The underground heroes fighting MAGA within the American government

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0:33the new statesman

0:38hey michael it's ollie dougmore at the new statesman uh looking forward to seeing you again i want to talk to you about blockers obviously but i kind of want to get into these bigger questions right because yes okay the book is about doge it's about elon musk it's about civil servants but i think underneath that it is about these bigger themes of public service duty political power and maybe even the idea of kind of, you know, neutrality in and of itself. Like, what should we do when things that are patently wrong happen before us and we're described as someone who's kind of a neutral arbiter?

1:10Should we intervene? I mean, these are all big questions. Either way, really looking forward to seeing you. Take it easy and I will see you at the studio. Ali, got your message. Got every time I hear your voice, it feels like you're just right there in front of me that that even when you're a long way away you're in my mind and i love the way you take what i wrote which is really a story and you back out from it the themes and the interest uh and i so i'm kind of looking forward to coming and visiting and learning what my book is about michael lewis has a unique understanding of the way modern america works what motivates its citizens and what makes money move.

1:51He started out on Wall Street as a bond salesman in the 1980s. This would go on to serve as inspiration for his first book, Liar's Poker. Since then, he's published over two dozen books, often financial thrillers, looking into subjects such as the subprime mortgage loans and the global financial crisis, that's the big short, advanced baseball statistics, that's Moneyball, and the rise and fall of fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, that's going infinite. His latest work turns away from the financial markets and Wall Street, instead looking towards America's official hub of power, Washington. The four months in which Elon Musk ran amok and the public servants who tried to stop him disassembling the state.

2:31I'm Oli Dougmore and you're listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Michael Lewis, hello. How are you? Oli, great to see you. Likewise. Very glad to have you here. Your latest book, Over Your Shoulder, Blockers. It's a story about doge. It's a story about power. It's about duty. All of those things. But before, we'll talk about all of that for sure. Before we do that, I just brought a question kind of about your process, your style. Because I'm struck that here we are talking about civil servants. You've done advanced baseball statistics. You've done credit default swaps.

3:05And they're not necessarily the sexiest things when you start to look at them. But by the time I finish reading what you write about them, I'm fascinated by them. And I just, I'm interested in your process of selecting a story, why you choose it. And if maybe there's a degree of kind of, should we say personal challenge in taking something that people on the face of it might not think is the most interesting thing in the world and then turning it into a bestselling book. I mean, why do you choose the stories that you choose to tell? You know, it's funny you ask this because it is, what is absolutely true whenever I'm onto a book that I know is going to be a good book.

3:35One of the tests is at a dinner party when someone asks me what I'm working on, I tell them how I'm thinking about it. And if their eyes glaze over, I know I'm onto something. If they're like, oh my, if I see pity on their face, I know I'm onto something. And I'm deadly serious about this because I don't know if I'm interested, my threshold for boredom is very low. Like if I don't get interested in weird arcane stuff that no one else is going to be interested in. If I found a way to be really interested in it, sufficiently interested, I'm going to spend a year and a half doing a book, then I don't worry that much about people being interested.

4:13And if I can find a subject that people don't realize is interesting, that I'm genuinely interested in, it's kind of like an arbitrage. It's like a financial arbitrage that, oh, oh, like I can, I can like shine, I can take people and say, look, look at that. And you're not going to believe how good it is. And so true of all of what you said, the big, the big short wins is the financial crisis. So that looked on the surface like it was interesting, but the actual mechanism of it was tedious on the surface of it. And this, I mean, the civil service, I'm not making it up. These people were amazingly interesting just as characters, even if they hadn't collided with this, you know, this thresher, the chainsaw that was in the Trump administration.

5:01And so the process, It's kind of that. It's sort of like, I found something nobody else has found. I found an interest in something that nobody else has really discovered. And that's really important. There's another way to put this is something I learned my brief stay on Wall Street. That it's the idea of adverse selection. That if someone is coming to you with like a financial trade, we want to sell you this. but I'll say this for this. You always got to ask, and it seems like a really good deal. You've always got to ask like why it's a good deal because why are they offering this to me? Why is this available to me?

5:44Because most of the things in life that come at you that are offered as gifts in your romantic life, in your financial life, in your consumer life, that there is a reason why you're being offered them and you should be very cautious. With book subjects, it's kind of the same as a version of this. If I can't figure out why this is available to be done, I have trouble believing that I'm the one to do it. And when something comes at me that is so on the face of it, so dull and without interest, but I get excited about it, I know why it's available to me. Because it looks dull. It looks dull, but it's not dull, and I figured out why it's not dull.

6:29So that is really what gets me going. But maybe the inverse of that is true as well, which is that if something on the face of it seems incredibly stimulating. Sexy. Yeah, exactly. That everyone's drawn to it. And then before you know it, you're writing about the same thing as everyone. But, you know, even if that was the case, by the way. That's true, though. If you don't mind me saying, I think, you know, you would do a pretty good job of blowing all those people out of the water. Because whilst the perhaps the subject material on the face of it can be boring, reading your writing, you know, there is a sort of a flow and a conversation.

