The Bulwark Podcast - S2 Ep1005: Michael Lewis: Government Workers Aren't the Corrupt Ones

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Trump loves to complain about the deep state while Elon claims he's rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse with all his mass firings. But DOGE should be looking higher up the food chain to target the graft: for example, the South African immigrant whose car company would not have gotten off the ground without the taxpayer money he still collects. In contrast, government workers are mainly mission-driven and they're not in it for the money. Michael's new collection of essays takes a look at some of the characters who populate our federal workforce, including people performing small miracles without fame and glory. Plus, the risk of Trump politicizing economic data and his plan to destroy whatever trust people still have in the government. Michael Lewis—and Sarah Vowell, who profiled a record keeper at the National Archives for the new book—join Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes The new book, "Who Is Government: The Untold Story of Public Service" Tim's "Bulwark Takes" on some of the men taken taken to the El Salvador prison camp Adrian's "Huddled Masses" newsletter on ICE deportations based on tattoos George Conway emergency pod on the Paul Weiss law firm caving to Trump Michael's book, "Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House" Tim's playlist

Hey guys, just a couple of programming notes. There are two news stories that me and my colleagues have our hair on fire about and I did not get to them on this podcast. I want to direct you to where you can find our Scorch Not Takes. For me, it is the continued revelations around the men that we have sent to this barbarous El Salvador prison camp and the fact that according to their lawyers at least a few of them actually had not done anything illegally were here legally under the Venezuelan temporary protected status and were sent wrongfully based on a misunderstanding of their tattoos or Government that doesn't care or it's being intentionally cruel, you know, we will find out the reasoning government that doesn't care or it's being intentionally cruel, we will find out the reasoning.

But it is just so sick and so un-American. I did an 11-minute rant about this when my blood was boiling hot last night. You can get that either on our YouTube feed or now we're turning these into a podcast as well. Search for Bullwork Takes in your podcast feed, subscribe to that feed, and then you can see it's under the headline, Breaking the new news about the El Salvador deportations. So on addition to that, Adrian Carrasquillo in his newsletter for us, Huddled Masses, writes about this tattoo issue and gives you some historical examples of how the government

has screwed this up before, misunderstanding the tattoos of the people that they're detaining. So please go read that as well. One other thing, George Conway, his hair was on fire over Paul Weiss, this law firm's capitulation to Donald Trump. Trump extorted them. It's a complicated story, but essentially that an executive order that was going to target the firm because of their work on some of the investigations against Trump.

The head of Paul Weiss went to the White House, groveled, cut some deal where they're going to do 40 million in pro bono services for Trump. It's an absolutely insane, George Conway knows all the players. So we taped an emergency episode of George Conway explains it all together. So go check that out on that podcast feed or also on YouTube. So those are the news stories. We got a good one coming for you next. It is Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame and Sarah Vowell.

They have a new book out about who is government, which is very relevant right now given everything that's happening with Doge. So stick around for that. Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Could not be more delighted to welcome today the pride of Newman High School right around the corner from me. His many books include The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Blind Side.

He's the editor of a new collection of essays, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, which came out this week. We'll have one of those essayists, Sarah Vowell, join us in segment two, but first it's Michael Lewis. What's up, Michael? Good to see you, Tim. I don't think this is maybe the first interview I've ever done with a hostess in New Orleans.

Well, there you go. Proud to do it. Walter's never interviewed you? Not from there. From home studio? Not from there, no. Walter has interviewed me, but in person in New York. All right, well, I could hit your high school with a three wood from here. So we are we're right in the hood

I've got another Brag on you first before we get into the book So when I was writing why we did it was kind of my reflection on how the Republican Party got to where it is The editor asked me what book to model it. I wanted to model it after like style wise what books I gave him to One of them was losers your 1996 Campaign book that is maybe the least acclaimed of all your works

But I loved it because you did not get boxed in by the conventions of political reporting and like treated the characters as three-dimensional People and it's just delightful So people are looking for a political book that is from a much, a time when the stakes were much lower losers is a good one. But, uh, anyway, what are your reflections on that book? The way it happened was I didn't set out to write a book. I got sent off by the new Republic to cover the 96 campaign. The center of things, Dole versus Clinton was so dull and so controlled

that I needed to find a way to kind of come at it with a different voice. Like I just doing it conventionally was going to be deadly. And I just called him. I said, let me just do this as a, as a kind of a travel log and let me just go where I think it's interesting rather than where the campaign tells me to go. And it rocked in the new Republic. It was like, great. I mean, I made the main character, Maury Taylor, you know, it also ran in the new Republic. It was like, great. I mean, I made the main character, Maury Taylor, you

know, it also ran in the Republican primary. Yeah. And the conceit was like, nobody actually gives a shit about Clinton or Dole. There's no like passion around either one of them, but there's all this passion around all these kinds of marginal candidates. I mean, some were not so marginal, you know, Pat Buchanan. And you could get to kind of where political passions were in the country

through these candidates better than through the main campaign. And of course it's also more fun. So it works so well. And it was basically coherent because it was just my travel as a political travel log that we brought it out as a book, but you're right. It was very hard after the campaign to sell a book. I mean, Alan keys and Marty Taylor. Well, but also about just that event. Like nobody wanted to read about the 96 presidential campaign.

Yeah. But I love doing it, man. It was so much fun. I don't want to go on too much about it, but I gotta say it was one of those moments in my writing life where I realized that, that you could invest anything with importance just by observing it. You could take the reader who came to it thinking they wanted to read about Clinton and all, wherever you wanted to take them if you were compelling enough.

If I didn't write about Maury Taylor, people were disappointed. That was kind of funny. Also, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight and Trump, I guess 20 years, but between 96 and 16, like taking the fringe right-wing candidates seriously, like treating them seriously, I mean, teasing them too, but like treating them seriously and like, and reporting what they said and all that actually like has relevance. I mean, a lot of these kind of niche type characters are the people that are not the actual people, but the types of people that are at the center of our government right now. This is completely true.

