'Who is Government' with Michael Lewis
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This week on the podcast, what can I say? Every time I am afforded an opportunity to sit down with Michael Lewis, it's just delightful. He's such a fascinating character. The people and ideas he writes about are absolutely fascinating. His new book, he has this...

Just absolutely insane way of seeing around a corner. I asked him, how come every time you find yourself covering a subject, you're

Six months later, it blows up and it's in the headlines. He's done it with the big shorty. A big short, though, was mostly after the fact. But he did it with Flash Boys and he did it with Moneyball. And he certainly did it with Going Infinite. And now he's doing it again with Who's Government. We talk a little bit about the Elon Musk and Doge, but we mostly talk about these nerds.

nameless, faceless civil servants who dedicate their career to providing a service to the American taxpayer. And whether it's saving lives in coal mines or stopping cybercrime or keeping the food supply safe, the book is just filled with all these stories. And it's absolutely a nonpartisan, it's not a left-right thing. It's, hey, there are certain things that

Only government can do. The private sector isn't building the interstate highway system on NASA. In fact, when you see private sector services in these spaces, it's because they've built on top of the seminal work the government has done that no one would undertake these projects that are billions of dollars and take decades. The ROI just is too far, too long, too expensive.

The book is fascinating. Michael is fascinating. If you're listening this far into the intro, it's because you know this is going to be delightful. With no further ado, my discussion with Michael Lewis about his new book, Who Is Government? Michael Lewis, I don't have to welcome you. Let's just jump right into this. And we'll start with your prior book, The Fifth Risk, which is really the predecessor to Who Is Government?

Tell us about that earlier book on presidential transitions. Trump had just been elected for the first time and he had fired his transition team.

And I didn't, I learned all this after the fact, but outgoing presidents are required by law to prepare a transition. And so the Obama administration had deputed a thousand people inside the government to prepare the best course ever given on how the government works and not just the White House, right? The Department of Energy and all those other places. And Trump had fired the mechanism for getting the briefings. He fired all 550 people.

and told Chris Christie that he didn't need to know because he could figure out everything he needed to know in an hour about how the federal government worked. When I saw this, I thought it's like a great comic premise. I'm going to get to roll around the government and get the briefings. And the reader will be on the joke that we know more about the government than the president does because they haven't bothered to learn.

And so, and I, and it was just sort of like where you start. And I, and there are two things where I started and what kind of the spirit in which I did it. The spirit was go to places that no one has any idea what they do. Like most, I mean, I'm surrounded, I'm in Berkeley. I'm surrounded by people who talk about politics all the time and just want to inflict their political opinions on me constantly. And, but if I ask them, what does the department of commerce do? They

They have no idea. They do commerce, right? Yeah, yeah, their business. Some business thing. Yeah, something. What they do is weather, you know, but never mind. But I didn't know that. So I just thought, I'm going to go to the places that are most opaque to the American people. And so I picked the Department of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy. And thinking like, if I can make these swing on the page, I can make anything swing on the page. But I started with energy because it was so great.

He had appointed Rick Perry, former governor of Texas, to be the secretary of energy. And Rick Perry had called for the elimination of the Department of Energy when he was running for president. Like all this waste and fraud in the government, we're going to get rid of whole departments and one of them is Department of Energy. And now he's supposed to run it. He found out quickly what I found out when I walked in and got the briefings that, oh, they run the nuclear stockpile.

Oh, oh, they gave the loan that created Tesla. Oh, oh, there's one thing after another in it. And he had to backtrack in his hearing and say, oh, I didn't mean that. Really, we need the Department of Energy. And so anyway, I don't want to go too long about this, but to say that I wrote these things in Vanity Fair, long form narrative journalism.

I stapled them together into the book, The Fifth Risk. It sold half a million copies. That's a lot for a finance book, right? People don't understand. It's a lot. Oh, it's a lot for a book. This was an indication. This was market tested. This was an indication to me that, oh my God, people really do actually want to know that there is these stories interest me, but it's not just me. So I had that in the back of my mind over the last few years, because I

I had this other takeaway from the fifth risk. And it was, although I'd written a lot about what these places done, it was like a travel, they were like travel pieces. It wasn't until the very end in the paperback where I did a deep dive on a single character, on a single bureaucrat,

And he was, and I had picked his name kind of out of a jar. It was, the material was literary. The material was just epic. It was so good. I thought, man, I want to come back and just do more of that. Like grab people out of the government and just write about a person. I'm going to, at some point, it's going to, the accusation is going to arise. And it always does like, oh, this is just Michael Lewis making it up. Or this is Michael Lewis with his own view or whatever. And so I thought, grab a bunch of other writers.

And and do it with them, drop them in, parachute them in wherever they want to go and have them write stories so that you can see just how rich and interesting a place this is. And that's what that's that idea is what led to who is government.

So I have to point out what an incredible knack you have for finding yourself in the right place at the right moment in history. You did it with FTX and Sam Bankman Freed in the year leading up- That was pure luck. Pure luck. Okay. So now-

You write a book about the transition in the first Trump administration and lots of things you write about in The Fifth Risk turn out to be very prescient for how the administration in many different ways, I don't want to make a blanket statement about them, but in specific areas, specific policies kind of drop the ball and bad things happen. But

The thing that's so fascinating is this book about all these different government agencies and the really amazing work these people do comes out right into the doge elimination of we're going to close the Department of Education. We're going to fire all these people, whether we have the authority to or not.

Your timing is really exquisite. Twice? Are you telling me this is dumb luck four times in a row? All right, let me try. So kind of. But let me let me at a certain point. I know you're fairly humble.

And it's not a false humility, but at a certain point, us readers of your work have to say, hey, this guy really sees around a corner, finds an area before anyone else has any inkling big things are going on there. And by the time we realize it, he already has the full story out in paperback.

