Michael Lewis: Don't Bet Against the Country

0:00If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background Play. So you can lock your phone and it still plays, baby. Oh, and it is completely ad-free. Yes, I said it ad-free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Hell eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. Hello, welcome to the Bullwork Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. We'll get to our guest here in one second, a few programming notes. We got to sail happening. It's an October surprise. And our surprise for you is you can get the Bullwork Plus for cheaper. 30% off, go to thebork.com slash surprise. You get to comment.

1:01I read the substack comments on the podcast, so if you have some complaints, it's like an open complaint box for you to share with me or a compliment. I take those two. You get the secret podcast. JVL's New Zealander, the best in the business is sometimes pay a wall to always get that. It's worth it. You just support the mission, help us go out and find new audiences. Make the message up to new people. So go ahead, join this October, the Bullwork.com slash surprise. Just a news item, I guess. Can we call it that? Are demented into Prairie President give a speech yesterday in Nebraska and en route and to and fro. That speech was bleeding on his social media site. No couple things. I was going to flag. He was discussing doing the weave, the pain that his war in Iran has caused. Most people domestically. He said something that raised some eyebrows in the speech last night. He said, I want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did.

2:03And remember, with the war, it's just artificial. It took me a second to figure out what he's talking about there, but I think he's talking about gas prices being up. It's just artificial. So we'll repeat it with that in the context. And remember, with the war, it's just artificial. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping the country safe. They can take a city, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. It's a very small price to pay and it's going to be over with very soon. So our president's brain is so adult that it's a little bit hard to translate like whether he wants Iran to take out San Diego because it's a liberal city or something. Or he can rationalize further war or whether what he's trying to say is that these gas prices, the high price at the pump, the high price at the grocery store, the economic pain that he inflicted on your family's at the war of choice. That's a small price to pay because otherwise the Iranians might take out Los Angeles or

3:07San Diego. That's some more generous way to interpret it. I assume that's what was trying to happen in his brain like the three little flies flying around, you know, inside the light bulb. But even if that generous interpretation is true, it's pretty strange. I mean, nobody thought that Iran was going to attack Los Angeles or San Diego and they can't reach Los Angeles or San Diego with their missiles. If Iran was going to attack something in the West, it probably would have been Europe like Italy, they could maybe reach. I would assume that these coasts would be more concerned than the West coast. And the whole thing is preposterous. And so what you see here is a man that has nothing, has no good arguments, has a broken brain and always drops to the lowest common denominator whether it's talking about this war or domestic issues.

4:09And you know, on that front, it was interesting. There were some news items about both of the long shot candidates that Bill Crystal and I picked yesterday. Neither of us saw any of this coming. You know, sometimes I get a little tip, a little insight in fell from a friend, you know, working on one of these campaigns that they're seeing some private polling. And I usually share everything that I get with you guys, but sometimes I get things that are private. That wasn't true yesterday. I just, I happened to have been in Lexington and was interested in that district as a stretch goal. You know, Bill Crystal being Bill Crystal obviously goes straight to Dr. Andy Andrews and South Carolina as his long shot candidate. And in the subsequent hours after we taped, we saw some interesting news items. Number one, the D-Triple C, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee went in with their first ad in that Kentucky Six District. Zach Dembaugh. I think there was a 166th most Republican district. So if the Democrats could be there, and they would have a majority that haven't seen

5:10in quite a long time in size. And so I think it's interesting that the Democrats, the people that see the polling think that is also apply, conversely to that, more interesting, more fun, more delicious, the Republicans put in 5 million. In the South Carolina Senate race, they are now not spending money on Georgia. They've given up on Georgia, and they are spending money on South Carolina. Again, if this was the polls were fake or whatever, this was a blue mirage, then we'll see what happens on election day, but the Republicans' internal polls are saying the same things that the public polls are saying if they feel like they got to spend money in South Carolina. So the Republicans are panicking, putting an injection of 5 million dollars into South Carolina. There's some conversation that they need to give up on Texas to shore up Iowa and Kansas. And meanwhile, that information is trickling to the President because he posted on his social media feed calling any Andrews, Tranny Andrews. I like these guys have like two jokes left. You know, it's like everything is a trans joke or the R word.

6:12It's like that's just all they have. You think that if you're going to do insult comedy, you can at least keep it fresh. You know, Louis C.K. at least comes up with some new material. And you know, it's just Trump and Higgs, I thought the beat isn't bad at Tranny, Tranny. It's embarrassing. Trans people and Muslims, I guess are the only people that politicians can just slur and attack like with minimal blowback at this point. And it's gross. But I think we can simultaneously be outraged that we have a president that's stooped to this level and also see it for what it is, which is that these guys are in a world of hurt right now. And they are grasping for anything. And if they feel like they need to do bigoted prejudice insult comedy against the Democratic candidate for Senate and South Carolina, the numbers aren't good. The data's not looking good. Former Republican governor David Beasley, I wanted to mention yesterday, he tweeted about the president's post saying this is abhorrent.

