The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Lewis: Don't Bet Against the Country

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Destroying trust in the government is one of Trump's key sources of power, but Michael reports from the front lines of the deep state that there still are good employees serving the public interest. In his new book, Michael celebrates some of the heroes who either managed to survive DOGE—or were stupidly pushed out despite the vital roles they filled. And the absolute failures of DOGE raise serious questions about how Elon could be trusted to run any enterprise. Plus: Trump sure sounded like he was inviting Iran to bomb two big blue cities, and Republicans are rushing money to South Carolina and a very GOP district in Kentucky. Seems like Tim and Bill were onto something with their long-shot midterms picks on Monday. Michael Lewis joins Tim Miller.show notes: Michael's new book, "Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State" Tim's 'Take' on how Trump's corporate enablers should be worried about 2027 Michael's post-Katrina piece, "Wading Toward Home" "The Fifth Risk," Michael's book on Trump 1.0 Michael on Sam Bankman-Fried, "Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon" October Suprise: The Bulwark is 30% off Upcoming Bulwark LIVE shows, including Atlanta on Oct. 20 Closing Song: MJ Lenderman - She’s Leaving You The Bulwark’s campaign to help the Haitian community of Springfield The Bulwark store

Welcome to the Bullwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We'll get to our guest here in one second, a few programming notes. We've got a sale happening. It's an October surprise. And our surprise for you is you can get the Bullwark Plus for cheaper. 30% off. Go to the Bullwark.com slash surprise.

You get to comment. I read the Substat comments on the podcast. So, you know, 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 newsletter, the best in the business that sometimes pay well, so you always get that. It's worth it.

And you just support the mission, help us go out and find new audiences, get the message out to new people. So go ahead, join this October, the bulwark.com slash surprise. Just a news item, I guess. Can we call it that? Our demented and depraved president gave a speech yesterday in Nebraska. And, you know, on route and to and fro, that speech was bleeding on his social media. media site. And a couple of things I just wanted to flag. He was discussing, you know, kind of doing the weave, the pain that his war in Iran has caused people domestically. And 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. And 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, so that 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 of the grocery store, the economic pain that he inflicted on your families at the war of choice, that's a small price to pay because otherwise the Iranians might take out Los Angeles or San Diego. That's the more generous way to interpret it. I assume that's a small price to 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. up like Italy they could maybe reach. I would assume that the East Coast 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, you know, always drops to the lowest common denominator, whether it be talking about this war or domestic issues. And, you know, on that front, It was interesting. There was 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. Sometimes I get a little tip, little insight info from a friend 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. And, you know, Bill Crystal, being. and Bill Crystal, obviously, go straight to Dr. Annie 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 6th district. Zach Dembo. I think it was the 166th most Republican district. So if Democrats could win there, and they would have a majority they haven't seen in quite a long time. in size. And so I think it's interesting that the Democrats, to people that see the polling, think that is also in play. Conversely to that, more interesting, more fun, more delicious, the Republicans put in five 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 know. 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 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 Annie Andrews Tranny Andrews. These guys have like two jokes left. You know, it's like everything is a tranny. trans joke or the R word. It's like that's just all they have.

You'd think that if you're going to do insult comedy, you could 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 hugs off. It's like, uh, beves them by head, tranny, training. 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, it's gross. But I think we can simultaneously be outraged. that we have a president that stoop 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, prejudiced, 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 elections don't have to be about cruelty and lies

south korenda deserves better i agree with all that four 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 darlene 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 annie 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. Asterisk texting the people that endorsed John Huntsman. That might be a good starting block for this, for Annie Andrews. Anyway, that's what was happening yesterday in Nebraska and in

the president's Adelbrain. 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 any time you've tried to travel somewhere where English isn't the first. language and you wish you could communicate a little better. Maybe you 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. I 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 on 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? It couldn't be

something that bad. It was a pizza and 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 eggs man. You know, I'd be learning about that from me right now. So there's a way to prevent all 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. Babel is built around those real life conversations. It's designed by one of the 200 language experts. So you know what you're learning is what people actually say. And it fits into real life.

