Who happened to talk easy?
You're not talking so easy anymore.
Can I tell you what happened?
You're going to be a cranky old man.
So, so, he consults Claude.
I was at the show. This is a different show three years ago.
Oh my. We're going to talk about your mother. Relax.
So who hurt you as a kid? We're going to get there. Don't worry.
This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.
Today, writer Michael Lewis. He's the author of several best-selling books, including Liars Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short. His latest is called Blockers. It's a return to the subject he first explored in The Fifth Risk, which is the federal government and, of course, the largely invisible public servants who keep it all running, or at least tried to keep it all running before what Lewis describes as the meteor strike of the second Trump administration. Viewed through the eyes of six workers across several agencies, including the IRS and the NIH, the book uncovers the ways in which the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, briefly led by the inimitable Elon Musk, ran roughshod across the federal government and targeted those deemed insufficiently loyal or pliant or, you know, blockers.
Fittingly, Musk is back in the news with the release of Alex Gibney's new documentary, Musk, and Luca Guadagnino's latest film, Artificial. And so today we talk about the wrecking ball that was DOGE, mass firings across the federal government, the battle over public and private data, and why the people dismissed as blockers, quote unquote, became the characters Lewis wanted to better understand. Then after the break, we try to do the same with Michael: how he finds his characters, what past controversies have taught him about reporting, and why after nearly 20 books, he remains drawn to people working against the grain.
Before I turn it over to the episode, I want to say that Talk Easy was recently named a finalist for three Signal Awards this year, including Best Host, Interview, or Talk Show, and Best Video Podcast Host. I think we're up against Oprah in two of those categories. And so, if you want to give us a fighting chance, voting is now open through Thursday, October 15th. If you like what we do here and want to support, you can head on over to the link below or go to vote.signalaward.com. If that all sounds like too much, or you know, if you want to save your vote for the midterms, the second best thing you can do is subscribe to the show on Apple or Spotify. If you're on Spotify, actually, there's a little bell at the top of your screen. Be sure to click that so that new episodes get notified and pop up at the top of your feed. If you want to watch us on YouTube, you can do that. Our page is Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso on YouTube. And of course, if you want to reach out, my email is
[email protected]. Now, on to the show.
Michael Lewis, welcome back to the show.
Sam.
I didn't think it was possible. I thought you picked me over like a chicken in a Chinese restaurant the last time I was here, and I didn't think there was anything left of me.
And yet, you remain fully formed.
I just don't know what we're going to talk about.
Oh, you need not concern yourself.
I won't. I assume that is your problem, but I have to say that I have said this to other people. I'm not just saying this to you. It was one of the most delightful interviews I've ever done. And it was actually interesting how much you knew about me that in some cases I didn't know about myself, and that was an interesting experience. I love talking about my parents, for example. That was great. It was a different kind of thing.
I think this is the third time you've been on the podcast, right? And this is roughly the third or fourth book you've written about government agencies and civil servants in the Trump era. Can we go back to where this project began? I think it's January 2017, inauguration day, and you just had a hip replacement surgery. There you are watching the broadcast, high on some drug. I don't know which.
What was the opioid that caused the epidemic?
And yet through the oxycodone haze. You're watching CNN. Tell me what happens. What do you say? What do you think?
I was watching, everybody will remember this moment, when Trump got out of the limo outside the White House and bounded up the stairs, leaving Melania behind him to shake hands with Barack and Michelle Obama. And I had this thought, and it was a kind of drug-induced haze. I just thought, I felt this feeling, he's going to kill me in some way. He's going to... that all of a sudden, you know, that feeling you have that the risk in the environment has just gone up. And I had that feeling and it was a panicky feeling. And so I sat with that a bit and I thought, you know, this could probably be translated into some sort of study, analytical sort of approach to the Trump administration. Try to calculate how many people die because he's president. That was my first thought. It was a crazy thought.
The first thought was Donald Trump just won, he's going to kill me. Michael Lewis, bestselling author.
It wasn't quite as direct as that, but yes, it was that kind of... my life just got cheaper, then the risks to my life just went up.
It's weird because you were on oxycodone, but that sounds like someone who took like an edible that was too strong.