7:13Elections don't have to be about cruelty and lies. South Carolina deserves better. I agree with all of that. For great sentences by former governor David Beasley, Republican, South Carolina. And then the next sentence, I urge voters to look at the merits of each candidate and cast their vote accordingly. And I guess that's like a cheeky southern way of kind of doing like, bless your heart. There are no merits to darling Graham. But yeah, it'd be nice if one of these guys would at least have the balls just to be like I'm for Andy Andrews at this point. So hopefully we can see that from him or some of the other old time Republicans down there in South Carolina. And I'm sure that the Wall Street text and the people that endorse John Huntsman might be a good starting block for this. Rainy Andrews. Anyway, that's what was happening yesterday in Nebraska and in the president's addle brain. And we'll keep you posted on that. We've got another one of the stretch possibilities on tomorrow's show and I'm looking forward to that. All right, I'm sure we've all been there anytime. You've tried to travel somewhere where English isn't the first language and you wish you could communicate a little better.

8:14Maybe felt a little bit like an outsider. You didn't know what people were talking about. You didn't know the right thing to order. Remember one of my very first trips abroad. I was very excited because I had learned some French and I'd seen the ingredients. I knew all of the ingredients and the thing that I was ordering except one word and I didn't know what that word was. And I was like, fuck it, who knows? Well, that couldn't be something that bad. It was a pizza with some toppings on it. And I got all the toppings I wanted and the pizza and then just like a massive fried egg on top of it. I did not know the word for eggs still don't. And that it ruined the enjoyment for me. I'm not an ex-man. You know, you're learning about that from me right now. So there's a way to prevent all of this with our friends at Babel. Babel exists to close these language barriers. It's not textbook grammar. It's not leaderboard streaks. It's just words and phrases you'd actually use with a real person in a real place. People's built around those real life conversations. It's designed by one of the 200 language experts.

9:16You know what you're learning is what people actually say. And it fits into real life. A coffee breaker commute. Ten minutes of four bed. Me and Talies doing it in between when we order our dinner and when it comes to us at a restaurant. That's our favorite time to do it. And so easy. That's why it's sold more than $2.25 million subscription. So if you've been meaning to pick up a language or pick one backup, this is the moment. Give it a try. Think about it. If you have summer vacation next year, you started now. You'd fucking be in business by next summer. All right. Start learning a new language today with Babel. Right now listeners can save up to 60% off at babel.com slash bowl work. That's babel, B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash board for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions. Bay apply. He is a graduate of Newman High School, a new Orleans author of many books. You might have heard a couple of them. The big short money ball, the blind side of the new book is called Blockers. Rebels in the deep state, which is out today. It's Michael Lewis. What's up, man? Welcome back.

10:16Thank you, Tim. Good to see you. Good to see you. Last night was bad for my adopted city, your home city, the Saints. It was the dome coming. It was the anniversary, 20-year anniversary of the reopening of the Superdom, which was a year later after Katrina and the first game back for the Saints, which they won in dramatic fashion. Last night they lost in non-dramatic fashion. I reread your article called Waiting Towards Home from 2005 this morning. I was hoping maybe we could just start with a more fun memory of that time for you, a fun anecdote, to kind of wash away, no pun intended, the memories of the football game for the last night. I've never really left New Orleans in the sense that my whole family is still there. When I come back, I stay in the bedroom that I've had since I was six years old. My parents are in the same house, all that. My sister lives in my grandparents' old house. It's very New Orleans. When I came back, I'll tell you one story. I have a vivid memory. I was working on what I thought was going to be the sequel to Moneyball, so I was in

11:20Round Rock, Texas, watching a minor league baseball game when the levees broke. My whole family had evacuated. My father at the time was chairman of the board of the Oksana Hospital. I called him because I knew they were letting just doctors in. They were conmedical convoys. I called him and I said, could you get me in through a medical convoi? He said something like, after all we've been through, you're going to put us through this by going back in there. That's crazy. I remember it's hard to believe, but maybe it isn't that hard to believe. What was on the news suggested it was like the most dangerous city in the world. It was the same shoe store being robbed over and over again. And Fox was playing it on a scroll. I just didn't really believe it. He put me in touch with the guy, the operational, the CEO of Oksana, who put me in touch with the doctor who was going in on a convoi. I snuck in with my wife.