I love how much more credit you give me than I deserve. Are you saying it's luck? I don't believe it. So if I were trying to explain me, like how, if I was trying to give myself some credit for the serendipity of my book publication dates,

I guess what I'd say is that the best way to predict the future is just observe very closely the present. So it's close observation of what's going on at a moment. And it's also, the other thing is being interested in the thing you're interested in rather than the thing everybody's talking about. And so nobody's talking about this, but it's interesting. That's good because it means that it's going to be fresh and different. And

And I guess it may be it's true that when I'm closely observing something I'm really interested in that the world is not all that interested in, that some of those things end up being the future. And that's true. But it isn't like, you know, all kinds of people who make a decent living on the electric circuit pretending to be able to tell the future. I've just gotten how not to invest. And I assume I will find in this book a chapter about

false prognostication. We know that, you know, the future, it's too complicated. So all you could tell is the present really well. And if you tell the present really well, and you're not just defaulting to what everybody's talking about in the moment, you will get the future sometimes. Yeah.

I love that. It's similar to investing, I bet. Very similar. Right? It's like, oh, this company really interests me. Why isn't anybody here? Why isn't anybody investing in it? But I'm really interested in it. That's like a great sign that you're interested and nobody else has figured it out yet. And that's a great sign with writing too. So something interests you. What I find fascinating is you end up kind of embedding yourself in

in unfamiliar places and fields that you haven't necessarily studied before. Things I don't know anything about. Right. Like you like, so by the way, that is a sign of a, of a curious intellect. Hey, I don't know anything about this. I'm going deep down the rabbit hole to learn. But a lot of these things are kind of big institutions that don't trust outsiders that don't trust people.

the media or authors, how do you win these people over? I mean, you know, night 2020s, Michael Lewis is well-known guy, and maybe you have a, uh, an ability to gain the trust of people now, but you've been doing this your whole career. How do you win the trust? And how do you get close to people who are skeptical and reserved and holding the public at arm's distance?

So we've seen, you've seen how Elon Musk has approached government employees over the last 60 days with hostility, malice, and condescension. And that it's the opposite of, of the way to approach someone if you actually want to learn. So I don't have a perfect answer to this, but I'll say a couple of things that I think helped me. One is I'm usually just genuinely curious. Like I really have some questions I want to answer. Why are you winning baseball games?

You know, like explain it to me. How did you figure out to short the market in 2007?

How did you figure out how to stop coal mine roofs from falling in on the heads of coal miners? It's like something has happened here and you know the answer. And I genuinely want to know the answer. People respond to genuine curiosity, which is different from I have a theory and I want you to sort of dance inside my theory, which is like I've sat in a room and I decided there's a story here. This is the story. I'm just going to gather some quotes here.

to fill in the story. Nothing I've done that's any good is that. It's always like just a glimmer of an interest and I just want to know. And so it creates a natural learning environment. That's one. Two, don't be boring. Like if it's tedious for me to show up, like that's bad. And which you want almost the opposite. It's like, I hope he comes because I learned something last time just from the questions he asked.

And he adds value in some other way, like he brings good sandwiches or whatever. So no, so it's like you want to create an incentive system, right? People respond to incentives. You want to create, you want to make them want you there. It's not just not want you there. It's like want you there. So that's a second sort of prerequisite. And the third is I try to make it clear what I'm thinking when I'm thinking it.

And so I'm not hiding like myself from the person I'm writing about. I'm letting them get to know me a little bit. If I'm letting them bouncing theories off them and listen and respond and object or whatever. And so that they don't, they aren't shocked. They're often shocked when they read the book because they're surprised what I've decided is important and what isn't.

They're sometimes shocked by the way I see them or describe them, a little shocked. But they aren't shocked by what I'm interested in. They don't have a feeling I'm being sneaky. So all those help, I think. And I'd say this, that people I write about, they often are really interesting people with really interesting stories.

And while they may not think of themselves and usually don't think of themselves as characters, they're very aware they're in the middle of something interesting. That's why they're doing it. So they can understand why I'm so interested. Like, yeah, I get it. I get why you have all of a sudden gotten interested in local public health, says Charity Dean, because it's broken. And that's why we're not responding well to this. You know, it's like or I get why

Sam Bankman Freed, he understood I thought of him as weird. Like you are a weirdo moving through the world with a very weird view of the world. And you're seeking to impose this sort of abstract idea about how to live on the world around you. And I just want to watch it. And he's like, yeah, I get that. I know I'm weird. I know what's happening is weird. And I understand why you're amused by it.

Go ahead, watch. So that, it has to be an honest relationship, right? It just has to be an honest relationship.

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What what's been the biggest surprise that you found in all these areas? Like you're delving into things that interest you. But what what really sticks out in any of your books where you say, huh?

Didn't see that coming, not counting SBF getting busted. You took away the easy one. Right. No, I did that on purpose. You took away the easy one. That's the obvious one. Although, as I was reading that book, your book, Going Infinite, there are all sorts of little signposts along the way. I'm sure a lot of that's just hindsight bias because as you were writing those chapters, that hadn't yet happened. But as you're reading it, it's like, oh, this can't be good. Right.

You know, all these little, it's like a fault line with an earthquake. All these little pressures are building up along the book. I don't know if that's intentional. Oh, it's totally intentional. I didn't start writing it until it all blew up. Oh, you didn't. All right. So yeah, no, it's intentional. But that was an obvious one. What was like, I didn't see that coming. All right. So here's one from this book. This is illustrating a general point. And the general point is the difference between what you imagine a story is

and what's going on in the world, what's going on when you're just doing it through abstract kind of speculation compared to when you go out and report and learn and collide with the world and how much more interesting the world ends up being than you imagine, even when you imagine it being interesting. So the first story in this book, Christopher Mark, how do I find it? I find it because I get a list of nominees for civil service awards, like 600 people on this list.

how do you pick one of them it's all these names and descriptions of things they've done joe blow with the fbi has broken up a a child porn ring uh but doesn't say anything about joe blow i get to a name on the list it says chris mark solve the problem of coal mine roofs falling in on the heads of coal miners which killed 50 000 coal miners in the last century

A former coal miner, it says. All right, sitting at my desk, I'm thinking, man, there's a story. And I already think I know what the story is. I think the story is, all right, this guy probably grew up in West Virginia, former coal miner. There's got to have been some personal, if it's killing all these coal miners and he got out of the coal mine to fix it, a friend, a relative, someone got killed by a coal miner. That it was like, there's a movie in this kind of, I already had it in my head. But then I call him up. I find him, he lives in Pittsburgh.

