Who Is Government? Storytime with Michael Lewis

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Speaker 1 Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Weekly Show Podcast.
My name is Jon Stewart. I will be your weekly show podcast host

Speaker 1 on this celebratory. We are taping this on Wednesday, April 2nd, as we all know it, Liberation Day.
It is Liberation Day, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 1 I don't know how you traditionally celebrate with your families, but Liberation Day was always. always big.

Speaker 1 I may go down to Times Square today and see soldiers kissing nurses and see the people throwing their hats in the air. Three cheers for Liberation Day.

Speaker 1 It's the day day that we all remember where Jesus rose from the tomb and raised prices on Honda Civics by $2,000 a car. And I think we all remember how that goes.

Speaker 1 You know, this is prior to the announcement. So God knows

Speaker 1 it may not be tariffs. It may be something else.

Speaker 1 The unpredictability of all this is probably part of what's driving all the attention to it, which is, I would assume, Donald Trump's whole plan, because God knows the man likes nothing more than a bunch of people not knowing what he's going to do and hanging on his every word.

Speaker 1 And, oh, he's just so important

Speaker 1 to all of us.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, Corey Booker, I don't know if you guys, look, I'm not a big performative, you know, but

Speaker 1 I must say I was quite taken with Corey Booker and especially the idea that he stood up there for 24 hours and broke Strom Thurmond's horrible filibuster record when Strom Thurman, I guess it was in the late 50s, filibustered the Civil Rights Act, because sure, why wouldn't you try and prevent that from ever happening?

Speaker 1 But to see Corey Booker up there, and again, forget about his verbal abilities, because

Speaker 1 they are massive.

Speaker 1 The ability to stand and speak, even if you've got some preparation and even if you're just reading it off a list, my God, you could read War and Peace and it wouldn't take you that long for him to be able to, oftentimes extemporaneously with, I'm sure, preparation, still be, forget about being even riveting, just coherent.

Speaker 1 But maybe the most impressive to me as an older man is the lack of urination. I mean, forget about booking ending it with powerful John Lewis anecdotes.

Speaker 1 To go 24 hours awake, conscious, which means if you're conscious, look, I'm awakened from dead sleep by urination. Not obviously, I mean by the urge.
And then I go, I don't want to,

Speaker 1 I don't want to podcast suggest to you that as an older man, I just lie in my bed and piss myself. That is, I'm sure it's coming, but it is not here yet.

Speaker 1 So the just the part of your brain that goes, hey, hey, bladder, buddy. And then you get up and you go.

Speaker 1 But the idea that he could stand there as a conscious human for more than 24 hours, because you're not allowed to urinate. That's one of the, you know, there's all these rules.
You can't sit down,

Speaker 1 you can't urinate. I don't even know if he's allowed to have like space food.
I don't even know how they do any of that stuff. But more importantly,

Speaker 1 I thought what he did was kind of a primal scream of alarm and not in a processed, reactive, shitty, let's all put on a play and hold up placards that have Musk lies on it.

Speaker 1 I thought he actually put some teeth behind it. And I actually thought he put a great deal of thought into it.
And I found it moving. And that's all I'll say about that.
And speaking of moving, and

Speaker 1 in the way that right now government, not the political side of it, but the bureaucratic side of it, the administrative side of it is being demonized.

Speaker 1 Boy, this moment is ripe ripe for somebody to give a more nuanced view of what's actually going on behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 And on this week's podcast, it couldn't be more timely and we couldn't be more fortunate. Our guest today, Michael Lewis.

Speaker 1 So ladies and gentlemen, I'm so delighted that our guest today can join us. I'm just an enormous fan of his work and have spoken to him many times over the years.

Speaker 1 His books, Too Numerous to Mit, Moneyball, The Big Short, all these fantastic

Speaker 1 storytelling yarns that are always on the cusp of exactly the cultural moment that's about to break. Editor and contributor to the New York Times best-selling collection, Who is Government?

Speaker 1 The Untold Story of Public Service, Michael Lewis joins us. Michael!

Speaker 3 John, good to see you.

Speaker 1 Michael, how

Speaker 1 in God's name do you always find yourself on the precipice of the next cultural moment.

Speaker 1 The Doge crew comes in and they absolutely demonize and destroy the people who work in the bowels of the government, just as you come out with a collection of stories that you've contributed to that actually humanize these faceless bureaucrats.

Speaker 1 How did this idea arise? Did you anticipate this moment?

Speaker 1 Give me me some backdrop on this.

Speaker 3 So you remember Trump won. I got interested in the government, Trump the first term.

Speaker 3 What caught my attention was when he fired his transition team right after he was elected.

Speaker 3 There were 500 and something people who were supposed to go in and get these briefings from the Obama administration.

Speaker 3 And by law, the outgoing president is supposed to prepare so that the incoming administration can hit the ground running.

Speaker 3 And Obama had deputized 1,000 people to spend six months preparing the best course ever prepared about the federal government, how it worked. And Trump just didn't show up for the briefings.

Speaker 3 He told Chris Christie that

Speaker 3 in an hour we can learn everything we need to know about how the federal government works. And I saw that in the paper and I just thought, it's just a great premise.
Like, I thought it was a comedy.

Speaker 3 I thought, I can go in and I can wander this place and figure out how it works. And the reader will know they know more than the president about what's going on in whatever.

Speaker 3 And so, I started, and as a challenge, I just thought, pick the places that nobody knows, what nobody knows anything about.

Speaker 3 Like, I'm so you, like you, probably, I'm surrounded by people who just are always inflicting their political opinions on me. But if I ask them, you know, what does the Department of Energy do?

Speaker 1 I have no idea, no idea.

Speaker 3 Right. And so, I picked energy, agriculture, commerce, and I started just, I just wrote about these places.
The book was called The Fifth Risk. And,

Speaker 3 and while I was there, I was, the thing that shocked me the most was the quality of the person who was inside.

Speaker 3 Like it was not, I don't know what picture I had in my head of bureaucrats, but you know, I had bureaucrats, right? It was like I had this lazy stereotype in my head.

Speaker 3 And I kept meeting these people who were just like smarter than the bankers I worked with at Solomon Brothers, devoted to their mission, like counting the paperclips before they bought another one.

Speaker 3 You know, it was, it was insanely driven, interesting people who didn't think of themselves as characters.

Speaker 3 So I realized at the end of that, that I'd sort of missed a trick. And it was I should have focused less on the institution and more on the people.

Speaker 3 And so I thought, if I ever come back, it's going to be with the people.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 the awareness was.

Speaker 3 I mean, I got to tell you about the guy I met, the guy I met that triggered this. All right.
Yeah. So I was at the end of the fifth risk.
I had to write an afterword for the paperback.

Speaker 3 The government was shut down because Trump had shut down the government,

Speaker 3 2018, 19. There were all these people who were furloughed.
Like two-thirds of the civilian workforce was sent home, no pay, told they were inessential workers.

Speaker 3 And I got a list of like thousands of people who'd been furloughed who had also been nominated for some civil service award.

Speaker 3 I mean, like, someone thought they did whatever they'd done was good, but it was thousands of people. And I didn't know what to do with it.
So I just took the name. It was alphabetized.

Speaker 3 I just took the first name on the list.

Speaker 1 It can't be this easy.

Speaker 3 It is this easy.

Speaker 1 Arthur A. Allen.

Speaker 3 I call up Arthur A. Allen.
And Arthur A. Allen is the only oceanographer in the Coast Guard search and rescue division.
I call him out. I say he's in the middle of Connecticut.

Speaker 3 And I call him, I say, can I come visit and talk to you? And what do you do? Like, what's this inessential work that you do kind of thing?

Speaker 3 And he had all the time in the world because he wasn't working. And so I went across the country and I spent three days with him.

Speaker 3 And it turned out that this guy had, over a course of about 25 years, had basically created a science. And the science was the science of how objects drift at sea.
What?

Speaker 3 So if you go overboard in your sailboat and you're just floating, you will move differently in the water than if your sailboat turns over and you get on top of it.

Speaker 3 or if you're in an inner tube or if you're on a life raft.

Speaker 3 And if the Coast Guard doesn't know how your object drifts, even though it might know when you got in trouble and how long you've been in the water, they won't know where you are.

Speaker 3 They won't know where you are. And

Speaker 3 he had seen a mother, a young mother and a daughter die on the Chesapeake Bay. He had seen it.

Speaker 3 He'd been there when they got the bodies. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 Because they couldn't predict how their overturned sailboat drifted. And he set out to say, he said, I'm never going to let this happen again.

Speaker 3 And it took him forever, but he like classified 300 different objects. And it was like a magic act.

Speaker 3 The minute he gave the Coast Guard his algorithms for objects drifting at sea, like a week later, a fat guy fell off a cruise ship 80 miles east of Miami.

