 16, taking the fringe right wing candidates seriously, treating them seriously, I mean, teasing them too, but treating them seriously and reporting what they said and all that actually like has relevance. I mean, a lot of these kind of niche type characters are the people that are not the actual people, but the types of people that are at the center of our government right now.
- [06:06]
Michael Lewis
This is completely true. Maury Taylor is definitely a proto Trump, though. He's without the malice and without the vengeance, without any of that. You meet him and, you know, he's basically a sweet person, but he's coming at it from the position of someone who knows zero about governing. His qualifications are he ran a Titan. He was the CEO of Titan Tire and Wheel, very successful businessman. But has that very successful businessman's resistance to the idea that government does anything useful? And if you kind of patch together all these different characters views of the world, you just got a fuller portrait of where America was politically. So as a result, you can see where we are now. Then you're just looking at Clinton and Dole. You never guess what would happen?
- [06:49]
Tim Miller
Hell, no. No, that's right. All right, well, to that point, about government, that's this sort of, who is government? What does government do? Well, is I guess the central thesis to the book pretty relevant now, given what has happened with Elon. So I'm wondering if you could share with the audience some of the people you feature broadly. And I guess I was wondering, have any of them got the ax yet of any of the people in the book?
- [07:11]
Michael Lewis
Briefly, let me explain the project together with David Shipley, the former opinion editor at the Washington Post. I went out and hired writers I just loved, and they aren't conventional journalists. Most of them are sort of performers, novelists, people who are really talented at making material entertaining. It was Sarah Val, Dave Edgar Kamau Bell, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks and Casey Sepp. A wide variety of voices basically dropped them into the government and said, just find a story. And I did this because I had written a book during Trump, one called the Fifth Risk, where I was just shocked by the quality of the material inside the government. I mean, Trump provoked me to get interested in it. And I wasn't expecting the quality of characters who were there, the importance of the mission. I mean, you can argue about what government should do, but we'd all agree should be doing some things. And there are places where people are doing things that like no one else is going to do, and you're just grateful they're doing them. And they are amazing characters and they don't know their characters and their stories never get told for a whole bunch of reasons, which we can talk about if you want to get into that. So we launched these real talented writers at this beast. I did two of the eight pieces, and they're long. I mean, my first was like 13,000 words, and out came like a wonderful array of stories. So I wrote the first piece in the book is about a guy named Chris Mark who solved the problem of coal mine roofs falling in on the heads of coal miners, which sounds very niche, but. But it's a problem that killed 50,000 coal miners in America.
- [08:49]
Tim Miller
You would have thought that the coal companies would have been working on that, but I guess so.
- [08:53]
Michael Lewis
That's where it gets really interesting. It's like what happened in the coal mining markets that led this to being kind of a neglected problem. And what happened was. And he shows, he does. My character himself is a historian of his own field. He shows that, like, technology evolved so that they actually had the technology to make it a lot safer in West Virginia. And what they did with the technology is make it cheaper to mine the coal while keeping the kind of the level of risk the same. They had acclimated a workforce to a certain level of mortality and they just kept it there. And the culture just. It was a kind of a macho culture. It's like your risk you're taking by going into the coal mine. Chris Mark, my character shows that it was actually not until the government interceded with punishment if they didn't use the technology properly. And with the stuff he figures out about how you use the technology to keep the roof from falling, that the safety records start to improve. But I don't think this would happen in every industry. But I think it's that coal mining is such a competitive industry. Like, it's so sensitive to cost and there are lots of little coal mines so that nobody wants to be the one to spend the money to make it safe. And the population of workers was not sensitive to slight changes in safety. The whole reason why it ended up being a government problem. But anyway, that's one Sarah Vall, who you're going to talk to later. I'll leave that to one side because she wrote about the National Archives and a woman who helps run them, a piece that, like, was totally unexpected. John Lanchester, who I just adore English writer, he came in and he said, I know you probably want me to write about person, but my character is the Consumer Price Index. He said, it is fundamental to the United States government that it count things. It can apportion power unless it counts people for a census and it's written into the Constitution. And the United States government is the greatest counter of things in the world. And what it counts is amazing. And basically it provides portraits of our society and other people's societies with really careful statistical collection and analysis. And he just takes one of these things, the cpi, and shows just how hard it is to do this. Well, just what a monumental achievement it is. And just actually incidentally how at risk it would be in nefarious hands. We trust it. We just assume that whoever's doing is doing their best.
- [11:12]
Tim Miller
So what is that? What would be the downside of the CPI of us putting Corey Lewandowski in charge of the CPI and then just making it whatever Trump thinks is the best?
- [11:21]
Michael Lewis
Well, if we don't actually know what inflation is, I mean, for a start, the Federal Reserve won't know how to adjust policy. It will sow confusion into the minds of people. People will have to kind of guess what was happening with prices. You know, that in and of itself, it'd be interesting to see what happened if you just actually totally politicized it. There are hints that they're thinking this way. They fired a bunch of experts who helped the Department of Labor Statistics improve it. And the next step would be, oh, you don't get to release it out of the Department of Labor Statistics. We're gonna release it out of the White House.
- [11:54]
Tim Miller
Well, you already said so. They complain about the job because job numbers come out and then they get adjusted. Right. And so as you get more information coming in, you already heard them during the Biden years saying that these guys are cooking the books because a couple times it got adjusted from what had initially had been said. And so if you use that as a pretext to just say we don't trust these guys, they're political actors, we'll decide ourselves.
