Michael Lewis: Don't Bet Against the Country

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Borg Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. We'll get to our guest here in one second, a few programming notes. We got to say all happening. It's an October surprise. And our surprise for you is you can get the Borg Plus for cheaper. 30% off, go to theborg.com/surprise. You get to comment, I read the sub stack comments on the podcast. So, you know, if you have some complaints, it's like an open complaint box for you to share with me or compliment. I take those too. You get the secret podcast. JVL's New Zealand are the best in the business. It's sometimes pretty walled, so you always get that. It's worth, I just support the mission. Help us go out and find new audiences, get the message out to new people. So go ahead, join this October of the Borg.com/surprise. Just a news item, I guess. Can we call it that? Our "Demented and Depraved" president gave a speech yesterday in Nebraska. And, you know, on route and to and fro, that speech was bleeding on his social media site. No couple of things. I just wanted to flag. He was discussing, you know, kind of doing the weave, the pain that his war in Iran has caused people domestically. And he said something that raised some eyebrows in the speech last night. He said, "I want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And remember, with the war, it's just artificial. It took me a second to figure out what he's talking about there, but I think he's talking about gas prices being up. It's just artificial. So we'll repeat it with that in the context. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping the country safe. They can take a city, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. It's a very small price to pay, and it's going to be over with very soon. So our president's brain is so adult that it's a little bit hard to translate like whether he wants Iran to take out San Diego because it's a liberal city or something so he can rationalize further war or whether what he's trying to say is that these gas prices, you know, the high price at the pump, the high price at the grocery store, the economic pain that he inflicted on your family's at the war of choice as a small price to pay because otherwise, the Iranians might take out Los Angeles or San Diego. That's some more generous way to interpret it. I assume that's just what was trying to happen in his brain like the three little flies flying around, bzzz, bzzz, you know, inside the light bulb. But even if that generous interpretation is true, it's pretty strange. I mean, nobody thought that Iran was going to attack Los Angeles or San Diego. And they can't reach Los Angeles or San Diego with their missiles. If Iran was going to attack something in the West, it probably would have been Europe like Italy, they could maybe reach, I would assume that these coasts would be more concerned than the West coast. Just, and the whole thing is preposterous. And so what you see here is a man that has nothing, has no good arguments, has a broken brain and, you know, always drops to the lowest common denominator whether it'd be talking about this war or domestic issues. And, you know, on that front, it was interesting. There were some news items about both of the long shot candidates that Bill Christo and I picked yesterday. Neither of us saw any of this coming. You know, sometimes I get a little tip, a little insight info from a friend, you know, working on one of these campaigns that they're seeing some private polling. And I usually share everything that I get with you guys, but sometimes I get things that are private. That wasn't true yesterday. I just, I happened to Ben and Lexington and was interested in that district as a stretch goal. And, you know, Bill Christo will be in Bill Christo. Obviously, he goes straight to Dr. Annie Andrews and South Carolina as his long shot candidate. And in the subsequent hours after we taped, we saw some interesting news items. Number one, the D-Triple C, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, went in with their first ad in that Kentucky Six District. Zach Dembaugh. So I think there was a 166th most Republican district. So I mean, if the Democrats could win there, and they would have a majority that haven't seen in quite a long time in size. And so I think it's interesting that the Democrats, people that see the polling think that is also apply. Conversely to that, more interesting, more fun, more delicious, the Republicans put in five million. In the South Carolina center race, they are now not spending money on Georgia. They've given up on Georgia, and they are spending money on South Carolina. Again, if this was the polls were fake or whatever, this was a blue mirage, then we'll see what happens on election day, but the Republicans' internal polls are saying the same things the public polls are saying, if they feel like they got to spend money in South Carolina. So the Republicans are panicking, putting an injection of $5 million into South Carolina. There's some conversation that they need to give up on Texas to shore up Iowa and Kansas. And meanwhile, that information is trickling to the president because he posted on his social media feed calling Annie Andrews, Tranny Andrews. These guys have like two jokes left. It's like everything is a trans joke or the R word. It's like that's just all they have. You'd think that if you're gonna do insult comedy, you could at least keep it fresh. You know, Louis CK at least comes up with some new material. And you know, it's just Trump and Hanks, I thought the beat was about it, Tranny, Tranny. It's embarrassing. Tranny and people in Muslims, I guess, are the only people that politicians can just slur and attack with minimal blowback at this point, and it's gross. But I think we can simultaneously be outraged that we have a president that's stooped to this level and also see it for what it is, which is that these guys are in a world of hurt right now and they are grasping for anything. And if they feel like they need to do bigoted, prejudiced, insult comedy against the Democratic candidate for Senate and South Carolina, the numbers aren't good. The data's not looking good. Former Republican governor David Beasley I want to mention yesterday, he tweeted about the president's post saying this is abhorrent. Elections don't have to be about cruelty and lies. South Carolina deserves better. I agreed with all that for great sentences by former governor David Beasley Republican, South Carolina. And then the next sentence, I urge voters to look at the merits of each candidate and cast their vote accordingly. And I guess that's like a cheeky Southern way of kind of doing like, bless your heart. There are no merits to darling Graham, but yeah, it'd be nice if one of these guys would at least have the balls just to be like, I'm for Andy Andrews at this point. So hopefully we can see that from him or some of the other old time Republicans down there in South Carolina. I'll stick text in the people that endorse John Huntsman though it might be a good starting block for this for Andy Andrews. Anyway, that's what was happening yesterday in Nebraska and in the president's adult brain and we'll keep you posted on that. We've got another one of the stretch possibilities on tomorrow's show and I'm looking forward to that. All right, I'm sure we've all been there anytime. 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That's babel, b-a-b-b-e-l.com/bolwork for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions, BAPO. He is a graduate of Newman High School, a new Orleans author of many books. You might have heard a couple of them. The big short money ball, the blind side of the new book is called Blockers. Rebels in the Deep State, which is out today. It's Michael Lewis. What's up, man? Welcome back. - Thank you, Tim. Good to see you. - Good to see you. Last night was bad for my adopted city, your home city, the same. So it was the dome coming. It was the anniversary, 20-year anniversary of the reopening of the Super Dome, Thank you. year later after Katrina and the first game back for the Saints which they won in dramatic fashion. Last night they lost in non-dramatic fashion. So I reread your article called Waiting Towards Home from 2005 this morning when I was hoping maybe we could just start with a more fun memory of that time for you. A fun anecdote to kind of wash away, no pun attended the memories of the football game for last night. So you know I've never I've never really left New Orleans in the sense that like my whole family is still there. When I come back I stay in the bedroom that I've had since I was six years old. My parents are in the same house all that. My sister lives in my grandparents old house. It's very New Orleans. But when I came back I'll tell you one story. I have a vivid memory. I was working on what I thought was going to be the sequel to Moneyball. So I was in Round Rock, Texas, watching a minor league baseball game when the levees broke and my whole family had evacuated. My father at the time was chairman of the board of the auction hospital. And I called him because I knew they were letting just doctors in or con medical convoys. And I called him and I said could you get me in through a medical convoys. And he was said he said something like after all we've been through you're going to put us through this by going back in there. That's crazy. And I remember it's hard to believe but maybe it isn't that hard to believe. What was on the news suggested it was like it was like the most dangerous city in the world. It was the same like shoe store being robbed over and over again. And Fox was playing it on a scroll. And I just didn't really believe it. So he put me in touch with the guy the operational the CEO of Oxner who put me in touch with the doctor who was going in on a convoy and I snuck in with my wife who took this was on behalf of the New York Times. She took pictures. I wrote the article. Well, it's so funny. It's like when I was growing up as a kid on this on state street when I was 15 16 and got my drivers license. I roll in at night after dates and try to park my car across the street for my parents house because there's no parking on their side. And no matter the time of day or night, this little old lady named Dottie Perry would come running out of her house even though I was parking on the street and yell at me about not parking in front of her house. She's like she was waiting for me every night. So this is now what 25 years later. And I'm rolling into New Orleans with this convoy in a rental car. I peel off when we get to Oxner. And it isn't all underwater. Like I said, you know, you were told the whole city's underwater. It wasn't. In fact, it was high and dry all the way to my parents house. A lot of trees down and things. It was dramatic. Cut power lines down all the way to my parents house. And you did not see a soul like it was the neutron bomb. All property all all intact. The people all wiped out. And I get to my parents house. And there's a tree down in the in the street right in front. So I park across the street. And I'm getting out of the car. And this ancient lichy comes running out of her house. And it's Dottie Perry, a who I've not seen in 25 years. And I think she's going to say Michael Lewis, do not park your car in front of my house. And instead she says, where is everybody? And she remembers, she's Michael. Like I've seen you. Where is everybody? She's got dementia. She's been in her house for a week, five days. However, long it's been and just and does not know what's happened. That was the beginning of an unreal, a very odd couple of weeks and an amazing piece of kind of material for a piece of journalism. It's an unbelievable read. People I'm going to put the link in the notes. People can read all of it. There is one quote in there that I was reading it that struck me as I don't know, maybe there's a relationship between here and and blockers, which is talking about our, you know, the people inside our decaying bureaucracy that is under attack from outside forces. And you wrote this about New Orleans. You said, my parents would never put it this way, but they're fatalists. They've come to view change as unfortunate and inevitable. That's one difference between stability and stagnation. A stable society has the ability to reject or adapt to change. A stagnant one has changed and posed on it unpleasantly. The only question is from what direction it will come. I was reading that paragraph, and I was like, I think that's how a lot of people at the bulwark feel about our current liberal democracy that it had become stagnant. And the change is being imposed upon it unpleasantly. Yeah. I think that's a good description of the federal government. It's not good description every part of the federal government, but a lot of it feels that way. It's gotten harder and harder for it to rejuvenate itself. It's a pleasure. But on the other hand, like New Orleans, filled with marvelous characters, filled with inspiring people, actually, doing kind of inspiring things, just in more and more trying circumstances. So I wrote a book about Trump's first administration, about just as neglected the government. It's called the fifth risk. And the revelation to me was one, just kind of the unbelievably interesting array of stuff the government's responsible for. You don't even think about, like, you just take for granted, but all kinds of wild, interesting stuff that the problems that the private sector won't deal with, so they get jammed into the into the government. And just how good the characters were. It just sounds so weird. I can say this to people like, you don't understand the civil servants. The best of them are some of the best characters I have ever run across. And they're still there. So it's not at least guys. That is hopeless as New Orleans felt at the time. New Orleans was hit by Katrina. New Orleans felt really. Our liberal democracy doesn't feel as hopeless as New Orleans. New Orleans felt like there was nothing that would ever prod it out of its situation. Whereas I do feel like our democracy is an expression of lots of different, lots of different aspects of our society, our society itself. It's pretty vital place still. Like, they're still, they're still in energy. I mean, yeah, a lot of things have screwed up, but I can imagine an easier story. It being an easier story to tell the rebirth of American government than the rebirth of New Orleans. And I say that as someone who just loves New Orleans, but it's okay. Well, I wanted to talk about some of these characters, but now you've peaked my interest though. What's the story that you're telling yourself of the rebirth of American government right now? It's so important. The government, I mean, eventually the society crumbles if the government crumbles. And I think that if it gets dramatized sufficiently well, I think it just creates an, there's a possibility of an opening in the marketplace for political ideas for someone to walk in and say, this is important. I'm going to explain to you. We're not going to just like shove the government to one side and make this all about day-to-day politics. I'm going to, I'm going to make it argument about why this matters. Let me give you like a little example. I can't tell you who it was, but a very senior member of the House representatives that I were on a hike, I don't know, a year ago. And he said, if we get control a house, I would like to use the House Oversight Committee to do hearings, not where we like play the opposition. The point of the hearings are just to explain the government to the people. And would you help orchestrate these hearings so they're entertaining enough everybody wants to watch them? And that impulse, we are going to have to entertain people. Look, the book has to be a page tour. People aren't entertained. People do not want to boring civics lesson. But they do like an entertaining civics lesson. So I just think they're fixable problems. It's a public education problem. It's an interest in attention problem. But the resources are there. You know, the resources and the energy is there. The youthful idealism is there to be tapped. I mean, doge in a funny way. I almost hate to say it this way, but there was youthful idealism in Doge, just kind of misdirected. I just wouldn't bet against this country. And I think betting that the government will never figure it out is betting against the country. It just feels like a dumb move to bet against the country. As is my usual style, I was going to start with, you know, kind of the negative and depressing and raged, inducing elements. Since you've taken us there, let's begin with the one shining light, other more shining lights. But the one really hopeful I thought part of the book was the Doge character that goes in to tear down the IRS and then realizes that it's like, well, you tell the story. And then push that and come out. I'll tell it. So actually, so let's give a minute. His name is Sahil Lavingia. And Sahil was one of, you know, a couple of hundred people who rolled into Washington. And what was it? What was really kind of just a loose social network? Like Doge didn't really, they didn't vet anybody or do background checks. Or it was like, if you were at a cocktail party where someone knew Elon and they were going to Washington, honestly worse than that. If you sent tweets at Elon that made it seem like you were ideologically aligned. That's right, dude. You might have just, that's right. And Sahil was, it's important to know a couple of things about me. He wasn't one of the 20 somethings. He was in his early 30s. He'd also made, if not as fortunate, quite a bit of money. He dropped out of USC when he was 19 and was the second employee at Pinterest in the first engineer. And he created a company called Gamero that was very successful. So he had some millions of dollars, unlike a lot of the Doge young people. A lot of the young Doge people has actually not done very well. They're young. And, well, that's, that's not true. I mean, there was big balls. Was it big balls? One of the guys had like ancient scrolls. That was, that was Luke, that was Luke Farritor. Oh, that was Luke. I mean, press it, kids who are very bright, but they hasn't done very much, but anyway, but he saw, he had a motive, he had a very specific thing. It drove him batshit that he got paper from the IRS. He did not understand why he couldn't do his taxes on his phone. He didn't understand why like a refund check went to his old address, you know, three months after he had moved, and he just said, like, I can fix this. Like, I can turn the IRS into an app. When he gets to Washington, they don't actually listen to what he wants to do. They say we need you at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He goes over to the VA, knowing nothing about it. Finds another do a young doge guy there, completely bewildered and frazzled, because he's been told to cut contracts. Now, I'm trying to, you just have to just kind of pause here. I'm trying to imagine what would happen if I'm 28, or 35, or 60, and I don't have no idea what's in the VA. And someone in Elon's world says here is the key to the VA, go cut contracts. Like, I wouldn't even know how to be good, especially if they weren't done in like two days. What the kid did was saw how it walks in on. Is he's, the guy has a file. He's got the file with all of the VA's contracts. And he's just plugging in keywords like gender or bias, or women. Right. And yeah, this was how the annool again, got taken out of the right. That's right. And anything that was like about statistical bias, boom, going. And just whacking them on the basis of a word. Now, he even, he knew, he's apparently looked up at Saul and said, "I think God you're here, because man, I don't know if I should be doing this." And Saul looks down and he's like, no, he probably shouldn't be doing that. And he, Saul then gets himself in trouble with those. In a couple of ways, he speaks up in a meeting with Elon Musk, saying that they should be more transparent and that upsets some people. I think what he really doesn't get some trouble is he gives an interview to fast company, in which he's quoted saying something like, "You know, I've been here a couple of weeks, and the government really isn't as inefficient as I thought it was." And he's like, "I remember that." If you're in Doge, you could be reposting neo-Nazi tweets, right supremacist tweets, you could be a, you have a past of sexual abuse, you could have made up colleges on your resume, you never went to. And in each case, you were protected. And if you said the government was a little less than inefficient than you thought, that you're fired. So that was he found. And more on the nose of this guy, I mean, like literally, there was somebody that was sending the most disgusting anti-Indian comments imaginable. And JD Vance, like, defends that person and circles the wagons around them. And this guy, Sahel gets good. The wagons could circle for everyone with Sahel. So he gets kicked out. I don't know how many people got fired from Doge. Possibly he was the only one. And he was the well-meaning one. So he goes off and then Doge dissolves, and everybody agrees basically, even in Elon Musk agrees it's a failure. They even, they lie a lot about what they did. But it was a horrible failure. But with Sahel, there were remnants of Doge. There were people. Not everybody in Doge was uninformed. Not everybody in Doge came in with malicious intention. And there were a few people left behind who were still kind of embedded in the government. We're thinking like, look, could we do something useful here? And so Sahel gets a call from one of them saying, you know, that thing you said about the IRS? You want to come back and try. And what I love is that he turned to his wife. Sahel did and said, I've already seen this isn't like a three-month assignment. I've already seen how this place works. You have to embed. You have to really understand how our works get stuff done. I'm going to go to work to the IRS for 10 years. Now, apparently he's sugared this pill by saying, I promise we'll have a million dollars in passing income every year. So don't worry about that. And he's also saying, I think when he rolled, he said, I think I might be the richest person in the IRS. And they give him an office which you got a seat to believe. In New York, it's just, what does it look like? It looks like it was awful before the people left. It looked like the people left in a great hurry. Like there was an invading army, probably was, came through. They're like plants and artworks. And people just left all kinds of crap. It's just empty cubicles. And Sahel gets there and starts to work. And in fact, his app, I don't know if it's out yet, but it's imminent. Like, he's actually done the thing. It's amazing what he's done. But, but when he gets there, he's got a little OCD, a little, a whatever, some alphabet problem, he would tell you, I'm on the spectrum, I think, is where the way he puts it. He says, he gets to his floor and he goes to Phil's water bottle. And the water fountain doesn't work. And he gets obsessed with it. He goes, in what first-world country is it acceptable in a government building for the water fountain not to work? And he decides that he's going to fix the water fountain. The end of the book is Sahel fixing the water fountain, not the app. And it's such a fun story, but it's such a way of moving stories. It's sort of like, this is who should be in government. People like him. People want to fix problems. People are there for good reasons. And you watch him in action. For whatever reason, I have a kind of hopefulness about our society. And even after watching what has just happened in our government, I do feel a hopefulness. And I do feel like that we are a very public-spirited country. We're a very philanthropic country. We're a problem-solving country. We're a protean country. We change. We can change on a dime. And forget what just happened. And I just thought, it's wonderful to see this spirit just a lot. Still a lot. The spirit and all these characters who got run out of the government. And I want to end on the note that spirit is still a lot. And so he just gave me the perfect way to do it. The water fountain. The water fountain. And we've got big problems. We have big problems. We've got to start with the water fountain. Well, you start with the, you know, the water fountain. I don't need to tell you, it's a metaphor. I got it. The water fountain is not just the water fountain. I got it. Okay, that's very important. All right. The problem is that the people like him have mostly been thrust out of the government across a bunch of different areas. A lot of people like him. Yeah, a lot of people like him. And so you write about some of them. You know, it's funny when I didn't understand, but I came to understand, because of Doge, how much easier it is to chase the good people out of government than the bad people. What they did, I mean, in addition to cutting contracts, the way that the moronic way they did, the way they fire people, they got came and they realized that what dead wood there was has civil service protections. And they couldn't just fire them. That they could do two things. They could fire the probationary workers. That's a odd title for them. The people who's only been there 18 months or so. Yeah. So the new young people, the country desperately needs. And people who have been brought in to solve some immediate problem. People, exactly, they were people you don't want to fire. And also that included weirdly people that, again, the entrepreneurial people that had changed from like one department to another, because they wanted to go do some other job. They were also probationary. So they could get canned too. That's right. That's exactly right. So that kind of the vitality of the place, easily fired and was just wiped out on mass by Doge. And the other thing is, if you make it with a, also to do is make life so unpleasant for federal workers, they didn't want to be there anymore. The self-deport strategy. Yeah. The self-deport. And who self-deports? People who have options in the private sector. You lose, it's so much easier to chase out the good people than the bad people. So they did the opposite of what you would, I mean, let's just say we agree with them. And there's, I don't know, take some number 10% of the people in the federal workforce who shouldn't be there. It's probably right. Something like that is true in the private sector. Sure. This is the, this is not how you would go about getting rid of them. You probably, this is probably, you've left yourself with them. So it is very disturbing. It raises questions. Here's a question for you. I get pushed back on this whenever I say this. People say you're going too far. But how do we know Elon Musk is a good manager of enterprise? Like, this is so dumb that it's like, how could this person be trusted with a company? And he fucked up Twitter. Like, and he said, and he hid the mistake. He's using SpaceX to jam the embarrassment of his mismanagement of Twitter into that. He's really good at carnival barking kind of thing as promoting, of getting share prices up. You know, but his company is a trading at hundreds of times earnings. I don't know who's actually running Tesla or who's running SpaceX when he's tweeting all the time. I do wonder like, are we misunderstanding this guy? He's got talents, but maybe he's actually very poorly suited to actually running something. I wish this was Jerry Springer. And I could bring your newman high school grad Walter Isaacson in right now. And we could, the three of us could hash this out together because I think we'd probably would have. My view is, I think those are the years. Walter and I did hash this out on this podcast a couple of years ago. And I was kind of pushing the argument you just made. The point that he made just kind of steel man that Elon does know how to do stuff argument is like, it's not nothing that NASA stopped being able to put space shuttles on the moon and that SpaceX did. And that SpaceX is the only company right now to a degree that's dangerous. Frankly, they can get into low orbit and offer people satellite Wi-Fi. And so like, well, what? I think like the obvious answer to that is like twofold one. the certain kind of craziness that allows somebody to have the like vision to go do something like that. Like all that craziness also has negative consequences that show up, particularly when you're running when you're trying to do something that takes real organizational skills with the government. And then the other possible theory is like Twitter and his daughter being trans just like broke his brain. And he went from and like the crazy, you know, sort of compounded it. - It used to be one thing, now he's another. - Right, yeah, maybe a combination of the two. Maybe, and maybe the challenge of, you know, Starlink is a different sort of challenge than running Twitter or running the federal government. - Well, and definitely that is true for running the federal government. And this is true in your book. Like you see this from solid and the other like doge people to go in, it's just like, because you have a, because responsibility is the word, right? Like if you're in the government, like you have an obligation to the people that pay for the government, right? And so the way that you can do creative destruction in the private sector is not fully analogous. Right? Like I used to be a Republican. I was for all the points. I was like, oh, we should make government more efficient. We should cut red tape. It's like, so those arguments have some truth to it. But they're also, they're just not the same thing, right? It's why, you know, it's why healthcare can't be run like Amazon. - Yeah, and you can't reward people in the government. Like you reward people in the private sector. You can't punish people in the government. Like you punish people in the private sector. It is a harder management problem. And the kind of problems the government is often dealing with, the government solution is not meant to be exactly efficient. It's like, you weren't redundancies. When you're dealing with like nuclear safety or air traffic control, or there are all kinds of things like this where-- - Or benefits for people. This is why the stupid fraud discussion like is invoked on the right right now. I like, sure, we should make sure that there's not fraud in the Medicaid system. But like you actually would rather make sure everybody had healthcare or everybody had their food stamps and also have some fraud than have a system that's so onerous that like people can't get, you know what I mean? - Yeah, they're different. - You tolerate a certain amount of fraud to make the system work for the people who are fraudulent. - Here we go, you've made me-- - That's right. - Sounded like Bernie, I'll decide. - No, no, but that's right. I think that's right. I mean, I had people tell me that. So it's just a different management problem. And we've sort of gotten away from that discussion. It gets analogized to the private sector falsely. I mean, the Trump administration, the SELT on the federal government had many parts and doj was just one of them. But this is an defense of the Trump administration, but it is, if I were defending the Trump administration, I would say a lot of the problems we have in managing the government pre-existed. The Trump administration and one of the big problems is that we sort of abandoned the notion that the person who was put in charge of, I don't know, the Commerce Department or the Agriculture Department has to know anything about it. Or have any ability, any previous ability to manage anything and care about it. And so that you get the situation, the Trump administration is an extreme example like how we're running the Commerce Department and barely showing up there and never figuring out what's really inside the place and making really dumb kind of management decisions that will-- - Well, the Alex Baron-Geeda's story on that front, for sure. - So it's 20,000 words on the book. So I can't tell the whole thing, but it's-- - Give us a tease. - The way I thought about the book was, government has been transformed by this administration, that this attempt to take this multi-million person, supposedly non-partisan workforce, that previously took an oath to the Constitution to come being the civil service and turn it into a narrow loyalist operation that serves the personal interests of the president. And when you do that, you change the way all the different functions function. And what I did with the book was I picked what I thought of as the main functions and found a character to dramatize how the function was gonna change. This was the most subtle of the buckets, of the functions that I-- It's the public safety function. Because it's not clear that even like a narrow loyalist civil service once like airplanes fall in and out of the sky. It becomes the management of public safety. It gets managed differently and probably worse. There's more corruption, less, less transparency, there's-- it gets managed differently, but it's still completely neglected. But Alex Marragete was my character to dramatize the issue. And Alex Marragete invented a fire science. This sounds weird, I didn't even know there was a fire science. Any fire sciences, it turns out there's more than one. There's the history of the study of indoor fires, there's the history of the study of wildfires. And what he invented was the study of wildland urban interface fires. The ones we talk about comes out of the woods, wipes out paradise, wipes out campfire. And he has-- he persuaded me that this is a growing risk, that warming planet, drying parts of the country. It's just-- like the East Coast doesn't think of it. It's a big problem for the East Coast. He says, "All it takes is six weeks and it's a tender box. There's so much built up fuel." And he did just spectacular, well, to back up, the way he got the permission inside the Department of Commerce, a little organization called NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is where a lot of the fire science research is done in the government. The way he got permission to do it was he had an expertise in building and doing giant fire experiments. And he was brought in to understand-- to try to understand why the twin towers fell in 9/11. Because the general belief was the steel wouldn't melt. Nothing would bring those things down. And he actually rebuilt floors of the World Trade Center. The floor is right below Howard Letnik's old firm and showed how the fire had moved and how, in fact, that is what had happened. The fire has been melted to the beams. So you would think that since this impacted Howard Letnik's life so much, that he really valued this person's contribution to the Department of Commerce and word-growing his remit and we're learning a lot about how to prevent it in the future. Is that where the story goes? That's not where the story goes. You know, that's not the way the story goes. The story goes by 2,045 as they're in the right to use the NIST Fire Lab on the side, on the slide, to start studying wild land urban interface fires. And he's doing things like-- he needs to know how trees burn, for example. He's doing things like bringing in hundreds of Christmas trees and burning them and measure everything that happens. Well, it's a very odd job. But like, going out into actual, you know, the witchfire in San Diego and in the while it's happening and watching how the fire moves for the community, seeing that wooden fences are, you know, transmitting the fire from house to house. Going back to his lab and burning kids' placets to see how much energy they emit. He's trying to create essentially a body of knowledge that will enable communities to design themselves and they can defend themselves against these fires. He's trusted to be able to do it. He can-- nobody's really watching him too closely. So this is before Trump. In 2008, there's an accident at a NIST Lab in Colorado with plutonium. Some visiting researcher did something they shouldn't have done. It led to a congressional investigation. And Congress passed these rules about experiments that required Alex afterwards to get like 18 signatures on a piece of paper before he could do anything in his lab, which basically shut down on the fly stuff. And there was this growing tendency for the government to both cut his budget or make his budget insecure and increase the complexity of his life. It's always really hot shot kind of scientists types who you want doing science. It used to have its own travel agent. And the travel agent, you just call travel agent, your travel would be done, you didn't think about it. Someone got in their head that that was excessive and a luxury and a waste of taxpayer dollar and they fired the travel agent. And what they do instead is they spend an hour or a month in seminars, these scientists learning how to book the cheapest flight for the-- it's crazy. It's crazy. And so Alex's life got that way. It was like increasingly scrutinized. He was hamstrung. At the bottom of it was a kind of mistrust. When all this guy was doing, this guy was going to make five times more money in the private sector, working 100 hours a week, trying to solve a problem that we all want solved. In comes how reluctant. Takes away all the credit cards from the scientists. Tells them they can spend a maximum of $1 on their cards, I think is what he does. He says, any expenditure over $10,000 I need to personally sign. But then he's not there to sign them. And so he must hang out with Trump. So he's not even in his office. So there would be these scenes where at night, where there's a line of people hoping he'd get something signed by how reluctant he is. Hoping he shows up that evening in his office. But Alex would say he was exhausted already. And it's got to the point where the signal is coming from the very top of the organization is total ignorance and a feint hostility to the work that's going on in the organization. And it drove Alex out. This knowledge is one person deeper. You read the papers. And you read the advice. I mean, states are taking his advice. Cal fire, the people, my home state fire department, thinks he's a genius and thinks that he's already saved lives. And that he is, like, that work is key to the future of addressing this problem. The federal government is the natural home for this. He's obsessed with it. He's a world's expert. And we're losing him. It's insane. And this has happened for thousands of Alex's. And we're losing him because he's sitting outside and having a lot of next office. So I'm like, I'm going to go. I am who should know the importance of this. Like waiting for him to sign something, but instead he's, you know, trying to impress, trying to try to do in a Fox business hit. Or something like that. - I gotta say, tip it off as kids, just whatever's happening. - It's all very disturbing and it's all very angering. I found myself many times while writing the book, shocked by how much joy, how much fun I was having writing the book. And the truth is these people are, they're fun to write about. It's crazy shit they're doing, and it is obsessive, and nobody's ever paid them any attention. So it's fresh, you know, it's like fresh material. - Yeah. - Every time I go into the government, I find this. - This is why we need movies. - Yeah, that's right. - And that's why a lot of nerds going into sports front offices because of money ball now. So, you need some movies. - So this might be a movie. There's some action and this, it's got the same problem as the big short. Writing the book is very similar to the big short. I cast it. I cast it, I had an idea of what the story was, and I knew I needed people who represented different things, like public safety, like data collection, like long-term science research. And I have a spoil for choice, like with a big short. And I sort of flower or arrange the whole book. And it is made for someone like Adam McCay to come in and take what I've done, break it and remake it, because you're right. We do need a movie about this. - I have two A, I think I just have to pick your brain on four I lose you, just 'cause I'm curious. You wrote also the big SBF book. He's still in jail for now. - He's in jail for 25 years. - Just waiting for that pardon. But when we talked last time, you talked about how he saw cryptos or religion. And like in the intervening period, we have all of this kind of discussion about AI and effective altruism, which is part of this effective altruism. And like the Trump administration's calling that a cult. We had this weird story, the anthropic co-founder, Christopher Ola, like went to, was in discussions with the Vatican and religious scholars, like telling them that they want AI consciousness to be recognized. Some very weird culty stuff going on. And I don't know, I always saw SBF is kind of faking it on all that. But I don't know, you got to spend time with them. - He wasn't faking it on some things. He was faking it on where the money was. But he was, - Yeah, sure. - No, he was all in on effective altruism, all in. It was his identity, still his identity. And it is a kind of religion. It organizes the people, those people's lives. And at the center of it, at the time, interestingly, was this sense that the one problem they could and should address was AI. And that's why, yeah, that's why Sandbag were free to own 20% of anthropic. At an investment that would be worth, I don't know, $80 billion today, maybe more. - The Ponzi scene could have worked if he just survived. - I'm told enough until to sell the stock. - Ponzi schemes the wrong analogy. - You're right, sorry. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Here's what it is, 'cause each of these things is different. He was using his deposit, it's like taking your bank depositors money and turning them into venture capitalists without them knowing. He bought a venture capital portfolio. That portfolio is, it would be so much fun to analyze now because I've had in VCs tell me it's the most successful portfolio ever assembled. It's an amazing, it's all kinds of stuff in it, including SpaceX. But the anthropic investment was made because they saw that, is it Dario? - Dario. - Dario was thought to be more righteous about AI safety than Sam Oldman. And he left open AI to create the good one, the one that would be responsible. - Like on the one hand, I'm attracted to the kind of pitch from the anthropic side that we need to be more careful and there needs to be more AI safety. And I've been like consuming just an unhealthy amount of material about all this lately. But then part of that, then you start to hear them talk about AI consciousness and the cultishness in which they talk about it. And then I start to feel like, I don't know. I trust these guys even better, yeah. - Let's just say, let's just accept that there's a possible existential threat here. They seem to think so. I don't know, but let's just say it's up. The only solution to this will come from the federal government. So the existential threat is occurring and growing, expanding, precisely at the time, we have basically deballed the federal government made it, made it, made it into risk. - Yeah, it is fifth risk. We don't have the capacity and it's a kind of, it's a kind of moral, social and like capacity to address the problem. Trump's just, so Trump's just throws out his head and says, let them do it. But whatever they want to do. But what is really needed is a blocker. What is really needed is a really smart blocker to ask hard questions and decide who can do what with AI. Now, maybe that it's all a fool's game that even a federal government involved, like the Chinese would do the irresponsible thing. But I don't know. - But there's no trust. And this is what it comes back to and this other thing. And then I'll let you go. The last thing we talked about last time was just, the way that Trump and Elon and these guys attack trust 'cause it gains power for themselves. And this is the most extreme example of that, right? We could potentially be in a world in a couple of years where people can't even really trust what is real. You know, they're not even sure what's real and what is fake. And so when that trust breaks down and the government trust continues to break down further, I told you I'd bring you background to the negative after your positive optimistic start. Like you can kind of see all of the warnings from the fifth risk and kind of the threats from this from bloggers. Potentially our exacerbated times a million by what these guys are doing with AI. - Yeah. We have a pretty strong sense of self preservation as I just don't believe it. I think there's gonna be a backlash to all this. I do think. But you're right, you're right. The strategy, the Trump strategy, the best way to predict where he's gonna go is figure out where there's still trustance and see how he tries to destroy it. He smells it and he goes after it because he's threatened by it that in a trusting environment, he does very poorly because he's so untrustworthy. He needs to create this kind of gas. He needs to spread this kind of gas where everybody must trust everybody else and he's very good when nobody trusts anybody else because he's so good at being untrustworthy where everybody else is sort of like hesitates a little bit. There's like a little bit of a beat before they tell them the real lie. And so he's just so much better at that. - I guess the characters through your book is who are rebuilding trust with. It's hard. Who do you use to rebuild the trust with? - I mean, you use these characters or really good place to start. Yeah. - Michael Lewis, man, I'll see you uptown in a couple of months. All right, nice to meet you down to see your family, all right? - Yeah, good to see you. - All right, thanks so much to Michael Lewis. One thing I didn't get to him that I wanted to get to with him was how to rebuild that trust through accountability and through bringing back kind of the functions, the referees that insured that our liberal democracy worked and that rule of law can prevail. And I would point you to his book. He's a great chapter on kind of these referees that work in the shadows and the government. It's an excellent book, super interesting. He's the best. But if you want to get some rage out over on the board, takes feed. I did a little solo rant called Trump's corporate enablers should be very worried about 2027 that offers some harsh words from some of the Democrats who've been telling political that they're not sure that we need that kind of accountability coming in 2027. So go check that out over on the board that takes feed. I appreciate Michael Lewis very much. We'll be back tomorrow. It should be a fun one. See y'all then, peace. ♪ You can put your clothes back on ♪ ♪ She's leaving you ♪ ♪ No time to apologize for the things you do ♪ ♪ No rent to Ferrari ♪ ♪ And sing the blues ♪ ♪ Believe that Clapton was the second comment ♪ ♪ Far so far, we all got work to do ♪ ♪ It gets dark, we all got work to do ♪ ♪ She's leaving me ♪ ♪ She's leaving me ♪ - The "Board Daily" is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzali Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.