Government is Moneyball all over the place. The private data that can be weaponized against one's enemies is instantly weaponized. What is Trump? He's a trust-destroying machine.
This is Gavin Newsom and this is Michael Lewis.
What gave you the idea of doing this in the first place? What was the original kind of like...
Inspiration, desperation, right? It's the two driving forces of life. So I just, after we got shellacked, I was like, what the hell is going on with my party? So I was more out of frustration, and I was so interested in why we lost and who drove successfully that campaign and the opposition. And so Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon...
You had them. You had Charlie Kirk on.
And it just, people were pissed. My party...
I had a little taste of that because I know Bannon and I've written about him and I've spent a lot of time with him.
Well, by definition you wrote about him, right? Obviously, you couldn't write that first transition book without talking about it.
Correct. But that wasn't why he bought the film rights to Liar's Poker, my first book.
Nobody knows this. Not only do you know this book I wrote, maybe you don't know it, but I wrote a book about working on Wall Street and it was called Liar's Poker. I wrote it when I was 27 years old. Bannon was...
Your first book, '89, right?
'89. Oh my god. Yes, you're right. And Bannon was in his Hollywood phase. He had just left Goldman Sachs.
And he and two other people bought this thing and he was so pissed off by how bad the screenplay they got from some famous writer was that he wrote a screenplay of Liar's Poker.
So that's the beginning of the relationship.
And he sought you out or did you seek him out? I mean, was...
Then he was the high bid.
Yeah. And I didn't even meet him then. I found this out later. But so he's tracked me since then. And so when I called him, it was like I had him at hello. 'Come on over. I love Liar's Poker.' So I've gone over to his house a bunch. And I think these conversations are really important to have.
Oh my god. They're so important to have, but this taboo around them is insane.
No. And so I was trying to break that. So that was the idea. But trust me, I had some high-profile Democrats just literally refuse to come on. Still haven't come on.
They still haven't forgiven because how dare you platform. And I was like, platform? I have literally no followers. I mean, they're platforming me. They're making this thing up.
It probably does have the effect of you reaching people you wouldn't normally reach.
100%. And also showing humanity. I wasn't and I'm not trying to take people down, which is what we do on cable. I do that, trust me, I'm a fighter. But I just wanted to find out what their motivations were, the humanity. And for Bannon, it was interesting. I'll never forget that conversation because I literally stopped him. I said, I feel like I'm talking to Bernie Sanders.
The populism. He was arguing at the time against Trump's tax cuts to the wealthy.
The financial crisis that drove him, that politicized him. It was like, what? Saving the asses of all these rich people. It bothered the hell out of him. And what happened to his dad? His narrative is all about saving the working class.
Yeah. Exactly. I mean, it gets more complicated as you dig into it, but I'm curious. I was surprised that they wanted to come on.
I think it was just curiosity, particularly. And Charlie wanted to come in person and we spent a couple hours together.
Yeah. It was here, where was I... actually I did it in Marin County and he was the first one. So I was trying to get guests. He was the first to say I'll do it in person. We really wanted someone in person. So he happened to be the first guest. He was one of the first I reached out to, but successfully, because he was out there organizing the campuses. I had friends and family that were showing up saying, 'Gavin, you know, dad,' or 'Gavin, my niece's nephew's USC.' I had a niece who said, 'Look at the photo of the amount of people that are showing up in Charlie Kirk.' I'm like, we need to pay some attention to this. And we weren't. I mean, we were kind of dismissing it. And so that was...
How did you find him as a guy?
Unbelievably personable. More religious than I expected. Every time I said, you know, 'God, you know, this or that,' he would cut me off. I thought it was a joke. And then I was like, forgive me. I feel like I'm actually insulting you a little bit.
Right.
So it was like there. So I felt there was more of a, you know, there was something else there, a sense that he felt he needed to protect himself from you in any way, that he couldn't let you in.
Yeah. Well, he also found some opportunities to be a little more competitive because he knew his audience wouldn't take it. So kind of have to own the live, you know, and I was not coming in with that mindset. I wasn't trying to take him down. I was honestly trying to understand his motivation and understand what he was doing and make the case. I literally asked him, what do you recommend my party do? We just got shellacked, right? We lost both houses. We lost the presidency. We lost the popular vote. How have you been organizing? Tell me more about what your strategies are, what you're hearing, what you see.
You know what to do with that.
It was interesting. It was just more personable, but it's fascinating. I mean, looking back, obviously with the tragedy of that assassination and the fact that we had that moment, and it was a moment because there's not many moments like that. I mean, you saw what happened to Jeff meeting with Kushner.
I mean, people just want nothing to do with it. It's scorched earth and that's just not healthy.