- [12:16]
Michael Lewis
So that's right out of the Trump playbook, that if you want to know what he's going to do, see what he's accusing other people of doing, usually falsely. He's a master of bearing false witness. He operates within the limits of his imagination. His imagination is spurred by the awful things he can imagine other people doing. It's usually fantasy. He's had the idea then that oh, you can do this and oh, in my mind they've already done it so I can go do it. That's sort of the psychology of it and that's the psychology that would lead to just as you say, like them starting to sort of make up whatever they want to make up. If you lose the portrait of the society, you can't manage it. I mean, that's one thing. But with this specifically regard to inflation, let's say all of a sudden we knew they were just making it up and they had control of the money supply so that the Federal Reserve is no longer independent. I think what happens is it becomes self fulfilling that we're panicking and grabbing at ways to preserve the value of our dollars. You think egg prices are bad now or housing prices or whatever that there becomes the anticipation of inflation spurs.
- [13:20]
Tim Miller
It spurs inflation. Yeah.
- [13:22]
Michael Lewis
So John Lanchester wrote about that. Dave Eggers wrote about people at NASA who were looking for little green men in distant space and doing really interesting research. There wasn't one of the things where you and you thought, oh, we don't need this.
- [13:36]
Tim Miller
The one that you did also that really jumped out at me was the epidemiologist at the FDA because they're investigating these diseases that are so rare that there's no profit motive to do it. So pharma is not going to develop treatments for these sorts of things. And I've got a friend with a kid that has this type of disease. He's just like, there's no.
- [13:53]
Michael Lewis
Really?
- [13:54]
Tim Miller
Yeah, well, he's like, look, there's no money for that because he has this really debilitating disease. It's a horrible story. And you know, me and some friends got together and said, let us donate to a group that's out there trying to solve this. And like the Answer is no. Like, only the government is. Like, it's too rare. It was three kids a year or something in America that get this type of disease.
- [14:14]
Michael Lewis
Let me use that story. It's about Heather Stone, who's at the currently, but who knows for how long at the Food and Drug Administration to illustrate just how easy it is to get the stories to fall out of the tree if you just shake it a little bit. So that story, I was working on a book about the pandemic. It's called the Premonition. A character in that book is a genius mad scientist at UCSF named Joe derisi. And he figures in that premonition in one way, but while I was with him, he said he happened to have thought he found a cure or at least a treatment for a brain eating amoeba called ballamuthia. Now, we haven't even known about Ballamouthia since the mid-90s. It was discovered in the mid-90s. It's responsible for a lot more deaths than we know because it just hadn't been identified. But it manifests as, like, encephalitis. Your brain explodes. No one was quite sure how people got it, but little kids got it, and turns out it's probably like ingesting dirt. Little unclear how it comes in, but whatever. So a patient had walked into UCSF's hospital with this, died. He took the ballamuthia, and in his lab bombarded it with all known acceptable chemicals to put inside human beings, all known approved drugs, not just in the United States, but in Europe, and found that there was a drug that was used for UTIs in Europe called nitroxyline, that actually killed this thing. The next time someone walks into the hospital with it, the person's going to die if you don't do anything. He bombards it with nitroxyline. The doctors do, and the person survives. Really good sign. So I watched that. I just watched that happen. I said, wow, you solved a problem. And he goes, no, I haven't solved a problem because we know about it. And if someone happens to call me, they will get that treatment. But, like, the doctors of America don't know about it. And I said, well, doesn't like, someone in the government or someone somewhere assimilate anything that's been done about these rare diseases so that there's, like, a database? And he said, nope. And then he paused and he said, you know that this is one woman, one woman in the FDA who badly wants to do this and who keeps pestering me. And I don't know how it's going there, but he said she doesn't seem to have much support from her institution. But she's trying to get doctors from around the whole world to feed whatever treatments that have worked for rare diseases into her. It's called Cure id, and God knows where it goes. So I called her up for this just to see if she was a story. And that story at the end of the book is her. And it's not the story of government success, it's the story of what should happen. This thing she's created should work. Now, it does so happen that she personally intercedes to save the life of a little girl in Arkansas who's got it. And how that happens is amazing and serendipitous and requires lots of accident. But. But at the same time, at exactly the same time, another very little girl in Northern California contracted it and the doctors never heard about it, and she died. But what I loved about Heather Stone was like, all by herself for all kinds of deep personal motives she was trying to spin up, which should be a massive operation, and was kind of meeting resistance because of our hostility to government. She's still there. You asked me, I see the question you asked at the top. What's happened to these characters? You read all of them and you think, I want that person in government. I mean, it's just no brainer. And two of them have resigned. My two both feel they're on tenterhooks and like their job could be gone any day. And the others, I think I've been told with all of them, they don't want to have much interaction with the writers who wrote about them anymore.
- [18:00]
Tim Miller
Right. They don't want the attention.
- [18:01]
Michael Lewis
They don't want the attention anymore. It's like they didn't want the attention in the first place much. But it's like, really? Don't write about me now.
- [18:07]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I was just talking to my husband about this, who's. We have a friend, I guess I won't say it. He's in the bowels of one of these kind of institutions, you know, solving problems like this. And he's like, it's sort of a USAID adjacent thing. I'm like, like, is he okay? And it's like, well, yeah, for now. Right. But it's like they haven't figured it out yet. You know what I mean? They haven't figured out all of the ways the different, you know, agencies interconnect. Right. And so, you know, tbd, it's really interesting.
- [18:34]
Michael Lewis
I mean, it's disastrous. But it's interesting watching how they're going about what they're doing, because quite obviously they don't know. They come in not knowing anything or very much.
- [18:44]
Tim Miller
Just somebody tell me that Elon did not know that there were two different houses of Congress, like, in the middle of the campaign. Like, somebody had to. Somebody had to educate him about the fact that Senate and the House are two separate bodies.
