March 12, 2025 • 53 mins
What if the government workers we often overlook are actually heroes? In this eye-opening conversation, Katie sits down with Michael Lewis to explore the unseen work of civil servants who keep our country running—often under relentless attack. They discuss why these jobs have become political targets, what’s at stake when expertise is lost, and how our perceptions of government have been shaped. Drawing from his new book, Who Is Government?, Michael shares eye-opening stories of the people behind the policies—offering a fresh perspective on the critical role they play and why their work matters more than ever.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric, and this is next question.
I love talking with Michael Lewis. He has this incredible
ability to zoom in on one person's story and from
there reveals something much bigger about our culture. His books
leave you seeing the world differently, and his books about
(00:24):
federal workers are no exception. So why has the federal
government gotten such a bad rap? Why are the workers
often maligned even demonized? After all, they're described with words
like the deep state and the swamp. Michael Lewis feels
very differently after writing about a group of these civil servants,
first in The Fifth Risks and now in a new
(00:47):
book of essays called Who Is Government? This time Lewis
and a powerhouse lineup of writers turn their attention to
people who are some of the unsung heroes of our
society actually making government work, even though Elon Musk and
his posse of doge dudes made beg to differ. Here's
(01:07):
my conversation with Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis, you must have
a crystal ball, because Who Is Government? The untold story
of public service could not be more timely. Now I
know this is a continuation of sorts of your twenty
eighteen book called The Fifth Risk. You examined the transition
(01:30):
and political appointments of the first Trump administration, But what
made you decide to do another deep dive into the
federal government?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So there are two reasons. The good literary argument was
at the end of The Fifth Risk, I had to
go back and write it afterward for the paperback, and
I thought to myself that I'd done a lot to
describe the functions of government in that book, but I
had not really dwell gone deep on a person really,
and I thought might be fun to just go deep
(01:59):
on one of our old bureaucrats. And I basically picked
a name out of a jar. I mean, it's a
long story how I picked the guy, but it was
just it was kind of random, and the story. He
ended up being an oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search
and Rescue Department who had had this quite dramatic encounter
with the death of a young woman and her and
her daughter that it caught, I mean, it was avoidable.
(02:23):
Had they under the Coastguard understood how objects drifted at sea,
they kind of knew where they had capsized in the
Testapeake Bay. They knew like how the currents were and stuff,
but they were upside down on a sailboat and nobody
had ever measured how a sailboat drifted at sea. This guy,
my subject guard Allen, was so disturbed by the fact
that they these two people died because they didn't know
(02:44):
how the object had drifted since they discovered they were gone,
that he went and created basically a whole science of
how objects drifted sea. And it was it was such
a he was such an amazing story. I mean, it's
a movie his story that I thought, like, if I
ever come back to this, I want to come back
to the people, because because the stereotype of the of
(03:05):
the bureaucrat or whatever you are, the deep state or
whatever you want to call him, he was such a
He was a mission driven, selfless giver of a person
who was also ingenious in how he'd solved a critical
problem that has saved thousands of lives. So I thought,
if I ever come back to this, I'm gonna see
what more of this there is in our government. So
(03:27):
that was the first the literary reason. It is like
this material here because the people, the way people think
of these people, they don't they're faceless. They don't put
a face to them, so they're easy to knock around
in when you're by politicians, by media, by whoever. Uh.
The second reason was I was just astonished after especially
after Trump won and then neglect of the federal government
(03:50):
during that administration, that the Democrats never offered a full
throated like defense or even an explanation of like where
are taxpayer dollars? Go, like what is it actually doing?
And who are these people? That they never kind of
came out and said, like, there's a reason we have
this government. So no one ever sold the government. So
(04:13):
I thought like there was so there are all these
stories that just didn't get told. So the idea, So
I thought, like the world needs to understand some of
these stories, and so they don't think it's just like
Michael Lewis bloviating with his views of government, blah blah blah.
I'm going to pick six other writers and it's not
going to just be me. It's going to be seven
really distinctive personalities on the page, and I'm going to
(04:35):
just like drop them into the government, say find a story,
could you know, find a story and write up and
so much of the book ran in the weeks. About
seven eighths of the book ran in the weeks running
up to the election in the Washington Post. Weird long pieces.
I mean, my longest piece is thirteen thousand words, and
it was so powerful the effect, but for a very
(04:56):
small audience, because it was like the Washington Post and
behind a paywall, and it was pretty obvious these things
should They were a coherent hole and they should be collected.
But of course, having said that, no one had any
I did. Donald Trump was going to be the president
of the United States and be doing what he's doing
to the federal government where we wrote these things.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
In fact, in the Washington Post opinion series where the
essays in this new book originated, they received four times
the session's average readership. And you've said it was like,
the country is hungering for an explanation of how government works.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, where do you.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Think that hunger is coming from? And why do you
think the quote unquote bureaucracy, which is often said in
a very pejoradaed way, it's so misunderstood.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Well, so remind me to answer the second part of
that question, because that's the longer and interesting answer. But
the hunger in the first place, we just don't get
stories very many stories about the government, or when we
get them, they're in the form of some poor civil
servants hall in front of Congress to be ritually humiliated
for some mistake they made. And I do think I
(06:05):
don't know this is true, but I've been told it's
true that there has been just to kind of decline
in civics education in the country. Like the Civics course
you got in the eighth of the ninth grade is
not as widely taught anymore, are not taught in the
same way. So you know, just like how a bill
becomes a law, that kind of stuff just doesn't get
into kids' brains.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
We need Schullhouse rock part too.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, it's something like that. No, it's kind of true.
But the second part of this is like these people
who work in these jobs are one forbidden from promoting
themselves and they don't have time to do it anyway. Two,
they're really not the kind of people who tell their
own story. They're not self promoters. They're almost the opposite
(06:47):
of self promoters. They give you a lit'll tell you
a little anc though it's funny. When I went to
write that piece about the first the first deep dive
I did in a single person. Arthur Allen was his name,
the oceanographer of the Coast Guard. I called him up,
said I want to come talk to you about what
you've done. Without knowing really much about what he'd done,
spent three days with him, with his wife, his kids,
(07:09):
you know, interviewing people around him, three full days with him.
At the end of three days, I was driving back
to the airport and he calls my cell phone. He says, says, hey,
you're a writer. And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm a writer.
Well you think you know? I sit there with a
notepad for three days taking notes, and I know. I
said I was a writer when I called you. He says,
(07:30):
but my son says that like you've written books that
have become movies, like you're like big time. And I said, well,
don't know if I'm big time, but I am a writer.
And he says, you're going to write about this, and
I said, yeah, I'm I going to write about this.
What do you think I was doing there for three days?
And he said, I just thought you were really interested
in how objects drift, And I thought, this is the
mind of someone He's so different from like the investment
(07:53):
banker you go to interview. He's so oblivious, he's interested
in his expertise. He's very narrow, he's not thinking like
how he appears to the world. He's open to help
people who come to him for help, but not thinking
at all, like I was going to turn him into
some celebrity and didn't know what to do with it
or care that they're that way. So they don't project.
(08:16):
So someone has to go project them for us because
they won't do it themselves. And there's a built in
problem in the government. The politicians and I hate to say,
I hate to use that word as a pejorative, but
it is just true that people who are campaigning and
running for elective office find it very useful to be
negative about the civil service and to blame them for
(08:39):
their or when problems occur. But there's not really any
upside for giving them credit. It's like the politicians want
the credit. So the people who are junior class senior
class president types who are out there waiving at the crowds,
have no real interest in selling the mechanism of the government.
And I think we all kind of know, you know,
the government we sent in the back of our minds.
(09:00):
This government is doing something. You know, it's it's kind
of magical. You get you turn on the tap and
you get cold water you can drink. You know, that's
that doesn't just happen and it comes from like a
reservoir from three hundred miles away or that you know, Uh,
the weather is predictable seven days out. Used to be
not predictable at all. Ah, that happened. It just becomes
like the the infrastructure of our lives. And I think
(09:24):
until it's threatened, you just it's like your parents. Until
they're threatened, you just think, well, they're there, Thank God,
they're there. Maybe, but I'm not going to pay much
attention to them. But the minute it becomes like, oh crap,
they're going to take it away, even if it's just
a hint of that, people kind of wake up and go, oh, oh, oh,
I need maybe I need to know about this.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
You illuminated, Michael, why people don't appreciate the federal government,
why they often take it for granted. But it's even
worse than that. There's an enduring, an entrenched negative stereotype
in our culture about civil servants that they're stupid, and lazy,
as you describe it. How did that happen? I know
(10:06):
that they're not good at telling their stories or blowing
their own rams horns like politicians are. But where do
you think this negative perception comes from?
Speaker 2 (10:17):
I mean, I think it's a it's a it's like
a it's a complicated question to answer, but I mean,
most most obviously, they don't do the thing that we
value in this culture, which is make money. They don't.
They don't have they're not successful people. They're not famous people.
They're not you know, they're not there. So they don't
have that going for them. They're also they're vulnerable because
(10:41):
the enterprise they work for is most complicated enterprise ever
created on in the history of the university, the United
States government, and they're spending now seven trillion dollars a
year there, and they're bound to be problems. You know.
It's just sort of like they're bound to be mistakes made,
and when they're made, it's sort of it's sort of
like it's assumed no mistakes will be made, and when
(11:02):
they're made, they get exposed and ridiculed and all the rest.
You know, Why else is it this one? I mean,
you know, I haven't really thought too much about how
this why Ronald Reagan could roll in, you know, forty
five years ago or whatever it was fifty years ago
and say the most you know, dangerous words in the
English languages, I'm from the government and I'm here to
(11:22):
help you.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Didn't he also say that the government is the problem.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, and the government, you know, there's this fantasy you
take it away and everything's going to be better, And
the truth is, you don't have markets without the government,
you don't have an awful lot of our economic growth
is driven by government private partnerships. But what you all,
you know, this is part of the reason they're so
easy to beat up on is a lot of what
(11:49):
they're doing is prevention. Like a lot of what they're
doing is stopping things from happening. And when you stop
something from happening, you don't get credit. You get credit
when you come after the bad thing has happened. So
there's an awful lot of work that's out there, I
don't know, stopping someone from getting a bomb on a plane.
Who do you think is doing that? I can tell
you who's doing that. There's a lab called a Livermore
(12:12):
lab that's like forty miles from my house, where they
are constantly experimenting with different sort of chemicals and ingredients
to see what you might be able to make a
bottom of. And as they whenever they find something new,
they program those machines that you put your bag through
to detect those things. And you don't see any of it.