No, no, no. It's really not healthy.
You know, and you got to, even if you want to think of them as your enemies, you got to understand your enemy.
You know, it's like you have this thing. In my life there's a version of this and it informs the way I go about reporting the books. It was a kids' book called The Traveler's Tale that I read when I was like six, and there was a guy walking through a landscape with a cloak and the north wind and the sun get in an argument about who can get the guy to remove his cloak, right? You know, open up, like get to know him. And the north wind comes in and blows and blows and blows and the cloak goes like this, right? It's like he holds it tighter and tighter, and the north wind finally gives up. Sun comes in and bathes sunshine on him and he removes it voluntarily. That to me is sort of like the metaphor, right? You've got to get people in a comfortable space before they'll give up whatever it is. And what we're trying to get is understanding. What is the point of a conversation if you're not going to have some sort of understanding? And if everybody's operating in this defensive crouch or this combative, you never get anywhere. And so with subjects, it's a little different. It's not a political thing so much. It's more that...
They don't want to get... they're worried what I might do to them. They're worried that if they're known, that somehow that would work against them, right?
They have to. The only way to kind of tease people out is to make them feel completely warm and comfortable, right? Nice soft seats, nice tour of the mansion, you know, coffee. Coffee for the machine. You know, it's just like, I mean, if you had had me in here to take me down, this is exactly how you should do it because what you'll do is we start out, you know, you would lead me to take myself down. You know, you already expose myself, right?
But you don't do that in your book. I mean, you're not known for taking down your subjects.
I'm not. However, let's be honest, if we actually go through the literature, there are a lot of people who are really pissed off about every book. Every book.
I mean, Liar's Poker pissed off all of Wall Street. Flash Boys pissed off all of Wall Street. Big Short, they'd been so humiliated they couldn't be pissed off, but they would have been pissed off. Moneyball pissed off all of baseball. All of baseball. I was persona non grata. I mean, I could not watch ESPN without people being pissed off. The Blind Side, interestingly, pissed off people who thought there was something wrong about a white family taking in a black kid and helping him with his life. It was like it was...
Oh my god. It was very odd. Sam Bankman-Fried story pissed off everybody who wanted to be pissed off at Sam Bankman-Fried.
But he couldn't really complain. He's in jail.
No, he couldn't, for 25 years. So the books, but the relationships to the subjects...
But the subjects themselves are not the ones.
I will tell you this is also true, that I have not had a book where the subject was not instantly upset in some way. And it isn't, 'You made stuff up about me,' or 'I didn't say that.' It's not that. They feel a little violated, that this is a little closer to the bone kind of thing. And I mean, Billy Beane, what would Billy Beane have to complain about?
He was livid, livid with me. He calls me and there is just this loud sound coming out of the phone and I say, 'Billy, what's the problem?' And I actually thought maybe the problem was I gave away his secrets and that was going to be... Yeah, so that could be. But no, he says, 'You have me saying [__] all the time.' And I said, 'You do say [__] all the time.' And he says, 'Wait,' he says, 'My mother's going to be so pissed.' And I said, 'Wow.' I said, 'Billy, your mother, that's who you're worried about? I thought you'd be worried about everybody else in baseball being pissed.' And he says, 'You don't think everybody else in baseball is going to read your book? Nobody's going to read your book. So my mother's going to read this book.' So that thing, I swear that it's about to happen with this book, that the subjects will read it.
And they'll think, 'Oh, what are people going to think about me now?' And a lot of times my subjects are people who have gotten a lot of attention.
Right. That's the difference.
And so, it isn't until a few weeks later when their spouse or their brother or whoever has read it and said, 'Yeah, that's you.' And someone who loves them reads it and says, 'Yes.' Right. That they realize it's okay. It's okay for me to be me on the page.
Yeah. Nobody knows what they look like to other people. Like, you know how the first time you ever heard your voice on a tape before, 'That's not me.' So that's the... if I do my job, I mean, never mind if I screw it up, but if I do my job well, that they are going to have that hearing their voice on the tape recorder for the first time sensation, like, 'Oh, that's me.' And so I need the help of their whole social world to calm them down after the books come out. So it's an uncomfortable thing.
But they know that going in, right? I mean, it may not be in the first book, but 18 later they must have a theory of your case, that you're casing their joint, that you're with them 24/7. What is the parameter? Do you do an NDA? Do you do a tape recorder? You just observe? What's the expectation? And then you got to pick and choose the subjects. I imagine some fall through after an extended period of time. Right.
All the time. This book is a good example of that. And that is more...
You only had two million people. So that's right. No, you put your finger on it.