He knows who I am because he's read Moneyball. He's like, why the hell are you calling me? Like, it was just bizarre. Like, he took me a while to believe it was me. And I said, I just like I saw this line on a list. He didn't even know he'd been nominated for a prize. So it was especially weird. And he and I said, I said, like, I just give me the five minute summary of your story. And he says, the first thing out of his mouth is I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a professor at the university.

I thought, oh, there goes my story. Right. So much for presumptions. So much for the movie. Right. Well, but hold on. In the next 10 minutes, he tells me this. He had been a radical in the 60s as a little kid. Radicalized, started calling, throwing around words like bourgeois. His father said that he was like, didn't want to join the ruling class, didn't want to go to Harvard, which he could have.

And leaves high school early to go join the working class, much to his father's chagrin. His father's really upset. His father is a famous guy in his world, Robert Mark. Robert Mark was a civil engineer who took technology he used to stress test fighter planes for the Air Force and nuclear reactors for Princeton. He took it and used it to figure out, to stress test Gothic cathedrals.

He built little models of like sharks and rim, and he could show what was holding the roof up, basically. And he could also show why it might collapse or where it was weak. And so he actually taught all our architectural historians how the medieval builders had built the Gothic cathedrals. And there's actually documentaries about him in this. So anyway, that's his dad. Chris rebels against his dad, not going to have anything to do with your way of life, not having to do anything with you.

Ends up working in an auto factory, in a UPS plant, and finally in a coal mine in West Virginia. He ends up with his fellow young radicals, 19 years old, working in a coal mine. The young radicals last like a day because it's so awful. Chris actually likes working in the coal mine. He's interested in it. But it's incredibly dangerous. He almost is killed twice by falling roofs.

figures I could get out of this and figure out how to like stop this. He goes back to Penn State, gets his degree, and he's got his own intellectual journey. Right. This is which I don't get into when I'm talking to him. But in this first phone call, he says, I

I it took you know took 30 years but I figured out how to keep the roofs of coal mines from falling on the heads of coal miners and I say oh so you're rebelling at your dad who was figuring out how the roofs of gothic cathedrals didn't fall down and you just do the same thing underground you figure out like how to keep the roof of a coal mine up

And he in the first 20 minutes, he's pissed at me. He says, I have nothing to do with my dad. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what my father did. And I thought, oh, my God, this is even better than I thought. It's a father son story. And the son thinks he's rebelling against his father. And in fact, he goes and sort of lives out a different version of his father's life.

And what's wild about the story. So I have that thought. And when I start to get to know him, it takes a while before he says to me like days of spending time with him.

Oh, and my dad and I finally kind of collaborated. I said, what? And he says, yeah, yeah. The government called my father because they thought the National Cathedral in Washington was falling down. And I don't know if that National Cathedral in Washington was built over a century. It's tilted. They that would happen was they built an insufficient foundation for what they redesigned on top of it.

And the father is brought into like, oh, Jesus, can you tell us how to keep this thing from falling? And the father gets there and realizes the problem's underground. And so he has to call his son. And together they write a paper explaining why it's not going to, you know, how it's all working and why it's probably not going to fall down again.

But it's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. Like an amazing story. And it was so different from what my feeble imagination had dreamed up. And this happens over and over and over and over. You know, the most amazing thing about that chapter, and we'll talk about the book in more detail in a few minutes, you kind of buried the lead in your discussion, right?

He is studying this problem for 30 years. Like this isn't like he keeps coming back to it. This is three decades of his life. And he eventually figures it out.

issues like a set of guidelines to coal companies and every engineer and every safety person in every coal mine, that now becomes the standard. Plus, the government makes it a regulatory requirement. And it wasn't that, oh, the free market figured this out. But for the regulations, we would still be having all these coal mine collapses.

What's wildly cool about Christopher Mark is that not only does he do all this, he becomes the historian of his own subject. He becomes and he writes these papers explaining why

coal mine safety was so poor. And he finds the whole world in this very narrow subject. And there's a moment that's actually really interesting where he shows that the technology had been created to actually prevent a lot of the disasters.

And the coal mine industry, it was so- You're talking about the ceiling rods? The roof bolts. The bolts, right. The bolts, you bolt the roof to itself. It's not intuitive. Like when they first started doing it, the miners were like, what the hell? How are you going to bolt the roof to itself? But you drill, essentially you're attaching less unstable rock to deeper, more stable rock. And you anchor it in the mountain above it. But-

I mean, this is a long time ago. This is invented 50, 60 years ago or whatever. But instead of using the technology properly, like in a way that really prevents, reduces roof fall, the industry uses it to make it cheaper to make it just as safe as it's always been, meaning not safe. So they maintain the same level of mortality, like the same level of risk. It's just less cost and just reducing the cost of what they're doing to hold the roof up.

And so what they'd done, and it's because the industry was so competitive that nobody could take the step of making the extra expense of making the mine really safe. And they had acclimated the working guys in West Virginia mainly, but the coal miners who work everywhere in the country, to this level of risk. So they were just used to it.