Yeah. Well, the cause of it was, I think probably a visceral sense of his indifference to my own life and not, you know, just like he was so self-absorbed that all he cares about is himself, and combined with the sense that he didn't have any idea of the instrument he was going to be in charge of, the American government. And when I thought about the government, I thought of it as a big risk-management exercise. So I already knew at that point that he had fired his transition team, which is a 550-person unit, which was the mechanism for getting information about how the government ran to the president, and that the Obama team had spent six months and put a thousand people on it to create like the best course about the American government that could be created to give it to them so that they could hit the ground running and know what the Department of Energy did, and knowing that Trump had skipped the class, and then later finding out that he turned to Chris Christie right after the election and said, fire all those people because you and I are so smart we can figure it out in an hour, that I had the sense that he'd done something like that already. And so I was sitting there thinking, oh, this risk-management device that helps manage the risks in my life, whether it's risks from deadly disease or war or whatever, that this thing is going to be in less capable and knowledgeable hands and he doesn't really care. I think that was where I was coming from, plus the drugs. I mean, that book did start with that spasm.
So once you come to that, that resulted in The Fifth Risk, which was during Trump's first term, which you described as a story about the price of ignorance and the risk of radical neglect. As we move our way to Blockers, what's the story to tell about Trump's second term?
Yeah, nobody wants to rewrite the same book twice, and I don't have any interest in it. And I kind of would have imagined that that was that for me in the federal government. But this time, they come in after the election, after the inauguration, and there is this plan in the background called Project 2025, which he's disavowed, which is a plan to radically remake the federal government. It was unclear whether he cared about that or not until he got to the White House. And then he starts, it's kind of almost the opposite story of Trump one. They have planned to sort of seize control of this operation and even parts of the executive branch that the president doesn't normally control. That he went from not managing at all to sort of asserting his right to powers that presidents previously hadn't had. And that it was a huge power grab. The president's going to micromanage everything. And this two-million-person civil service, nonpartisan civil service, two million people who take an oath not to a person but to a constitution and who among their other duties is to tell the president they won't do something if it's against the law, all of a sudden those two million people are going to become essentially loyalists in a Trump political operation. So I'll tell you this. I can't do a book without a frame. It's like, what is the frame of the book?
People long to have a Michael Lewis elevator pitch.
But I never... and what's funny about that is I don't have to pitch the book. I mean, I have the same publisher I've had for 35 years, but it's pitching the book to myself. It's like, what is this about?
Okay. So how did you pitch it to yourself?
This is how I pitch it to myself. I said, look, we are witnessing a transformation of an environment. The government, not American politics, the government and the executive branch, the two-million-person civil service. And then I thought, well, how do you think about the government? What are the things the government does and how are those things going to be different? It's sort of like everything from public safety to data collection to long-term scientific research that the market won't fund, and then what's happening to the people in those places. So that was where I started, and I thought of it almost metaphorically as an environmental shift. It's like meteor hits the planet, habitats change, some species all of a sudden go extinct. You can describe kind of the new environment by what can't survive in it, and it's an extinction story.
So a blocker is someone who cannot survive in this new environment. What and who are blockers?
So that's Elon Musk's term. He said when he went into the government with his team at DOGE, the same thing he said when he went into Twitter with his team. He said, 'You're going to get in there and there are going to be people who are already there who want to stop you from doing what you want to do. These people are blockers. Find the blockers and get rid of them.' And it was a term they threw around all over the place.
And prior to January 20th, 2025, was that the name they went by? Blocker?
No. No, no, no, no, no. They went by, they went by like civil servant.
This is a new term. It's a new term. Okay. Yeah. No, this is like, what is this like? This is an insult that Elon Musk was hurling at them.
Elon Musk, famous for quality insults.
Yes. Famous for quality insults. But he shares that with Trump. Do you see him? He likes to use ChatGPT at parties to create insult humor.
This is the thing. He said, 'If you want to have a good time at a party and make a crash joke instead of coming up with one yourself, because he's a [__] who can't.'
Who happened to talk easy?
You're not talking so easy anymore.
Can I tell you what happened?
You're going to be a cranky old man.
Time. So, so, he consults Claude.
I was at the show. This is a different show three years ago.
Oh my. We're going to talk about your mother. Relax. So we're going to get... So who hurt you as a kid? We're going to get there. Don't worry.