A coffee break, a commute, 10 minutes before bed. Me and Toulouse 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 it's so easy. That's why it sold more than 25 million subscriptions. If you've been meaning to pick up a language or pick one backup, this is the moment. Give it a try. Think about if you have a 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 babble.com slash bulwark.

That's Babel, B-A-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-E-L-L-L-Sash-Bullwork for up to 60% off. Rules and Restrictions. He is a graduate of Newman High School in New Orleans, author of many books. You might have heard a couple of them. The big short money ball, the blind side. 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. Thank 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 Superdome, which was a year later after Katrina and the first game back for the Saints, which they won in dramatic fashion.

And last night they lost in non-dramatic fashion. So I reread your article called Waiting Towards Home from 2005 this morning. And I was hoping maybe we could just start with like maybe 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 from last night. So, you know, I've never really left New Orleans in the sense that like 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. But 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 Round Rock, Texas, watching a minor league baseball game when the levees broke. And my whole family had evacuated. My father at the time was chairman of the board of the auctioner hospital. and I called him because I knew they were letting just doctors in or medical convoys.

And I called him and I said, could you get me in through a medical convoy? And he said, 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. And 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, it was like the most dangerous city in the world. It was the same shoe store of being robbed over and over again, and Fox was playing it on a scroll. And I just didn't really believe it. So he put me in touch with the guy, the operational, the CEO of Oxner, who put me in touch with the doctor who was going in on a convoy.

And I snuck in with my wife, this was on behalf of the New York Times. She took pictures. I wrote the article. What was so funny is like when I was growing up as a kid on State Street, when I was, I was 15, 16 and got my driver's license, I'd 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 convoy in a rental car. I peel off when we get to auctioner, and it isn't all underwater. Like, you know, you were told the whole city's 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.

It had power lines down all the way to my parents' house, and you did not see a soul, like it was the neutron bomb. Property all, all intact, the 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 lechy comes running out of her house.

And it's Doddy Perrier, who I've not seen it 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? And she remember, she said, Michael, like, I haven't seen you in. Where is everybody? She's got dementia. she's been in her house for a week, five days, however how 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's one quote in there that I was reading it that struck me as, I don't know, maybe there's a relationship between here and blockers, which is talking about our. are, you know, the people inside are 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 are fatalists. They've come to view change as 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 change imposed 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 bulwark 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 a good description to every part of the federal government, but a lot of it

feels that way. Sure. It's gotten harder and harder for it to rejuvenate itself. It's clodier. 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 trying circumstances. So I wrote a book about Trump's first administration, about just this neglect of the government. And it's called the fifth risk. And 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 this sounds so weird i could say this to people like you don't you understand the civil servants the best of them are are some of the best characters i have ever run across and that they're still there so it's not i don't think it's not as hopeless as new world at the time when new Orleans was hit by katrina new Orleans felt really our liberal democracy doesn't feel as hopeless as new Orleans at the time new world's felt it's not as I don't think felt like there was nothing that would ever prod it out of its situation. Whereas I do feel like our democracy is an expression of lots of different, lots of different aspects of our society. Of our society itself, it's a pretty vital place still. Like there's still, there's still an energy.

I mean, yeah, a lot of things are screwed up. But I can imagine an easier story, it being an easier story to tell the rebirth of American government than the rebirth. 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, though. What's the story that you're telling yourself of the rebirth of American government right now? It's so important. The 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, like, shove the government to one side and make this all about day-to-day politics. I'm going to make an argument about why this matters. Let me give you, like, 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 a house, I would like to use. use the House Oversight Committee to do hearings, not where we like flay 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 turn.

People aren't entertained. People do not want a boring civics lesson. But they do like an entertaining civics lesson. So I just think they're fixable problems. It's a public education problem. It's an interest and 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 idealism in Doge. Just kind of misdirected. I just wouldn't bet it 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, you know, kind of the negative and depressing and rage-inducing elements.

But since you've taken us there, let's begin with, like, I guess, maybe the one shining light. Well, there are 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 all like, well, you tell the story. And then he pushed that and comes back. I'll tell it. So actually, so his name is. So let's give him a name. His name is Sahil Lavinia. And Sahil was one of, you know, a couple hundred people who rolled into Washington. And what was it, what was really kind of just a loose social network?