- [18:56]
Michael Lewis
But that's believable. Whether it's true or not, it's sort of, like, believable. But they come in and this was the point of the series, this is the point of the book, is they come in very clearly with this really stupid stereotype in their head of what these government workers are like. They're just wasteful. They're graft, they're corruption, they're deep state. They're, like, there to prevent Donald Trump from doing whatever he wants to do. And it's so not who they are. They're so, like, mostly nonpartisan people performing missions, tasks that we've all agreed need to be done. And the point of story was like, explode this stereotype. Like, you will see over and over again, people who do not conform to this really stupid, lazy idea in one's head of what a federal worker is. And if you explore the stereotype, maybe they'll hesitate a little bit before they do stupid things like just fire all the probationary workers, which they did. And obviously it didn't work. The only way you move through this place, the way they've moved through this place, is if you were wholly ignorant of who the people are and what they're doing. And we've seen they fired people that even they realized right away they needed to hire back. But the probationary workers is. There are a couple of things that have gotten stuck in Micron we don't have to get into. We can do as much. Elon, as you want.
- [20:15]
Tim Miller
No, let's do it. This is what the people want.
- [20:18]
Michael Lewis
I mean, the list of disturbing things is so long. But the ones that maybe not have been as attended to as they should have, the probationary workers, the 50,000 workers, they. These are people who are in their first year of government service or who.
- [20:30]
Tim Miller
Have been promoted recently in their first year.
- [20:33]
Michael Lewis
That might be true.
- [20:33]
Tim Miller
First year of the. Yeah, it's the first year of service. Or it's like you worked at some sub agency and got promoted and took a job at a different sub agency. You become probationary again. If you've changed kind of. Yeah.
- [20:44]
Michael Lewis
Okay, so you. So you you know more about it than I do. But what I do know is that. So there's this period where you don't have. You can just be fired at will. Simple, easily. You don't have to go through some process to fire this person. So because they were fireable, they got fired. But think about who those people must be. Almost certainly they skew extremely young. Like, these are the young people coming into government, which is what we desperately need. I mean, here's a stat for you. In information technology, like the computer systems, only 4% of the employees across the federal government are under the age of 30. 50% are over the age of 50. It means some huge number of people who are in charge of the IT systems don't know how to use their phones. So they fire the young people. And who else are they firing? They're firing whoever was hired for obviously, some immediate purpose. Like, we need this person now. We need this engineer now on this job, because this is something we need to do. That person is still probationary and gets fired. So it's like almost exactly who you don't want to fire. It's not the deadwood who's been kind of mailing it in for 20 years. So the second thing is, this is. I thought the first tell, like, they came in saying, waste, fraud and abuse and all that. If you're really interested in fraud, the person you want to go right to and harness and empower is the inspector general of every one of these agencies. They're the cop on the beat. They operate independently from the agency. They speak directly. They can speak directly to Congress. They're there to scare the hell out of the people who are in the agency and prevent them from waste, fraud, and abuse. They went in and they fired all the inspector generals. What that does, it's the opposite. Whatever they're doing seems to be the opposite of what they're saying. What they have done in that case is enable waste, fraud, and abuse. So it's interesting as an intellectual exercise to try to figure out what they're trying to achieve.
- [22:41]
Tim Miller
This is literally what I was trying to go to next. You've abandoned New Orleans. You live in the bay now.
- [22:47]
Michael Lewis
Abandoned is strong abandon. Very strong. I narrow all the time. My whole family's there.
- [22:54]
Tim Miller
So my point is, you know, some of these people, just because they're your neighbors and social circles. You wrote the SBF book, which I want to get to next. But so, you know, like, the types of people that are around Elon and around Doge at some level, what do you think is motivating it?
- [23:11]
Michael Lewis
I think it's a gumbo, to use a New Orleans metaphor. The reason it's so hard to explain everything with a simple theory is that there's more than one thing going on. Here's some of the things in the gumbo. The rice is ignorance. You don't have the gumbo or the beans. You couldn't do any of this. If you actually knew very much, you'd shoot yourself. But the ignorance is a precondition and the hostility and the malice is a precondition. But one trying to reorganize, politicize the federal workforce and weaponize it so that it is an instrument that is just there for the use of the political use of Donald Trump. So anything that would interfere with Donald Trump's political interests needs to be squashed, which is not how the federal workforce has been used by any other president. So that's one ingredient in the gumbo. Two, anything that gets in the way of Elon Musk's businesses, regulation. And it's not just Elon Musk. The constellation of tech billionaires and probably.
- [24:16]
Tim Miller
Wall street people, I think, particularly the AI and crypto folks, I think, are particularly concerned about regulation, though.
- [24:21]
Michael Lewis
There you go. That's probably right. One of the characters in the book, Geraldine Brooks, wrote a lovely piece about him. Jared Koopman is a total student of a cybercrime cop inside the IRS who has raked in, like, billions of dollars for the United States government by busting cybercrime rings, broke up child sex trafficking operations. I mean, he's a superhero also, like a black belt, someone Elon Musk would not want to be in a ring with. And they gutted his unit. And it's like, this is a hugely profitable enterprise and doing, like, nothing but simple good in the world.
- [25:00]
Tim Miller
That's not saving any money.