12:21This was on behalf of the New York Times. She took pictures. I wrote the article. It was so funny. It's like when I was growing up as a kid on this on state street, when I was 15, 16, and got my driver's license, I roll in at night after dates and try to park my car across the street from my parents house because there's no parking on their side. And no matter the time of day or night, this little old lady named Dottie Perry would come running out of her house, even though it was parking on the street and yell at me about not parking in front of her house. She was like, she was waiting for me every night. So this is now what, 25 years later. And I'm rolling into New Orleans with this convoi in a rental car. I peel off when we get to Oksana, and it isn't all underwater. Like they say, you were told the whole city is underwater. It wasn't. In fact, it was high and dry all the way to my parents house. A lot of trees down in things. It was dramatic. That power lines down. All the way to my parents house and you did not see a soul like it was the neutron bomb. All property, all intact.

13:23The people all wiped out. And I get to my parents house and there's a tree down in the street right in front. So I park across the street. And I'm getting out of the car. And this ancient leaky comes running out of her house. And it's Dottie Perry, who I've not seen in 25 years. And I think she's going to say Michael Lewis, do not park your car in front of my house. And instead she says, where is everybody? She remembers. She said, Michael, like, I've seen you. Where is everybody? She's got dementia. She's been in her house for a week, five days, however long it's been. And just and does not know what's happened. That was the beginning of an unreal, a very odd couple of weeks. And an amazing piece of kind of material for a piece of journalism. It's an unbelievable read. I'm going to put the link in the notes. People can read all of it. There is one quote in there that I was reading that struck me as, I don't know, maybe there's a relationship between here and blockers, which is talking about our, you know, the

14:27people inside our decaying bureaucracy that is under attack from outside forces. And you wrote this about New Orleans. You said, my parents would never put it this way, but they're fatalists. They've come to view changes unfortunate and inevitable. That's one difference between stability and stagnation. A stable society has the ability to reject or adapt to change. A stagnant one has changed and posed on it unpleasantly. The only question is from what direction it will come. I was reading that paragraph and I was like, I think that's how a lot of people at the bullwork feel about our current liberal democracy that it had become stagnant and the change is being imposed upon it unpleasantly. Yeah. I think that's a good description of the federal government. It's not good description every part of the federal government, but a lot of it feels that way. It's gotten harder and harder for it to rejuvenate itself. It's a cludger year. But on the other hand, like New Orleans, filled with marvelous characters, filled with filled with inspiring people actually doing kind of inspiring things just in more and more

15:29trying circumstances. So I wrote a book about Trump's first administration about just isn't neglect of the government and it's called the fifth risk. The revelation to me was one, just kind of the unbelievably interesting array of stuff the government's responsible for. You don't even think about, like you just take for granted, but all kinds of wild interesting stuff that the problems that the private sector won't deal with so they get jammed into the government. And just how good the characters were. It just sounds so weird. I say this to people like, you don't understand the civil servants. The best of them are some of the best characters I have ever run across. And they're still there. So it's not at least, guys, it's hopeless as New Orleans felt at the time. New Orleans was hit by Katrina, New Orleans felt really. Our liberal democracy doesn't feel as hopeless as New Orleans. New Orleans felt like there was nothing that would ever prod it out of its situation.

16:30Whereas I do feel like our democracy is an expression of lots of different aspects of our society, our society itself. It's a pretty vital place still. Like, they're still, they're still in energy. I mean, yeah, a lot of things have screwed up. But I can imagine an easier story. It being an easier story to tell, the rebirth of American government than the rebirth of New Orleans. And I say that as someone who just loves New Orleans. But it's okay. Well, I wanted to talk about some of these characters, but now you've peaked my interest at what's the story that you're telling yourself of the rebirth of American government right now? It's so important. We government, I mean, eventually the society crumbles if the government crumbles. And I think that if it gets dramatized sufficiently well, I think it just creates, there's a possibility of an opening in the marketplace for political ideas for someone to walk and say, this is important. I'm going to explain to you. We're not going to just shove the government to one side and make this all about day-to-day

17:32politics. I'm going to make an argument about why this matters. Let me give you a little example. I can't tell you who it was, but a very senior member of the House of Representatives that I were on a hike, I don't know, a year ago. And he said, if we get control of the House, I would like to use the House Oversight Committee to do hearings, not where we like, play the opposition. The point of the hearings are just to explain the government to the people. And would you help orchestrate these hearings so they're entertaining enough everybody wants to watch them? And that impulse, we are going to have to entertain people. Look, the book has to be a page tour. People aren't entertained. People do not want to boring civicism. But they do like an entertaining civicism. So I just think the fixable problems, it's a public education problem, it's an interest in attention problem, but the resources are there. You know, the resources and the energy is there, the youthful idealism is there to be tapped. I mean, doge in a funny way, I almost hate to say it this way, but there was youthful

18:34idealism in doge, just kind of misdirected. I just wouldn't bet against this country. And I think betting that the government will never figure it out is betting against the country. It just feels like a dumb move to bet against the country. As is my usual style, I was going to start with the negative and depressing and raged inducing elements. But since you've taken us there, let's begin with the one shining light, other more shining lights. But the one really hopeful I thought part of the book was the doge character that goes in to tear down the IRS and then realizes that it's like, well, you tell the story. And then push that and come back. So actually, so let's give him his name is Sahil Lavingia. And Sahil was one of a couple of hundred people who rolled into Washington. And what was really kind of just a loose social network? Like doge didn't really, they didn't vet anybody or do background checks.

