Hey. Good evening. Good evening. I hear clapping. Welcome to The Freight. This is a high place. I'm only here for a little while, so I just want to make sure I get my remarks in. Then we're going to bring out the real superstars.
This is a remarkable and historic venue that attracts excellent music, artistic expression, and impactful voices. And tonight, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy is pleased to join these ranks with a conversation among two of the most thoughtful, provocative, and intellectual figures of our time. Tonight, we present Coming Up Short—A Conversation with Robert Reich and Michael Lewis. It's going to be fun.
My name is David Wilson. I'm Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and a professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Before we begin—thank you. This is a lively audience. We should do more of this stuff. Before we begin, just a couple of housekeeping notes. Please take a moment to silence your phones, and our conversation will run about 90 minutes. And when you came in, you should have gotten a note card and a pencil. And you can write down your questions, and we'll collect them during the event and pass them along to Mr. Lewis throughout the discussion.
Our event tonight is part of the Goldman School's Democracy Book Club. It's a series highlighting authors whose work deepens our understanding of democracy by exploring the institutions, policies, and civic traditions that shape public life. As a school of public policy located at the People's University, UC Berkeley, we are deeply interested in what gets in the way of good citizenship, and we want to develop skills, tools, knowledge, and ultimately policies that remove these impediments to inspire, shape, change, and produce civic flourishing.
As we all know, our democratic systems today are under strain—from political suppression and hyperpolarization to disinformation and eroding trust and faith in our institutions and leaders. This moment calls for new ideas, new voices, and new inspirations, especially from colleges and universities. The Goldman School and other schools of public policy, public affairs, and public administration are the only intellectual fields created expressly to strengthen and improve the understanding and performance of our democratic institutions and government. We care about the public. We care about the people who lead our institutions and government, and we care about public servants who lead us. And you should know this. Everyone should know this. The Goldman School is the number one school of public policy in the nation.
Now, some might argue that at this moment, our field of public policy and public affairs is the field that matters most. By closing critical gaps in knowledge, innovation, capacity, and communication, our schools can play a transformative role in promoting, protecting, and delivering on the promise of American democracy. Indeed, our democracy places a responsibility on all elements, inclusive of government—local, state, and federal—private industry, philanthropy, and each individual to fulfill its promise. And the Goldman School is here to help.
At the Goldman School, we're advancing a democracy policy agenda fueled by rigorous evidence and committed minds to identify, study, organize, and share forces for democratic renewal. This work and this vision have all been made possible through generous support from the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, the Levi Strauss Foundation, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, and the Peter E. Haas Jr. Fund. We thank them deeply because none of this would be possible without their belief and their investment. Please give them a round of applause for supporting our work.
And so tonight, we're honored. We're here to have a lively, timely, and necessary conversation about the state of American democracy, hearing from our dear Goldman School colleague and renowned public intellectual, Professor Robert Reich, and one of the most prolific and brilliant minds of our time, author and journalist Michael Lewis. Tonight's conversation will explore cultural, political, and economic forces that have brought our democratic institutions to a critical crossroads. And we'll hear stories and lessons from Professor Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, a personal reflection of his life and career, and Mr. Lewis's latest work, a brilliant edited volume titled Who Is Government?
By the end of this event, we will have key insights into not only how we got here but what it will take to build a government—I laugh because I don't know how we got here, honestly. But I'm glad they're here to tell us. But we'll have those insights. Not just how we got here, but what it will take to build a government that truly serves the people and maybe a people that truly serve government and our democracy. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming tonight's moderator, Mr. Michael Lewis, and our champion of ideas, Professor Robert Reich. How are you doing?
So I've lived in Berkeley for coming on 30 years, and Bob has lived here for almost 20. And we've seen each other in passing just a couple of times, but we've never actually sat down and had a conversation. And so when he sent me a note asking me if I would come and interview him about his book and his latest—and this film he's just made—I just jumped at it because I thought it was just a chance to get to him and create a little sense of indebtedness so he would buy dinner. But—
Now, I didn't know that, but I'll do it. I will do it anyway.