Okay. Sorry. Sorry, we got to touch.
No, my heart, like many people who like and listen to the show, has been hardened by the exact thing you write about.
I'm writing about. This is right. We're going to get to that. But so Elon Musk, he comes in, you're right. The characters in my book, the six main characters, they didn't call themselves blockers. Elon Musk would have described them that way. And mainly what they were just trying to do is not break the law. But I thought when I found this pattern, these people who would have been described as blockers were actually doing their job beautifully. They were not partisan people. No one would have ever accused them of incompetence. They were dedicated to the country. And I thought this term, it's like impressionist. That was an insult. When the impressionist painters, they turned it into a compliment. Tories. That was an insult. The Tory party has made hay with it. So I thought we're just going to take that term, we're going to turn it into a compliment. So, and I tell you something, I don't know anything. I don't have any deep source inside the White House, but two weeks ago, Donald Trump got up in a speech and he said that if the Democrats take the House and they try to do stuff, I'll be a blocker. I'll end up being a blocker. I'll block all their bad stuff for two years. It won't be the same, but I'll be a blocker. What can I tell you? And I thought, I wonder if someone has at least told him the title.
But he wants to be one though, right now. He wants to be one. That's, it's not in Elon Musk world. It's the worst thing you can be.
But once we're inside the frame, let's talk about these six people. They are dedicated civil servants, right? They were before they were fired.
Yep. Or quit because they couldn't do the job anymore.
Precisely. But are they anomalies within the system? Because I think a lot of people who think of or at least have an assumption about civil servants go, they clock in, they clock out, they don't particularly care about what they do, they have great benefits, vacation, they retired at 60, 65, call it a day, right? Are these people anomalies in the system?
No. And you know, they're so easy to find. I could have done this book five times over with five different cast of characters. Sure, it's a two-million-person workforce. Sure, there are lazy people. Sure, there are people who have no higher calling. I'm sure you, but you can find that in the private sector. What's striking about the federal government is how many people you find who could make twice what they make in the government outside the government who are working not 40-hour weeks, not 60-hour weeks, but 100, 80-hour weeks. And why don't they leave or why didn't they leave? Because the jobs are so meaningful, because there's some purpose. They see the purpose of the job. They see how important it is and they see they're having all these knock-on effects on the lives of other people and it gives them enormous satisfaction. It's often people who are interested in a specific problem that only the government's going to address, people with specific skills that will address that problem. I mean, it was so easy to do and it's so easy to do because there are all these untold stories. I mean, that's the story of the government, is the story the government does not tell its own story, that the politicians, people conflate politics and government. They see politicians and they think that's the government. No, there are these people who are there who are doing things that we all agree need to be done that the private sector won't do. And they're often there on a mission and they make such good characters. One, because they don't think of themselves as characters. When people think of themselves as characters, they suck as characters. They like, don't be such a character, you know? Two, they have obsession. They're obsessed with something they're doing. What they're doing is important and they're just not watched and so they're not used to having their stories told and all of that is a recipe for making it swing on the page.
And all of their stories are changed by the arrival of DOGE.
Yes. And DOGE, and it's not just DOGE. DOGE is one of the prongs in the assault that is the Trump administration, but this administration comes in with malice towards them.
So, let's talk about that. DOGE at the time was spearheaded by Elon Musk. Who were the men and women enlisted?
Almost all men. Very. I mean, the DOGE female was a rare.
Were there any women in DOGE?
But just like not really. But who were these people who were carried out to...
It was a collective of people. I think what they probably all shared in common was a desire to be closer to Elon Musk. There were some older people, middle-aged people who came out of Musk's companies, people who had mainly some loose business relationship with Musk. But underneath that, the active ingredient were young men between the ages of 19 and 27 who were either in college or just out of college who were Musk disciples.
So they were bound by a general, broad, sort of nebulous frustration with government at large.
I would say that most of them, they knew nothing at all about the government, but...
But they believed it was wasteful.
They believed what Elon Musk said, which he said it was wasteful. Waste, fraud, and abuse. He said that he was going to go into the $7 trillion deficit and he was going to cut $2 trillion out of it and he was going to find all the crooks.