19:36It was like, if you were at a cocktail party where someone knew Elon and they were going to Washington, yes, worse than that. If you sent tweets at Elon that made it seem like you were ideologically aligned. That's right. You might have just picked up. That's right. And Sahil was, it's important to know a couple of things about him. He wasn't one of the 20 somethings. He was in his early 30s. He'd also made, if not as fortunate, quite a bit of money. He dropped out of USC when he was 19 and was the second employee at Pinterest in the first engineer. And he created a company called Gamero that was very successful. So he had some millions of dollars, unlike a lot of the doge young people. A lot of young doge people had actually not done very well. They were young. And that's not true. I mean, there was big balls. Was it big balls? One of the guys had like ancient scrolls. That was Luke Farrettor. Oh, that was Luke. That was the different guys. I mean, press it. Kids who were very bright, but they hasn't done very much. But anyway, but Sahil, he had a motive.

20:38He had a very specific thing. It drove him batshit that he got paper from the IRS. He did not understand why he couldn't do his taxes on his phone. He didn't understand why a refund check went to his old address three months after he had moved. And he just said, I could fix this. I could turn the IRS into an app. When he gets to Washington, they don't actually listen to what he wants to do. They say we need you at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He goes over to the VA, knowing nothing about it, finds another doge, a young doge guy there, completely bewildered and frazzled, because he's been told to cut contracts. Now, I try to, you just have to just kind of pause here. I'm trying to imagine what would happen if I'm 28, 35 or 60. And I have no idea what's in the VA. And someone in Elon's world says, here is the key to the VA. Go cut contracts. Like I wouldn't even know how to be good, especially if they weren't done in like two days.

21:40The kid did. With Sahil walks in on, is he, the guy has a file. He's got the file with all of the VA's contracts. And he's just plugging in keywords like gender or bias or women. Right. And just, this is how the annullly gay got taken out of the, that's right. That's right. And anything that was like about statistical bias, boom, gone. And just whacking them on the basis of a word. Now, he even, he knew, he apparently looked up at Sahil and said, I think God you're here because man, I don't know if I should be doing this. And Sahil looks down at me like, no, he probably shouldn't be doing that. And he, so I don't know, gets himself in trouble with those. In a couple of ways, he speaks up at a meeting with Elon Musk saying that they should be more transparent. And that upsets some people. I think what he really does it get some trouble is he gives an interview to fast company in which he's quoted saying something like, you know, I've been here a couple of weeks.

22:41And the government really isn't as inefficient as I thought it was. And it's like, I remember that. If you're in Doge, you could be reposting neo-Nazi tweets, right supremacist tweets, you could be a, you have a past of sexual abuse. You could have made up colleges on your resume you never went to. And in each case, you were protected. And if you said the government was a little less inefficient than you thought, that you're fired. So that was, he found that. And more on the nose of this guy, I mean, like literally there was somebody that was sending the most disgusting anti-Indian comments imaginable. And JD Vance, like, defends that person and circles the wagons around them. And this guy saw how it gets kicked out. The wagons get circle for everywhere with soil. So he gets kicked out. I don't know how many people get fired from Doge, possibly he was the only one. And he was the well-meaning one. So he goes off and then Doge dissolves and everybody agrees, basically even in Elon Musk agrees it's a failure. They even, they lie a lot about what they did.

23:43But it was a horrible failure. But with soil, there were remnants of Doge. There were people. Not everybody in Doge was uninformed. Not everybody in Doge came in with malicious intention. And there were a few people left behind who were still kind of embedded in the government. They were thinking, like, look, could we do something useful here? And so, so I would get a call from one of them saying, you know, that thing you said about the IRS, you would come back and try. And what I love is that he turned to his wife, Saul did, and said, I've already seen this isn't like a three-month assignment. I've already seen how this place works. You have to embed. You have to really understand how it works get stuff done. I'm going to go to work to the IRS for 10 years. Now, apparently he's, he's sugar this pill by saying, I promise we'll have a million dollars in passing income every year. So don't worry about that. And he's also saying, I think, when he rolled, he said, I think I might be the richest person in the IRS. And they give him a, they give him an office, which you got to see to believe in the