So, I'm running this show. Right?
Really? Really? Can I say something?
Can you— are you— I can already tell you're going to be—
You're going to be a hard guest. I can already tell you're going to be a hard guest.
I want to thank Michael Lewis. Can I just do that publicly? Because Michael, I mean, when I asked if you would join me tonight here, I don't think there was maybe two minutes before—and I wrote you. I emailed you, and you got right back to me. You said yes. And I think there was even an exclamation point.
But I also want to thank David Wilson, Dean David Wilson, an extraordinary, extraordinary leader of the Goldman School. And let me also thank probably the best staff. You know, the faculty are great, and I love faculty. And I was and I am a member of the faculty. But the staff of the Goldman School needs a special recognition. They are truly fabulous. And I would—this is a little bit weird, but can I ask the staff to stand up, please?
No, I'm not done. I want to—
You just let me know when you want to start.
OK, I also want to thank Michael Lahanas-Calderon and Heather Lofthouse, and Michael and Heather are from this nonprofit that I co-created called Inequality Media. And they work so hard. And Elliot Kirschner, who is the director of this movie that was a bait and switch because he told me that it was just going to be a video, and it became a movie about—called The Last Class. And Elliot, thank you. OK, I'm done. Thank you very much.
So, there's a structure to the evening. I've got him for about 40 minutes to go over roughly 80 years. And then we've got—then it's yours, and I'll decide what questions of yours will be asked. But before we get into it, I'm sure a lot of people are here to hear you talk about what's going on in the country. But I want to start by what's going on in you because this is a memoir you've written. It's very personal. And I thought there were three stories that kind of jumped out at me from your early life that I wanted you to recount, because I'm sure the book is new, and people wouldn't have read it yet, and to set up the conversation.
And the first is this story when you were a very young child of the way you were tormented at school and where your interest in bullies comes from is having been on the wrong end of it. There's no right end of it. And the story, particularly the episode with you and the principal or the head teacher and the bathroom, could you just tell us—describe what your life was like when you were four years old?
It was really hell. Most kids—were you bullied as a kid? Most kids are bullied to some extent.
Well, I was bullied because I was very short. And I think anybody who's different in any way really is a target of bullies. And I didn't want to go to school. And every day it was a big, big deal. Even getting on the bus, I didn't want to be on the playground. I wanted to be—because I was basically afraid. And with that fear—and I was afraid for good reason, because the kids, the first graders and the second graders—you know, children don't know how mean they can be.
They don't know the effects of what they're doing.
They don't really understand. And I think it came one day when I was in kindergarten, and the second graders met me in the boys' room and turned me upside down, hung me over the toilet, and said that they were going to plunge me into the toilet headfirst. And I just screamed, got out of there, ran down the corridor, got back to the kindergarten. And I didn't want to ever go into the boys' room again. And well, if you want to know the story, you've got to read the book.
No, no, no, no, no, no. A lot of people got the bundled deal here. So you've already sold the book.
OK. To make a very long story much, much shorter, I devised a system over the years when I was between the ages of five and eight of having an older boy kind of watch over me and keep the bullies at bay. And Michael, you know the end of the story because you read the book. When I was a freshman in college, I learned that one of the boys who, when I was eight years old, had watched over me and kept the bullies at bay, was named Mickey. I called him Mickey. I didn't know his last name. That's when I was a kid. But I learned when I was a freshman in college that Mickey had been among the civil rights workers who had gone down to Mississippi to register voters when Mickey was in his 20s. And he was named Michael Schwerner. And he, along with two other civil rights workers, were brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
And when I discovered that my protector had been brutally murdered by the real bullies—not by kids holding me upside down, not by childhood tormentors, but by the real bullies—it really did change my life in terms of seeing bullying and seeing the results of bullying all around me—Black people being bullied by white supremacists, employees being bullied by employers, women being bullied by men, people with power having the power to bully and exploit, harass, diminish, belittle other people without the power. And I became perhaps acutely, perhaps too much, oversensitive to these issues of bullying and power. And so that when the bully in chief, Donald Trump, became president, my curiosity—and it was more curiosity than anything else—was triggered. How did this happen? How was it possible that this country would elect and then obviously re-elect a bully? A bully—a brutish bully.
