People have a faith in him that is religious.
Yep. He's like Bitcoin, right?
Are you saying he's a pump-and-dump scheme?
He's a meme coin.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Weekly Show Podcast. My name is Jon Stewart. I will be your Weekly Show Podcast host on this celebratory—we are taping this on Wednesday, April 2, as we all know. Liberation Day. There are—it is Liberation Day, ladies and gentlemen. I don't know how you traditionally celebrate with your families, but Liberation Day was always—always big. I may go down to Times Square today and see soldiers kissing nurses, and see the people throwing their hats in the air. Three cheers for Liberation Day.
It's the day that we all remember, where Jesus rose from the tomb and raised prices on Honda Civics by $2,000 a car. And I think we all remember how that goes. You know, this is prior to the announcement, so god knows. There may not—it may not be tariffs. It may be something else. The unpredictability of all this is probably part of what's driving all the attention to it, which is, I would assume, Donald Trump's whole plan, because god knows the man likes nothing more than a bunch of people not knowing what he's going to do and hanging on his every word and, oh, he's just so important to all of us.
Meanwhile, Cory Booker—I don't know if you guys—look, I'm not a big performative—you know, but I must say, I was quite taken with Cory Booker, and especially the idea that he stood up there for 24 hours and broke Strom Thurmond's horrible filibuster record when Strom Thurmond—I guess it was in the late '50s—filibustered the Civil Rights Act, because sure, why wouldn't you try and prevent that from ever happening? But to see Cory Booker up there—and again, forget about his verbal abilities, because they are—they are massive. The ability to stand and speak, even if you've got some preparation and even if you're just reading it off a list—my god, you could read War and Peace and it wouldn't take you that long. For him to be able to, oftentimes extemporaneously, still be—forget about being even riveting, just coherent. But maybe the most impressive to me, as an older man, is the lack of urination.
I—I mean, forget about bookending it with powerful John Lewis anecdotes. To go 24 hours, awake, conscious—which means if you're conscious—look, I'm awakened from dead sleep by urination—not obviously—I mean by the urge. And then I go—I don't want to—I don't want to, in a podcast, suggest to you that as an older man, I just lie in my bed and piss myself. That is—I'm sure it's coming, but it is not here yet. So just the part of your brain that goes, hey, hey! Bladder! Buddy! And then you get up and you go. But the idea that he could stand there, as a conscious human, for more than 24 hours—because you're not allowed to urinate. That's one of the—you know, there's all these rules. You can't sit down. You can't urinate. I don't even know if he's allowed to have, like, space food. I don't even know how they do any of that stuff. But more importantly, I thought what he did was kind of a primal scream of alarm, and not in a processed, reactive, shitty, let's all put on a play and hold up placards that have 'Musk lies' on it. I thought he actually put some teeth behind it. And I actually thought he put a great deal of thought into it. And I found it moving. And—and that's all I'll say about that.
And speaking of—of moving—and you know, in the way that right now, government—not the political side of it, but the bureaucratic side of it, the administrative side of it—is being demonized, boy, this moment is ripe for somebody to give a more nuanced view of what's actually going on behind the scenes. And on this week's podcast, it couldn't be more timely. And we couldn't be more fortunate. Our guest today, Michael Lewis.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to get to—I'm so delighted that our guest today can—can join us. I'm just an enormous fan of his work, and have spoken to him many times over the years. His—his books, too numerous to—Moneyball, The Big Short, all these fantastic storytelling yarns that are always on the cusp of exactly the cultural moment that's about to break. Editor and contributor to the New York Times bestselling collection, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, Michael Lewis joins us. Michael!
Michael, how in god's name do you always find yourself on the precipice of the next cultural moment? The DOGE crew comes in and they absolutely demonize and destroy the people who work in the bowels of the government just as you come out with a collection of stories that you've contributed to that actually humanize these faceless bureaucrats. How did this idea arise? Did you anticipate this moment? What—give me some backdrop on this.