- [25:01]
Michael Lewis
It's such a good losing money, billions of dollars. So why would you do that? Well, the reason is in the name of the unit, cybercrime. You've let cybercrime criminals out of jail. You've given pardons to cybercriminals. You are courting the cyber world, the crypto world. And they don't like this sort of police. So that's another threat of it. It's like just the narrow business interests of some now very influential people. But it doesn't explain all of it. Like, none of that really explains the Department of Education being whacked. They'll tell a story about how, oh, it's being whacked for culture war reasons. Like it's woke and it's telling all the states how to teach in the schools. But that's not what it's doing. It's a big bank that does redistribution from rich to poor areas. So poor kids, it's subsidizing poor kids school education. A lot of the poor kids are in rural America. It is a direct subsidy to red America. And so not obviously in Donald Trump's political interest because they're stripping money funds away from his base. So I think the other ingredient is this guy, this dude, and I don't know how to pronounce his name because I've heard it pronounced two ways, Russell Vaught or Russell Vogt, the guy at OMB who is one of the architects of Project 2025 and who's got a kind of a libertarian attitude that there's too much government, we just got to get rid of government. And it sounds really good until you actually see what the government's doing and what happens if you remove it and then you can start having a grown up conversation. But it's like he's never had the grownup conversation. And some of it might not make sense, but it's like it's so crude. He seems to be an ingredient in the gumbo, because I can't, knowing Trump's total indifference to the bureaucracy, I can't imagine he cares all that much about the Department of Education.
- [26:49]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [26:50]
Michael Lewis
The last thing, then I'll shut up. The last thing that sort of runs through all of this or underpins it is, I think Donald Trump, another key to predicting what he's going to do is find wherever there's trust and destroy it. And the reason is tactical. The reason for this, he himself is wholly untrustworthy. He lies all the time. He cheats people out of stuff, money, he owes them all that stuff, bankrupted six companies, all that. And he doesn't even pretend really to be that trustworthy. And he is at a disadvantage in an environment that's high trust, that you put a bunch of people in a room and they trust each other, they'll quickly spit Donald Trump out like a bad seed. But if he creates a playing field where there's no trust and nobody can trust anybody else, he's at a kind of tactical advantage, like, because he's so good at untrustworthy behavior. And so I think a lot of it is an animal lizard brain instinct, like get rid of any place, anything people trust because that's going to create a disadvantage for me. And I know we think that nobody trusts the Government, and when you put it that way, they do. But there are huge amounts of the government that people just take for granted. They trust weather reports, that kind of thing. It's like, wow, I'm living my day by this thing. I must trust it. Unless it's radically wrong, which it seldom is. Do I think I shouldn't trust it? But he's trying to gut the National Weather Service. Like, why would you do this? He has some private interests there that he's serving, but also, it's like he smells trust and he wants to get rid of it.
- [28:17]
Tim Miller
I think that's insightful because to me, that is where the alignment between Trump and the tech guys are, is that Trump wants to destroy all the trust so that there's only faith in him. Right. That he is the authoritarian, the Kim Jong Un or whatever. You only trust the leader, the tech guys. You know, I don't know if you've gotten deep into the Curtis Yarvin, you know, techno, authoritarian stuff, but, like, they want to tear down all the things people trust so that they control everything, right? So that this small cadre of, you know, whatever tech geniuses and, you know, folks that. That are. That are deep into. Into AI and this other sort of innovation, so they. They have control. And so at least for a while, their interests align. Right, right. Because, you know, like, as long as there's not a fight between Trump and Elon, their interest in tearing down the other institutions that people trust so they can have control is an alignment. How does that sit with you?
- [29:14]
Michael Lewis
That sits fine with me. You didn't say anything that caused my brain to go on red alert. That all sounds very reasonable. I mean, there's more than one kind of Silicon Valley nerd.
- [29:23]
Tim Miller
Of course, I'm talking specifically about, like, the strain of teal and Dreesen. That's right.
- [29:29]
Michael Lewis
One of the things about this structure strain of people, they don't shut up, right? They're like, they're issuing manifestos, they're giving speeches. They're like, they're tweeting all the time. They just never shut up. I wonder how any of them do their job, because they just talk all the time. And they have a crowd of people who are approve of them, who I guess celebrate what they say. And this is just me talking. Maybe I'm not the world's greatest expert on what's interesting and what's not, but I keep looking for them to say something interesting like, oh, oh, I hadn't had that thought. Or, oh, nobody ever said that before, or oh, that's both true and interesting, you know, and I have the feeling with them all the time, this feeling, like I want to say to them, what you've said is true and interesting, but unfortunately the parts that are true aren't interesting and the parts that are interesting aren't true. I'm just shocked by how dull they are. That's the thing. That, and the antics like Elon Musk, the way he dresses, carrying his kid around on his shoulder like he's a mini me, the chainsaw, all that stuff. It's all like putting a lampshade on your head at the party because you actually don't have anything witty to say. And it all feels like that he's the dude walking around with a lampshade on his head. And I mean, has he ever said anything funny in his life? I don't know, maybe.
- [30:43]
Tim Miller
But if you like fart jokes. If you like fart jokes.
- [30:46]
Michael Lewis
Yeah.
- [30:46]
Tim Miller
He thinks of himself as a 7 year old. My 7 year old did like the Tesla farting. They got a chuckle out of the fact that you can make the Tesla do a whoopee.
- [30:54]
Michael Lewis
Yeah, there you go.
- [30:55]
Tim Miller
So there you go.
- [30:55]
Michael Lewis
There you go.
- [30:56]
Tim Miller
You can make a seven year old, but it's just.
- [30:59]
Michael Lewis
Oh, it's like a stink bomb at the party. Like, do I really want to have to listen to this person? Will you shut up? Like, there's so much more interest out there and this is like one of the side effects of this political movement. I think of all the interesting people in the country, I mean, it is amazing the, you know, the range of artistic expression and it all gets kind of drowned out by these people with lampshades on their head, shouting at the top of their lungs. And I just wonder at what point everybody just gets bored because it is so boring. And at any rate, your point that this is strange and strain in Silicon Valley and you just name the people kind of who are the leading lights of that, of this movement that got a following, that somehow attached himself to Donald Trump. That's true. It would be nice to have a serious conversation. I would love to sit down with a Peter Thiel physically inside one of the departments of government and go piece by piece through what that department is doing and have him say, let's just have a conversation about why this is necessary, why it happened in the first place, why we're doing this and why in my life start in the Department of Energy. Because without the Department of Energy, Tesla doesn't get off the ground. I can't remember the size of the loan, but I think hundreds of millions of dollars in loans or loan guarantees to Tesla, which at the time, Elon Musk said got him off the ground. And Tesla employees have said the company would never existed if the government hadn't come in. So much of just technological growth, economic growth, springs from public private partnerships, springs from the government interceding in the economy. And that they have been direct beneficiaries of this and are still. And that they don't acknowledge it and want to go gut the things that actually made us all rich and made them rich. That's where it gets really bewildering. And I'd like to have the conversation, like, just explain yourself, Elon. You're the richest man in the world because this government came and helped you.
