Michael Lewis (Extended) | "Who Is Government?"

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Michael Lewis (Extended) | 'Who Is Government?'"

The Late Show Pod Show with Stephen Colbert
Episode Release Date: April 11, 2025
Guest: Michael Lewis
Book Discussed: Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

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Introduction

In this episode of The Late Show Pod Show with Stephen Colbert, host Stephen Colbert welcomes acclaimed author Michael Lewis, renowned for his bestselling works such as Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short. Michael Lewis returns to discuss his latest book, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, delving into the intricacies of federal work and the vital role of government employees.

“Always good to have you here. You explain stuff real good,” Colbert opens the conversation at [02:20], highlighting Lewis's ability to make complex subjects accessible.

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Discussion on Tariffs and Economic Policies

The conversation kicks off with a discussion on the current administration's tariff policies, a topic Lewis is well-versed in given his background in covering Wall Street and the economy.

Stephen Colbert ([02:19]):
"You explain stuff real good. You can make any subject, you can lay it out like parts on a lawn and explain to us what all the parts mean."

Colbert questions Lewis about former President Trump's stance on tariffs, referencing Trump's claim that tariffs were "the most beautiful word in the English language" and whether Lewis believed Trump would follow through with his tariff policies.

Michael Lewis ([03:35]):
"Donald, his mind does not work like your mind or my mind. He's different... he frames everything as a zero-sum interaction... trade is a win-win kind of thing. And I think he sees, when he looks at the world, he sees, if you're getting something out of this, then it's coming out of my pocket." ([03:37])

Lewis expresses skepticism about the efficacy of Trump's tariff approach, emphasizing that economic experts generally view tariffs as detrimental. He criticizes Trump’s perception of trade as a zero-sum game, arguing that such policies undermine global trust and economic stability.

Notable Insight:
Lewis underscores the chaos introduced by Trump's policies, stating, "If I'm trying to predict what Donald Trump is going to do and where he's going to go... he tries to destroy trust in the world and these trusting relationships we have with friendly nations." ([04:04])

This segment highlights Lewis's critical view of the administration's economic strategies and the broader implications for international relations and domestic trust.

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Exploring Who Is Government? and Public Service

Transitioning from economic policies, Colbert steers the conversation toward Lewis's new book, Who Is Government?, which seeks to illuminate the indispensable work of federal employees.

Stephen Colbert ([06:28]):
"First of all, what brought you to tell the untold story? I'm guessing that the reason why most people have not told the story is they didn't think it would be that exciting of a story, and neither did you."

Lewis explains that his motivation stemmed from the realization that federal workers perform crucial, often unnoticed tasks that keep the country running smoothly. He recounts his initial surprise at discovering the depth and significance of government operations.

Michael Lewis ([07:07]):
"Trump gets elected the first time. The day after he's elected, he fires the 550 person team, his transition team... it was like what are they not paying attention to? It was like, what does our government do?" ([07:27])

Lewis shares his experience in accessing detailed briefings on various government departments, which revealed the complex and essential functions that often go unappreciated.

Key Highlight:
Lewis emphasizes the dedication of federal employees, describing them as "mission driven, passionate, problem-solving people, experts who were there, who could have made a lot more money in the private sector" but chose public service instead. He narrates stories of individuals like Chris Mark, who innovated safety measures for coal miners, and Arthur A. Allen, an oceanographer whose work has saved countless lives ([09:03] - [10:28]).

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The Impact of Government Cuts and Policy Changes

The discussion shifts to the current administration's efforts to reduce government size and budget, raising concerns about the ramifications of these cuts.

Michael Lewis ([11:23]):
"The government is also a portfolio of risks. They're managing all kinds of risks, a lot of them very long term risks... the risk of really bad things, a lot of really bad things happening, measles outbreaks, coal mines, roofs falling on the heads of coal miners... it's one thing after another that [the government] will just be managed less well." ([11:48])

Lewis warns that dismantling government functions compromises the nation's ability to handle both immediate and long-term challenges. He criticizes the firing of probationary workers—new federal employees who lack job protection—as a detrimental tactic that undermines the government's effectiveness and devalues public service.