Speaker 3 And like fat guy, fat guy off, wait, wait, fat guy off cruise ship is like a problem. It happens.
It happens. And Americans, like, we have an incredible talent for getting lost at sea.

Speaker 3 We are just doing it all the time. Really? So the fat guy, any other time in human history, he's dead.
But they realized like a few hours later, oh, he's gone.

Speaker 3 They looked at the cameras on the ship and they could see when he went off. And the Coast Guard flew over and plucked him out of the sea like seven hours after he had fallen.
Alive.

Speaker 1 Alive.

Speaker 3 What? And so since then, thousands of people had been saved because of this guy.

Speaker 3 Here's your innocential worker. But here's the kicker.
So I spent three days with him and I thought, my God, it's an incredible story. I wrote it up at the back end of the fifth risk.

Speaker 3 But on the way to the airport, after I'd spent three days with him, you know, interviewing his wife and his children and going to work, his office and going out on the bay with him and all that stuff,

Speaker 3 he calls me on my cell phone and he says, hey,

Speaker 3 you're a writer. And I said, I'm almost sure I said that when I called you.
Yes, I'm a writer. He goes, no, my son just told me that like you wrote a book that became a movie.

Speaker 3 And like, are you said, are you going to be writing? He says, are you going to be writing about me? And I said, Yeah, yeah, Art. Like, why do you think I just spent three days talking to you?

Speaker 3 And he said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drifted. And, and, and, and, but that, and at that moment, you will get this, you will get this.

Speaker 3 At that moment, I realized like these people don't know their characters, and that makes them great characters.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, they're just so in the weeds with the thing they're doing, they're so about service, like helping others.

Speaker 3 It does not occur to them to like promote themselves, to sell themselves, to market themselves, to talk to journalists in a certain way so their story gets out.

Speaker 3 His story just never would have been told. And I just thought, like, there are thousands of people like this in the government.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 If I ever come back, come back with that in mind. And then the second thought as we approached the, I mean, it was a year ago now.
Right.

Speaker 3 When I curate, I hired six writers who I thought were great writers. And they weren't like normal journalists.
They were novelists. They were stand-up comedians.

Speaker 1 I mean, Sarah Vowell and, you know, Kamal Bell. I mean, it's an incredible group.

Speaker 3 Kamal Bell is a stand-up comedian. Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks.
It's a great group. But I just, I wanted people with different voices, but

Speaker 3 I wanted some protection from the charge that, oh, this is just Michael Lewis making things up or spinning it a certain way.

Speaker 1 Why were you concerned about that, Michael?

Speaker 3 Because if it's just one writer, it's easy to attack them. It's easy to, for someone who wants to make the other argument.

Speaker 1 You made it more resilient.

Speaker 3 I made it more resilient. It was like, okay, seven people are dropping in and they can do whatever they want.
Right. And

Speaker 3 all of them, like in a moment, found some story and usually some person that was just incredible. And I'm telling you, you could do this.
We could do 10 of these and you wouldn't run out of material.

Speaker 3 And so what does that say about what's going on right now? I mean, I sorry, so to answer your second question, I had no idea. I mean, I knew that Trump didn't give a shit, right?

Speaker 1 He's just like, what is this? You were following following your own.

Speaker 1 I'm interested in how Michael Lewis' current, how he travels through, because you are, you drift into these areas almost as if they have gravitational force, but there is actually no,

Speaker 1 you are following something that you are self-generating, but it turns out there is a larger, if you step back in the macro, there's a larger pattern.

Speaker 1 And I can actually almost trace it through a lot of your books. And it has to do with data and systems and analysis and how I feel like you're a climate scientist of humanity in some respects.

Speaker 3 None of them, yeah, my math teachers from high school would all disagree.

Speaker 1 But it's not, but it's a humanistic mapping. Yeah.
Yeah. And almost how it's translating behavior from data in all these different areas.

Speaker 3 So I would think of it slightly differently. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But, but it's, and it's that where I get really jazzed is if I find something that is clearly, that is clearly, if I find a person or a situation that is radically different from what general opinion is about it.

Speaker 3 I mean, the book before was about Sam Bankman-Freed. I got an unbelievable amount of shit because I described him actually how he was rather than how everybody, how everybody wanted him to be.

Speaker 3 Because at that, but you know, know i did i started writing it when he was in jail i knew everything he had done but he was not a deeply sinister character he was a kid who did something wrong right it was closer to that and everybody around him understood that even the people who hated him but there was it got me excited to know that like crypto twitter was out there saying this guy was like evil incarnate without knowing him And there was a story that was just true and different that just didn't match with what people thought they knew.

Speaker 3 And this feels the same way. It's sort of like people think they have this lazy stereotype in their head of what a federal worker is.
And that lazy stereotype enables Doge.

Speaker 3 Like if everybody knew who these people were, they would be outraged on their behalf.

Speaker 1 And by the way, they exploit that lazy stereotype. I don't know if they do it consciously, but certainly their strategy is to do that.
Totally.

Speaker 3 No, I mean,

Speaker 3 it's a bit like you can demonize federal workers in the the same way you can demonize trans people and immigrants.

Speaker 3 You know, we've created this category in people's head that, oh, it's, they, they classified as, oh, bad, or wasteful, or corrupt.

Speaker 3 And then you can do whatever you want to the individuals because actually no one knows any of the individuals. It's a bigotry.

Speaker 1 Not only are they, and by the way, they, in this bigotry, those characters are not caricatures. They're actually evil.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What they do is they portray this as these are evil forces

Speaker 1 working with purpose to subvert America. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Couldn't be further than what it is.

Speaker 3 The opposite. I mean,

Speaker 3 they're waiting to do the president's bidding when he, if you just tell them what it is they want him to do.

Speaker 3 But mostly they're engaged in pretty long-term missions that everybody's agreed like we need. Like we need nuclear weapons not to go off when they shouldn't go off.

Speaker 1 We need to find all these people falling off of cruise ships.

Speaker 3 That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 We need to know. What's amazing?

Speaker 3 I tracked down one of the dudes who had been plucked out of the water. It was a separate fat guy who fell off a fishing boat.
Wait, what?

Speaker 1 Oh, Zempic is going to end this entire thing. No one's going to fall off anymore.

Speaker 3 No, that's not what's going to happen. They're going to fall off and die because when you're fat, you survive.

Speaker 1 Oh, no one knows how they float. No.

Speaker 3 No, they know how they float, but when you're fat, you can survive forever in a cold water.

Speaker 3 If you're skinny, you're a goner.

Speaker 3 So being fat is a huge advantage if you fall into cold water. Hypothermia gets to you if you're skinny.

Speaker 1 I am learning dynamics about this that I had no idea of. Fat people have a huge advantage.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's kind of great that Americans get lost at sea a lot and are also fat.

Speaker 1 Well, the cruise ship then is the perfect vehicle for that because it's an all-you-can-eat buffet for weeks and weeks.

Speaker 3 That's right. You start with the buffet and then you end in the drink.
Right. But I found one of these people who had been plucked from the ocean.
This was the Pacific Ocean.

Speaker 3 And I asked him, like, do you know why you were saved? Like, you were floating there for hours in the dark.

Speaker 3 And in human history, when a human being goes off the side of a boat, you just can't find them. It's like finding a soccer ball in the state of Connecticut.

Speaker 3 And he said, yeah, he does, I do know. It was Jesus Christ.
I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior while I was in the water and then I was saved. And I said, no, it was actually Arthur A.

Speaker 3 Allen.

Speaker 3 It wasn't Jesus Christ. It was Arthur A.

Speaker 1 Allen.

Speaker 3 And Arthur A. Allen figured out how to find your ass.
And that's why you're alive. And he was like, oh, no one told me that kind of thing.
And that's the problem. No one tells anybody that.

Speaker 3 So people don't know kind of what their taxpayer dollars are doing for them because no one explains it.

Speaker 1 Okay, we're going to take a quick break. We shall be right back.

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Speaker 1 We're back.

Speaker 1 I wonder, too, if it's the type of situation where where government is very happy.

Speaker 1 Because in some respects, have you ever seen those videos where an incredibly angry and frustrated traveler is just screaming at somebody who is manning the Southwest Airlines counter?

Speaker 1 And it's all about, and it's, how dare you route these planes? And don't you understand? And the person is just looking at them like, I don't know if you know this, but I have not designed.

Speaker 1 And in some respects, as you said earlier, these are individuals who are doing what they have been tasked to do through congressional action.

Speaker 1 But rather than place the onus on what the Congress has put into place, it's this faceless, dark group of lazy entitled sucking off the teat of the taxpayer's largesse.

Speaker 1 And what it ultimately turns out to be is political appointees are more likely to be in that category

Speaker 1 than the people who are in the rank and file.