- [32:59]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I think he'd have trouble assimilating that. That fact into his personal narrative.
- [33:04]
Michael Lewis
There's one other thing that is bewildering to me, and it'd be nice to have. This would be like a small group of people we all agreed were masterful at running big institutions, like the dude who runs Microsoft, clearly some kind of genius. People who CEO types, heads of large organizations, maybe even a coach of a football team, and would sit around a table and would say, how many of you have succeeded by walking in and vilifying the employees or the players and telling everybody they were idiots, making everybody feel condescended to making everybody fill out a little chart about what they did last week, saying, you're going to fire everybody because they're all useless. When in human history has this worked as a management style? And I think they'd all say, like, you would never do that. That's the opposite of what you do if you're running something. Well, the only person I know who's done this is Elon Musk at Twitter. And it's kind of a catastrophe. I mean, the people who invested with him are not happy. That's another kind of conversation we're not having. It's like a Harvard Business School case study of how not to run something.
- [34:07]
Tim Miller
Well, it's only the federal government. We've only got three and a half more years of it. So no worries there.
- [34:13]
Michael Lewis
Can I ask you a question?
- [34:14]
Tim Miller
Please.
- [34:14]
Michael Lewis
I'm just dying to know because you're living in my hometown. How do you feel my hometown is doing? How do you feel about New Orleans these days?
- [34:23]
Tim Miller
It's interesting. I think I steal. I stole this from Carville, I think. But all the good about New Orleans outshines all the bad. Like, makes up for all the bad, because the good is so good. And so, you know, I mean, look. And it's got problems. Like, I had to. I had to trade in my Volvo, my California Volvo for a Jeep because you can't drive on the roads because the roads are like a Third World country. They're trying to fix Claiborne Avenue to get ready for the super bowl and tragically trying to fix Bourbon street to get ready for the Super Bowl. They'd moved the ball, you know, so you have these, like, huge. And they didn't do either of them right. Like, it's still not done right. The super bowl is coming past. So that part is tough. But, man, I don't know. The people here are so wonderful. And the folks like us who've chosen to come here, you know, all are interesting, right? Like, nobody's moved here because Boeing sent them here. You know what I mean? Like, they've all moved here because there's something they love about the art or music or food or culture or they had a friend or a connection. So that's great.
- [35:22]
Sarah Vowell
I don't know.
- [35:23]
Tim Miller
That kind of ties me back to you. I wonder. You've been so successful in drawing out these characters, drawing out people that other folks might not have heard of, and you have to feel like there's some connection to growing up here. Right. It's just people are so friendly, and it is so easy to get to know people here. Maybe because they're drinking more. I don't know why, but do you feel that way, that maybe you would have been less good at what you did if you grew up in Topeka?
- [35:45]
Michael Lewis
I don't think I do what I do if I grew up in Topeka. I think that. I think I grew up in a. And I notice it even now. I think it was even more so when I was a kid. But when I land there, as I'm going to land there in a week, it happens every time I get into the taxi cab and the taxi driver is all of a sudden jabbering away, talking to me. And I have the best conversation I've had in. In two months with the taxi driver. And then I'm walking the streets and people don't let you walk by without acknowledging that everybody's expecting some acknowledgment. So it's like the first step of improv that you accept and you build. Yes, and the. Yes and is in every. All these. It's woven into the fabric of New Orleans daily existence. And. Yes, and is where you get the story that you you're meeting people and you're accepting and you're building. You're trying to understand and hear what they're saying. And I grew up. That's just a muscle that I think a lot of New Orleans have. So I use that muscle in all my interactions with subjects. This is absolutely true. There's this other thing. New Orleans encourages a kind of cockeyed view of the world. And I was just thinking about the day that Zelensky was in the White House and being humiliated to our disgrace by J.D. vance. I looked at the New Orleans Times, the New Orleans Times Picayune, or whatever it's called. The next day, the incident was all over the front page of every newspaper in the world. And on the front page of the New Orleans newspaper was discussions about how to get ready for the Endymion Parade and, like, where the traffic was going to be, where you could put your ladder up. And I thought that was in New Orleans. I grew up in, you know, problems on the west bank were the problems on the other side of the Mississippi River. It was so focused on itself. There was something inherently comic about the childhood, about the place. And I do port that. It's just a sensibility into pretty much everything I do. I like if I'm not laughing, if I'm not in an emotional space, but it usually starts with laughter, and I'm not staying interested. And sometimes it's laughing and crying, but it's like getting to that space. The two pieces in the book, the bookends that I wrote in who Is Government? They're both such emotional stories. Like, people are crying when they read the last one.
- [38:05]
Tim Miller
The coal miner story is so good, people got. We don't need to ruin it. So people should get the book. But it is the connection to his father.
- [38:11]
Sarah Vowell
I'm breaking in here to say Gwendolyn Brooks was from Topeka.
- [38:17]
Tim Miller
That's Sarah. This is good podcasting. Sarah Vall is going to be up there in the next segment. She's keeping me on task right now. Hold on, though, before I lose you, Michael, I got to do one of your other books, if that's okay.