It was a casting search situation. The only other time I had this very same was The Big Short. I had a casting search situation, but there I had a pool of 15 people to choose from. In here it was 2 million. But it's never explicit, like no, there's nothing in writing. It's never formal. Like in the very beginning, because I don't know when I go in if I'm going to generate the level of interest I need in the person to want to write about them. I think maybe, so I go spend some time and then I spend some more time and I never, I don't record anything. And I don't record anything, one, because it's a pain to go listen to all these recordings, but two, I think it forces me to filter. So if I'm interviewing you and I got to write it down, that requires a little bit of effort. So I'm already filtering out the stuff that's not interesting.
So you're not even writing anything down in the very beginning.
I'm not even, I'm just talking to them just to see, and I'm not going to use any of it. It's just I'm just trying to... if they say something that I think I might want to use at some point, I just come back to it later. But eventually I bring out a pad and I start writing stuff down. And the process of going from being with a person out in the wild to that stuff being in a book is first it has to pass the filter. It's interesting enough for me to write it down. Then when I get back to my desk, it's interesting enough for me to transcribe. So by the time I've got the material I'm working from, I've already kind of filtered out a lot of the boring stuff and stuff that is irrelevant in some way. And the subjects, it's funny what happens. By the time I start writing stuff down, they've gotten comfortable enough with me as a person that they're interesting.
They're not worried anymore. So when they see that act, they're not like, 'Don't write that down, Michael.'
And I'll say to them, I'll say, 'Look, if you say something, I can't do what I do if we are in this kind of artificial space where I've got to ask you if I can quote you on the record. On the record, none of that. You just tell me if you say something by mistake that you shouldn't have said or something, and just tell me.' It almost never happens. It almost never happens. But it makes them feel comfortable. So that's it. And so that's part of it too, is like getting them in a... but people are people, especially people who have not been written about a lot, get very self-conscious. So you got to wear them down. It's like months and months and months of going back over and over and over. And people would tell you that they forget I'm there, that at some point I have a hall pass and I can walk in and out of their lives and they kind of forget I'm there and they stop thinking of me as someone who's going to document something about themselves and start thinking of me as just furniture in their lives. And very commonly, if I've done it really well, at the end of the process they're really upset I'm not coming back.
Oh my god, they miss me because no one's ever been so interested in them in their lives.
It was almost therapy. You were able to share so much with... not just almost therapy, it is therapy. And so it gets to the point where, because I mean, even their spouses don't care. Like at some level they don't want to, you know, talk to the hand.
Someone walks in and is intensely interested in what you do and why.
You've been seen and heard.
That's right. And so I have this problem. The hardest part of the relationship is the end where they're still all in my lives. Everybody is still on my... I get emails from Sam Bankman-Fried every three days from jail. The corrections facility has an email thing. It's probably read by six people before it gets to me. But I still get them. They don't...
Just meaning what? Longing for what? To maintain the relationship?
To express a point of view. And I was so interested in what they thought and said for this period of time, I must still be interested in what they thought and said. And it isn't that I'm not interested, but once the book is done there's less of a motive.
Can't do much with it. So there is this awkward kind of thing where, I mean, no one has ever said this to me, but it's like, it isn't 'You used me,' but it's like, 'You didn't love me the way I thought you loved me.' There's a little of that, just a little of that, it's in the air.
An after-book kind of feeling.
And so that can be a little awkward, but it is what it is, it's just time. And so the other thing I think I couldn't do well... I can sneak around a little bit as a journalist. I can be a little duplicitous in the sense that I can walk into someone's office who I basically disapprove of and interview them without telling them I disapprove of them. But that can happen. But I can't spend three months with someone who I basically disapprove of, or I'm not sincerely interested in. So I have walked away from subjects who I find personally offensive. Like Sam Bankman-Fried did bad things, but I never found him personally offensive. I was interested in him as a person. He's an interesting person. And so I never felt duplicitous, like loitering in his vicinity. I didn't have a deep loathing or anything of him. So I have had subjects where I just think, life's too short to spend time with this person, and I've walked away from those kinds of people.
When you start a project, I mean, does it go from 30 or 40 subjects and it's sort of weeded down to four or five on the basis of that sort of hierarchy of, you know, just interpersonal interests or interesting? How does it work? I mean, do you throw a wide cast?