24:45York. It's just, it, it, what does it look like? It looks like it was awful before the people left. It looked like the people left in a great hurry. Like there was an invading, an invading army probably was, came through. They're like plants and artworks and people just left all kinds of crap. It's just empty cubicles and saw him gets there and starts to work. And if that his app, I don't know if it's out yet, but it's imminent. Like he, she's actually done the thing. It's amazing what he's done. But, but when he gets there, he's got a little OCD, a little, a whatever, some alphabet problem, he would tell you, I'm on the spectrum, I think is with the way he puts it. He says he gets to his floor and he goes to fill his water bottle and the water fountain doesn't work. And he gets obsessed with it. He goes in what first world country is it acceptable in a government building for the water fountain not to work? And he decides that he's going to fix the water fountain. At the end of the book is saw how fixing the water fountain, not the app.

25:47And it, it's such a fun story, but it's such, it's such a way of moving stories. Sort of like, this is who should be in government. People like him, people want to fix problems. People are there for, you know, good reasons. And you watch him in action, you know, for whatever reason, I have a kind of hopefulness about our society. And even after watching what has just happened in our government, I do feel a hopefulness. And I do feel like that we are a very public spirited country, a very philanthropic country. We're a problem solving country. We're a proteim country. We can change, we can change on a dime and forget what just happened. And I just thought, it's wonderful to see this spirit just a lot, still a lot. The spirit and all these characters who got run out of the government. And I want to end on the note that spirit is still a lot of. And so he just gave me the perfect way to do it. The water fountain. The water fountain. And we've got big problems. We have big problems. We've got to start with the water fountain. Well, you start with the, you know, the water fountain, I don't need to tell you, it's a metaphor.

26:48Yeah. I got it. The water fountain is not just the water fountain. I got it. Okay, that's very important. All right. The problem is that the people like him have mostly been thrust out of the government across a bunch of different areas. And you write about it. A lot of people like him. Yeah, a lot of people like him. And so you write about some of them. You know, it's funny when I didn't understand, but I came to understand because of Doge, how much easier it is to chase the good people out of government than the bad people. Yeah. What they did, I mean, in addition to cutting contracts, the way that the moronic way they did, the way they fired people, they got came and they realized that what dead would there was has civil service protections and they couldn't just fire them. That they could do two things. They could fire the probationary workers. That's an odd title for them. But the people who've only been there 18 months or so. So the new young people, the country desperately needs and people who have been brought in to solve some immediate problem. People, exactly, they grew up, people who don't know fire.

27:49And also that included weirdly people that, again, they have entrepreneurial people that had changed from like one department to another because they wanted to go do some other job. They were also probationary. So they could get canned too. That's right. That's exactly right. So that kind of the vitality of the place easily fired and was just wiped out on mass by Doge. And the other thing is, if you make it with a, also do make life so unpleasant for federal workers, they didn't want to be there anymore. The self-deport strategy. Yeah. And who self-deports? People who have options in the private sector. You lose. It's so much easier to chase out the good people than the bad people. So they did the opposite of what you would, I mean, let's just say we agreed with them. And this, I don't know, takes some number 10% of the people in the federal workforce who shouldn't be there. It's probably right. Something like that. Right. It's true in the private sector. Sure. This is not how you would go about getting rid of them. You probably, this is probably, you've left yourself with them.

28:50So it is very disturbing. It raises questions. Here's a question for you. I get pushed back on this whenever I say this. People say you're going too far. But how do we know Elon Musk is a good manager of enterprise? Like this is so dumb that it's like, how could this person be trusted with a company? And he fucked up Twitter. And he hid the mistake. He's using SpaceX to jam the embarrassment of his mismanagement of Twitter into that. He's really good at carnival barking kind of thing, as promoting, of getting share prices up. But his company is trading at hundreds of times earnings. I don't know who's actually running Tesla or who's running SpaceX when he's tweeting all the time. I just wonder, like, are we misunderstanding this guy? He's got talents. But maybe he's actually very poorly suited to actually running something. I wish this was Jerry Springer. I could bring your newman high school grad Walter Isaacson in right now.

29:53And we could, the three of us could hash this out together, because I think we'd probably adopt my view as I think those are the years. Walter and I did hash this out on this podcast a couple of years ago. And I was kind of pushing the argument you just made. The point that he made just kind of steel man that Elon does know how to do stuff argument is like, it's not nothing that NASA stopped being able to put space shuttles on the moon and that SpaceX did. And that SpaceX is the only company right now to a degree that's dangerous, frankly, that can get into low orbit and offer people satellite Wi-Fi. And so like, what, what? I think like the obvious answer to that is twofold. One, the certain kind of craziness that allows somebody to have the vision to go do something like that. Like all that craziness also has negative consequences that show up, particularly when you're running when you're trying to do something that takes real organizational skills with the government. And then the other possible theory is like Twitter and his daughter being trans just like broke his brain and he went from like the crazy, you know, sort of compounded it.

