S2 Ep1005: Michael Lewis: Government Workers Aren't the Corrupt Ones

Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 11 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 18 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 23 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 26 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 28 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 30 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 33 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So I'm going to direct you to where you can find our Scorch Not Takes. For me, it is the continued revelations

Speaker 36 around the men that we have sent to this barbarous El Salvador prison camp and the fact that, according to their lawyers, at least a few of them actually had not done anything illegally, were here legally under the Venezuelan temporary protected status and were sent wrongfully based on a misunderstanding of their tattoos or a government that doesn't care or it's being intentionally cruel.

Speaker 36 You know, we will find out the reasoning. But it is just so sick and so un-American.
I did a 11-minute rant about this when my blood was boiling hot last night.

Speaker 36 You can get that either on our YouTube feed or now we're turning these into a podcast as well. Search for bulwark takes in your podcast feed.

Speaker 36 Subscribe to that feed and then you can see it's under the headline, breaking the new news about the El Salvador deportations.

Speaker 36 So in addition to that, Adrian Caraschillo, 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 are detaining.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 It's a complicated story, but essentially they had an executive order that was going to target the firm because of their work on some of the investigations against Trump.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Could not be more delighted to welcome today the pride of Newman High School, right around the corner from me.

Speaker 36 His many books include the big short money ball 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.

Speaker 36 We'll have one of those essayists, Sarah Valle, join us in segment two, but first it's Michael Lewis. What's up, Michael?

Speaker 35 Good to see you, Tim. I don't think this is maybe the first interview I've ever done with a host as in New Orleans.

Speaker 36 Well, there you go. Proud to do it.
Walter's never interviewed you?

Speaker 35 Not from there.

Speaker 35 Not from there. No.
Walter has interviewed me, but in person in New York.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So when I was writing Why We Did It, which is kind of my reflection on how the Republican Party got to where it is, the editor asked me what book to model it.

Speaker 36 I wanted to model it after, like style-wise, what books. And I gave him two.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And it's just delightful. So if 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 anyway,

Speaker 36 what are your reflections on that book?

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 Like just doing it conventionally was going to be deadly. And I just called him.

Speaker 35 I said, let me just do this 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.

Speaker 35 It was like great. I mean, I made the main character, Maury Taylor, you know, and also ran in the Republican primary.

Speaker 35 And the conceit was like, nobody actually gives a shit about Clinton or Dole. There's no like passion around either one of them.

Speaker 35 But there's all this passion around all these kind of marginal candidates. I mean, some were not so marginal, you know, Pat Buchanan.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 And it was basically coherent because it was just my travel as a political travelogue that we brought it out as a book. But you're right.
It was very hard after the campaign to sell a book.

Speaker 35 I mean, it wasn't.

Speaker 36 It was about Alan Keyes and Maury Taylor.

Speaker 35 But also about just that event. Like, nobody wanted to read about the 96 presidential campaign.
But I loved doing it, man. It was so much fun.

Speaker 35 I don't want to go on too much about it, but I got to say, it was one of those moments in my writing life where I realized that

Speaker 35 you could invest anything with importance just by observing it. Like, you could take the reader who came to it thinking they wanted to read about Clinton and Dole wherever you wanted to take them

Speaker 35 if you were compelling enough. If I didn't write about Maury Taylor one week, people were disappointed.
That was kind of funny.

Speaker 36 Also, 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

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 You meet him and you know he's basically a sweet person, but he's he's coming at it from the position of someone who knows zero about governing. His qualifications are he ran a Titan.

Speaker 35 He was the CEO of Titan Tire and Wheel, very successful businessman, but has that very successful businessman's resistance to the idea that government does anything useful.

Speaker 35 And if you kind of patch together all these different characters' views of the world,

Speaker 35 you just got a fuller portrait of where America was politically. So as a result, you can see like where we are now then.

Speaker 35 If you're just looking at Clinton and Dole, you'd never guess it would happen, what would happen.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 Pretty relevant now, given what has happened with Elon. So I'm wondering if you could share with the audience some of the people you feature broadly.

Speaker 36 And I guess I was wondering, have any of them got the acts yet? Have any of the people in the book?

Speaker 35 Briefly, let me explain the project.

Speaker 35 Together with David Shipley, the the former opinion editor at the Washington Post, I went out and hired writers I just loved. And they aren't conventional journalists.

Speaker 35 Most of them are sort of performers, novelists, people who are really talented at making material entertaining.

Speaker 35 It was Sarah Vowell, Dave Edgar, Kamal Bell, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, and Casey Sepp. A wide variety of voices, basically.
dropped them into the government and said, just find a story.

Speaker 35 And I did this because I had written a book book during Trump one called The Fifth Risk, where I was just shocked by the quality of the material inside the government.