It's his chief trait, this bullying.
Yeah. It's his cheap trick, did you say?
It's the most important thing about him.
So it's funny. The death of that young man in Mississippi was the second thing I wanted to ask you about. So you already got to it. You say it changed your life. I would've thought by the time you got to your freshman year in college, you would have already been extremely sensitive to unfairness, to inequality. Is that so? Where does—that interest runs through your work, runs through your class. I want to talk a little bit about your class. But I've got two questions here. One is when did you first have a sense that you had had that gene, like, really concerned with that subject, interested in the weak, the vulnerable? And the second thing is, when did you start to write? Like, your writing life has been so important to your career and your life, and it doesn't just follow from a career in government service or the Yale Law School that you are going to become a writer. And you're quite a natural writer. When did that emerge in your life?
Can I ask for equal time in terms of—because I am very curious about your illustrious career as a writer. So I will answer—I will answer your question.
I feel like my role here is to be the stripper's pole and that you're the—
I think we have enough time—
You're supposed to dance around me—
I think we have enough time—
—and I'm supposed to stay here kind of in a neutral way and not reveal very much.
You lost the whole point, Michael.
I'm going to ask you—because this is a discussion, and I will answer your question. And your question, I can't remember. No, your question was—your question was when did I first become sensitive to these issues of unfairness.
Connect it up to your writing ability.
And connect it up to writing. Well, I think it was very early on, maybe even earlier than kindergarten, because my parents moved to this little WASP town in New York state, 60 miles—7 miles north of New York City, when I was two. We were the only Jewish family within 50, 60, 80 miles. And we were greeted by a group of town elders. My mother thought that they were—actually, they're coming to our house to welcome us. But they were, according to my parents—and I don't remember this, but they came in, and they said, 'Mr. and Mrs. Reich, this is a Christian community and we don't think you will be happy here.' And I knew nothing of this, but I did sense my parents' feelings of being outsiders, of not being wanted.
My father owned a little women's clothing store. He worked extremely hard six days a week. My mother helped him. I was also aware of how difficult it was for him. He would come home at night, and he would just—most nights, he had an upset stomach from the pressure. So all of that together, I think, made me aware of issues of unfairness, of differences, of being outsiders or being insiders. And that's always been there. Now, in terms of writing, from the earliest years I can remember, as soon as I was able to hold a pencil—and it was a pencil—as soon as I was able to hold a pencil, I was writing. And I was writing books. I never got them published, but there are all these little children's books. And my parents were always after me to go out and play, and I didn't want to. I wanted to sit there at my desk and write.
Was it because playing wasn't fun?
Part of it was the playing wasn't fun, and I didn't want to be teased, but partly because I felt so comfortable. I just loved it. I loved writing, and I loved illustrating the books and the chapters. And now it's my turn, Michael Lewis. What? No, seriously. Seriously. I mean—
This is not an ask for their money back.
No, I want—I really am curious because I want to tell you, honestly, and you said. You and I have passed each other over and over and over again in Berkeley. I've never had a chance to tell you how much I love your writing.
Truly love it. And it's the kind of writing that I cannot—I wish I could do. It looks easy. That's the hardest kind of writing because you are able to put together stories that are powerful and subtle and complicated, and you make them look and sound to the ear very simple. And it's a fabulous talent. I really love it. I love your writing. So when did you—when did you start with all of that?
Yeah, the pole has become the stripper. So I have a really unconventional literary backstory in that I never had a sense of myself as a writer growing up. I grew up in New Orleans. It's a storytelling culture. It's a slow culture, and it's stagnant. So you're in a world where there are characters, and they're permanent characters. You can pick up stories where you left off. So I grew up telling stories and listening to stories. But, I mean, you're looking at a guy who got C's in English class all the way through to my senior year. I kind of woke up my senior year in high school. And I got to tell you. Here's a story.
