Deep State Rebels v. Trump (with Michael Lewis)

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This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Okay, we've been talking about Kewpie Mayo for a minute now, Bow, and wow, the feedback we're getting. I mean, so many of y'all love this stuff. You're stopping us in the street going, I love Kewpie. And if you're thinking, wait, what is Kewpie? Uh, do you not have the internet? It's the OG Japanese mayonnaise. The one with the red cap and the little baby. On the bottle. Once you know it, you start seeing it everywhere. People ask what makes it different from basic mayo. Well, the answer, egg yolks. Kewpie is made with egg yolks only, giving it this incredibly rich umami flavor that elevates everything. Burgers, fries, sandwiches, chicken, noodles. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. People who really love food and flavor use it. Whatever you're eating, Kewpie it. So if you haven't tried Kewpie yet, find the bottle with the red cap and see whatever. Everyone's talking about. You'll understand. Kewpie, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Hey everybody. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Lovett. I just wrapped a great conversation with my friend, John Lovett. He's a great guy. He's a great guy. He's a great guy. He's a great Michael Lewis. He is an author of the new book, Blockers, Rebels in the Deep State. It is a conversation not just about what happened when Doge tried to run roughshod over the government, but also the people inside who fought back. And there are a lot of fascinating stories and lessons and ways that we should be thinking about how not only to repair the damage, but build something better going forward. And just loved getting to talk to Michael Lewis. And I think you'll like it too. It's good to see you, John. Good to see you. The book is enraging. Is it? Yeah. It was fun to write. It wasn't making me angry as I wrote it. Well, that seems sort of your quality. So I want to start with Colin O'Brien. He's the head of security for what was then known as the U.S. Institute of Peace. What happened when Doge tried to gain entry to that building? In a word, he watched and he's at a security and he's a more interesting character than that. He's like, he presents as like an NFL lineman just to look at him, but he's like a college professor in his head. He watched Doge basically rearrange all the guns on their side so that he thought first he thought the Institute of Peace, it's not really part of the executive branch. It's a, it's a congressionally created organization and it has got funding from the U.S. government, but it owns its own building. It's a nonprofit. They didn't think of themselves as actually answering to the White House in any way. So it's weird when Doge shows up and says, we're taking this. It's also very small. I think, but people are like, oh, it's the Institute of Peace. They associate it with USAID. USAID is vast compared to what the Institute of Peace is. A couple hundred people. Yeah. It's a $70 million budget or something. Some of it privately raised and, and Colin assumed, well, he has a private security firm that works for him. If the, if the federal government tries to invade his building, he can call the DC police before he knows it. He, he's actually the most successful in repelling Doge because he lasted a few days, but before he knows it, the, the private security firm has been blackmailed by the Trump administration and turned. So they, they're working for the Trump administration, the DC police sign on whatever diabolical thing they did with the DC police is it's unclear, but I loved it as a kind of opening of the book because he was physically trying to block them from getting into the building. And, and the, the, the, in the end, like they get the building. I mean, in the end, it's now not, it's now not the, you know, it's not the US Institute of Peace anymore. It's the Donald Trump Institute of Peace. So I feel like it's such a, obviously is why you start the book with it, you're very good at this, but it's a signal example, right? Because he's on solid legal ground, right? These people don't have any right. They're just Doge. It's like, it's like they're coming to your house to take your house, right? They're just people off the street. They're very aggressive. They act like they own the place. Right. And he says, no, you can't come in. They're 26 years old, right? They're, they're these kids, right? No, you can't come in. Then they have a, they bring an FBI guy with them. And that person isn't really there other than to facilitate. He says, no, you can't come in the private security firm. The reason Trump is able to, the administration is able to get this firm to be part of their efforts to take the building is the Institute of Peace has a very small contract. The State Department has a contract that's a hundred times the size, their money is at stake. So now all of a sudden, because of that contract, not for any legal reason, they're suddenly on the side of Doge. And yet still this guy, O'Brien, he locks them in the portico of the building and he physically removes, this is a shocking story. The third, the, about the third assault, the third assault, he is, he figures, Colin figures his only vulnerability is there is one lock on the building that actually a key will open that he can't shut down with a press of a button on his phone. There's one key that's out there. It's in the hands of the, of someone who works for the private security firm. He, nobody knows it's out there. He assumes that the guy at the private security firm will just keep it a secret, not use it. But he comes, but they, they, they, they, they, they wake up one morning and the private security firm has, has broken in using that key to get in. And Colin watches them on the cameras and they all get into a single room in the front of the building. And he realizes he can sort of seal it hermetically shut. So imprison the, imprison the invaders. And there's, there's a, there's a, it's a wonderful scene where he, they realize they're locked in and trapped. And so the Colin, Colin's people call the DC police and say, we have to get them. And, and come, come and get them. And the, the guys who were trapped call their bosses and resulting in a call from Ed Martin's office from, you know what I mean? It's just like it, it escalates inside the Trump administration. He was the US attorney at the time, the US attorney at the time. And in the end, DC police do in fact come, but they come in, they're working for the Trump administration. And it is, so here's the bigger point of the story. Actually, this is what got me interested, uh, kind of thinking this was a book, a book because it was such, you know, if you think of Trump won, Trump won the first administration, it was this, the signature was indifference and ignorance. Like he didn't care at all about running the government. He'd fired his transition team right after the election. He told Chris Christie, it would take him an hour to learn how the federal government worked. He just didn't care. And I think Trump too comes in and they care more than any administration has ever cared in funny way. They they're extending their power into places that doesn't belong. They're saying, we, we're not only gonna run the stuff that we're supposed to run, we're gonna take stuff that we're not supposed to run. And, um, you know, the, the Institute of peace is set up under Reagan and it's set up to be really at, at, it's not for the president to control. It's at arm's length from the American government for a very specific reason. It's set up to, to, as a kind of instrument of soft power, to be able to go out into the field and hotspots in the world and, and facilitate conversations between. Warring parties without it being the us government sort of quasi government kind of thing. And