Like, those didn't really, they didn't vet anybody or do background checks. It was like if you were at a cocktail party where someone knew Elon and they were going to Washington. Honestly, it's worse than that. If you sent tweets at Elon that made it seem like you were ideologically aligned, that's right. You might have gotten picked up. That's right. And it was important to know a couple things about him. He wasn't one of the 20-somethings.

He was in his early 30s. He'd also made, if not his fortune, quite a bit of money. He dropped out of USC when he was 19 and was the second employee at Pinterest and the first engineer. And he created a company called Gumroad that was very successful. So he had some millions of dollars, unlike a lot of the Doge young people. A lot of the young people had actually not done very much. Well, they were young. Well, 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. That was Luke Ferritour. Oh, that was Luke. The different guy.

I mean, I'm impressive. Kids who are very bright, but they hasn't done very much. But anyway, but he saw him, he had a motive. He had a very specific thing.

It drove him bat shit that he got paper from the IRS. He did not understand why he couldn't do his taxes on his phone. You'd understand why, like a refund check went to his, old address, you know, three months after he'd moved. And he just said, I can fix this. Like,

I can 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'm trying to, you just have to kind of pause here. I'm trying to imagine what would happen if I'm 28 or 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 begin, especially if they weren't done in like two days. What the kid did, what Sawill walks in on is he's, the guy has a file. He's got the file with all

of the A's contracts. And he's just plugging in keywords like gender or bias or women. Right. And this was how like the annola gay got taken out of the DOD. 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 Saul and said, I thank God you're here. Because, man, I don't know if I should be doing this. And Sautil looks down and he's like, no, you probably shouldn't be doing that. And he, Sahl then 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 doesn't get some trouble is he gives an interview to Fass Company in which he's quoted saying something like,

you know, I've been here a couple of weeks. And the government really isn't as inefficient as I thought it was. And it's like, 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, and more on the nose with this guy. I mean, like literally there was somebody that was sending the most disgusting anti-Indian comments imaginable.

And Jady Vance, like, defends that person and circles the wagons around them. And this guy, Sahel, gets kicked. The wagons gets circle for everywhere by Sawhill. So he gets kicked out. I don't know how many people got 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 even the

Musk agrees it's a failure. They lie a lot about what they did. But it was a horrible failure. But with Sawhill. 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. We're thinking, like, could we do something useful here? And So Aahill gets a call from one of them saying, you know, that thing you said about the IRS, you want to come back and try. And what I love is that he turned to his wife, Sawhill did, and say, and said, you. that I've already seen this isn't like a three-month assignment. I've always seen how this place works. You have to embed, you have to really understand how it works to get stuff done. I'm going to go to work to the IRS for 10 years.

Now, apparently he sugared this pill by saying, I promise we'll have a million dollars in passive income every year, so don't worry about that. And he also said, I think when he rolled and he said, I think I might be the richest person in the IRS. And they give him an office, which you've got to see to believe in New York. it's just 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 it gets there and starts to work and in fact his app i don't know if it's out yet but it's imminent like he's actually done the thing it's amazing what he's done but he's done but But when he gets there, he's got a little OCD, a little whatever, some alphabet problem, he would tell you. I'm on the spectrum, I think is 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. The end of the book is Soho Fishing the Water Fountain, not the app. And it's such a fun story, but it's such in a way moving story. So it's sort of like, this is who should be in government. People like him, people want to fix problems. People are there for 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, we're a very philanthropic country, we're a problem-solving country, we're a protean country. We can change on a dime and forget what just happened. And I just thought it's wonderful to see this spirit still alive, the spirit and all these characters who got run out of the government. And I want to end on a note of that spirit is still alive. 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. You got to start with the water fountain. Well, you start with a, you know, the water fountain, I don't even tell you. It was a metaphor. Yeah, I got it, my God.

The water fount 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. A lot of people like him. Yeah, a lot of you like him.