The book I wrote called The Blind Side—one of the main characters, the dad in the family, Sean Tuohy, was in my class from kindergarten through 12th grade. He was a year older. He was kind of a year older than me. I was young for the class, he was old for the class. He was a spectacular athlete. He was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds and the New Jersey Nets to play both basketball and baseball. And I played sports with him growing up. That was the extent of our relationship. I had not seen him since high school. When I land in Memphis to give actually a talk about Moneyball, and I thought—and I was thinking about writing something about my high school baseball coach, and I thought Sean had this kind of deep relationship with the coach that I had, and I ought to go see Sean and talk to him just a bit about it. So I told him I was coming in. He comes and picks me up at the airport. And so I haven't seen him in 20 years. And the first thing out of his mouth when he sees me is not, 'Hey, how you doing,' or a big hug. He looks up at me. He goes, 'So who writes your books?' And I said, 'Sean, I write my books.'
And he goes, 'Man, I see you on TV. You're great on TV. You're great marketing them.' He says, 'You sell those things well.' He says, 'But who actually puts the words on the page?' And I said, 'Sean, I put the words on the page.' And he goes, 'No, you don't. You're a dumb shit just like me. You sat in the back of Dr. Francis's English class, and you got C's.' And if you asked anybody who knew me—I bet if you asked people who knew me when I was a kid, they'd say, 'Oh, not that surprised.' If you ask anybody who knew me when I was a kid, they'd think some sort of fraud has been perpetrated. And this is not just self-deprecation. This is honest.
It sounds like honest self-deprecation.
Yeah, I know. So I get to—I'll be quick because we need to get back to you. But I get to—I slid into Princeton because I was a baseball player and my dad went. And I kind of woke up, as I said, the end of my senior year in high school. So I started to become a good student. And I got to Princeton, and no one there—I never wrote for a school newspaper, never had the faintest notion of myself as a writer. So this is like a lesson for anybody who's got kids or any kids. You never know what's inside someone. I get to my senior year in college, and to get out of Princeton, you had to write a thesis. I was an art history major. It was this—
You know, I was an art history major.
You don't mention this in the book.
No, I don't. I never heard—
There's so much. This book is 400 pages long. How do you leave that out?
How'd you leave that out?
But how did you leave out the fact—I've never heard—it's not in any biography that—
—that you were an art history major at Princeton?
It's known. There is a small army of unemployed art historians who I hear from because they hear—the word is out.
But I fell in love with art history.
Early Renaissance. Early Italian Renaissance.
I was 19th century American.
I mean, a lot of what interested me, it was driven by who the professors were. Because it's a small—
But there was this question of—so I wrote my thesis. It doesn't matter what it's about, but it's about Donatello. It was. And it was an original thesis. And a thesis was not like any other academic exercise I'd ever engaged in. It was wholly immersive, took a year to do. It was the length of a book, a small book. And something happened to me. I just loved it. And I thought, oh, this is what I'm meant to do. I'm meant to be an art historian. And I went to my—
Almost. You almost got it.
I went to my thesis defense thinking that. And the thesis got a good grade. And actually, the professor, the guy who ran the department, was my advisor. And there was a little part of him that could not believe I had written this thing. He saw—
He thought—it is a theme. He thought this was—he thought of me as this kind of charming preppy from New Orleans who was kind of—airhead's too strong, but it was just a little—just like unserious. And so I can remember him. I remember saying to him, like, I think maybe this means I should be an art historian. He said it was publishable, which he said—none of these—he said, we don't see these things often. It was an extraordinary piece of work coming out of me. And he said—so once he established I had written it, he was like, well, I think I want to be an artist. He says, you're not an art historian. He says, you're never going to be an art historian. And he also said—he was actually kind of paternalistic. There are not going to be art historians, really. The whole industry is collapsing. So don't do that. And so I said—
You didn't know there was an industry of art historians.