Speaker 3 Oh, yes. You know, the whole idea that the place to go find corruption, like financial corruption, is a federal agency is insane.

Speaker 3 Like, I can remember working on Wall Street, and if you took like, there are a thousand things that would happen every day on a Wall Street firm or in a Wall Street firm that if you did it in a federal agency, you'd be in jail.

Speaker 1 No question.

Speaker 3 There's so many eyes on you, you can't buy them a sandwich when you take them out to lunch.

Speaker 3 They're so... They're so sensitive to, oh, we have to be careful because if we put a foot wrong,

Speaker 3 we're going going to be hauled in front of Congress and we're going to be in the newspaper.

Speaker 1 The Inspector General will be on top of it in terms of tracking where that money went, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3 Used to be, except Trump fired all the inspectors.

Speaker 1 When we used to have inspector general. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 So it's kind of wild that they say they're coming in to get corruption and waste and they fire the person who's eliminating. corruption and waste.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's no question we're now in a situation where it's much easier to be corrupt and wasteful inside the federal government than it was i mean they've made it explicitly legal i think trump one of trump's first orders of business was to say that you can bribe officials now the supreme court has made corruption unless you literally say i'm going to give you money for this exact action right it's not even considered corruption anymore so what do you make of you know the claim i mean it's kind of interesting that they come in saying that's what they're trying to do when they do the opposite it's not even that they're not doing it well it's that they're doing the opposite yeah I mean,

Speaker 1 I would say I think that's the strategy.

Speaker 1 What it appears to me to be is that they've got a much deeper plan about privatization and a sort of a, you know, do you ever remember? Did you ever watch the show Peaky Blinders?

Speaker 1 And I brought this up before.

Speaker 3 So out of the corner of my eye, when I was walking through the bedroom and Tabitha was watching it,

Speaker 1 it's a fantastic story of these, you know, Birmingham gangsters called the Peaky Blinders in the 1920s. Yes.
But he's got a theory of power, Tommy Shelby, called Big Fuck Small.

Speaker 1 And the whole idea of

Speaker 1 government is to create these systems of collective action that can somehow protect minority rights, can protect people that would normally just be at the whim of warlordism.

Speaker 1 And I think they have a theory of power that is much more feudal.

Speaker 1 and much more warlord. And what gets in the way of that? Somebody who will diligently study how objects flow through water to help people.
This is about patronage.

Speaker 1 It's about changing the way that we act together. It's a much more sinister plan than just

Speaker 1 pretending that you're going after waste. I think that's just the delivery system

Speaker 1 for their larger.

Speaker 3 But that the American public would begin to accept the delivery system is kind of amazing. I mean, and this is what got me interested in the first place.

Speaker 3 It wasn't like, oh, Trump's going to destroy this, so you got to protect it. It's, oh my God, these stories are incredible.

Speaker 3 And when you hear them, you're just moved and inspired and you're proud of your country and all the rest. These people still exist.
And

Speaker 3 we've kind of built a mechanism. I don't know how far back it goes.
Maybe it goes forever.

Speaker 3 But a mechanism that prevents the stories from getting out. And the mechanism is the elected officials.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 The elected officials, the political class that comes into the government to run the government,

Speaker 3 has something that's kind of convenient for them. If something goes wrong, they can haul one of these people out and say they were to blame.
But if something goes right, they can take credit for it.

Speaker 3 And they have no incentive to celebrate the work of the permanent federal workforce. And so as a result, there's no kind of cultural recognition.
And it's actually pre-Trump.

Speaker 3 This is a problem it's like it's like who what business runs well if the employees only get punished if nobody gets rewarded for for doing good stuff and i think you can track that you know to some extent that when there's government failure to this to like people are not allowed to stick their necks out.

Speaker 3 They're not incentivized to stick their necks out.

Speaker 1 That's right. And creativity and innovation wouldn't be rewarded.

Speaker 3 Right, correct.

Speaker 1 It would be that kind of, that kind of risk-taking. Look, it's similar to the idea, you know, when they talk about Musk, they say, this is the guy that's that's got to do it.

Speaker 1 But understand that his methodology is, and by the way, for an entrepreneur and an inventor and an innovator, it probably works, but you got to blow up a bunch of rockets before you find the rocket that does right.

Speaker 1 Well, if you're working for the government and it's a bunch of people that are falling off of things or you're protecting them, the ethos isn't.

Speaker 1 A bunch of these people are going to have to die until we figure it out or to get us to figure it out. It's actually the opposite.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 The minute he blows up the first rocket, he's fired and never allowed to work again.

Speaker 1 But that's exactly right.

Speaker 3 The whole Silicon Valley celebrating failure and risk-taking and all that.

Speaker 3 It is the opposite.

Speaker 1 What do you make of that then? Do they within the bureaucracy, A, do they feel maligned? Is that something that you found from them? Do they get frustrated within?

Speaker 1 Because the system is, look, it is built. in a bit of a Rube Goldberg kind of a way in terms of there are so many checks on waste, fraud, and abuse.
It's almost wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive. Yes.

Speaker 1 That part of the system. That's right.
So do they reflect that to you?

Speaker 3 Let me think about this.

Speaker 3 So I did, there's eight stories in the book. I did two of them.
And the other writers did the other six.

Speaker 3 And the characters that I have dealt with, they're not, they don't celebrate the structure they're in. They're aware that, oh, this is a pain in the ass to do what I'm doing.

Speaker 3 It's more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be. Everybody agrees with that.

Speaker 3 And you know what they also agree with is that by the time I get to them so i was able to get to arthur a allen because he was furloughed because he was not employed at the time and so there was there was no communications officer to stop me from getting to him but with all the other ones that every story in this book there was a little phalanx of of political people and this was the biden administration huh uh you know kind of prevent us basically from telling the story so they were very aware that like kind of amazing we're now in this situation where i can actually talk to you yes it took it took a league took a lot of persistence to get to them.

Speaker 3 But once you get to them, that, yeah, they'll say that, you know,

Speaker 3 I'll give you an example. So I'll give you one concrete example.

Speaker 3 The last story in the book is actually a story of government failure, but kind of personal heroism. This woman, her name is Heather Stone.

Speaker 1 She may be gone today.

Speaker 3 They're firing all these people in the FDA, but she's in the FDA, and she noticed a problem that she tried to set out to solve with a colleague. And the problem was

Speaker 3 pharmaceutical companies have no interest in developing drugs for really rare disease. There's no market for them.
They're a rare disease.

Speaker 3 So you get something really horrible somewhere in the world, and no one's developed the drug for it. And you're going to die.
And doctors will experiment.

Speaker 3 You're going to die anyway. Let's try, let's try this.
Let's try that. And there's no formal record keeping of these experiments.
So if something works, you might not hear about it.

Speaker 3 And if something doesn't work, you might not hear about it. So the rare disease that's the center of this story is balamuthia.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 3 It's a brain-eating amoeba. And in and of itself, it's a kind of a wild thing.
It wasn't discovered until

Speaker 3 in the 1990s in the San Diego Zoo. Someone discovered this thing.
And there's all along story, backstory about it. But

Speaker 3 she built this app to encourage doctors from all over the world. to, if you have a case, like so just say what you did and what happened.

Speaker 3 And so if you have balamuthia, if you've treated it, all right, so you gave them X and it didn't work. What's nice is it'd be good for other doctors to know that.

Speaker 3 Well, there was actually at UCSF, a researcher six to seven years ago, his name is Joe DeRisi,

Speaker 3 actually found a drug that worked on in his lab that worked on balamuthia called nitroxylene and it's a it's a drug that's used to treat urinary tract infections in europe and china what yeah weird what he did was he took the balamuthia in the lab and he took the 2000 and something approved drugs anywhere in Europe or America.

Speaker 3 He bombarded the balamuthia and he found this one thing killed the balamuthia. Jesus.

Speaker 3 And but here's the, but this is what Heather Stone at the FDA was responding to was that he had done this because he'd watched someone had their brain eaten before him and he figured out it was balamuthia and that person died.

Speaker 3 He went and made this discovery. The next time a patient walked into UCSF with this,

Speaker 3 they tried it and it worked. And I said to Joe Dorisi, I said, well, this is great.
You found the cure. And he says, we don't know that.
It's one person.

Speaker 3 But even though I've done that, no one will know. If you're lucky enough to walk into the UCSF hospital with balamuthia, yes, they may think of using this, but no one else will have heard of this.
And

Speaker 3 because medical journals tend not to write up single case studies, so on and so forth. So this woman at the FDA had identified this problem problem and said, I'm going to market this app.

Speaker 3 I'm going to let everybody know the FDA is a safe place to come tell your stories.

Speaker 3 So, and every doctor in the country will know that if they've got a balamuthia case, they hit the button and they can see that 50 times someone's done this.