And so you write with some of them. You know, it's funny what 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. What they did, I mean, in addition to cutting contracts, the moronic way they did, the way they fired people, they got came and they realized that what dead wood 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 the group of people you don't want to fire. And 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 can too. That's right. That's exactly right. So kind of the vitality of the place easily fired and was just wiped out.

out en masse by Doge. And the other thing is, if you make it what they also do is make life so unpleasant for federal workers, they didn't want to be there anymore. The self-deport strategy. Yeah. The self-deport. 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 which you would, I mean, let's just say we agreed with them in this, I don't know, take some number, 10% of the people in the federal workforce who shouldn't be there. It's probably right.

something like that. 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. So 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 companies are 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 do wonder, like, are we misunderstanding this guy? Like, he's got talents, but maybe he's actually very poorly suited to actually running something. I wish this was Jerry Springer and I could bring your Newman high school grad Walter Isaacson in right now. And the three of us could hash this out together because I think we probably would all have. My view is, I think, close to yours.

Walter and I did hash this out on this podcast a couple 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, I think the obvious answer to that is like twofold. One, like, the certain kind of craziness that allows somebody to have the like 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 like

the government. And then the other possible theories like Twitter and his daughter being trans just like broke his brain. And he went from and like the crazy, you know, sort of compounded. It used to be one thing and now he's another. Right. Yeah, maybe a 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 the federal government. And this is true in your book. You see this from Slal and the other like Doge people that 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.

Those arguments have some truth to it. But also they're just not the same thing, right? 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. It 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 want 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 in vogue on the right right now. I like, sure, we should we should make sure that there's not fraud in the Medicaid system. But like you actually would rather make sure everybody had health care 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 it's different. You tolerate a certain amount of fraud to make the system work for the people who aren't fraudulent.

Here we go. You've made me. I'm sounded like Bernie all of a sudden. No, no, but that's right. I think that's right. I mean, I have people tell me that. 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. I mean, the Trump assault, the Trump administration, assault on the federal government, had many parts, and Doja was just one of them. But this isn't in defense of the Trump administration, but if I were defending the Trump administration, I would say a lot of the problems we have in managing the government preexisted 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 previous ability to manage anything and care about it. And so that you get the situation, the Trump administration is an extreme example, like Howard Luck, 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... Well, the Alex Barangita's story on that front for the book. Sure. Sorry, it's 20,000 words in the book, so I can't tell the whole thing, but it's... Give us a tease. The way I thought about the book was government is being transformed by this administration,

this attempt to take this multi-million person, supposedly nonpartisan workforce that previously took an oath to the Constitution to come being the civil service and turned 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, it's the public safety function because it's not clear that even like a narrow loyalist civil service when it's 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, less transparency. It gets managed differently, but it's still not completely negligently. elected. But Alex Marigotes was my character to dramatize the issue. And Alex Marigadis invented a fire science. This sounds weird. I didn't even know there was a fire science. Any fire sciences, 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 wildland urban interface fires, the ones we all talk about. Comes out of the woods, wipes out paradise, wipes a campfire. And he has persuaded me that this is a growing risk, that warming planet, drying parts of the country.

It's just, you know, like the East Coast doesn't think of it as a big problem for the East Coast. He says, all it takes is six weeks and it's a tender box. There's so much built up fuel. And he did just spectacular, well, to back up. The way he got the permission inside the Department of Commerce, a little organization called NIST, to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is where a lot of the fire science research is done in the government. The 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 while 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 Howard Lutnik's old. and showed how the fire had moved and how, in fact, that is what had happened. The fires had melted the beams.

So you would think that since this impacted Howard Lutnik's life so much that he really valued this person's contribution to the Department of Commerce and we're growing his remit and we're learning a lot about how to prevent it in the future. Is that where the story goes? That's not the way the story goes. You know that's not the way the story goes. The story goes that Alex, by 2004 or five, has earned the right to use. use the NIST fire lab on the side, on the slide, to start studying wildland urban interface fires.