6:59You just feel like you're being pulled on this journey. You could be writing about paint drawing on a wall and I would listen to it. So only if I was interested in paint drawing on a wall. I mean, what's going on there is I get genuinely enthusiastic about the thing I'm writing about. Yeah. It is true. People come, younger writers have come to me often saying, do you think there's a book in this? Do you think there's a book in that? And it is never the thing. It's what's in you about that is where the book is. And so you can write a book about anything, a great book about anything. and you can write a really shitty book about anything too and it doesn't matter you know give give someone i don't know princess diana obvious subject and there'll be many awful books written about it because it's such they're doing it because it's an obvious subject rather than rather than they're doing it because they have some special interest and this is i mean this just seems this seems like writing 101 this is elementary i think anybody who has written anything good knows that the interest is coming from inside them, not from the thing outside them.

8:01Do you mentor younger writers? You've got a lot of people, obviously, I mean, you inevitably have a lot of people asking you for advice, but I mean, tell me about - It sounds so formal, the mentor. Do you have a program? Is there a fellowship, Michael Lewis fellowship? I'd like to mentor you. I mean, no way. I'm not suggesting anything improper, Michael Lewis. I want to be absolutely clear about that. Can we go to lunch and explore our mentoring relationship? That's what we're doing after this. No, it's very haphazard. I mean, but the most common kind of advisory role I play is when people are 20 years old or when they're really young or 15 years old and they want to know what is it like?

8:36Do they want to really be a writer kind of thing? Or how do they become a writer? And I find by far the most useful advice I give people is just to ask them the question, do you actually want to write? Do you want to talk about writing? Do you want to have written a book? or do you actually just really get something out of sitting down and writing? Is the thing itself giving you pleasure? Because if you just like the idea of it, there are a lot of people like that. And they just, you may end up writing a book, but you'll hate it. You'll be miserable. And that if you are, and I try to disabuse younger people, the idea of the tortured artist.

9:13Like, I guess it's okay to torture yourself to generate some words. But generally when you're doing that, you're going to be torturing the reader too. There are exceptions, I know. But if you are getting real pleasure out of it, you're in the beginning of the reader getting real pleasure out of it. And so make the distinction in your mind between just do you want to do it? And if you want to do it, there's really one way to do it, and that's put your ass in a chair. Just do it like you have to do it. And that's kind of the sum total of my advice. And so I've had people actually come to me and say, actually, one writer who I was just with, has won Pulitzer Prizes for her novels, Geraldine Brooks, said, you gave me the best advice when I was writing my first book.

9:57You said, because I was wandering around Hampstead Heath. We were both living in London, thinking about my book and agonizing my book. And you said, you're not going to have a book if all you do is walk around Hampstead Heath, put your ass in the chair and write the words. And she said, ever since then, when I'm starting a book and I'm not wanting to do it, I remember you saying, put your ass in the chair and write the words. That's good advice, isn't it? Stephen King, I think, said something similar as well about you just have to write, there's no other way around it. And I was struck listening to you talk about being a pundit as well.

10:24I heard John Ronson talking the other day. For listeners, obviously, that's, you know, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, The Psychopath Test, The Men Who Stare at Goats. And he was kind of, again, disavowing that sort of pundit role. He sort of talked about his role as someone who wants to immerse himself in a story and do nonfiction narrative journalism or investigations. And he actually felt that punditry almost would compromise him in a sense, because he needs to be relatively impartial. He needs to be an observer and present. But that actually, if he starts offering opinions on this, that and everything, it kind of in a way prevents him from being able to draw out hypocrisy, nuance, whatever it is in a story that he's writing.

10:58It anchors him. You see this all the time. You get anchored in the view you had so you can't have another view. And you also become attached to your own view and you won't let the reader have another view. and and i do think that the secret to really good non-fiction writing is to let the reader have some discretion over the meaning of the thing you've written that you can't so muscle them around that they have no choice but to think whatever you might think and that they're and they just that and that one the symptom of a successful piece of writing is you have people coming at you with very different interpretations of what you've written and they very they will have very different views of it so i agree i sympathize with that attitude let's do blockers then let's talk about it um let's start with the protagonists what was doge well so doge stands for the department of government efficiency it was it was elon musk's idea and donald trump basically gave him for several months freehand to do whatever he wanted to the two million person u.s government workforce and in theory it was meant to be eliminating waste fraud and abuse of which there was supposed to be a lot.

12:14Elon Musk said that when he was done, he would have cut$2 trillion out of the U.S. budget of$7 trillion. Now, who he got to do this was a curious assortment of hangers-on kind of peripheral employees at SpaceX and at his companies and then just people who knew people who knew him. And the active ingredient in Dojo, there were some middle-aged people. The people who were actually doing the scary stuff were young men ages 19 to 28 who really just wanted to be near Elon Musk. Physically, they lived for a brief time inside a building called the General Service. Sorry to say it with a straight face.

12:56They bunked on the floor of the General Services Administration, which is, by the way, illegal living in a government building. But they treated it like a startup. They were going to reboot the American government. And every day, Elon Musk would say, go forth, young men, and bring me scalps. Bring me people you've cut and costs you've cut. And the results were kind of predictable. I mean, the young men, they weren't students of government. I mean, I think a lot of them didn't even know there were three branches of government when they arrived in Washington. They knew that Elon was right and that they approached the government with contempt.