Maury Taylor is definitely a proto Trump, though he's without the malice and without the vengeance, without any of that. You meet him and you know he's basically a sweet person. But he's coming at it from the position of someone who knows zero about governing. His qualifications are he ran a Titan, he was a CEO of Titan, tire and wheel, very successful businessman, but has that very successful businessman's resistance to the idea that government does anything useful. And if you kind of patch together all these different characters, views of

the world, you just got a fuller portrait of where America was politically. So as a result, you got you can see like where we are now, then you're just looking at Clinton and Do result, you can see where we are now then. If you're just looking at Clinton and Dole, you'd never guess what would happen. Hell no. No, that's right. All right. Well, to that point about government, that's this sort of who is government, what does

government do well is, I guess, the central thesis to the book. Pretty relevant now given what has happened with Elon. So I'm wondering if you could share with the audience some of the, you know, people you feature broadly. And I guess I was wondering, have any of them got the acts yet of any of the people in the book? Briefly, let me explain the project. Together with David Shipley, who the former editor, opinion editor at the

Washington Post, I went out and hired writers I just loved and they aren't conventional journalists. Most of them are sort of performers, novelists, the people who are really talented at making material entertaining. It was Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggers, Kamau Bell, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, and Casey Sepp. A wide variety of voices, basically. Drop them into the government and said, just find story and I did this because I had written a book during Trump one Called the fifth risk where I was just shocked by the quality of the material inside the government I mean Trump provoked me to get interested in it and I wasn't expecting The quality of characters who were there that the importance of the mission

I mean you can argue about what government should do, but we'd all agree it should be doing some things. And there are places where people are doing things that like no one else is gonna do, and you're just grateful they're doing them, and they are amazing characters, and they don't know their characters. And their stories never get told,

for a whole bunch of reasons, which we can talk about if you wanna get into that. So we launched these real talented writers at this beast. I did two of the eight pieces and they're, they're long. I mean, my first was like 13,000 words and out came like a wonderful array of stories. So I wrote my, the first piece in the book is about a guy named Chris Mark who solved the problem of coal mine roofs falling in on the heads of coal miners, which sounds very niche,

but it's a problem that killed 50,000 coal miners in America. You would have thought that the coal companies would have been working on that, but I guess... So that's where it gets really interesting. It's like what happened in the coal mining markets that led this to being kind of a neglected problem. And what happened was, and he shows, he does, my character himself is a historian of his own field, he shows that like technology evolved so that they actually had the technology to make it a lot safer in West Virginia. And what they did with the technology is make it cheaper to mine the coal while keeping the kind of the level of risk the same. They had acclimated a workforce to a certain level of mortality,

and they just kept it there. And the culture, it was a kind of macho culture. It's like your risk you're taking by going into the coal mine. Chris Mark, my character, shows that it was actually not until the government interceded with punishment if they didn't use the technology properly, and with the stuff he figures out

about how you use the technology to keep the roof from falling, that the safety records start to improve. But I don't think this would happen in every industry, but I think coal mining is such a competitive industry, like it's so sensitive to cost, and there are lots of little coal mines so that nobody wants to be the one to spend the money to make it safe. And the population of workers was not sensitive to slight changes in safety. The whole reason why it ended up being a government problem. But anyway, that's one. Sarah Vowell, who you're going to talk to later. I'll leave that to one side because she wrote about the National Archives and a woman who helps run

them. A piece that like was totally unexpected, John Lanchester, who I just adore, English writer. He came in and he said, I know you probably want me to write about person, but my character is the consumer price index. He said, it is fundamental to the United States government that it count things. It can't apportion power unless it counts people for a census. And it's written into the constitution

and the United States government is the greatest counter of things in the world and what it counts is amazing and it basically It provides portraits of our society and other people's societies with really careful statistical collection and analysis And he just takes one of these things the CPI and shows Just how hard it is to do this. Well Just how would a monumental achievement it is and and just actually, incidentally, how at risk it would be in nefarious hands.

We trust it. We just assume that whoever is doing is doing their best. So what is that? What would be the downside of the CPI, of us putting Corey Lewandowski in charge of the CPI, and then just making it whatever Trump thinks is the best? Well, if we don't actually know what inflation is, for a start, the

Federal Reserve won't know how to adjust policy. I mean, it will sow confusion into the minds of people. People will have to kind of guess what was happening with prices. You know, that in and of itself, it'd be interesting to see what happened if you just actually totally politicized it. There are hints that they're thinking this way. They fired a bunch of experts who helped the department of labor statistics improve it. And the next step would be, oh, you don't get to release it out of the department of labor statistics. We're going to release it out of the white house.

Well, you already said, so they complain about the job because, you know, job numbers come out and then they get adjusted. Right. And so you, you know, after, as you get more information coming in, you already heard them during the Biden years saying that these guys are cooking the books because a couple of times it got adjusted down from what had initially been said. And so if you use that as a pretext to just say, no, we don't trust these guys are political actors, we'll decide ourselves. So that's right out of the Trump playbook that if you want to know what he's going to do, see what he's accusing other people of doing. Usually

falsely. He's a master of bearing false witness. He operates within the limits of his imagination. His imagination is spurred by the awful things he can imagine other people doing. It's usually fantasy. He's had the idea then that, oh, you can do this. And oh, in my mind, they've already done it so I can go do it. That's sort of the psychology of it. And that's the psychology that would lead to, just as you say, like them starting to sort of make up Whatever they want to make up if you lose the portrait of the society. You can't manage it I mean, that's that's one thing but it with this specifically regard to inflation

Let's say all of a sudden we knew they were just making it up and they had control of the money supply So that they're like the Federal Reserve is no longer independent I think what happens is it becomes self-fulfilling that we're panicky and grabbing at ways to sort of preserve the value of our dollars, you know, you think big prices are bad now or housing prices or whatever that there becomes a. The anticipation of inflation spurs it. And so John Lanchester wrote about that. Dave Eggers wrote about people at NASA who were looking for little green men in distant

space and doing really interesting research. There wasn't one of the things where you read it and you thought, oh, we don't need this. The one that you did also that really jumped out at me was the epidemiologist at FDA because they're investigating these diseases that are so rare that there's no profit motive to do it. So, right, pharma is not going to develop treatments for these sorts of things. Right. And I've got a friend with a kid that has this type of disease, right? He's just like, there's no- Really?