- [38:26]
Michael Lewis
Yep. Any book.
- [38:27]
Tim Miller
Or kind of connecting two of them, really. You wrote the Going Infinite about sbf? I'm kind of obsessed about the crypto stuff right now. And one thing that really worries me is I think we are increasing the systemic risk of the system. Like the failure of his bank exchange. It was just an exchange exchange, excuse me, was isolated mostly from the rest of the financial system, but that's changing it's particularly changing now in this Trump administration that's going to be very pro crypto. I think about your book the Big Short. And so you've just been so deep in both of these stories. I just wanted to put a quarter in the machine and hear what you think about that worry.
- [39:05]
Michael Lewis
All right, two things. You're absolutely right that decent public policy would wall crypto off from the rest of the financials from an ordinary fiat financial system. We shouldn't have a crypto reserve. It's going to be trivial, but we shouldn't be doing that. We have a currency and actually crypto is a threat to our currency. It's not good for the dollar to the extent that, like banks are encouraged to take crypto risks or big financial institutions have big crypto risks. So if crypto goes south, which it will at some point, there's nothing underneath it. It's just air. You know, it's faith. It's a religion. Like, who knows what's going to happen. It's like predicting what's going to happen with Scientology. But you do not want the financial system connected up to it in any way. And the drift right now is to connect it. It's not so big. I mean, I don't know, sum total of all the value of crypto is like a few trillion dollars right now. It doesn't feel like it's big enough.
- [40:02]
Tim Miller
To have a housing style, systemic exposure.
- [40:06]
Michael Lewis
That's right. But there's this. I tell you. But I tell you what's on my mind. If you look at the story of the financial crisis, you look at the big short story. The reason the financial crisis is resolvable is the government is plausible. The government. There's faith in the government. And as angry as people are about it, governments can walk in and insure the risk. They can walk in and say, we're not going to let these banks go down, we're going to calm the markets kind of thing. If the government becomes the source of the problem, if nobody trusts the government, there's nothing else to walk in above it and stabilize the financial system. So, for example, Donald Trump made a passing reference. I've been waiting for this. And he did it. And this is like the rule. Wherever Trump finds trust undermine it. He made a passing reference to some treasury bonds not being like other treasury bonds and some of them are like owed to foreigners. And then maybe we didn't owe it that kind of thing. If you start screwing with the faith and credit of the United States government, if you start causing People to doubt our willingness to repay our loans. You're playing with a whole other order of financial crisis that is also related.
- [41:13]
Tim Miller
To the crypto thing. Why in God's name would we want to create a currency competitor? If you took their argument at face value that this is a currency, why would we want to create a strategic reserve of something that is a competitor to the dollar? That could undermine the thing that gives us our greatest power.
- [41:29]
Michael Lewis
The dollar is central to American global power. The willingness of people to hold it interest free, use it as a reserve currency. Trust it is so important. But that's what he's coming for. I mean, that trust is what he's coming for. And we'll see how this plays out. When you start fooling with rich people's money, they do tend to get upset. He's going to run into a phalanx of opposition as he gets closer and closer to this.
- [41:55]
Tim Miller
All right, last thing, Sarah, I promise I'm coming for you. But I asked Walter Isaacson. I said, your friend Michael Lewis is coming on the pod. What should I ask him? So I'll close with this. He said, number one, how important was becoming king of Squires to forming who you are? Number two, biographers know it's all about dad. Tell us about your dad. So why don't you leave us with a little something on Squires and your father?
- [42:13]
Michael Lewis
Well, King of Squires, I actually would go from baseball practice to a little house next to the Newman School where I was taught to wave a scepter and sit on a throne and greet subjects. And I did this for a couple of months, once a week or something. So I actually have training in how to be a royal. I'll let you figure out what that did to me. It probably wasn't good for my character, but it was fun. And my father gave me, left me always with a sense everything was going to be all right and not depressed too much. I told this story often. I don't want to repeat myself too much. But he. He had me persuaded through freshman year of college that on our family coat of arms there was a little. We have a family coat of arms, the Lewis family, and there's some Latin on the bottom of it. And he told me the Latin translated into this. He said, this is our family motto. He said, do as little as possible and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task. And I took that as like, relax, chill, back away from. It was like an instruction to be lazy.
- [43:20]
Tim Miller
And that I still have it in Very New Orleanian.
- [43:24]
Michael Lewis
I still have it in me. And what it means is I don't do busy work. It's like I don't do stuff. I don't write stuff I don't really want to write. I don't do stuff just to do it. I don't publish books just to publish books. That's very useful. It's like I only do what interests me. That's how I interpreted it.
- [43:39]
Tim Miller
Anyway, find fulfilling work. Michael Lewis. I guess I'll see you next week in person for the first time. Look forward to it and let's stick around. Sarah Valhalla. Her story is so good, it's worth. I think she's gonna be a little more in the traditional Bulwark tone of. Of dower and dark about the state of affairs. So please stick around for that. Thanks, Michael.
- [43:56]
Michael Lewis
All right, Tim, see you soon.
- [44:18]
Tim Miller
All right, we're back. You've already heard her, Sarah. Val. She was listening in and, you know, had something to add, which I appreciate. It's a. It's a welcome space here at the Bulwark Podcast. She's the author, historian, journalist, essayist, and actress. She was Violet Parr in the Incredibles. How about that? She also wrote one of the essays in who Is Government? About the record keeper. Pamela Wright at the National Archives. What's up, Sarah? Tell us about Pamela Wright.