it's done this very successfully. Or I mean, you know, you, you know, it's like if you go to the Pentagon and ask them, are you glad that this place exists? They would tell you, yes, it's saved his lives and saved his money. It it's, it's stop. It's stopped conflict. And it, but it only works if this isn't seen as instrument of American power. It's it's a, it's a nebulous kind of thing. And legally they own the building, you know, it's, it's, it's just really clear. The Trump administration's clear. What it showed was not only we're gonna take everything we can, we're gonna show that not only are we gonna run everything we're supposed to run, we're gonna take everything we can, and we're gonna show people as a kind of statement, we can do this and we're gonna worry about the law later. Uh, so it was, I mean, it's, it's bl I didn't see blatantly illegal, but it's working its way through the courts slowly. Right. That, that is what, this is sort of stunning about the example. There is, there's, and, and I do wanna talk about some of the ways in which. There were aspects of the project 2025 critique that were agreed to by people within the government. But part of the reason I say that is because at, at a certain point, if we're not following the law, it really is about who has the keys and the guns and the guns in the basement. This is right. And, and, and when the cops show up, who do they point their guns at? Right. Whose side did they take? It becomes about it's very element. It's very elemental. And, and here at this place, this Institute created by Ronald Reagan, supported in a bipartisan way for a very long time. You have this security guard basically trying to a physical building to keep Donald Trump out, and he can't, and he ultimately can't. And so it is, I think, because no shots were fired, I think we ignore the importance of who has the guns, you know, but it was, Doge was very aware, the Trump administration was very aware, we don't want these security guards with guns pointing out at us, we don't want the D.C. police, we don't want, it's, we gotta, and that just happened without anybody saying much about it, I mean, it's interesting, it's outrageous that the D.C. police turns itself into an arm of the Trump administration, it's outrageous that a private security firm turns itself into, but it's, so that's, I think, the very beginning of this story of transforming the presidency from one thing into another, from extending the power of the president, turning the two million person civil service into, from a non-partisan, workforce that takes a oath to the constitution, not to a person, into a sort of loyalist operation who is meant to serve the personal narrow interests of a single man, like, all of that, those changes are just, they're just profound changes, and, but it all starts with, we have the power, like, we have the guns, and we're gonna eliminate the law, we're gonna eliminate, fairness, like, we eliminate all the referees. Yeah, it's, and I do think there's two things happening at once in parallel that get mixed together, one is a shocking and aggressive assertion of executive power, either at the edge of, or in the border between legal and illegal, right, just trying to push executive power in new ways, or ways that haven't been used in a very long time, because of, kind of, norms and institutional prerogatives and deference, right? On the other side, you have just lawlessness, and just, we're gonna go in and do what we want, and the faster we go, the harder it will be for you to catch up to us with the courts and all the rest, and those things, I think, both are playing out here and playing out across the government, but I think it's interesting, you talk about this difference between the first term and the second term, so in the first term, Chris Christie puts together this transition team, Trump fires him, doesn't need him, it's neglect, it's indifference, it's ignorance, fundamentally different in the second term, and you say in the book, you know, the Trump team blames bureaucracy for their failures. When, in reality, their agenda was undermined by their own ineptitude, right, that they chose people with little management experience to run these agencies, and then were dumbfounded by their failure to be able to, kind of, yoke the machine, get the machine to do as, to their, do their bidding. Were you in the White House when they came in the first time? No, no, I was, no, I was out here, I was hosting a post-in, I was hosting a post-in. I see, okay, because there are people in the White House who'll tell you that, I can remember stories from the fifth risk, I wrote a book about the Trump one, where, like, Jared Kushner is being, is bewildered that everybody's leaving the White House, they thought they just stayed. You know, that they, the level of, they just, I don't know what they thought, it was just ran on autopilot or something, but the level of indifference the first time was incredible. I mean, did that, that I went and got the first briefing to be got about how the nuclear arsenal was run, because they didn't go bother, bother to do it, that kind of thing. And, and so, this time, and, and the subsequent complaint that, like, whatever, Trump didn't have any great policy. Plans, it, it's not like he came in with a great plan and then it didn't get executed. He, he came in without any particular interest in doing anything, except, you know, the, the dog caught the bus. He was, he got to be president and surprised him and, but he wasn't there for any particular purpose. And so, the idea that, like, there's this deep state that undermined him was insane. But that, that's, and it's, it's a line they started to peddle very hard towards the end. And it is true that when he broke the law, or when he sought to do things that were, that, that were illegal, that there were people, there were mechanisms inside the civil service to get in his way. And he didn't like that. But that's a, that's a, that's kind of a separate thing. But you, but you see this playing out in all kinds of ways, right? He says, like, if you don't let me put my name on the Kennedy Center, well, it's just going to go to pot and then we'll have to tear it down, right? And no one's saying that the president can't institute a plan to repair the Kennedy Center. Just have to do it competently and legally, according to the rules, right? The frustration. And of the kind of shambolic lawless effort leading to roadblocks and therefore the deep state is stopping us becomes a lot of the basis for what Doge does. Yes. Pots of America is brought to you by Wild Alaskan Company. The difference between low and high quality seafood is enormous. And it's also one of those things that's tough to accurately assess for yourself in the grocery store. When you are just browsing around. Wild Alaskan Company offers the best way to get wild caught, high quality seafood delivered to your door on your schedule. Each Wild Alaskan box comes with individually portioned fillets. They're vacuum sealed, easy to prep and great for any meal, no matter how quick or elevated. All the fish is quick frozen, fresh from the Alaskan waters, which helps lock in its freshness, texture, flavor and key nutrients like omega threes. 