So you remember, Trump won. I got interested in the government, Trump—the first term. The only—what caught my attention was when he fired his transition team right after he was elected. There were 500 and something people who were supposed to go in and get these briefings from the Obama administration. And by law, the—the outgoing president is supposed to prepare so that the incoming administration can hit the ground running. And Obama had deputized a thousand people to spend six months, like, preparing the best course ever prepared about the federal government and how it worked. And Trump just didn't show up for the briefings. He told Chris Christie that we—in an hour, we can learn everything we need to know about—about how the federal government works. And I saw that in the paper. And I just thought, it's just a great premise. Like, I thought it was a comedy. I thought, I can go in and I can wander this place and figure out how it works, and the reader will know they know more than the president about what's going on in whatever. And as a challenge, I just thought, pick the places that nobody knows what—nobody knows anything about, like you, probably. I'm surrounded by people who just are always inflicting their political opinions on me. But if I ask them, you know, what does the Department of Energy do? They have no—no idea. And so I picked energy, agriculture, commerce. And I started just—I just wrote about these places. The book was called The Fifth Risk. And—and while I was there, I was—the thing that shocked me the most was the quality of the person who was inside. Like, it was not—I didn't know what picture I had in my head of bureaucrats, but you know, bureaucrats, right? It was like, I had this lazy stereotype in my head. And I kept meeting these people who were just like, smarter than the bankers I worked with at Salomon Brothers, devoted to their mission, like, counting the paperclips before they bought another one. You know, it was insanely driven, interesting people who didn't think of themselves as characters. So I realized at the end of that, that I'd sort of missed a trick. And it was, I should have focused less on the institution and more on the people. And so I thought, if I ever come back, it's going to be with the people. What—the awareness was. I mean, I got to tell you about the guy I met, the guy I met that triggered this. All right, so I was at the end of The Fifth Risk. I had to write an afterword for the paperback. The government was shut down because Trump had shut down the government, 2018-'19.
There were all these people who were furloughed. Like, two-thirds of the civilian workforce was sent home, no pay, told they were inessential workers.
I got a list of like, thousands of people who'd been furloughed, who had also been nominated for some civil service award. And like, someone thought they'd—whatever they'd done was good. But it was thousands of people. And I didn't know what to do with it. So I just took the—it was alphabetized. I just took the first name on the list. His—his name was—
It is this easy—Arthur A. Allen. I call up Arthur A. Allen, and Arthur A. Allen is the only oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Division. I call him and I say—he's in the middle of Connecticut. And I call him and I say, can I come visit and talk to you? And what do you do? Like, what's this inessential work that you do? Kind of thing. And he had all the time in the world because he wasn't working. And so I went across country and I spent three days with him. And it turned out that this guy had, over a course of about 25 years, had basically created a science. And the science was, the science of how objects drift at sea. So if you go overboard on your sailboat—
If you go overboard on your sailboat and you're just floating, you will move differently in the water than if your sailboat turns over and you get on top of it, or if you're in an inner tube, or if you're on a life raft. And if the Coast Guard doesn't know which—doesn't know how your object drifts, even though it might know when you got in trouble and how long you've been in the water—
They won't know where you are.
—they won't know where you are. And he had seen a mother—a young mother and a daughter die on the Chesapeake Bay. He had seen it. He found—he'd been there when they got the bodies—
—because they couldn't predict how their overturned sailboat drifted. And he set out to say—he said, I'm never going to let this happen again. And it took him forever. But he like, classified 300 different objects. And I mean, it was like a magic act. The minute he gave the Coast Guard his algorithms for objects drifting at sea, like a week later, a fat guy fell off a cruise ship 300 miles—80 miles east of Miami. And like, fat guy—fat guy off—wait, wait—fat guy off cruise ship is like, a problem. It happens. It happens. And Americans, like, we have an incredible talent for getting lost at sea. We are just doing it all the time.
So the fat guy, any other time in human history, he's dead. But they realized, like a few hours later, oh, he's gone. They looked at the cameras on the ship, and they could see when he went off. And the Coast Guard flew over and plucked him out of the sea, like seven hours after he had fallen—
And so since then, thousands of people have been saved because of this guy. Here's your inessential worker. But here's the kicker. So I spent three days with him. And I thought, my god, it's an incredible story. I wrote it up at the back end of The Fifth Risk. But—but on the way to the airport, after I'd spent three days with him, you know, interviewing his wife and his children, going to work in his office and going out on the Bay with him and all that stuff, he—he calls me on my cell phone. And he says, hey, you're—you're a writer! And I said—I said, I'm almost sure I said that when I called you. Yes, I'm a writer. He goes, no, my son just told me that, like, you wrote a book that became a movie and—like, he said, are you going to be—are you going to be—he says, are you going to be writing about me? And I said, yeah, Art. Like, why'd you just think—why do you think I just spent three days talking to you? And he said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drifted.