But if they weren't there, you would notice. You know,
the FAA right, your plane doesn't crash if it doesn't,
(12:35):
you know, air safety is a you know, a miracle
of modern life. It's the government. But you're not getting
credit for the plane not crashing, so a lot I
think that's also part of it. It's sort of easy
to beat up on them because there's a lot of
their work is preventive, a lot of it is just
keeping us safe. And as I say, they're just not
doing the thing that's celebrated in the culture, which is
(12:57):
make money.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Meanwhile, the administration, as you know, I've thought about you
often with these DOGE government cuts, but even before DOGE
was created, they have not only encouraged this stereotype as
bureaucrats or government workers being stupid and lazy and extraneous,
if you will, but they've turned it into something more sinister.
(13:21):
Let me give you a quote that jd Vance said
on a podcast in twenty twenty one. If I was
giving Trump one piece of advice, it's fire every single
mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,
and replace them with our people.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
So it's just such a misconception of who these people
are in the first place, because it's probably true that
the government workers generally probably tilt more left than right,
but their politics are very hard to predict. You'd be
surprised who they voted for, I think. But the bigger
point is most of what they're doing is so nonpartisan.
It's like it's it's stuff that the Congress has allocated
(14:04):
money for because it's problems that needed to be dealt with,
and they're dealing with them. And the list is like
endless of what these problems are. But you know, you
know about air safety, but like there's all this stuff
you don't see. Rural America, for example, is propped up
by the Agriculture Department. Like there wouldn't be firehouses and
schools and all they would It would be a wasteland
(14:26):
without the spending from the Agriculture Department. And that's something
you can argue that we shouldn't have, but that argument's
been had by Congress, and it's authorized. The money and
the people who are the people who are in there
working are they're just trying to execute tasks and and like,
how is it, how is it partisan to like make
sure nuclear weapons don't explode when they they they shouldn't explode.
(14:50):
It's just it's such a misapprehendsion of what that enterprise
is and what they're doing. It's interesting because what they're
doing is accusing the existing workforce of being essentially political,
like their deep state. They're out to get us, when
in fact that it's not who they are. But what
they're trying to do is turn it into something. It's
(15:12):
very political. It's out to get the other side. And
it's taking fifty thousand jobs and turning them from career
civil service jobs to essentially patronage jobs that the Trump
administration can appoint not based on expertise, but based on loyalty.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
How dangerous is that replacement in your view.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
It's dangerous on a couple of levels. It's very dangerous,
and it is one it's going to make the government
a lot less effective because you're replacing people who actually
know things with people who don't and their main qualification
is they're just loyal with Donald Trump. That's not a
good place to start when you're solving complicated problems. But
it's dangerous in another way that if you actually succeed
(15:56):
in turning the federal government into what Trump advance say,
it is, turning it into this political weapon, it's hard
to know. You know, it's from there to like no
democracy is a half step, and so it's dangerous on
that level too, and it'll have this knock on effect.
And this is the knock on effect of a lot
(16:16):
of Republican rhetoric is you know, you disable, you villainize
this enterprise that's there to serve us all, you make
it less effective at what it's supposed to do. And
then you could point to it and say, look how
ineffective it is, Like the problem is government. Well, no,
the problem is how you run the government. The problem
(16:37):
is in government.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
If you want to get smarter every morning with a
breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and
wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter
Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot Com. I'm
(17:08):
curious how you feel this kind of rhetoric, things like
weaponizing or demonizing the deep state, how that erodes the
public trust in our government and institutions in general.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
I mean, I'm trying to think of some equivalent. Where
can you think of a product or a service or
that is just all it gets is negative publicity, and
it's like there's like a publicity machine designed to undermine it,
and that's all people here. I mean, it's just there's
no question that public there is this reflexive public opinion,
(17:43):
especially on the right, but not just on the right,
that like, oh, it's just government's waste, government's fraud. So
this would attracted me to somebody in the first place,
is I don't have any big stake in government. I
just saw that wasn't true because I wanted around the
government and saw what was there. And what's what's what's
shocking about it is whatever people believe because of what
(18:06):
they've heard from casual this kind of casual loose talk.
The opposite is kind of true that if you're looking
for waste or fraud, you were so much more likely
to find it in a private sector company than you
are in a in a government agency, especially fraud like that,
(18:26):
that the places are on a hair trigger or alert
for like people stealing money. You can't you know, you
can't you when you're on Wall Street and you wanted
to get business, you could, you know, take people to
strip clubs and get them front row seats to watch
the Mets and all that stuff. You can't buy a
sandwich for someone who works in the federal government. That
it is. So it is like and there and all
(18:48):
around these places are watchdogs whose job is to prevent
money from being stolen. And in fact, the first people
the Trumpe administation fired were those watchdogs. So that tells
you something about how much they care, actually care about
the fraud. The waste is more complicated because it's true that,
like there are some ways government does things that if
(19:08):
you were starting from scratch, that's not how you do them.
And there is, for sure ways to go in and
make it work work somewhat better. But the way but
the way to when that in that case, the way
to go in is with an appreciation of why it
works the way it is, because you're just gonna end
up recreating with what was created. If you don't understand
why it got the way it was. It's like, there
are reasons, there are reasons. It's like there's analyst bureaucracy
(19:32):
around contracting. You know, it's to revent the fraud kind
of thing. And it's maddening how it's done because basically
there's no trust. You know, it's a low trust environment.
And in a low trust environment, it's a very inefficient environment.
When you got to sign pieces of paper to get
an extra box to take the paper clips, you're going
to be less efficient. And if you can just go
to the storeroom and take one. So there are problems there,
(19:54):
but a lot of the wasteful problems will rise from
the mistrust about the institution. It's been sown into the
public mind by this rhetoric. I mean, let me ask
you a question. You're asking me questions, but I want
to ask you a question. Is it not if you
just back away from it? Kind of weird that we're
in a democracy where we elected people to do stuff,
(20:16):
and these things that got done by the government. It's
not like some autocrat did it. We the people did it,
and that we view the these civil servants, the instruments
of our will, as somehow our enemies, somehow like insiders
trying to bring us down. It's a really odd thing
for in a democracy for people to feel that way
about their government. And anyway, I didn't have it, As
(20:40):
I said, I came into this, I didn't have any
particular view. I'm not like some screaming liberal. I like
people who make money and none of that. It was
just I could not believe like the heroism basically in
the civil service, could not believe the quality of the
people that were engaged in such critical stuff, like the
(21:04):
society falls apart if they're not there. And I started
pulling my hair out when I realized, like, oh, they've
been doing this for thirty years and all they've heard is,
you know, abuse from the outside. It just like there's
something untrue about this. So my question for you is,
how do you explain this, Like it just seems really odd.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
I think that government workers for as long as I
can remember, growing up in Arlington, Virginia, outside DC, where
a lot of people did work for the government, I
think there was an attitude that there was excess and
redundancy and inefficiency in the federal government. And I think
(21:49):
it's just been a stereotype that for whatever reason, has
been baked in yes to our national consciousness, and that's
but of course there are critical jobs. But I think
that there has always been the impression, Michael, that there
were extraneous jobs or jobs that weren't really necessary. And
(22:13):
I think the very word bureaucracy has gotten, you know,
has become a dirty word in the public's mind. And
with bureaucracy it means unnecessary levels of maloney that you
have to kind of get through. So I think all
those things have kind of come together to make people
(22:37):
feel fairly anti government. And I think to your point,
we haven't heard enough stories about civil servants. And I
also think there's something about having a job for life.
You know, this is all just kind of things that
when I was a kid growing up right outside DC,
like that some jobs are protected like tenure, when other
(23:01):
people are subjected to performance reviews, and there was a
feeling of a meritocracy. When you've got in the civil service,
you basically had a job for life. Yeah, I think
that probably explained some of the negative things that I've
heard about government workers.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Right, some of that's valid, and I can understand hostility
towards tenure. Basically they don't exactly have tenure. You can
fire a civil servant, you just have to have cause.
But I think at the I do think at the
bottom of this is some false kind of like false
ideas that people have in their heads about what goes
on inside the places and its relationship to the society.
(23:40):
So if you ask people that most I bet most
people say government just has been growing out of control.
For example, like it has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.
Now it's true, our deficits have gotten bigger and bigger
and bigger. That's not the big generals, it's trunk. It's
like the civil service, not the military. Fifty years ago
was two point three million workers. It's still two point
(24:02):
three million workers. The society is you know, forty percent
bigger or whatever. So in relationship to the society, it
is shrunk. So people can flate like government spending, which
is a different thing on the government workforce. That the
fact that Elon Musk, when he goes in to say
to eliminate, to reduce, to cut two trillion dollars out
(24:25):
of the budget deficit, he said, and eliminate all this inefficiency,
finds himself cutting so he finds the cutting in such
a this he cutting just the civil service. But it's
such a small sliver of the actual spending that has
almost no effect. I mean, eighty six percent of government
spending is either interest payments on the debt, defense, or entitlements,
(24:47):
So it's only fourteen percent of the budget that's these
people anyway. So but that nobody says, oh, wait, he's
doing he's trying to cut a big chunk out of
the pie, but he's confined himself to a little slipper
of the pie. This is impossible, it will never happen. Instead,
people cheer and say, yeah, he's getting rid of all
of that, and we're going to get rid of our deficits.
(25:09):
It's just it's, I mean, we're ignorant. So here's another
answer to your question, like, how did we come to
this past? Why are these people so easily distorted by
the political process so that people think of them differently
than they actually are. The answer is, we've been afforded
(25:33):
that luxury that we've lived through a very long period
without great existential risk to ourselves. It hasn't been all
peace and prosperity, but by world historic standards, a lot
of peace and prosperity. We don't wake up thinking our
society is about to be invaded by barbarians or we're
all going to die because of a pandemic or whatever.
(25:55):
So we can afford to take the parents for granted.