It was really interesting that the market, you would think if you were sitting in a room alone thinking about it, you think, oh, some coal mine company is going to make their mine safer. And that's going to make it easier to attract workers, less expense because the roof is not falling in as much. But no, that's not what happened. You're familiar with the Peltzman effect? Does that ring a bell? No. Tell me what it is. So Sam Peltzman, and this is...

In 2040, my next book, Sam Peltzman's the guy who studies seatbelts and airbags and ABS and all that stuff.

And what turns out to happen is exactly what happened with the coal mine. As soon as you get a seatbelt and an airbag, you're driving, oh, this car feels solid and safe, so I could drive a little faster. And so we have all the safety equipment that keeps getting built into cars, and yet the fatality rates don't drop. It's not that we're all going to just do 55 and we're that much safer.

All this great, you know, crumple zones and lane detection and all these things, they make us complacent and comfortable. And so we drive faster and the fatality rates are the same. So you can either maintain the same behavior and have the fatality rate drop or

Or like drivers and coal mine companies, you could have the same fatality rate, but with a whole lot more speed and or coal mining. It's a fascinating psychological thing. I want you to apply that effect to investing. What's the version of the Peltzman effect?

I think what it really is about is the broader picture is unintended consequences. You think when the seatbelt laws are passed, the result will be we'll have fewer deaths and safer vehicles. But instead, the actual unintended consequence is that people just drive faster.

So from an investing perspective, you know, Paul Volcker famously said there have been no other than the ATM. There's been no innovations in finance, but there actually have been between ETFs and online trading. Now, trading is free. And I in the book, I go through a whole long list.

And what ends up happening, and now you have the gamification of Robinhood. So instead of making things cheaper and easier and faster for investors, we're still encouraging, or at least the industry is encouraging, many of our own worst instincts. And of course, the outcomes, instead of saying, hey, I could buy an ETF and buy the whole market for three bips and it costs me nothing to trade. And wow, isn't that great?

Instead of doing that, a lot of people say, oh, I could day trade. I could jump in and out of Nvidia. This is great. It is the airbags, ABS, and seatbelts of investing. And instead of taking the win, we just keep pushing. Our risk aversion slides up with the lack of friction. The greater the illusion of safety we create in the markets-

the more recklessly the people behave. Especially if you're in the midst of a bull market. Yeah. Because at that point, hey, markets only go up. That's all they do. So I say this to you all the time and you push back, but I got to bring it up again because

All of the characters in the book are very Michael Lewis. They're all outsiders. They're quirky. They're pushing against the grain because they've discovered some great out of consensus truth. You've disagreed with that description before. Has this book changed your mind? Because it's even the chapters you didn't write. Right.

are still Michael Lewis characters. All right, so I want you to, all right, I'm going to push back again. These writers who did this with me are some of my favorite writers on the planet. And they are all excellent. So let me just name them so the people know it's Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks,

Kamau Bell, Casey Sepp, Sarah Val, and John Lanchester. So John Lanchester, English writer, and they all have, they were, I picked them one because they're all fun, two because they're all able to kind of go in and find stories that other people don't see, and three, their voices are so different from each other. I thought they'd find very different things.

John Lanchester, he doesn't find a person. He finds the consumer price index. It's a whole chapter about, I just found riveting about what the United States does to count things. And that the United States government is like the greatest counting mechanism in the world. And that it's the one democracy where counting was, it was built into the constitution. You couldn't distribute power unless you had a census to count where the population was.

And he says, as example, and how complicated this is and how much expertise is deployed within the government to do it well, he explains over many pages how the Consumer Price Index is put together. So right there, there you go. There is something that is not a Michael Lewis character. That's the exception that proves the rule. And I'm going to put this right back at you. Exceptions don't prove rules.

Just so you know, but that expression means it tests the rule. OK, so and so that I just tested your rule. So you gave me the one again. You gave me the one chapter that wasn't a Michael Michael Lewis character. So the conversation we just had about Christopher Mark and the coal mines. Oh, my God. How is he not?

a total Michael Lewis. All right. Next chapter. And you didn't write this. I think this was Casey Seff's chapter about Ronald Walters and the National Cemetery Administration. This is a little bit of a cheat because Casey asked me if I had anything on the cut. She said, do you have anything on the cutting room floor from the fifth risk? And I had all this stuff on the cutting room floor because there was so much stuff.

And I said, you know, there is this dude who wouldn't take my calls. Like I couldn't get him. Really? Oh, yeah. No, it was it was like they didn't want to. And I, of course, was going through communications officials and they don't ever respond properly. But his name was Ron Walters.

And what I knew was this, that they're inside the Veterans Administration. There's something called the there is a function that management of the national cemeteries where we bury our war dead, we bury our veterans. It is a sacred duty of the society. And that this that like all the functions of the all the different agencies, this place has its customer satisfaction measured by serve by survey.

And that when Ron Walter came into the job of running the National Cemeteries, it had very mediocre customer satisfaction. I don't know why. I don't know what was going on. I don't know anything in the story. Casey wrote the story. But that over a couple of decades, he took the place from being kind of mediocre to

to having the highest customer satisfaction of any institution in America, private or public. That includes Costco, Walmart, FedEx. He somehow figured out the problem. And no one knew who he was. He didn't advertise himself. If he had done this in business, he'd be on the cover of business magazines and giving lectures for money on the lecture circuit. But he was just this faceless bureaucrat who had figured something out. And I said to Casey, I'd write about him.

And for whatever reason, he took her call and she and she she she walks us through his story. First of all, that that chapter made me cry. Number one, it's incredibly touching and it makes you proud to be an American. It really I know that's corny, but it really does.

