DOGE Was Doomed From The Start. Author Michael Lewis Explains Why

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Well, I mean, some of the books, I kind of wrote and kind of didn't like anthologies for new tours for them. So it's not. But I bet I've done, like it has a paperback and there's a hardback, they're European tours that Japanese do. Wow. So it's probably if you count them all up 50, I mean, 40, 40 in this part of the job. It's like roughly 20 books. Movies come out. And then you go tours? New year anniversaries come out. Then you do the 10 year anniversary tour for each movie? That hasn't happened. Well, we did the big short. Was that the 10 year? That was the book, though. That was the rerelease the book as a, it wasn't the 10 year anniversary book. It was the new audiobook and it was the new podcast. It was the 15th anniversary. 15th anniversary. Right. But what's happened is, we have time to chat. They'll tell us. What's happened is the audio rights are coming back to me for all the books and they used to be not worth anything. And now they're huge. And also, a lot of times I didn't read them and I never reread the books. It's really fun to go back and I just did the new new thing, which is an internet bubble book. Yeah. Like I did a live spoken. I thought, oh, this isn't very good. Like it needs work. I did a new thing. I went, oh my God. That guy learned stuff. Wow. It's better. It's really fun. And it speaks so directly to the eye, bubble, that will come out in April and there'll be a big podcast on the side of it. I'll probably come through here. Yeah. So those, but there's all of a sudden, the audio rights now for a book that's 20 years old and not selling are worth more than the audio rights were worth back then by a lot. So. I mean, thank goodness. Why? Like, we had the technology for audiobooks. People were driving. No, that's what's happened. The phone has just changed everything. Good morning on this Veterans Day where we honor all military veterans who served in the United States armed forces. The office is close today. So instead of a standard show, we're bringing you an interview with Michael Lewis, the best selling author who wrote big short money ball and other blockbuster business books turned movies. Lewis is out with a new book on Doge called blockers and he stopped by the studio to talk about what Elon Musk actually found when he went digging in DC and why his attempt to root out waste was doomed from the start. It's the era that turned Doge from an internet meme about cute dogs into one of the most disruptive forces DC has ever seen and Michael Lewis got a front row seat to all of it. But before we get into our chat with Michael, a word from our sponsor runway, Neil, you know how variants are the spice of life? Do you mean variety? No, because runway ads makes new creative variants for your best ads, publishes the ones you approved to met a TikTok in Google and tells you which ones worked to inform what to ship next. Their creative suite gives anyone the power to generate, edit and finish video images and audio for campaigns, including social and product content. So whether you're solo or part of a team of 500, you can storyboard, create lookbooks, re-style product shots, create cinematic videos, stage rooms and more. Now that's some good variety right there. Sign up for free at runway.com/morningbrew and get 25% off paid plans with the code Morning Brew. Now, here's Michael, Michael, good to have you back on the pod. Well, it's a surprise you did have me back, but that's nice of you. Your top 10 guests all time. All right. First question, you wrote a book about Doge. Could Doge have worked the people involved led more with curiosity than with contempt? That is such a good question. No, that is such a good question. That's why he's back. No, no. That's such a good question because it's true. It is true. That it could have worked because in the moment they had enormous power. They were able to do whatever they wanted to do. They were able to break the law. They could do whatever they wanted to do. If they gone in in a different spirit, like you're not all idiots, you're not all crooks and we actually know some things that might help. We could like fix the computers and spend some time understanding what it was that needed to be fixed. They could have been hugely helpful. That kind of thing could be hugely helpful in that moment and in particular, it's a tech. These stats are going to be slightly off but broadly right. The last I saw in information technology in the United States government, which is a vast enterprise, something like 60 percent of the employees are 50 or over and something like 8 percent are 30 or younger, which means the tech people in the government don't know to use their own phones. There's such a need for this infusion of young tech talent and that the nicest thing you could say about Doge's is there was young tech talent there and that was just a waste. It was just such a waste. Yes. Doge's thing is generally true that contempt doesn't get you very far and that curiosity gets you to the finish line finishing first. It's a way of going through life. Anything you do would be better if you led with curiosity instead of contempt. So do you think it was the wrong leader and Elon Musk bringing that sort of attitude? But if it was somebody else leading the charge, then they might have been more successful. If it could have been Elon Musk, but Elon Musk was a different person, like a behave. Elon Musk skills. If you had his status, the status was important. I mean, one of the reasons I could do whatever they wanted is the richest man in the world who gave all this money to Donald Trump was in charge and so we had this great latitude. So Musk was in a way the right person, but but Musk himself, I don't know what to say about Elon Musk here because he's obviously not stupid, like he's not a fool. But the things he said he wanted to do or was going to do weren't possible given how he went about