You know, it's like we've been safe for so long
and we don't it's not till something really bad happens
that people don't realize why we needed this thing. And
what I worry is that's what has to happen, Like
something really bad is going to happen, and people are, oh,
that's why we had the government'll bring it back, And
(26:17):
it's a shame it has to come to that. And
the point of the book is, like, you know, just
read this seven random profiles from inside the government and
see if you can you can you can preserve that
bigotry you have about the civil servant, See if you can't, like,
see if you can avoid opening up your mind to
the possibility that this is actually a useful enterprise.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
I want to talk to you about some of those essays,
and particularly the person you profile. But since you mentioned
Elon Musk, I have wondered, Michael, how you have felt
given the fifth risk, and given your interests in profiling
the federal workforce, how you have felt watching Elon Musk
(26:59):
and his so called doge Bros go in and just
wholesale fire tens of thousands of people.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Right in the very beginning, there was a little part
of me that was hopeful. And the little part of
me that was hopeful was it is true that the
government has been kind of starved young talent for a
long time. People, young bright, young people have not been
encouraged to go into government service, and particularly in the
tech world, because you could get paid so much better
(27:31):
just going and work for a Silicon Valley startup. And
the idea that he might channel some of this talent
into the government and actually fix some old and broken systems,
that was a I thought, maybe there's hope there, like,
but then when then they started doing what they were doing,
which is like cutting agencies, you know, like without explanation exactly,
and going in and randomly cutting seemingly big chunks of
(27:54):
the federal workforce without a whole lot of explanation about why,
except to say that they were cutting fat out of
the out of the budget. But so then I became
puzzled because what they said they were doing was clearly
not what they were doing. The first thing they said
they were doing was going after fraud. And when they
got rid of all the inspector generals at the agencies,
those people, they're not deep state bureaucrats who are there
(28:16):
to help fraud happen. They're there to point out fraud
to Congress. They are the refs, the cops on the beat.
So they got rid all the cops. So that's not
what you do. If you're trying to catch the crooks,
you don't get rid of all the cocks and then
the cops who know the most. So it was an
odd thing to do. So I thought, they're not going
after fraud, that's not what this is about. And when
(28:37):
with a waist, it was like, are you know the fat?
They were dealing with such a small part of the government.
They were never going to make that much of a dent.
So it was not about that they're not going to
like get the bud get rid of the budget deaf
as they're doing what they're doing. They're not going to
cut two trillion dollars like they claim they might. They
probably got to cut a hundred billion dollars it's like
they're dealing with rounding errors and so like, if they're
not doing what they say they're doing, or they're doing
(28:59):
it so badly, they might as well not be But
I don't think they're that dumb. Like, what is the motive?
And so far as I can tell, the motive is
to turn this enterprise that's supposed to be serving the
entire society and it's filled with these exquisite human beings
doing extremely complicated and important things. Is to turn this
(29:20):
into an instrument of personal political power for Elon Musk
and Donald Trump and so turn it into something that
just doesn't get in their way whenever they do whatever
they want to do, whatever that might be. And it's
hard to know how the size is going to react
to this, because it's been told for so long that
this government is so awful they mighty might just let
him get away with it. I'm not sure of that.
(29:43):
But so now I'm just sitting watching, like how are
we going to react? How upset are people going to be?
How much of a stand are they going to take?
Will Republicans in Congress have the nerve to stand up
and actually argue against this when they know it's wrong
or bad, and I just don't no. But I've become,
you know, in the course of the first six weeks
(30:03):
of the Trump administration, pretty cynical about them because I
don't see a whole lot of reason to it. Like
I don't see them doing things that I think, oh,
that's going to make us stronger. I see them doing
things that they're going to make them more powerful, but
at our expense. And I have this feeling. It's a
visceral feeling. I have a feelings. It's a feeling you
(30:26):
have when the risk in your life has just gone up.
It's a feeling that like, oh, we're all always kind
of playing Russian Roulette. They're always risks, but they're just
sticking Willy Nelly more bullets in the chamber of the gun.
That and we're now playing Russian Roulette with greater risk
of fatality. And I feel that So that's agitating because
(30:48):
it seems like wholly unnecessary to be inflicting this risk
on the population. You know, you go in and you
start firing air traffic controllers, or you start firing people
whose job it is to monitor the the cleanliness of
the wader, or you fire people whose job it is
overseas to monitor and control disease that might find its
way to our shores, or you fire the nuclear the
(31:10):
people in charge of the nuclear weapons. I mean, sometimes
they've done this and then they've said, oh, we made
a mistake and we're going to bring them back. But
there's been an awful lot of mucking around with the
mechanisms for controlling existential risk, and that makes just makes
me really uneasy. Like so I don't don't I don't
really feel good about it. I wrote a note. I mean,
I don't know where you got it. I wrote elon muskin.
(31:30):
Note said, like, if you're so sure this is right,
I'd love to come to sit and watch and you
can explain to me why this is. This is smart.
I've spent a lot of time inside this institution, a
lot more than you. Happy to come and like talk
to you about it. And I didn't get a response.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
I was going to ask if he wrote you back,
but you just told me it seems like the whole
tech adage of moving fast and breaking things right, being
complete disruptors is what is at play here. Well, what
strikes me is it doesn't seem that this is being
done reducing government in any kind of thoughtful way, and
(32:07):
if anything, it is so insulting and demoralizing and demeaning
to some of these public servants who have dedicated their
lives to their area of expertise. And not surprisingly I
just read that many of them are dealing with some
serious mental health issues. They're also getting abused online, and
(32:28):
these are people who were not seeking out attention. I
don't understand why this is being done with a sledgehammer
and not a scalpel, but maybe this is just not
Elon Musk's m O.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Why it's being done with such malice is that it's malicious, right,
and there is there's a there's a point to there's
a point to be made here about like his MO,
how he how he operates. I'm sure most people think
Elon Musk is like an incredibly smart guy, and in
some ways, I'm sure he is incredibly smart, but that
(33:03):
doesn't mean he's like universally smart, doesn't mean he's like
good at everything. And he's actually not demonstrated that he's
all that good at managing a large institution. He's really
good at products like peddling products. He's but he looked
he took Twitter, which was, you know, whatever it was,
(33:26):
it was a successful issue business. He bought it, and
he's reduced its value by more than half. I mean,
anybody who invested alongside of him has lost sixty percent
of their money. And he did it much the same
way he ran, and he came into this existing institution.
I'm so smart. All you all are fired unless you
can prove that you belong here. Humiliated everybody, and that
(33:48):
doesn't seem to have worked out very well. And I'd
like to hear You're not hearing any of these voices
because everybody's scared of Donald Trump. But I'd love to
hear with people who are genuinely gifted running big, complicated institutions,
like people who run big corporations. Think of this as
a management style. It's not something you see in successful
(34:08):
it's successful big companies. The CEO doesn't run insulting the employees,
telling them how valueless they are and all the rest.
It's that's that's not historically been like a recipe for success.
Why would it work here? And on top of it,
maybe that maybe in some weird corporation might work, but
(34:29):
it's definitely not going to work in a workforce where
you can't actually pay people very much like that. They're
working there. They're not there for the money, they're not
there for the fame. They're there if they're the best
people for the mission. And so if you're going to
come in and like undermine their sense of selves and
undermine the mission, I mean, that's just got to be
just especially toxic in a in the government environment. So
(34:51):
I think, you know, I suspect that it's going to
all end so badly that we'll look back and say,
how do we let that happen? And we'll go to
fix the things he broke. But you never know, because
we have a world where people believe all kinds of
stuff that isn't true, and people will be being told
that this was a big success even if it's a
big failure. My biggest fear in a funny way in
(35:14):
the back of my head right now, and I'm thinking about,
like what if I write something else, what purpose would
it serve. My theory is the bad thing happens because
of something they've disabled in government. The mechanism for preventing
the bad thing, whatever the bad thing is, was disabled,
and the bad thing happened, and it can be traced
(35:34):
by a rational person directly back to what Elon Musk
and Donald Trump have just done, but that after the
bad thing happens, a narrative of war follows and their
side gets to make up all kinds of facts and
say that, no, we didn't have anything to do with
the bad thing. The bad thing was the response with
the responsibility of the deep state, which we haven't rooted out,
(35:56):
or however they frame it. I'm trying to think, how
do you vent them from being able to do that?
How do you make sure that when the bad thing happens,
everybody understands it was their fault. I am groping towards
like what the next literary response is to this this book.
It's funny. The timing of this book is so funny,
just because like if everybody read it, you put it
(36:16):
in the hands of just red state people and made
them read it, and so you can think whatever you
think about it, but you got to read it. I
do think a lot of people would say, yeah, I know,
good people work in government. Yeah it's not as simple
as like it, but it's just like that's not what
they hear every day. And so I do think there's
some hope of changing shifting the narrative a bit.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Michael, I'm wondering if you have found it hypocritical that
Elon must praises private sector led in a but a
lot of these breakthroughs come from NASA and the Department
of Energy, and he couldn't do what he does without them.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
It's sinister because it's not just typic critical. He's claiming
credit for stuff he doesn't deserve credit for. Not that
he doesn't deserve credit for some stuff, but like he says,
he was the founder of Tesla and the founder of PayPal,
and he wasn't someone else founded the company. He came in. Tesla.
Isn't just the triumph of the private sector that Tesla
(37:31):
does not get off the ground without a four hundred
and fifty million dollar loan, our loan guarantee from the
Department of Energy. At the time, he said this saved us,
and other people at Tesla said we just wouldn't exist
without this. It was like a little bit of a
moonshot technology, and the Department of Energy has a little
has two a couple of programs that back moonshot technologies,
(37:54):
and they've had astonishing success with it, and it's true
of a lot of our economy. It's that it especially
a lot of innovation, it starts with some public private partnership.
So to try to pitch people on the idea this
is all a bunch of smart guys in Silicon Valley
who'd be even who'd be doing even greater things if
the government wasn't in their way, is a complete misreading
(38:18):
of what has happened. But also it's very self serving.
It's like, now I'm on top, I'm gonna I'm going
to disable this mechanism for like people coming up from
beneath me to challenge me, and and I'm gonna I'm
a swarm around telling the story that I'm basically responsible
for all this.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Not a big fan of Blon, must are you?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I mean less and less? So I didn't have a view.
I didn't I wasn't born with the animist towards him.
But I think he's been very, very bad for the
country and any It's just to tell when someone is
lying all the time, it's just like when they're putting
lies out constantly, it's just that this this underlying rot
(39:01):
and they'll they're all these lies about what they've achieved
in the government when they haven't achieved them. There are
lies about other people and the other thing's offensive about him.
He's a bully. You know, He's got this platform and
he'll and he can turn his fans against anybody at
any time, and does it routinely, you know, outing civil
(39:23):
servants by name disgusting. I mean, it's just disgusting. And
so I think, you know, I think he's a bully,
and I don't react. I just don't react very well
to bullies.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Getting back to your book, Who Is Government, The Untold
Story of Public Service? You, as you mentioned, got a
number of great writers to profile different government workers, and
you picked someone named Christopher Mark. You met him, I guess,
via something called the Sammy's when you described as the
Oscars for Public Service. Out of the five hundred fifty
(39:56):
names on that list, what made you stop in your
tracks when came across Chris Mark?