And—and at that moment—you will get this. You will get this. At that moment, I realized, like, these people don't know they're characters. And that makes them great characters.
They're just so in the weeds with the thing they're doing, they're so about service, like, helping others, it does not occur to them to like, promote themselves, to sell themselves, to market themselves, to talk to journalists in a certain way so their story gets out. His story just never would have been told. And I just thought, like, there are thousands of people like this in the government. If I ever come back, come back with that in mind. But don't—and then, the second thought, as we approached the—you know, it was a year ago now—
—when I curated—I hired six writers who I thought were great writers. And they weren't like, normal journalists. They were novelists. They were stand-up comedians.
Yes. I mean, Sarah Vowell and, you know, people—
Kamau Bell is a stand-up comedian.
Incredible group. Dave Eggers, right.
—Geraldine Brooks. It was a great group. But I just—I wanted people with different voices. But I wanted—I wanted some protection from the charge that, oh, this is just Michael Lewis making things up or spinning it a certain way or—
Why were you concerned about that, Michael?
Because if it's just one writer, it's easy to attack them. It's easy for someone who wants to make the other argument—
You made it more resilient.
I made it more resilient. It was like, OK, seven people are dropping in, and they can do whatever they want.
And—and all of them, like, in a moment, found some story or usually, some person, that was just incredible. And I'm telling you, we could do 10 of these, and you wouldn't run out of material. And so what does that say about what's going on right now? I mean, I started—so to answer your second question, I had no idea. I mean, I knew that Trump didn't give a shit, right? He's just like—he—what is it?
You were following your own—I'm interested in how Michael Lewis, current, how he travels through, because you are. You drift into these areas almost as if they have gravitational force. But there is actually no—you are following something that you are self-generating, but it turns out there is a larger—if you step back in the macro, there's a larger pattern. And I can actually almost trace it through a lot of your books. And it has to do with data and systems and analysis and how I feel like you're a climate scientist of humanity in some respects.
None of them—yeah, my math teachers from high school would all disagree.
But it's not. But it's a humanistic mapping, and almost how it's translating behavior from data in all these different areas.
So I would think of it slightly differently.
But—but it's—and it's that—where I get really jazzed is if I find a person or a situation that is radically different from what general opinion is about it. I mean, the book before was about Sam Bankman-Fried. I got unbelievable amount of shit because I described him actually how he was, rather than how everybody—how everybody wanted him to be, because at that—but, you know, I started writing it when he was in jail. I knew everything he had done. But he was not a deeply sinister character. He was a kid who did something wrong.
So it was closer to that. And everybody around him understood that, even the people who hated him. But there was—it got me excited to know that, like, crypto Twitter was out there saying this guy was like, evil incarnate without knowing him, and that there was a story to—there was a story that was just true and different, and that—that—that just didn't match with what people thought they knew. And this feels the same way. It's sort of like, people think—they have this lazy stereotype in their head of what a federal worker is. And—and that lazy stereotype enables DOGE. Like, if everybody knew who these people were, they would be outraged on their behalf. Like—
And they exploit—by the way, they exploit that lazy stereotype. I don't know if they do it consciously, but certainly, their strategy is to do that.
Totally. No, I mean, if—it's a bit like, you can demonize federal workers in the same way you can demonize trans people and immigrants, you know, that we've created this category in people's head that, oh, it's—they classify it as, oh, bad or wasteful or corrupt. And then you can do whatever you want to the individuals because actually, no one knows any of the individuals. It's a bigotry.
Not only are they—and by the way, they—in this bigotry, those characters are not caricatures. They're actually evil. What they do is, they portray this as, these are evil forces working with purpose to subvert America.
Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Couldn't be further than what it is.
The opposite. I mean, they're waiting to do the president's bidding when he—if he'd just tell them what it is they want him to do. But mostly, they're engaged in pretty long-term missions that everybody has agreed, like, we need. Like, we need nuclear weapons not to go off when they shouldn't go off.
We need to find all these people falling off of cruise ships.
And, you know, it's—it's amazing. I tracked down one of the dudes who had been plucked out of the water. It was a separate fat guy who fell off a fishing boat.
Ozempic is going to end this entire thing. No one's going to fall off anymore.
No, that's not what's going to happen. They're going to fall off and die because when you're fat, you survive.
Oh, no one knows how they float.
No, no, they know how they float. But when you're fat, you can survive forever in cold water. If you're—if you're skinny, you're a goner. So being fat is a huge advantage if you fall into cold water. Hypothermia gets to you if you're skinny.