And 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 admit. And 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. And 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 the on-the-fly stuff. And there was a growing tendency for the government to both cut his budget or make his budget insecure and increase the complexity of his life. It's all these really hot-shot kind of

scientist types who you want doing science. It used to have its own travel agent. And the travel agent, you just call a travel agent, your 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, and they fire the travel agent. And what they do instead is they spend hours a month in seminars, these scientists learning how to book the cheapest flight for the, it's crazy. It's crazy. 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. When all this guy was doing, this guy who would have made five times more money in the private sector, working 100 hours a week, trying to solve a problem that we all once solved. In comes Howard Lutnik. It takes away all the credit cards from the scientists. Tells him 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 he wants to hang out with Trump. So he's not even in his office. So there'd be these scenes where at night where there's a line of people hoping he'd get something signed by our Ludney, 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 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, my home state fire department thinks he's a genius and thinks that

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, there are thousands of Alexes. And we're losing him because he was sitting outside Howard Lutnik's office. So like a man who should know the importance of this, like waiting for him to sign something, but instead he's, you know, trying to impress, he's probably doing a Fox business hit or something. I got to say, tipping off his kids, just whatever's 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 the book. And the 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. Yeah, that's right. There's a lot of nerds going into sports front offices because of money ball now. So we 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 was 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 was spoiled for choice, like with the big short, and I sort of flower arranged the whole book.

And it is made for someone like Adam McKay 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 AI things I just have to pick your brain on before I lose you, just because I'm curious. You wrote also the big SBF book. He's still in jail for now. He's in jail for 25 years.

Just waiting for that pardon. But when we talked last time, you talked about how he saw crypto as a religion. And like in the intervening period, we have all of this kind of discussion around AI and effective altruism, which he was part of this effective altruism. And like the Trump administration's calling that a cult. We had this weird story.

The anthropic co-founder, Christopher Ola, like, went to, was in discussions with the Vatican and religious scholars, like telling them that they want AI consciousness to be recognized. Some very weird culty stuff going on. And I don't know. I always saw ASVF as kind of faking it on all that. But I don't know. You got to spend time with him.

He wasn't faking it on. He was faking it on something. He was faking it on where of that. the money was. But he was... Yeah, sure. No, he was all in on effective altruism. All in. It was his identity. It still his identity. And it is a kind of religion. It organizes those 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 AI. And that's why, yeah, that's why Sam Beck-R-Fried, owned 20% of Anthropic, an investment that would be worth, I don't know, $80 billion today, maybe more.

The Ponzi scheme could have worked if he just survived long enough until to sell the stock. Ponzi schemes the wrong analogy. You're right. Sorry. No, no, no, no, 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 in VCs tell me it's the most successful portfolio ever assembled. It's an amazing. It's all kinds of. and stuff in it, including SpaceX. But the anthropic investment was made because they saw that is Dario. Dario was thought to be more righteous about AI safety than Sam Alton. And he left open AI to create the good one, the one that would be responsible. Like on the one hand, I'm attracted to the kind of pitch from the anthropic side that we need to be more careful

and there needs to be more AI safety, and I've been consuming just an unhealthy amount of material about all this lately. But then part of that, then you start to hear them talk about, you know, AI consciousness and the cultishness in which they talk about it. And then I start to be like, I don't know if I trust 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 so.

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. It's a fifth risk. Yeah. It is fifth risk. Yeah, right. We don't have the capacity.

And it's a kind of moral, social, intellect capacity. to address the problem. So Trump just throws out his head up the hand and says, let them 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, it may be that it's all fools game that even if federal government

involved, like the Chinese would do the irresponsible thing. But I don't know. But there's no trust. And this is what it comes back to them. And this is the other thing. And then I'll let you go with. The last thing we talked to last time was just the way Trump and Elon and these guys attack trust because it gains power for themselves.

And this is the most extreme example of that, right? Like 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 like, kind of, kind of

kind of the threats from this from blockers potentially are 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.

But 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 smells it and he goes after it. because he's threatened by it, that 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 mistrust 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 mean, you use these characters. These characters are really good place to start. Michael Lewis, man. I'll see you uptown in a couple months. All right? Next time 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, you kind of the functions, the referees that ensured that our liberal democracy worked and that rule of law can prevail. And I would point you to his book. He's a great chapter on kind of 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 2027 that offers some harsh words from some of the Democrats have been telling Politico that, you know, they're not sure that we need that kind of accountability coming in 2027. So go check that out over on the Boorke that takes feet. I appreciate Michael Lewis very much. We'll be back tomorrow. It should be a fun one. See you all then. Peace.

The Bullwark Daily is brought to you thanks for the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeChico and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.