The career, the path, was not as—it was not as obvious as it had been for him. And so he said, so in that defense, I remember thinking, oh, not art historian. Maybe this means I want to write. Maybe I'm a writer. And said to him—he was telling me what he thought of this. I said, what did you think about the writing? His pipe comes down. He says. He looks at me. He says, put it this way. Never try to make a living at it. And I got to rub his nose in that.
I gave the Princeton commencement speech about a decade ago, and I got to tell that story to the Princeton University community. Anyway, but this is where I discovered. I said, Christ, this is what I'm going to do. I have some feeling when I'm doing this that I've never experienced before. And it was a kind of passion. That's what it was, an intellectual passion. And I'm going to go find a way to replicate that in the world. And it was a really messy story getting from there to actually writing a book. But that was the beginning of it for me.
So I don't have—what I don't have and what you do have is an obvious motive. Like, what you endured as a kid was rough. And how you get—in your book, how you get from the little kid who's being very badly treated—you have some good things happen in school where a teacher explains to you that you're special. They figure out what's going on, that things are going on inside of you that are important. But how you get from that kid who doesn't want to go to the bathroom because he's afraid what's going to happen to him to president of your freshman class at Dartmouth is not explained by your memoir. So I need—
If you're interested, I'm—
I'm interested because by the time you're president of your freshman class at Dartmouth, you are obviously you.
Yeah, I haven't changed a bit. Exactly. No, seriously.
So I want to—I want to know how that happened.
Well, I'll tell you. In third grade—are you ready for this?
I'm ready. I'm listening.
This is going to take a long time. No, I'll truncate this. In third grade, I had a teacher named Alice Camp. And I came into that third grade feeling like a failure, feeling ashamed, feeling like a freak, feeling like somebody who really did not deserve to be on the Earth. And she saw in me something that I did not see in me. This is about teaching. And the movie that Elliot and Heather made is really about teaching as well. And in the book, I talk a lot about teaching. It's a passion with me. But what she did is because she saw in me something, I was able to see that in me. Very often, you can't see something in yourself unless somebody else sees it in you. And she was such a generative, powerful, I think, in retrospect, loving person. I've written about her before, and I got a wonderful email from her granddaughter saying, you know, that's the greatest present you could possibly have given.
Did she know what she'd done for you?
I mean, she didn't hear from you from Dartmouth or—
No, no, no. And I, like most people, I never bothered to thank my teachers. I mean, I went through public school all the way until college. I should have come to Berkeley for college. That was a big mistake.
No, really. It was a mistake. Dartmouth College—
Your life would be completely different.
Well, unlike Princeton, Dartmouth—I went to Dartmouth. Dartmouth College was, in those years, a monastery in Siberia. I mean, really, there were no women. The roads were iced over six months. There was no interstate highway system connecting Dartmouth to anyplace else. I really did not know what I missed, but I missed life.
That's not the word you use in the book.
No! So Alice Camp really did see something in me. And then it was a straight line. After Alice Camp, I was—
Well, it may have—some other teachers also saw a lot in me. But what I discovered, and this—I discovered it in writing my memoir, hadn't put it together before, is that my father, who lived until about two weeks before his 102nd birthday, just about a week before he died, I was lying next to him in his bed and hugging him. And I said, Dad, I love you. And he said, that's interesting. And I said, what—why is that interesting? I said, I love you. He said, well, it's interesting because we were never a very demonstrative family. And I said, well, that's ridiculous. I mean, you hug me, I hug you. We've always been demonstrative. And what he had mixed up was that his own father had been very hard on him. His own father had told him that he would never amount to anything. Can you imagine that?
I mean, I can't either. I knew him as a very—as a lovely old man, a kind of grandfather. But he was cruel to my father. And my father ended up having a tremendous sense of inferiority, deep inferiority. He worked hard, and he never thought that he was good at anything. And so I, at some subconscious level, felt worried that by being such a shrimp, I was, in some sense, confirming my father's sense that he was not worth anything. And so I was determined to be somebody he would be proud of for himself.