Speaker 2 (40:02):
So, Chrismak cannot want any award. When I met him,
it was just a list of nominees, right, And what
made me stop was he was the one nominee where
there was some trace of personal information, some trace of
a human being that the way the nominations were laid out.
It was a couple of sentences, and it was like
Joe Schmoe from the FBI discovered and disrupted a child
(40:27):
sex trafficking ring. And then they moved on not telling
you anything about Joe Schmoe. And it got the Christopher
Mark and it said, Christopher Mark inside the Department of
Labor has solved the problem of coal miner whos collapsing
on the heads of coal miners, a problem which killed
fifty thousand coal miners in the last century. And then
it said Christopher Mark is a former coal miner. And
(40:50):
I thought there's a story here. I mean, there's probably
a story everywhere, but like, how does a former coal
miner get himself in the position of solving was probably
a really tech and a complicated problem. And I had
assumed that, like he had a personal mode, he did
have personal motivation, but I assumed the wrong one. I
assuming he like grew up in West Virginia and his
dad had been killed by a falling roof for something
(41:11):
like that. So that's what got me to him. But
then the story ended up being wildly different and even
more interesting than I expected.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. He wasn't from
West Virginia at all, No, he was.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
He grew up in an upper middle class family, child
of a Princeton professor, and had rebelled against his father
kind of it was a kind of lefty rebellion against
his bourgeois father in the late sixties early seventies and
set out to become be a working man rather than
go to Harvard or Princeton, which he could have done.
(41:47):
And what then I find all this out like the
first thirty minutes, and this just blew me away. His
dad had become famous as a civil engineer for building
technology that analyzed kept the roofs of Gothic cathedrals from falling.
And he was so good at it, I mean Robert
Marcus's name, you can go. There were like TV shows
(42:07):
made about it. But he's so good that he could
like predict where in the Sharps Cathedral the stones would
be crumbling because the designers made a mistake. And so
it was like he was answering question everybody has who
goes to those gorgeous buildings, like what keeps the roof off?
And the son said, put a middle finger in the
air of the father when he was seventeen years old,
(42:28):
left home, went away and started working in factories and
warehouses and ends up working in a coal mine, thinking
I'm not going to have anything to do with what
my father did, and then realizes the roof step fall
and killed me and goes and he's very clever, and
the intellectual journey's wild. But how he figures out how
(42:48):
to keep roofs from collapsing on cole Myers is his
own story. But what's even wilder is when I get
him and I hear this story, I say, wow, you
rebelled against your dad and then you kind of like
went in your dad's line of work. You all about
it keeps the roof up, and he goes, that is
not true. What I did had nothing to do with
my father. She was like, nope, no, no, And I said,
this is a character. He's got a little bit of himself.
(43:11):
He doesn't fully understand. And I know he's great. I mean,
he was really great fun to write about.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
And theirs similar stories are very inspiring stories by all
these other writers in the book. Can you just tell
us some of your favorites.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
It would take a long time to go there all
of them, but I'll tell you who the writers are,
because it's an illustrious class. It's John Lanchester, Dave Eggers,
Sarah val Casey Spp, Geraldine Brooks, and camal Bell and
Casey Sepp in the New Yorker young writer. She's going
to be very famous one day. She's a little famous already.
She I'll tell you her story. She found a guy
(43:51):
inside the Department of Veterans Affairs. I don't know if
he's still there. They've goutted it, but his name is
Ron Walters, and Alters had walked into a job that
is a kind of sacred duty. It's caring for the
national cemeteries. It's it's providing the experience for the families
(44:11):
of veterans when they bury their dead. And when he
comes into it, and this is like twenty years ago,
the customer approval rating is not great. It's kind of eh.
And he sets about attacking the problem with such panache
that kind of a decade. In the surveys that the
(44:34):
Universe in Michigan does of customer satisfaction across the economy,
and they measure satisfaction of government agencies as well as
with like private companies, so Amazon and the Department of
Agriculture is in these surveys. By the time Round Walters
is done, this National Cemetery's burial program has the highest
customer satisfaction of empty institution in our country. And nobody
(44:57):
knows who he is. He doesn't he's not out there
telling people how to manage businesses because he's a genius manager,
though he obviously is. All he cares about is this
sacred duty we have to our veterans. It's a moving story.
I mean, it's like who this guy is and why
he did what he did, and then he did what
he did and all I mean, I think she just
kind of scratched the surface in some places, because I
(45:18):
do think that the Harvard Business School should go figure
out what he did, because it's an amazing transformation like
the private, public, whatever sector to do that with a
very delicate problem. But you never hear about it that happened,
and you never hear about it, Like if that had
happened in one of Elon Musk's company or got amazing
(45:41):
Donald Trump's companies, Donald Trump would be telling you how
he took the company from here to there, and you'd
be celebrating Donald Trump as a manager, and you know,
but that's different personality.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
I'm wondering if you're hoping that this book will inspire
more people at this terrible time for government workers to
become public servants, because even now, people younger than thirty
represent only seven percent of a full time civil service,
despite being twenty percent of the overall US labor force,
(46:16):
and sixty eight percent say they'd never consider pursuing a
non military federal job.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
Yeah, now you wonder why, right, because all they hear
is what they hear. So this is what I hope for.
I hope that young people read the book or read
these stories somehow, some way, and they don't rule out
the possibility that they'll be called to serve. That they
will develop their skills and whatever feel they choose. But
(46:43):
if there comes a time when those skills clearly are
needed by the country, they don't just turn up their
nose at the federal government because they think the federal
government is all a waste. That they realize it's just
the opposite, that this is the place where you can
have the greatest impact with those You won't make a
lot of money, and then you won't just make money,
(47:03):
but you will change lives save lives, and if that
idea is still kind of alive, there's hope. You know,
it's like and it is alive. It's very clearly alive.
These are role models we're writing about. And it wasn't
rigged that way. It wasn't like I didn't tell the writers,
go find a role model. I said, go find a story.
And this same kind of story just kept presenting itself
(47:25):
because it's there, you know, It's just it's right there
on the surface, waiting to be described.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
You wrote a book called Going Infinite, the story of
billionaire Sam Bankman Free who's now serving time, and I'm
curious how you feel about his latest interview with Tucker
Carlson and reports that their efforts from his family and
allies to receive a pardon from Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
I mean, if you had to ask me the moment
Trump was elected what the Bankman Freeds were going to do,
I'd have told you they're going to seek a pardon
from Donald Trump. That doesn't that part doesn't surprise me.
And there's even a kind of a weird sort of
narrative path to it because the judge that's sentence Sam
Bangman freed to twenty five years in jail. It was
(48:10):
also the judge in the Egen Carroll case, so there
will be some natural hostility Trump would feel towards that judge.
It's sort of the rule in life that wherever Sam
Bangman freed is, even when it's jail, gets way more
interesting because he's there than it ever was before. So
I was wondering when he went to jail, like, what's
(48:31):
going to happen here? It's going to generate story because
everywhere he goes he generates story, and we're kind of
spoiled for choice. Now he's given secret interviews to Tucker
Carlson from his prison cell without the Bureau of Prisons knowing.
He's got p Diddy in the next bunk. Luigi passed
through for a nano second. It's like, I mean, his
(48:51):
life is like a sitcom wherever he goes, and I
just think it's like, that's just who he is. It's
what attracted to me, me to him as a subject.
In the first it's like where we win. It was funny,
but there is some if this happens. There is some
irony in the fact that the idea of Trump pardoning
(49:12):
a guy who is trying to pay him five billion
dollars a year not to run for president. Sam Bangfree
was trying to pay Donald Trump not to run for
president four years ago, and that Donald Trump getting him
out of jail. I mean, somehow that feels like the
end of.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
A story, right, at least a Michael Lewis story.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
The other question I wanted to ask you quickly and
then I'll let you go. What do you think of
Jeff Bezos's new attitude toward the opinion pages of the
Washington Post. Your essays originally appeared in those pages, and
now he has said that alternative points of view that
aren't focused on I guess liberties right, personal liberties and
(49:55):
free Marcus will not be welcome at the paper. There
are other places to read those kinds of things. What
do you think of Jeff Bezos's attitude now, a new
edict towards opinion writers at the Washington Post.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
It's gonna kill interest in the Washington Post. I mean,
it already has. And the editor of this series, David Shipley,
left because of this decision of Bezos'. So I think it.
I could see why he did it. I can see
why people feel they need to suck up to Donald Trump.
(50:31):
I don't. I don't think this was it's it's it's
a particular shame in this case because I think I
kind of like Jeff Bezos. I think he's a good guy.
I mean, just as a guy. I don't feel the
way I feel towards Elon Musk towards Jeff Bezos. But
the thing that's so disturbing is that there are not
many places in the country where if you write something,
(50:53):
all the Democratic legislators and all the Republican legislators read it.
They don't all read the New York Times. They the
media has gotten so polarized. But the Washington Post still
had this kind of like it was the industry towns newspaper,
and you could get to everybody through it. And if
you had a party that the Washington at the Washington Post,
(51:16):
Republican senators would turn up. You know, it wasn't it
Obviously it leaned left, but it was it was a
way to speak to the the industry, to the politicians.
And he's now abandoned. It's not. Now it isn't and
now it's it's lost, it's lost. Its appeal to me
is a place to write. I won't write. I'm not
going to. I have a piece that the last piece
of this book appears on Thursday in the Post. It's
(51:39):
another long piece about a civil servant. But I wrote
it a couple of months ago, and I won't write
for it in its current incarnation.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
Again, I'm sure a lot of government workers, whether they're
still employed or have gotten the acts, will be so
grateful for this book and for someone actually celebrating the
work that they do if they get it.
Speaker 2 (52:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that wasn't the real purpose in
my mind. The purpose in my mind was to sort
of attack the stereotype, like I just to make it,
make people's minds more interesting, Like get off this kind
of weird, this weird picture you have of the federal
bureaucrat and get to something a little more real. That
was the goal. But one side effect maybe makes people
(52:25):
feel better, that would be all right.
Speaker 1 (52:27):
Well. The book is called Who Is Government? The untol
Story of Public Service, and Michael, it really is kind
of an addendum to your previous book, The Fifth Risk,
which paints a very different picture of the men and
women in our federal workforce. I always love talking to
you Michael, Thank you, Thank you, Katie, thanks for listening. Everyone.