Notable Quote:
"These people did meaningful work that protected us, that made our lives better. And that we have come after them. That we have allowed a politician to demonize them and traumatize them is such a damning statement about, like, the state of our soul." ([13:48])

Lewis passionately argues that undermining government employees not only hampers essential services but also reflects a moral failing in how society values public service and dedication.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Colbert expressing gratitude for Lewis’s insights, reinforcing the importance of appreciating and understanding the role of government workers.

Stephen Colbert ([13:54]):
"Michael, thank you for that."

Michael Lewis ([13:50]):
"Thank you."

Colbert wraps up by directing listeners to additional content on The Late Show YouTube channel, encouraging them to engage further with the show's material.

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Key Takeaways

• Economic Policies: Lewis criticizes the Trump administration's tariff policies as misguided and harmful, emphasizing the importance of trust in international trade relationships.

• Public Service: Who Is Government? sheds light on the essential, yet often overlooked, work done by federal employees, portraying them as dedicated professionals committed to solving complex societal problems.

• Government Cuts: Reducing the size and budget of government poses significant risks, jeopardizing the nation's ability to manage critical and long-term issues effectively.

• Moral Reflection: Undermining public service workers reflects a deeper societal and moral crisis, highlighting the need to value and support those who work tirelessly to maintain and improve public welfare.

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This episode of The Late Show Pod Show with Stephen Colbert offers a profound exploration of government functionality and the indispensable role of public servants, urging listeners to recognize and support the backbone of national stability and progress.

Transcript

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[Stephen Colbert]

Hey everybody. Welcome back to THE Late show, folks. Ladies and gentlemen, my next guest is the bestselling author of many books including Moneyball, the Blind side and the Big Short. He's just written a new book on federal workers titled who is the Untold Story of Public Service? Please welcome back to THE Late show, Michael Lewis.

[Michael Lewis]

All right, all right.

[Stephen Colbert]

Always good to have you here. You explain stuff real good. You can make any subject, you can lay it out like parts on a lawn and explain to us what all the parts mean. And I want to get into your new book, who Is Government? Quite timely in its release, seeing as the question of should we have Government is arising in a lot of our leaders minds for some strange reason right now. But first I want to talk to you about one of the things our government is doing right now. You've written, you've worked on Wall street, you've written about the economy many times. Talk about these tariffs for a second because people are confused, even people who seem to before it are confused about what the goal of this is.

[Michael Lewis]

Right.

[Stephen Colbert]

When Trump said he was gonna do tariffs during the campaign and said it was the most beautiful word in the English language, did you believe that he would actually do what was happening right now?

[Michael Lewis]

No.

[Stephen Colbert]

Did anyone believe he would do what he was doing right now?

[Michael Lewis]

No.

[Stephen Colbert]

What is he doing right now?

[Michael Lewis]

You kind of gotta ask him because.

[Stephen Colbert]

It, he gives a different answer every time you ask.

[Michael Lewis]

So I think the answer is, I mean, Donald, his mind does not work like your mind or my mind. He's different. And one of the ways he's different.

[Stephen Colbert]

It'S called the weave, Michael.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, but he frames everything as a zero sum interaction. Like I don't think he actually understands the benefit of trade. Like trade is a win win kind of thing. And I think he sees, when he looks at the world, he sees, if you're getting something out of this, then it's coming out of my pocket. So he's got, it's an expression of kind of his natural talent for grievances, but it makes no sense. Like I don't know anybody who thinks this is a good idea.

[Stephen Colbert]

So you can't think of any of this economist who doesn't work for Donald.