It depends on the subject. I mean, Moneyball, for example, it started with an observation about the team. It was like, how are they winning games? And once that became clear, clearly a really interesting question. I mean, Billy Beane was at the center of the book. It wasn't like I was choosing... but with The Big Short, once it became clear what the story really wanted to be, it was a big bet. Wall Street had gone long subprime mortgages, all these Wall Street firms had bet on the subprime mortgage market, and some smart people who were kind of oddballs on the side of Wall Street had bet against them. Find the oddballs because they knew what they were talking about. There was a pool of 15 of those people. I went and interviewed and got to know all of them, and there were reasons why I selected the ones I selected, but mainly they enabled me to explain the different ways you might get the right answer. There was a variety of the correct experience. And so in that case, yes, whittle it down. In the case of the new book, I'd be interested, I'm genuinely interested what you think, because you run a government and I've never done that, but what you think of how I thought about this problem. But it was all right, Trump administration comes in, Trump one, the story is neglect and ignorance. Like dog caught the bus, didn't think he was going to catch the bus, didn't care about the government, fired his transition team.
You wrote a book on this.
I wrote a whole book about this, The Fifth Risk, but it was like, Chris...
And by the way, just for the purpose of understanding, The Fifth Risk is literally what... Jack McWilliams? And he's...
John, was it John or something? Yeah. And he has five risks.
I asked him what five risks you're worried about.
It was like, you know, it was like the North Korean missiles, and he was in the Energy Department. Iranian concerns too, bomb, which is a little more contemporary now. The fifth risk itself was the funny one because he said it was the one he worried most about, and he said program management. I said, what the hell is that? Like, this is taking me down the most boring path here. He says, no, you don't understand, the US government has all these very long-term programs. And he started, I think the first thing he talked about was the Hanford nuclear waste cleanup. Like, we built the bombs for World War II, we got the plutonium in a 600-square-mile site in eastern Washington that is still like the biggest nuclear cleanup problem. It's going to cost $50 billion and take 50 years. And if you don't do it well, it poisons the entire Pacific Northwest. And he was saying there's so many things like this. And we were, you just assume that the government's like this train that's on the tracks and once it gets going it will just go. But all of a sudden he says, I'm wondering if that's true. Like, there's a risk to these big programs.
So Trump one is talking about just how I get the characters. Yeah.
Can I... I'm going to bore you with this a little bit.
Bring it on. No, I love this.
It's the essence of you. So it's hardly boring.
All right. So the Trump one story was this thing. It's like me wandering around. What is he ignoring when he tells Chris Christie, 'Chris, you and I are smart enough that in an hour we can figure out the entire federal government and know everything we need to know'? It's an amazing thing, right?
We had Chris on the podcast talking specifically about that. Fantastic.
And I thought, well, I can wander around the federal government and my reader will know more about the federal government than the president. And this is fun. It's like fun. And this is true. I didn't have any particular interest in writing about government. It wasn't some dream of mine. But you start going into places like the Department of Energy, it's amazing what you find. And I could get the briefings from the people who were trying to brief the Trump administration about how they ran the nuclear arsenal, and they'd say, 'I'm really glad you showed up. We wanted to tell someone.'
Yeah. So that had its own sort of logic to it. But the logic in the case was me figuring out on behalf of the reader what it was that Trump was ignoring and what this thing did. And because you can very easily from a distance say it's all [__], it's just like all lazy people, bureaucrats, all that stuff. But actually when you get into it, the deeper and deeper you get, the more shocking it is how important it is. And the more shocking it is the quality of the people.
I love that. I love that coming out of this book.
And so, to get to Trump two, it is no longer neglect. It is we are going to destroy.
We are going to reorganize the federal government along a simple principle. It now exists for the personal pleasure of Donald Trump. It exists to serve a single person, not a society. And I say, well, okay. Let's just accept that. Let's, in the improv comedy spirit, yes, and yes, okay, we're going to have a federal government now where Congress doesn't matter very much and the Supreme Court does what the president wants them to do and the president is going to have this whole 2-million-person executive branch and the whole point of it is to be loyal to him and serve his personal interests. Okay, let's just say we're going to just do this. What happens? That's the next thing, like what happens to the various things the government does and how will it do it differently? And so this is where I would love, you can sense-check me on this, because the way I thought about it was, don't think about Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, don't think about it in the boxes of the government, think about it as like the basic abstract functions the government performs. Like the government performs a big refereeing function, it's in the judicial system, but also the regulators inside of each agency, there are these people called the inspectors general who referee disputes, referee corruption, and referee all kinds of that. So there's a whole layer of people whose job is to be like NBA refs, fair people who sort of adjudicate the thing.
What's the implication for those people?
Before we get to that, but so the categories I had in my head were the referees, public safety like managing risk, science, what happens to the long-term science projects, information is a big one, like you don't really think about it, but our portrait of the window we have into the society, how we know what we know about ourselves, right?
Largely because the federal government collects all this data and it's like, what are the implications for that?