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They're these electric blinds that we can operate with a remote so that when it's super sunny in the late afternoon, we can lower a bit so we can see our screens and, and, and keep up with the news, which we never stopped doing. We're always keeping up with the news when it's sunny, when it's cloudy, when it's raining, no matter what happens, there is the news and that's our choice and it's our life. But we have great blinds and that's so important. So visit blinds.com. Right now for an exclusive $50 off, when you spend $500 or more with code crooked, that's blinds.com with code crooked. So I want to talk about Howard Lutnick because I think with Howard Lutnick, you see both the neglect and ignorance and the kind of aggressive destruction that sort of, I think the, the kind of marries the two, uh, what happens when Howard Lutnick takes over at commerce? And how did that impact an agency that has very rarely been seen as sort of political, which is the, uh, uh, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, the place you go to find out what time it is exactly. So NIST, NIST is one of those agencies every American should know about just because it's fascinating. Established in the early 19th century, uh, or late, late 19th century to, to, to just make it, to create standards, it's called the Bureau of Standards. Like there are arguments about what a yard is or what a pound is. And if you traveled America in 1902 and you tried to buy a pound of butter, you'd found that the pound was not a pound anywhere. And so there, there, it starts that way. The character in the book who is, who, who, who carries the water for the story is a fellow named Alex Meringuides who invented an entire fire science inside of NIST. He was, he was, um, he, he, he, he invented the science. He invented the science of wild land, urban interface fires, you know, palisades. The fires that are the fires we're all talking about. That's exactly right. He is, he, he is like, how do you study these things? How, how, and how do we defend ourselves against them? Getting quickly, just, just to set this up. So NIST, why, why is NIST doing that? In 1904, there is a, a, the great Baltimore fire, which becomes the great Baltimore fire, because when a fire set starts in a warehouse and fire trucks come from surrounding areas, the threads on their hoses don't match the fire hydrants in Baltimore. So they can't put out the fire and it just spreads. It's kicked to NIST to create a standard for a fire hydrant in a hose. So that's how they get into fire. The reason your smoke detectors are where they are and they work the way they work, the reason your sprinklers are where they are and they work the way they work, the reason buildings are designed with the exits where they are, all came out and NIST did a lot of the original research. It's filled with these tinker types. These, it's kind of a, I mean. in a twist of dial on the kind of person who works at NIST and they end up some academic science department, but they're handsy. They do stuff. They do stuff. And Alex, the character in the book, came to NIST because he had been one of the world's great big fire experimenters. He worked for the Navy, set big fires on ships to test various retardants and how you would put them out. So he had the experience with setting huge fires and getting information out of them. When the World Trade Center, when 9-11, when the World Trade Center falls, NIST is assigned to figure out like, why did it fall? Like, why did those towers fall? They weren't supposed to fall. And the arguments were that the fire could never have gotten so hot that it melted the steel beams. And Alex has brought in, he recreates, he rebuilds floors of the World Trade Center and sets them on fire. And he's the reason we know, he's one of the part of the reason we know why the towers fell. Because the Jews. Yes. Because. Oh, God. Sorry. You just had to say that. Yeah, I got to get in there. So this is all backstory. Because you need to know this. Howard Lutnick is, I mean, it's kind of a downstage voice in the book. But Alex, you know, and the point of the story of Alex is, so he comes to NIST in 2002, thereabouts. And he has enough flexibility to invent. Like, he knew he wanted to invent this new science. He knew he wanted to go study big fires and wiped out communities and see if he could create new standards of how you build. Build communities or design communities to make them more defensible. So just one example that comes from the book, just like a small, like, this is the kind of thing where no one has to be doing this work. Exactly. It's just as good that they are. So for example, where should people clear things that can burn from their houses? Well, clear it away from the house. How far away? How far away? Well, it turns out that actually those rules, which are common sense, you're moving stuff away from your house, but towards your neighbor's house. That's right. Right? That's like a small example from the book. So, like, just a smart guy thinking things through on our behalf. When you walk through his suburban Maryland neighborhood with him, and by the way, what he would tell you is, like, we spend a lot of time talking about west fires out here. He said the east is the tinderbox. He said that all it takes is six weeks of dry and this, of no rain, and the east, the east coast is waiting to go up. So he says, you walk through one of these neighborhoods and you see it in a completely different way through his eyes. You'll see a wooden fence that runs the length of a block. He'll go, that's how the fire is going to trap you. And he'll go, I'm going to travel from that house to that house. That fence is a really dangerous thing. And it's all, it's all fallen out of this research he's done basically by himself. Very small team at very little expense. And he's been doing it. The point of his story is that, and this is, I don't want to undermine your point, but. No, please. The point of the story is that it isn't just Trump. It's that, that it's that we have, that the way we run our government, it's made it harder and harder for people like Alex to do what they do. When he starts, he's able to use the NIST fire lab just on the side when it's open to just throw it, throw some trees in and burn them and see what happens kind of thing. He's, he creates this science sort of like in his spare time. That's, that's how it begins until, until people start to see how valuable it's going to be. And then he gets some proper funding. But, but, but five years in, this is an example. This is an example of how government gets kind of kludgy. Five years in at a NIST lab in Colorado, someone has an accident with plutonium. It triggers a congressional investigation, which triggers all these new rules about experiments. And Alex then to, you know, when this downtime in the NIST lab, which happens, you know, when he happens in the, in the spur of the moment, he needs now needs to get six signatures to, to get, to run an experiment. So his life had gotten a little harder and harder and harder until you get to Trump too. He was able to keep doing his work until he gets to Trump too. And, and he gets to Trump too. He's already kind of tired and worn out. And Howard Lutnick comes in. And NIST is inside the Department of Commerce. And by the way, Howard Lutnick lost his whole firm in, in 9-11. One floor up from the building, the floors that, that Alex. Just floors up from, yes. That he modeled. Alex actually explained why Howard Lutnick's whole firm died. That he, that, that Howard Lutnick doesn't see this connection, but they are, there, there's a connection between these two people. They shake Alex's hand and say, what do we need to do to help you? Or at least when he gets the job, you'd think you're excited to go meet the people that work for you because it's a job. You have a job now. Yes. You're going to go do your fucking job. Yes. So Howard Lutnick is the reductio ad absurdum of a bigger problem. And it is that we stopped asking what qualifications should a person have to run one of these federal agencies? They, they, that there's sort of, it's very weird what, what they get tested for. Did they know Jeffrey Epstein? Not, not. That's, that's sort of, I mean, you don't want them to know Jeffrey Epstein, but you really want to know that they know what's inside the department of commerce and you really want them to know that they can run this sort of organization. The, some felt experience with the things the department of commerce does, the weather