[Michael Lewis]

Trump who would say this is, and I'm probably the economist who work for Donald Trump think it's a bad idea, but they don't want to tell that to him. So I mean, I'm not an economist. I know, but I talked to economists and nobody thinks it's a good idea. No, I think also he likes chaos. Like he likes chaos. If I'm trying to predict what Donald Trump is going to do and where he's going to go, I mean, like one rule is look for where there's trust in the world and he will try to destroy it. He's really uncomfortable with trust and these trusting relationships we have with friendly nations. I mean, that was an obvious target, the soundness of the dollar. And I think there's a logic to it. And the logic to it is he himself is so untrustworthy. And I don't mean that as an insult, it's just true. Right. He lies all the time. I mean, when he Says something true. It's kind of like an accident, but I mean, just it. Right. And you know, he stiffs people on deals, all that. He's like, that's the way he thinks. You move through the world. If we're in a world where we trust each other, he's at a disadvantage. He doesn't belong. But if he eliminates trust between people, he's leveled the playing field. He gets the world into a place where he's good at it. Like, none of us trust each other. And these trade relationships. Trust relationships. And I don't know what you do. I mean, let's say tomorrow he wakes up and he decides, oh, it was a bad idea. But is anybody going to believe it? I mean, does anyone believe that? Is Canada gonna feel the same way towards us ever again? No. I mean, I don't. It's hard to blame them. So that's all I have to say.

[Stephen Colbert]

We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more. Michael Lewis, everybody. Hey, everybody. I'm back with the author of who Is Government? Michael Lewis. Let's talk about something else. That is a responsibility of our president, which is the federal government right now. And you have the new book, who Is Government? And this is the Untold Story of Public Service.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Stephen Colbert]

First of all, what brought you to tell the untold story? I'm guessing that the reason why most people have not told the story is they didn't think it would be that exciting of a story, and neither did.

[Michael Lewis]

I. I mean, that's exactly right.

[Stephen Colbert]

You never thought you'd be telling the story.

[Michael Lewis]

If you told me I got not one, but two books out of the federal government and that they would actually resonate with people, I would have told you, you know, eight years ago, you were crazy. What happened? This is what happened. Trump gets elected the first time. The day after he's elected, he fires the 550 person team, his transition team. These people are supposed to go into the government and receive the briefings that have been prepared over six months by 1,000 people in the Obama.

[Stephen Colbert]

The thing that Chris Christie was heading up, Right?

[Michael Lewis]

Yes. And he fires all of them and he tells Christy that you and I are so smart, it'll take us an hour to figure out how the government works. Yes. And I thought, I thought, I mean, I could go in, I could go in and get these briefings and know more about the government and the reader would know more about the government than the president who's supposed to be running it.

[Stephen Colbert]

This is how many people in the Federal government work 2.3 million, 2.3 million.

[Michael Lewis]

In the civil service. And so you could go into. I mean, it sounds dull, but it actually isn't. When you get there, the Agriculture Department, there's things going on here that are riveting. And so I went and actually got the briefing for how the nuclear arsenal gets managed in the Energy Department. They're like, thanks for showing up. You know, it's nice to give it to somebody. And it's. I mean, I'm deadly serious. So I went in thinking it was quite. Back then, in innocent days, it was like, what are they neglecting? It was neglect. It wasn't destruction. It was like, what are they not paying attention to? And so it was like, what does our government do? And, you know, we all talk about politics all the time. We seldom talk about what does the Commerce Department do? Do you know, I mean, most people don't.

[Stephen Colbert]

And when I think they distribute those take a penny, leave a penny trades, don't they?

[Michael Lewis]

There you go. You're the only one who knows, but they do. The weather service is in the. It is, it is, it is.

[Stephen Colbert]

So is NOAA under Commerce, Noah's under Commerce.

[Michael Lewis]

It's the three quarters of the budget. But this is what happened. So I wrote this thing, it's called the Fifth Risk, about the functions, like, what was happening. And I increasingly realized the people were the story. The people were amazing. I expected. I don't know what I expected. Bureaucrat, deep state. But it was mission driven, passionate, problem solving people, experts who were there, who could have made a lot of them, could have made a lot more money in the private sector. They had been drawn to the government because the government was solving some problem. And what is the government? It's like it's a place where all the problems the private sector doesn't want to solve end up. And you would not believe how many there are. It's like, there's no problem.

[Stephen Colbert]

Oh, that's it. There's no profit.