- [44:42]
Sarah Vowell
Hi, Tim. Pamela Wright. Well, when I was given this assignment a million years ago, I wanted to pick someone who was from west of the Mississippi, partly because I was a Smithsonian intern and I'm from Montana. I'm in Montana right now. People from out here, when you say Washington, it's almost like a different species of human. When I left Montana State University to become a Smithsonian intern, no one was from Washington. Everyone was someone like me from, you know, America. So I found Pamela Wright. She was the NARA Chief Innovation Officer and quickly figured out that her background, she comes from Conrad, Montana, up in central Montana. She grew up on a ranch up there. That her background completely influenced how she was doing her job. And her job was to share the records of the National Archives with the American people online. And so, like, there are 13 billion records in the National Archives. And her job was to digitize those records so you don't have to go to D.C. you don't have to go to Maryland. You can be from Sitka, Alaska, and, you know, access the records that you own as Alaskan. I think the fact that she came from somewhere that was a 32 hour drive from D.C. really motivated her to get as much online as possible just so everyone can access these records. And so. And then another thing about her being a ranch kid is she's super thrifty. So one of the, I guess, critiques of the government as it's being enacted right now is that there's a lot of waste, right? Well, she grew up on this ranch where they had a cistern for water. She knitted her own hat for winter. They put canned vegetables in the cellar to make it through the winter. And that's how she approached her job at nara, which was, we don't have enough money. What can we do with what we have? And so she started these volunteer programs to get just regular citizens to work for free, transcribing the records, scanning the records that she has. This program called History Hub, where anyone, anywhere can type in a question on the NARA website. And one of the archivists or one of these volunteers will try and help you. And some of them are just, you know, random history questions about, I don't.
- [47:15]
Tim Miller
Know, Annie Oakley or Millard Fillmore.
- [47:19]
Sarah Vowell
Yeah, Millard Fillmore, who doesn't care about him. But some of them are like real needs. Like veterans apparently aren't so great at keeping track of their discharge papers. So, like, they'll get some terrible disease or something and need health care. And, you know, they type in and someone will help them get their own papers. Like one other thing about it when, like, thinking in terms of the larger project writing about these people that we did for the Washington Post is the National Archives tells the story of the federal government, especially the executive branch. And then also I knew I could tell Pam's story by using those records. She's a homesteader's granddaughter. We looked at the Homestead Act. She went to the University of Montana and became an archivist because she was a work study student. We looked at the Higher Education act of 1965. I was a work study student too, here at Montana State. That's how she got the training to become an archivist, by this government program that, you know, was set up to not just fund students educations, but give them the training to go out into the world and to lead, you know, middle class professional lives, which no one in her family had ever done.
- [48:44]
Tim Miller
I mean, and there are also just these elements now that are online that people never could have gotten before. There are elements in the archives that are pretty wondrous. You kind of end the story talking about the glass plate negatives, these early pictures from the Civil War.
- [48:58]
Sarah Vowell
Talk about that Matthew Brady's Civil War pictures. Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of the records are about our wars and our veterans and the way they, you know, keep and take care of these records is so solemn and so serious. And I mean, these soldiers died in the Civil War. And I mean, I just think about them all the time. What would they think if they knew they were in these, like, glass cases in Maryland being taken care of? But I mean, all the. I can go really Rain man on this stuff because all of these records are so interrelated. Like, one of Pam Wright's programs was digitizing the censuses, putting those online. And I mean, the census in 1870 is different because of those guys who are in those glass plate negatives, because that was the first census that all African American names were listed.
- [49:56]
Tim Miller
Wow.
- [49:56]
Sarah Vowell
Because of what those men had done. And, you know, everyone's stories are in the census. I mean, the census. It's funny, Michael is talking about John Lanchester's piece, and it's really wonderful about the Consumer Price Index and talking about the data and, like, the knowledge that the federal government provides. I mean, I talk about, like, all the federal records start with the Constitution and the Declaration. And the Constitution requires census to be taken to apportion the House of Representatives, which, you know, yawn. But you go into those census, you can learn. The last one that Pamela Wright got in line was 1950, because they wait 72 years because there's a lot of private information. You know, it just came out with these JFK files that got put online this week by nara, that a lot of those files have people who are still alive, Social Security numbers, Security numbers on them. Yeah.
- [50:52]
Tim Miller
One of the problems maybe rushing it out just because it's the whim of the child king.
- [50:57]
Sarah Vowell
But anyway, so like, the census from 1950, I learned things about my own family that I didn't know that everyone's in there and it's completely democratic. I learned things I didn't want to know about my family. But, you know, you can't pick and choose.
- [51:13]
Tim Miller
You have a secret great aunt you learned about.
- [51:16]
Sarah Vowell
I just learned why my mean drunk grandfather was a mean drunk. And as a liberal, it was a hard lesson because it turns out he worked for the WPA on a road crew, and that's how he broke his back and turned into the misanthrope who ruined all our lives. So it's really hard for a liberal to know that the, you know, New Deal is responsible for an entire family crumbling for decades.
- [51:42]
Tim Miller
Now we gotta close with the one political element to this that's very. It's related because it's very relevant, which is. Well, there are a lot. But the one acutely political story that is related to your story, which is Colleen Shogun. Right. Which is that Trump fired the archivist, the head archivist, Pamela's boss, Which is his right. Which is his right. But the thing that is relevant here is that Shogun is the type of person that is another type of person you guys could have profiled. And she took her job so seriously that in kind of a really tough situation as Biden was going out, Biden was kind of decreed that the Equal Rights Amendment was officially part of the Constitution. And whatever your feelings are about the Legal Rights Amendment, I assume most listeners, and both of us are supportive of it, but it did it in a way that didn't follow the letter of the law. But Shogun was getting pressured to, you know, whatever, put it in the official archive, and she wouldn't. So she kind of stands up to Biden, you know, because she takes her job so seriously. Trump comes in, fires her anyway because he's pissed about the. That it was the narra the archives that kind of kicked off the classified documents that he was keeping in his bathroom at Mar A Lago. Like, that whole case.