And so I remember I got the idea of running for president of my freshman class, which, in those days, that was a big deal.
Had you ever run for anything before then?
Run for high school president.
I'm going to run for president. And you know what? I'm going to go to every single dorm room of every single dormitory and talk to every single member of this class. And I did. And then I called him when I was elected president of the class. I said, Dad? He said, yes? I said, I've been elected president of my freshman class. And there was a long silence, and I could hear him smiling. Yep, that was it, Michael.
That was also—I want you to explain your first encounter with Hillary Clinton.
It goes right from this experience.
Yeah, yeah. Well, Hillary went to Wellesley. One of the big disadvantages of going to Dartmouth College, which was that monastery in Siberia, and being under five feet tall, was that I was never going to meet a woman who would actually look at me and think of me as a potential boyfriend. And so I came up with this idea. I was president of the freshman class. So I came up with this idea. I'm going to have conferences, all sorts of conferences, interesting conferences that will attract—if I just attract—if I just bring boatloads of girls, which my class wanted me to do, and I did—but they were not going to look at me. I wanted to have conferences on interesting and important issues. And guess who arrived for one of those conferences? Hillary Rodham, not Hillary Clinton—Hillary Rodham who became Hillary Clinton. And it was a conference about educational reform. Michael, it was. It was. It was. But—
Your MO is very different from mine at that age.
Wait a minute. And then I took her. I said, do you want to see a movie? And she said, sure. And then we had what she considered and I considered a date.
At the time, she considered it a date.
She—well, I think she—yes, because years later, when she ran for president, a reporter for The New York Times found a cache of her letters from Wellesley. And in those letters, apparently, she said that she had gone out with a boy from Dartmouth, and we had gone to see a movie at the Nugget Theater in Hanover, New Hampshire. And his name was Bob Reich. And the reporter called me. Remember, she's running for president. And the reporter called me and said, is there anything you can tell me about that date? And I said, well, we went to a movie. We saw Antonioni's Blow-Up. And the reporter said, well, is there anything you can tell me about seeing the movie or having that date that might shed light on how she'd perform as a president?
You can't blame him for trying.
And I just—I stopped him. Here was the tel—I mean this is the telephone, and I—I thought, well, I'm going to have some fun here. And I said, I'm not sure I'm supposed to tell you this. And she said, please do. And I said, well, she wanted an inordinate amount of butter on her popcorn. And that made it into The New York Times. Seriously, it did.
Can I poke and prod you a little bit about this date?
Was there any tension in the air?
Yeah, a little—was there anything going on?
I mean, it was—I think it was anti-tension.
There was—no, I was smitten in a way. I mean, she had big, thick glasses. She was not glamorous in any way, but she had so much energy and the greatest laugh you've ever heard. And she was so smart. She was so bright. And I really wanted to ask her out again, but I couldn't come up with another conference.
Yeah, but I didn't support her when she ran—what was it, 2008? I supported Obama, and she was pissed off, and I think Bill was pissed off, too. And so our friendship cooled at that point.
When was the last time you heard from her?
Maybe five years ago, six years ago. I don't think I'm a very important person in her life.
So I want to talk a little bit more about your writing, and then I want to talk about your role in politics. I want to talk about politics and government.
I want to make sure we have enough time to do this.
I want to talk about government, too, because I—
Because we've both been writing about it.
Well, I want to brag about your book because your books are fabulous, all your books. As I said, they take complicated subjects, and a lot of them are mathematics and sports and things that I know very little about. And you've explained them to me so clearly. And your books about government and about the civil service and about the people who are doing the hard work of making these institutions respond to the public, I found it inspiring and very consistent with my experience when I was in Bill Clinton's cabinet.
So can I become the stripper for just a little bit longer?