So you write in the book, no country on earth had ever sought to understand itself as creatively as the United States. The impulse to count, to use numbers to create a picture, was present at the country's founding, which is how of course we arrive at the census to determine seats in Congress, the consumer price index, etc. But in Trump term two, you write, the impulse to count was being replaced by another impulse: the impulse to remain ignorant. What no one knew, no one could be blamed for. And one of the more serious and timely examples of this, especially considering what's happening at Cornell and the seven fraternity members accused of gang rape, is around the National Crime Victimization Survey. Tell me how they approached that survey and did DOGE and Trump work in some ways to limit the amount of sexual and domestic violence cases being reported?
This is in the section on the data collection enterprise, and there are two, you can think of the data the government collects as kind of breaking down into two buckets. One is data that it needs to disseminate, so we all have a picture of our society, and that is economic statistics, climate statistics, the census data, this kind of thing. And the National Crime Victimization Survey, of which I am not an expert, but it was created in response to frustration with official police statistics. It's like there were some crimes that were clearly going completely underreported, and domestic violence is a really good example. And so it was an attempt to do by survey what the police reports didn't capture. So that's one bucket. The other bucket is like your tax data or your health data, which the government collects by necessity but it's supposed to keep to itself. What interested me, what got me going on that subject, is how when you change the government from what it was to what Trump wants it to be, you almost invert the way these two buckets are treated.
So all of a sudden the IRS tax data, which is supposed to be sacrosanct, can be used as a weapon for the political operation. It can be used to hunt down undocumented workers. It can be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. So all of a sudden the private data becomes endangered and the public data gets manipulated for the benefit of the administration, whoever happens to be in the White House. So that if the economic statistics are bad, you change them or you hide them. And so they fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because of, I can't remember if it was inflation or unemployment, or there was a stat that he didn't like. Or you don't like the climate data. Guess what? We're not going to put it up on the websites. And with the crime victimization survey, the reason there's two lines in the book is that the blockers won this time. I mean, the people at the Commerce Department, the data people said, you can't completely do this. And they backed off that thing. And so they polluted the statistics though, because they don't acknowledge in the survey any longer trans people. And so you're not going to get crimes against trans people. It's one of many examples of taking information they don't want the public to have and just not presenting it to them.
These kids are basically let loose within these different federal agencies.
And they are given strict instructions to go through the bylaws and certain org charts and find, you know, basically Command-F certain buzzwords.
Diversity, trans, anything. Women is the one.
Can I explain what you're saying?
All right. So, imagine you're a 24-year-old muskrat who worships Elon Musk and you've been told, 'Go into the Department of Veterans Affairs.'
Can you imagine me as a muskrat?
No, I can imagine you in the song Muskrat Love, but I can't imagine you as a muskrat.
Yeah, it is a compliment. It's a very Talk Easy song. Okay. Muskrat Love. You could even play it as you're kind of thinking.
Old Talk Easy or new Talk Easy?
I'm still getting my mind around the idea of new Talk Easy. But so you are sent into one of these agencies, Department of Agriculture, Energy, IRS, wherever, and you're given a mission without any information. You don't know anything. You know less than you and I know sitting here. And you're told cut the people, get rid of people, and cut contracts. Now, both are problematic legally because the civil service has protections. You can't fire them without cause. And the reason for that is you don't want a president to come in and fire everybody who he thinks is a Republican, or a Democrat who comes in and fires everybody he thinks is a Republican. You want to keep politics out of it. There's a reason for the protections for the civil service. And the contracts, that's money that Congress has authorized. Congress has the power of the purse. They're told also, but this is a whisper, this is sub rosa, this is their pardons: you'll get a pardon. Don't worry about the law. Basically, you get a pardon.
And where did you get that from?
Several of them. I interviewed like a dozen of the DOGE people. They were feeling as if they could do whatever they wanted. The richest man in the world and the president of the United States were behind them. And the president could give them a pardon if they got in trouble. But it wasn't just a feeling. It was true. That's how they behaved. That was a feeling. And it was, well, maybe it's true. Maybe they won't get a pardon. None of these people have been given pardons yet.
They haven't been prosecuted yet either.