But all right. So that's a cheat. Let me. That's it. So the next one is probably Dave Eggers. Dave Eggers. And he goes and finds the people in Nassau who are looking for little green men in deep outer space. Oh, it's the searchers. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. So maybe not a little green men. They're looking for life. Well, and the fascinating thing is we're going to clearly find the first line I highlighted in all likelihood in the next 25 years, we'll find evidence of life on another planet. I'm willing to say this because I'm not a scientist and I don't work in media relations for NASA, but,

What he's talking initially about is not intelligent Star Trek, Star Wars life. But hey, there's hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen everywhere. Those are the fundamental building blocks. And we'll find some bacteria somewhere. You know what they're going to find? They're going to find the Peltzman effect.

They're going to find somewhere way out there, someone will have discovered the Peltzman effect. Dave is working with these characters. I thought Dave, I told Dave this just the other day, that Dave, when he announced he was doing NASA and these people who were doing this incredibly cool work at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California,

Geraldine Brooks, another of the writers said, Dave is way too talented to do this. This is such an easy thing to make interesting. He needs to pick something that's harder to write about. She thought he was cheating, that it was just like, of course, everybody's going to love to read about this. And Geraldine said to him, said to me to say to him, if he does that, I'm going to find the most repulsive government worker to write about. I'm going to go into the IRS.

the most hated, loathed branch of the government. And I'm going to write about the IRS. So she did that in response to Dave's piece.

And she does do that. So that, I wouldn't, I mean, Dave has more, those characters are not characters I would have naturally sought out. They are characters. So as he puts it, he was like, he has no scientific aptitude. He stopped doing math and science when he was like seven years old. He's a poet at heart. So he finds it riveting when scientists can make comprehensible to him complicated stuff they're doing.

And he had found these people and they could explain in a way he could explain how they were doing what they were doing. And it is riveting. But but it's also very Michael Lewis. These are quirky. You know, these are very quirky characters. All right. I'm a pushback. All right. But before you push back, you just brought up Geraldine Brooks and the cyber sleuth in the IRS. Here's a guy who's an accountant.

Teaching classes and Brazilian jujitsu and like like becoming a ninth level black like that is not your run of the mill. I need your papers to get your taxes filed. No, he said he's worked in the cybercrime division of the IRS and has collected billions of dollars for the government busting up cybercrime rings. Jared Coopman, Coopman, his name. And here's a here's a kicker for you. His unit.

which is like a huge profit maker. They, they, they, I mean, they cost nothing and they, they generate billions has been gutted by Doge in any case, but this was before it was gutted. Geraldine found this dude. I don't know how she found him. Actually. She just went off. She said, I'm going in the IRS and I'm coming out with a story. And so she went into the IRS and found him. And, um,

And call me, you know, it's funny. She did call me. So this is not pushing back on you. When she was done with the story, she had to go back to a novel she was writing kind of thing. And she said, this is such your kind of story. She said, there's all this stuff behind it. You really need to look into it. Like it might be a book for you.

So she had the thought she'd run into a story that I might have written. And that might be true there. But here's what I want to let me just say this. Maybe I'm so jazzed by our federal government because when you walk into these places, they're all these really curious characters doing really curious things. And you haven't heard of them and you might not think they're important until you do.

And and they are characters in the best sense. They don't think of themselves as characters. They just like they are who they are and they can be kind of shockingly interesting without realizing how interesting they are and that the stuff they're doing is breathtakingly important, like existential risk level of importance is.

So, yes, I'm interested in that. And they're all over the government. And I think that if you said you have to spend the rest of your career wandering this institution writing about these people, I could I could pull it off that I could I could I could use it as a launch pad for every other book I ever wrote. If I had to. You mentioned Doge. One of the things that comes up in the book in her chapter is.

is these guys that are literally saving tens of billions of dollars in cyber fraud, their pay tops out at like $130,000, something crazy. Like any one of them could go to a Wall Street bank and 10X their salary. Like stop and think about how insane that is. And we got to cut those jobs. And then you, we don't, yeah, then you fire them. And not only that, you insult them before you fire them. Give me a list of the five things you did last week. You know, it's just,

it's obscene what's going on right now. And that would be a place where you would dramatize some of the obscenity. Yeah, so I don't think there's a character in the book

that couldn't be paid a whole lot more money outside of the federal government. And this is another thing, I think this is between the lines of the book, but all these people are much more interested in mission than money. And this is hard for Wall Street people to get their minds around sometimes, but I don't think entirely. There are a lot of Wall Street people who really get the joy of mission. And these are people who are taking pay cuts because they want to do this thing. And nobody says this in any of the chapters.

But I think all of the chapters say this. All these people have found the secret to a meaningful life.

None of these people on their deathbeds are going to look up and say, well, I wish I'd gone to Goldman. I wish I'd made a whole lot of money. They all feel like they did what they were supposed to do. And that's kind of cool. There is this thing going on, how to lead your life, right through it, right through the whole book. And there's a moment when I'm talking to Chris Mark.

who, I mean, one of the reasons I find it hard to report Chris Mark, the coal mine guy, is that, you know, he won't stay in the Ritz. He'll stay in the Hampton Inn. So I got to stay in the Hampton Inn. You know, he wants to sit in the back of the plane. So I got to sit in the back of the plane. And so, you know, it's like that I have, you know, a standard of comfort I've gotten used to that he finds like immoral, maybe too strong a word, but like unnecessary. Right.

And at one point he said to me, and I put it in the book because he has decided to live a life that's materially modest, but spiritually rich. He said to me, we taught our kids there are two ways to be rich. One is to make a lot of money and the other one is to not need very much. And I just thought, wow, you know, it's interesting.

Say what you will about the luxury quality of the Hampton Inn. It ain't a coal mine. And he spends a year or two working in a coal mine. Wait, I'm above ground on clean sheets with air conditioning and heat? Sign me up. And a Peloton now. I couldn't believe it. There's a Peloton in there. By the way, when I first saw this title, I picked up the book and I'm like, huh.