I am learning dynamics about this that I had no idea of. Fat people have a huge advantage.
I mean, it's kind of great that Americans get lost at sea a lot and are also fat.
Well, the cruise ship then is the perfect vehicle for that because it's an all-you-can-eat buffet for weeks and weeks.
That's right. You start with a buffet and then you end in the drink.
But I found one of these people who had been plucked from the ocean. This was the Pacific Ocean. And—and I asked him, like, do you know why you were saved? Like, you were floating there for hours in the dark. And in human history, when a human being goes off the side of a boat, you just can't find them. It's like finding a soccer ball in the state of Connecticut.
And he said, yeah, he goes, I do know. It was Jesus Christ. I accepted Jesus Christ as my lord and savior while I was in the water, and then I was saved.
And I said, no, it was actually Arthur A. Allen—
—you know. It wasn't Jesus Christ. It was Arthur A. Allen. And Arthur A. Allen figured out how to find your ass, and that's why you're alive. And he was like, oh, no one told me that kind of thing. And that's the problem. No one tells anybody that. So people don't know, kind of, what their taxpayer dollars are doing for them because no one explains it.
I wonder, too, if it's the type of situation where government is very happy—because in some respects—have you ever seen those videos where, you know, an incredibly angry and frustrated traveler is just screaming at somebody who is manning the Southwest Airlines counter? And it's, how dare you route these planes? And don't you understand? And the person is just looking at them like, I don't know if you know this, but I have not designed—
And in some respects, as you said earlier, these are individuals who are doing what they have been tasked to do through congressional action. But rather than place the onus on what the Congress has put into place, it's this faceless, dark group of lazy, entitled, sucking off the teat of the taxpayer's largesse.
And what it ultimately turns out to be is, political appointees are more likely to be in that category—
—than the people who are in the rank and file.
Oh, yes. You know, the whole idea that the place to go find corruption, like financial corruption, is a federal agency, is insane. Like, I can remember working on Wall Street. There were a thousand things that would happen every day on a Wall Street firm—or in a Wall Street firm—that if you did it in a federal agency, you'd be in jail.
There are so many eyes on you, you can't buy them a sandwich when you take them out to lunch. They're—they're so sensitive to, oh, we're—we have to be careful because if we put a foot wrong, we're going to be hauled in front of Congress and we're going to be in the newspaper.
The Inspector General will be on top of it, in terms of tracking where that money went, et cetera, et cetera.
Used to be, except Trump fired all the inspectors.
When we used to have inspector general.
Yeah, that's right. So—so it's kind of wild that they say they're coming in to get corruption and waste, and they fire the person who's eliminating corruption and waste. I mean, there's no question, we're now in a situation where it's much easier to be corrupt and wasteful inside the federal government.
I mean, they've made it explicitly legal. I think Trump—one of Trump's first orders of business was to say that you can bribe officials now. The Supreme Court has made corruption, unless you literally say, I'm going to give you money for this exact action, it's not even considered corruption anymore.
So what do you make of, you know, the claim? I mean, it's kind of interesting that they come in saying that's what they're trying to do, when they do the opposite. It's not even that they're not doing it well, it's that they're doing the opposite.
I would say, I think that's the strategy. What it—what it appears to me to be is that they've got a much deeper plan about privatization and sort of a—you know, do you ever remember—did you ever watch the show Peaky Blinders? And I brought this up before on the—
Out of the corner of my eye, when I was walking through the bedroom, and Tabitha was watching it.
It's a fantastic story of these, you know, Birmingham gangsters called the Peaky Blinders in the 1920s. But he's got a theory of power, Tommy Shelby, called 'big fuck small.' And the whole idea of government is to create these systems of collective action that can somehow protect minority rights, that can protect people that would normally just be at the whim of warlordism. And I think they have a theory of power that is much more feudal and much more warlord. And what gets in the way of that? Somebody who will diligently study how objects flow through water to help people. This is about patronage. It's about changing the way that we act together. It's a much more sinister plan than just pretending that you're going after waste. I think that's just the delivery system.