30:54It used to be one thing, you know, is another. Right. Yeah, maybe your combination of the two. And maybe the challenge of, you know, Starlink is a different sort of challenge than running Twitter or running the federal government. Well, definitely that is true for running federal government. And this is true in your book. Like you see this from solid than the other like those people to go in. It's just like because you have a, because responsibility is the word, right? Like if you're in the government, like you have an obligation to the people that pay for the government, right? And so the way that you can do creative destruction in the private sector is not fully analogous. Right? Like I used to be a Republican. I was for all the points of like, oh, we should make government more efficient. We should cut red tape. And it's like, so there's arguments have some truth to it. But they're also, they're just not the same thing, right? It's, it's why, you know, it's why healthcare can't be run like Amazon. Yeah. And you can't reward people in the government like you reward people in the private sector. You can't punish people in the government like you punish people in the private sector.

31:55It is a harder management problem and the kind of problems the government is often dealing with. The government solution is not meant to be exactly efficient. It's like you weren't redundancies when you're dealing with like nuclear safety or air traffic control or there are all kinds of things like this where or benefits for people. This is why the stupid fraud discussion like is the is invoked on the right right now. I like sure we should we should make sure there's not fraud and Medicaid system. But like you actually would rather make sure everybody had healthcare or everybody had their food stamps and also have some fraud than have a system that's so onerous that like people can't get you know what I mean. So they're different. You tolerate a so you tolerate a certain amount of fraud to make the system work for the people who are fraudulent. Here we go. You've made me that sounded like I'm sounded like Bernie. I'll dissuade. No, no, that's right. I think that's right. I mean, I tell you I have I have people tell me that. Yeah. So it's just a different management problem and we've sort of gotten away from that discussion. It gets analogized to the private sector falsely.

32:58I mean, the Trump assault the Trump administration assault on the federal government had many parts and dojos was just one of them. But the this is an defense of the Trump administration. But it is if I were defending the Trump administration, I would say a lot of the problems we have managing the government pre-existed the Trump administration. And one of the big problems is that we sort of abandoned the notion that the person who was put in charge of I don't know the Commerce Department or the Agriculture Department has to know anything about it or have any ability any previous ability to manage anything and care about it. And so that you get the situation the Trump administration is an extreme example like how we're blood running the Commerce Department and barely showing up there and never figuring out what's really inside the place and making really dumb kind of management decisions that will allow the Alex Baron Gita story on that front. Sure. So it's 20,000 words in the book.

33:58So I can't tell the whole thing. But it's give us a tease. The way I thought about the book was government has been transformed by this administration that this this attempt to take this multimillion person supposedly nonpartisan workforce that previously took an oath to the Constitution to come being the civil service and turn it into a narrow loyalist operation that serves the personal interests of the president. And when you do that, you change the way all the different functions function. And what I did with the book was I picked what I thought of as the main functions and found a character to dramatize how the function was going to change. This was the most subtle of the buckets of the functions that I in it's the public safety function because it's not clear that even like a narrow loyalist civil service once like airplanes falling out of the sky. It becomes the management of public safety. It gets managed differently and probably worse. There's more corruption. There's less transparency. There's it gets managed differently, but it's still completely neglected.

35:01But Alex Marig器's is was my character to dramatize the issue. And Alex Marig器's invented a fire science. It sounds weird. I didn't even know there was a fire science. Any fire science as it turns out, there's more than one. There's a history of the study of indoor fires. There's a history of the study of wildfires. And what he invented was the study of wild land, urban, interface fires. The ones we talk about comes out of the woods, wipes out paradise, wipes out campfire. And he has persuaded me that this is a growing risk, that warming planet, drawing parts of the country. The East Coast doesn't think of it as a big problem for the East Coast. He says, it all takes it six weeks and it's a tender box. There's so much built up fuel. And he did just spectacular, well, back up, the way he got the permission inside the Department of Commerce, a little organization called NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is where a lot of the fire science research is done in the government.

36:02The way he got permission to do it was he had an expertise in building and doing giant fire experiments. And he was brought in to understand, to try to understand why the twin towers fell in 9-11. Because the general belief was the steel wouldn't melt. Nothing would bring those things down. And he actually rebuilt floors of the World Trade Center. The floor is right below how we're letting it all firm and showed how the fire had moved and how, in fact, that is what it happened. Fire has melted the beams. So you would think that since it's impacted our next life so much that you really valued this person's contribution to the Department of Commerce and word growing his remit. And we're learning a lot about how to prevent it in the future. Is that what the story goes? That's the other way the story goes. You know, this is not the way the story goes. The story goes, by 2004-05, as earned the right to use the NIST Fire Lab on the side, to start studying wild land, urban, interface fires.