service or whatever it is, that would help. It's remarkable how we install people for, to be the temporary heads of these places with enormous power over them without knowing anything about them. So Howard Lutnick really knows nothing about the department of commerce and, and he doesn't care. So what he does is he arrives, doesn't really show in his office much. He's in the White House all the time because he wants to be with Donald Trump. But at the same time, insists on micromanaging what's going on, the going, going on in commerce by approving checks. It's just like anything over $10,000 I have to sign, which just shuts things down because he's not there to sign them. They're like lines of people. He shows up in the evening for an hour and there are lines of people outside his door waiting to, to please, could you just look at this and sign the check? Alex's credit card is taken away. He, he, he can't buy supplies for his, for his lab. It's just, it, it basically grinds him to a halt. And he was already at a point where they're making it so hard. I'm exhausted. I can't, I can't do the work. And so he leaves, he leaves. And funny enough, I can tell you the code of this. So Alex left about a year ago, but he was so worried about the research. The research is research that will save our lives. It will, it will. It's the research that will help us defend against this coming threat, this growing risk. And he says like that knowledge that we created, it's one person deep. Alex had a young assistant. He's trying to kind of jam into the young assistant's brain all he needs to know. But Alex kind of needs to be there. So for the last year, he's worked for free just before, before he leaves and goes back to Greece where he came from. And he said to me, he just read the 20,000 words in the book about his fire science. And he said, he said, nice job. He said, but I'm now going to have to go turn in my laptop because I'm sure they're coming for me now. And it was, it was, it was, he's afraid that he's afraid that just the public exposure of the consequences of the way they're running this thing in the person of him is going to cause trouble for NIST in him. When it really, really should, it's caused someone to come and get rid of Howard Lutton and get someone in there to run the place. But it's, it's incredible. And I don't know what your like just broad view of the government is as opposed to politics, but whenever you kick around the government, you find all these Alex Maranghetti's, you find all these people who've got some weird expertise who are doing something that you might think in the back of your mind, the market would do. Like you might think like the insurance industry would be doing this and they kind of do a little bit of it. But in fact, no, that they're, they're, they're, they're these whole, the market, the market. Especially with public safety stuff, the market is terrible and, and the government does all this great stuff. And it's usually someone like Alex who has just an obsession with the problem and he sees how big the effects are going to be if he can solve the problem and he goes down the rabbit hole and he works a hundred hours a week and he doesn't get paid very much and he could be being paid way more in the private sector and doesn't even expect you to cheer for him. He doesn't even want attention. He just wants the freedom to solve the problem and that we as a society. Have created these obstacles and that the Trump administration comes in and sees it says like, oh, that's deep state. It's insane. It's insane. You look at the moments where there, there are these innovations or discoveries or sort of promising research that produces results like this. And it is these sort of moments of small groups of people with the freedom to maneuver, try things, right? You can talk about DARPA, you could talk about the Manhattan project. You could talk about startups that make incredible things. You talk about Facebook at the beginning, whatever. And it's a group of people with a passion and a freedom to explore their ideas and no one kind of watching every, you know, you don't want to waste money, but no one watching every dollar and every little penny that goes out the door, whether that's because they're independent or that there's leadership that has enough trust and respect for what they're doing, trust in and respect for what they're doing to give them the space to operate. There's, and, and, you know, one example you have in the book is that before, long before Trump shows up, there used to be a travel agent. There used to be a travel agent and the travel agent worked for this department for NIST. And so when you wanted to go look at a forest fire or go to a research lab or whatever, you would call this person and say, Hey, I need to do this trip. And that person would say, all right, let me get you the information. Right. And so in order to quote unquote, save money, they cut that department. and now the scientists have to book their own travel and they have to go to cities seminars where they learn about how to save money on airplane tickets, right? And you may be able to show on a ledger somewhere that some money was saved, right? But in the end result, the government is less efficient and less effective. And the people that you have presumably hired to do, to provide their comparative advantage now have to spend more time doing administrative tasks. And you see that fucking everywhere. You see it everywhere. And at the bottom of it, there's probably something at the bottom of what I'm about to say, but at the bottom of it, it's this, it's so, once you start generating mistrust of government, it's so easy to distort what's going on inside of it for political gain to point to and go, look at, look at how outrageous it is. They have a travel agent inside of NIST. You don't have a travel agent. They have a travel agent. Yeah. And the fact is you want them to have a travel agent because you want them doing the science. You don't want them learning how to book airline tickets. And, and it's, it's, um, we have paid an enormous price for people just not understanding what the government does. And this, this, this cyclone of mistrust that has spun up and that it just gets and ends up like running through the government and hitting whatever it hits willy nilly. It, and it creates this, I mean, one, it creates the travel, the elimination of the travel agent, but in the minds of the people who are working there, if you're there, I mean, not everybody in the 2 million person civil service is great that I'm sure there's, there is waste. Of course there's waste. There's not a lot of fraud because they get, watched so close. It may be fraud perpetrated on the government by American citizens, but the idea that people in the government like stealing a lot of money from the government, that's probably unlikely. It is inefficient in ways. Contractors are making, making money. That's yeah. But that's why, I mean, it's a fair question. Like why we subcontract so much, why we don't have the capabilities inside, but, but the over and over in these things I've written about the government, I didn't go looking for like the, the rare, the rare, the person who was doing something good. They're all over the place. People who, who bust their ass, who have, who really have a sense that like they want their lives to mean more than just like they made money for themselves or they got famous. They want to do, they want to serve. They care a lot about the democracy. They care a lot about, about whatever thing they're doing inside the government, whatever specialty they're practicing. And they really just want to keep their heads down and do their work. And the idea that whenever they look up, they're seeing a more and more hostile gaze, like, like it's just so it's, it's like, it's like we have, we're the best of them are the best among us. And if