Yeah. Well, he's like, look, there's no money for that because I asked, he has this really debilitating disease. It's a horrible story. And me and some friends got together and said, let us donate to a group that's out there trying to solve this. And the answer is no, only the government has. It's too rare. It was three kids a year or something in America that get this type of disease. Let me use that story. It's about Heather Stone, who's at the currently, but who knows for how long, at the Food and

Drug Administration, to illustrate just how easy it is to get the stories to fall out of the tree if you just shake it a little bit. So that story, I was working on a book about the pandemic. It's called The Premonition. A character in that book is a genius mad scientist at UCSF named Joe DeRisi. And he figures in My Premmonition in one way, but while I was with him, he said, he happened to have thought he found a cure or at least a treatment for a brain eating amoeba called Balamuthia. Now Balamuthia, we haven't even known about Balamuthia since the like the mid 90s. It was discovered in the mid 90s. It's responsible for a lot more deaths than we know, because it just hasn't been hadn't been identified, but

it manifests as like encephalitis, your brain explodes. No one was quite sure how people got it, but little kids got it. And turns out probably like ingesting dirt, little unclear how it comes in, but but whatever. So a patient had walked into UCSF hospital with this died. He took the balamuthia and in his lab, bombarded it with all known acceptable chemicals to put inside human beings, all known approved drugs, not just in the United States, but in Europe,

and found that there was a drug that was used for UTIs in Europe called nitroxylene that actually killed this thing. The next time someone walks into the hospital with it, you the person is gonna die if you don't do anything He bombards it with nitroxylene the doctors do and the person survives really good sign. So I watched that I just watched that happen. I said wow you solved a problem. He goes No, I haven't solved a problem because we know about it If someone happens to call me they will get that treatment But like the doctors of America don't know about it. If someone happens to call me, they will get that treatment. But the doctors of America don't know about it.

And I said, well, doesn't someone in the government or someone somewhere assimilate anything that's been done about these rare diseases so that there's a database? And he said, nope. And then he paused and he said, you know that this is one woman, one woman in the FDA, who badly wants to do this and

who keeps pestering me. And I don't know how it's going there. But he said he doesn't seem to have much support from her institution. But she's trying to get doctors from around the whole world to feed whatever treatments that have worked for rare diseases into her. It's called cure ID. And God knows where it goes. So I called her up for this just to see if she was a story.

And that story at the end of the book is her. And it's not the story of government success. It's the story of what should happen. This thing she's created should work. Now, it does so happen that she personally intercedes to save the life of a little girl in Arkansas who's got it. And how that happens is amazing and serendipitous and requires lots of accident.

But at the same time, at exactly the same time, another very little girl in Northern California contracted it and the doctors never heard about it and she died. But what I loved about Heather Stone was like, all by herself for all kinds of deep personal motives, she was trying to spin up, which should be a massive operation, and was kind of meeting resistance because of

our hostility to government. She's still there. You asked me the question you asked at the top, what's happened to these characters? Like you read all of them, you think I want that person in government. I mean, it's just no brainer. And two of them have resigned my two both feel they're on tinderhooks and like their job could be gone any day and The others I think I've been told with all of them They don't want to have much interaction with the writers who wrote about them anymore, right? They don't want the attention

They don't want the attention anymore. It's like they didn't want the attention in the first place much But it's like really don't write about me now. I was just talking to my husband about this is we have a friend, I guess I won't say it he's in the bowels of one of these you know kind of institutions you know solving problems like this. Then he's like, it's sort of a USAID adjacent thing. I'm like, like is he okay? And it's like, well, yeah, for now, right? But it's like, because they haven't figured it out yet. You know what I mean? They haven't figured out all of the ways the different, you know, agencies and interconnect, right? And so, you know, TBD. It's really interesting. I mean, it's disastrous, but it's interesting watching how they're

going about what they're doing. Cause quite obviously they don't know very, they come in not knowing anything or very much. I had somebody tell me that Elon did not know That there were two different houses of Congress like in the middle of the campaign Somebody had to somebody had to educate him about the fact that said in the house are two separate bodies But that's believable whether it's true or not. It's sort of like believable But they come in and this was the point of the series is a part of the book is they come in, and this was the point of the series, this is the point of the book, is they come in very clearly with this really stupid stereotype in their head

of what these government workers are. Like they're just wasteful, they're graft, they're corruption, they're deep state, they're like there to prevent Donald Trump from doing whatever he wants to do. And it's so not who they are. They're so like mostly nonpartisan people doing the performing missions tasks that we've all agreed need to be done.

And the point of story was like, explode this stereotype. Like you will see over and over again, people who do not conform to this really stupid, lazy idea in one's head of what a federal worker is. And if you explore the stereotype, maybe they'll hesitate a little bit before they do stupid things like just fire all the probationary workers, which they did. And it obviously didn't work. The only way you move through this place, the way they've moved through this place, is if you were wholly ignorant of who the people are and what they're doing.

And they've, you know, we've seen they've like had, they fired people that even they realized right away they needed to hire back. But the probationary workers is there a couple of things have gotten stuck in micro. We don't have to get into, we can do as much Elon as you. Let's do it. This is what the people want. I mean, the list of disturbing things is so long, but the ones that maybe not have been as attended to as they should have, the probationary workers, the 50,000 workers, these are people who were in their first year of government service.

Or who have been promoted recently in their first year. That might be true. Yeah, it's the first year of service or it's like you worked at some sub-agency and got promoted and took a job at a different sub-agency. You become probationary again if you've changed. Okay. So you know more about it than I do. But what I do know is that,

so there's this period where you don't have, you can just be fired at will, simply, easily. That you don't have to go through some process to fire this person. So because they were fireable, they got fired. But think about who those people must be. Almost certainly, they skew extremely young. Like these are the young people coming into

government, which is what we desperately need. I mean, here's a stat for you in information technology, like the computer systems. Only 4% of the employees across the federal government are under the age of 30. 50% are over the age of 50. Like it means like some huge number of people who are in charge of the IT systems don't know how to use their phones. So that's, they fire the young people and who else are they firing? They're fine.