And so once I had those buckets in my head, and I had a fifth, but if you read the end of the book it explains why, but it was like one of the other abstract things, and I was trying to dream up categories. And the ambition, I knew it was a fool's errand, but still the ambition was in a handful of categories. They should be sufficiently broad that actually the entire federal government can fit into those categories. And the last thing that I had in my head was the trusted institutions. Like it creates trusted institutions, which sounds weird, but money. I mean, you say people don't trust the government, but they trust the money. So I had these categories. I thought I'm going to cast this in the way I cast The Big Short, right? I'm going to find people in each of the categories who've been flushed out.
And I'm going to write about them. And then I was spoiled for choice. I mean, then it was, you know, you go into public safety or risk management. The guy who runs the FAA was sort of muscled out. The guy who runs the FDA's food safety programs.
And are you just Googling for this? I mean, is that the question? I mean, how do you even begin that process? Where do you find the categories? I mean, what's friends, family? If politics doesn't work out for you, journalism might.
No, but no, it's a very good question. It's because no... this is where I had a tactical advantage. So, and I ask myself this before I start books. Why is this book available for me to be written? It's a bit like a Wall Street person asks, why is this trade available for me to do?
There's adverse selection in any marketplace.
Got it. And when I'm checking my sense about whether I should write a book, I want to know there's some reason why I have an advantage writing it, because otherwise it should have been written already, kind of thing. Maybe I shouldn't write it. Maybe someone else will write it.
And I had gotten so deep in the weeds in the government with both The Fifth Risk and then I published an anthology called Who Is Government? where I brought some writers in to prove my point that if you airdrop writers, good writers, into the government, they come away with incredible stories, right? And that had been a bestseller. I mean, that had sold a lot of copies. And so it shown that there was an interest in it. But the combination of those two books, I had met people all over the government. And I had my secret agent, a guy named Max Stier, who runs the Partnership for Public Service, which created the obligation. They're the ones who got the laws passed that required presidential transitions. Max Stier, he's someone you should know. You really should. He's devoted his life in a nonprofit trying to make government work better.
He starts by, he starts 25 years ago by trying to make government a place where smart young people want to come to work, and he realizes that the only way you do that is you make it work better. Now it's been a Sisyphean task. It's been a hard job. I think numerically, what, 7% of people under 30 years old or something. That's it.
No, it's where it gets really crazy is you start looking at like in information technology, like who makes the computers run, like 60% of them are over the age of 55 and they can't use their phones and it's not fair. Yeah. Right. But Max is attacking these problems.
Yeah.
And he attacks them sincerely and in a nonpartisan way. And as a result, the partnership has become this hub for the civil service. He trains civil servants. There's an award ceremony he created called the Sammies where he hands out awards to people who've done extraordinary interesting things.
And so he's got a database of thousands and thousands of civil servants.
And I started with him. I started, he introduced me to some people.
And he ran through dozens of people for me to interview who had come out of various parts of the government. And I think in no case did he actually introduce me to someone who became a subject of mine, but the people I interviewed led me to people who led me to people and finally got it. So I had a choice with every category. But when I got to the person, almost in every case I thought, 'Oh my god, yes, this person enables me to describe, to teach, to dramatize the general problem in the best possible way.' These different people who are strung together like circus elephants in the story, these different people are different enough from each other that nobody will feel there's a redundancy, that they'll realize they're with a different person. And they speak to each other in odd ways. So I cast it, and in no case did I have anybody say, 'I don't want to do this.'
Meaning when you reached out, they... the civil service is in such a state of despair that they've dropped their pose of 'I don't talk to journalists' that normally... yeah, normally they're like, 'I'm not the subject.' Normally they're like, 'Go away' or 'Go talk to the press secretary.'
Yeah. Exactly. In this case, they were...
Our society's falling apart.
What I've come... why I...
I'm questioning the whole reason I went into public service in the first place.
I need therapy, you know. No, really, I want to talk to someone. I need to talk to someone. So they were all open to it. And I gotta say, I'm probably done with the government now as a subject, but I gotta say that this little detour in my career has been among the most delightful. There's something about these people, people who've selected, people who could have gone into the private sector and made a lot of money.
Who found some problem they want to attack, want some purpose greater than themselves, want to serve in some way. There's something so moving about them. And between the lines of all the stuff I've written about them, I feel like they are also sort of teaching us how to lead meaningful lives. These are people, none of these characters, unlike some of my Wall Street characters, none of these characters are people who on their deathbed will have regrets about how they led their lives.
They'll say, 'I did what I was supposed to do. I did my best. I left it on the field.' That's it. They feel like people have left it all on the field. And so it's, I don't know, in this case it's fun. The casting of the book is a fun challenge.