Speaker 3 And she's unbelievably frustrated because the FDA doesn't have the funds to market it. There's no money.

Speaker 3 There's a kind of nervousness about, well, what happens if someone gets a bad recommendation off the site?

Speaker 3 It's all risk averse.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

Speaker 3 So, what happens in the story, which is kind of amazing, is that in this particular case, Joe Dorisi, the scientist, managed to write up a paper about how this person had been cured and

Speaker 3 thanked Heather Stone at the FDA for getting him the nitroxylene, the drug, even though it wasn't approved in the United States, really fast. What?

Speaker 3 And there's a little girl who's alive in Little Rock, Arkansas right now.

Speaker 1 Come on.

Speaker 3 Or, no, to Queens, Arkansas. She's six years old.

Speaker 3 Her name is Elena Elena Smith, who is dying in the Dallas Children's Hospital because the mom, her mom saw this paper on the web, saw Heather Stone's name, called her up, and Heather Stone got the drugs to the hospital and the girl was saved.

Speaker 3 But at the same time, there was another six-year-old girl in Davis, California whose doctors never saw this and who died.

Speaker 3 But so Heather Stone would tell you, if she were here, she'd say, We are the mechanism. The government is the only place that's going to do this.

Speaker 3 We are the mechanism for getting this information out to people. And I am in somewhat stifled because

Speaker 3 people are risk averse, because we don't have resources. And you see this and you're just like,

Speaker 3 it breaks your heart because you just know that there's so many tragedies that could be avoided.

Speaker 1 And the demonization occurs. What also happens is the expectation of the public for some reason is that government, there has to be perfection.
We have the same thing in the criminal justice system.

Speaker 1 We have a system that demands anybody who's let out of jail must not recommit, even though the system does nothing to rehabilitate them.

Speaker 1 So we have a system that demands perfection, yet is unable to discern the difference between a real threat and a non-threat.

Speaker 1 You know, so we're demanding something that is absolutely not possible to achieve.

Speaker 3 Stop your work. Can I stop you one sec?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, please, please.

Speaker 3 What you just said, what personal relationship does that remind you of?

Speaker 1 Of demanding perfection.

Speaker 3 And being extremely harshly critical when there's any kind of little error.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm going to say my mother, but I think that's. There you go.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 3 It's exactly right. You just put your finger on it.
That we are, as a country, we treat our government the way we treat our mothers when we're like 14-year-old boys.

Speaker 3 That's the country right now. And it's over and over and over.
Right. And you ignore all the good things mom has done because it's just assumed that mom's going to do the good things.

Speaker 3 But if mom screws up and puts a bologna sandwich in your lunch instead of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, mom, you don't know me. You're a horrible mom.

Speaker 1 Or the opposite, which is, mom, I'm trying as hard as I can.

Speaker 1 You think I wanted a D? Come on.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's reciprocal. Okay, it's both ways.

Speaker 3 And this is a wasp Jewish thing.

Speaker 1 That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 It goes both ways.

Speaker 1 Quick break. We'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 And we're back. In fact, my favorite story about that with my mother is this is a complete tangent and we'll get back to what we're talking about.
Unfortunately, so she's 91 and she's doing great.

Speaker 1 Sharp as attack. Couldn't be, you know, happier about that.
But she did get pneumonia about a year ago and was knocked out on her ass.

Speaker 1 And there's a very strong person, but she unfortunately had to go to the hospital for about five days. Five days, IV drip of a ton of antibiotics.

Speaker 1 Don't think it was dioxaline, but it was whatever it was that they were throwing in there that I'm sure I'll have to thank Heather Stone for.

Speaker 1 But after five days, I go to get her to pick her up and she's lying out. She's got the oxygen tube and she's completely out of it.
And I said, mom, mom, we're going home. I'm here to take you home.

Speaker 1 And she looks up and she opens her eyes. She looks at me and she goes, you look tired.

Speaker 1 I was just like, oh, it's so hard to,

Speaker 1 yep, yep, you got me. Let's just, like, meanwhile, I've been up for like five days straight while she's in.

Speaker 3 So this is, I mean, I have a, I have a less dramatic version of this, but just happened. Yeah.
I'm here in New Orleans in my childhood bedroom.

Speaker 3 And I did a favor from my mother and went and talked to one of her community groups. And she said, Could you go talk to this group? And I got on stage and I talked for whatever.

Speaker 3 And she drove me over there and drove me home. And she didn't say a word on the way out till we got in the car.

Speaker 3 And she said, When we got in the car, she said, You and your father have one thing in common. And I said, What? She goes, You both do go on quite a bit.

Speaker 1 It's like, all right, all right,

Speaker 1 you're welcome. See, and this is why we don't have the government we deserve.

Speaker 3 This is exactly right.

Speaker 1 It's exactly right. Which brings me, so to bring this back around, and here's, I think, what has been so interesting about your work.
So you've had feet in

Speaker 1 the Wall Street industry,

Speaker 1 professional sport, all these different industries. And now in government, the expectation, I think, to some extent, we forgive business for the mistakes they make and the damage that they do.

Speaker 1 I mean, the big short, you're talking about in 2008 destroying almost the entire world financial system because, as Alan Greenspan would say, I really thought the banks would have done a better job regulating themselves.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 and now you get into this, and what you see is there is no margin of error.

Speaker 1 And it is because maybe there is a, mistakenly so, a purposeful cloak over the intricacies of what the government actually does, how it actually does it, because of a risk aversion or a fear of criticism or an exposure to litigation.

Speaker 1 Why do you think it is that we're so enamored of private industry and so

Speaker 1 reflexively angered by government industry?

Speaker 3 I mean, top of the list is that we admire rich people. You know, we admire money making.
And

Speaker 3 we're the biggest money culture in the world. And it's so that's one thing.

Speaker 3 You're never, the government people are always going to be, and they're always going to be low status because they have a little, they don't have any money. So that's, that's one thing.

Speaker 1 We deem them, if you're good enough, you wouldn't be in government. Is that the idea?

Speaker 3 So, so, so, so, and here's another, let me just think this through. Yeah, yeah, that's true, but which is completely false, by the way.
Uh, it's people have made a conscious choice to serve.

Speaker 3 And that's what's so offensive about going after them is that they're criminals. They're actually, it's sort of like the takers going after the givers

Speaker 3 and without anybody ever acknowledging that there's this moral disparity.

Speaker 3 But there is another thing that what happens in the private sector, we see the successes, the successes survive. and get celebrated and the failures kind of fade into the background.

Speaker 3 No one pays them that much attention. They come and they go very fast.

Speaker 3 Whereas in government, it's much more complicated.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's what's the government? The government is the place all the problems the private sector won't solve go.

Speaker 1 Say that again, because that, man,

Speaker 1 that is such an important nugget of wisdom for people to understand. Please repeat that in capital letters.

Speaker 3 The government is the place that all the problems the private sector can't solve go.

Speaker 3 And so, the,

Speaker 3 what are these problems?

Speaker 3 I mean, it reminds me of, so I spent like six months with Obama when he was president, writing a story about him, just what it was like to be president.

Speaker 3 And I remember one of the first things he said about, he was just writing about the job. And one of the first things he said was,

Speaker 3 you know, this job is a decision-making job. And it's an unpleasant decision-making job because all the easy decisions get solved, but get made by everybody else.

Speaker 3 What gets to me are the horrible decisions because nobody else wants to make them. So what gets to government are all the problems that unpleasant problems that no one's going to make money solving.

Speaker 3 No one's going to make money figuring out how a fat man drifts at sea.

Speaker 3 No one is going to make money figuring out how to collect anecdotal information about treating rare disease.

Speaker 3 No one is going to make money figuring out how to stop the roofs of coal mines from collapsing onto the heads of coal miners.

Speaker 3 A problem that killed 50,000 coal miners in America in the last hundred years.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 50,000?

Speaker 3 50,000. Being a coal miner during the Vietnam War was more dangerous than being in the Vietnam War.

Speaker 3 It's an incredibly dangerous occupation.

Speaker 3 It's less dangerous now, a lot less dangerous because of the dude I write about in the book because he figured out how to stop the roofs from falling in on the heads of coal miners.

Speaker 1 That person's just not the next person on the alphabetical list, is it? I mean, you did. You did branch out from.

Speaker 3 No, no, no, you tell you how I found him. It was great.

Speaker 3 So it was great because

Speaker 3 I hired, you know, Geraldine Brooks and John Lanchester and Dave Edgars and all these famous writers. Right.
And I sent them out in the government.

Speaker 3 And then I realized, oh, shit, I have to find something to write about. And so

Speaker 3 I called up the people with the list of people of

Speaker 3 civil servants who've been nominated for some award. And I got this year's list.
And it was, in this case, it wasn't thousands of names because it wasn't over 20 years.