Whoever was hired for obviously some immediate purpose, like we need this person now, we need this engineer now on this job, because this is something we need to do that person is still probationary and gets fired. So it's like almost exactly who you don't want to fire. It's not the dead wood who's been kind of mailing it in for 20 years. So the second thing is, this is, I thought, the first tell. Like, they came in saying waste, fraud, and abuse, and all that. If you're really interested in fraud, the person you want to go right to and

harness and empower is the inspector general of every one of these agencies. They're the cop on the beat. They operate independently from the agency. They speak directly. They can speak directly to Congress. They're there to scare the hell out of the people who are in the agency and prevent them from waste fraud and abuse. They went in and they fired all the inspector generals. What that does, it's the opposite. Whatever they're doing, it seems to be the opposite of what they're saying. What they have done in that case is enable waste fraud and abuse. So it's interesting as an intellectual exercise to try to figure out what they're trying to

achieve. Pete Slauson This is literally what I was trying to go to next. I mean, because you've abandoned New Orleans, you live in the Bay now. Pete Abandon is strong. Pete Yeah, you know some of these people. Pete Abandon is very strong. I'm there all the time, my whole family is there.

Pete You know, so my point is, you know some of these people, just because they're your neighbors and social circles. You wrote the SBF book, which I want to get to next. But so, you know, like, the types of people that are around Elon and around Doge, right? You know, at some level, like what do you think is motivating it? I think it's a gumbo, to use a New Orleans metaphor. The reason it's so hard to explain everything with a simple theory is that there's more

than one thing going on. Here's some of the things in the gumbo. The rice is ignorance. I mean, you can't. You don't have the gumbo without the beans. You couldn't do any of this if you actually knew very much. You'd shoot yourself. But the ignorance is a precondition, and the hostility and the malice is a precondition. But one, trying to politicize the federal workforce and weaponize it so that it is an instrument that is just there for the political use of Donald Trump. Anything that would interfere with Donald Trump's political interests needs to be squashed,

which is not how the federal workforce has been used by any other president. That's one ingredient in the gumbo. Two, anything that gets in the way of Elon Musk's businesses, regulation. And it's not just Elon Musk, the constellation of tech billionaires and probably Wall Street people. I think particularly the AI and crypto folks,

I think are particularly concerned about regulation though. There you go. That's probably right. One of the characters in the book, Geraldine Brooks wrote a lovely piece about him, Jared Koopman, is a total stud of a cybercrime cop inside the IRS who is raked in like billions of dollars for the United States government

by busting cybercrime rings, broke up child sex trafficking operations. I mean, he's like, he's a superhero also like a black belt, someone Elon Musk would not want to be in a ring with. And they got it as unit. And it's like, this is a hugely profitable enterprise and doing like nothing but simple good in the world. That's not saving any money. It's such a good way of costing

billions of dollars. So why would you do that? Well, the reason is in the name of the unit, cybercrime. You've let cybercrime criminals out of jail. You've given pardons to cybercriminals. You are courting the cyber world, the crypto world, and they don't like this sort of police. So that's another threat of it. It's like just the narrow business interests of some now very influential people. But it doesn't explain all of police. So that's another threat of it. It's like just the narrow business interests of some now very influential people. But it doesn't explain all of it. Like none of that really explains the Department of Education being whacked. They'll tell a story about how, oh, it's being whacked for a culture war reasons.

Like it's woke and it's telling all the states how to teach in the schools. But that's not what it's doing. It's a big bank that does redistribution from rich to poor areas. So poor kids, it's subsidizing poor kids school education. A lot of the poor kids are in rural America. It is a direct subsidy to red America. And so not obviously in Donald Trump's political interests, because they're stripping money funds away from his base. So I think the other ingredient is this guy, this dude, and I don't know how to pronounce his name

because I've heard it pronounced two ways, Russell Vaught or Russell Vaught, the guy at OMB, who is one of the architects of project 2025, and he's got a kind of a libertarian attitude that there's too much government, we just got to get rid of government. And it sounds really good until you actually see what the government's doing and what happens if you remove it. And then you can start having a grownup conversation. But it's like he's never had the grownup conversation. And some of it might not make sense,

but it's like, it's so crude. He seems to be an ingredient in the gumbo. Cause I can't, knowing Trump's total indifference to the bureaucracy, I can't imagine he's total indifference to the bureaucracy. I can't imagine he cares all that much about the Department of Education. Right. The last thing that I'll shut up. The last thing that sort of runs through all of this or underpins it is I think Donald

Trump, another key to like predicting what he's going to do is find wherever there's trust and destroy it. And the reason is tactical, the reason for this. He himself is wholly untrustworthy. He lies all the time. He cheats people out of money. He owes them all that stuff. Bankrupted six companies, all that.

And he doesn't even pretend really to be that trustworthy. And he is at a disadvantage in an environment that's high trust. That you put a bunch of people in a room and they trust each other. They'll quickly spit Donald Trump out like a bad seed. But if he creates a playing field where there's no trust and nobody can trust anybody else, he's at a kind of tactical advantage, like because he's so good at untrustworthy behavior. And so I think a lot of it is an animal lizard brain instinct, like get

rid of any place, anything people trust, because that's going to create a disadvantage for me. And I know we think that nobody trusts the government. And when you put it that way, they do. But there are huge amounts of the government that people just take for granted. They trust the weather reports, you know, that kind of thing. It's like, wow, I'm living my day by this thing. I must trust it unless it's radically wrong, which it seldom is. I do. I think I shouldn must trust it. Unless it's radically wrong, which it seldom is, I think I shouldn't trust it. But he's trying to gut the National Weather Service. Like, why would you do this? He has some private interests there that he's serving, but also it's like he smells trust and he wants to get rid of it. I think that's insightful because to me that is where

the alignment between Trump and the tech guys are, is that Trump wants to destroy all the trust so that there's only faith in him, right? That like he is the authoritarian, that the Kim Jong-un or whatever, you only trust the leader. The tech guys, you know, I don't know if you've gotten in deep into the Curtis Yarvin, you know, techno authoritarian stuff,

but like they want to tear down all the things people trust so that they control everything, right? So that this small cadre of, you know, whatever, tech geniuses and, you know, folks that are deep into AI and this other sort of innovation, so they have control. And so at least for a while, their interests align, right? Because, you know, like as long as there's not a fight between Trump and Elon, their interests in tearing right? Because, you know, like, as long as there's not a fight between Trump and Elon, their interests in tearing down the other institutions that people trust so they can have control is an alignment.