you treat them with this kind of cynicism, you're driving out something that's just essential to the society. It's like, like, like, why should I bother? You, we, you know, we're gonna become grease. You, why should I bother like throwing my weight into something that's gonna help the collective? If I'm gonna be punished for it, it's uh, right. Like you're, you know, doing, doing work that might make more in the private sector or with the skills and talent that could get a, a, a much more high paying job, but instead choosing to do this, maybe one of the perks is yeah, there's somebody that helps you with the travel so that you can, right. There are, there are, there are advantages to working for the government that come with like some prestige and some respect, if not money, especially when the, the, the rounding error that is NIST, the rounding error that is the US Institute of peace compared to like what, when, when people talk about where our tax dollars goes, right. It's, it's interest Pentagon, uh, healthcare and social security. Can we talk about this for a minute? Cuz it is interesting to me. It's interesting to me what the difference between what Doge and the Trump administration this time around said they were doing and what they are doing, because what they said they were doing in the very beginning was we're coming to cut the, the cut, the deficit, right? Elon Musk said, we're gonna cut $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion deficit, but, but then he ignores interest payments on the debt, military and entitlements, which is about 75% of the budget. So it's mathematically impossible to cut $2 trillion out of this last little slice he's attacking. What he's attacking is a nonpartisan civil service. It does lots of other things, lot and, and, um, and then doing it in a kind of very haphazard way, cutting things, willy nilly firing people, willy nilly, not, not really for cause just because fire, whoever you can kind of thing. And so clearly he's, this is not a stupid person. Clearly the way he went about it was not going to achieve what he said he wanted to achieve. So the, so either, either he is a stupid person. He just really didn't know. And he was like an, uh, attention star drug addled attempt to do something. And he didn't, he wasn't thinking about it or he was actually trying to do something else. And that's the, the, and what is the, something else then? Like, what did they actually assume for a minute they got what they were after as opposed to it was one giant failure. And, and I think that what they have done is so, uh, is they've traumatized the workforce, the government workforce. They have eliminated a lot of the checks on presidential power, um, firing inspectors, general, you know, the, the, the referees are all gone. Um, also culturally shifting what is acceptable for president to do. It's sort of like, if we can do that, we've established, we can do this so we can do anything. And, um, that they've created with what it really is where the preconditions for a big power grab, that was what it was. That's. And, um, I'm not sure they were smart enough to think that way, but that is, but it's possible. That's just what this was. Um, and, and all the noise about, we're gonna eliminate waste, fraud and abuse w it, it, it were, that was just noise that actually didn't even, it didn't never thought they were gonna do that in the first place. Pod Save America is brought to you by trees.com. 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I do think a little bit is this is looking for your keys where the lights are shining. You know, they can, this is where they can make trouble, right? It's actually very difficult. Trump has, at times he's talked about cutting entitlements. At times he said he won't, uh, there's obviously not a lot of good politics in the Paul Ryan style of entitlement reform. Right. Uh, he's made all kinds of claims about cutting taxes, which he's done right. And about cutting the debt, which he has, of course not done. By the way, you know, much to get debt has grown in his first two years, three and a half trillion dollars. Of course. And by the way, any big gains you would have potentially gotten, right? Like there's, there's, there's some debate as to where there is going to be legitimate savings from Doge legitimate, meaning like actual long-term reductions in what they're spending, which is going to be dwarfed by not just payouts to the people that were fired in the first year, fine, that's one year. The IRS has been gutted. We're not able to do the auditing. And by the way, people say, oh, well, this is the amount that was coming in on audits and that's gone down. What about all the people that are taking a flyer on a risky tax scheme because they're pretty sure they're not going to get caught? That's money, it's hard to measure what that cost is. So I want to talk about- It does get measured. I mean, when they came in, it was already like $600 billion. It's not insignificant, right? So you're right, it's just going to grow. All I mean by that, so what I'm saying is there's the actual amount coming in because of audits and that's going down. But then there's the kind of amorphous number of how many people are just paying less in tax, right? And they can take an estimate of that, but we'll never fully know exactly how much has been lost because somewhere there's a person who's like, I don't think anybody's going to read this thing. Here's another tax loss. It's an interesting one. So one of the things they did, and it was a sin, is DHS, ICE, asked the IRS for the tax returns of undocumented workers. There's a separate file of about 7 million people, and it's got the best information on their most recent home address. It's supposed to be sacred and private. It's supposed to be as private as citizens' tax data. We've been telling that population for 30 years that file your taxes and it will help. If you decide you want to become a citizen one day, and no one will ever use any of this information against you, it's generated hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes that people have paid. We now know that they actually took this data and went and used it to grab people in their homes. If you're an undocumented worker, what are the chances that you're going to pay taxes now? You know, it's just, it creates a climate of such mistrust. It's so poisonous. And once the mistrust is gone, it's so poisonous. And once the mistrust starts, I mean, I keep thinking of Greece. It's like the Greeks don't pay their taxes. That once you start to lose the sense of the collective purpose, it's amazing how quickly it can unravel. Why should I pay my taxes? Yes, it is. Nobody else is paying their taxes. It's the going from a high trust to a low trust society, right? And that's his MO. It's so Trump that when I think about, I mean, Trump is not a huge part of this book, but he's hovering in the background. He's like this gas everywhere. And when I think about how he, like, if you're going to try to kind of predict what he's going to do, he's going to find where there's trust and try to destroy it. And he might not think quite this way, but his blizzard brain operates this way. He knows at some deep level that if he doesn't do well in a high trust environment because he's so untrustworthy, right? So if there are eight of us in a room and we all trust each other, we'll quickly realize that this is the guy, this guy's just lying all the time, and we won't want to deal with him. If he can somehow get us all to miss trust each other as much as we mistrust him, he's on a level playing field and he's ruthless in his ability to operate in an untrustworthy way. He has an advantage. So he's, he's sort of like instinctively hostile to places where there's trust. And you know, what's odd is people, if you said to people, like, do you trust the government? They'll say, oh, no, I don't trust the