doing it. It was never going to work. It was never going to cut $2 trillion out of the federal deficit if all he looked at was everything but military entitlements and interest payments on the debt because that's only 20% of the budget. So you couldn't get there with the math and you couldn't get there actually practically unless you involved Congress because Congress decides the expenditure and he right away said we're not going to even talk to Congress. So I don't, my view is he came into such bad faith. He was trying to do something different from what he said he was doing and that doomed the hopefulness of the enterprise. It's a shame. It's like such a waste because it is true the government needs refurbishing and it needs a rethinking about how the systems work. You couldn't this company. If I said to you, I said to you, all right, morning brew, right? From now on, you're going to have a different boss every 18 months and they're not going to come in knowing zero about the business and you know they're going to be gone in 18 months. You're going to have a different budget every year and you don't know what it is. That your employees are going to be shot upon by everybody outside. They're going to be, everybody can say whatever they want about your employees and the employees can't defend themselves in any way or tell their own story. You try running that business like nobody would want to be here and that's the government right now. So that sort of needs to be addressed. It's interesting. We started talking about Elon Musk, this conversation about Doge, but when you're writing the book, you could have slapped his face on the cover and said how Elon Musk's mission to reform the government failed. But you went in a different direction when telling the story. You focused on individual government employees and told their stories like, why did you make that choice and do you think it led to a more effective book? It was because the way I framed it, with books for me, it starts with the frame like what is this about and what I thought when I looked at it, it wasn't Doge was a thing that happened. It was a thing that was part of a bigger thing. The bigger thing was the radical seizure of power by the Trump administration. What was happening was that the two million persons civilian workforce who take an oath not to a president but to the Constitution, they're serving us, serving the law, that was being turned. There's an attempt right now to turn that into essentially the personal army of whoever happens to be president, serving the narrow interests of that person. That seemed to me to be the big story. The question was, what did it mean for the different jobs people do in government and the people who do them? All of a sudden the incentive system's just changed. Government's going to function differently. I know this sounds boring but this is how I started. All my books sound boring when I'm thinking of them out loud, but it was like, okay, what does the government do that the private sector won't do? Like safety, like long-term scientific investment, collecting data. And then? Oh, who are the people who do this? And oh, they're being run out because they won't do it the way they want to do it now. So that's how it was framing the thing. And Doge was important because Doge was the first assault. It was sort of like the artillery in the beginning of this war to change this whole institute, but it wasn't the end. It was like one, and it wasn't the only thing. There were other things coming in on the civil servants. And so it seemed to me that the point of view that you wanted to inhabit in this transformation of the environment was the point of view of basically the species who were going extinct and that you could describe what we got now or what we're headed towards by what no longer can exist, what the environment won't tolerate. So that's the idea of the book. Presumably, in talking to these people, you found some people with some deep esoteric knowledge that are making the government run that you don't necessarily see. So I just want to hear some stories of maybe to make a comparison to another one of your books, like the Kevin Euclis of the government, who is deeply un-saxied, but he's being very effective in supporting a very important part of like our bureaucratic infrastructure. Do you have a Kevin Euclis of the government? The one that's easiest to explain here, and simply, Kathleen Walters was the chief privacy officer of the IRS, like, what is that? That is the person who sits between your tax returns and a politician and a president who wants to weaponize them and use them against you. And the privacy laws, you think about like the government collects all this data. Most of it, it wants to collect and give it to us, like climate data or economic data, the stuff that we can use to make decisions. But some of it is extremely sensitive, our health data, our tax data, and can be used as a weapon against us. And that data has got really strict laws about who can and can't look at it. So that if an IRS employee, I don't know, looks at Beyonce's tax returns just because they're curious about the Beyonce's tax returns, they not only get fired on the spot, there's a fair chance they're going to end up in jail for a year. So it's like, it's that kind of serious. This job was to enforce those laws. She gets run out because, and that is important, it's like, who's going to file their tax returns if they think the tax returns, this is going to be used again, and if you don't have taxes, you don't have a country. So she got asked right after the inauguration to hand over a database of seven million tax returns of the tax returns of undocumented workers. Now I didn't even know that there was such a thing as a way for undocumented workers to file taxes. They don't have social security numbers, so they have this other thing called an ITIN. It's existed since the '90s. The government has told that population that your data will be treated as sacredly