How does that sit with you? That sits fine with me. I don't... You didn't say anything that caused my brain to go on red alert. That all sounds very reasonable. I mean, there's more than one kind of Silicon Valley nerd. Of course. I'm talking specifically about the strain of the teal and Dreeson and you know, one of the things about this strain of people, they don't

shut up, right? They're like, they're issuing manifestos, they're giving speeches, they're like, they're tweeting all the time. They didn't never shut up. I wonder how any of them do their job. They, because they just talk all the time and they have a crowd of people who are approve of them, who I just talk all the time. And they have a crowd of people who are a proof of them, who I guess celebrate what they say.

And this is just me talking. Maybe I'm not the world's greatest expert on what's interesting and what's not, but I keep looking for them to say something interesting. Like, oh, oh, I hadn't had that thought, or oh, nobody ever said that before, or oh, that's both true and interesting, you know, and I have the feeling with them all the time, this feeling

like I want to say to them, what you said is true and interesting, but unfortunately the parts that are true aren't interesting and the parts that are interesting are true. I'm just shocked by how dull they are. That's the thing that and the antics like Elon Musk the way dresses carrying his kid around his shoulder Like he's a mini me the chainsaw all that stuff it's all like a putting a lampshade on your head at the party because you actually don't have anything witty to say and It all feels like that. He's the dude walking around with a lampshade on his head And I mean, he's he ever said anything funny in his life

I don't know maybe but I But like fart jokes. If you like fart jokes, my seven year old did like the Tesla farting. They got a chuckle out of the fact that you can make the Tesla do a whoopie. Yeah, there you go. So there you go. You can make a seven year old. But he's just, it's just, oh, it's like a stink bomb at the party. Like, do I really want to have to listen to this person? Will you shut up?

You're like, there's so much more interest out there. And this is like one of the side effects of this political movement. I think of all the interesting people in the country. I mean, it is amazing that, you know, the range of artistic expression, and it all gets kind of drowned out by these people with lampshades on their head shouting at the top of their lungs. And I just wonder at what point everybody just gets bored because it is so boring. And anyway, your point that this is a strain in Silicon Valley and you just name the people kind of who are the leading lights of this movement, they've got a following that has somehow attached itself to Donald Trump.

That's true. It would be nice to have a serious conversation. I would love to sit down with a Peter Thiel physically inside one of the departments of government and go piece by piece through what that department is doing and have him say, like, let's just have a conversation about why this is necessary, why it happened in the first place, why we're doing this. And I might like start in the Department of Energy, because without the Department of Energy, Tesla doesn't get off the ground.

I can't remember the size of the loan, but I think hundreds of millions of dollars in loans or loan guarantees to Tesla, which at the time Elon Musk said got him off the ground. And Tesla employees have said, like the company would never exist if the government hadn't come in. So much of just technological growth, economic growth springs from public private partnerships. It springs from the government interceding in the economy and that they have been direct beneficiaries of this and are

still, and that they don't acknowledge it and wanna go gut the things that actually made us all rich and made them rich, that's where it gets really bewildering and I'd like to have the conversation. Like just explain yourself. Elon, you're the richest man in the world because this government came and helped you. Yeah, I think he'd have trouble assimilating that fact

into his personal narrative. There's one other thing that is bewildering to me, and it would be nice to have like, this would be like a small group of people we all agreed were masterful at running big institutions. Like the dude who runs Microsoft, clearly some kind of genius. People who, CEOs, types, heads of large organizations, maybe even a coach of a football team, and would sit around table and

would say, how many of you have succeeded by walking in and vilifying the employees or the players and telling everybody they were idiots, making everybody feel condescended to making everybody fill out a little chart about what they did last week, saying you're gonna fire everybody because they're all useless. When in human history has this worked as a management style? And I think they'd all say, like, you would never do that. That's the opposite of what you do if you're running something well. The only person I know who's done this is Elon Musk at Twitter. And it's kind of a catastrophe. I mean, the people who invested with him are not happy. That's another kind of conversation. I don't think we're not having. It's like a Harvard

Business School case study of how not to run something. Well, it's only the federal government. We've only got three and a half more years of it. So no worries there. Can I ask you a question? Please. I'm just dying to know because you're living in my hometown. How do you feel my hometown is doing? How do you feel about New Orleans these days? It's interesting. I think I stole this from Carville, I think, but all the good about New Orleans outshines

all the bad, like makes up for all the bad because the good is so good. And so, you know, I mean, look, it's got problems. Like I had to trade in my Volvo, my California Volvo for a Jeep because you can't drive on the roads because the roads are like a third world country. Yeah. They're trying to fix Claiborborne Avenue to get ready for the Superbowl. And tragically trying to fix bourbon straight to get ready for the Superbowl. They'd moved the ball, you know, so you have these like huge and they didn't do any either of them, right?

Like it's still not done, right? The Superbowl is coming past. Right. So that, that part is tough, but man, I don't know that people here are so wonderful and the folks like us who've chosen to come here, you know, but man, I don't know. The people here are so wonderful. And the folks like us who've chosen to come here, you know, are interesting, right? Like nobody's moved here because Boeing sent them here. You know what I mean? Like they've all moved here because there's something they love about the art or music or food or culture or they had a friend or a connection.

So that's great. I don't know. That kind of ties me back to you. I wonder, you've been so successful in like drawing out these characters, drawing out people that other folks might not have heard of. And I do, you have to feel like there's some connection to growing up here, right? It's just people are so friendly and it is so easy to get to know people here, maybe because they're drinking more. I don't know why, but do you feel that way that maybe you wouldn't, you would have been less good at what you did if you grew up in Topeka. I don't think I'd do what I do if I grew up in Topeka. I think that I think I grew up in it and I notice it even now. I think it was even more so when I was a kid, but when I land there, as I'm going to land there in a week, it happens every time I get into the taxi cab and the taxi driver is all of a sudden jabbering away talking to me.