(52:59):
If you have a question for me, a subject you
want us to cover, or you want to share your
thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world, reach out
send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to
hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia
and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kuric,
(53:19):
and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and
our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller
composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call,
go to the description in the podcast app, or visit
(53:40):
us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me
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wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric, and this is next question.
I love talking with Michael Lewis. He has this incredible
ability to zoom in on one person's story and from
there reveals something much bigger about our culture. His books
leave you seeing the world differently, and his books about
(00:24):
federal workers are no exception. So why has the federal
government gotten such a bad rap? Why are the workers
often maligned even demonized? After all, they're described with words
like the deep state and the swamp. Michael Lewis feels
very differently after writing about a group of these civil servants,
first in The Fifth Risks and now in a new
(00:47):
book of essays called Who Is Government? This time Lewis
and a powerhouse lineup of writers turn their attention to
people who are some of the unsung heroes of our
society actually making government work, even though Elon Musk and
his posse of doge dudes made beg to differ. Here's
(01:07):
my conversation with Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis, you must have
a crystal ball, because Who Is Government? The untold story
of public service could not be more timely. Now I
know this is a continuation of sorts of your twenty
eighteen book called The Fifth Risk. You examined the transition
(01:30):
and political appointments of the first Trump administration, But what
made you decide to do another deep dive into the
federal government?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So there are two reasons. The good literary argument was
at the end of The Fifth Risk, I had to
go back and write it afterward for the paperback, and
I thought to myself that I'd done a lot to
describe the functions of government in that book, but I
had not really dwell gone deep on a person really,
and I thought might be fun to just go deep
(01:59):
on one of our old bureaucrats. And I basically picked
a name out of a jar. I mean, it's a
long story how I picked the guy, but it was
just it was kind of random, and the story. He
ended up being an oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search
and Rescue Department who had had this quite dramatic encounter
with the death of a young woman and her and
her daughter that it caught, I mean, it was avoidable.
(02:23):
Had they under the Coastguard understood how objects drifted at sea,
they kind of knew where they had capsized in the
Testapeake Bay. They knew like how the currents were and stuff,
but they were upside down on a sailboat and nobody
had ever measured how a sailboat drifted at sea. This guy,
my subject guard Allen, was so disturbed by the fact
that they these two people died because they didn't know
(02:44):
how the object had drifted since they discovered they were gone,
that he went and created basically a whole science of
how objects drifted sea. And it was it was such
a he was such an amazing story. I mean, it's
a movie his story that I thought, like, if I
ever come back to this, I want to come back
to the people, because because the stereotype of the of
(03:05):
the bureaucrat or whatever you are, the deep state or
whatever you want to call him, he was such a
He was a mission driven, selfless giver of a person
who was also ingenious in how he'd solved a critical
problem that has saved thousands of lives. So I thought,
if I ever come back to this, I'm gonna see
what more of this there is in our government. So
(03:27):
that was the first the literary reason. It is like
this material here because the people, the way people think
of these people, they don't they're faceless. They don't put
a face to them, so they're easy to knock around
in when you're by politicians, by media, by whoever. Uh.
The second reason was I was just astonished after especially
after Trump won and then neglect of the federal government
(03:50):
during that administration, that the Democrats never offered a full
throated like defense or even an explanation of like where
are taxpayer dollars? Go, like what is it actually doing?
And who are these people? That they never kind of
came out and said, like, there's a reason we have
this government. So no one ever sold the government. So
(04:13):
I thought like there was so there are all these
stories that just didn't get told. So the idea, So
I thought, like the world needs to understand some of
these stories, and so they don't think it's just like
Michael Lewis bloviating with his views of government, blah blah blah.
I'm going to pick six other writers and it's not
going to just be me. It's going to be seven
really distinctive personalities on the page, and I'm going to
(04:35):
just like drop them into the government, say find a story,
could you know, find a story and write up and
so much of the book ran in the weeks. About
seven eighths of the book ran in the weeks running
up to the election in the Washington Post. Weird long pieces.
I mean, my longest piece is thirteen thousand words, and
it was so powerful the effect, but for a very
(04:56):
small audience, because it was like the Washington Post and
behind a paywall, and it was pretty obvious these things
should They were a coherent hole and they should be collected.
But of course, having said that, no one had any
I did. Donald Trump was going to be the president
of the United States and be doing what he's doing
to the federal government where we wrote these things.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
In fact, in the Washington Post opinion series where the
essays in this new book originated, they received four times
the session's average readership. And you've said it was like,
the country is hungering for an explanation of how government works.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, where do you.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Think that hunger is coming from? And why do you
think the quote unquote bureaucracy, which is often said in
a very pejoradaed way, it's so misunderstood.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Well, so remind me to answer the second part of
that question, because that's the longer and interesting answer. But
the hunger in the first place, we just don't get
stories very many stories about the government, or when we
get them, they're in the form of some poor civil
servants hall in front of Congress to be ritually humiliated
for some mistake they made. And I do think I
(06:05):
don't know this is true, but I've been told it's
true that there has been just to kind of decline
in civics education in the country. Like the Civics course
you got in the eighth of the ninth grade is
not as widely taught anymore, are not taught in the
same way. So you know, just like how a bill
becomes a law, that kind of stuff just doesn't get
into kids' brains.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
We need Schullhouse rock part too.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, it's something like that. No, it's kind of true.
But the second part of this is like these people
who work in these jobs are one forbidden from promoting
themselves and they don't have time to do it anyway. Two,
they're really not the kind of people who tell their
own story. They're not self promoters. They're almost the opposite
(06:47):
of self promoters. They give you a lit'll tell you
a little anc though it's funny. When I went to
write that piece about the first the first deep dive
I did in a single person. Arthur Allen was his name,
the oceanographer of the Coast Guard. I called him up,
said I want to come talk to you about what
you've done. Without knowing really much about what he'd done,
spent three days with him, with his wife, his kids,
(07:09):
you know, interviewing people around him, three full days with him.
At the end of three days, I was driving back
to the airport and he calls my cell phone. He says, says, hey,
you're a writer. And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm a writer.
Well you think you know? I sit there with a
notepad for three days taking notes, and I know. I
said I was a writer when I called you. He says,
(07:30):
but my son says that like you've written books that
have become movies, like you're like big time. And I said, well,
don't know if I'm big time, but I am a writer.
And he says, you're going to write about this, and
I said, yeah, I'm I going to write about this.
What do you think I was doing there for three days?
And he said, I just thought you were really interested
in how objects drift, And I thought, this is the
mind of someone He's so different from like the investment
(07:53):
banker you go to interview. He's so oblivious, he's interested
in his expertise. He's very narrow, he's not thinking like
how he appears to the world. He's open to help
people who come to him for help, but not thinking
at all, like I was going to turn him into
some celebrity and didn't know what to do with it
or care that they're that way. So they don't project.
(08:16):
So someone has to go project them for us because
they won't do it themselves. And there's a built in
problem in the government. The politicians and I hate to say,
I hate to use that word as a pejorative, but
it is just true that people who are campaigning and
running for elective office find it very useful to be
negative about the civil service and to blame them for
(08:39):
their or when problems occur. But there's not really any
upside for giving them credit. It's like the politicians want
the credit. So the people who are junior class senior
class president types who are out there waiving at the crowds,
have no real interest in selling the mechanism of the government.
And I think we all kind of know, you know,
the government we sent in the back of our minds.
(09:00):
This government is doing something. You know, it's it's kind
of magical. You get you turn on the tap and
you get cold water you can drink. You know, that's
that doesn't just happen and it comes from like a
reservoir from three hundred miles away or that you know, Uh,
the weather is predictable seven days out. Used to be
not predictable at all. Ah, that happened. It just becomes
like the the infrastructure of our lives. And I think
(09:24):
until it's threatened, you just it's like your parents. Until
they're threatened, you just think, well, they're there, Thank God,
they're there. Maybe, but I'm not going to pay much
attention to them. But the minute it becomes like, oh crap,
they're going to take it away, even if it's just
a hint of that, people kind of wake up and go, oh, oh, oh,
I need maybe I need to know about this.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
You illuminated, Michael, why people don't appreciate the federal government,
why they often take it for granted. But it's even
worse than that. There's an enduring, an entrenched negative stereotype
in our culture about civil servants that they're stupid, and lazy,
as you describe it. How did that happen? I know
(10:06):
that they're not good at telling their stories or blowing
their own rams horns like politicians are. But where do
you think this negative perception comes from?
Speaker 2 (10:17):
I mean, I think it's a it's a it's like
a it's a complicated question to answer, but I mean,
most most obviously, they don't do the thing that we
value in this culture, which is make money. They don't.
They don't have they're not successful people. They're not famous people.
They're not you know, they're not there. So they don't
have that going for them. They're also they're vulnerable because
(10:41):
the enterprise they work for is most complicated enterprise ever
created on in the history of the university, the United
States government, and they're spending now seven trillion dollars a
year there, and they're bound to be problems. You know.
It's just sort of like they're bound to be mistakes made,
and when they're made, it's sort of it's sort of
like it's assumed no mistakes will be made, and when
(11:02):
they're made, they get exposed and ridiculed and all the rest.
You know, Why else is it this one? I mean,
you know, I haven't really thought too much about how
this why Ronald Reagan could roll in, you know, forty
five years ago or whatever it was fifty years ago
and say the most you know, dangerous words in the
English languages, I'm from the government and I'm here to
(11:22):
help you.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Didn't he also say that the government is the problem.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, and the government, you know, there's this fantasy you
take it away and everything's going to be better, And
the truth is, you don't have markets without the government,
you don't have an awful lot of our economic growth
is driven by government private partnerships. But what you all,
you know, this is part of the reason they're so
easy to beat up on is a lot of what
(11:49):
they're doing is prevention. Like a lot of what they're
doing is stopping things from happening. And when you stop
something from happening, you don't get credit. You get credit
when you come after the bad thing has happened. So
there's an awful lot of work that's out there, I
don't know, stopping someone from getting a bomb on a plane.
Who do you think is doing that? I can tell
you who's doing that. There's a lab called a Livermore
(12:12):
lab that's like forty miles from my house, where they
are constantly experimenting with different sort of chemicals and ingredients
to see what you might be able to make a
bottom of. And as they whenever they find something new,
they program those machines that you put your bag through
to detect those things. And you don't see any of it.