as citizens data. They've paid more than $100 billion of taxes in that time. What those tax returns contain is the most recent home address of undocumented workers. And ICE was having trouble getting everybody out, and they wanted these tax returns. And she loses her job because she refuses to hand them over. They got handed over, and ICE is going to doors now, and ripping people out of them because they pay their taxes. I mean, that's an example. Deal, as much as I love fall, the sun's rising way later than I'd like. Truly, hard not to think about just getting back in bed. Now that sounds nice. How do you stay awake? Too much coffee. Do? Ultra pouches. They're plant-powered pouches with clinically proven new tropics and adaptogens, designed to sharpen your mind and lift your energy, no caffeine, nicotine, or crash. Perfect, because I feel like crash coming on right now. I'll get you one as soon as we're done. New customers can use code MBD to get 15% off at takeultra.com. That's takeultra.com for 15% off with code MBD. Toby, say I want to invest in AI. Okay. I want to invest in AI. That's what the Global X Artificial Intelligence and Technology ETF, AIQ, is for. It gives investors a way to participate in the economic shift AI created with companies across the AI ecosystem from development to utilization all in one package. AIQ casts a wider net across software platforms, semiconductor designers, cloud infrastructure providers, and more. It tracks the INDXX Artificial Intelligence in big data index, which is positioned to give investors exposure to AI's evolution rather than just its headlines. To learn more, head to globalXETFs.com/funds/aiq, that's globalXETFs.com/funds/aiq. Neil, this is the moment I've been training for. A marathon? No, thanksgiving. I'm going to give it my all, but I need my body to be ready. Sounds like you can use water, boy. They have three different hydration formulas depending on what you've got going on. There's daily hydration, weaken recovery for those late nights, and morning after hydration and workout hydration. So however you're planning to dehydrate responsibly this holiday season, there's a water boy for that. Stock up for the holiday season, starting November 18th, shop water boy online on Amazon or Shopify for 20% off dehydrate responsibly. The government just fails to communicate these things to us, and I'm not saying we need to know that there's a cheap, like, privacy officer at the IRS, but the government does seem to have a communications problem with its sprawling bureaucracy. We know what Apple does, we know what Walmart does, but we don't know about this particular position. We don't know what something like the NIST does. Why is the government so bad at communications? It is amazing how bad the civil service is at telling a story. It's not allowed to, right? They're not allowed to spend money advertising themselves, and in addition, the recent experience of people who work in government is, if you draw public scrutiny, it's usually a bad thing. You are hauled before Congress, you become the scapegoat of some problem. There is, in between the government and us, is a class of people, the people who ran for junior class president in your high school, right? That person. You remember that person? Like, they're all annoyingly always wanting to be president. They end up being politicians, and they want attention, and they get it, and they go with the cameras on them. They tend to use both parties, the Republicans will worse about it, but still both parties tend to use, like, take credit for the things the civil service does, and tend to blame the civil service if something goes wrong. There's a kind of a built-in mechanism for distorting, in a bad way, permanent government employees. Let's tell NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology, starts as the bureau of standards in like 1902, around then, because, and this is wild, what if you start thinking about all the things the government doesn't have, what would be, where would be without it? In 1902, there's a problem, no one knows what an inch is, no one knows what a foot is, no one knows what a minute is, no one knows what a pound is, there's no agreement. Like, they're in, in, in, in the New York real estate, they're like eight different measures of a foot, like, that's screwing up the maps, and, and, and people go to stores to buy a pound of butter. The government does a little like survey of the country, they're like three thousand different measures of a pound, and they're all in the favor of the storekeeper. So, so this place is created to say, this is the, the standard of what a foot is, or what it, and this, this thing is all over your life. If you go and pump gas at a gas station, how do you know you're getting a gallon? They NIST creates the flow meter that measures precisely a gallon, and the states take the flow meter, and they, and they regulate the pumps, and say, you got to use this thing. They're, everything you touch in our society has gotten NIST is kind of behind it, and the people who work at NIST are wildly interesting, like, the kind of person who figures out how to improve the measure of a second is a cool person. It's a tinkerer of science type. In the middle of my book is a guy who invented a fire science at NIST, NIST, you got into fire in 19, you stopped me if I'm boring you, but this is wild. There was something called the Great Baltimore Fire in 1904, right after NIST is, Bureau of Standards is created. The reason it's the Great Baltimore Fire is a fire starts in a warehouse. All these fire trucks come from surrounding areas, and their, their hoses, the threads don't fit the fire hydrants in Baltimore, and so everything goes up. So the government gets involved, and says we've got to create standards for hoses and fire hydrants, so this doesn't happen again. Get's him into fire. My character in the middle of book is a guy named Alex Maren-Gedi's. He's the guy who figured out how the World Trade Center