And I had the best conversation I've had in, in two months with a taxi driver. And then I'm walking the streets and people don't let you walk by without acknowledge that everybody's expecting some acknowledgement. So there it's like the first step of improv that you accept and you build. Yes. And the yes. And is in every, all these it's woven into the fabric of new orleans daily existence and yes and is where you get the story that you you meeting people and you're accepting can you building your trying to understand and hear what they're saying and i grew up that that's just a muscle that i think a lot of new orleans have, that must, I use that muscle in all my interactions with

subjects. This is absolutely true. There's this other thing. New Orleans encourages a kind of cockeyed view of the world. And I was just thinking about the day that Zelensky was in the White House and being humiliated to our disgrace by JD Vance, I looked at the new Orleans times, the new Orleans times, pick you know, whatever it's called the next day. The incident was all over the front page of every newspaper in the world. And on the front page of the new Orleans newspaper was discussions about how to get ready for the endemic and parade.

And like where the traffic was going to be, where you could put your ladder up. And I thought that was in New Orleans. I grew up in, you know, the problems on the West bank were the problems on the other side of the Mississippi river. It was so focused on itself. There was something inherently comic about the childhood about the place. And I do port that it's just a sensibility into pretty much everything I do. I like if I'm not laughing, if I'm not in an emotional space, but it usually starts with laughter and I'm not staying interested. And sometimes it's laughing and crying, but it's like getting to that space.

The two pieces in the book, the bookends that I wrote in who is government. They're both such emotional stories. Like people are crying when they read the last one. The coal miner story is so good. People got, we don't need to ruin it so people should get the book, but it is the connection to his father. I'm breaking in here to say Gwendolyn Brooks was from Topeka. That's Sarah.

This is good podcasting. Sarah Vowell is going to be up there in the next segment. She's keeping me on task right now. Hold on though, before I lose you, Michael, I got to do one of your other books. That's okay? Yeah, any book. Or kind of connecting two of them really. You wrote the Going Infinite about SBF. I'm kind of obsessed about the crypto stuff right now. And one thing that really worries me is I think we're increasing the systemic risk of the system, like the failure of his bank.

Exchange. It was just an exchange. Exchange, excuse me. It was isolated mostly from the rest of the financial system, but that's changing. It's particularly changing now in this Trump administration that's going to be very pro crypto. I think about your book, The Big Short, right? And so you've just been so deep in both of these stories. I just wanted to put a quarter in the machine and hear what you think about that worry. All right. Two things.

You're absolutely right that decent public policy would wall crypto off from the rest of the financials, from an ordinary fiat financial system. We shouldn't have a crypto reserve. It's going to be trivial, but we shouldn't be doing that. We have a currency and actually crypto is a threat to our currency. It's not good for the dollar. To the extent that banks are encouraged to take crypto risks, our big financial institutions have big crypto risks. So if crypto goes south, which it will at some point, there's nothing underneath

it. It's just air. It's faith. It's a religion. Who knows what's going to happen? It's like predicting what's going to happen with Scientologyology but you do not want the financial system connected up to it in any way and There the drift right now is to connect it. It's not so big I mean, I don't know some total of all the value of crypto is like a few trillion dollars right now It doesn't feel like it's big enough To have a housing style systemic like exposure. That's. But but there's this I tell you but I tell you what's on my mind. If you look at the story of the financial crisis, look at the big short story, the reason the

financial crisis is resolvable is the government is plausible, the government has faith in the government. And as angry as people are about it, governments can walk in and ensure the risk, they can walk in and say, we're not going to let these banks go down. We're going to calm the markets kind of thing. If the government becomes the source of the problem, if nobody trusts the government, there's nothing else to walk in above it and stabilize the financial system. So for example, Donald Trump made a passing reference. I've been waiting for this and he did it.

And this is like the rule wherever Trump finds trust, undermine it Donald Trump made a passing reference. I've been waiting for this and he did it. And this is like the rule, wherever Trump finds trust, undermine it. He made a passing reference to some treasury bonds, not being like other treasury bonds. And some of them were like owed to foreigners and then maybe we didn't owe it, that kind of thing. If you start screwing with the faith and credit of the United States government,

if you start causing people to doubt our willingness to repay our loans, you're playing with a whole other order of financial crisis. That is also related to the crypto thing. Why in God's name would we want to create a currency competitor? Right? Like if you took their argument at faith value that this is a currency, why don't we want to create a strategic reserve of something that is a competitor to the dollar that could undermine the thing that gives us our greatest power?

The dollar is, is like central to American global power. The willingness of people to hold it interest free, use it as a reserve currency, trusted is so important, but that's what he's coming for. I mean, that trust is what he's coming for. And we'll like see how this plays out. You know, when you start fooling with rich people's money, they do tend to get upset. He's going to run into a phalanx of opposition as he gets closer and closer to this. All right, last thing. Sarah, I promise I'm coming for you, but I asked Walter Isaacson,

I said, your friend Michael Lewis is coming on the pod. What should I ask him? So I'll close with this. He said, number one, how important was becoming king of squires to forming who you are? Number two, biographers know it's all about dad. Tell us about your dad. So, why don't you leave us with a little something on squires and your father? Well, king of squire, I actually would go from baseball practice to a little house next to the Newman School where I was taught to wave a scepter and sit on a throne and greet subjects. And I did this for a couple of months, once a week or something. So I actually have training in how to be a royal.

I'll let you figure out what that did to me. It probably wasn't good for my character, but it was fun. And my father, my father gave me, left me, always with a sense everything was gonna be all right and not depressed too much. I've told this story often, I I don't want to repeat myself too much, but he, he had me persuaded through freshman year of college that on our family coat of arms, there was a little Latin, we have a family coat of arms, the Lewis family,

and there's some Latin on the bottom of it. And he told me the Latin translated into this. He said, this is our family motto. He said, do as little as possible and that unwillingly for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task. And I took that as like, relax, chill back away from, but it was like an instruction to be lazy and that I still have it in very New Orleanian. Yeah.