Speaker 3 It was like 600 people, 600 people. And the list was just, can I tell you this story? Do I have five? Do I have five minutes?

Speaker 1 All right. It's a podcast.

Speaker 3 it's wild people are driving to work it's like a two-hour commute okay okay it's wild so the problem with the list was it it would say like Helen Jones FBI agent broke up a cyber crime ring period and it didn't say there are all these names and all these amazing things they had done but no sign of a human being like in this on this list until I got to I was just flipping through it and then it said it said Christopher Mark Christopher mark uh saw inside the labor department solve the problem of coal mine rules collapsing on the heads of coal miners a problem that killed 50 000 americans in the last hundred years

Speaker 3 but then it said a former coal miner and i thought wow wow there's a story right that he grew up in west virginia his dad was killed by a falling roof he was motivated i could you could almost the a movie sprung in my mind that he had some who solves this problem who comes out of a cooper what coal miner gets out of the coal mine to solve this kind of problem?

Speaker 3 So I find his phone number. No, not even email.
I find his phone number. He's in Pittsburgh.
I call him up. He knows who I am because he's read Moneyball.
It's kind of funny.

Speaker 3 But so he's, so he'll stay on the phone with me.

Speaker 3 And he says about the first thing out of his mouth, because I said, what's the story? What's your story? He says, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a professor at the university.

Speaker 3 And I went, oh shit, there goes my story. Like, this is going to be boring.
And my whole fantasy, my whole, what I had in my head was just

Speaker 3 so, but you got to, this is where it gets wild. This all happens in the first 20 minutes I'm talking to him.

Speaker 3 He explains his dad, a guy named Robert Mark, was actually quite a famous engineer at Princeton. And he was famous for having taken

Speaker 3 a mechanism he had developed to stress test like fighter planes.

Speaker 3 He built models of the fighter planes and subject him in his little device to stress to see if like, if you had this design, would the wing fall off if you went too fast? And

Speaker 3 the military hired him and Princeton had hired him to test nuclear reactors to see if they were going to work if they built them.

Speaker 3 Robert Mark is teaching engineering at Princeton when an undergraduate comes into his class from an art history class and says, this is really cool what you've developed.

Speaker 3 Can you use it to stress test Gothic cathedrals to figure out how they were built, like where the stresses are in the building?

Speaker 3 No one knew all these Gothic cathedrals were built in France without anybody knowing, without any record being left behind about how they were built.

Speaker 3 So he does this and he becomes the world's expert on how the Gothic cathedrals were built because finally someone has something to say and he can like predict where and shark there's going to be a stone that's going to need to be replaced because it's too much load for the stone.

Speaker 1 That's a load-bearing stone right there.

Speaker 3 It's wild. It's wild.
And like PBS documentaries were made of him. He was featured in Life magazine, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3 But his specialty, what he's doing is figuring out why the roofs of Gothic cathedrals don't fall down. The son, who I've now got on the phone, Christopher, tells me about his dad.

Speaker 3 Then he says, but you got to know is that like, I didn't want any part of my dad's world. The Vietnam War was raging.
I was in high school. He started throwing words like bourgeois around the house.

Speaker 3 You know, it was like, I don't want any part of your bourgeois life. I'm going to join the working class.
So he could have gone to Harvard or Princeton.

Speaker 3 Instead of going to Harvard or Princeton, he leaves home after high school and joins the working class, works in a car factory, works in a UPS warehouse, and finally ends up with three fellow radicals in a coal mine in West Virginia.

Speaker 3 The other three radicals flee after a day. It's so awful.

Speaker 3 He actually finds something really appealing about coal mining, and he lasts a year, but is almost killed twice by falling stuff.

Speaker 3 And he figures out there's this problem and he gets himself out, goes to Penn State,

Speaker 3 studies rock engineering, and starts this journey. And the journey, the intellectual journey is riveting, how he figures out what he figures out.
But anyway, he tells that I find out later.

Speaker 3 But the first 20 minutes, he's telling me roughly what happened in his life. And I said to him, I said, oh, so you rebelled against your dad, and then you just relived your dad's life underground.

Speaker 3 He figured out how the roofs of Gothic Cathedral stayed up and you figured out how to keep the roofs of coal mines up.

Speaker 3 And there's this pause on the end of the line. He goes, that's not true.
It has nothing to do with my dad.

Speaker 3 These things are not. And

Speaker 3 he's so hostile. Well, it's great.
I think this is a story. It's great.
He does not know that

Speaker 1 how this looks. He doesn't get structural integrity of ceilings in cathedrals.

Speaker 3 So here's where it gets beautiful.

Speaker 3 Beautiful. There are two things that happen that are just beautiful.
One is after I've written the piece and I'm on a hike with his wife, his wife says, finally, someone said it to him.

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Amazing.

Speaker 3 But the best thing is, is like around the year 2000, the federal government figures out that the National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I know that thing was built over like a hundred years, and the people who built the foundation were less ambitious than the architects who came in after him, made it bigger and bigger and bigger.

Speaker 3 So the foundation can't support the building properly. And it was tilting like Leaning Tower of Pisa.
It was like one of the towers sinking faster than the other tower.

Speaker 3 And so they called up Chris Mark's dad to say, you did it with Gothic cathedrals. Come do this.

Speaker 3 And he comes in and he realizes that my tools work for what's above ground, but actually something's going on below ground. And he calls his son and says, we've got, I need your help.
No.

Speaker 3 And so the son and the father together figure out. whether the National Cathedral and they write a paper.
They write a paper about it.

Speaker 3 I mean, this is literature you know you can't make that but you can't make this up it's shakespearean it's unbelievable i mean it's it's the stories are unbelievable and and but but i i i keep i found this now so many times and the fellow writers have found it so many times it's like why why are these stories so good and here is my the the why is this this federal government generating literature that nobody's paying attention to?

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 The seriousness of the mission, like how important it is,

Speaker 3 the fate of the society is at stake if they don't do a good job. The nature of the person who's attracted to it is not a selfish, self-absorbed, look-at-me kind of person, just the opposite.

Speaker 3 And when people, like when people think they're characters, they cease to be characters.

Speaker 3 They lose altitude on the page. They're like zany.

Speaker 1 There's nothing performative about these people. Nothing.

Speaker 3 And so that, and that gives them an altitude on the page.

Speaker 3 It's sort of like the reader figures out that they know things about this person that the person themselves may not have even thought about because the person's not thinking about themselves ever.

Speaker 3 They're thinking about some mission.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the fact that all this is happening in a context where we as a society are attacking them and dismissing them and trying to traumatize them and all this other stuff, it creates a kind of moving situation.

Speaker 3 There's like an emotion, there's emotion there that

Speaker 3 just is naturally sort of fuel for story.

Speaker 3 I'm telling you,

Speaker 3 it's not a party trick. It's like every time I've gone in.

Speaker 1 It's the foundation of it.

Speaker 3 It's the foundation of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you a question about, and I think this maybe encapsulates a lot of what we're talking about. Last week on the podcast, I'm talking to Ezra Klein and we're talking about sort of his,

Speaker 1 he's written this book called Abundance about maybe a new theory of

Speaker 1 democratic governance, you know, in terms of regulations getting in the way of us being able to build things abundantly and all that. And so he walked me through this

Speaker 1 rural broadband project, right?

Speaker 3 It's been a disaster.

Speaker 1 A disaster. Billions of dollars.
There's a 14-point NOFO, which is a way for them to just even get started on doing it. It's a 14-point

Speaker 1 bureaucratic process that basically weeds out anybody who might possibly be interested in building rural broadband.

Speaker 1 It's honestly, I was saying to him, it's like if you were told to design a machine that would prevent people from getting rural broadband, this is somewhat of

Speaker 1 what it would look like, right?

Speaker 1 But it gets back to something you said earlier, which I thought was such an important nugget. The fact that we have an issue with rural broadband is a failure of the private markets.

Speaker 1 They're not interested because there's no money there because the distance of these people, it's like when we tried to get electricity to people or water to people. That's not a moneymaker.

Speaker 1 That's a utility. And it's something that has to get out there.
The frustration is

Speaker 1 here's this need that the private sector refuses to solve, right?

Speaker 1 The government has this responsibility to come in and lift all boats through the spreading. And they create a process that is the antithesis.
of fixing the process.

Speaker 1 And then there are all those people, humble, smart hardworking who are tasked with whatever it is that the government muckety mucks come up with they'll execute and they're given the sandwich yes and we all blame them that's right when they had nothing to do with it so how do you

Speaker 1 As we as you look at these systems as the climate scientists that you are, how do we empower those people to help build these systems? Because I know they could do it.