But these are blockers, Michael. They're blockers. The pejorative, you ever heard that term?
I mean, every conceivable pejorative for a civil servant and for the civil service, yes.
Yes, right. So Elon Musk had this thing, he used it at Twitter, like find the blockers and clearly the evil people who don't see the future. Like go in and get rid of them.
And he said this to all the muskrats he brought into Washington to go and clear out this in the... with DOGE.
So I just thought that was the frame of the book is like, 'Yeah, I'll find the blockers. I'll show you who they are.'
The rebels in the deep state.
Yeah. There are people who are actually, if they're blocking you, the only reason they're blocking you is you're asking them to do something against the law. Under their understanding of their job, they aren't there to serve the personal interests of Donald Trump. They're there to serve the Constitution. They take an oath to the Constitution. They're not allowed to break the law. They're not allowed to weaponize the IRS, you know, the IRS data. They're not allowed to this and that, right? They're not allowed to be a dishonest referee. So what DOGE hit when it went in were these people who were principled and who in the end ended up sacrificing their career for their principles, right? Like there was an option to just suck up to DOGE and some people took that option. There was this kind of Vichy moment where you could decide which side you're on. And the people I chose to profile were the people who said, 'No, I'm not going along with this. I guess I'm a blocker,' kind of thing.
So you were... so was the inspiration for this, but obviously there's a through-line here with the multiple books and going back to Trump 1.0, Trump 2.0, and this notion of being present in the 2.0 frame versus indifferent in the 1.0 frame. But was this, I mean, were you just sitting back watching all these headlines with DOGE, this ready-fire-aim construct, and just going in and, you know, was that the impetus?
I knew enough. So there, I actually had a brief moment where I thought this Elon Musk thing could work out because it was...
I was hopeful. I was like, I kind of thought very...
Time for someone to take on the bureaucracy.
It wasn't that. Thin it out. What... that wasn't what it was. It was the big... there is a big technology problem in government.
Government is slow. Government is not well suited to an environment with rapid technical change.
We live in an environment with lots of technological change and it's slow to upgrade.
It really needs to be, our government needs to be upgraded. And I thought he was going to attack that problem because that's the one he's qualified to attack. And instead he attacked an entirely different problem. He framed it as a different problem, is the whole thing is waste, fraud, and abuse. And so unfortunately I knew too much already. I'd spent way too much time actually going and finding out things. And yes, there's waste. Of course there's waste. It's trillions of dollars and two million people and there's always better ways to do things.
Much of the waste is institutionalized. It's systemic. If it's wasteful, it's because Congress makes them do it this way. It isn't that they're wasteful people.
Yeah. What there isn't, the idea that you're going to find a lot of fraud, like people in the government stealing...
Is insane. They're watched every which way. It is true that we Americans have some talent for stealing from their government, like not people who work for the government, but like defrauding Medicare or something like that. Sure, you might find that legit.
But the idea that these people are kind of corrupt in some way, you can't buy them lunch. There's so many rules around them and they're so phobic about violating those rules.
If you want to find fraud, go to a Wall Street firm, you know, go to a private sector firm. There you go.
You know, for sure that you'd find much more of it there.
And it's not that, it's not really so there are not going to be a lot of stories about civil servants stealing from the government. And so I knew that was already kind of a weird approach. And then what lit me up was when he said he was going to save $2 trillion out of the deficit and he didn't even start to talk about Medicaid or Medicare or Social Security. And it was literally $2 trillion that was the promise. What he was attacking was there wasn't $2 trillion there. And I knew how starved of resources parts of the things that we really want to be done were. So I knew he was going to try to starve something that was already maybe being starved too much. So then I started watching and it was, you know, it was a [__] show, right? He didn't know.
I always assume people know more than I do. I'm not an expert type, right? I'm a writer type. I go in, I learn what I need to know to try to tell an accurate story, a story that will grip people about a thing that interests me, and then I'm out and I forget about it. Bathtub flushes, new story comes in. So I'm always assuming that the people in charge know all this [__] that I don't know.
He was so obviously less informed than I was, it shocked the hell out of me.
And then he started making stuff up and he's just lying.
Yeah.
Now, what was odd about that is I tried to talk to him. He didn't want to talk to me. But I talked to some of his closest friends and they were kind of adamant. 'Elon never lies.'
I know. No, no, no. Their line was this is different from... it's different. No, even Trump's best friends wouldn't say Trump never lies. But they say Elon believes what he's saying is what it... Okay. But I started watching what he was saying and I just thought there's no way he could believe that. And the things, very quite damaging lies. I mean, one of the things that set me off was when in the very beginning they start invading various pretty peripheral institutions in the federal, small ones, not places where you're going to find trillions of dollars. USAID, I mean that was a big pile. US Institute of Peace.
Yeah, you open up the book right there, right? Kieran O'Brien.
Well, Kieran O'Brien is a security guard at the US Institute of Peace and used to... and when I read...
Who's heard of the US Institute of Peace? Thank you.
Well, so this... Thank you. Thank you. So this was my first thought when I read a headline, 'DOGE invades US Institute of Peace,' and I thought, what the hell is the US Institute of Peace? And I thought, how do I not know about it? Because when I was working on The Fifth Risk, I had gotten the org chart for the entire federal bureaucracy.
You went deep on Commerce, deep on Ag, deep on Energy. You knew before the...
Former energy secretary under Trump 1.0, you know, that actually it includes nuclear. That's—I knew all kinds of things they didn't know. But more point for the purposes of my story, I had on my office floor every government agency, and I was thinking about which ones, where do I go? Like, what should I write about?
And on my office floor was not the US Institute of Peace. So I thought, and I thought, how did I miss this? How did they not turn up? Yes, it turns out because it's really not part of the—it's not part of the executive branch. It is a private nonprofit that Congress has funded, but that owns its own building.
It raises its own money. It's way complicated. Congress chartered it to be separate, out of the president's control. The president does get—the way the board was constituted, the president does nominate members of the board, and there are a couple of ex officio members: the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. But it's designed so that the terms of the people on the board are asynchronous with the president's, so that he can't control it. The whole point is to be removed.
And the money and private money was used to build the building, all that. So what are they—they're basically going into a—it's like they're coming into your house and saying it's my house now. So I forgave myself for never having heard of this thing because it wasn't part of the government. And that's where—that's where I started with, where the penny dropped for me. I was like, 'Oh, you never want to write the same book twice.' The first book, so I thought—I thought probably not going to write about this because maybe it's the same book twice. Trump, that The Fifth Risk was all about like they don't—he doesn't want to run it. Then I realized, oh, he wants to run it. Not only he wants to run it, and stuff that he's not even supposed to run.
That's what got me interested. And Colin O'Brien was—I just, you know, it was a quixotic way to see, to meet DOGE, but he's literally at the front door. Former cop, former army guy, former sniper.
He's like, you look at him and he's exactly what you would expect. He's a guyry county.
He's a guy who wants—you want protecting the government governor's mansion. He's like that guy.
Very, very smart. Like understands that security is noticing the things that other people don't notice. The shadow—the shadow nobody notices is the door—the door handle that's slightly loose, all that stuff. And he sees DOGE, and he—he instantly goes and starts researching these people, and he doesn't like what he finds.
He—he thinks—he thinks young punk. He thinks I want to punch him in the face. He doesn't do any of that. But he—he is as clever as anybody is in the government, if you assume the US Institute is in the government, at keeping DOGE out. And so there was this lovely cat and mouse where they're trying to get in the building and he keeps them out of the building. And what he pointed out to me, even though he is, you know, in the grand scheme of things, not a hugely important person—he's the head of security at the US Institute of Peace—he actually does give you a good overview of one of the things, one of the necessary things that was happening right at the very beginning. And to put it crudely, it's this: it's seizing the weapons. It's making sure everybody's got a gun.
Yeah. We're in charge of now.
And that was not obvious that they had control of the weapons because there was a security detail with a lot of weapons in their basement that DOGE ends up blackmailing into having—into flipping and working for DOGE rather than the institute.
So they were putting their guns down because they weren't going home with the guns. So they had this down.
They had down the basement. So, but it was a private security force,
That DOGE co-opts the Washington city police, who are supposed to be their own police force, DOGE forces. So what you see is,
If we're going to seize power, the first thing we need to do is seize the weapons. And I know without ever a shot fired,
It's important. It's important. Um, and his—his—his view, Colin's view of DOGE is—is an interesting kind of working guy, straight guy, guy who's been this live-by-the-rules, hero-in-the-police-force kind of guy looking at the world changing and realizing, you know, oh my god, we're not living in the rule of law anymore. This is something has fundamentally changed.
Uh, so the book opens with him. Can I pause for a sec because—
I was asking a question. I never like gave you a chance to answer it. This idea I have of framing the federal government and these—these functions that are going to be—are going to be carried out very differently if we have basically a king than if we have the government we had before. Does that seem like a fair way to think about it? A dumb way to think about it? A weird way to think about it?
It's the only way to think about it. I mean, guys like me come and go, and these are the folks that—I mean, these are the people we rely on for the expertise. These are the heroes of the story. Politicians are the ones getting all the—you know, we get all the attention. If something goes wrong, then we immediately castigate these folks and, you know, say, god damn it, god, the bureaucracy [__] this up, the whole thing. And so 100%. By the way, but I—and I—but I do understand the instinct because there is a level of influence where they can wait folks like me out.