I still have it in me. And what it means is I don't do busy work. It's like New Orleanian. Yeah, I still have it in me. And what it means is I don't do busy work. It's like, I don't do stuff, I don't write stuff I don't really wanna write. I don't do stuff just to do it. I don't publish books just to publish books. That's very useful. It's like I only do what interests me.

That's how I interpreted it anyway. Fine fulfilling work. Matt Glewis, I guess I'll see you next week in person for the first time. Yeah, see you next week. So I look forward to it. And let's stick around. Sarah Val, her story is so good. It's worth, I think she's going to be a little more in the traditional bulwark tone of dour and dark about the state of affairs. So please stick around for that. Thanks Michael.

All right, Tim're back. You've already heard her, Sarah Vowell. She was listening in and had something to add, which I appreciate. It's a welcome space here at the Bullard podcast. She's the author, historian, journalist, essayist, and actress. She was Violet Parr in The Incredibles. How about that? She also wrote one of the essays and who is government about the record keeper, Pamela Wright at the National Archives. What's up, Sarah? Tell us about Pamela Wright. Sarah Bruckner Hi, Tim. Pamela Wright. Well when I was given this assignment a million years ago I wanted to pick someone who was from west of the Mississippi

Partly because I was a Smithsonian intern and you know I'm from Montana and in Montana right now people from out here when you say Washington It's almost like a different species of human and when when I was, you know, left Montana State University to become a Smithsonian intern, no one was from Washington. Everyone was someone like me from, you know, America. So I found Pamela Wright. She was the NARA Chief Innovation Officer. And I quickly figured out that her background, she comes from Conrad,

Montana up in central Montana. She grew up on a ranch up there. That her background completely influenced how she was doing her job and her job was to share the records of the National Archives with the American people online. And so like there are 13 billion records in the National Archives and her job was to digitize those records. So you don't have to go to DC, you don't have to go to Maryland. You can be from Sitka, Alaska

and access the records that you own as an Alaskan. I think the fact that she came from somewhere that was a 32 hour drive from DC really motivated her to get as much online as possible just so everyone can access these records and so and then another thing about her being a ranch kid is she's super thrifty so one of the I guess So one of the, I guess, critiques of the government as it's being enacted right now is that there's a lot of waste, right? Well, she grew up on this ranch where they had a

sister for water, she knitted her own hat for winter, they like put canned vegetables in the cellar, you know, to make it through the winter. And that's how she approached her job at NARA, which was, we don't have enough money, what can we do with what we have? And so she started these volunteer programs to get just regular citizens to work for free, transcribing the records, scanning the records, that she has this program called History Hub, where anyone anywhere can type in a question on the NARA website and one of the archivists or one of these volunteers will try and help you.

And some of them are just random history questions about, I don't know, Annie Oakley or- Millard Fillmore. Yeah, Millard Fillmore, who doesn't care about him. But some of them are like real needs, like veterans apparently aren't so great at keeping track of their discharge papers. So like they'll get some terrible disease or something and need health care and you know they type in and someone will help them get their own papers. Like one other thing about it when like thinking in terms of the larger project, writing about these people that we did for the Washington Post is the National Archives tells the story of the federal government, especially the executive branch. And then also, I knew I could tell Pam's story by using those records.

You know, she's a homesteaders granddaughter. And so we looked at the Homestead Act. She went to the University of Montana and became an archivist because she was a work study student. And so we looked at the Higher Education Act of 1965. I was a work study student too here at Montana State. And that's how she got the training to become an archivist

by this government program that was set up to not just fund students' educations, but give them the training to go out into the world and to lead middle-class professional lives, which no one in her family had ever done. I mean, and there are also just these elements now that are online that people never could have gotten before. There are elements in the archives that are pretty wondrous. You kind of end the story talking about the glass plate negatives, these early pictures from the Civil War. Talk about that.

Julie Matthew Brady's Civil War pictures. Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of the records are about our wars and our veterans and the way they, you know, keep and take care of these records is so solemn and so serious. And I mean, these soldiers died in the Civil War. And I mean, I just want to think about them all the time. What would they think if they knew they were in these like glass cases in Maryland being taken care of? But I mean, all the I can go really Rain Man on this stuff, because all of these records are so interrelated.

Like one of Pam Wright's programs was digitizing the censuses, putting those online and I mean the census in 1870 is different because of those guys who are in those glass plate negatives because that was the first census that All African American names were listed Wow because of what those men had done and you know Everyone's stories are in the census I mean the census it's funny Michael is talking about John Lanchester's piece and it's really are in the census. I mean, the census, it's funny, Michael is talking about John Lanchester's piece, and it's really wonderful about the consumer price index and talking about the data and the knowledge that the federal government provides. I mean, I talk about like all the federal records start with the Constitution and the

declaration, and the Constitution requires census to be taken to portion the House of Representatives, which, you know, yawn. But you go into those census, you can learn. The last one that Pamela Wright got online was 1950 because they wait 72 years because there's a lot of private information. You know, it just came out with these JFK files that got put online this week by NARA that a lot of those files have people who are still alive, social security numbers. Social security numbers on them? Yeah.

Yeah. So- This is one of the problems, they're rushing it out just because it's the whim of the child care. But anyway- So like the census from 1950, I learned things about my own family that I didn't know that everyone's in there and it's completely democratic I learned things I didn't want to know about my family

But you know, you can't pick and choose you have a secret great aunt you learned about I Just learned why my mean drunk grandfather was a mean drunk and as a liberal It was a hard lesson because it turns out he worked for the WPA on a road crew and that's how he broke his back and turned into the misanthrope who ruined all our lives. So it's really hard for a liberal to know that the, you know, new deal is responsible for an entire family crumbling for decades. Pete We've got to close with the one political element to this that's very, it's related because it's very relevant, which is, well, they're a lot, but the one acutely political

story that is related to your story, which is Colleen Shogan, right? Which is that Trump fired the archivist, the head archivist, Pamela's boss. Which is his right. Which is his right. But the thing that is relevant here is that Shogun is the type of person that is another type of person you guys could have profiled. And she took her job so seriously that in kind of a really tough situation as Biden was going out, Biden was kind of decreed that the Equal Rights Amendment was officially part of the Constitution. And whatever your feelings are about the Equal Rights Amendment, I assume most listeners and both of us are supportive of it, but like it did it in a way that didn't

follow the letter of the law. And so Shogun was getting pressured to, you know, whatever, put it in the official archive and she wouldn't. So she kind of stands up to Biden, you know, because she takes her job so seriously. Trump comes in, fires her anyway, because he's pissed about that it was the NARA, the archives, that kind of kicked off the classified documents that he's keeping in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, like that whole case. Yeah.