collapsed in 9/11, that he figured out how the fire, he rebuilt sections of the, with cabinets and everything, and lit it on fire, and showed how hot it got, and how the beams were exposed, and how, in fact, there was a mechanism for the fire to bring the towers down. He is obsessed, from the time he's in college, with the fact there's no science for, to try to understand wild land, urban, interface fires. The fires we all talk about, campfire, paradise, they want, they're going to be coming to these coast, but, you know, fires that come out of the wilderness and, and sweep over communities. And he's, he, he builds over two decades, like you can go read his stuff, how fire moves differently, and how you need to build your community if you don't want to be overrun by a fire. And it's, it's absolutely ribbing stuff. You see the world differently when you're with him. You see, you're walking in a suburb and he goes, you know, this isn't not a city. This is actually Wildland, or urban, the woody, they call it. And I'm going to show you, when the fire comes, how it's going to burn down that house. It'll start at that house. And there's a wooden fence that runs the length of the neighborhood. That fence is the most dangerous thing in this neighborhood. That kind of thing. So, it sounds a good dog, great. It's a great time to be walking around with the guys like, so I see all how it all looks. It's an immigrant. He came from Greece. And it's a wild story. The science wouldn't exist without him. He's just been basically put out of business because his life was made too hard by the Trump administration. But more generally, we have made it hard for him to do his job for a long time. And you know, that's, you read that story. Nobody, it's 20,000 words in the book. The books just come out. But my like editors and stuff like, where the draws were in the full, like, I didn't know about this. This is incredible. I could find a thousand people like him in the government. They've got some obsession, some body of knowledge they've created, some problem they're attacking. And they're doing it under resourced, unappreciated stories untold. And when you muck about with the government, you're mucking about with them. And they're kind of the best among us that he could be making fortune in the private sector. He's a genius. He just knows that like, if I solve this problem, I'm going to save thousands of lives and billions of dollars. I mean, let's go to fantasy land for a second here. If you allow me, if Elon Musk had called you before he attempted doge and said, Michael, give me three things to understand about the government before I go in here. What would you tell him? So people won't listen to advice. So I, and he, I can't imagine him listening to advice is fancy land. So, and so no, but what I would have given, I would have given him three people. I'd have given him, I'd have given him an Alex Marin Gedi's kind of character. I wrote, they've written about some of them before. So he could understand the nature of the person who he was attempting to reform. I would have given him Tim Curry, who's the, at the office of the management of the budget, who's in this book, who he touched. He was sort of the referee between the political people and the entire civil service who understood like where the problems were. Like it is true that it's too hard to fire the civil servants. It's also true that most of them don't deserve to be fired. So I would, he would have explained how you might go about doing this in a more intelligent way. And I would give him, I would have given him the number probably of like Jamie Raskin, a congressman who's really interested in government reform, where he could have worked with Congress. So you get this stuff permanently in law. I would do that kind of thing. If I give him advice, if I give him one piece of advice, I mean, I've not spent all this time wandering around the government. I said, let me just come in there. And just before you do something, let's just talk about it. I could stop you from doing a lot of stupid stuff. Well, what if you were Elon Musk and you were in charge with cutting 10, 20% of spending? Do you think you could do it more effectively than he can? Or do you think it needs to be done at all? I mean, I think a lot of people could do it more effectively. So it isn't me. And yes, it does need our budget. This is, it's not like a joke anymore that what's happened with the national debt. It's gone up three and a half trillion dollars in under Trump. We are facing a kind of possible doom loop where people will only lend us money at higher rates of interest and the rates of interest themselves become a huge deal to us because so much of the debt is deficit is paying off the debt. So it's got to be dealt with. And you got to go, you got to go to entitlements and you've got to go to the military. If you said, Michael, if you said instead, you got to go do a version of what Doge did, we're going to thin the federal workforce outside of the major buckets. The simple thing to do would have just gone would have found find people who really know the institutions and care about them like they care about the treasury or the agriculture department, whatever and say here, you tell me you know this place. You tell me how you do this. And then you sit in a room and you kind of walk with everybody and you walk through what this means. But they didn't as you say they didn't go at it with curiosity. They didn't go at it. We're going to learn about these places before we rip them up. It was like, we're going to blow it all up and then we're going to worry about it. In the process of writing this book, who would you rank higher and lower in status than your perceptions going in? Like, you must have learned a lot about this world. Who's stock rose and who's stock fell? Give me a list of who you mean. What kind of people you mean? Like Musk. I mean, Musk or the civil service or that. Oh, I see any of the characters you've encountered or any of