- [52:53]
Sarah Vowell
Yeah.
- [52:53]
Tim Miller
And so, like, this is just another example. Like, both of these characters, Colleen and Pamela, people that are, like, are in there, they take their work seriously, they're doing it judiciously, and they're just being treated like garbage by the incoming administration.
- [53:08]
Sarah Vowell
Well, I mean, that's one reason I wanted to write about NARA was the President hadn't made it into news because he kept our records in his bathroom. And nara's job is to get those and keep them safe for us. Like, when I was going to to see those Matthew Brady cases, I had an ink pen that I was taking notes with, and we had to go back to somebody's office and get me a pencil because they're so serious about taking care of all these records. Ink can damage the records and a pencil can be erased. So we had to go back, get me a pencil so I don't wreck anything. Like, they're very serious people and not, no nonsense. And there are all these laws that govern how NARA operates, including the Presidential Records act, including how they. How would you put that with the ERA thing? Like, they're the ones who put these new amendments into the Constitution. Right. So there are whole processes that they're all going to follow to the letter because they're actually, I Mean, Michael Lewis, his whole thing is, let's take something you think is boring and make it interesting. My whole thing is like, no, this thing you all think is so interesting is actually super boring. And that's how it should be. And the National Archives is completely, you know, nonpartisan and just follows the law. But because, I mean, the interesting thing is, if you like, one of the strains of American thought that goes into whatever this madness we're in right now with firing the federal workforce is suspicion of the government. Right. Like, nara's function since Watergate and since the Freedom of Information act is to provide us the access to our own records so that the government is held accountable. So if you're suspicious of the government, which all of these, you know, government efficiency people seem to be, NARA is the place to go to confirm your suspicions. I mean, the other thing is I had this list of documents I wanted to see partly because I'm a history nerd. And I was like, hey, can you guys show me the Louisiana Purchase? Because I wanted to see it.
- [55:16]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [55:16]
Sarah Vowell
And because Pamela Wright was born within its borders, and that was kind of the moment when America becomes way too big to govern, and her mission was to shrink down that distance. But when I looked at my list, it was a pretty liberal list. And so I asked a Republican ex governor of Montana to like, what. What should I ask to see? Because my list was so liberal, and he gave me a bunch of Nixon stuff, like the Bright side of Nixon. And it's incredible. I saw the Clean Air act that Nixon signed, and that doesn't really conform to how I think of Nixon and so much of the Archives as the Nixon tapes and his worst impulses. But the Clean Air act has saved tens of thousands of lives. The other thing about the National Archives is it tells the full story, even the ones we don't want to know or think about.
- [56:11]
Tim Miller
I need to close something completely unrelated to this. Based on your expertise for the Incredibles.
- [56:16]
Sarah Vowell
Okay.
- [56:16]
Tim Miller
What superpower do we actually want? If you got to have one, which one would you actually want?
- [56:23]
Sarah Vowell
I would love the one that Michael Lewis just told you about where he just doesn't work too hard or overthink things because I like working or you.
- [56:32]
Tim Miller
Can succeed without trying.
- [56:34]
Sarah Vowell
Yeah, totally. I'm a doer of homework work. I. I, like, sent him a bunch of articles this morning. Maybe he should think about, like. He doesn't do any of that. I've been up since 4:00am reading about, you know, investment of the U.S. government. And, like, did you know this, Tim? That there's this new medical journal article about the COVID vaccine that 35 years and $337 million worth of federal research went into that before the pandemic started. And so the operation warp speed went. President Trump's greatest accomplishments, because it happened so fast, was actually because we invested in federal research for more than three decades and more than $300 million. That's the kind of thing I do that Michael Lewis is not getting up at 5am to redo at.
- [57:22]
Tim Miller
There's a lot of MRNA work happening. That's a casual.
- [57:26]
Sarah Vowell
That's the superpower I want but will never happen.
- [57:29]
Tim Miller
That's good. May we all be successful without trying, like Michael Lewis. That's a good place to end. Thank you, Sarah. It's so good to meet you. Appreciate you doing the podcast. Everybody else, we'll be back here. Well, wait, I'm in Arizona tomorrow, so we're taping some live shows in Phoenix. You'll get those conversations on Monday's pod and maybe we'll do a bonus interview as well. We'll see how it goes. So we'll see you all on Monday. Peace.
- [57:53]
Unknown
I see the clouds that move across the sky I see the wind that moves the clouds away the moves the clouds over by the building I pick the building that I want to live in I smell the pine trees and the peaches in the woods I see the pine cones that fall by the highway that's the highway that goes to the building I pick the building that I want to live in it's over there it turns over there My building has every convenience it's going to make life easy for me it's going to be easy to get things done I will relax along with my loved ones Loved ones loved ones Visit the building take the highway park and come up and see me I'll be working, working but if you come visit I'll put down what I'm doing My friends are important don't you worry about me I wouldn't worry about me don't you worry about me don't you worry about me I see the stakes across this big nation I see the laws made in Washington D.C. i think of the ones I consider my parents I think of the people that are working for me Some civil servants are just like my loved ones they work so hard and they try to be strong I'm a lucky guy to live in my bearer they all need buildings to help them along it's over there it's over there My building has every convenience it's gonna make life easier for me. It's gonna be easy to get things done. I will relax along with my love One love, one love. Loved ones visit the building, take the highway walk and come up and see me. I'll be working, working, but it's too confident. I'll put down what I'm doing. My friends are important. I wouldn't worry about me. They wouldn't worry about me. Don't you worry about me. You don't you worry about me.
- [60:41]
Tim Miller
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.