But if they weren't there, you would notice. You know,
the FAA right, your plane doesn't crash if it doesn't,
(12:35):
you know, air safety is a you know, a miracle
of modern life. It's the government. But you're not getting
credit for the plane not crashing, so a lot I
think that's also part of it. It's sort of easy
to beat up on them because there's a lot of
their work is preventive, a lot of it is just
keeping us safe. And as I say, they're just not
doing the thing that's celebrated in the culture, which is
(12:57):
make money.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Meanwhile, the administration, as you know, I've thought about you
often with these DOGE government cuts, but even before DOGE
was created, they have not only encouraged this stereotype as
bureaucrats or government workers being stupid and lazy and extraneous,
if you will, but they've turned it into something more sinister.
(13:21):
Let me give you a quote that jd Vance said
on a podcast in twenty twenty one. If I was
giving Trump one piece of advice, it's fire every single
mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,
and replace them with our people.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
So it's just such a misconception of who these people
are in the first place, because it's probably true that
the government workers generally probably tilt more left than right,
but their politics are very hard to predict. You'd be
surprised who they voted for, I think. But the bigger
point is most of what they're doing is so nonpartisan.
It's like it's it's stuff that the Congress has allocated
(14:04):
money for because it's problems that needed to be dealt with,
and they're dealing with them. And the list is like
endless of what these problems are. But you know, you
know about air safety, but like there's all this stuff
you don't see. Rural America, for example, is propped up
by the Agriculture Department. Like there wouldn't be firehouses and
schools and all they would It would be a wasteland
(14:26):
without the spending from the Agriculture Department. And that's something
you can argue that we shouldn't have, but that argument's
been had by Congress, and it's authorized. The money and
the people who are the people who are in there
working are they're just trying to execute tasks and and like,
how is it, how is it partisan to like make
sure nuclear weapons don't explode when they they they shouldn't explode.
(14:50):
It's just it's such a misapprehendsion of what that enterprise
is and what they're doing. It's interesting because what they're
doing is accusing the existing workforce of being essentially political,
like their deep state. They're out to get us, when
in fact that it's not who they are. But what
they're trying to do is turn it into something. It's
(15:12):
very political. It's out to get the other side. And
it's taking fifty thousand jobs and turning them from career
civil service jobs to essentially patronage jobs that the Trump
administration can appoint not based on expertise, but based on loyalty.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
How dangerous is that replacement in your view.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
It's dangerous on a couple of levels. It's very dangerous,
and it is one it's going to make the government
a lot less effective because you're replacing people who actually
know things with people who don't and their main qualification
is they're just loyal with Donald Trump. That's not a
good place to start when you're solving complicated problems. But
it's dangerous in another way that if you actually succeed
(15:56):
in turning the federal government into what Trump advance say,
it is, turning it into this political weapon, it's hard
to know. You know, it's from there to like no
democracy is a half step, and so it's dangerous on
that level too, and it'll have this knock on effect.
And this is the knock on effect of a lot
(16:16):
of Republican rhetoric is you know, you disable, you villainize
this enterprise that's there to serve us all, you make
it less effective at what it's supposed to do. And
then you could point to it and say, look how
ineffective it is, Like the problem is government. Well, no,
the problem is how you run the government. The problem
(16:37):
is in government.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
If you want to get smarter every morning with a
breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and
wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter
Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot Com. I'm
(17:08):
curious how you feel this kind of rhetoric, things like
weaponizing or demonizing the deep state, how that erodes the
public trust in our government and institutions in general.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
I mean, I'm trying to think of some equivalent. Where
can you think of a product or a service or
that is just all it gets is negative publicity, and
it's like there's like a publicity machine designed to undermine it,
and that's all people here. I mean, it's just there's
no question that public there is this reflexive public opinion,
(17:43):
especially on the right, but not just on the right,
that like, oh, it's just government's waste, government's fraud. So
this would attracted me to somebody in the first place,
is I don't have any big stake in government. I
just saw that wasn't true because I wanted around the
government and saw what was there. And what's what's what's
shocking about it is whatever people believe because of what
(18:06):
they've heard from casual this kind of casual loose talk.
The opposite is kind of true that if you're looking
for waste or fraud, you were so much more likely
to find it in a private sector company than you
are in a in a government agency, especially fraud like that,
(18:26):
that the places are on a hair trigger or alert
for like people stealing money. You can't you know, you
can't you when you're on Wall Street and you wanted
to get business, you could, you know, take people to
strip clubs and get them front row seats to watch
the Mets and all that stuff. You can't buy a
sandwich for someone who works in the federal government. That
it is. So it is like and there and all
(18:48):
around these places are watchdogs whose job is to prevent
money from being stolen. And in fact, the first people
the Trumpe administation fired were those watchdogs. So that tells
you something about how much they care, actually care about
the fraud. The waste is more complicated because it's true that,
like there are some ways government does things that if
(19:08):
you were starting from scratch, that's not how you do them.
And there is, for sure ways to go in and
make it work work somewhat better. But the way but
the way to when that in that case, the way
to go in is with an appreciation of why it
works the way it is, because you're just gonna end
up recreating with what was created. If you don't understand
why it got the way it was. It's like, there
are reasons, there are reasons. It's like there's analyst bureaucracy
(19:32):
around contracting. You know, it's to revent the fraud kind
of thing. And it's maddening how it's done because basically
there's no trust. You know, it's a low trust environment.
And in a low trust environment, it's a very inefficient environment.
When you got to sign pieces of paper to get
an extra box to take the paper clips, you're going
to be less efficient. And if you can just go
to the storeroom and take one. So there are problems there,
(19:54):
but a lot of the wasteful problems will rise from
the mistrust about the institution. It's been sown into the
public mind by this rhetoric. I mean, let me ask
you a question. You're asking me questions, but I want
to ask you a question. Is it not if you
just back away from it? Kind of weird that we're
in a democracy where we elected people to do stuff,
(20:16):
and these things that got done by the government. It's
not like some autocrat did it. We the people did it,
and that we view the these civil servants, the instruments
of our will, as somehow our enemies, somehow like insiders
trying to bring us down. It's a really odd thing
for in a democracy for people to feel that way
about their government. And anyway, I didn't have it, As
(20:40):
I said, I came into this, I didn't have any
particular view. I'm not like some screaming liberal. I like
people who make money and none of that. It was
just I could not believe like the heroism basically in
the civil service, could not believe the quality of the
people that were engaged in such critical stuff, like the
(21:04):
society falls apart if they're not there. And I started
pulling my hair out when I realized, like, oh, they've
been doing this for thirty years and all they've heard is,
you know, abuse from the outside. It just like there's
something untrue about this. So my question for you is,
how do you explain this, Like it just seems really odd.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
I think that government workers for as long as I
can remember, growing up in Arlington, Virginia, outside DC, where
a lot of people did work for the government, I
think there was an attitude that there was excess and
redundancy and inefficiency in the federal government. And I think
(21:49):
it's just been a stereotype that for whatever reason, has
been baked in yes to our national consciousness, and that's
but of course there are critical jobs. But I think
that there has always been the impression, Michael, that there
were extraneous jobs or jobs that weren't really necessary. And
(22:13):
I think the very word bureaucracy has gotten, you know,
has become a dirty word in the public's mind. And
with bureaucracy it means unnecessary levels of maloney that you
have to kind of get through. So I think all
those things have kind of come together to make people
(22:37):
feel fairly anti government. And I think to your point,
we haven't heard enough stories about civil servants. And I
also think there's something about having a job for life.
You know, this is all just kind of things that
when I was a kid growing up right outside DC,
like that some jobs are protected like tenure, when other
(23:01):
people are subjected to performance reviews, and there was a
feeling of a meritocracy. When you've got in the civil service,
you basically had a job for life. Yeah, I think
that probably explained some of the negative things that I've
heard about government workers.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Right, some of that's valid, and I can understand hostility
towards tenure. Basically they don't exactly have tenure. You can
fire a civil servant, you just have to have cause.
But I think at the I do think at the
bottom of this is some false kind of like false
ideas that people have in their heads about what goes
on inside the places and its relationship to the society.
(23:40):
So if you ask people that most I bet most
people say government just has been growing out of control.
For example, like it has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.
Now it's true, our deficits have gotten bigger and bigger
and bigger. That's not the big generals, it's trunk. It's
like the civil service, not the military. Fifty years ago
was two point three million workers. It's still two point
(24:02):
three million workers. The society is you know, forty percent
bigger or whatever. So in relationship to the society, it
is shrunk. So people can flate like government spending, which
is a different thing on the government workforce. That the
fact that Elon Musk, when he goes in to say
to eliminate, to reduce, to cut two trillion dollars out
(24:25):
of the budget deficit, he said, and eliminate all this inefficiency,
finds himself cutting so he finds the cutting in such
a this he cutting just the civil service. But it's
such a small sliver of the actual spending that has
almost no effect. I mean, eighty six percent of government
spending is either interest payments on the debt, defense, or entitlements,
(24:47):
So it's only fourteen percent of the budget that's these
people anyway. So but that nobody says, oh, wait, he's
doing he's trying to cut a big chunk out of
the pie, but he's confined himself to a little slipper
of the pie. This is impossible, it will never happen. Instead,
people cheer and say, yeah, he's getting rid of all
of that, and we're going to get rid of our deficits.
(25:09):
It's just it's, I mean, we're ignorant. So here's another
answer to your question, like, how did we come to
this past? Why are these people so easily distorted by
the political process so that people think of them differently
than they actually are. The answer is, we've been afforded
(25:33):
that luxury that we've lived through a very long period
without great existential risk to ourselves. It hasn't been all
peace and prosperity, but by world historic standards, a lot
of peace and prosperity. We don't wake up thinking our
society is about to be invaded by barbarians or we're
all going to die because of a pandemic or whatever.
(25:55):
So we can afford to take the parents for granted.