And so, like, this is just another example, like, both of these characters, Colleen and Pamela, people that are, like, are in there, they take their work seriously, they're doing it judiciously, and they're just being treated like garbage by the incoming administration. Well, I mean, that's one reason I wanted to write about NARA, was the president had made it into news because he kept our records in his bathroom, and NARA's job is to get those and keep them safe for us.

Like, when I was going to see those Matthew Brady cases, I had an ink pen that I was taking notes with and we had to go back to somebody's office and get me a pencil because they're so serious about taking care of all these records. Ink can damage the records and a pencil can be erased. So we had to go back, get me a pencil. So I don't wreck anything.

Like they're very serious people and no nonsense. And there are all these laws that govern how NARA operates, including the Presidential Records Act, including how they, how would you put that with the ERA thing? Like they're the ones who put these new amendments into the constitution, right? So there are whole processes that they're all gonna follow to the letter because they're actually,

I mean, Michael Lewis, his whole thing is let's take something you think is boring and make it interesting. My whole thing is like, no, this thing you all think is so interesting is actually super boring and that's how it should be. And the National Archives is completely, you know, non-partisan and just follows the law. But because, I mean, the interesting thing is, if you, like one of the strains of American thought that goes into whatever this madness we're in right now with firing the federal workforce is suspicion of the government, right? Like NARA's function since Watergate and since the Freedom of Information Act is to provide us the access to our own records so that the government is held accountable. So if you're suspicious of the government, which all of these, you know, government efficiency people seem to be, NARA is the place to go to confirm your suspicions. I mean, the other thing is I had this list of documents I wanted to see partly because I'm a history nerd and I was like,

hey, can you guys show me the Louisiana Purchase? Because I wanted to see it. And because Pamela Wright was born within its borders and that was kind of the moment when America becomes way too big to govern. And her mission was to shrink down that distance. But when I looked at my list, it was a pretty liberal list. And so I asked a Republican ex governor of Montana to like, what, what should I ask to see because my list was so liberal? And he gave me a bunch of Nixon stuff, like the bright side of Nixon.

And it's incredible. Like I saw the Clean Air Act, the Nixon side, and you know that doesn't really conform to how I think of Nixon and like so much of the archives is the Nixon tapes and his worst impulses, but the Clean Air Act has saved tens of thousands of lives. So, like, the other thing about the National Archives is it tells the full story, even the ones we don't want to know or think about. I need to close something completely unrelated to this, based on your expertise for The Incredibles. Okay. What superpower do we actually want? You know, if you got to have one, which one would you actually want? I would love the one that Michael Lewis just told you about where he just like doesn't work too hard or overthink things because I like working with him. You can succeed without trying. Yeah, totally. I'm a doer of homework. I like send him a bunch

of articles this morning. Maybe he should think about like he doesn't do any of that. I've been up since 4 a.m. reading about, you know, investment of the US government and like, did you know this Tim, that there's this new medical journal article about the COVID vaccine that 35 years and $337 million worth of federal research went into that before the pandemic started.

And so the operation Warp Speed went to President Trump's greatest accomplishments because it happened so fast was actually because we invested in federal research for more than three decades and more than $300 million. That's the kind of thing I do that Michael Lewis is not getting up at 5 a.m. to read about. There's a lot of mRNA work happening.

Yeah, casual. That's the superpower I want, but will never have. That's good. May we all be successful without trying, like Michael Lewis. That's a good place to end. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Tim. It's so good to meet you. Appreciate you doing the podcast. Everybody else, we'll be back here.

Well, wait, I'm in Arizona tomorrow, so we're taping some live shows in Phoenix. You'll get those conversations on Monday's pod, so we're taping some live shows in Phoenix. You'll get those conversations on Monday's pod and maybe we'll do a bonus interview as well. We'll see how it goes. So we'll see y'all on Monday. Peace. I see the clouds that move across the sky.

I see the wind that moves the clouds away. It moves the clouds over by the building. I pick the building that I want to live in. I fill the pine trees and the trees with the wind. I see the clouds that move across the sky. I see the wind that moves the clouds away. I see the clouds that move across the sky. I see the wind that moves the clouds away.

I see the clouds that move across the sky. I see the clouds that move across the sky. I see the clouds that move across the sky. I see the clouds that move across the sky. I see the clouds that move across the sky. I see the clouds that move across the sky. I see the clouds that by the building I pick the building that I want to live in I smell the pine trees and the peaches in the woods I see the pine cones that fall by the highway That's the highway that goes to the building I pick the building that I want to live in It's over there, it's over there My building has every convenience It's gonna make life easy for me It's gonna be easy to get things done

I will relax along with my loved ones Loved ones, loved ones, visit the building Take the highway, walk and come up and see me I'll be working, working, but if you come visit I'll put down what I'm doing, my friends are important Don't you worry about me I wouldn't worry about me, I wouldn't worry about me I see the states across this big nation I see the laws in in Washington, D.C. I think of the ones I can share with my parents

I think of the people that are working for me Some civil servants are just like my loved ones They work so hard and they try to be strong I'm a lucky guy to live in my building They call me buildings to help them along It's over there, it's over there My building has every convenience It's gonna make life easy for me

It's gonna be easy to get things done I will relax along with my loved ones Loved ones, loved ones, visit the buildings Take the highway, walk and come up and see me I'll be working, working, but if you come visit I'll put down what I'm doing, my friends are important I wouldn't worry about me They wouldn't worry about me

Don't you worry about me Don't you worry about me