Because I want to talk about—I want to talk about these little bits to come back to you to talk about your experience in government because I—so you came to government the honest way. You had a deep interest in public policy. You had a deep—you were interested in politics. I came to government because Donald Trump got elected president. And the day after he was elected president, he fired his 550-person transition team. And I thought we know a couple of things about Donald Trump. He doesn't know anything about anything, and he certainly doesn't know anything about the government. And he's going to be running this thing. And that he didn't have any interest in the mechanism for learning about this thing he was going to run riveted me. And I thought, you know, if he isn't going to get the briefings that the Obama administration put 1,000 people to the task of creating over six months, then I can, and that this will be fun.
It was just like, this is literary material, that I can wander the government and walk into any department and have it explained to me by people who are hungry to explain it to the people who are going to be running it. And so The Fifth Risk ended up being the book, and it starts with the first briefing I get is how to run the nuclear arsenal. And I thought, man, this is just great. Like, I'm the only one who now knows that everybody else is leaving. And the reader will be in on the joke.
How did you get them to give you that briefing? I mean—
They were in a room off Connecticut Avenue. They had left their offices, and they had the presentation. And they said, sure, sure, come on in. There was some stuff that was classified that they couldn't tell me, but I got the gist. And I—
You are lucky you were still free as a civilian.
But what I realized is that, one, that this material which might have been otherwise kind of inert—it's basically a civics lesson. It's me wandering around the federal government trying to figure out what the hell it does because our president, who's supposed to be running it, doesn't care. This material had been electrified by Donald Trump, and it was, for what it was, an enormous success. It was three articles in Vanity Fair, and there was a huge market for it. And it was fun to do. And in the process of doing that, I didn't realize it until the very end that these people in—a lot of these people who worked in the government were legitimate literary characters. They were mission-driven. They were curious in all kinds—they were odd characters, a lot of them. And when I finally—when I was done with The Fifth Risk, I came back to write the paperback, and I grabbed almost arbitrarily one of these characters and wrote him up as I would write a character sketch. And the material was so good, I thought, I've just got to come back to this. And the Who Is Government book is just that but with doing it with a bunch of other writers. And I'm coming back to it right now. I'm in the agonizing stage of another book, a book about this Trump administration's collision with the civil service. So I've gotten interested in it. But I come in—I foul-hooked the subject. I did not come in thinking, I really want to write about government. I've just gotten naturally interested because of what's going on in the world. And I didn't want to get to this until later, but now we're here. You were Secretary of Labor. By the way, in the film, you've got your cabinet chair in your office, and you're trying to dispose of it. You call the White House and offer to give it back. They don't know what you're talking about. In Berkeley, you just put the chair out on the sidewalk. It's not that hard. But—
Would it be recycled, do you think?
No, someone will pick it up.
Yeah, someone will pick it up. But when you get to that job—you'd worked in government before. But when you're running the Labor Department, do you have a similar sort of response to it? Like, wow, I didn't know—I'm surprised by the caliber of the person here. What is your—
One of the biggest surprises was the quality of the civil service, the permanent career people in the Labor Department. Now, I went to visit my predecessor before I took the job because I just wanted to know what she knew about the Labor Department. And I went into this just gigantic office. I mean, it was the biggest office I'd ever seen. And in the distance, outside these windows that were—the floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides of this giant room, I could see the Capitol building, this majestic, powerful dome. And I was very moved. And I sat down with the woman who—
was the previous Secretary of Labor. And I said, well, how do I do this? Tell me. Just tell me how to do it. And she was a Republican, and she said, ah, you're a Democrat. All the people here, they'll love you. You don't have to worry about a thing. And she was-- but she was really referring to the career civil service. And her experience had been-- and this is true of most of the Republican appointees to cabinet positions-- that the civil service is their nemesis. The civil service is trying to stop them from wrecking what the Departments ought to be doing. Well, my experience was just the opposite. My experience was exactly as she said. I have never worked with a group of people as talented, as dedicated and as self-effacing. They just didn't want to take credit. I wanted to-- at various public events, I wanted to single them out. They didn't want that. They just wanted to do their work. And their work was incredibly important.