government. People trust the government every which way still in their, in their, in their revealed behavior. They drink the water, they eat the food, they hold the dollar, they invest in treasury bonds. There's that people still basically, trust the government, even if they say they don't. And they act as if they do. He's coming for the trust. And, and it's, and you, you feel it, you feel it right through the book. Like you feel it. Every section has that feel like, oh, he's just undermined some, something I just, I used to just take for granted. I used to just take for granted that my tax return wouldn't be weaponized against me. Yeah. There's the, there's a, there's a, there's a name for this. Is there? There's a name for this idea that before, you eliminate a rule, even if you can't Chester and his fence. Yes. Chester and his fence. Are you impressed? I'm very, that was crazy. I am impressed. But basically explain Chester and his fence. The Chester defense idea is that I think it's GK Chesterton. It was in response to some numb nut, probably doge like movement inside the British government. But if someone comes in and tears down a fence and the fence actually served a purpose and Chester and said, it's okay to come down and tear down the fence, but before you can tear down the fence, you need to know why the fence was put there in the first place. Yes. Then you can tear it down. Because even if you can't tell why it's there, even if it's not blocking anything today, there was a reason this fence was built. And it may still be, have a purpose. Right. And so why is it that we have a rule where you can file your taxes, even if your income is from breaking the law? It's because we want the revenue. Yes. And we want people to file their taxes and pay taxes, even on illicit gains. Yes. And by protecting that, that brings in more revenue. There's a function to it. There's a value to it. Yes. And when you, when you play with those fundamental things without enough understanding or care, you're not going to be able to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. You do real damage. And that is what they do over and over and over again, either by ignorance or ideology. They don't care what the rule is. They don't trust that the rule was made in good purpose. And so they just eliminate it. And then we live downstream of those consequences. When you see a story like there's a lettuce contaminated by cyclospora, for example, are you just at the point where you just assume that that is because of the effect of Donald Trump? Or do you think that, that, that, that underneath a lot of these signals, these acute examples, a lot of the functions are still working and shit just happens to lettuce and otherwise some combination, I wouldn't blame him for everything. In that case, I think you can trace it back to the reduction in the number of inspectors of the FDA inspectors. And I do, I got to say, when I was, I was on a casting search for this book, it was very easy to cast it. I had a choice for each section. But this was the public safety section. And Alex Maranghetti is the fire, my fire science guy ends up being the character. But while I, I was roaming the government looking for who I might write about. One of the people I did interview was the head of the, the former head of the FDA food safety division. And he said bad stuff. This is before the, the, the lettuce and the cyclospora, but he said, look, this is bad stuff is coming. I can tell you that they're doing it in a way that is just not, it's just not going to work as well. And a lot of good people are being run out. So it's not, there is a connection. Of course, it's dumb. I mean, you know, that I, the book has a frame and the frame is the government does. We all basically agree with the possible, a handful of people who've read too much of Ayn Rand. We all agree that there's some things the government needs to do because the private sector won't. The private sector won't make long-term investments in science, in scientific research, research that won't pay off for a very long time. The private sector just doesn't do that. Probably won't generate a useful military. That's better for the government to do that. The private sector won't actually invent a new fire science to protect us from wildland urban interface fires. So there are these things that, that, that the private sector won't do. You can kind of carve these things up into these buckets, like the things that, like there is a public safety bucket. There is a, there's a, the science bucket. There is the data collection bucket there. You know, the private sector won't do the census. It won't, it, it won't collect climate data. It won't, there's all kinds of stuff like that. And I, what, what interested me was to wander through the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, and ask how, when you turn the executive branch from what it was to what it is now, from this nonpartisan sort of task oriented thing into a loyalist operation serving the interests of Donald Trump, how does it affect the different functions? And it's a little different in each case. It's not all one story. It's, it's, and, and so that's, that was, that's the frame of the book. So my question is, do you think that's a dumb frame or you think it's an interesting frame? Do you think that way about it? So I think it's a, an accurate frame for describing what you describe in the book. I guess what I was thinking about, so there's this moment where this guy, Tim Curry, he's at the office of personnel management. He's liked by everybody. It seems management, like trusted, trusted, trusted unions like him. He actually has some, you know, every administration thinks for some reason he's secretly on their side, right? Which is an incredible talent for somebody at the, at the, at the intersection of political appointees and career appointees. Yes. An important intersection. And as you know, you, you say this in the book that, that he sees project 25, 2025. And one of the things that project 2025 talks about in between some ridiculous ideological bullshit around the deep state is, Hey, the civil service is rated as being 99% effective and only 0.1% performing poorly. Right. Come on. Yeah. That's absurd. It there are too many bureaucratic hurdles to giving people good feedback. Too many managers are not holding standards. Yes. And that's something this guy agrees with. Yes. And it's true. It is true. And yet the hard work of addressing that problem is not something the administration's interested in. And so when he's in, he's in this job and he doesn't get the, when, when, who comes knocking on his door, it's not the authors of project 2025. It's a bunch of fucking doge twerps who seem to have absolutely no idea what anyone at this place does, but they're sure it's unimportant or if, or at, at best it's destructive. Yeah. And it's, and the way they go about cutting the workforce is interesting. They just told cut it how you can cut it. And they don't address the basic problem, which is, it has gotten hard. It is too hard to fire people. It's too hard to hire people. They do need protections. You, if you're going to have a nonpartisan workforce, they do need some protections because you can't have the Republican coming in and firing on the Democrats and the Democrat coming in and firing all the Republicans. And the truth about the workforce is that, I mean, most of them are not, they're not living their policy. They're not living their in their job, the politics is like, that's not a part of it. But instead, the Doge people go from place to place and they figure out pretty quickly that while it's very hard to fire someone with civil service protections, it's not at all hard to fire people who are the so-called probationary workers. And that's people who have been in the job for like two years or 18 months for a short time. So it's a pool of people and it's