You know, it's like we've been safe for so long
and we don't it's not till something really bad happens
that people don't realize why we needed this thing. And
what I worry is that's what has to happen, Like
something really bad is going to happen, and people are, oh,
that's why we had the government'll bring it back, And
(26:17):
it's a shame it has to come to that. And
the point of the book is, like, you know, just
read this seven random profiles from inside the government and
see if you can you can you can preserve that
bigotry you have about the civil servant, See if you can't, like,
see if you can avoid opening up your mind to
the possibility that this is actually a useful enterprise.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
I want to talk to you about some of those essays,
and particularly the person you profile. But since you mentioned
Elon Musk, I have wondered, Michael, how you have felt
given the fifth risk, and given your interests in profiling
the federal workforce, how you have felt watching Elon Musk
(26:59):
and his so called doge Bros go in and just
wholesale fire tens of thousands of people.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Right in the very beginning, there was a little part
of me that was hopeful. And the little part of
me that was hopeful was it is true that the
government has been kind of starved young talent for a
long time. People, young bright, young people have not been
encouraged to go into government service, and particularly in the
tech world, because you could get paid so much better
(27:31):
just going and work for a Silicon Valley startup. And
the idea that he might channel some of this talent
into the government and actually fix some old and broken systems,
that was a I thought, maybe there's hope there, like,
but then when then they started doing what they were doing,
which is like cutting agencies, you know, like without explanation exactly,
and going in and randomly cutting seemingly big chunks of
(27:54):
the federal workforce without a whole lot of explanation about why,
except to say that they were cutting fat out of
the out of the budget. But so then I became
puzzled because what they said they were doing was clearly
not what they were doing. The first thing they said
they were doing was going after fraud. And when they
got rid of all the inspector generals at the agencies,
those people, they're not deep state bureaucrats who are there
(28:16):
to help fraud happen. They're there to point out fraud
to Congress. They are the refs, the cops on the beat.
So they got rid all the cops. So that's not
what you do. If you're trying to catch the crooks,
you don't get rid of all the cocks and then
the cops who know the most. So it was an
odd thing to do. So I thought, they're not going
after fraud, that's not what this is about. And when
(28:37):
with a waist, it was like, are you know the fat?
They were dealing with such a small part of the government.
They were never going to make that much of a dent.
So it was not about that they're not going to
like get the bud get rid of the budget deaf
as they're doing what they're doing. They're not going to
cut two trillion dollars like they claim they might. They
probably got to cut a hundred billion dollars it's like
they're dealing with rounding errors and so like, if they're
not doing what they say they're doing, or they're doing
(28:59):
it so badly, they might as well not be But
I don't think they're that dumb. Like, what is the motive?
And so far as I can tell, the motive is
to turn this enterprise that's supposed to be serving the
entire society and it's filled with these exquisite human beings
doing extremely complicated and important things. Is to turn this
(29:20):
into an instrument of personal political power for Elon Musk
and Donald Trump and so turn it into something that
just doesn't get in their way whenever they do whatever
they want to do, whatever that might be. And it's
hard to know how the size is going to react
to this, because it's been told for so long that
this government is so awful they mighty might just let
him get away with it. I'm not sure of that.
(29:43):
But so now I'm just sitting watching, like how are
we going to react? How upset are people going to be?
How much of a stand are they going to take?
Will Republicans in Congress have the nerve to stand up
and actually argue against this when they know it's wrong
or bad, and I just don't no. But I've become,
you know, in the course of the first six weeks
(30:03):
of the Trump administration, pretty cynical about them because I
don't see a whole lot of reason to it. Like
I don't see them doing things that I think, oh,
that's going to make us stronger. I see them doing
things that they're going to make them more powerful, but
at our expense. And I have this feeling. It's a
visceral feeling. I have a feelings. It's a feeling you
(30:26):
have when the risk in your life has just gone up.
It's a feeling that like, oh, we're all always kind
of playing Russian Roulette. They're always risks, but they're just
sticking Willy Nelly more bullets in the chamber of the gun.
That and we're now playing Russian Roulette with greater risk
of fatality. And I feel that So that's agitating because
(30:48):
it seems like wholly unnecessary to be inflicting this risk
on the population. You know, you go in and you
start firing air traffic controllers, or you start firing people
whose job it is to monitor the the cleanliness of
the wader, or you fire people whose job it is
overseas to monitor and control disease that might find its
way to our shores, or you fire the nuclear the
(31:10):
people in charge of the nuclear weapons. I mean, sometimes
they've done this and then they've said, oh, we made
a mistake and we're going to bring them back. But
there's been an awful lot of mucking around with the
mechanisms for controlling existential risk, and that makes just makes
me really uneasy. Like so I don't don't I don't
really feel good about it. I wrote a note. I mean,
I don't know where you got it. I wrote elon muskin.
(31:30):
Note said, like, if you're so sure this is right,
I'd love to come to sit and watch and you
can explain to me why this is. This is smart.
I've spent a lot of time inside this institution, a
lot more than you. Happy to come and like talk
to you about it. And I didn't get a response.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
I was going to ask if he wrote you back,
but you just told me it seems like the whole
tech adage of moving fast and breaking things right, being
complete disruptors is what is at play here. Well, what
strikes me is it doesn't seem that this is being
done reducing government in any kind of thoughtful way, and
(32:07):
if anything, it is so insulting and demoralizing and demeaning
to some of these public servants who have dedicated their
lives to their area of expertise. And not surprisingly I
just read that many of them are dealing with some
serious mental health issues. They're also getting abused online, and
(32:28):
these are people who were not seeking out attention. I
don't understand why this is being done with a sledgehammer
and not a scalpel, but maybe this is just not
Elon Musk's m O.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Why it's being done with such malice is that it's malicious, right,
and there is there's a there's a point to there's
a point to be made here about like his MO,
how he how he operates. I'm sure most people think
Elon Musk is like an incredibly smart guy, and in
some ways, I'm sure he is incredibly smart, but that
(33:03):
doesn't mean he's like universally smart, doesn't mean he's like
good at everything. And he's actually not demonstrated that he's
all that good at managing a large institution. He's really
good at products like peddling products. He's but he looked
he took Twitter, which was, you know, whatever it was,
(33:26):
it was a successful issue business. He bought it, and
he's reduced its value by more than half. I mean,
anybody who invested alongside of him has lost sixty percent
of their money. And he did it much the same
way he ran, and he came into this existing institution.
I'm so smart. All you all are fired unless you
can prove that you belong here. Humiliated everybody, and that
(33:48):
doesn't seem to have worked out very well. And I'd
like to hear You're not hearing any of these voices
because everybody's scared of Donald Trump. But I'd love to
hear with people who are genuinely gifted running big, complicated institutions,
like people who run big corporations. Think of this as
a management style. It's not something you see in successful
(34:08):
it's successful big companies. The CEO doesn't run insulting the employees,
telling them how valueless they are and all the rest.
It's that's that's not historically been like a recipe for success.
Why would it work here? And on top of it,
maybe that maybe in some weird corporation might work, but
(34:29):
it's definitely not going to work in a workforce where
you can't actually pay people very much like that. They're
working there. They're not there for the money, they're not
there for the fame. They're there if they're the best
people for the mission. And so if you're going to
come in and like undermine their sense of selves and
undermine the mission, I mean, that's just got to be
just especially toxic in a in the government environment. So
(34:51):
I think, you know, I suspect that it's going to
all end so badly that we'll look back and say,
how do we let that happen? And we'll go to
fix the things he broke. But you never know, because
we have a world where people believe all kinds of
stuff that isn't true, and people will be being told
that this was a big success even if it's a
big failure. My biggest fear in a funny way in
(35:14):
the back of my head right now, and I'm thinking about,
like what if I write something else, what purpose would
it serve. My theory is the bad thing happens because
of something they've disabled in government. The mechanism for preventing
the bad thing, whatever the bad thing is, was disabled,
and the bad thing happened, and it can be traced
(35:34):
by a rational person directly back to what Elon Musk
and Donald Trump have just done, but that after the
bad thing happens, a narrative of war follows and their
side gets to make up all kinds of facts and
say that, no, we didn't have anything to do with
the bad thing. The bad thing was the response with
the responsibility of the deep state, which we haven't rooted out,
(35:56):
or however they frame it. I'm trying to think, how
do you vent them from being able to do that?
How do you make sure that when the bad thing happens,
everybody understands it was their fault. I am groping towards
like what the next literary response is to this this book.
It's funny. The timing of this book is so funny,
just because like if everybody read it, you put it
(36:16):
in the hands of just red state people and made
them read it, and so you can think whatever you
think about it, but you got to read it. I
do think a lot of people would say, yeah, I know,
good people work in government. Yeah it's not as simple
as like it, but it's just like that's not what
they hear every day. And so I do think there's
some hope of changing shifting the narrative a bit.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Michael, I'm wondering if you have found it hypocritical that
Elon must praises private sector led in a but a
lot of these breakthroughs come from NASA and the Department
of Energy, and he couldn't do what he does without them.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
It's sinister because it's not just typic critical. He's claiming
credit for stuff he doesn't deserve credit for. Not that
he doesn't deserve credit for some stuff, but like he says,
he was the founder of Tesla and the founder of PayPal,
and he wasn't someone else founded the company. He came in. Tesla.
Isn't just the triumph of the private sector that Tesla
(37:31):
does not get off the ground without a four hundred
and fifty million dollar loan, our loan guarantee from the
Department of Energy. At the time, he said this saved us,
and other people at Tesla said we just wouldn't exist
without this. It was like a little bit of a
moonshot technology, and the Department of Energy has a little
has two a couple of programs that back moonshot technologies,
(37:54):
and they've had astonishing success with it, and it's true
of a lot of our economy. It's that it especially
a lot of innovation, it starts with some public private partnership.
So to try to pitch people on the idea this
is all a bunch of smart guys in Silicon Valley
who'd be even who'd be doing even greater things if
the government wasn't in their way, is a complete misreading
(38:18):
of what has happened. But also it's very self serving.
It's like, now I'm on top, I'm gonna I'm going
to disable this mechanism for like people coming up from
beneath me to challenge me, and and I'm gonna I'm
a swarm around telling the story that I'm basically responsible
for all this.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Not a big fan of Blon, must are you?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I mean less and less? So I didn't have a view.
I didn't I wasn't born with the animist towards him.
But I think he's been very, very bad for the
country and any It's just to tell when someone is
lying all the time, it's just like when they're putting
lies out constantly, it's just that this this underlying rot
(39:01):
and they'll they're all these lies about what they've achieved
in the government when they haven't achieved them. There are
lies about other people and the other thing's offensive about him.
He's a bully. You know, He's got this platform and
he'll and he can turn his fans against anybody at
any time, and does it routinely, you know, outing civil
(39:23):
servants by name disgusting. I mean, it's just disgusting. And
so I think, you know, I think he's a bully,
and I don't react. I just don't react very well
to bullies.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Getting back to your book, Who Is Government, The Untold
Story of Public Service? You, as you mentioned, got a
number of great writers to profile different government workers, and
you picked someone named Christopher Mark. You met him, I guess,
via something called the Sammy's when you described as the
Oscars for Public Service. Out of the five hundred fifty
(39:56):
names on that list, what made you stop in your
tracks when came across Chris Mark?