13:32and they would walk in, they'd be given a badge that gave them access to the Internal Revenue Service or the Department of Energy or the Department of Agriculture. And they'd walk in and announce themselves and say they're here to find the crooks and the fraud and all that, and then demand to see the books and demand to see an org chart. And there are anecdotes of, well, in the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has hundreds of billions of dollars of contracts, money that Congress has agreed to spend on American veterans. Young man walks in, asks for the file with all the contracts, 90 ,000 contracts.

14:08Of course, how is he going to evaluate these things? He just starts hitting, putting keywords, like the keywords they think are woke, signs of woke funding, trans, bias, woman, and just cuts anything that's got that in it. But in the IRS, another young man, 25 years old, he had as much idea of what he was staring at as I would have, an org chart of the IRS. And he's looking at boxes on the org chart that sound like, oh, you could just do without them. So he sees communications and outreach. He goes, we'll just get rid of that. And then someone walks up and says, that's all our relations with Congress.

14:47You just got rid of. And any outside person who wants to know anything about what's going on at satirist, he says, oh, I'll put that back. So it is – if Monty Python tried to satirize what actually happened, they would generate something like what actually happened. And on the personnel's – on the functions of government side, Doge was – what I think it was doing – So it never achieved anything. Like I think it costs the American taxpayer and the budget, the debt has gone up three and a half trillion dollars in two years. So it didn't solve what it said it was going to solve. So the question is deep.

15:33Your question is actually deep. What was Doge? Because Elon Musk isn't a fool. He couldn't, he didn't begin to attack where most of the money gets spent, entitlements, military, interests on the debt. But he couldn't, the way he went about doing it, he couldn't have achieved much. So the question is, what was he actually doing? And what I think he was actually doing is creating enough trauma, enough noise, enough of a smokescreen to enable him to squash the investigations of his own companies and install a friend of his as the head of NASA. and that this was permissible to the people who were at the center of the Trump administration, and he really wasn't, but people who understood government and understood what they were about in the White House.

16:25It enabled them to exercise this enormous power grab that while all this doge stuff is going on and people are sort of saying, oh, maybe it's good. Maybe they're cutting stuff, all that, that they did things like eliminate all the inspectors general, who were the people, independent people in each agency who do identify corruption, fraud, made it impossible to identify any kind of corruption. They did things like undermine the mechanism by which the entire two million person government workforce keeps at one arm's length from politics. They turned it into a loyalist operation. So they grabbed agencies that they weren't meant to run.

17:10They grabbed the power of the purse in a lot of cases, which is like the founding fathers understood that if the president had the power of the purse, he'd just become a king. And so it was a massive power grab. And Doge was like the smoke bomb before the massive power grab. When you're running a growing business, the right systems can unlock your full sales potential and make fulfilling every order effortless. Switch to ShipStation before peak season so you're prepped and ready before the rush hits. ShipStation connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and over 200 more marketplaces with one platform that does it all.

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18:25Thumbtack knows homes. Download the app today.

18:31I'm so glad you've taken it there already because I think we can talk about the sort of the spectacle. So Musk parading around with a chainsaw and the sort of gratuitous social media posting that accompanied a lot of the quote unquote work that was going on. It almost seemed like the things that they were doing were being done with a view to posting. Like the whole thing was about the spectacle rather than any type of meaningful reform. Side note, and maybe we'll talk about this later, you know, it's actually done quite a lot to undermine any idea. If anyone steps forward and says, I think government should be more efficient, everyone's going to be like, no, no, no, not again.

19:12So it's a very funny thing, this, right? Because it could have been so good. I mean, there are things to do. I mean, in particular, he was in some ways ideally suited to do the things that needed to be done. Government is really bad at moving fast. Government is really bad in environments of rapid technical change, getting the technology into the government. It's just slow. And he could have done that. And he liked to make this joke. I know he stole it because I think he might have even stolen it from me because in my first book, I said it, that it's funny how so many of these agencies are the opposite of what their name says they are.

19:47and that they're all misnamed is basically, you would want to change their names if you really want them to describe what they did. And he went, ha, ha, ha, the government's so inefficient, all the names are wrong. But there's nothing that was ever so misnamed as the Department of Government Efficiency. They caused so much damage, created so much waste that actually you're right. If anyone else comes in to do it, it's going to be a really hard sell. He managed to make everybody even more cynical. And now he's kind of parading around. First, he admitted it didn't work. But now he's got this thing like, it could never work.

20:30It could never be done given the way the government was. I proved that it couldn't be done because even I couldn't do it. He's laying that line on people. And it is such a crock. I mean, he is so full of it. And in addition, in the bargain, in Elon Musk's excellent adventure inside the United States government, what he really did is he honed his ability to lie. I think hanging out with Donald Trump taught him the power of mendacity. And this would, to me, in a funny way, I can't believe I still retain the power to be shocked. But as I get into this story and I'm looking at the kind of things he tweeted, once you actually compare it to reality, it's not even like an approximation of the truth.