Yeah. But that the American public would—would begin to accept the delivery system is kind of amazing. I mean—and this is what got me interested in the first place. It wasn't like, oh, Trump's going to destroy this so you got to protect it. It's, oh, my god, these stories are incredible. And when you hear them, you're just moved and inspired. And you're proud of your country and all the rest, that these people still exist. And—and we've built—we've kind of built a mechanism—and I don't know how far back it goes. Maybe it goes forever—but the mechanism that prevents the stories from getting out. And it's—it's—and the mechanism is the elected officials. The elected officials, the political class that comes into the government, to run the government, has—has something that's kind of convenient for them. If something goes wrong, they can haul one of these people out and say, they were to blame. But if something goes right, they can take credit for it. They have no incentive to celebrate the work of the permanent federal workforce. And—and so as a result, there's no kind of culture of recognition. And it's actually pre-Trump. This is a problem. It's like—
It's like, who—what business runs well if the employees only get punished? If nobody gets rewarded for—for doing good stuff? And I think you can track back, you know, to some extent, when there's government failure, to this, to like, people are not allowed to stick their necks out. They're not incentivized to stick their necks out.
That's right. And creativity and innovation wouldn't be rewarded. It would be that kind of risk-taking. Look, it's similar to the idea—you know, when they talk about Musk, they say, this is the guy that's got to do it. But understand that his methodology is—and by the way, for an entrepreneur and an inventor and an innovator, it probably works. But you got to blow up a bunch of rockets before you find the rocket that—that does right. Well, if you're working for the government and it's a bunch of people that are falling off of things or you're protecting them, the ethos isn't, a bunch of these people are going to have to die until we figure it out or to get us to figure it out. It's actually the opposite.
Yeah. And the minute he blows up the first rocket, he's fired and never allowed to work again.
The whole Silicon Valley celebrating failure and risk-taking and all that, yeah, it is the opposite. So—
What do you make of that then? You know, do they, within the bureaucracy, A, do they feel maligned? Is that something that you—that you found from them? Do they get frustrated with it? Because the system is—look, it is built in a bit of a Rube Goldberg kind of a way, in terms of, there are so many checks on waste, fraud, and abuse, it's almost wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive, that part of the system. So do they—do they reflect that to you?
I'm just—let me think about this.
So I did—there's eight stories in the book. I did two of them. But—but—and the other writers did the other six. And the characters that I have dealt with, they are not—they don't celebrate the structure they're in. They're aware that, oh, this is—it's a pain in the ass to do what I'm doing. It's more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be. Everybody agrees with that. And you know what they also agree with, is that by the time I get to them—so I was able to get to Arthur A. Allen because he was furloughed, because he was not employed at the time. And so there was no communications officer to stop me from getting to him. But with all the other ones that—every story in this book—there was a little phalanx of—of political people. And this was the Biden administration, you know, kind of preventing us, basically, from telling the story. So they were very aware that, like, kind of amazing we're now in this situation where I can actually talk to you.
It took a lot of persistence to get to them. But once you get to them, then yeah, they'll say that, you know—so I'll give you one concrete example.
The last story in the book is actually a story of government failure, but kind of personal heroism. There's this woman, and her name's Heather Stone. She may be gone today. They're firing all these people in the FDA. But—but she's in the FDA. And she noticed a problem that she tried to set out and solve with a colleague. And the problem was, pharmaceutical companies have no interest in developing drugs for really rare disease. There's no market for them. They're a rare disease. So you get something really horrible somewhere in the world, and no one's developed the drug for it. And you're going to die. And doctors will experiment, just, OK, you're going to die anyway. Let's try this, let's try that. And there's no formal record-keeping of these experiments. So if something works, you might not hear about it. And if something doesn't work, you might not hear about it. And so—so—the rare disease at the center of this story is Balamuthia.
It's a brain-eating amoeba. In and of itself, it's kind of a wild thing, wasn't discovered until in the mid—in the 1990s. And the San Diego Zoo, someone discovered this thing. And there's a whole, long story, backstory about it. But—but she—she built this app to encourage doctors from all over the world to, if you have a case—like, just say what you did and what happened. And so if you have Balamuthia, if you treated it—all right, so you gave them X and it didn't work, well, it's nice—it'd be good for other doctors to know that.
Well, there was actually, at UCSF, a researcher, six or seven years ago—his name is Joe DeRisi—actually found a drug that worked—in his lab—that worked on Balamuthia, called nitroxoline. And it's a drug that's used to treat urinary tract infections in Europe and China. Not approved—yeah. Weird. What he did was, he took the Balamuthia in the lab, and he took the 2,000-something approved drugs anywhere in Europe or America. He bombarded the Balamuthia, and he found this one thing killed the Balamuthia.