quite a large pool of people who have only been around for a couple of years. Now, who are those people? They're the young people. This is exactly who you don't want to fire. And they're people who have been brought in because there's some immediate problem. They have some special skill that is of the moment. They fire these people. Now, it's actually against the law what they did because you're supposed to only fire these people for cause. But what they did is they went from place to place and said, you're all fired for cause, which was demoralizing to talk about taking a thousand idealists and turn them into cynics. If you're like this young person who wanted to work in government because you wanted to give back or you wanted to help or you had some skill that would benefit the society and you're doing well and you get told, you're being fired for cause, I mean, it's offensive. But they did that. He started – Tim Curry watched that and he realized I can't – my job is to adjudicate fairly the disputes between the political – and it's a naturally fractious sort of environment. That border between the political people who come in to run it and the permanent civil service. And by the way, like attention that is irresolvable. It is a real – the spoil system where they could come in and fire everybody didn't work. They create the civil service in response to that. It has problems. There's no perfect answer for how to staff a government that is run by political people but ultimately has to provide continuity. It is a deep challenge. And he just – but he realized what I loved about Tim Curry is that he seemed to be able to weather any political change. Like Trump won, didn't faze him at all. The Trump people thought he was just great. And that this thing is so different. He realizes that his job is to ensure that the tensions don't escalate, resolve disputes before they get there. And that he doesn't get really ugly. To preserve this sense of fairness. And it's his whole life. He doesn't have a family. He doesn't have a cat. He works 100 hours a week. Everybody trusts him. He has a physical response. He starts – his heart rate goes up. His blood pressure goes up. He actually thinks, I physically don't survive in this environment. He could have survived any other environment. And I thought it was just – it's a canary in the mine shaft, right? And he doesn't sign off. He refuses to sign off on firing. Like 7,000 people for cause, right? That's fundamentally – And I think the thing – weirdly the thing that drove him over the edge was when Elon Musk or the Doge people sent out that email to the two million person workforce saying, list the five things that you did last week that were useful. Which sounds like – I guess if you work in a private company, you think, oh, why are they upset about that? Like we get that kind of thing in the private sector all the time. I would say if you got that in the private sector, that is so stupid. I just – that is so insulting and stupid and trying to solve – like if you believe that you're at an organization where no one is doing anything and everyone is lying to you and the managers aren't managing and the staff isn't working and no one is telling you the truth, that your only solution is to ask every single person what they did last week, you're so far gone from like actually being able to solve a problem. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Uh-huh, Mar. Life spectacular. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East. Do you not have the internet? Put it on the bottle. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. So if you haven't tried Kewpie yet, find the bottle with the red cap and see what everyone is talking about. You'll understand. I want to come back to this idea of private sector versus public sector because it's like that's just laziness. At root, that is, I don't want to do the hard work of going through and meeting with managers, talking about individuals as individuals, what's working, what's not. I want to do it with a. A cleansing fire. And like that to me is what this problem was. They didn't even read the emails. Right. So I mean, and the amount of disruption, I mean, in the extreme case, what does a spy do when he gets that email? What does someone who is in the sensitive part of the IRS and looking at people's tax returns do? What do they do? There were stories, I mean, just to the IRS, like some huge number of people at the IRS don't have a computer. So the stories of in IRS center, you know, processing centers, like lines forming at the computer. And you have to wait three hours to answer this question. It was people took it seriously. They were told to take it seriously, except in a couple of places where Trump's appointees said, don't answer. Like, I think maybe the Pentagon did that. But but but it's it's yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's insulting. And but Tim, you know, he knew the whole workforce and he knew just how how much trouble that was going to cause, how counterproductive it was. And he's the person who they should have gone to before they. Send it out. He would save them the trouble. You can imagine a completely different version of Doge where there's a team and over a few weeks they go and they meet with department heads and they get, you know, they go department by department. Yep. And they say, hey, like, you know, you your last report said that your workforce is ninety nine point nine percent effective. We think that's probably a little bit of an exaggeration. Yeah, we we believe it is. And we're going to go through and do a 10 percent cut everywhere. And we really want we will do it. If you don't do it, I don't support doing it this way, but you would get like much better way to do it. You cut 10 percent or we'll cut 10 percent. Right. Right. And then we need and give us a report as to where and why. And we would love to know that and we'll go through it. But they don't do that. They do it in this hamfisted way. And just to come back to a question you asked at the beginning, which is how do we choose these people to run these departments? Right. That that we ask if they're in the Epstein files and you shouldn't be in the Epstein files. But are you interested in these topics? You have experience in these topics. You have management experience. And I actually you look at. Do you even want to be there? Right. Are you are really you coming because you'll get you a ticket to get to the White House and hang out with Donald Trump? Right. And and by the way, look, maybe, you know, look, there have been times when we've had I think of like the the the best and the brightest and these sort of business leaders that all knew each other from college and these these prep schools, these high and mighty guys coming in and sort of sort of with these arrogant perspectives on how the world should work. But they were at least civic minded and they were. Curious. Right. And they had a sense of of of purpose, right? Like, do you need the person that runs the Commerce Department to have a deep knowledge of weights and measures? No, you don't. And actually, you could just be a person that was an incredibly six. Howard Ludnick, he's a very successful business, right? Like, not him. He's a he's a he's a dipshit, but like somebody that had his expertise, but actually the kind of style of leadership I think the public associates with civic minded corporate leadership who said, you know, I don't know what you do here. But I'm a great manager of people. I want to understand it. I want to help you guys do your job better, right? Like, that is not inconceivable. No, but but instead, Howard Ludnick has a butler who brings him fancy meals into secure compartmentalized information facilities. I mean, that's extraordinary. Yeah, you're right. Like, what? What? Yeah, no, what? That's this is and we're not even but but beyond that, why don't why