21:16It's not even can be described as hyperbole or exaggeration. It's the opposite of what happened. And he's spouting this stuff off. and i think he's i think he's come to believe what trump believes is that the public is so sort of the public that's on his side already is so on his side that all you gotta do is feed them what they want to believe and they'll and they're with you um as opposed to feeding them something that's true and interesting and might like lead to a better civilization but he he um but this become a feature of his that just like says all this stuff that's not true. And he's made, he's making everybody way more cynical about the possibility of like positive change.

21:59You had - Well, there's another line then he might still as well, because there's one, isn't there? Whatever was interesting wasn't true and whatever wasn't interesting wasn't either. You had something like that. I can do this. I can do this. Please. Yeah. That Elon Musk said things that were true and interesting, but the problem was that the things he said that were true weren't interesting and the things he said that were interesting weren't true. There we go. You got it. Yeah, it's your work. You'll do a better job of quoting it than I will. Sorry to be quoting myself. Very good. As the author Michael Lewis.

22:28Yeah, as Michael Lewis said. Yeah. But I do want to talk about sort of stereotyping or preconceived ideas because I kind of think one reading of what happened is that Musk and his acolytes, they had preconceived ideas about what they were going to find, right? And they had this conception of what the US government was, which - It's like bad journalism. You go in - Wouldn't know anything about that, Michael. No, no. It's like you go, you're the opinion writer who goes in to find the thing that justifies your opinion. Exactly. It's very like that. And so because they have these ideas about what the federal government does, even though actually, as you've written in previous books, the name of an agency, like you just said, who's managing the nukes?

23:13Not the people you think it is. What's the weather department doing? kind of, well, a million different things. The weather department is in the Department of Commerce. Yeah. How does that work? Quite. The Department of Energy handles the nukes. Yeah. The Department of Agriculture does have something to do with agriculture. It's mainly food safety. It's mainly getting food to people who need food. So there's that kind of thing. But can you just talk a bit more about how their preconceptions informed what they did? And actually, okay, side note as well, you mentioned scalping a couple of answers ago, and it's just reminded me.

23:42They did have this hierarchical scalping system, right, where the phones and the laptops that they collected as they told all these different government agencies well one form the scalps took is the number of people they fired but the other form was just how many agencies they'd infiltrated and each time they got a badge and they got a laptop so uh i think the leader of the pack was a kid named gavin cliger and he had five and he was always in he was in five major agencies um now just as a footnote to this the so that the what was actually going the difference between what they were doing what was actually going on underneath it i mean these are people who supposedly believe they're basically libertarians they're kind of silicon valley libertarian types they basically think all government's bad government they basically think that everybody there is kind of like feathering their own nest in some way that's that's uh costing the society they have no sense of the role of government in a in a in in a properly function in society.

24:37Gavin Cliger was, they call him the chaos agent because even among these young men, he was the person who did the most disruption and was the most aggressive and rude to the existing civil service. What is Gavin Cliger doing now? He went to work for, one of his badges was in the Pentagon. He's created a company that's sole source of revenue is contracts with the government with the Pentagon. What is this? I mean, like, why aren't these people being like, like tried for treason kind of thing? It's the most amazing, it's the most amazing situation where, um, they, they were kind of, they were, they were kind of embodying the thing that they said they despised.

25:20And at the, at the, at the, at the higher level, there was no such thing as a deep state until 18 months ago. And they kind of proved it. You could go in and just lop off heads and nobody was going to get in your way. If you were going to be irresponsible with the government, you could. And the resistance was surprisingly weak. And you could take control of this thing in a shocking way. Now, there's a single person, a Russell Vogt, who sits deep inside the government in a place called the Office of the Management Budget, who's orchestrating a lot of this, who now, like any science grant, it's meant to go from Congress to the science agencies who decide because they're scientists where this money is best spent.

26:07Now, every single grant passes through his fingers and he decides whether Yale University gets its money for its medical school. But before Yale University can get its money, They have to do something that pleases Russell Vought. It's become, they've created the thing that they said they were attacking. And that's a curious feature of this administration. And the mind sort of hesitates before fully understanding what they're doing because they've frozen it by accusing others of doing exactly the thing they're doing. Let's dial into some of the blockers themselves. who's colin o 'brien colin o 'brien is the is the is the lead character the protagonist of the opening of the book and he was the chief security officer of something called the the united states institute of peace you can be forgiven for not knowing of its existence uh i'd written a whole book about the federal government and thought i knew every agency in the government and i didn't know the u.s institute of peace and turned out the reason for that was the u.s institute of peace isn't an agency of the federal government.

27:17It's a complicated kind of quasi-government institution that Congress created back in the Reagan administration. And Colin's job was to guard it, to guard the building. It's a nonprofit. The building is owned by the nonprofit, just like your house is owned by you. And I opened the book with it because the Trump administration decided it was going to seize it. Doge decides to come and take it. And given how small it was, given how unknown it was, given how independent it was supposed to be, that's what caught my eye in the first place. It's like Trump won the first time he was president. He didn't want to run anything.

27:54He didn't bother to get to know the government at all. Trump, too, was so aggressive that it was grabbing things to run it wasn't supposed to run. And I thought, well, this is different. Like, oh, why are they doing this? And Colin O 'Brien, in addition to being the chief security officer, the guy who ran the security force, he, I thought, had a very persuasive interpretation of what was going on and a nuanced understanding of what Doge was doing. I mean, this is a guy, Colin, is a former army sniper, a former Baltimore cop, has made an art out of security. But he said to me, and plus the story of the storming of the building and all that and Colin fighting them.