I wonder if Michael is going to get a little partisan. This is one of those things that could really red state, blue state, but there's none of that. This is all about you pay taxes and here's what the government does to serve you, whether you're the family of a deceased veteran or relying on weather forecasts or stopping cyber crime or, you know, on and on it goes. These are really things

broad, nonpartisan topics. Did it ever enter your mind? Oh, someone's going to accuse me that that punk Berkeley writer is really a libtard and we really don't care what he has to say. Did that ever enter your mind as you were putting this together? Of course. I mean, it was it was top of mind.

- It was. - In a way, I mean, 'cause it has happened already and it will happen that you, it is a feature of our society right now that everything gets quickly politicized and you're either in tribe A or tribe B. You're either an Ole Miss Rebel or a Alabama Crimson Tide player. You know, you're on one team or the other. The people need to see you that way. And especially the people who are most absorbed with the politics.

And if you write anything that challenges the assumptions, prejudices, bigotry of one side or the other, they're going to try to dismiss it by just saying you're a member of the other tribe. So you just can't do anything about that.

except try to come at the material pure of heart and open a mind. You know, it's like, these are stories that are true stories. You can maintain your prejudice and bigotry and whatever you think of federal workers, you know, if you want to preserve that stereotype in your head, fine, but you've got to acknowledge the truth of the stories.

Like, okay, all federal workers are wasteful. Where do you put Chris Mark then? He just, he's saving thousands of lives of working class men, basically. What do you do with that? So what do you do with this and that and the other thing? I mean, there's so many of these stories. The FDA, so on and on it goes. It's almost, I'd say it's, I think this is true, that to the extent you succeed in really threatening people,

either side's prejudices, you're going to elicit a violent reaction. And so I expected the book, given the current moment where Elon Musk and Doge is trying to basically fire all these people,

that it would elicit a violent reaction. And I've stayed off social media. I don't know exactly how much of the violent reaction has happened, but I've gotten whispers of it. And it's funny. It's funny to find myself, I do live in Berkeley and people love to bring that up when they're trying to classify me. But in Berkeley, I'd be a Republican.

You know, I mean, I mean, that's not hard, but where are you originally from? I grew up in New Orleans. I'm like, I'm like a kid who played sports and didn't think about politics and and like voted for Reagan once. And like John McCain was a close friend. And it's like the idea that I'm like, oh, firmly this lefty person.

is insane. It's just insane. I mean, it's, and it's, it's a tell for me when people try to shove me into that box, because it means they're not dealing with the story. And it happens from the other side, the blind side, there's the whole, the crazy left. And,

has taken the blindside story as like, oh, Michael's like a racist who's told a white savior story. No, seriously. I've read all about that. Listen, how many times have you and I, this has got to be like our eighth, tenth interview. I have lost track.

When I'm prepping stuff and I have my research assistant go out, hey, find me something we haven't talked about in these previous eight conversations. Well, you know, the pushback to the blind side is the whole story is fake and here's the litigation and here's the depositions. And I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not.

I'm not buying into this. This is clearly someone has a grudge. Yeah, but I mean, the New York Times ran a cover story like a year. It's like trying to sort of, I don't know exactly what it was trying to do, but between the lines was trying to say like the story. Now looking back on it, we can say the story was false in some way. No one who was there at the time disapproved of the story said,

when the book came out, Michael or himself loved the book. All, everybody around him said this like true, great, true story. You know, there was never, it's been, it got reinterpreted at high woke. It got reinterpreted as, as,

a condescending story about a young black boy, which is not what it was. You're by the way, being generous to the people who have changed your friend, Malcolm Gladwell would clearly call it revisionist history because, Oh, we're going to, we're going to rethink this in light of,

of current mores. Yeah. But that's all flipped again. So it's going to make a come. There was a revolution, a counter-revolution, and a counter-counter-revolution. But my point is that I have had my work

filtered through people's bizarre perverted political prisms and uh certainly happened last book going it gets dis it gets distorted uh my views get misrepresented to the extent i have views uh that mostly it's not an expression of you it's a telling of a story that i'm doing

And I've had it from both sides and it's not pleasant from either side. And this one, it was really clear the side it's where the blow blow back is going to come is from the, from the right now. It's funny. I have a little suspicion that,

I feel a little uncomfortable at preaching to the converted, at cheap applause. I'm now finding myself on stages with this book. And of course, the audience is all kind of on its side. The audience is all often liberal people, federal workers. And I have them at Hello.

And I don't particularly like that. I mean, it's better than having them hate you. But I want people to just like the story, like judge it by the quality of the thing rather than judge it by whether it confirms your prejudices. And that's and it's just increasingly this is something that's changed in my life, my literary career, in my life.

It's getting harder and harder to to pierce people's prejudices that they're so they come in so armored with some opinion that's very half baked that they have possibly even uttered themselves on social media so that they've sort of like they're anchored in it and they don't want to they don't even think about anything different than what they've said. And so you've got this you've got an army of kind of prejudices.

prejudiced readers that you have to deal with it. It's just louder than it's ever been. And it makes it hard to get the story told.

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What's really ironic is that a lot of the people who are the beneficiaries of a lot of the government work, coal mine most obvious, is they're in red states. And so there's a little bit of craziness with that. But let's talk about the process of the book.

The eight or nine chapters, you write the first one, you write the last one, and then the middle six are the six writers you mention. I don't really think of you as an editor. I think of you as a writer. What was that like having not only to edit this, but edit friends? What I did was talk them into doing it. I recruited them.

And I talked to them about what stories that they might write. But after that, I left everything to David Shipley, who was who? Oh, sure. I know David. And and who's former Bloomberg editor. And so so I didn't have to do any of the line. And I didn't touch anybody's pieces.

I kept a great distance from that. And most of them didn't need that. A couple did. I have often engaged with other writers and having them bounce their stories off me and talk about how they might do it. So that's easy for me and fun. And all these writers were kind of spoiled for choice. It wasn't like throwing up their hands and saying, what am I going to write about? I don't have a story. It was more, should I do A or B or C?