Speaker 2 (40:02):
So, Chrismak cannot want any award. When I met him,
it was just a list of nominees, right, And what
made me stop was he was the one nominee where
there was some trace of personal information, some trace of
a human being that the way the nominations were laid out.
It was a couple of sentences, and it was like
Joe Schmoe from the FBI discovered and disrupted a child
(40:27):
sex trafficking ring. And then they moved on not telling
you anything about Joe Schmoe. And it got the Christopher
Mark and it said, Christopher Mark inside the Department of
Labor has solved the problem of coal miner whos collapsing
on the heads of coal miners, a problem which killed
fifty thousand coal miners in the last century. And then
it said Christopher Mark is a former coal miner. And
(40:50):
I thought there's a story here. I mean, there's probably
a story everywhere, but like, how does a former coal
miner get himself in the position of solving was probably
a really tech and a complicated problem. And I had
assumed that, like he had a personal mode, he did
have personal motivation, but I assumed the wrong one. I
assuming he like grew up in West Virginia and his
dad had been killed by a falling roof for something
(41:11):
like that. So that's what got me to him. But
then the story ended up being wildly different and even
more interesting than I expected.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. He wasn't from
West Virginia at all, No, he was.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
He grew up in an upper middle class family, child
of a Princeton professor, and had rebelled against his father
kind of it was a kind of lefty rebellion against
his bourgeois father in the late sixties early seventies and
set out to become be a working man rather than
go to Harvard or Princeton, which he could have done.
(41:47):
And what then I find all this out like the
first thirty minutes, and this just blew me away. His
dad had become famous as a civil engineer for building
technology that analyzed kept the roofs of Gothic cathedrals from falling.
And he was so good at it, I mean Robert
Marcus's name, you can go. There were like TV shows
(42:07):
made about it. But he's so good that he could
like predict where in the Sharps Cathedral the stones would
be crumbling because the designers made a mistake. And so
it was like he was answering question everybody has who
goes to those gorgeous buildings, like what keeps the roof off?
And the son said, put a middle finger in the
air of the father when he was seventeen years old,
(42:28):
left home, went away and started working in factories and
warehouses and ends up working in a coal mine, thinking
I'm not going to have anything to do with what
my father did, and then realizes the roof step fall
and killed me and goes and he's very clever, and
the intellectual journey's wild. But how he figures out how
(42:48):
to keep roofs from collapsing on cole Myers is his
own story. But what's even wilder is when I get
him and I hear this story, I say, wow, you
rebelled against your dad and then you kind of like
went in your dad's line of work. You all about
it keeps the roof up, and he goes, that is
not true. What I did had nothing to do with
my father. She was like, nope, no, no, And I said,
this is a character. He's got a little bit of himself.
(43:11):
He doesn't fully understand. And I know he's great. I mean,
he was really great fun to write about.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
And theirs similar stories are very inspiring stories by all
these other writers in the book. Can you just tell
us some of your favorites.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
It would take a long time to go there all
of them, but I'll tell you who the writers are,
because it's an illustrious class. It's John Lanchester, Dave Eggers,
Sarah val Casey Spp, Geraldine Brooks, and camal Bell and
Casey Sepp in the New Yorker young writer. She's going
to be very famous one day. She's a little famous already.
She I'll tell you her story. She found a guy
(43:51):
inside the Department of Veterans Affairs. I don't know if
he's still there. They've goutted it, but his name is
Ron Walters, and Alters had walked into a job that
is a kind of sacred duty. It's caring for the
national cemeteries. It's it's providing the experience for the families
(44:11):
of veterans when they bury their dead. And when he
comes into it, and this is like twenty years ago,
the customer approval rating is not great. It's kind of eh.
And he sets about attacking the problem with such panache
that kind of a decade. In the surveys that the
(44:34):
Universe in Michigan does of customer satisfaction across the economy,
and they measure satisfaction of government agencies as well as
with like private companies, so Amazon and the Department of
Agriculture is in these surveys. By the time Round Walters
is done, this National Cemetery's burial program has the highest
customer satisfaction of empty institution in our country. And nobody
(44:57):
knows who he is. He doesn't he's not out there
telling people how to manage businesses because he's a genius manager,
though he obviously is. All he cares about is this
sacred duty we have to our veterans. It's a moving story.
I mean, it's like who this guy is and why
he did what he did, and then he did what
he did and all I mean, I think she just
kind of scratched the surface in some places, because I
(45:18):
do think that the Harvard Business School should go figure
out what he did, because it's an amazing transformation like
the private, public, whatever sector to do that with a
very delicate problem. But you never hear about it that happened,
and you never hear about it, Like if that had
happened in one of Elon Musk's company or got amazing
(45:41):
Donald Trump's companies, Donald Trump would be telling you how
he took the company from here to there, and you'd
be celebrating Donald Trump as a manager, and you know,
but that's different personality.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
I'm wondering if you're hoping that this book will inspire
more people at this terrible time for government workers to
become public servants, because even now, people younger than thirty
represent only seven percent of a full time civil service,
despite being twenty percent of the overall US labor force,
(46:16):
and sixty eight percent say they'd never consider pursuing a
non military federal job.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
Yeah, now you wonder why, right, because all they hear
is what they hear. So this is what I hope for.
I hope that young people read the book or read
these stories somehow, some way, and they don't rule out
the possibility that they'll be called to serve. That they
will develop their skills and whatever feel they choose. But
(46:43):
if there comes a time when those skills clearly are
needed by the country, they don't just turn up their
nose at the federal government because they think the federal
government is all a waste. That they realize it's just
the opposite, that this is the place where you can
have the greatest impact with those You won't make a
lot of money, and then you won't just make money,
(47:03):
but you will change lives save lives, and if that
idea is still kind of alive, there's hope. You know,
it's like and it is alive. It's very clearly alive.
These are role models we're writing about. And it wasn't
rigged that way. It wasn't like I didn't tell the writers,
go find a role model. I said, go find a story.
And this same kind of story just kept presenting itself
(47:25):
because it's there, you know, It's just it's right there
on the surface, waiting to be described.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
You wrote a book called Going Infinite, the story of
billionaire Sam Bankman Free who's now serving time, and I'm
curious how you feel about his latest interview with Tucker
Carlson and reports that their efforts from his family and
allies to receive a pardon from Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
I mean, if you had to ask me the moment
Trump was elected what the Bankman Freeds were going to do,
I'd have told you they're going to seek a pardon
from Donald Trump. That doesn't that part doesn't surprise me.
And there's even a kind of a weird sort of
narrative path to it because the judge that's sentence Sam
Bangman freed to twenty five years in jail. It was
(48:10):
also the judge in the Egen Carroll case, so there
will be some natural hostility Trump would feel towards that judge.
It's sort of the rule in life that wherever Sam
Bangman freed is, even when it's jail, gets way more
interesting because he's there than it ever was before. So
I was wondering when he went to jail, like, what's
(48:31):
going to happen here? It's going to generate story because
everywhere he goes he generates story, and we're kind of
spoiled for choice. Now he's given secret interviews to Tucker
Carlson from his prison cell without the Bureau of Prisons knowing.
He's got p Diddy in the next bunk. Luigi passed
through for a nano second. It's like, I mean, his
(48:51):
life is like a sitcom wherever he goes, and I
just think it's like, that's just who he is. It's
what attracted to me, me to him as a subject.
In the first it's like where we win. It was funny,
but there is some if this happens. There is some
irony in the fact that the idea of Trump pardoning
(49:12):
a guy who is trying to pay him five billion
dollars a year not to run for president. Sam Bangfree
was trying to pay Donald Trump not to run for
president four years ago, and that Donald Trump getting him
out of jail. I mean, somehow that feels like the
end of.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
A story, right, at least a Michael Lewis story.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
The other question I wanted to ask you quickly and
then I'll let you go. What do you think of
Jeff Bezos's new attitude toward the opinion pages of the
Washington Post. Your essays originally appeared in those pages, and
now he has said that alternative points of view that
aren't focused on I guess liberties right, personal liberties and
(49:55):
free Marcus will not be welcome at the paper. There
are other places to read those kinds of things. What
do you think of Jeff Bezos's attitude now, a new
edict towards opinion writers at the Washington Post.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
It's gonna kill interest in the Washington Post. I mean,
it already has. And the editor of this series, David Shipley,
left because of this decision of Bezos'. So I think it.
I could see why he did it. I can see
why people feel they need to suck up to Donald Trump.
(50:31):
I don't. I don't think this was it's it's it's
a particular shame in this case because I think I
kind of like Jeff Bezos. I think he's a good guy.
I mean, just as a guy. I don't feel the
way I feel towards Elon Musk towards Jeff Bezos. But
the thing that's so disturbing is that there are not
many places in the country where if you write something,
(50:53):
all the Democratic legislators and all the Republican legislators read it.
They don't all read the New York Times. They the
media has gotten so polarized. But the Washington Post still
had this kind of like it was the industry towns newspaper,
and you could get to everybody through it. And if
you had a party that the Washington at the Washington Post,
(51:16):
Republican senators would turn up. You know, it wasn't it
Obviously it leaned left, but it was it was a
way to speak to the the industry, to the politicians.
And he's now abandoned. It's not. Now it isn't and
now it's it's lost, it's lost. Its appeal to me
is a place to write. I won't write. I'm not
going to. I have a piece that the last piece
of this book appears on Thursday in the Post. It's
(51:39):
another long piece about a civil servant. But I wrote
it a couple of months ago, and I won't write
for it in its current incarnation.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
Again, I'm sure a lot of government workers, whether they're
still employed or have gotten the acts, will be so
grateful for this book and for someone actually celebrating the
work that they do if they get it.
Speaker 2 (52:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that wasn't the real purpose in
my mind. The purpose in my mind was to sort
of attack the stereotype, like I just to make it,
make people's minds more interesting, Like get off this kind
of weird, this weird picture you have of the federal
bureaucrat and get to something a little more real. That
was the goal. But one side effect maybe makes people
(52:25):
feel better, that would be all right.
Speaker 1 (52:27):
Well. The book is called Who Is Government? The untol
Story of Public Service, and Michael, it really is kind
of an addendum to your previous book, The Fifth Risk,
which paints a very different picture of the men and
women in our federal workforce. I always love talking to
you Michael, Thank you, Thank you, Katie, thanks for listening. Everyone.
(52:59):
If you have a question for me, a subject you
want us to cover, or you want to share your
thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world, reach out
send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to
hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia
and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kuric,
(53:19):
and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and
our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller
composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call,
go to the description in the podcast app, or visit
(53:40):
us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me
on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Katie Couric
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