the institutions you encountered. I'm just trying to think like what surprised you to the upside and what surprised you to the downside? Let's go within, within Doge. I thought less of the more I learned about what Musk did the less I thought of him. The more dishonest he felt. He was like lying all the time. And what was his odd because his friends say the first thing you need to know about Elon is he never lies. He believes everything he says. He couldn't possibly believe everything he was saying. And they were really damaging things. He was saying they were just not true. So like, it's hard for me to look at him with a straight face now. I can't believe he's the richest person in the world. So that's that's an obvious one and not obvious one. So this guy named Sam Corcus who is the chief information officer at he was in Doge. He's stuck. And he pissed off a lot of civil servants. He's like he would be there. People in my book who would take a dim view of him. I don't. I think I think he's a really he really cares about it. He's really interesting. He's he become he's become a bit of a public voice. So there are people in Doge who I have thought I thought I don't just paint them all with the same brush. They're different kinds of Doge people in the government. You know, it's hard it's hard to learn about what you learn when you go look at what they've done and not feel worse about Congress. Like they should be manning up. They should be stopping this. And the idea that Congressman who know very well because they fund the things what happens in the Department of Interior or whatever. And they see the damage that they aren't shouting about this. It's disturbing. The IRS. I mean, the IRS is in some ways it's it is a little messy that like the technology is from the 14th century. It's like it is shocking. But it works. You know, the problem is that it just basically works. It's you know, it's not efficient. My view of the IRS is like really I didn't have much of a view. But I now feel kind of more warmly about it because I've gotten to know some of the people in it. And they're so they're so disliked by everybody. Yeah. That they created a kind of we used to be like the way the Oakland Raiders were like everybody hated the Raiders. And so the Raiders were really like a tight team. And Raider fans were especially, you know, loud. The IRS a bit like that. It's like there's they have to bond together because they're so used to being hated from the outside. So that would be one who I thought I think probably more highly of than I thought going in. So you've been out here. If you could have people take one take away from blockers, what would it be? You know, we need to change the country. And it's not like a joke anymore. Like the and you can't do it with an uninformed citizen. That take some responsibility to know about the government and hold elected people's feet to the fire. If some elected person starts mowling off about the government in a general way, waste fraud abuse, all that say no, no, no, no, no, like speak specific. I would love it if in public forums when candidates are running. If someone just initially initially stood up and say, tell me name three people in the whole federal government and that you admire and tell me why you admire them. Have you taken the trouble to figure out you're going to be running this thing. If you're in Congress or you're in the White House, name, tell me, tell me about three people you've bothered to get to know who you approve of. And tell me their stories. I bet you get just a blank stare from many people running for office. It'd be fun if that was out there in the land. You're not allowed to have this job if you don't know anything. One of the chances blockers becomes a movie. Fifty-fifty. Really? Wow. I know it's shocking. Yeah. It's very similar to the big short structure. It requires it's this ensemble piece where these characters are all feeling the pieces of the elephant and you're getting the picture of the whole through the through that each one has a different kind of piece of the story. And an Adam McKay like genius could be challenged by it. And there's noise about it already. I mean, I kind of know who's might be interested. And I think it could be it's a really interesting challenge for a movie maker. The problem is right now half of like Hollywood won't touch a political thing that they just don't want to be anywhere near it. So finding the place for it is a little tricky. But finding the talent to do it isn't less so. Interesting. It's like this fall has been there's been a flood of movies about tech billionaires. I mean, we have artificial coming out about Sam Altman. There's I guess she's not a tech billionaire, but there's the Elizabeth Holmes documentary coming out. We have the social reckoning like there seems to be this movement around Hollywood. This antipathy toward billionaires and to skewer them. So they might want to take yours and make it the Elon Musk framing rather than the the bureaucrat framing. But pretty interesting that they everyone seems to be allowing to gang up on tech. But when it comes to politics, seems like it's a third rail. It's a third rail. It is a third rail. Lena Dunham has just written the most wonderful screenplay of going infinite by Sam Beckman, free book, and that has traction. That's the style. That's what they'll make that. Right. That's definitely make that. That's awesome. Well, Michael, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. It's so fun hearing the stories that you come up with. We could talk to you literally four hours and I can't wait for you know the next to come out. So, so we get you again. I'm just going to plug your book a little bit if that's okay with you. Blockers.fm. That's where you can access the audio version. Maybe if you're training for a marathon like Neil, toss it in the ears. Go listen to it. It sounds like a rip-roar and good time. So, Michael, thank you for, for jumping in the studio again. Thanks for having me.