[Michael Lewis]

There's no profit in it. And curing a rare disease. Pharmaceutical companies don't care about that. It's rare. There are eight customers. People in the NIH are working on that. One of the first characters in this book, Chris Mark, he's 30 years figuring out how to stop the roofs of coal mines from falling in on the heads of coal miners. Which you think maybe that's a trivial problem. 50,000American coal miners were killed in the last century by this. And he solved the problem. And the industry had no interest in doing it. I Mean, it's like one where the.

[Stephen Colbert]

Industry had no interest in not killing their workers.

[Michael Lewis]

The industry used any kind of technical advance that would have made things safer to make them cheaper rather than protect the workers. So there was absolutely no improvement in the safety of the workers until the government came in with the stuff that this character creates and enforces standards and sort of requires them to do it. And so I spent three days with a guy who. Art Allen. His name is Arthur A. Allen. Arthur A. Allen is the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue division who basically created a science of how objects drift at sea. And you need to know how an upside down sailboat drifts differently from way a lone person in the water drifts to figure out, to predict where they might be if you go looking for.

[Stephen Colbert]

Them, wind and currents, all that stuff.

[Michael Lewis]

And so his work has saved thousands of lives. I spent three days with him in his house, like interviewing him about his science, talking to his wife and his kids. After three days, I'm going back to the airport and he calls me and he says, hey, you're a writer. And I said, yeah, I'm a writer. I was. Had my notepad out. He says, you're going to write about me? And I said, yeah, why do you think I was there? He said, I thought you were just really interested in how objects drift. This is our federal worker. And this is actually when I met him. I knew I got to write about these people because they won't tell their own story.

[Stephen Colbert]

Well, you do kind of care about how objects drift because our nation is drifting right now.

[Michael Lewis]

We are a fat man who's gone off the side of a Carnival cruise ship and hoping someone picks us up. That is exactly right. That is exactly right.

[Stephen Colbert]

So right now we see Donald Trump giving the keys to Elon Musk and his Doge boys and going in there with a metaphorical but sometimes literal chainsaw on stage and just cutting things out willy nilly. When you start gutting parts of the government for bulk rather than for purpose, which seems to be happening right now, what are we losing?

[Michael Lewis]

What are we losing? The government is also a portfolio of risks. They're managing all kinds of risks, a lot of them very long term risks. So the risk of really bad things, a lot of really bad things happening, measles outbreaks, coal mines, roofs falling on the heads of coal miners, you not whatever the technology is that might save you at sea when your boat is lost, that might be developed in the Coast Guard. It's one thing after another that that will just be managed less well. There's another thing they've done, though. They've cut the workers they can cut. And there's this group of people called probationary workers. And it's like the first two years on the job, you don't get the protection of civil service. You can be fired without cause. Who have they fired? They fire the people who've been hired in the last two years. Who is that? It's young people who come into government, and it's people who've been hired for some urgent, necessary task now. So it's exactly who you don't want to fire. You know, like, the government is not going to be refreshed. And I think what they've done, the horrible thing they've done is they sort of. They've broken some sort of. They've betrayed the trust of the federal workers. I mean, a lot of these people could be making a lot more money outside of the government. They are service kind of oriented people. They're not about themselves. They're about doing things for other people. I felt like jumping off the page of this book from between the lines is these are people who've sort of figured out how to lead a meaningful life. It's like when they're on their deathbed, they won't look back and say, regret the way they led their lives. A lot of people on Wall street might regret it. A lot of people who go work for big law firms might regret it. But these people did meaningful work that protected us, that made our lives better. And that we have come after them. That we have allowed a politician to demonize them and traumatize them is such a damning statement about, like, the state of our soul. Like, we should not have allowed this to happen.

[Stephen Colbert]

Michael, thank you for that.

[Michael Lewis]

Thank you.

[Stephen Colbert]

Thank you for listening to the Late Show POD show with Stephen Colbert. Just one more thing. If you want to see more of me, come to The Late Show YouTube channel for more clips and exclusives.