Speaker 35 I mean, Trump provoked me to get interested in it, and I wasn't expecting the quality of characters who were there, the importance of the mission.

Speaker 35 I mean, you can argue about what government should do, but we'd all agree it should be doing some things.

Speaker 35 And there are places where people are doing things that like no one else is going to do, and you're just grateful they're doing them.

Speaker 35 And they are amazing characters, and they don't know their characters.

Speaker 35 and their stories never get told for a whole bunch of reasons which we can talk about if you want to get into that so we launched these real talented writers at this beast i did two of the eight pieces and they're 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.

Speaker 36 You would have thought that the coal companies would have been working on that, but I guess not.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 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,

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 They had acclimated a workforce to a certain level of mortality, and they just kept it there. And the culture just was, it was a kind of a macho culture.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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 roof from falling, that the safety records start to improve.

Speaker 35 But I don't think this would happen in every industry, but I think it's that coal mining is such a competitive industry, like it's so sensitive to cost, and there are lots of little coal mines, so that nobody wants to be the one to spend the money to make it safe.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 Sarah Vowell, who you're going to talk to later,

Speaker 35 I'll leave that to one side because she wrote about the National Archives and a woman who helps run them. A piece that goes totally unexpected.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 He said, it is fundamental to the United States government that it counts things. It can't apportion power.
unless it counts people for a census. And it's written into the Constitution.

Speaker 35 And the United States government is the greatest counter of things in the world. And what it counts is amazing.

Speaker 35 And it basically, it provides portraits of our society and other people's societies with really careful statistical collection and analysis.

Speaker 35 And he just takes one of these things, the CPI, and shows just how hard it is to do this well, just what a monumental achievement it is, and just actually, incidentally, how at risk it would be in nefarious hands.

Speaker 35 Like, we trust it. We just assume that like whoever's doing is doing their best.

Speaker 36 So what is that? What would be the downside of the CPI, you know, of us, you know, putting Corey Lewandowski in charge of the CPI and then just making that whatever Trump thinks is the best?

Speaker 35 Well, if we don't actually know what inflation is, I mean, for a start, the Federal Reserve won't know how to adjust policy. I mean, it will sow confusion into the minds of people.

Speaker 35 People will assume, we'll have to kind of guess what is 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.

Speaker 35 There's always hints that they're thinking this way. They fired a bunch of experts who helped the Department of Labor Statistics improve it.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 36 Well, you already said, so they complain about the job, because job numbers come out and then they get adjusted, right?

Speaker 36 And so, 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 it initially had been said.

Speaker 36 And so you use that as a pretext to just say, no, we don't trust these guys. They're political actors.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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 to make up. If you lose the portrait of the society, you can't manage it.

Speaker 35 I mean, that's that's one thing.

Speaker 35 But with this specifically regard to inflation, let's say all of a sudden we knew they were just making it up and they had control of the money supply so that they're like the Federal Reserve is no longer independent.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 You know, you think big prices are bad now, or housing prices or whatever, that there becomes a the anticipation of inflation spurs it.

Speaker 36 Spurs inflation, yeah.

Speaker 35 So John Lanchester wrote about that. Dave Eggers wrote about people at Nassau who were looking for little green men in distant space and doing really interesting research.

Speaker 35 There wasn't one of the things where you read it and you thought, oh, we don't need this.

Speaker 36 And the one that you did also that like 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 I

Speaker 36 pharma is not going to develop treatments for these sorts of things. And, you know, I've got a friend with a kid that has this type of disease, right? He's just like, there's no, really? Yeah.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And, you know, me and some friends got together and said, well, let us donate to a group that's out there trying to solve this. And like, the answer is no, like only the government is.

Speaker 36 Like, it's too rare. There's three kids a year or something in America that get this types of disease.

Speaker 35 Let me use that story.

Speaker 35 It's about Heather Stone, who's 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 And he figures in that premonition in one way. But while I was with 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.

Speaker 35 Now, balamuthia, we haven't even known about balamuthia since the like the mid-90s. It was discovered in the mid-90s.

Speaker 35 It's responsible for a lot more deaths than we know because it just hasn't been, it hadn't been identified, but it manifests like encephalitis. Your brain explodes.

Speaker 35 And no one was quite sure how people got it, but little kids got it. And it turns out it's probably like ingesting dirt.
A little unclear how it comes in but but whatever

Speaker 35 so a patient had walked into ucsf's 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 nitroxyline that actually killed this thing the next time someone walks into the hospital with it you know the person's going to die if you don't do anything.

Speaker 35 He bombards it with nitroxyline, the doctors do, and the person survives. Really good sign.
So I watched that. I just watched that happen.
I said, wow, you solved a problem.

Speaker 35 And he goes, no, I haven't solved a problem because we know about it. And if someone happens to call me, they will get that treatment.
But like the doctors of America don't know about it.