28:34It was fun material. But what gripped me about him was his understanding that, one, this looked like a bloodless event, this seizure of power. But in fact, if you looked at what they did across the government, they were very careful to get all the guns first. Doge, for example, to guard the building, Colin hired a private security company that had 15 security officers there every day. One day he wakes up and Doge has told that private security company that they're going to lose their government contracts if they continue to guard the building. And in fact, their job now is to let them into the building.

29:17once they're in the building and Colin has successfully actually locked them in a chamber so they're prisoners. It was like home alone. It was exactly like home alone. It was home, but briefly it was home alone. That's so funny. And he thinks he's got them and he calls the Washington DC police, another set of guns, another little army. He thinks they're going to come and arrest them for trespassing. No, the DC police somehow has been strong armed by the Trump administration and then now working with the Trump administration. So that was one thing. It was a very astute observation. He said it was not trivial that they were careful to get all the guns on one side.

29:53And he said the second thing was, like, why us? Like, nobody's ever heard of us. And what they did, they did interesting things, and that's a whole separate story. And their history is interesting because it was George Washington's idea. George Washington, very early on, said we need an institute of war and an institute of peace. And the institute of war got created. It was West Point. And they found the land for the Institute of Peace and Congress never funded it. And purely by chance, purely by chance, when they eventually fund it during the Reagan administration, they plop it down on exactly the piece of land Washington had selected for the site and nobody knew it.

30:27So that's a funny fact. But why us was this thing. Like nobody knows we're here. We're independent. This is illegal. And he said that's why they did it. They did it to show they could do it. that if they could take us, that we were on the outer fringes of what could possibly be claimed as belonging to the president. And that if they can take us, they have a case for the Federal Reserve. They have a case for presidents in charge of the money supply. They have a case for lots of other stuff. And I find that very persuasive. I think it wasn't an accident. They made a lot of noise about taking it.

31:03And it's still this problem. I mean, the third feature, another feature of the Trump administration is to do a lot of illegal stuff and just hope the law doesn't catch up to you or know that the law moves so slowly. So right now, if you drive to the building, and it's a lovely building, it doesn't say U.S. Institute of Peace on the outside anymore. It says the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. They've plastered his name on the side of this thing, but it's in the courts and the courts seem to be pretty clear. It's on appeal, but I think the building is going to be returned eventually. But when?

31:36Three years from now, five years from now, you know, that's, that's what they, that's what they figured out. Ah, we move fast. We have all the guns. Courts will take forever to catch up. Yeah. Not the first time as well. He's plastered his name all over something, is it? Yeah. The, I was really moved just by your character study of him. You know, there's a line about him. I think he was chasing joyriders, was he? And then the car explodes in a ball of fire and he, Colin O 'Brien. Yeah. Yeah. And, and he really, yeah, not Trump. You're telling there, you're going to bring a tear to the eye. He's a war hero.

32:06No, Colin O 'Brien, you know, I mean, there was one thing after another about him. As a Baltimore cop, he's chasing four kids who've stolen a car. Their car runs out of control, speeds out of control, crashes in the tree, blows up, and he's pulling burning bodies out of the car. Three of them die, but he saves one of their lives. And he's a naturally brave man. And he's naturally, I mean, there's a salt of the earth kind of quality to him. And there's a no bullshit tolerated quality to him. And his view of Doge felt to me, these kids coming in who are just punks who start to insult him and treat him like he's a nobody and he's just the security guy.

32:51I felt in that interaction, we were getting something that was really useful for the reader to see. uh we were we were seeing what we were seeing in that interaction was a real man stares into the eyes of a fake man and um and the doge people they really have they you they have active fantasy lives i think they imagine themselves as the smartest people in the room they imagine themselves as you know the hero of their own narrative but but they've never They're not socialized, a lot of them. They're tech bros who never got punched in the mouth kind of thing. And they're meeting someone who got punched in the mouth.

33:30And I would love to have actually been there in the interaction because I bet they're scared to death. But then they go and they have all the guns on their side. And it's bravery meets cowardice. It's a lot of things going on at once. but but it is also a way to set up the whole rest of the book because once the guns on their side they can then go do whatever they want to do and that's what they proceed to do so yes maybe i should have done that for this interview but it's just so interesting to in the way that almost masculinity has now been contested in this way because there's this version of what those guys and trump musk and their followers think what a man is and there's the archetype of someone who actually is objectively a good but a good man and and the the way those two things intersect with each other is fascinating.

34:16Maybe I should have done that, but I haven't. So we're going to have to move on. That's all right. I just did it for you. Thank you so much. That's my job. Too kind. There was another, you know, this is funny. There was another thing that really moved me and it wasn't just Colin. Listeners will think I've gone mental here, but it was individual taxpayer identification number, which I'm going to get you to talk about in a moment, but I just, there were a few reading them just sort of punched me in the stomach and when you tie in what this really sort of bureaucratic the equivalent in the uk you know things that run in hmrc people get panicked and come out and sweats the idea talking about tax returns you know it is not it is not fun it's not fun and somehow you've managed to create a character that angelina jolie will play yeah that's tough for her that she's the tax code but tell people what it is tell people is tell people what it does and what they wanted to use it for?