And—and—but here's the—but this is what Heather Stone at the FDA was responding to, was that he had done this because he'd watched someone have their brain eaten before him, and he'd figured out it was Balamuthia, and that person died. He went—he went and found—made this discovery. The next time a patient walked into UCSF with this, they tried it. And it worked. But—and I said it. I said to Joe DeRisi, I said, well, this is great, you found the cure. And he says, we don't know that. It's one person. But—but even though I've done that, no one will know. If you're lucky enough to walk into the UCSF Hospital with Balamuthia, yes, they may think of using this. But no one else will have heard of this. And—and because medical journals tend not to write up single-case studies, so on and so forth. So this woman at the FDA had identified this problem and said, I'm going to market this app, I'm going to let everybody know the FDA is a safe place to come tell your stories, and every doctor in the country will know that if they've got a Balamuthia case, they hit the button and they can see that 50 times someone has done this. And she's unbelievably frustrated because—because the FDA doesn't have the funds to market it. There's no money.
There's a kind of nervousness about, well, what happens if someone gets a bad recommendation off the site? It's—it's all risk-averse.
So what happens in the story, which is kind of amazing, is that in this particular case, Joe DeRisi, the scientist, managed to write up a paper about how this person had been cured, and thanked—thanked Heather Stone at the FDA for getting him the nitroxoline, the drug, even though it wasn't approved in the United States, really fast.
And there's a little girl who's alive in Little Rock, Arkansas, right now—
—or no, in Queens, Arkansas. She's six years old. Her name is Alaina Smith, who was dying in the Dallas Children's Hospital because the mom—her mom saw this paper on the web, saw Heather Stone's name, called her up, and Heather Stone got the drugs to the hospital, and the girl was saved. But—but at the same time, there was another six-year-old girl in Davis, California, whose doctors never saw this, and who died. But so Heather Stone would tell you—if she were here, she'd say, we are the mechanism. The government is the only place that's going to do this. We are the mechanism for getting these—this information out to people. And I am—am somewhat stifled because—because beaurac—because people are risk-averse, because we don't have resources. And you see this, and you're just like—you—it breaks your heart because you just know that there—there are so many tragedies that could be avoided.
And the demonization occurs—what also happens is, the expectation of the public, for some reason, is that government, there has to be perfection. We have the same thing in the criminal justice system. We have a system that demands anybody who's let out of jail must not recommit, even though the system does nothing to rehabilitate them. So we have a system that demands perfection, yet is unable to discern the difference between a real threat and a non-threat. You know, so we're demanding something that is absolutely not possible to achieve, yet.
Can I stop you one second?
You just—what you just said, what personal relationship does that remind you of?
Of—of demanding perfection for something?
And being extremely, harshly critical when there's any kind of little error?
Well, I'm going to say my mother, but—
There you go. That's right. [Laughter] That's it. It's exactly right. You just put your finger on it, that we are—as a country, we treat our government the way we treat our mothers when we're like, 14-year-old boys. That's the country right now. And it's over and over and over. It's like, and you ignore all the good things Mom has done because it's just assumed that Mom's going to do the good things.
But if Mom screws up and puts a bologna sandwich in your lunch instead of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Mom, you don't know me, you're a horrible mom.
Or the opposite, which is, Mom, I'm trying as hard as I can! Do you think I wanted a D? Come on! [Laughter] So it's—it's—it's reciprocal.
It's both ways. And this is the WASP-Jewish thing.
That's exactly right. It goes—it goes both ways. In fact, my favorite story about that with my mother is—this is a complete tangent, and we'll get back to what we're talking about—unfortunately—so she's 91, and she's doing great, sharp as a tack. Couldn't be, you know, happier about that. But she did get pneumonia about a year ago and was knocked out, on her ass. And this is a very strong person, but she unfortunately had to go to the hospital for about five days, five days, IV drip of a ton of antibiotics. Don't think it was dioxoline, but it was—whatever it was that they were throwing in there that I'm sure I'll have to thank Heather Stone for. But after five days, I go to get her, to pick her up, and she's lying out, she's got the oxygen tube, and she's completely out of it. And I said, Mom, Mom, we're going home. I'm here to take you home. And she looks up and she opens her eyes. She looks at me and she goes, you look tired. [Laughter] I was just like, oh, it's so hard to—to—yep, yep, you got me. Let's—like, meanwhile, I've been up for like, five days straight.