Speaker 1 I know there's a ton of people within the government right now who could get rural broadband out there effectively and cost effectively and all these other things who are not allowed to.

Speaker 1 And they are being demonized for it.

Speaker 3 So if I could answer this in a way that fully satisfied you, I should be president.

Speaker 3 Hey, I'm fine with that.

Speaker 1 Whatever you want. I don't care.
I'm happy.

Speaker 3 But my first thought is, and when you look at the things that

Speaker 3 work

Speaker 3 in our our book, um, that how Chris Mark fixed the problem of Ruse falling on coal miners, he was giving a, he was given a lot of rope.

Speaker 3 He was so superior intellectually and in his mission-driven that everybody around him just said, let him go. Like, let him just do what he needs to do.

Speaker 1 Even within the government, they understood, like, this dude's something.

Speaker 3 Even within the, this dude's something.

Speaker 3 So, where the government, I, I bet, I'm just guessing here, but I bet if we, you and I wandered through the government looking for bright spots, like things that worked, Ezra is looking for things that don't work.

Speaker 3 And there are plenty of things that don't work. But if you were looking for things that work, you'd find that over and over.

Speaker 3 And it's where

Speaker 3 there's some distance from the political process.

Speaker 3 You depoliticize it. You put it.
So, for example.

Speaker 3 The Centers for Disease Control was gold standard for health agencies in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and Americans adored it, like thought it was just the bees knees. Reagan,

Speaker 3 in his first term, I think,

Speaker 3 changed the head of the CDC from being a career person who the president could not fire,

Speaker 3 who was there for longer than an administration, to a political appointee who had to keep looking over his shoulder at what the White House thought of whatever he did.

Speaker 3 And if you go in the CDC and interview people, they will will say this place has deteriorated since then. We've gotten more risk-averse, less able to do our mission, more politicized.

Speaker 3 And I think that I would systematically go through the government, I think, and

Speaker 3 try to put some distance between politicians and the people doing the job, which is the opposite.

Speaker 1 I was about to say, I've got some bad news for you. I know, I know, I know.

Speaker 3 You politicize it, you're going to make it less effective.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 so they've got to be able to fail some. They've got to have

Speaker 3 just some flex. And they can't be always looking to some senator who's making a snap judgment.

Speaker 1 Because politics, the event horizon on politics is two years.

Speaker 1 And even within that, the electoral cycles are so often now. And the access to social media, the circadian rhythms of everything have sped up.
There is no patience for that.

Speaker 3 Correct. But so many of the problems the process is trying to, the government's trying to address are long-term problems, are longer projects kind of thing.

Speaker 3 And there's a mismatch there between the incentives of the people who are ultimately bossing the operation and the people and the operation.

Speaker 3 So, you know, if you look at institutions that kind of work in our government, the Federal Reserve works pretty well.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, we can argue about whether they should have raised or lowered by half a percent, but basically they've kept us in a situation people trust the dollar.

Speaker 1 We have not been as bubble vulnerable as maybe we have sometimes in the past.

Speaker 3 But it's it's like they do they do make mistakes, but no one thinks the president's controlling the money supply.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the minute they do,

Speaker 3 right? The minute he does, it's a catastrophe. It's going to be done worse.
It's going to be, everybody's going to know it's going to be done worse.

Speaker 1 So it's sort of like and then the data is politicized and then you don't. That's right.
And then we have nothing. And isn't that kind of what they want?

Speaker 3 Well, that's an interesting question is, do they want to live in a world where there is actually no objective truth?

Speaker 3 They seem to.

Speaker 1 I'm going to say yes. Yes.

Speaker 3 And I can understand. I agree with you, but

Speaker 3 you're going to pay a huge economic price if nobody trusts anything. Right.
I mean,

Speaker 3 the whole society runs on trust. Now, Trump is like a trust-destroying machine.

Speaker 1 But not with it. So he's a trust-destroying machine for those who might look for

Speaker 1 more objective or data-driven or things. But he engenders, let me say this.
He's a trust-destroyer, but a faith-creator.

Speaker 1 People have a faith in him that is religious.

Speaker 3 Yep, that's right.

Speaker 1 And it's an interesting dichotomy. If you think about it, you might look at it and I might look at it as, is anybody seeing the emperor has no clothes?

Speaker 1 And they would look at it and go, no, that's a beautiful fucking coat.

Speaker 3 He's like Bitcoin.

Speaker 1 Right? Right.

Speaker 1 Are you saying he's a pump and dump scheme? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a meme coin.

Speaker 3 He's a meme coin.

Speaker 3 He's Bitcoin because he's got more faith than a meme coin, right? He's, but it's, it's still basically when you're trying to predict the future of this, it's like predicting the future of Scientology.

Speaker 3 Like, are people, are people going to continue to believe in this? Who knows? Like, it's because it is faith.

Speaker 1 Well, ultimately, that's why these

Speaker 1 populists, like the whole thing is, there's sort of this misnotion that, you know, Mussolini, well, at least he made the trains run on time. But the truth is, populists actually don't govern

Speaker 1 in a very good way. They just have to prosecute their scapegoat case until the point where

Speaker 1 it sort of becomes absurd. That's right.
And that's kind of where we

Speaker 3 end up.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you, because look, anytime something is obtuse and you don't know what it is, you can project onto it all of your anger or disappointment or other things, like with a government bureaucracy.

Speaker 1 But the minute you start to humanize it and individualize it and start to realize a lot of the good that they're doing and the types of people that they are, boy, invaluable.

Speaker 1 What this book is to me is, especially in this moment, you know, it's you've pulled the curtain back in Oz, and rather than it being a wizard, you're like, oh, those are just really smart engineers that are working together.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's how they make. So that's how the Yellow Brick Road got built.
So it really was. They were looking for load bearing and they discovered how.

Speaker 1 And then there was a guy who said, yes, someone had to build the Yellow Brick Road. And how do munchkins flow through currents? And how, and where do we find them on the back end? So

Speaker 1 it's this incredible insight into this.

Speaker 1 And what we find is maybe, because how I always feel, and this is through a lot of sort of experience with the VA system or other things that we've worked on, is that the government sets up an adversarial position to its constituents.

Speaker 1 for fear of being drained of resources, right? It's overly policed. And because of that, everything costs way more than it should and is overly complicated.

Speaker 1 There must be a way to reduce that aspect to see what it would be like if these talented people actually were given the opportunity to do their jobs in the way that they should.

Speaker 1 Because I think never forget the original premise statement that Michael said earlier, which is government exists to take care of the things private sector won't or can't.

Speaker 3 And it's shocking what's on that list. You know, it's shocking how much it's charged with, say, preventing.
You just take for granted an awful lot of what does.

Speaker 3 You know, you turn on your faucet and you can drink this water that you can drink and not worry that you're going to get sick. There's a kind of miracle there going on.
Someone's done that.

Speaker 1 I think we've all gone to places where that is not a miracle. That's right.
And then when you come back, you think, hmm.

Speaker 3 Yeah, hmm, yes.

Speaker 3 So the question that pops into my head after you said what you just said is, like, what does it take for the society to wake up and realize it needs to be better at governing itself?

Speaker 3 It needs to need to allow our government to work and give it some room to operate kind of thing. And I keep coming back to it's going to take some sort of existential crisis.
Like,

Speaker 3 people are going to have to actually fear. People do turn to the, Americans turn to the government in a nanosecond when

Speaker 3 there's a tragedy or a crisis. Like,

Speaker 3 they just assume FEMA is going to show up, kind of thing.

Speaker 1 Well, they're looking to get rid of that.

Speaker 3 I know. I know.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you, Michael, that brings up an interesting point because you say an existential crisis. You could say COVID was that crisis.

Speaker 1 There was a moment where it engendered a tremendous amount of trust.

Speaker 1 And then that not only ebbed, almost reversed. And in some ways, we're still dealing with the fallout of

Speaker 1 institutions that we felt like, like the CDC, like the NIH, that we thought overstepped or were being overly critical of outside theories or weren't being honest about any of the negative effects of a vaccine or of a medication.

Speaker 1 You know, it actually, in that moment, lost trust.

Speaker 3 Yep.

Speaker 3 So COVID wasn't bad enough.

Speaker 1 Oh, no. Please don't say that.

Speaker 3 No, I think that, no, I think that the moment everybody realized it just kills old people, they got that in their head.

Speaker 3 No, really.

Speaker 1 Well, as an old person, I object to that.

Speaker 3 No, no, no, that it was

Speaker 3 if you had flipped it and it was more like the 1918 pandemic when it was mostly younger people who were dying of influenza. Right, I think there'd have been a different reaction.

Speaker 3 That's one, that's one thing.

Speaker 3 But the second thing, I mean, we still have not as a society answered the question, well, what should we have done? You know, like, okay, you're angry about what happened.