35:12Yes. So Congress in the 1990s, as a money grab, decided to see if we could get undocumented workers, illegal aliens, whatever you want to call them, to pay taxes. And it's not an obvious sell, right? If you're in the United States and the government's sort of hostile to your presence and you're here to make money to send it back to Mexico or wherever, that, you know, why would you ever pay taxes? Why would you reveal yourself kind of thing? But the government, the Congress said, we're going to create this mechanism. You don't get a social security number, so you're not a citizen. You get this other thing called an ITIN, and that if you pay your taxes, we, the United States government, will accept that this is maybe the beginning of a longer term relationship, and that you're paying your taxes and you're not getting anything for it.

36:01You're not getting the benefits. It's kind of an extraordinary act. And that you will, you know, you'll establish, you'll build goodwill. And if you want to apply for citizenship, this will be on your record that you pay taxes. And astonishingly, it's, I can't remember the exact number,$100 billion,$200 billion in taxes has been paid by this population since then. And in this database now, and it's called the I-10 database, there are 7 million names. Seven million people right now, or last year, were paying taxes. And their tax returns also happened to include their most current home address. So right after the inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security and the ICE, the people who are cracking down on illegal immigration, asked the IRS for this database.

36:49Now, there's a woman in the IRS who's the character of the story. Her name is Kathleen Walters. And she's her own interesting character. But Kathleen Walters was the human being between, say, my tax return and Donald Trump. Like anybody who wanted to weaponize my tax return had to go through her first name. She would prevent it. And the laws around the tax returns are like the laws around health records. Very, very strict. I mean, there's no ambiguity in them. It is illegal to ask for the tax returns of the 7 million undocumented workers. It's illegal to look at them. If you were, say, for example, an IRS employee who didn't have a good reason to look at one of those tax returns and you looked at one of those tax returns, you might go to jail.

37:35You definitely lose your job. And if you leaked any of it, you go to jail for at least a year. And so everybody knows, like, you don't touch this stuff. And everybody knows also that the United States government has been saying to this population for 30 years, trust us. like this is this is a healthy relationship you're going to give to us until we feel like you've satisfied something and then you can apply for citizenship and um so it's a violate it's a deep deep violation to give this stuff over kathleen walters i mean it is a game of cat and mouse it's a version of home alone but but but she plays she manages to kind of keep it out of their hands for a few months until she too loses her job.

38:20And what she would say, what she does say is, look, what I was doing in this game of cat and mouse, what I was trying, the reason I was fighting so hard, yes, it's a violation. And actually it was interesting to talk to her about, I mean, she's a bit of a historian of government data, like in the history of the United States government, has there ever been such a violation of trust with the data? And the only example she and others who know these stories can think of is during World War II, the census data was used to round up Japanese Americans to put them in concentration camps. Everyone now agrees that was appalling.

38:59It was actually legal. It was not illegal for the census to do that, but it was appalling. This was clearly both appalling and illegal. And it cost her her job, but she'd say, look, there's something bigger when you start. And this is what the book is. The book is about like how the functions of government at bottom, like the frame of the house, which you don't see because it's all covered up with decoration, but is that how is the government going to be different if it's a loyalist operation? How are we going to function as a society differently if this is where we're going? Because we've gone here right now and you can start to see how it's different.

39:36And she'd say, look, that if we allow this kind of thing to happen, what happens next? Everybody understands that their data is weaponizable. Everybody understands that you're giving information when you give it to the government. You're no longer giving it to something you trust. You're giving it to something that is a political operation. So what's going to happen is it's going to choke off data. And if you choke off data, you don't just choke off, you just don't scare illegal immigrants back home or cut down the tax revenues from them. You stop citizens from supplying information. And once that happens, you don't have a picture of the society.

40:13You don't know what reality is. So it's a lot at stake. It sounds boring, data collection by the government. It's actually really interesting. And she was at that spot, that vulnerable spot, where if it behaved badly, it had huge consequences. And now it's behaving badly. We're going to take a quick break now. If you're enjoying this episode, please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And leave a comment letting us know who else you'd like to hear on The Exchange. Stay with us. We will be back after this.

41:22Still waiting in line? supply.

41:28This leads me on to two of my questions. One, which was about how writing this and understanding this has changed how you think about neutrality and perhaps particularly the importance of it in the civil service. But the second one, you know, we called these people blockers. Because Elon Musk called them blockers. Yes. I want to test that premise because you mentioned it there, you know, many of them, you know, resigned before committing what would, or not committing, participating or being implicated in illegal activity. You know, who wins? Who's won? Because I hear a story about people like Kathleen, whoever it is, and go, surely you want that person administrating your government.

42:13And yet, not necessarily always the case that they still are. So has Doge won? The Trump administration has won in the short term. But it's the short term. I mean, this is an average evolving story. There is a growing backlash against both Trump and what he's done with the government. Nobody, even Trump supporters have expressed disapproval of how he's running the government. This is interesting. And his own approval ratings are as low as they've ever been. And so I don't think this is over. I think this is, I think what we're in right now is in the middle of a narrative war. And the war was all one-sided for a very long time.