why don't we know this already? Like, why? Why is this just assume tolerated? What it's it's it's Thank you. It's demoralizing for the people who put their lives – throw their lives into the business of, I don't know, predicting the weather or figuring out what a pound is or stopping wildfires from devouring us. To have someone – Or protecting data at the IRS. Or protecting data at the IRS. To have someone on top who is so dismissive of the function that they are supposed to be managing. I mean it's just – you wouldn't – look, you would not run – just for starters, this is a big subject. But you wouldn't run any private sector organization the way we run the government. You wouldn't change bosses every 18 months. You wouldn't do it, right? You wouldn't have ignoramuses being brought in to run places every 18 months. You wouldn't change the budget every year. You would – the amount of instability that they already deal with is – it's such a problem. It's such a hard thing to run. And there are reasons it is the way it is. To add on to this, we've just thrown out the window any standards for who runs the places. It's not going to function. Eventually, it's just going to cease to function. So this is – I'm coming back to your question about sort of the framing of the book. What I was thinking about is – I remember reading Mancur Olson, and I will maybe get it a bit wrong because I read it a very long time ago. The rise and decline of nations and about what happens over time as institutions build up interests. But bureaucracies, guilds, rules that get layered and layered and layered and layered and layered. And that after World War II, the reason Germany can come back so quickly and the reason Japan can come back so quickly is they got to start again, right? Now, there are problems with this, and there are ways in which this is way too simple, obviously. But at the end of the book, you talk about somebody that was at Doge who comes back and decides to actually work at the IRS. In part because he seemed to have learned something about the government and what was needed inside the government. And he had tools that would be useful. He wanted – he's got the spirit, right? He wants to fix the tax system. Or not the system. He wants to – what bothered him – his name is Sahil Lavingia. What bothered him – he's a technologist. What bothered the hell out of him, he had to get paper from the IRS. Why can't I do it all on an app? He wanted to build an app. And he's done it. He's come back, and he's done it. But it's the story of how hard it was for him to do. Little things is also the story of government. The spirit still exists. The big problems still exist. If what you were – I thought where you were going with Manker Olson was have we hit a point where we can just rebuild it because it's been – it's effectively been destroyed. Well, this is what I want to – this is the – this is what I did want to talk about because he's now – this guy who was at Doge is now at the IRS. A lot of empty desks. He's alone. He's alone. And I'm wondering if you're seeing anyone, any Democrats, any policymakers, anyone who's thinking that this is now an opportunity. I keep waiting for this. It seemed to be a hole in the political marketplace for someone to talk about government as opposed to talking about Trump. I just don't – maybe it's just a boring subject. Maybe it's that people just don't care. I just – but I don't believe that. The books I've done have way outperformed what anybody expected. There seems to be an appetite for this stuff. I keep waiting for the candidate to arise who says we're going to rethink how we govern ourselves because a lot of it makes no sense. And Trump is a symptom of a lot of big problems. That if everything was working just beautifully, Doge would never have been allowed to come in and trash it. They're allowed to come in and trash it because people have a sense that some of this isn't working. Maybe they can fix it and it's vague enough. Or they take it for granted. But so I – it does feel to me like there is a vacuum. There is a vacuum in our politics and that there's a hole there waiting for someone to walk into it, a role that's waiting to be played. And it is a person who – it's an explainer and a builder role. Explain and rebuild this thing. And that I don't think it's that hard to interest people in it. This is where I also was just thinking about the way Democrats talk about the government and the way Trump talks about the government. There was a piece the other day. There was a piece the other day talking about how Trump wields executive power and with all the downsides in how he does it. But we haven't had a president in our lifetimes that has been so aggressive at making decisions from the White House to great ill effect, right? But when I – I talked to Barry Diller, longtime media – ran Paramount, ran Fox, kind of created this company. And he talks a lot in his book about how he'd be in these meetings with people. That would give him all the research data, what people want to see on television, right? And of course that data is always wrong. It just gives you a frame by which you can make decisions. But of course what matters, is it good? Is there a great writer? Do you love it? Does my instinct tells me something, right? And I think sometimes Democrats valiantly believe in making data-driven decisions, right? But then you end up with a bureaucracy that's 99.9% effective. And then Trump comes in and has no respect for past. And no respect for numbers. And no respect for facts, right? But knows how to wield power. He knows how to tell a story. And has an instinct, right? An instinct that defies the polls and often shocks Democrats by being effective, right? And I'm like looking for – when I'm reading what you're – I'm like where is the person that can understand power, right? And understand where you should and should not be making evidence-based decisions but rather decisions based on philosophy or theory, right? But actually respects and cares about the civic purpose of our government. And that to me is the opening that I see. Right. From the very beginning in writing about Trump's approach to government, I've had this feeling that we're in this narrative war. That he has a story and the other side doesn't have a story. And that what the purpose of blockers, the purpose of this is to show you a story that's a true story that is a constructive story. And it's that surfacing these narratives is actually – It isn't just entertainment. It's kind of fun to read about kind of thing. But it's that it is actually absolutely essential to the preservation of the democracy. That you need to have the narrative. And we've sort of lost the narrative. Yeah. And I do think it's about who can appreciate this – who sees what's been happening with the government. Sees the value of what people are doing at the IRS and NIST and at the Office of Personnel Management. But actually understands that the – That we're – without just a platitude of we're not going back or we're going to build something better than before. But actually is going to have the people that are eager and excited for the project of building a functional, working, faster, better government than what we can. Right. And that's the conversation that I think is missing. Yeah. Michael Lewis, thank you so much for your time. The book is called "Blockers." It's – this is out Sunday. You can pre-order it now. It's out on Tuesday. It's really worth your time. Thank you for your time. And we'll talk to you next time. Thanks, Jon. Thank you to Michael Lewis. Thank you to Michael Lewis for joining us. Thank you for listening. And we will be back in your feeds with a brand-new episode on Tuesday. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Michael Goldsmith with Ree Chirlan, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. 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