So that, that part was really fun. I can't tell you how easy this thing was. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's surprising. I thought when I involved, I was a little trepidatious about involving other writers because they're all neurotic, you know, they never know what they're, you know, it's herding cats. You never know what they're going to do, what they're going to show or, and everybody hit their marks and were kind of, nobody was trouble. They were all, they all did what they were supposed to do. And, and, and,

I did. You know, that was the other thing, you know, the moment, the gut check moment for me was I got them all riled up. Are they going to be these great stories? Go do it. And then I realized, oh, I got to write something. And finding my, I thought, oh, it's going to be tough for me to like rise to this occasion again. And I found, I think these are two of the more interesting long form narrative stories I have ever written.

and they are, and that's saying something. It is saying, I mean, I've had some great material. I think the material I'm always good as my material, right? I can't make, I can't put in what God left out. Agree to disagree. No, it's true though. It's true. If you, I really, if I have boring, really bad material, it wouldn't be very good. But this case, the ingredients were there for excellent meals. And, uh,

And it just, they turned out beautifully. I'm just really proud of them. You know? I love that feeling of like, I don't know how this is going to, when you start, I'm intrigued by this. I don't know where it's going to go. And then when you're done, it's like, Oh, this turned out bad. Like I thought this was a good idea and Hey, this turned out even better than I expected. It really is a lovely sensation as a writer. It is a, it is a completely lovely sensation. And the whole book,

When I look back on it, it feels like the whole group was in a flow state. That the whole group... Everybody. Nobody overthought it. People just went and did what they did. They played their best game. And I did too. And so it was really gratifying. And it's had...

the response to it, I mean, of course now with what's going on, but the, you know, most of them appeared in the Washington post over running up to the election. And, uh, the response was just, I remember the letter after the first one, the woman who edits the, the, the comment section said, I've never seen anything like this. Uh,

Really? Yes. And it was just exploded. And this is all before Trump's elected. And now the thing's all together in one piece, in one place, and there's this deconstruction of the government going on.

It sits in the middle of the conversation. I mean, it's like that the world is smiling upon this work. There's no question. There is no question. It could not possibly be more timely. I know I only have you for a limited amount of time. There's two questions I have to ask. One sports related.

And the obvious question I always feel like I have to ask you is, hey, what's the... Because you recall the dinner with a bunch of people talking about SBF. So I got to ask you, what's the next Michael Lewis story that's going to be told? What story haven't you told? What subject haven't you touched that you're eager to attack? Well...

I kind of have a rule and the rule is I don't, I don't really like to talk about it. I know that it takes the energy out of it. Oh, really? Yeah. That's why I thought you just didn't want to reveal. No, no. It's like, you're getting, you're sort of getting the response before you've done the work. And it's, it's sort of, it's, it's nice to build the tension just in yourself. But having said that, I don't have, it's not, I mean, I just finished this and I don't,

I don't have a book I'm writing now. I'll tell you what things that interest me. Okay. I think what Elon Musk and Doge is doing is unbelievably interesting. It is a tornado ripping through the culture. And I think that daily journalism does a really good job of telling you just what kind of just happened on the surface. It doesn't go below. And that's worth paying close attention to.

Another thing that really interests me is the commercialization of youth sports of college and college sports, especially the, the way this radical free agency has come to college sports. And you've got 15 year old quarterbacks who have got $2 million name, image and likeness deals. And that, that, that it's an environment that's just been upended. And it interests me on like who wins, who loses, who succeeds, who,

who can coach in this environment, who can lead in this environment. I'm interested in college sports and a third area. And I don't, we won't get in this too much, but grief, you know, I lost a child four years ago and I'm starting to find the words to describe that experience. And I don't think it's a book, but I don't know, but these, but I mean, if you were here, Barry, in my office,

I have like, you know, 50 folders here of stuff that's, you know, at least in the back of my mind that might lead somewhere. And you never know what's going to spark it. You never, I really never know what's going to, what's going to, the call I'm going to get or the person I'm going to meet or the thing I'm going to read where I think, oh, that's it. That's where I need to go. And it happens very quickly.

I mean, it's like slow, slow, slow, slow, slow. And then there we go. And I'm in that. Gradually than all at once. You're quoting Hemingway. Here we go. That's how it feels. It feels gradually than all at once. And I'm in the gradual phase right now. Huh. That's really interesting. I'm going to come back to sports in a minute, but I got to ask. So given all these files and given how this book.

was so different than prior books. And then Going Infinite was so different than Flash Boys and on and on it goes. I'm curious about what's your writing routine like?

And how has it evolved over time? Like I am intimately familiar with the Liars Poker story, which I just love that whole thing. We've talked about that many times. But from kind of writing at night, getting home from Salomon Brothers to being a full time author, how has your process changed? I had to shift when kids start when we started having kids, obviously.

Instead of a really late night life, I became a morning writer. I may go back. Our youngest is a senior in high school. And the minute he's out of the house, I would not be surprised if I revert to Nocturnal Beast. That's my natural state. But the one thing I've noticed that's changed in my process is...

a deeper and deeper appreciation of the importance of the character of the of the subjects uh that i that i the premonition is that it was a was for me it was a sort of a breaking it was a

it was a marking point because I thought, I do want to write about this thing that's happening, the COVID, but I want to do it, I want to put the characters first. And I almost cast it. I went looking, I worried about the story less than I worried about the people I was writing about.

I put the, and, and the same with SBF. It was like, this guy is, I don't know what's going to happen, but it's, he's interesting. Like there's a thing to do here because this person is so interesting. The person will create the story.