42:52That you could say anything you wanted to about people who worked in government. You could trash them in every which way. And they had no ability to respond. They're not allowed to respond. In addition, they're not the kind of people who tell their own story at all or know how to respond. So that there's this relentless barrage of negativity pointed towards them. I mean, it goes back to Ronald Reagan. And so, in fact, the public perception of them that's distorted because of this relentless barrage of negativity is what enables Elon Musk to go in and do this stuff with a chainsaw in the first place.

43:31If anybody really knew what was there, they'd be outraged. And so in response to this, there's a new narrative. This book is part of it. It's like there's this other narrative. The stories, these stories are going to get told. And then what happens? That's the question. And I don't know what happens. I mean, right now, Donald looks like Donald Trump is one. But irony of ironies would be if, oh my God, it wakes up Congress. And what we get in the next Congress is a more bulletproof, nonpartisan civil service, that Congress can do that. I think that's very possible. I think it's very possible. Congress is going to wake – it's already woken up.

44:16Everybody knows that they rolled over. The Republicans in Congress rolled over for Donald Trump. And if you're a congressman, you're thinking this is existential for the society. You can't give the – you can't just cede all power to the executive. It's going to take us in a completely different direction. And even Democrats, even if they suspect they're going to get the White House, Democrats now are going to feel, I think are going to feel like, we do not want to be in the same position with a Democratic president, that the Republicans in Congress were with a Republican president. So we need to defend this thing that got politicized.

44:49So I can imagine, well, I don't have to imagine, and I've had senior people in Congress call me and say, can we turn your book into a hearing? can we actually get these characters up and have them explain to the American people what it is we need to create? And so I think there's going to be some response. And it's possible that we're going to end up in a world that looks... It's possible people will look back and say, well, Doge was a good thing, but it created the climate for actual reform of the government. It's possible. It's interesting, isn't it, how it's the institutions themselves which have almost become the dividing line, not just in America, but here too in our politics.

45:31Obviously, there's the yard signs again on the US side of it. And how recent that is, I guess the test will be, as you've said, if they're long lasting and they come back and they're rejuvenated, then I guess people on the pro-institution side of the argument will win. But it's just interesting to me that I think particularly with Trump, it's like you document it in The Fifth Risk that he seems apathetic towards institutions. Oh, totally. He's uninterested, right? Uninterested. And it's a sea change between Trump 1 and Trump 2 to go from this. He's still personally apathetic. He just realized that the things that get in his way, if he wants to scratch an itch, and there's a rule against scratching the itch, it's irritating to have the person remind him there's a rule against scratching the itch.

46:14And he was pleased to have all that got rid of. There are people who are thinking more broadly than Trump in Trump's administration who are using Trump's very simple desire to want to scratch every itch he can scratch to create a different kind of government. And so that Trump is partly tool here. I think they would be very careful about saying that, but I think that's the case. They're people who are the theorists. And they're probably the same kind of Straussian types who think that the president is just a front man for intellectuals who manipulate him in various ways. I don't think Trump's so easily manipulable as that.

46:54But I think that something like that is going on. That there is a symbiosis between Trump's utter narcissism, self-interest, don't get in my way. I want to do whatever I want. I don't care about the law, all that. And people who want to basically create an autocracy. And so, and for their own purposes. So I, it's not all one thing. And in fact, one of the fun things about the story, it was so much fun doing this thing. I mean, it sounds, it kind of sounds like it, I didn't find it all depressing. It was a joyous book to write in part because the literary challenge of both structuring it, not just finding the material and building the frame and all that, but structuring it so that it had a single narrative quality to it.

47:45And also not just caving to the simple idea that this was just Doge and Elon Musk and Trump. It's more than that. It's like there are all these things, these forces now being exerted upon the government that some of them have nothing to do with Donald Trump that are corrosive. and trying to get those all into the story so the reader didn't have just a simplistic view of the situation was, it was a gas. Finding like the right character. You know what book this reminds me of? Of my books, it was very similar to The Big Short in that it's the two times in my career where I had the frame to the house before I had any of the, before I had the inhabitants and I could go out and cast it.

48:27And it was because in both cases, you got this hairball of a subject. It's like, what's the financial crisis? What's the Trump administration? And there are a million different ways to go at it. And one way to go at it is to create this ensemble piece where each character has a little piece of the story. And if you design, if you pick the right characters and line them up in the right way, all together, they give the reader the whole story, but none of them have the whole story. They each have a little piece of the story. So it was the only other time where I had in my mind, I was not thinking movie, but I'm thinking book, but that I was actually on a casting search as I wandered around the federal government.

49:10And the same way I was in a casting search as I wandered around the ruins of Wall Street looking for the people who had figured it out. It was a very similar exercise. And that people felt things, things, it was these incredible strokes of luck where things just fell in my lap that just solved a problem. like for example um the a subset of what i just said that like there's more than one thing here the attack the attack that's going on in science in america in the trump administration it is way more than one thing it's about five different things there are five different motives of people who want to kind of come for science and um and then i found this character francis collins who had been that i mean he's a giant in american science and world science he ran the human genome genome project.