Right. Now, here's what they do. So, it actually turns out to be very difficult to fire anybody who has the civil service protections. However, there is a collection of people in every agency who are called probationary employees. That sounds bad, but what it means is you've only been there 18 months, and there's a period after you get hired to work in the federal government where they want to watch you work for 18 months before they give you these protections. And who are these people? These are young people and these are people who have been brought in to deal with some immediate problem that they needed someone for. So, it's exactly who you don't want to fire. They fire all the probationary workers. They aren't really allowed to do that. There's a rule that you're not supposed to fire them without cause. So they get someone to sign a document or they say we're firing you for cause. So they basically tell tens of thousands of young people, idealistic people, many of whom are doing great jobs, that you suck at your job and you're fired.
And how much money did that save?
None. Nothing. They were still being paid, a lot of them, for not coming to work. The second thing they do is to cut contracts. They're told there's all this woke spending. And so, for example, in the Department of Veterans Affairs, a young man goes in, he knows nothing about it. He asks for the file that contains all the contracts. It's got 90,000 contracts in it.
And he F9-ing, as you said, he starts just typing in keywords and it's bias, it's gender, it's whatever.
Native American, whatever it is.
And woman, yeah. And he just cuts them without even knowing what they are.
Because it's woke. Because he thinks that it's just all waste. Now, I'm sure, beyond sure, that you or I could go through every contract, every dollar the US government spent and we'd find things that were objectionable to us. But the bigger principle is the way those programs happen doesn't happen because some bureaucrat is creating them. Congress creates them because of pressure from the people. So the way you were supposed to do this is you go to Congress and say that you shouldn't be funding this. They're just essentially seizing the power of the purse. The bigger point is what do they say they're doing? They're going to cut the deficit. $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion deficit. If you look at the deficit, 75% of the spending is either interest payment on the debt, the military, or entitlements. They're addressing none of those. It's mathematically impossible to cut $2 trillion out of that just attacking what they're attacking. And then on top of that, what they actually end up cutting is a few billion dollars. It ends up being nothing, almost nothing, and the costs that they incur by having to pay people they've laid off for two years end up probably being greater than what they cut. So it's not been good business. And if you just back away and look at it from Mars, as Elon Musk would, you see in the first two years of the Trump administration, the national debt has increased by $3.5 trillion.
Why does that not bother Republicans?
I mean, they're scared of him. The simple fact is they're scared of him.
Of Elon Musk or Donald Trump?
Donald Trump. I mean, probably both because Musk throws money into these campaigns. But Musk himself seems to be genuinely upset with what's happened with the deficit. But Trump obviously doesn't care about that at all. And this is, you know, this is as we speak, it's the sort of thing we've been living with forever. Oh, our debt just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and maybe it just doesn't matter at all. Except there's a moment. There comes a moment where, oh, it does matter.
What do you think that is?
And this is what happened. What does that mean?
What it means is when people buy a treasury bond to lend us the money we need to run our government, they're taking a risk. They're taking a risk that we won't pay them back. And the price that investors have been demanding to take that risk has gone up and up and up very fast in just the last few months. So all interest rates have gone up and up and up. What that does is it raises the cost of paying the interest on the debt, causing the investors to think, wait, their finances are getting even worse because people are lending to them on worse and worse terms. And you start this vicious cycle and you get Greece in 2008. How that plays out here is it's kind of hard to imagine.
But I've imagined it. And it's like...
It's like, you think interest rates at 7% are bad? Wait till you see 15%. Wait till you see... Here's what I think happens. If it happened now, Donald Trump gets up and he says, enough about all this talk about the debt. We don't... who do we owe that money to? Like all these foreigners who've been cheating us in trade deals. So we're not going to pay. We're going to have effectively a workout situation here. And what he'll have done is completely destroy the trust that has been built up over generations in the American government. It's still there. It's like people will still lend us money. People will still hold dollars because they think it's the best currency to hold. That trust is under siege. And the cost of that trust going away is huge. It has huge long-term effects on the economic growth of the country. We pay a price for not being trustworthy. And he's not trustworthy, he's turning us into him. You have Russians in the financial markets that are really unusual. And unlike the financial crisis, when the reason that the whole crisis could be calmed was there was trust in the American government, they could come in and assume all the bad debts. There's no person to come in, no entity.
institution to come in and sort of backstop the whole thing.
So, are you seeing 2026 the same way you felt or saw 2007?