Do you think that they were, in fact, obstructing her? Do you think that she had a legitimate point?
Yes. Well, not entirely. That is, I think that the civil service I came to know, the public servants, the career people, they had an attitude which was this, too, shall pass. The political appointees-- Robert Reich, my predecessor, anybody-- will not be here very long. So whatever you don't like about them, don't worry. They'll leave.
You're a substitute teacher.
Yeah, right. That's my-- yeah.
I felt a little bit like that. But they didn't think I was going to stay more than two years. A lot of cabinet people, they leave after two years. I stayed 4 and 1/2 years. And by the third year, I had enough credibility and knew them well enough that we started to really do some dynamite stuff.
Does it make you wonder if we've got the proper structure for our government-- that people coursing through at the very top of these organizations, who are only going to be there for a couple of years, that they aren't really-- that we need a deeper state?
It's a good question. I mean, right now, obviously-- and we're talking about the federal government. None of this is about state or local. We're talking about the federal government. The federal government, obviously, we all know, is shut down, is not operating. And the people who are so-called essential workers are not getting paid. Air traffic controllers are not getting paid. I want them paid for obvious reasons and fairness. But-- and the head of our government really does not respect people working in the federal government. I think that's clear. And the head of OMB, Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought-- let's have a bit of respect. Russell Vought really doesn't, I think, have any respect or any admiration whatsoever for any federal civil servant. I mean, he's breaking the law. They're all breaking the law. Yeah.
We just took a right turn onto a road. I didn't want to get on until a little later because I have a feeling that this is going to be all about Trump. I want to-- so I want to stop you for one second because I want you--
I was just getting going.
I know you're just getting going. So let's do it this way, because I want-- you've given a lot of advice to a lot of presidents and a lot of-- presidents and presidential candidates. Has anybody ever taken it?
That's not an easy question to answer.
I'm reading your book. It's between the lines.
Yeah. I think that a few of them tried to. Bill Clinton did, actually, for the first year of his administration, I believe. But coming up with policy ideas-- and I don't-- I want you to know that I respect schools of public policy. I don't just respect them. I love them. And the Goldman School of Public Policy is the best school of public policy in the world. Can I just say that? However--
I don't doubt that, but how do we--
However, public policy and politics don't always go together. And if you don't have enough political will, it's very hard to do what the policy process might suggest is the best outcome. So it's always been a pull and tug, Michael.
Describe your class to us a little bit. I mean, I watched the film. Love the film. The class called wealth and poverty?
Has it been the same class since you've been here?
No, I started-- I taught. I can't believe I'm not teaching, I am teaching a little.
I don't understand where the father who died at 102, what on Earth you're doing stopping now. You might have another 20 good years in you.
Well, I hope so. But I didn't want to-- I was just feeling that I was losing a little bit of my edge. Do you know what--
Do you know? No, but you know what I'm talking about. You're a young man. You're a young man.
I mean, I understand. You see, people lose a step, but you do not-- you have not obviously lost a step.
Well, I'm-- I am 10 days younger than Donald Trump.
He's lost a lot of steps.
And I look at him, and I think, you know, maybe I really am losing more than I think I am. I didn't know--
I'll tell you, but I wouldn't make such a point of not telling you that it's-- no, you don't come across as old.
Old-- well, the brain's not old.
The brain? Well, who knows? I mean, the brain-- we're all aging.
Yeah, well, as you speak, we're aging. That's true.
I mean, this is something that I hate to share this with you, but it's really true. There is a process called aging, and it ends at some point. And that's the end. It really is the end. And so--
So I decided to retire because I didn't feel I could give my students everything that they deserved.
Hm. All right. It's again not obvious, but it's-- so I want you to explain the class as you were-- that you were teaching at the end. It seemed like you were explaining how our society got to the way-- to be the way it was. And so I want to hear what this class is, and I want to hear your theory of this case--
--and explain how we got to Donald Trump.