49:54He ran the NIH. But he's just a scientist in his lab when we meet him. And that he had been the victim of basically a mob hit that they told him to clear out in 24 hours. He was no longer welcome. But that he didn't know who had whacked him. He'd been whacked, but he didn't know. He knew that there were like five people who could have done it or might have done it. And so you had this kind of Agatha Christie closed room murder mystery where, you know, six guys in a room and They were all guys, lights go off, shot rings out, lights come back on and Francis Collins is dead on the floor. And the other five people, RFK Jr., Trump, whoever it is, all together are a perfect portrait and complete portrait of the attack, not on Francis Collins, but on science itself.

50:38It was like, that's just, that is so lucky to have that kind of material. So I felt that way with the big short too, it's like the material just, it just, it It just came in just the way you wanted it. It's like a chef in a kitchen. You know the meal you want to cook, and when you're looking around, and oh, my God, the ingredients are there. That's what this felt like. So once again, I've had a joyous experience at the expense of the misery of a society.

51:08Great. Good. Sorry about that. Sorry, guys. Last couple of questions. We're running out of time. Do you think do Americans value public service in the way that they should? If you ask Americans, like in a poll, we think of bureaucrats or do you trust government? Of course, they say they hate bureaucrats and they don't trust government. If you get them in auditoriums with a thousand people and you tell them one story, like from this book or from my previous work about a civil servant, they start to cry. And then you say, would anybody who's worked for the federal government stand up? And they give them a standing ovation.

51:47So they don't know what they think. They have a shallow stereotype in their head, which they probably move, gets them through every day. But the minute they're forced to attend to it, they quite admire it. Who doesn't admire people who live for something other than themselves? A lot of these civil servants are there for big, important reasons. And they could have made more money in the private sector. And they certainly could have become more famous in the private sector. And they're there for the right reasons. And when people understand that, they admire that thing. and just as with government, like I hate government, government's bad, but I don't trust government that you get that all the time.

52:22But what do them, they drink the water, they eat the food, they own the treasury bonds, they hold the money that, you know, they drive on the roads. It's like they cross the bridges there in their behavior. They're displaying incredible trust of the thing. Now that's undermineable. That's not like, doesn't mean that won't change, but, but there's a disconnect between what people think they think and how they actually behave I'll finish here and it's in part a follow on to what you were saying earlier about Congress but I just I'm wondering about how this ends not the interview because it might never end I'll be getting voice memos from you from her at home it's Ollie again can we just talk one more time Michael I just want to talk Is there a tragic ending to this?

53:13A tragic ending? Yeah. I don't know. The thing that's uncomfortable about my country, it reminds me a little of me. That it's – the tragedy seems to happen to other people. That it feels to me like if I – the consequences of Donald Trump are more likely to fall more heavily on foreigners than it is on Americans themselves. I've often thought that Americans shouldn't be allowed to vote for president. It should be everybody who's not an American because we, we, because you're sort of at the end of the game of crack the whip outside of the United States. We move and you're at the back end and you end up, you're the little fat kid who gets thrown into the tree in their underwear.

53:52And, and, and what's happened because of Elon Musk? I mean, the last number I saw is there are 14 million dead people in Africa. Uh, you know, I, it's like that's. This is USIR data. Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's a whole story there and there will be – it's too much to get into, but it's – and I didn't write it. But that feels to me like, yes, there are tragedies. There were totally avoidable tragedies, much of it outside the United States. In the United States, I really do think – I don't know why I think this. I am like wired for optimism, but I think we're going to bounce. I don't think, I think civilization and decline is the wrong mental model.

54:37It's the easy one because we, you know, everybody remembers Rome or they think they do. I don't know what actually happened, but you hear, you hear there was a civil, there was once a great civilization and it declined. Okay, I'll buy it. This civilization is different. It is so protean. It is so capable of self-reinvention. is so, it is maddeningly moronic until it's not. And so, and it just bounces. It comes back. I just, like, I just wouldn't bet against it. So I suspect we're going to bounce in a completely different direction. And just as right now, you sit here and you think, like, how did they ever elect Obama president?

55:19How is that possible? This same place had that. I think it's possible that the next thing they'll look back and say, how did they ever elect Trump president? It's totally changeable and fixable. And we are, I think, a people who fix things eventually. So I think in some ways, though, I mean, there are a lot of, there are a lot of, there are a lot, it's a, what we're living through, what gave rise to Donald Trump has, it's a complicated story, but part of the story is about attention and especially the attention of elites, rich people, powerful people, CEOs of companies. Mostly they kind of thought they could just ignore the government or use it for their purposes.

56:04The minute there's an existential threat and it feels like an existential threat, people start paying attention in a different way. So what are the odds I could have gotten CEOs of companies to read a book about bureaucrats 15 years ago? Zero chance. like, Michael, thanks for give me another book on baseball statistics. They're all reading this. Why are they reading this? They're reading this because they know it's like, things changed. We need to pay attention now. We've got to think about it. He'll tell me a story that will help me think about how to think about this. So I think, I do think that it's, that tragedy is not the right word for what's going to happen inside the United States.

56:43But what do I know? A lot of people would disagree with me. Michael Lewis, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me, Ollie. I really appreciate it. You've been listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman with me, Ollie Dougmore, and my guest, Michael Lewis. The podcast will be back next week.

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