So this is—I mean, I have a less dramatic version of this that just happened—
—here in New Orleans, in my childhood bedroom. And I did a favor for my mother and went and talked to one of her community groups. And she said, could you go talk to this group? And I got on stage, and I talked for whatever. And she drove me over there and drove me home. And she didn't say a word on the way out, until we got in the car. And she said—when we got in the car, she said, you and your father have one thing in common. And I said, what? She goes, you both do go on quite a bit. [Laughter] It's like, all right, all right. You're welcome.
See? And this is why we don't have the government we deserve.
This is exactly right. It's exactly right.
Which brings me—so to—to bring this back around—and here's, I think, what has been so interesting about your work. So you've had feet in the Wall Street industry, professional sport, all these different industries. And now in government, the expectation, I think, to some extent, we forgive business for the mistakes they make and the damage that they do. I mean, The Big Short, you're talking about, in 2008, destroying almost the entire world financial system because, as Alan Greenspan would say, I really thought the banks would have done a better job regulating themselves. Like— And now you get into this and what you see is, there is no margin of error. And it is because maybe there is, mistakenly so, a purposeful cloak over the intricacies of what the government actually does, how it actually does it, because of a risk aversion or a fear of criticism or an exposure to litigation. Why do you think it is that we're so enamored of private industry and so reflexively angered by government industry?
I mean, top of the list is that we admire rich people. You know, we admire money-making.
We're the biggest money culture in the world. So that's one thing. You're never—the government people are always going to be—and they're always going to be low-status because they have low—they don't have any money. So that's—that's one thing.
We deem them, if you're good enough, you wouldn't be in government. Is that the idea?
Yeah, yeah, that's true, which is completely false, by the way. It's people that have made a conscious choice to serve. And that's what's so offensive about going after them as if they're criminals. They're actually—it's sort of like the takers going after the givers and—and without anybody ever acknowledging that there's this moral disparity. But—but there is another thing that—what happens in the private sector? We see the successes. The successes survive and get celebrated. And the failures kind of fade into the background. No one pays them that much attention. They come and they go very fast, whereas in government, it's much more complicated. What's the government? The government is the place all the problems the private sector won't solve go.
Say that again because that—man, that is such an important nugget of wisdom for people to understand. Please repeat that—in capital letters.
Yes. The government is the place that all the problems the private sector can't solve go. What are these problems? I mean, you know who it reminds me of? So I spent like, six months with Obama when he was president, writing a story about him, just what it was like to be president. And I remember one of the first things he said about—and I was just writing about the job. And one of the first things he said was, you know, this job is a decision-making job. And it's an unpleasant decision-making job because all the easy decisions get solved, but get made by everybody else. What gets to me are the horrible decisions because nobody else wants to make them. So what gets to government are all the problems that—unpleasant problems that no one's going to make money solving.
No one's going to make money figuring out how a fat man drifts at sea. [Laughter] No one is—no one is going to make money figuring out how to get rare—collect anecdotal information about treating rare disease. No one is going to make money figuring out how to stop the roofs of coal mines from collapsing onto the heads of coal miners, a problem that killed 50,000 coal miners in America in the last hundred years.
50,000. Being a coal miner during the Vietnam War was more dangerous than being in the Vietnam War. It's an incredibly dangerous occupation. It's less dangerous now, a lot less dangerous, because of the dude I write about in the book, because he figured out how to stop the roofs from falling—from falling in on the heads of coal miners.
That person's just not the next person on the alphabetical list, is it? I mean, you did—you did branch out from—
No, no, let me tell you how I found him. It's great. So it was great because I—so I hired, you know, Geraldine Brooks and John Lanchester and Dave Eggers and all these famous writers.
And I sent them out in the government, and I realized, oh, shit, I have to find something to write about. And so I called up the people with the list of people—of civil servants who had been nominated for some award. And I got this year's list. And—and it was in this case, it wasn't thousands of names because it wasn't over 20 years. It was like 600 people, 600 people. And—and the list was just—can I tell you this story? Do I have time?
The people are driving to work. It's like a two-hour commute.
OK, OK. It's wild.
So the problem with the list was, it would say, like, Helen Jones, FBI agent, broke up a cyber crime ring, period. And it didn't say—there were all these names and all these amazing things they had done, but no sign of a human being on this list until I got—I was just flipping through it, and then it said—said, Christopher Mark. Christopher Mark, inside the Labor Department, solved the problem of coal mine roofs collapsing on the heads of coal miners, a problem that killed 50,000 Americans in the last hundred years.