And I've tilted that direction. I mean, it was always there. I've always been writing about curious characters, but I've gotten more adamant. I've got to be more certain about the character before I start. Moneyball, I started with the idea, kind of. It was like, how do they win a baseball game? And oh my God, it's inefficient. Oh my God, analytics, blah, blah, blah.

but it doesn't work unless Billy Bean is a really good character. But I didn't, I didn't discover how good a character he was for months. He kept himself hidden for a while. And I think I now have to feel more confident in the character before I start. Huh. And, and, you know, I'm thinking in the top, off the top of my head. So you have Billy Bean, right. And, and then work you like Brad Katsuyama at, at IEX. Uh, uh,

Danny Kahneman. You just keep working your way through each of the books to say nothing of Michael Burry. Every book leads to one of these characters, leads to

This, again, this Michael Lewis character who's quirky and thoughtful and discovers a great out of consensus truth and uses it to either affect change or challenge the status quo. I think that shines through this.

certainly SBF was that guy hold aside the fraud and the money and all that stuff, same sort of character. And what I'm hearing from you is that you've become, even though the stories are always fascinating and amazing, they seem to become more and more character driven as you've worked through your books. It's true. It's true. Like your theory of my oeuvre,

I don't know how you explain how Liar's Poker fits into it, for example. Freshman attempt and you're still getting... By the way, when you had the anniversary of that book, and I literally picked it up having not read it for 25 years, and I reread it, I'm like, oh, good writer, shows potential. Not quite Michael Lewis yet. It's

But you could see, and this is a compliment. Oh, it comes through like, oh, I see exactly how all these little things, like all the seeds of Michael Lewis are planted throughout Liar's Poker. And then it just blossoms in every subsequent book. So your first book was like,

all right, this is real. Oh, he's a first time author. This is a really good book for a first time author. But that author wasn't a fully formed Michael Lewis, nor how old were you? 30 something? 20. I wrote it when I was 26. Okay. So a 26 year old Michael Lewis is certainly should never be expected to be a 30, 40, 50, 60 something Michael Lewis seasoned wizened

And just having lived life. So, and I say, I want you to understand, I'm saying that as a, I know, no, I, I re I had to reread it when I did the audio book. How bizarre is doing an audio book, by the way, is it not the craziest thing you've ever done? It's,

It's when I going back to something I wrote 30 something years ago, that was weird. And it was unsettling because I wanted to fix all this stuff, you know? Right. You want to edit as you're reading. Yeah. Things I didn't even notice at the time are just like appalling to me. Right. But doing my own audio books, as I mostly do now, I'm

The one thing I always notice is how much, how you read it differently, how you see it differently when you're reading it aloud. You see stuff that you wouldn't, you don't see when you just read, when you're doing it on the page.

And that you shouldn't let a book out the door without having read it aloud. I had an editor who used to say to me, you should take your columns and read them out loud and you'll have a totally different feeling for it. Plus, you discover half your vocabulary are things that you have never spoken out loud and don't know how to pronounce.

because you've only read them and written them. That's right. That's right. Capitalization. I took me like 10 minutes to get that word iterative because I've only read and written them. How often do you get to say capitalization and you always mangle it because you're so it's really fun. All right. So I only have you for a few moments left. I,

I got to throw you a curveball since you've written about baseball, you've written about Little League coaching, you've written about football, even you've written about basketball and Daryl Morey, which, by the way, there's a book in basketball, although maybe it's too late because Steph Curry and LeBron James are already towards the back part of their career. But I have to ask, what sports do you watch? What are your teams? Who do you root for?

And we're recording this just as March Madness has already destroyed all the brackets.

I had Drake. I had Drake over Missouri. Oh, yeah, really? Yeah, I did. I didn't have McNeese State, but I came close. I thought about it. And then I thought Clemson is going to bounce from losing to Duke. And I was wrong about that. But my bracket looks great, except for that. It's right now. It's intact, except for the McNeese State game. I watch college basketball. I watch it more like everybody else during March Madness.

I watch playoff baseball. I watch the Cubs. I watch the Cubs. You're not a Chicago guy? Nope. But Nico Horner is their second baseman. And Nico was in high school with Quinn, my daughter. And Quinn was a pitcher on the softball team. And Nico was a pitcher on the baseball team. And in the offseason, Nico and his English teacher father. And

me and Quinn would be out there. The only ones out there working out. And so I get to know Nico a little bit and he's a, he's this unbelievable kid, just a great kid. And so he has led me to become a Cubs fan. And it's actually a fun team. They they they're infield.

before games, this is something I might want. They get, they sit in a circle and, and they pick a different person and everybody has to say something nice about it. It's like, it's a completely different model of how you like collaborate, but for, for guys in sports. But so I watched that. I watch, uh,

some WNBA. I watch the NBA, the Warriors are my team and have been right there, right? I mean, we've been so blessed. I think Kerr is a magician and I think Curry has been, I mean, the whole thing has just been magical to watch. And the A's used to be my team, but they've left me. And football, I watch obsessively. So football, I watch more college and NFL football than anything.

And my team in the NFL is the Saints, which is we've had our ups and downs, but New Orleans has never left me. And in college football, I don't really have...

I like the Ole Miss Rebels. I got very attached when Michael Orr was there. I traveled around with that team. But I don't have one team. In basketball, the team that I – like college basketball, I don't know why because I didn't go there. I'm a Duke basketball addict. It's like you jump one way or the other with Duke. You either hate them or love them. Well, their coach was so beloved for so many years. And their new coach will be too. I think Shire is fabulous. So I think it's a different – he's managing in a different environment now

but clearly has the ability to do it. Michael, as always, every time I we have one of these conversations there, they're delightful. And I'm going to just announce here, anyone who wants to come listen to Michael discuss not just this book, but his whole career. April 7th at the Gene Rimsky Theater in Port Washington. It's going to be a lot of fun. I get to pepper Mike with all sorts of questions that we haven't gotten to here.

We have been speaking with Michael Lewis. His new book is Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the previous 500 conversations.

Thank you.

Sarah Livesey is my audio engineer. Anna Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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