More like 2005 or six. I'll put it this way: my antennae are up for another financial book because I think there's a chance there's going to be chaos in the financial markets, and that's when it gets interesting. And because of the way they're managing the finances...
Beyond it being interesting, does it unnerve you?
Well, I moved some of my own money into euro because I didn't trust the dollar as much, and into gold. So, yes, I've actually taken action. I think the dumbest thing you could do is buy like a long-term Treasury bond, like long-term debt. I don't know why anybody holds it. I think the truth in the end is that the country is so financially obsessed that when it gets bad, that it's the end for Trump. He's like this really the end that all of business will flee to and leave him high and dry, and that there'll be some reckoning with how we—there might be some way we bounce back in an interesting positive way, that it's not just decline. But so I don't feel like, oh, I got to leave the country, but I do feel I need to put some of my money somewhere else.
So this erosion of trust, it extends, of course, to the presidency, but I want to bring it back to civil servants for a second. Can we read a section from the book?
Are we going to do it or am I going to do it?
You're going to do it. Before you read that, who is Tim Curry?
Tim Curry worked inside of an obscure agency, but extremely important agency, called the Office of Personnel Management, along with two other agencies, the General Service Administration and the Office of Management and the Budget. It's sort of like the engine room of the entire government. His agency touches all the people who work for the government. So if you want to come in and start bossing the whole federal government around, it's the place you do it. And Tim's job was essentially—this is putting it a little crudely—it was essentially to be the referee between whatever political people came in to run the government and the government. And he prevented a lot of disputes from getting out of hand. He was regarded by both sides singularly as a fair ref. Like everybody trusted him.
And what was so cool about him was everybody thought secretly he was on their side.
That and this goes back to like the Clinton people thought he was a Clinton person. The Bush people thought he was a Bush person. The Trump people thought he was a Trump person before Trump won. The Obama people thought he was an Obama person. And as one person finally said to me when I was talking to them about a political person talking about Timmy, he said, 'He is the strangest person I've ever met in Washington. I spent a hundred hours in a room alone with him and I do not know his politics. I have no idea what he thinks.'
And there's no one I know who I spent 100 hours with, I don't have any idea their politics. So he's managed to keep himself out of it. And he sort of like the society needs—like games need referees that aren't corruptible. He's managed to make himself like the singular uncorruptible ref in this game, which is the continual friction between political people and the government.
And yet despite that spotless reputation, he finds with Trump 2, there's no room for a fair ref. Refs. It doesn't want refs at all, except the refs. It's rigged. So, I'm going to read you this passage. And this is Tim after he's seen DOGE for the first time.
What troubled Tim in a new way was DOGE's assault on nonpartisanship. Among Trump's first actions was a flurry of late-night emails firing the neutral third parties introduced by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. By removing the Inspectors General from most of the bigger agencies, Trump rid the system of the one place a whistleblower could safely blow a whistle. By removing a Democrat from the Merit Systems Protection Board, he turned what was meant to be an apolitical process into an overtly partisan one. In the same spirit, Trump issued an executive order that stripped the rights from all but the Republican-leaning unions—Border Patrol, firefighters, and police officers.
It was hard to see how any of this could be legal, but in some new way, the law no longer mattered. The probationary workers had all been fired for poor performance because it was illegal to fire them for anything else, when many of them hadn't had much chance to perform, and many of those who had performed had done extremely well. The Trump administration was betting that if they broke the law fast enough, the law would never catch up to them. If you pushed them to explain themselves, as Tim now did, they'd float the novel argument that the entire system of due process for civil servants was unconstitutional. If due process is unconstitutional, I asked Tim, why has it not come up in the 50 years since the Civil Service Act?
So, this is—I mean, I thought of Tim when I met him because he is deliberately so bland. He like doesn't want you to—he's like there's a Kaiser Soze quality to him. Like you spent two hours with him and you couldn't describe him after the two hours. What he disliked was trying to hide himself in the name of higher principle, and how this person could not find a place for himself no matter how hard he tried inside this new administration. And it took him about three weeks before he had a physical breakdown. Like he thought, I'm actually going to die if I stay—heart rate screwed up, blood pressure screwed up. And he was telling us something. He was telling us that fairness, the idea of fairness, no longer has a place in the government. It's a loyalist operation that serves the purposes of a single person.
When you were reading that, and I felt this way during the book, I kept writing, as you can see, note after note, about neutrality being under attack, that there was no place for nonpartisanship. And I kept writing in my notes, and I guess I just want to say it to you. I kept writing, why is this assault on something I believe in, which is neutrality, nonpartisanship—why is it producing so little in me? Like I was not stirred in the way I should be, right? And I wondered if you had felt any of that in the reporting of this book, because I kept going, I know this is bad. I know this is wrong. But something has changed in me. I don't know what that is.
That's interesting. Can we pick that up after the break because I can think about it during the break?
Yeah. You think you'll find the answer in the bathroom?
Or you might. But yes. [music] Yes. Let's do that after the break.
Okay. That's coming up next with Michael Lewis.
Last month I traveled to New York City to moderate a gallery event and host a couple tapings of Talk Easy. I stayed over in Chelsea. And going to New York in September, it's just the perfect time of year to be in Manhattan. The summer heat is starting to break, but it's just warm enough to spend most of the day outside. And in between work, I'd walk around the High Line or head to Greenwich Village to get some work done at a cafe, cuz working in a hotel room, eh, who wants to do that? I even caught a friend's concert in Brooklyn. It was nice to spend a few days getting reacquainted with New York. And it made me think about how much of traveling is about experiencing the everyday rhythms of a place—the restaurants, shops, parks, and neighborhood spots that make a city feel like itself. That's why when I find myself leaving my home in LA for any stretch of time, I think it could be a good idea to list my space on Airbnb. That way, someone can enjoy my city the way I enjoy the ones I get to visit. It's a practical way to make use of my space when I'm already gone. Plus, the extra income can help offset some of my future travel costs. If you got upcoming travel plans, your home could be working for you. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host.
[music] Coming back.
Did you find an answer in the bathroom?
I did. I was thinking about it because it's an interesting observation. By the way, that was a really good ESPN tease. Like, coming up next, why Sam felt a little apathy reading Michael Lewis's book. I sound like Colin Cowherd or something. I think because your reaction is coming against a backdrop of so much outrageous stuff going on that your senses have been sort of numbed, dulled. I think that's what's happened. It's like you've been overstimulated. But the nice thing about a book is you can sit down quietly with it and think about it. So I can understand how, you know, like he's ripping his name—he's ripping the Kennedy name off this Kennedy Center, putting his name on it, ripping down the East Wing of the White House, bombing Iran—it's like one thing after another. And you think, oh, well, what does it matter that he stole my tax returns?
It's more that the larger feeling that animates this moment is a kind of dulling, an apathy, a feeling as if nothing can change.
And I don't think that's true.
But I want to talk about how you profile and how you do this work because one of your subjects, Colin O'Brien, who was a security guard at the U.S. Institute of Peace, has this line that I think captures a little bit what we're talking about, which is: you can't really measure prevention. When something bad does not happen, there is no clear way to prove why. When it works, nothing happens. And I was thinking as you're writing this book, and even The Fifth Risk, you have to make drama out of nothing happening. How do you do that?
Well, each subject in the book was a different literary challenge. It's not that hard with Alex Maringer, who's inventing a fire science to deal with wildland-urban interface fires, because things are happening—people, communities are burning down. With Kathleen Walters, whose job is who sits between your tax returns and politicians, again, would have been very hard, except ICE comes in and demands seven million tax returns of undocumented workers so they can go arrest them in their homes in the middle of the night because they've got the most recent addresses on them.
A judge says over 40,000 tax violations the IRS committed.
Probably a radical underestimate.
That's what they've admitted to. Yeah. The database is seven million names, and we have promised that population for thirty years that use this number, pay your taxes, and they've paid hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes.
These are undocumented immigrants, right, who pay—
Who pay taxes on their money is kind of an odd thing because they often don't get benefits in the same way. So there it's a bit of a raw deal, but there's this assumption that it will help your case towards citizenship.
It absolutely proves buy-in.
But they're literally giving their money to a system that won't make them citizens right away, that tries to criminalize them, that demonizes them in the news.
Right. I don't know anyone who just gives money that they make from work to a system like that that they don't want to be part of and believe in.
And that we have told that population for thirty years, the IRS has, that this is treated—your information is as sacred and will be as protected as the information of American citizens.