But then it said, a former coal miner. And I thought, wow, there's a story, that—that he grew up in West Virginia, his dad was killed by a falling roof. A movie sprung in my mind. He had some—who solves this problem? Who comes out of it—who but a coal miner gets out of the coal mine to solve this kind of problem? So I find his phone number, not even email. I find his phone number. He's in Pittsburgh. I call him up. He knows who I am because he's read Moneyball. It's kind of funny. But so he'll stay on the phone with me. And he says—about the first thing out of his mouth—because I said, like, what's the story? What's your story? He says, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a professor at the University. And I went, oh, shit, there goes my story, like, this is going to be boring. And my whole fantasy, my whole—what I had in my head—was just wrong. This is where it gets wild. This all happens in the first 20 minutes I'm talking to him. He explains—his dad, a guy named Robert Mark, was actually quite a famous engineer at Princeton. And he was famous for having taken a mechanism he had developed to stress test, like, fighter planes. He'd build models of the fighter planes and subject them, in his little device, to stress, to see if, like, if you had this design, would the wing fall off if you went too fast? And the military hired him. And Princeton had hired him to test nuclear reactors, to see if they were going to work if they built them. Robert Mark is teaching engineering at Princeton when an undergraduate comes into his class from an art history class and says, this is really cool, what you've developed. Can you use it to stress test Gothic cathedrals, to figure out how they were built? Like, where the stresses are in the building? No one knew—all these Gothic cathedrals were built in France without anybody knowing—without any record being left behind about how they were built. So he does this, and he becomes the world's expert on how the Gothic cathedrals were built because finally, someone has something to say. And he can, like, predict, like, where there's going to be a stone that's going to need to be replaced because it's too much load.
That's a load-bearing stone, right there.
It's wild. It's wild. And, like, PBS documentaries were made of him. He was featured in Life Magazine, blah, blah, blah. But his specialty—what he's doing is figuring out why the roofs of Gothic cathedrals don't fall down. The son, who I've now got on the phone, Christopher, tells me about his dad. Then he says, because what you got to know is that, like, I didn't want any part of my dad's world. The Vietnam War was raging. I was in high school. He started throwing words like 'bourgeois' around the house, you know? It was like, I don't want any part of your bourgeois life. I'm going to join the working class. So he could have gone to Harvard or Princeton. Instead of going to Harvard or Princeton, he leaves home after high school and joins the working class, works in a car factory, works in a UPS warehouse, and finally ends up with three fellow radicals in a coal mine in West Virginia. The other three radicals flee after a day, it's so awful. He actually finds something really appealing about coal mining. And he lasts a year, but is almost killed twice by falling stuff.
And he figures out there's this problem. And he gets himself out, goes to Penn State, studies rock engineering, and starts this journey. And the journey, the intellectual journey, is riveting, how he figures out what he figures out. But anyway, he tells me—that, I find out later. But the first 20 minutes, he's telling me roughly what happened in his life. And I said to him, I said, oh, so you rebelled against your dad, and then you just relived your dad's life underground. He figured out how the roofs of Gothic cathedrals stayed up, and you figured out how to keep the roofs of coal mines up. And there's this pause on the end of the line. He goes, that's not true. It has nothing to do with my dad. These things are not—and he's so hostile.
Well, I think—this is a story. It's great. He does not know how this looks.
He doesn't get the structural integrity of ceilings in cathedrals are not—
Here's where it gets beautiful—there are two things that happen that are just beautiful. One is, after I've written the piece and I'm on a hike with his wife, his wife says, finally, someone said it to him. You know?
But the best thing is, like, around the year 2000, the federal government figures out that the National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down. The National—yeah, I don't know, that thing was built over, like, a hundred years.
And the people who built the foundation were less ambitious than the architects who came in after them and made it bigger and bigger and bigger. So the foundation can't support the building properly. And it was tilting like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was like one of the towers was sinking faster than the other tower. So they called up Chris Mark's dad to say, can you—you did it with Gothic cathedrals—come do this? And he comes in and he realizes that my tools work for what's above ground. But actually, something's going on below ground. And he calls his son and says, we've got—I need your help. And so the son and the father, together, figure out whether the National Cathedral—
They write a paper about it. I mean, this is literature. You know, you can't make this up.
The stories are unbelievable. I've found this now so many times. And fellow writers have found it so many times. It's like, why? Why are these stories so good? Why is this federal government generating literature that nobody's paying attention to?