Yes, that's true. And so they can irritate you.
They can irritate. They can sort of slow walk.
They see your type come and go.
They come and go. We've seen this all that. You know, they come in all this. Oh, and then just—and you know, they're seen in some ways you can make that argument after DOGE. It was a 10-month flash in the pan. Right.
That's right. Two trillion, then it was a trillion, then it's maybe 150 million, and now they're advertising 215, please.
And they're leaving out the huge costs they've incurred. Of course, it is. They—DOGE definitely cost the American people.
Yeah. And you write about—I mean, just the complete chaos and then hiring these essential workers back. I mean, all that through your book. But this—No, but I do get the—I mean, it's the system though itself, and I mean, I understand that there's—it's the process, not the people, right?
And that's a distinction that's an important one. You make that point.
Yes. I—I—I could see, you know, I kept trying to enter the point of view of Trump world, like why they were so frustrated or why they thought they needed to do this.
And the—the best story they could tell is a story they sometimes try to tell is we had this great agenda the first time that these people foiled,
But they—they didn't have an agenda. The whole point is they didn't have an agenda. They didn't try to—these people didn't know what they were supposed to do mostly. So they carried on doing whatever they were doing. And a lot of it is not—most of it's not partisan. Most of it is stuff everybody would agree. There's a reason it's being done.
So that's the false story. It's not a true story, but it's a story they've peddled. You need to get rid of this—the deep state.
There is the deep state. There is—there isn't really a deep—the clay layer of bureaucrats that are stopping any progress whatsoever. A world that's rapidly changing, we need government that recognizes that. What is true is that if you want to seize total control, these people do get in your way because they are abiding the law, not you.
And so over and over they're going to be—they're going—they're going to be irritants at minimum. And so it is true that you need to decapitate that—that part of it, that you need to get rid of the impulse to serve the constitution rather than a person, and that—that runs right. But when you do that, you're fiddling with the basic functions of government, and it's the things going to be done differently than they were before. I give you the example that where this—the penny dropped for me the first time was when I was just thinking about how the data story plays out. Information government is such a—it's such a wild story because we sort of take for granted the census and the weather service and all that—that—that my story Moneyball about baseball. It's a story about what people do when they have data. That—that there once you have data, you can change the way baseball is played. Government is Moneyball all over the place. Government's chock-full with data that people use or don't use. You got it.
And there you can break the data down into a couple of buckets for the purposes of this story. And one—the giant pool, the bigger bucket is—is data that the government collects and the public really needs and needs to be made accessible to the public. So weather data, climate data, economic data, so on and so forth, that—that bright people can come along and use for all kinds of interesting purposes. The smaller bucket, but is a critical bucket, is data the government necessarily collects but it's meant to be intensely private because it can be weaponized.
Uh, tax returns, health care data,
Now in the former world, in our old government world, uh, it's understood that the private data—it's taboo to touch the private data.
Yes. And there—there are all these safeguards around it. And you know, however inefficient or ineffectually it's done, there is an attempt to get the public data out to the public as on websites or whatever. So the public can make—and by the way, very intentional. I mean, Obama moving to open data initiatives. I wrote a book called, uh, Citizenville on this, government as a platform, making machine-readable all this treasure trove of data, uh, and allowing people to be, you know, to come up with their own apps and come up with their own design and sort of focus. 100% legit.
But then on the flip side, and this is—then when you—but if so you wave a one. So this is like, okay, you America, maybe you want this.
Yeah. We're not going to—we're not make any value judgments here. But if we're now in this operation that's a pure loyalist operation and everything, including the data, is meant to serve a person, what happens? Well, in the big pile of data, a lot of that data is going to be implicitly threatening to someone who's sitting in—good economic data, good inflation data when inflation's going up, bad, you know, good economic data when the economy isn't doing so great. Y—
Uh, climate data when you don't want to know. Thank you.
When you stick your head in the sand. So all of a sudden—
Data sets start to disappear over here. And that's what's happened.
The—the head of the—I think was the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the woman who is in charge of that gets fired because he doesn't like the—
I feel like that was 20 years ago. Thank you for reminding me.
But there's—it's systematic, right? That in this pool of data, it's going to be parsed by the loyalists to make sure no data that—that reflects poorly on the person we're supposed to be loyal to is out there, never mind how valuable it is to be out there. On the flip side, the private data that can be weaponized against one's enemies is instantly weaponized. And so the story in the book is Kathleen Walters was in charge of privacy at the IRS.