37:03And he's doing things like, he needs to know how trees burn, for example. He's doing things like bringing in hundreds of Christmas trees and burning them and measure everything that happens. Well, it's a very odd job. But like, going out into actual, you know, the witch fire in San Diego and in the while it's happening and watching how the fire moves for the community, seeing that wooden fences are, you know, transmitting a fire from house to house. Going back to his lab and like burning kids' play sets to see how much energy they have been. He's trying to create essentially a body of knowledge that will enable communities to design themselves so they can defend themselves against these fires. He's trusted to be able to do it. He can, nobody's really watching him too closely. So this is before Trump. In 2008, there's an accident at a NIST lab in Colorado with plutonium. Some visiting researcher did something they shouldn't have done. It led to a congressional investigation.

38:03And Congress passed these rules about experiments that required Alex afterwards to get like 18 signatures on a piece of paper before he could do anything in his lab, which basically shut down on the fly stuff. And there was this growing tendency for the government to both cut his budget or make his budget insecure and increase the complexity of his life. It's always really hot shot kind of scientists types who you want doing science. It used to have its own travel agent. And the travel agent, you just call travel agent, you travel would you be done, you didn't think about it. Someone got in their head that that was excessive and a luxury and a waste of taxpayer dollar. They fired the travel agent. And what they do instead is they spend an hour or a month in seminars, these scientists learning how to book the cheapest flight for the, it's crazy. It's crazy. It's just like a, and so Alex's life got that way. It was like increasingly scrutinized. He was hamstrung at the bottom of it was a kind of mistrust. But all this guy was doing this guy who's going to make five times more money in the private

39:05sector, working a hundred hours a week, trying to solve a problem that we all once solved. Incomes how it looked. Takes away all the credit cards from the scientists. And they can spend a maximum of $1 on their cards, I think is what he does. He says, any expenditure over $10,000 I need to personally sign. But then he's not there to sign them. And so, so he must hang out with Trump. So he's not even in his office. So there would be these scenes where at night where there's a line of people hoping he gets something signed by our lightning, hoping he shows up that evening in his office. But Alex would say it's like, you know, he was exhausted already. And it's got to the point where what is the signal is coming from the very top of the organization is total ignorance and a faint hostility to the work that's going on in the organization. And it drove Alex out. This knowledge is one person deep. You read the papers and you read the advice. I mean, states are taking his advice. Cal fire, the people might my home state fire department thinks he's a genius and thinks

40:07that he's already saved lives. And that he is like that work is key to the future of addressing this problem. The federal government is the natural home for this. He's obsessed with it. He's a world's expert and we're losing him. It's insane. And this has happened for their thousands of Alex's. And we're losing him because he's sitting outside and having a lot of his office. So like a man who should know the importance of this, like waiting for him to sign something but instead he's trying to impress, trying to do a Fox business head or something. But I got to say, tip an office kid's just whatever is happening. It's all very disturbing and it's all very angering. I found myself many times while writing the book, shocked by how much joy, how much fun I was having writing the book. And truth is these people are, they're fun to write about. It's crazy shit they're doing and it is obsessive and nobody's ever paid them any attention. So it's fresh, you know, it's like fresh material. Every time I go into the government, I find this. This is why we need movies.

41:08Yeah, that's right. And that's why a lot of nerds going into sports front offices because of money ball now. So, you need some movies. So this might be a movie. There's some action and this, it's got the same problem as the big short. Writing the book is very similar to the big short. I cast it. I cast it. I had an idea of what the story was and I knew I needed people who represented different things like public safety, like data collection, like long term science research. And I have a spoil for choice, like with a big short. And I sort of flower or range the whole book. And it is made for someone like Adam McCay to come in and take what I've done, break it and remake it. Because you're right. We do need a movie about this. I have two A.I. I just have to pick your brain on for I lose you just because I'm curious. You wrote also the big SBF book. He's Stone Jail for now. He's in jail for 25 years. Just waiting for that pardon.

42:09But when we talked last time, you talked about how he saw cryptos or religion. And like in the intervening period, we have all of this kind of discussion at A.I. And effective altruism, which is part of this effective altruism. And like the Trump administration is calling that a cult. We had this weird story, the anthropocopounder, Christopher Ola, like went to, was in discussions with the Vatican and religious scholars, like telling them that they want A.I. consciousness to be recognized. Some very weird culty stuff going on. And I don't know. I always saw SBF is kind of faking it on all that. But I don't know. You got to spend time with them. He wasn't faking it on something. He was faking it on where the money was. But he was. Yeah, sure. No, he was all in on effective altruism. All in. It was his identity. Still his identity. And it is a kind of religion. It organizes the people's lives. And at the center of it at the time, interestingly, was this sense that the one problem they could and should address was A.I.