Speaker 3 Either you think there was not enough government action, but more likely too much government action.

Speaker 3 There's not been a commission to like figure out, satisfy us all that there was some stuff that should be done.

Speaker 1 And could there be a depoliticized commission that could do that anyway? I mean, at this point, that's right.

Speaker 3 That's the problem. So

Speaker 3 it was not enough of a crisis that

Speaker 3 the society is demanding a depoliticized response. Right.

Speaker 3 That in a real crisis, what's going to happen is people are going to lose patience with politics, with the politicization of things and say, just get me a guy who can fix it or a woman who can fix this.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 1 And isn't that what they say Trump is? They sort of say that because of all this inaction and politicization and bureaucratization, I alone can fix it and we alone will give you that rope. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Right. But he's, yeah, it's the wrong.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying it's real. Right.
I'm saying that's the

Speaker 1 populist demagogue mentality.

Speaker 3 But there's a, there's a, a we should have learned some things from COVID. Our response was bad.

Speaker 3 We had we had a disproportionate number of deaths, and we should have had, we should have done better than the rest of the world, and we did worse than most of the rest of the world. And, like, why?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think there's answers to that question, but we don't, we, we've not grappled with that. And I think we've not grappled with it because most people weren't all that scared of it.

Speaker 3 After they were scared right at the beginning, and when they went, oh, it's just, it's just old folks' homes or whatever they said. Now, New York had its own exit.

Speaker 3 New York is the one place

Speaker 1 that had the exist.

Speaker 3 And why did it happen in New York? Because it hit there early before they learned how to treat it.

Speaker 3 The numbers are something like:

Speaker 3 if you went into hospital with COVID in April, you were like four times more likely to die than if you went in in late June.

Speaker 3 And the difference was just it took a couple of months to figure out how to handle the patients.

Speaker 1 That's something I've had trouble with grappling with for myself because I live in this area.

Speaker 1 It was terrifying, the velocity of death, the refrigerator trucks, people I knew in the healthcare industry who were, I mean, basically writing their wills as they went to work and the fear that gripped it.

Speaker 1 And I think it was hard for me originally to get out of the headspace of how I felt.

Speaker 1 in this moment to understand how people in other areas who are not feeling it to that same level of terror might be viewing the remedies differently.

Speaker 1 And it took me a long time to wrap my head around, oh, you know what? They're not being

Speaker 1 callous.

Speaker 1 They're just not experiencing, you know, it's like how I would, there's tornadoes ripping through Oklahoma. And I'm like, oh, that's tough.
But like, I don't have, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like, I don't have exactly right.

Speaker 3 Exactly right.

Speaker 1 That was a hard lesson for me to learn.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 1 And to give grace to all those others who weren't experiencing it that way.

Speaker 3 Probably someone has done this work, but it would be really interesting to see what the different psychological after effects are in New York versus the rest of the country.

Speaker 3 Like if you went to New Yorkers who were there when they watched this wave of death, if they would be more or less likely to say, oh, just let it run the next time they're there.

Speaker 3 No, really,

Speaker 3 they saw what happens when you let it run right at the very beginning.

Speaker 1 and also the mental gymnastics of look i remember when this was all happening in new york and uh at when the the doctors would get off their shifts and the firehouses would come out and with trucks and people would line up outside of hospitals in mass and applaud the doctors and then six months later they'd be out in front of the same hospital with a sign going, stop killing people with vaccines.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 what you must go through in your mind of like, wait, I was a hero who risked my life to go in there. They were clapping for me.

Speaker 1 And now I'm the enemy who's been withholding ivermectin suppositories just so I could kill people on purpose. And you're like, the mental gymnastics of that were, I'm sure, devastating.
Right.

Speaker 3 But I think that

Speaker 3 it terrifies me, but I can't, it's hard for me to imagine anything but all of us being on the receiving end of a tornado

Speaker 1 to wake up.

Speaker 3 They need that to wake up and say, well, we actually need to run this place better.

Speaker 3 But, well, and we're about to get a lesson in what the government does because they're disabling it. I don't know how long it's going to take.
Right.

Speaker 1 What would you say is kind of the,

Speaker 1 you know, when we talk about kind of

Speaker 1 when you weaken an infrastructure, and in some ways, you know, to bring it full circle, we're kind of now talking about the support systems on the ceilings of mines and on cathedrals.

Speaker 1 They don't collapse right away. No.
But the more that you take away those load-bearing operations, right,

Speaker 1 it begins to list. And I think in some ways, we may not see the results of that for a long, long time, but it will be because of that.
And we may misdiagnose it because it's...

Speaker 1 you know, because the time horizon is not right next to it.

Speaker 3 And Trump is certainly aware of that, right? If he thought he was

Speaker 3 going to be gone.

Speaker 3 I'll be gone. That's exactly right.
I'll be gone. It's all

Speaker 3 charging the future for present political benefits.

Speaker 1 Did you talk about any of that with the folks that do this work in the government?

Speaker 1 Because it sort of, it came out before this really,

Speaker 1 you know, the operation to undercut it was. But do they fear?

Speaker 1 the results of a future where these investments aren't being made or did they not were they not talking about that it's come up and it's come up now i mean the coal mine ruse is not just a metaphor.

Speaker 3 They just fired the inspectors who make sure that the standards that Chris Mark created are being abided by. So

Speaker 3 what will happen now is that coal mine companies will cut costs by not doing what they need to do to keep the roof off. I mean, this literally will happen.
So

Speaker 3 another example, Geraldine Brooks wrote,

Speaker 3 wrote a piece about a guy in the IRS, kind of badass sort of black belt and something,

Speaker 3 who runs the cyber crimes division or works in the cyber crimes division. And

Speaker 3 this is a profit center. I mean, they've collected billions of dollars of crypto and they just kept it for the federal government.

Speaker 3 They've gone in and gutted that operation, and it just can't work in the way it worked before. So you like these fuses all over the society, right? And there's a bomb

Speaker 3 that the spark is eventually going to get to. And

Speaker 3 function to function, the length of the fuse is different, but the bomb is there everywhere.

Speaker 3 But you're right, many of the fuses are very long. And

Speaker 3 it's hard to know when the explosions happen.

Speaker 3 And you're also right that when it happens, that he may be gone, they may be gone, and some poor schmuck who had nothing to do with it is in the White House and gets blamed for it.

Speaker 3 And even if it happens now,

Speaker 3 You can be sure that the right-wing narrative machine will spring up to tell a story that's a false story about how this had nothing to, that it was all the fault of in-hab government workers as or something.

Speaker 1 But this is why, Michael, this is why, you know, you write a lot of books and this is another one of them, but this is why the stories that you are telling in my mind are so crucial.

Speaker 1 What you do so well is tell stories. And stories is how we interpret the way that, you know, we move through life and the dynamics.
And it's how we absorb it in a much more accessible

Speaker 1 way.

Speaker 1 You know, it's interesting. I think sometimes about what you and I both do.
What you do is you go in and you try and illuminate the totality of the picture, right? To paint people three-dimensionally.

Speaker 1 Comedy is almost the opposite. We work in two dimensions almost exclusively.
Without stereotypes, I'm not sure I have a career. Like

Speaker 1 without reducing people to their, you know, most caricatured traits, how do I deal with a heckler? But

Speaker 1 it's such an important

Speaker 1 thing to be out there because if those stories are told, they can be accessed and they can be used to fuel a more honest narrative. about what's happening.

Speaker 1 And it's why I love the things that you, that you write.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 3 At the very least, it creates cognitive dissonance in the minds of someone who's just trying to live with the dumb stereotype. It's like, oh, gay people are evil.

Speaker 3 Oh, but my cousin's gay and I like him. Right.
You know, it's that. And so it causes that, just causes a bit of hesitation.
And it leaves you a little less susceptible.

Speaker 1 But that room, man, that room, that little hesitation, that little piece of room. Yeah.
That's everything. Cause I'm convinced most people, people aren't evil.

Speaker 1 There's a few of them out there, malevolence. But most people, we're all just, we've got blind spots.
We're ignorant of certain things.

Speaker 1 And any light that you bring to that brings us closer to a more honest accounting of like, what you say, we may not have the solution, but boy, if you've got an honest accounting, then there's people like Chris Mark and there's other people out there who are smart enough to look at that accounting and create solutions that improve things as they move forward.

Speaker 3 Yep, totally agree.

Speaker 1 Well, it's fantastic. Michael,

Speaker 1 this time goes so quickly with you because uh i i just i love hearing about your stories and i love uh the way that your mind is working and i really appreciate you uh taking the time i could do this all day but i know you've got to go back and clean your childhood bedroom yes because i'm sure you can't just stay in your house and not make that bed i'm going to go put the posters back on the wire

Speaker 1 the kiss poster get that pink floyd up there baby dark side of the moon get that triangle up there uh michael thanks so much for for taking the time michael lewis uh he's got that new book, Who is Government?