Speaker 35 And I said, well, doesn't like someone in the government or someone somewhere assimilate anything that's been done about these rare diseases so that there's like a database? And he said, nope.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 But he said she doesn't seem to have much support from her institution, but she's trying to get doctors from around the whole world to feed whatever treatments that have worked for rare diseases into her.

Speaker 35 It's called Cure ID.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 And how that happens is amazing and serendipitous and requires lots of accident.

Speaker 35 But at the same time, at exactly the same time, another very little girl in Northern California contracted contracted it and the doctors never heard about it and she died.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 She's still there. You asked me, I see the question you asked at the top.
What's happened to these characters? Like, you read all of them and you think, I want that person in government.

Speaker 35 I mean, it's just no-brainer. And two of them have resigned.

Speaker 35 My two both feel they're on tender hooks and like their job could be gone any day.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 36 Right, they don't want the attention.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 36 Yeah, I was just talking to my husband about this.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And he's he's like it's sort of a usdid adjacent thing i'm 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 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 because quite obviously they don't know very they come in not knowing anything or very much just i had somebody tell me that elon did not know that there were two different uh houses of congress like in the middle of the campaign like somebody had to somebody had to educate him about the fact that senate and the house are two separate bodies but but that's believable whether it's true or not it's sort of like believable but they come in

Speaker 35 and this was the point of the series this is the point of the book is they come in very clearly with this

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 They're like there to prevent Donald Trump from doing whatever he wants to do. And it's so not who they are.

Speaker 35 They're so like mostly non-partisan people doing, performing missions, tasks that we've all agreed need to be done. And the point of the story was like, explode this stereotype.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 And if 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 are a couple of things that have gotten stuck in micro and we don't have to get into we can do as much elon as you want let's do it This is what the people want.

Speaker 35 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,

Speaker 35 these are people who are in their first year of government service.

Speaker 36 Or who have been promoted recently.

Speaker 35 In their first year, that might be true.

Speaker 36 Yeah, it's the first year of service, or it's like you worked at some sub-agency and got promoted and took a job at a different sub-agency. You become probationary again if you've changed kind of yet.

Speaker 35 Okay, so you 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, simple, easily.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 Like, these are the young people coming into government, which is what we desperately need. I mean, here's a stat for you.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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 they fire the young people.
And who else are they firing?

Speaker 35 They're firing whoever was hired for obviously some immediate purpose. Like we need this person now.
We need this engineer now on this job because this is something we need to do.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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,

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 What they have done in that case is enable waste, fraud, and abuse.

Speaker 35 So it's interesting as an intellectual exercise to try to figure out what they're trying to achieve.

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Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 11 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 18 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 23 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 26 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 28 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 30 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 33 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 36 This was literally what I was trying to go to next. Because you've abandoned New Orleans.
You live in the Bay now.

Speaker 35 Abandon is strong. Yeah, abandoned people.
You know some of these people. It's very strong.
I narrowly strong. You know the time my whole family's there.

Speaker 36 You know, so my point is you know some of these people just because they're your neighbors and in social circles. You wrote the SBF book, which I want to get to next.

Speaker 36 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?

Speaker 35 I think it's a gumbo to use a New Orleans metaphor.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 I mean, you can't, you don't have the gumbo without the, or the beans. You couldn't do any of this if you actually knew very much.
You'd shoot yourself.

Speaker 35 So, but the ignorance is a precondition, and the hostility and the malice is a precondition. But

Speaker 35 one,

Speaker 35 trying to

Speaker 35 politicize the federal workforce and weaponize it so that it is an instrument that is just there for

Speaker 35 the political use of Donald Trump. So anything that would interfere with Donald Trump's...

Speaker 35 political interests needs to be squashed, which is not how the federal workforce has been used by any other president. So that's one ingredient in the gumbo.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 36 I think, particularly, the AI and crypto folks, I think, are particularly concerned about regulation, though.

Speaker 35 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

Speaker 35 a cybercrime cop inside the IRS who has raked in like billions of dollars for the United States government by busting cybercrime rings, broke up child sex trafficking operations.

Speaker 35 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 gutted his unit.

Speaker 35 And it's like, this is a hugely profitable enterprise and doing like nothing but simple good in the world.

Speaker 36 That's not saving any money. It's such a good

Speaker 35 costing billions of dollars. So why would you do that? Well, the reason is in the name of the unit, cybercrime.

Speaker 35 You've let cybercrime criminals out of jail. You've given pardons to cyber criminals.
You are courting the cyber world,

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 But it doesn't explain all of it. Like none of that really explains the Department of Education being whacked.
They'll tell a story about how, oh, it's being whacked for culture war reasons.

Speaker 35 Like it's woke and it's telling all the states how to teach in the schools. And that's not what it's doing.
It's a big bank that just redistribution from rich to poor areas.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 And so not obviously in Donald Trump's political interest because they're stripping money funds away from from his base.

Speaker 35 So I think the other ingredient is this guy, this dude, and I don't know how to pronounce his name because I've heard it pronounced two ways, Russell Vaught or Russell Vogt, the guy at OMB who is one of the architects of Project 2025 and who's got a kind of a libertarian attitude that there's too much government.

Speaker 35 We just got to get rid of government.

Speaker 35 It sounds really good until you actually see what the government's doing and what happens if you remove it. And then you can start having a grown-up conversation.

Speaker 35 But it's like he's never had the grown-up conversation. And not that some of it might not make sense, but it's like it's so crude.

Speaker 35 He seems to be an ingredient in the gumbo because I can't, knowing Trump's total indifference to the bureaucracy, I can't imagine he cares all that much about the Department of Education.

Speaker 35 The last thing, then I'll shut up.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 And the reason is tactical, the reason for this. He himself is wholly untrustworthy.
He lies all the time.

Speaker 35 He cheats people out of stuff, money he owes them, all that stuff, bankrupted six companies, all that. And he doesn't even pretend really to be that trustworthy.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 Do I think I shouldn't trust it? But he's trying to gut the National Weather Service. Like, why would you do this?

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 36 I think that's insightful because to me, that is where the alignment between Trump and the

Speaker 36 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, the Kim Jong-un, or whatever. You only trust the leader.

Speaker 37 Making the holidays magical for everyone on your list?

Speaker 38 It's no small feat.

Speaker 39 But with TJ Maxx, your magic multiplies. With quality finds arriving daily through Christmas Eve, you'll save on Lux Cashmere the latest tech, toys, and more.

Speaker 39 So you can check off every name on your list and treat yourself to a holiday look that'll turn heads.

Speaker 42 Now you know where to go to make all that holiday magic.

Speaker 39 It's TJ Maxx, of course.

Speaker 43 It's shaping up to be a very magical holiday.

Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 11 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 18 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 23 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 26 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 28 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 30 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 33 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 36 The tech guys, you know, I don't know if you've gotten deep into the Curtis Yarvin, you know, techno-authoritarian stuff, but like they want to tear down all the things people trust so that they control everything, right?

Speaker 36 So that this small cadre of, you know, whatever tech geniuses and, you know, folks that

Speaker 36 are deep into AI and this other sort of innovation, so they, they have control. And so at least for a while, their interests align, right?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 How does that sit with you?

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 I mean, there's more than one kind of silicon valley nerd of course i'm talking specifically about like the strain of the heel and dries that's right 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 just 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 guess celebrate what they say and this is just me talking.

Speaker 35 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 didn't have that thought.

Speaker 35 Or, oh, nobody ever said that before. Or, oh, that's both true and interesting, you know?

Speaker 35 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 aren't true.

Speaker 35 I'm just shocked by how dull they are. That's the thing that

Speaker 35 and the antics like elon musk the way he dresses carrying his kid around on his shoulder like he's a mini me the chainsaw all that stuff it's all like putting a lampshade on your head at the party because you actually don't have anything witty to say and it all feels like that he's the dude walking around with a lampshade on his head and i mean has he ever said anything funny in his life i don't know maybe but if you like fart jokes if you like fart jokes yeah he thinks of himself seven year my seven-year-old did like the tesla farting

Speaker 36 They got a chuckle out of that. Okay.
You can make the Tesla do a whoopee.

Speaker 35 Yeah, there you go. So there you go.
Yeah, 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.

Speaker 35 Like, do I really want to have to listen to this person? Will you shut up? Like, there's so much more interest out there. And this is like one of the side effects of this political movement.

Speaker 35 I think of all the interesting people in the country. I mean, it is amazing

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 And I just wonder at what point everybody just gets bored because it is so boring. And

Speaker 35 anyway, your point that this is

Speaker 35 strained in Silicon Valley, and you just named the people kind of who are the leading lights of this movement that got a following that has somehow attached itself to Donald Trump. That's true.

Speaker 35 It would be nice to have a serious conversation. I would love to sit down with Peter Thiel

Speaker 35 physically inside one of the departments of government and go piece by piece through what that department is doing and have him say, like,

Speaker 35 let's just have a conversation about why this is necessary, why it happened in the first place, why we're doing this.

Speaker 35 And I might like to start in the Department of Energy because without the Department of Energy, Tesla doesn't get off the ground.

Speaker 35 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 the time Elon Musk said got him off the ground.

Speaker 35 And Tesla employees have said like the company would never have existed if the government hadn't come in.

Speaker 35 So much of just technological growth, economic growth, springs from public-private partnerships. It springs from the government interceding in the economy.

Speaker 35 And that they have been direct beneficiaries of this and are still,

Speaker 35 and that they don't acknowledge it and want to go gut the things that actually made us all rich and made them rich. That's where it gets really bewildering.
And I'd like to have the conversation.

Speaker 35 Like, just explain yourself. Elon, you're the richest man in the world because this government came in and helped you.

Speaker 36 Yeah, I think he'd have trouble assimilating that fact into his personal narrative.

Speaker 35 There's one other thing that is bewildering to me. And it'd be nice to have, like, this would be like a small group of people we all agreed were masterful at running big institutions.

Speaker 35 Like the dude who runs Microsoft, clearly some kind of genius. People who, CEO types, heads of large organizations, maybe even a coach of a football team, and would sit around table and would say,

Speaker 35 How many of you have succeeded by walking in and vilifying the employees or the players and telling everybody they were idiots, making everybody feel condescended to, making everybody fill out a little chart about what they did last week, saying you're going to fire everybody because they're all useless?

Speaker 35 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 of what you do if you're running something well.

Speaker 35 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

Speaker 35 we're not having. It's like a Harvard Business School case study of how not to run something.

Speaker 36 Well, it's only the federal government. We've only got three and a half more years of it.
So no, no worries there.

Speaker 35 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?

Speaker 35 How do you feel about New Orleans these days?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And so, you know, I mean, look, it's got problems. Like,

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 You know, they were trying to fix Claiborne Avenue to get ready for the Super Bowl.

Speaker 36 And tragically, trying to fix Bourbon Street to get ready for the Super Bowl, they'd move the ball, you know, so you have these like huge, and they didn't do either of them, right?

Speaker 36 Like it's still not done, right? The Super Bowl is come and passed.

Speaker 36 So that part is tough, but man, I don't know. The people here are so wonderful.
And the folks like us who've chosen to come here, you know, all are

Speaker 36 interesting, right? Like nobody's moved here because Boeing sent them here.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 It 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.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 I don't know why. But do you feel that way? That maybe

Speaker 36 you would have been less good at what you did if you grew up in Topeka?

Speaker 35 I don't think I do what I do if I grew up in Topeka. I think that I think I grew up in a, and I notice notice it even now.

Speaker 35 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,

Speaker 35 it happens every time. I get into the taxi cab, and the taxi driver is all of a sudden jabbering away, talking to me, and I have the best conversation I've had in two months with the taxi driver.

Speaker 35 And then I'm walking the streets, and people don't let you walk by without acknowledging. Everybody's expecting some acknowledgement.

Speaker 35 So there, it's like the first step of improv that you accept and you you build. Yes, and that yes, and is in every all these, it's woven into the fabric of New Orleans' daily existence.

Speaker 35 And yes, and is where you get the story, that you're meeting people and you're accepting and you're building. You're trying to understand and hear what they're saying.

Speaker 35 And I grew up, that's just a muscle that I think a lot of New Orleans have. So that must, I use that muscle.
in all my interactions with subjects. This is absolutely true.
There's this other thing.

Speaker 35 New Orleans encourages a kind of cockeyed view of the world. And I was just thinking about it, the day that Zelensky was in the White House and being humiliated to our disgrace by J.D.

Speaker 35 Vance, I looked at the New Orleans Times, the New Orleans Times Picuna, whatever it's called, the next day. The incident was all over the front page of every newspaper in the world.

Speaker 35 And on the front page of the New Orleans newspaper was discussions about how to get ready for the endymion parade.

Speaker 35 And like where the traffic was going 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

Speaker 35 and i do port that it's just a sensibility into pretty much everything I do.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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 Was Government, they're both such emotional stories.

Speaker 35 Like people are crying when they read the last one.

Speaker 36 The Cole Miner story is so good. People got it.
We don't need to ruin it, so people should get the book, but it is the connection to his father.

Speaker 44 I'm breaking in here to say Gwendolyn Brooks was from Topeka.

Speaker 36 That's Sarah. This is a good podcasting.
Sarah Valley's going to be up there in the next segment. She's keeping me on task right now.
Hold on, though.

Speaker 36 Before I lose you, Michael, I got to do one of your other books. That's okay.
Yep, any book. Or kind of connecting two of them, really.
You wrote The Going Infinite about SBF.

Speaker 36 I'm kind of obsessed about the crypto stuff right now. And one thing that really worries me is I think we are increasing the systemic risk to the system.
Like the failure of his bank.

Speaker 35 Exchange. It was just an exchange.

Speaker 36 Exchange, excuse me. It was isolated mostly from like the rest of the financial system.
But like, that's changing.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 I kind of just wanted to put a quarter in the machine and hear hear what you think about that that worry.

Speaker 35 All right. Two things.
You're absolutely right that decent public policy would wall crypto off from the rest of the financial, from the ordinary fiat financial system.

Speaker 35 We shouldn't have a crypto reserve. It's going to be trivial,

Speaker 35 but we shouldn't be doing that.

Speaker 35 We have a currency, currency and actually crypto is a threat to our currency. It's not good for the dollar.

Speaker 35 To the extent that banks are encouraged to take crypto risks or big financial institutions have big crypto risks. So if crypto goes south, which it will at some point, there's nothing underneath it.

Speaker 35 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 Scientology.

Speaker 35 But you do not want the financial system connected up to it in any way. And the drift right now is to connect it.
It's not so big.

Speaker 35 I mean, I don't know, some total of all the value of crypto is like a few trillion dollars.

Speaker 36 Right now, it doesn't feel like it's big enough to have a housing style systemic like exposure.

Speaker 35 That's right.

Speaker 35 But there's this,

Speaker 35 but I tell you what that's on my mind. If you look at the story of the financial crisis, you look at the big short story, the reason the financial crisis is resolvable is the government is plausible.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 We're going to calm the markets kind of thing. If the government becomes the source of the problem, if nobody trusts the government,

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 And this is like the rule, wherever Trump finds trust, undermine it.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 36 That is also related to the crypto thing. Why in God's name would we want to create a currency competitor?

Speaker 36 Like, if you took their argument at faith value that this is a currency, why would we want to create a strategic reserve of something that is a competitor to the dollar that could undermine the thing that gives us our greatest power?

Speaker 35 The dollar is like central to American global power. The willingness of people to hold it interest-free, use it as a reserve currency, trust it, is so important.
But that's what he's coming for.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 He's going to run into a phalanx of opposition as he gets closer and closer to this.

Speaker 36 All right, last thing. Sarah, I'm promising 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 we'll close with this.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 So why don't you leave us with a little something on squires and your father?

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 It probably wasn't good for my character, but it was fun. And

Speaker 35 my father gave me, left me always with a sense everything was going to be all right and not depressed too much. I told this story often.

Speaker 35 I don't want to repeat myself too much, but 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.

Speaker 35 And he told me the Latin translated into this.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 35 And I took that as like relax, chill, back away from it was like an instruction to be lazy.

Speaker 36 and that I still have it in very New Orlean 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 want to write I don't do stuff just to do it I don't publish books just to publish books that's very useful it's like I only do what interests me that that's how I interpreted it anyway find fulfilling work Matt Lewis I guess I'll see you next week in person for the first time I look forward to it um and let's stick around Sarah Val her story is so good it's worth I think she's gonna be a little more in the traditional bulwark tone of dour and dark about the state of affairs.

Speaker 36 So please stick around for that. Thanks, Michael.

Speaker 35 All right, Tim. See you soon.

Speaker 37 Making the holidays magical for everyone on your list?

Speaker 38 It's no small feat.

Speaker 39 But with TJ Maxx, your magic multiplies. With quality finds arriving daily through Christmas Eve, you'll save on Lux Cashmere the latest tech, toys, and more.

Speaker 39 So you can check off every name on your list and treat yourself to a holiday look that'll turn heads.

Speaker 42 Now you know where to go to make all that holiday magic.

Speaker 39 It's TJ Maxx, of course.

Speaker 43 It's shaping up to be a very magical holiday.

Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 11 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 18 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 23 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 26 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 28 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 30 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried.

Speaker 31 So keep your enemies close.

Speaker 33 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 36 All right, we're back. You've already heard her.
Sarah Val. She's listening in and, you know, had something to add, which I appreciate.
It's a welcome space here at the Board Podcast.

Speaker 36 She's the author, historian, journalist, essayist, and actress.

Speaker 36 She was Violet Parr on the Incredibles. How about that? She also wrote one of the essays in Who Is Government about the record keeper, Pamela Wright at the National Archives.
What's up, Sarah?

Speaker 36 Tell us about Pamela Wright.

Speaker 44 Hi, Tim.

Speaker 44 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,

Speaker 44 I'm from Montana. I'm in Montana right now.
People from out here, when you say Washington, it's almost like a different species of human.

Speaker 44 And when I was a, 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.

Speaker 44 She grew up on a ranch up there, that her background completely influenced how she was doing her job. And her job was to

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 So you don't have to go to DC. You don't have to go to Maryland.
You can be from Sitka, Alaska, and you know, access the records that you own as an Alaskan.

Speaker 44 I think the fact that she came from somewhere that was a 32-hour drive from DC really

Speaker 44 motivated her to get as much online as possible just so everyone can access these records. And

Speaker 44 so, and then another thing about her being a ranch kid is she's super thrifty. So

Speaker 44 one of the,

Speaker 44 I guess, critiques of the government as it's being enacted right now is that there's a lot of waste, right? Well, she grew up on this ranch where they had a cistern for water.

Speaker 44 She knitted her own hat for winter. They like put canned vegetables in the cellar, you know, to make it through the winter.

Speaker 44 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

Speaker 44 just regular citizens to work for free. transcribing the records, scanning the records.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 And some of them are just, you know, random history questions about, I don't know, Annie Oakley or Millard Fillmore. Yeah, Millard Fillmore.
Who doesn't care about him?

Speaker 44 But some of them aren't like real needs, like veterans apparently aren't so great at keeping track of their discharge papers.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 And then

Speaker 44 also, I knew I could tell Pam's story

Speaker 44 by using those records. You know, she's a homesteader's granddaughter.
And so we looked at the Homestead Act.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 to not just fund students' educations, but give them the training to go out into the world and to lead, you know, middle-class professional lives, which no one in her family had ever done.

Speaker 36 I mean, and there are also just these elements out there online that people never could have gotten before. There are elements in the archives that are pretty wondrous.

Speaker 36 You kind of end the story talking about the glass plate negatives, these early pictures from the Civil War. Talk about that.

Speaker 44 Matthew Brady's Civil War pictures. Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of the records are about our wars and our veterans and

Speaker 44 the way they, you know,

Speaker 44 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. think about them all the time.

Speaker 44 What would they think if they knew they were in these like glass cases in Maryland being taken care of?

Speaker 44 But I mean, all the, I can go really rainman on this stuff because all of these records are so interrelated. Like one of Pam Pam Right's programs was digitizing the censuses, putting those online.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 Because of what those men had done. And, you know, everyone's stories are in the census.

Speaker 44 I mean, the census, it's funny, Michael is talking about John Lanchester's piece, and it's really wonderful about the consumer price index and talking about the data and like the knowledge that the federal government provides.

Speaker 44 I mean, I talk about like all the federal records start with the Constitution and the Declaration, and the Constitution requires census to be taken to apportion the House of Representatives, which, you know, yawn.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 36 30 numbers on them.

Speaker 36 This is one of the problems today rushing it out just because it's the whim of their child kid.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 I learned things I didn't want to know about my family, but you know, you can't pick and choose.

Speaker 36 Do you have a secret great aunt you learned about?

Speaker 44 I just learned why my mean drunk grandfather was a mean drunk.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 37 Making the holidays magical for everyone on your list?

Speaker 38 It's no small feat.

Speaker 39 But with TJ Maxx, your magic multiplies. With quality finds arriving daily through Christmas Eve, you'll save on Lux Cashmere the latest tech, toys, and more.

Speaker 39 So you can check off every name on your list and treat yourself to a holiday look that'll turn heads.

Speaker 42 Now you know where to go to make all that holiday magic.

Speaker 39 It's TJ Maxx, of course.

Speaker 43 It's shaping to be a very magical holiday.

Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 11 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 18 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 23 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 26 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 28 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 30 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 33 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 36 Now, we gotta close with the one political element to this that's very

Speaker 36 relevant, which is, well, there are a lot, but the one acutely political story that is related to your story, which is Colleen Shogun, right?

Speaker 36 Which is that Trump fired the archivist, the head archivist, Pamela's boss.

Speaker 44 Which is his right.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And she took her job so seriously that in kind of a really tough situation, as Biden was going out, Biden was, you know, kind of decreed that the Equal Rights Amendment was officially part of the Constitution.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 36 And so, but Shogun was getting pressured to, you know, whatever, put it in the official archive, and she wouldn't. So she kind of stands up to Biden, you know, because she takes her job so seriously.

Speaker 36 Trump comes in, fires her anyway, because he's pissed about that it was the NERA, 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.

Speaker 36 And so, like, this is just just another example.

Speaker 36 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, you know, treated like garbage by the incoming administration.

Speaker 44 Well, I mean, that's one reason I wanted to write about NARA was, you know, was the president had made it into news because he, you know, kept our records in his bathroom.

Speaker 44 And NARA's job is to get those and keep them safe for us. Like when I was going to

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 And there are all these laws that govern how NARA operates, including the Presidential Records Act, including how they,

Speaker 44 how would you put that with the ERA thing? Like, they're the ones who put these new amendments into the Constitution, right?

Speaker 44 So there are whole processes that they're all going to follow to the letter because they're actually, I mean, Michael Lewis, his whole thing is, let's take something you think is boring and make it interesting.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 And the National Archives is completely, you know, non-partisan and just follows the law.

Speaker 44 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?

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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?

Speaker 44 Because I wanted to see it.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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 should I ask to see? Because my list was so liberal.

Speaker 44 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 that Nixon signed.

Speaker 44 And, you know, that doesn't really conform to how I think of Nixon.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 36 I need to close with 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,

Speaker 36 which one would you actually want?

Speaker 44 I would love the one that Michael Michael Lewis just told you about where he just like doesn't work too hard or overthink things because I like working.

Speaker 44 Yeah, totally. I'm a doer of homework.

Speaker 44 I like sent him a bunch of articles this morning. Maybe he should think about like, he doesn't do any of that.
I've been up since 4 a.m. reading about investment of the U.S.
government.

Speaker 44 And like, did you know this, Tim?

Speaker 44 That there's this new medical journal article about the COVID vaccine: that 35 years and 337 million dollars worth of federal research went into that before the pandemic started.

Speaker 44 And so, the Operation Warp Speed, one of 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.

Speaker 44 That's the kind of thing I do that Michael Lewis is not getting up at 5 a.m. to read about.

Speaker 36 There's a lot of mRNA work happening over

Speaker 36 there.

Speaker 44 That's the superpower I want, but we'll never have it.

Speaker 36 That's good. May we all be successful without trying, like Michael Lewis.
That's a good place to end. Thank you, Sarah.
Well, it's so good to meet you. Appreciate you doing the podcast.

Speaker 36 Everybody else, we'll be back here. Well, wait, I'm in Arizona tomorrow.
So we're taping some live shows in Phoenix.

Speaker 36 You'll get those conversations on Monday's pod, and maybe we'll do a bonus interview as well. We'll see how it goes.
So we'll see you all on Monday.

Speaker 35 Peace. I see the clouds that move across

Speaker 35 I see the pine cones that fall by the highway.

Speaker 35 That's the highway that goes to the building.

Speaker 35 I picked the building that I want to live in. It's there, it's over there.

Speaker 35 My building has every convenience.

Speaker 35 It's gonna make life easier for me.

Speaker 35 It's gonna be easy to get things done.

Speaker 35 I'm gonna less along with my loved ones. My loved ones, loved ones is in the building.
Take the highway park and come up and see me. I'll be working, working.

Speaker 35 But if you come visit, I'll put down what I'm doing. My friends are important.

Speaker 35 Don't you worry about me.

Speaker 35 I wouldn't worry about me.

Speaker 35 Don't you worry about me.

Speaker 35 Don't you worry about me.

Speaker 35 I see the states across this big nation.

Speaker 35 I see the laws that are Washington, DC.

Speaker 35 I think of the ones I consider my favorites.

Speaker 35 I think of the people that are working for me.

Speaker 35 Some civil servants are just like my loved ones. They work so hard and they try to be strong.

Speaker 35 I'm a lucky guy to live in my building.

Speaker 35 They all need buildings to help them along. It's all there,

Speaker 35 it's all the dare.

Speaker 35 My building has every convenience.

Speaker 35 It's gonna make life easier for me.

Speaker 35 It's gonna be easy to get things done.

Speaker 35 I will relax and home with my loved ones, loved ones, loved ones. Visit the buildings, take the highway, park and come up and see me.
I'll be working, working.

Speaker 35 But if you come visit, I'll put down what I'm doing. My friends are in body.

Speaker 35 I wouldn't

Speaker 36 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 45 Gun violence isn't just a policy issue. It's personal.
It's a friend who never made it home. Every day in America, 125 people are shot and killed.
For too many of us, gun violence has left a mark.

Speaker 45 And for all of us, it's a crisis we can do something about. Every Town for Gun Safety Action Fund is the largest gun violence prevention organization in America.
We fight for common sense gun laws.

Speaker 45 We've helped pass life-saving legislation in states across the country. We've built the largest grassroots network of volunteers fighting for gun safety.
And we're not stopping.

Speaker 45 You believe in progress, in justice, in doing the work? So do we. This is your moment to act because this isn't someone else's problem.
It's all of ours. Go to everytown.org and donate today.

Speaker 45 Together, let's build a future free from gun violence. Support Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund and our fight to save lives because gun violence isn't just a policy issue.
It's personal.

Speaker 45 Make your donation today at everytown.org. That's everytown.org.

Speaker 36 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture Eastas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Get ready for your next TV obsession, All's Fair.

Speaker 36 Starring Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts, Nisi Nash Betts, Tayana Taylor, with Sarah Poulson, and Glenn Close, a team of fierce female divorce attorneys leave a male-dominated firm to start their own.

Speaker 36 Filled with scandalous secrets and shifting allegiances both in the courtroom and within their own ranks, these ladies know that lawyers are a girl's best friend.

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Speaker 46 Even though severe cases can be rare, respiratory syncytial virus or RSV is still the leading cause of hospitalization in babies under one.

Speaker 46 RSV often begins like a cold or the flu, but can quickly spread to your baby's lungs. Ask your doctor about preventative antibodies for your baby this season and visit protectagainstrsv.com.

Speaker 46 The information presented is for general educational purposes only.

Speaker 20 Please ask your healthcare provider about any questions regarding your health or your baby's health.