43:11And that's why, yeah, that's why Sandbag We're Free to own 20% of anthropoc. That investment that would be worth, I don't know, $80 billion today, maybe more. The Ponzi scene could have worked if he just survived. Absolutely. I'm told enough until to sell the stock. Ponzi schemes the wrong analogy. You're right. Sorry. No, here's what it is because each of these things is different. He was using his deposit. It's like taking your bank depositors money and turning them into venture capitalists without them knowing. He bought a venture capital portfolio. That portfolio is, it would be so much fun to analyze now because I've had VCs tell me it's the most successful portfolio ever assembled. It's amazing. It's all kinds of stuff in it, including SpaceX. But the anthropoc, the investment was made because they saw that is it Dario. Dario was thought to be more righteous about AI safety than Sam Olin. And he left open AI to create the good one, the one that would be responsible.

44:11Like on the one hand, I'm attracted to the kind of pitch from the anthropoc side that we need to be more careful. There needs to be more AI safety. And I've been like consuming just an unhealthy amount of material about all this lately. But then you start to hear them talk about AI consciousness and the cultishness in which they talk about it. And then I start to feel like, I don't know if these guys even better. Let's just say, let's just accept that there's a possible existential threat here. They seem to think so. I don't know, but let's just say it. The only solution to this will come from the federal government. So the existential threat is occurring and growing, expanding. Precisely the time we have basically deballed the federal government, made it, made it in a risk. Yeah, it is a fifth risk. We don't have the capacity. It's a kind of moral, social, and like capacity to address the problem.

45:19Trump's just throws it out as he says, let him do it. Whatever they want to do. But what is really needed is a blocker. What is really needed is a really smart blocker to ask hard questions and decide who can do what with AI. Now maybe that it's all a fool's game that even if the federal government involved, like the Chinese would do the irresponsible thing. But I don't know. But there's no trust. This is what it comes back to. And this is the thing. And then I'll let you go. But the last thing we talked about last time was just the way that Trump and Elon and these guys attack trust because it gains power for themselves. And this is the most extreme example of that. We could potentially be in a world in a couple of years where people can't even really trust what is real. You know, they're not even sure what's real and what is fake. And so when that trust breaks down and the government trust continues to break down further, I told you I'd bring you back around to the negative after your positive optimistic start. Like you can kind of see all of the warnings from the fifth risk and kind of the threats from this from blockers.

46:20Yeah. Potentially our exacerbated times a million by what these guys are doing with AI. Yeah. We have a pretty strong sense of self preservation as a society. I just don't believe it. I think there's going to be a backlash to all this. Yeah. I do think. And if you're right, you're right. The strategy, the Trump strategy, the best way to predict where he's going to go is figure out where there's still trust and see how he tries to destroy it. He'll see smells it and he goes after it because he's threatened by it. In a trusting environment, he does very poorly because he's so untrustworthy. He needs to create this kind of gas. He needs to spread this kind of gas where everybody mistrusts everybody else and he's very good when nobody trusts anybody else because he's so good at being untrustworthy. Where everybody else is sort of like hesitates a little bit. There's like a little bit of a beat before they tell them the real lie and so he's just so much better at that. I don't know. I guess the characters through your book is who are rebuilding trust with. It's hard. Who do you use to rebuild the trust with? I'm going to use these characters. These characters are really good places to start.

47:23Michael Lewis, man. I'll see you uptown in a couple of months. All right. Make sure you come down to see your family, all right? Yeah. Good to see you. All right. Thanks so much to Michael Lewis. One thing I didn't get to him that I wanted to get to with him was how to rebuild that trust through accountability and through bringing back the functions, the referees that ensured that our liberal democracy worked and that rule of law can prevail. I would point you to his book. He's a great chapter on these referees that work in the shadows in the government. It's an excellent book. Super interesting. He's the best. But if you want to get some rage out over on the board takes feed. I did a little solo rant called Trump's corporate enablers should be very worried about 27, that offers some harsh words from some of the Democrats who have been telling political that they're not sure that we need that kind of accountability coming in 2027. So go check that out over on the board to take speed.

48:25I appreciate Michael Lewis very much. We'll be back tomorrow. It should be a fun one. See you all then, peace. You can put your clothes back on, she's leaving you No time to apologize for the things you do No renta for Rory, and sing the books No believe that Clapton was the second coming Far so far, we all got work to do Take it star, we all got work to do She's leaving you

49:34She's leaving you The Bullwork Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown