Michael Lewis on Selecting the Public Servants Featured in Blockers
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[0:27]Okay, Michael Lewis.
[0:28]I have had Michael Lewis on the podcast
[0:31]several times.
[0:32]And guess what?
[0:32]It just does not get old.
[0:34]I have been a huge Michael Lewis fan, like my whole life.
[0:37]And the first time I interviewed him,
[0:39]I was sweating bullets.
[0:40]I was so nervous.
[0:42]And now it's like old hat,
[0:43]but seriously, it doesn't get old.
[0:45]I am so just blown away by his talent
[0:49]and the way he can make any topic feel cinematic
[0:54]and incredibly gripping.
[0:56]And he did so again in his new book,
[0:57]Lockers Rebels in the Deep State.
[1:01]Michael Lewis, if you don't know him,
[1:02]is the New York Times best-selling author
[1:04]who has published many books on subjects ranging
[1:07]from politics to Wall Street to sports.
[1:10]His most recent book,
[1:11]the number one New York Times best-seller going infinite,
[1:14]was the story about FTX's collapse.
[1:16]And it was all about Sam Bankman freed,
[1:18]which informed how I read the news going forward.
[1:22]In 2016, he did the undoing project.
[1:26]He did the number one best-seller Flash Boys,
[1:30]the blind side about that former NFL offensive tackle,
[1:34]Michael Orr, and how his whole life unraveled,
[1:39]the big short boomerang,
[1:41]the new new thing, Liars Poker,
[1:44]which I have read since I was young.
[1:46]And now of course,
[1:47]Michael Lewis is the creator and host of Apple's
[1:49]number one rated podcast against the rules,
[1:52]which is a searing look at what happens to fairness
[1:54]in American life through the lens of people
[1:56]who depend on public trust.
[1:58]He grew up in New Orleans
[1:59]and lives in Berkeley, California with his family.
[2:01]Enjoy.
[2:02]Welcome back on totally booked for your third time.
[2:05]Michael Lewis, so excited to have you here
[2:07]to talk about your latest book,
[2:09]The Locker is Congratulations.
[2:10]Thank you.
[2:11]Total pleasure to be here.
[2:12]Would you mind telling listeners a little bit
[2:14]about your book?
[2:15]Sure.
[2:16]So blockers is a phrase as a term that Elon Musk used.
[2:20]That's where the title comes from.
[2:21]And he used it first.
[2:22]I think back when he took over Twitter.
[2:24]And it was go in there, find the blockers
[2:27]that people are going to get in our way
[2:29]and get rid of them.
[2:30]At some point in the beginning of Doge
[2:32]and the second Trump administration,
[2:35]when Elon Musk went in,
[2:36]it supposedly fixed the government.
[2:38]I heard that he was using this phrase
[2:39]with people in the government.
[2:40]And I learned that like some of the people
[2:42]who were the blockers,
[2:43]all they were doing is trying to stop him
[2:44]from breaking the law.
[2:45]And it was, they were just,
[2:47]they'd taken an oath to the Constitution,
[2:48]to uphold the Constitution.
[2:50]They were being asked to violate the Constitution.
[2:52]And I thought,
[2:53]so this is just explaining the title.
[2:55]I thought back to like Impressionists,
[2:57]the painters that was an insult at one point,
[3:00]Tories, it is a long history of insults
[3:03]being turned into badges of honor.
[3:05]And I thought in this case,
[3:06]blockers was a badge of honor.
[3:08]And the book is,
[3:10]I mean, this is going to be kind of abstract,
[3:12]but I tell you how I actually thought about it.
[3:14]Because I'd written another,
[3:14]I'd written a book about the fifth risk
[3:16]was about the first Trump administration.
[3:17]It was really this like a few departments of government
[3:20]what were going on inside them.
[3:22]And I was interested in that because Trump wasn't.
[3:24]He like it fired all his transition team
[3:25]and they just took no interest in the government.
[3:27]This time they took an excessive interest in the government.
[3:30]They were running parts of the government.
[3:32]They weren't supposed to run kind of thing.
[3:33]It was like a complete swing of the pendulum.
[3:36]And I thought of it this way.
[3:37]I thought like effectively what's happened is a,
[3:39]is equivalent in government of an environmental catastrophe
[3:42]of some sort in the sense that a change in the immediate strike,
[3:45]the changes the environment,
[3:47]that the government was one thing.
[3:49]It was a thing where there were a lot of power
[3:51]was complicatedly shared
[3:53]between Congress and the judiciary and the president.
[3:56]Even in the executive branch,
[3:57]there were things that the president didn't really control
[3:59]and he did what he did control.
[4:01]He didn't control budget, for example.
[4:03]And that what was happening was a dramatic seizure power.
[4:06]And that these two million persons,
[4:08]supposedly non-partisan civil service
[4:11]were now meant to be essentially loyalists.
[4:14]And they were meant to serve at the pleasure of the president
[4:17]to do whatever he wanted them to do.
[4:19]And that never mind what you think of that.
[4:21]You might think, oh, well, that's what we want.
[4:23]But that just raised questions for what that meant
[4:26]about how the government function,
[4:27]like the basic things the government does,
[4:30]public safety, the long-term science investment,
[4:33]the gathering data and disseminating data,
[4:36]gathering data and keeping it private,
[4:38]like our tax returns,
[4:40]is a refereeing function the government play,
[4:42]role of plays and regulation and all the rest.
[4:45]And I thought like, what is this environmental change mean
[4:48]for those functions?
[4:49]And now I'm going to stop in just a sec.
[4:51]But no, keep going.
[4:52]No, but it was a very similar situation
[4:55]from a literary point of view as when I had the big short.
[4:58]I knew something had happened.
[5:00]And I knew that all these characters had happened to them, and really all I had to do
[5:04]was go and cast it. And so I started looking for people inside the different functions of government
[5:09]and what had happened to them. And settled on a group of characters, six of them, that who had been
[5:15]no one had questioned how good they were at their jobs ever. They'd been, and they'd been in
[5:20]their jobs for decades. No one had questioned their non-partisan ship that they never brought their
[5:24]politics into anything. And no one had questioned the importance of what they were doing.
[5:29]And all of a sudden they didn't belong. And I thought, I'm going to write it, it's a kind of
[5:32]negative space story. It's like, we're going to understand what this thing we've just allowed to
[5:36]happen in our government is by what doesn't belong in it. And we're going to describe the collision
[5:42]between this new force coming in to the White House and this two million person executive branch.
[5:50]And then to say, like to the reader, what do you think, you know, like you might like this,
[5:55]but this is what happened. And I got to say, as depressing as maybe all that sounds, some people,
[6:00]it was thrilling to write. It was so much fun to write. It was that there's something about these
[6:05]people. When you find not all government workers, but when you find the right civil servant who's
[6:10]doing something unbelievably important and they're kind of like obsessed with it. And they never
[6:15]they never brag on themselves. No one knows what they do. All they're doing it for reasons
[6:20]other than money and fame because they could make more money doing something else.
[6:24]They end up almost invariably being great characters because they have some interesting
[6:27]motive. And so that was mainly why it was so much fun. So that's the book. There's a logic
[6:32]to our lays out and I hope a narrative kind of repulsion to it. It's a book that tries to explain
[6:37]what just happened through the eyes of the people that happened to.
[6:40]Yeah.
[6:41]Wow. Well, thank you for that fabulous explanation. And yes, it was
[6:46]I have not stopped thinking. I think his name was Tim, who was in the fire research department.
[6:51]Alex. Alex, I'm sorry. Alex Marigitties. That's all right. Alex, Tim was Tim Curry, who was the
[6:57]first care of it. Anyway, okay. Alex, who was amazing, obsessed with how fire works and the
[7:05]interactions with the environment and how he recreated Marsha McClellan in the World Trade Center,
[7:12]which actually is where my best friend worked at the time of the attacks and where she died.
[7:16]We believe. Anyway, how much goosebumps I got from having him recreate those floors,
[7:23]finally understanding exactly how the towers collapsed. And also the whole collective notion that
[7:30]we have to take more responsibility. It's like a social psychology experiment. The lessons that
[7:34]he started and what we all have to do to prevent fires in our communities from being destroyed.
[7:39]I also have a home in the Palisade. So I don't know. I felt like this whole thing.
[7:42]So I found it absolutely riveting that this Greek immigrant had come to us and invented a fire
[7:49]science that it was. And they'd been to understood fields. One was like how fire operates inside
[7:55]a house and your sprinklers and your smoke detectors and your exits and all that stuff.
[8:01]There's a reason they are where they are and a lot of the work that was done to figure out how to
[8:05]do that was done in the government. But by people kind of like him. And then there was a kind
[8:10]of loose wildfire like how it moves through forests and all that. But no one had combined the two
[8:16]in the sense that when the wildfire jumps into the community, which is what we're living with, right?
[8:20]It's like, as he's Alex said, you think of this as a California problem or as a Western problem,
[8:26]he says, no, he says, Alex takes us six weeks of no rain in North Carolina. And you're going to get
[8:31]this more fuel there. You're going to get these megafires. And he saw as early as the 1990s,
[8:39]this was going to be a critical thing to understand how fire they came out of wild lands
[8:44]swept into communities and rolled over communities. And then he gets his start in a way.
[8:50]I mean, there's a prehistory to it by explaining how the World Trade Center collapsed
[8:57]was riveting. But he was always with someone who was really good at doing these large, these big fire
[9:02]experiments. And it isn't just lighting a huge fire, which he did. It was lighting huge fire and getting
[9:07]information out of the fire. And with the Marsh McClellan offices that they recreated two of those
[9:12]floors of the World Trade Center and set them on fire and showed how what nobody really thought was
[9:17]true, that how the fire could possibly have melted the beams. But anyway, it's a love hate
[9:22]relationship. What I love about this story is you can see this man, the work he's going to do
[9:30]explaining to us how to defend ourselves in his wildfire. And there are lots of things to do.
[9:35]He's doing it with really riveting investigations of actual wildfires. He's like dropping into the
[9:41]middle of massive fires and studying with how they behaved and how they moved. Like, I don't know,
[9:48]who would have thought that the wooden fence running through the neighborhood is the most
[9:52]dangerous thing because it's going to carry the fire from house to house. You know, the millions
[9:56]of things like that. And he is unbelievably clever and worse.
[10:00]100 hours a week and is being paid nothing to do it, that the problem he's facing his
[10:05]whole career, his and just Trump, is a government that is increasingly kind of clergy
[10:10]and is making it just hard for him to do his job, more forms to fill out, less money
[10:16]to spend on experiments, more blowback from the America Wood manufacturer's association
[10:21]because his work is showing that like Wood Burns, you know, that kind of stuff.
[10:27]And then he gets to this administration and all of a sudden they take his credit card
[10:30]away and tell him he can't spend more of the next dollars on something and the environment
[10:36]it turns hostile and the idea that we're turning on a person who might be our salvation
[10:42]and treating him as some kind of instrument of waste fraud and abuse or whatever they want
[10:48]to yell anglers they want to use, an object of suspicion, some wrong in our soul, that
[10:53]something, something we jump some shark, something went wrong in the way we think about
[10:58]each other and our willingness to sort of think hard about how we take care of each other
[11:03]and all he was was an instrument for taking care of each other and anybody who knew the
[11:08]story, anybody who knew the story would say put him back in there and give him twice
[11:12]as much money.
[11:13]You know, it was like that's a no brainer and that we don't do that indicate something
[11:18]really deep is broken and it's deeper than just like an administration.
[11:22]It's like the administration could do this because nobody's paying attention.
[11:26]I think that the meta story of this book is the power of story.
[11:31]I really think that if the stories get out there and people know them, they're activated.
[11:37]They're like, oh, now I know.
[11:38]No government is not politics.
[11:40]Government's something different from politics.
[11:43]Politics in government are related but I'm paying attention to what's on the news all
[11:45]the time and actually what I need to be a paying attention to is this guy who's going
[11:48]to save me from a wildfire and that's the hope of the book is it's like actually narrative
[11:54]matters.
[11:55]And there's a narrative about that as a false narrative that people who work for the
[11:57]government are, you know, just like an engine for sucking your dollars out of your pocket
[12:02]into theirs.
[12:03]That's not what they are.
[12:04]There's something else.
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[13:52]So what do you do if someone like me reads this and is like, oh my gosh, get Alex's
[13:57]job back.
[13:58]We need Alex.
[13:59]We need all these people.
[14:00]What do we, what can we do aside from recommend the book to more people?
[14:04]Well, tell the stories.
[14:05]I think that's really important is that you get the stories into people's heads, but
[14:08]you can write an email in your car saying what the hell just happened.
[14:10]You don't know you're in a state.
[14:11]You've got a fire risk, but you do, but a lot of people know it.
[14:15]It's like, get this thing back up like just like make some noise.
[14:19]It's silly to tell people how to vote.
[14:21]But I am now instinctively have an instinctive visceral response to politicians who make these
[14:28]hand-waving negative statements about government or about, you know, the government's
[14:34]all bad, these wasteful bureaucrats, when they, that kind of st, peddling that stereotype,
[14:41]turn away from that.
[14:42]And what needs to happen in the political marketplace is people need to be rewarded for
[14:47]talking honestly and intelligently about government like you explain not just selling it
[14:52]exactly.
[14:53]I mean, selling it.
[14:54]Yes, but explaining why it's important and why you, you shouldn't talk like that.
[15:00]And I think that getting behind people who have that ability,
[15:06]if you consciously do it enough people do it,
[15:08]a marketplace will develop four candidates
[15:11]who are seeking to make it work, not tear it down.
[15:15]So I think that's another thing.
[15:18]Well, you have my vote.
[15:19]I think you should run.
[15:21]I suck.
[15:22]I'd be so bad.
[15:23]You would turn on me in 90 seconds.
[15:25]You'd say, why have open that guy?
[15:26]What did he do?
[15:27]What was it, Dick?
[15:28]He came on my podcast.
[15:30]And now he's the worst congressman we've ever had.
[15:33]It was teaching me something different
[15:35]from being a podcast, a guest,
[15:36]between being a podcast,
[15:38]and being a congressman.
[15:39]I tell you what I would be good at.
[15:41]I think if you gave me the power to pick the people,
[15:48]gave me chances to interview them
[15:50]and decide who gets to be in the positions.
[15:53]I wouldn't, this is not a democracy
[15:55]that would be a bad idea.
[15:56]It's just a general little system of government.
[15:58]But if you gave me one shot to re-staff
[16:01]the political offices,
[16:02]I think I could do a pretty good job with that.
[16:04]But I would be horrible at running it, just horrible.
[16:06]I get interested in very narrow things
[16:08]and I go deep with them.
[16:10]They're, for Eric, Alex, there are thousands
[16:12]of Alex Mary Geeties, it's just one story.
[16:15]I pick that,
[16:16]but you have to be able to operate on a level
[16:18]understanding that this is across the government.
[16:20]And this is happening,
[16:21]that they're these people who you want to empower
[16:24]who are being, grabbing their hands tied behind their backs
[16:26]and being chucked out.
[16:27]And so the other thing about the stories,
[16:29]about this event, this moment,
[16:32]what are we saying to people?
[16:34]Let's put our cynicism to one side for one moment.
[16:36]Let's assume there is such a person
[16:39]who just wants to solve problems,
[16:41]who just wants to help people,
[16:43]who just wants to have a very impactful life.
[16:46]And they have the talent to do it.
[16:49]And they decide,
[16:50]I'm not gonna go work for some private sector thing
[16:53]that's gonna pay me a lot of money
[16:54]to do something that feels less meaningful
[16:55]and impactful.
[16:56]I'm gonna take a pay cut
[16:58]and I'm gonna take the trouble
[16:59]they're gonna work for the government.
[17:01]Those people do exist, lots of them,
[17:03]but let's just stay with me.
[17:05]What are we saying to that kind of person
[17:08]when we not, not only just ignore them,
[17:11]we insult them for doing that.
[17:13]It screws with the country's value system, I think.
[17:16]So I think getting back to a place where
[17:18]you're not allowed to do that.
[17:20]You're not allowed to just trash them.
[17:22]You're not allowed to treat them as this unpleasant stereotype.
[17:26]And that just starts with individual hearts and minds.
[17:29]And that's why stories are important.
[17:31]You get the story out in the hearts and minds.
[17:33]You never know why they change or why they shift,
[17:36]but all of a sudden what you wake up one day
[17:37]and oh, gay marriage is legal, how did that happen?
[17:40]It happened because there are a million stories
[17:41]got told and are someone new, someone who knew someone
[17:44]or someone, that's how it happens.
[17:47]So same sort of thing has to happen
[17:48]within this space because the space has gotten so warped
[17:52]and perverted and misunderstood.
[17:54]And this is an effort to push it in a direction.
[17:58]So how did you find the people and get them to share?
[18:01]In this case, getting to the share was not as hard
[18:03]as you might imagine because it all been fired.
[18:05]So it was like, and they had time on their hands.
[18:08]But finding the people was fun because let's say
[18:12]you start with public safety.
[18:13]That's Alex's bucket and who is going to play that role?
[18:17]Who got run out or left?
[18:19]Well, the guy who's was thought to be like the God's gift
[18:24]to air traffic control at the FAA, he'd be a good one just
[18:29]because they'd just been a plane crash over the Potomac
[18:32]and like you could already see maybe they're
[18:35]going to be problems or how about the guy
[18:39]in the food and drug administration who's in charge
[18:40]of food safety.
[18:42]He was supposed to be great at his job.
[18:44]He got run out, we're eating lettuce,
[18:46]and it's making us sick now.
[18:48]The government could be framed as public,
[18:51]even the military, could be framed as public safety.
[18:53]So I in it, what I did is I went and interviewed people
[18:56]and just got a sense of what they would contribute
[19:00]to the narrative, like how different they were.
[19:02]You want a variety in the characters,
[19:03]how different they were from the other people.
[19:06]In Alex's case, what would put me over the edge?
[19:09]I was really interested in the fire problem.
[19:10]I never even heard that there was the science,
[19:12]that he didn't vented, the science was cool.
[19:15]But what pushed me over the edge was he was an immigrant,
[19:17]that he'd come from Greece.
[19:18]And we were just coming out of a section
[19:21]that was an attack on immigrants, through the IRS.
[19:24]It was using private text,
[19:26]text data to run down on document of workers.
[19:28]And I thought that works well.
[19:30]Then it was partly a static calculations.
[19:35]Partly intellectual calculus was partly
[19:37]just a static emotional calculations.
[19:39]But the fact is, I could have done this book
[19:42]six times over with six different sets of characters.
[19:45]I was spoiled for choice.
[19:47]That big short was that way too.
[19:48]That I could have done it in a different way
[19:50]with three, there were three main characters.
[19:53]There was a pool of kind of 20.
[19:54]I could have done it with.
[19:55]In this case, there pools of the pool of thousands
[19:58]that I could have done it with.
[19:59]So it was fun.
[20:00]I don't know. It's odd. It's an odd way, because I don't always have this where I can kind of cast the book.
[20:04]It was fun to cast the book. It gave me a chance to graze like to just kind of wander all over the
[20:10]government, talk to lots of different people and think about what would jump off the page.
[20:15]It was that that was the calculation. Were you also casting them for the movie version?
[20:19]Well, you know, it's funny. I do I know it's this is going to sound disingenuous because I've had
[20:24]incredible luck with the movies. They've been so three books have been turned on movies,
[20:28]but I never thought when I was a writer that was writing books that would be turned into
[20:31]movies. If you look at the books, it's not obvious that they would be turned into movies. Moneyball
[20:36]on the big short especially that they were turned into movies and the way they were turned into movies
[20:41]led me to believe that the best way for me to write a book was to it was not to pay any attention to
[20:48]the movies at all that they're going to be turned into movies. They're going to be turning the
[20:51]movies. I can't do anything about it. It either works or it doesn't. People are interested in the
[20:56]the movie rights of this thing. I would be surprised if it got made. If it does get made, I kind of
[21:02]know how it will get made. It's taking these six people. No one's ever heard of and casting major
[21:08]movie stars in every role. So you're saying to the audience, Hey, you may think this is Kathleen
[21:15]Walters. IRS privacy person who's buried deep in the bureaucracy and all she does is stand between
[21:21]you and the politicians so that they don't weaponize your tax returns and you didn't know
[21:25]she existed. But actually she's Angelina Jolie. If some director was able to have to be a director
[21:32]with a real who really wanted to do it because you'd have to be really willing to talk people and
[21:36]play in these roles, it could happen and it could be a fun movie. It could be like the big short
[21:41]like it requires a really talented filmmaker, but it is not an obvious movie.
[21:45]All right. Well, I'm looking forward to that casting. We can bet on it. I'm going to bet, yes,
[21:50]it's going to get me. We shall see. I mean, people are scared. The whole movie industry
[21:55]half of it just won't do it because they don't want to do anything that's swifts of politics.
[22:00]Yeah. So it's a funny world. You never know. Okay. Well, all right. I think I'm putting my
[22:06]odds on that more than the congressman path, but you just keep writing books and we'll be good.
[22:10]All right. Thank you so much for your time and for
[22:14]the opportunity. All right. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi,
[22:20]formerly mom's don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend,
[22:25]leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much.
[22:31]Oh, and bye the books.