Speaker 1 It's a New York Times best-selling collection, The Untold Story of Public Service and obviously everything else that you do. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1 Michael Lewis, I feel badly because he's like the greatest dinner guest of all time. And I got him no food.
I got him nothing. I just sat there and enjoyed all these stories.
He's just such...

Speaker 1 a wonderfully evocative, specific storyteller, but always with purpose.

Speaker 9 I could listen to him for hours, honestly.

Speaker 1 Right. Absolutely.

Speaker 10 And I really appreciated those stories that aren't in the book because it really underscores the facts that the people in the book are not anomalies. Right.

Speaker 1 What if he did say that, though? If he came on, he's like, it's just these eight people.

Speaker 1 We scoured the entire government and we found eight people. 2.4 million.
Luckily, the first one was, how fucking crazy is it? The first one.

Speaker 1 He's like, so I went alphabetically and then he just comes up with this incredible individual. But I think it's right.
Do you guys remember? I think Steve Hartman still does this.

Speaker 1 It's a thing where everybody's got a story and he stands by a map and he just throws a dart and then he goes to the town and then he calls people up.

Speaker 1 He was doing this back when there were like phone booths and he would like open the yellow pages and call somebody up and whoever would agree to talk with him.

Speaker 1 And then he would sit with them and he would tease out always this incredibly moving, interesting story about this utterly random individual.

Speaker 1 And this book strikes me as kind of the hero's version of that.

Speaker 1 Totally.

Speaker 9 You know, I was thinking during that interview, just about that Ronald Reagan quote that's like the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

Speaker 9 And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, I guess you've never had balamuthia.

Speaker 1 Interesting story. Ronald Reagan suffered from balamuthia for most of his life.
Like, you're crazy. He got it from the monkey that he was in the movie with.

Speaker 1 I think Bonzo had given him Baldamuthia, but he did.

Speaker 1 I mean, the mining story.

Speaker 1 Yes. Incredible.

Speaker 10 I couldn't help when I was reading thinking, I wonder how many of these people are still working.

Speaker 9 Well, that's what he said. He said maybe the woman at the FTA might have been let go.

Speaker 1 Like today, as we speak.

Speaker 11 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 10 And then like Mark's team is gutted. And actually, I was reading this morning about what conditions are like.

Speaker 10 You can cut me off whenever, but for some federal employees, returning to the office has meant an expansion of their duties to include cleaning toilets and taking out the trash.

Speaker 10 For others, it has been commuting to a federal building, only continuing to work on video conferencing. Some showed up at the office just to be sent home.

Speaker 10 Others showed up early and had nowhere to sit. Some employees within the FAA returned to an office where lead had been detected in the water.

Speaker 10 And spending freezes have meant a shortage of toilet paper. It's just like...

Speaker 1 It's incredible. But listen, it's incredibly efficient.
If you don't have toilet paper, everybody's pulling a Corey Booker all day. Nobody's going to the bathroom.

Speaker 1 Nobody's doing anything.

Speaker 10 I just feel bad. It's like thankless work.
And then this is the conditions.

Speaker 1 In the name of efficiency, that's the whole point of it. They're lying about what they're doing.
There are improvements to be made in administration and all these other things, but this is not that.

Speaker 1 This is amputation. This is mutilation.
This is none of the things. that they purported to be.
And the real question is going to be, what is the render time till disaster? Because it will come.

Speaker 1 I think what Michael was talking about is: we don't know when it's going to come. We don't know when the roof is going to collapse, but it's going to.
And I'm assuming they think they're going to be.

Speaker 10 It's terrible. I mean, they didn't they just let go of people who oversee the bird flu response? Like these fuses are lit.

Speaker 1 Well, what's what's bird flu going to do? It's only jumped to cats now. And who's got cats? What's there to worry about? Yeah, the whole thing is

Speaker 1 fucked. But

Speaker 1 yeah, I really enjoyed.

Speaker 1 I've enjoyed, you know, some episodes i don't enjoy as much i can't really point to to many oh who are you calling out name names it was that i think it was like a harvard economist who's like i was like that guy's just a dick but oh yes uh but but mostly i'm always fascinated but this one in particular was just uh uh incredibly pleasurable you guys are doing a great job i gotta say i get to show up here around four pretty drunk

Speaker 1 well it's liberation day it's liberation day baby yeah you gotta celebrate Libations for liberation.

Speaker 1 Any questions from the audience this week? Anything they want to? Always. All right.

Speaker 12 John, I'm ready for my next binge session.

Speaker 12 Should I go Peaky Blinders or Severance?

Speaker 1 Oh, I mean, here's the thing. You can't.
It all depends. So Severance is two seasons of, I think, 10 each.
And I do think you want to keep it relatively tight because it's so dense.

Speaker 1 They do this show to such detail with so many interesting layers and things that were placed in the first season that pay off.

Speaker 1 So I would, if you got what's like 20 episodes, 20 hours, I would say you got to do that over like a fortnight. So if you've got yourself a fortnight, I'd go severance.

Speaker 1 Peaky blinders, if you want to take a gap year

Speaker 1 and roll through, I don't know how many years it was, but the only problem with peaky blinders is you will speak Shelby. You will speak Arthur Shelby.

Speaker 1 My wife was ready to throw me out of the house for how often I'd be like, that's right. That's right.
That's y'all boy. That's y'all boy.

Speaker 1 He's like a cross between the guy from Slingblade and like a cockney accent. So

Speaker 1 I drove people crazy with my Arthur Shelby impression for many years. But you can't go wrong.

Speaker 9 You got some good accent work in.

Speaker 12 And it's going to come back.

Speaker 1 Oh, Peaky Blinders is doing a...

Speaker 12 Peaky Peaky Blinders movie. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're doing a movie. I can't wait.
Such a good job. Everything about it.
All right. That's mine.
What else we got?

Speaker 12 What's worse? Torpedo bats or the tush push? Is it cheating?

Speaker 1 Oh, let me tell you something. So here's what's worse.
Using a torpedo bat for the tush push.

Speaker 10 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I got to tell you.

Speaker 3 That hurt those dastardly Yankees.

Speaker 1 I don't mind any of it. Listen, the whole idea of sports is the pitchers have a thing, so so then we got to lower the mound.

Speaker 1 Everybody's always sacrosanct about like, but that's, but the bases have to be, you can't make them smaller. And you're like, it's a fucking,

Speaker 1 they're throwing a ball at each other and trying to hit it with a piece of wood. And you're like, a piece of wood.
Like, I understand, make it fair, keep it on a thing.

Speaker 1 But there's always, people are always going to be, it's like, how fair is it that everybody's gotten bigger, stronger, and faster?

Speaker 1 You know, when I was a kid, I actually believed that I could play professional baseball because Bud Harrelson was the shortstop for the New York Mets, and he was like 5'8 and 140 pounds, and he didn't have to hit.

Speaker 1 And now you got guys like Derek Jeters out there like 6'4,

Speaker 1 Rodriguez. You know, come on.

Speaker 10 This is Jose Altuve erasure. He is like 5'2.

Speaker 1 It makes what Jose Altuve does. I don't care how many trash cans you bang on to let you know what pitch is coming.

Speaker 1 If you're 5'6 and you're banging 30 home runs a year, you're a fucking winner in my book.

Speaker 1 I don't know what's what's going to happen to either one of those, but I don't have a problem with either.

Speaker 10 I'm sorry to interject, but I did not know what that question was until you said sports. I was panicking inside.

Speaker 1 What did you think the tush-push was?

Speaker 11 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Her mind is going to dark places. I always think that, and I forget.
It's like when I used to read the financial news, and I'd be like, none of this makes sense.

Speaker 1 But if you asked me, like, on base percentage of a utility player for the Mets from 1984, I would have it for you like that. It is a different language and you forget not everybody certainly.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I'm here to represent the people who have no idea what sports ball talk is.

Speaker 1 Welcome to welcome to our country. Yes, thank you.
Hit them with the socials, Brittany.

Speaker 12 Twitter, we are weekly show pod. Instagram threads, TikTok Blue Sky, we are weekly show podcast.
And you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.

Speaker 1 Boom. And make sure to watch all my TikTok dances, which as always, go viral because they're awesome.
Well, fantastic job again, guys.

Speaker 1 Boy, Michael Lewis, what a lovely dinner date that turned out to be.

Speaker 1 And as always, I want to thank lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedovic, our video editor and engineer, Rob Vitola, audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate producer extraordinaire Jillian Speer, executive producers Chris McShane, Katie Gray.

Speaker 1 Thank you guys so much. We will see you next week.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 1 The weekly show with Jon Stewart is a comedy central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

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