Pushkin. Hey, there against the Rules listeners. This is Catherine Girardou. I'm one of the producers on the show. We're still working on our next season, coming out this fall. In the meantime, we'd like to share a conversation between Michael Lewis and journalist author Geraldine Brooks about Michael's new book, The Premonition. It's all about the experts who saw the pandemic coming and did their best to stop it. In case you missed it, check your feed. Michael read the first chapter here. A few weeks back. Geraldine Brooks covered crises in the Mid East, Africa, and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She also wrote the two thousand and six Pulitzer Prize winning novel March. Here, recorded as part of the Live Talk Los Angeles series, is her conversation with Michael. Michael, your wonderful nude book. On the back cover has just one quote, and it says I would read an eight hundred page history of the Stapler if he wrote it. John Williams, New York Times book Review, Pretty pretty great quote. You haven't yet given us the saga of the Stapler, but you have had a protean range in your work, from money to politics, to sport, to fatherhood to science and data analytics and now the pandemic. But all of your other books have been looking at events that have already occurred, and this is the first time that you've written a book where the events were crashing down around us as you wrote. What was that like? Fun? Like totally extrating? And I know I'm not supposed to say that, but let me just say that it required it. The only reason I did it is I found it. I took it just a different approach than I usually take. And the only reason I took a different approach than I usually take is I was ready to write a book with a different approach when the pandemic happened. And the approach was I have this character. He happens to be a college football coach, but it doesn't matter. And I haven't written the book, but I have this character that I'm so interested in. I don't care what happens, that whatever happens happens, and I'm going to write a very character driven work of nonfiction narrative and let the story is sort of unfolds as it happens and whatever it is it is, and just trust the character. So the pandemic happens just as I'm getting going on that, and I wasn't thinking, oh, just port that approach onto this, but I was thinking that, like I wrote this book about how the Trump administration is going to muck up any kind of management problem they have because they don't care about the federal government as a management tool. This is the bad thing that happened. They have to imagine maybe I should look into it and like into my lap drop, I think three of the best characters I've ever had. So I thought, and that thought that I can just follow these characters and let the characters just take me wherever they go, followed by another one that the characters have already given me my ending. And that was because because around June they basically said, it's over here that you know this thing is now we failed, and the story of the beginning of the pandemic was in a way the story of the pandemic for them, and that the end of the story for them was there's another one coming. This is one, but there's another one coming. So when I had that kind of stake in the distance to navigate too and I knew that the characters what was going to happen from kind of June July on. With the characters, who's going to be of kind of peripheral importance to the story. It was a matter of some indifference the details, the details that followed. How did they drop into a lap? Charity Deane, for example, absolutely marvelous character. And you haven't often sented a book on a female character. It was really interesting to see you do it in this case. Can you tell me how you came upon her? So before I do, I gotta ask you, Geraldine, can I write a woman? Certainly write this one? All right? So Charity is the last bit of the story did fall into place. When I meet Charity, I know I have a book. The other two are very important, are the two main characters, and they came in the following order. Five years ago I wrote Flashboys, and a San Francisco money manager asked me to go to dinner, and I thought it was to talk about Flashboys, and because he was a friend of the friend, I went and when I got there, he kind of grabbed me by the dollar and said, I have a character you were going to write a book about, which, of course I thought, these are false pretenses, and he says, isn't. His name is Joe Dici, and Joe Ici is a biochemist and kind of like badass virus hunter at UCSF, And so he wouldn't let me leave until I said, I'd go have a sandwich with Joe Dici. And I went and at a sandwich with Joe Dici, and I said, oh my god, he is a character. I'd love to write about him, but I got a d in biology my sophomore year in high school. I have no chops for this subject. There's no real connection with anything I've done. I would I don't even know how to do it. But we started a relationship, and so he would come back to him, but he was there already, and he ends up being very important. The second thing that happened was when our kids got tossed out of school, and I realized, this is like something I need to pay attention to. I called my jungle guide for the previous book. The fifth risk, his name's Max Styre and he should be the most famous man in America. But he has eight hundred and thirty two Twitter followers, and I can't I can't figure it out. But he is engaged in this quixotic, passionate quest to fix the federal government from outside the federal government. And as a result of this quest, he has gotten to know more about the federal government than anyone on the planet. And I called him and he said, if you're going to write about this, you got to talk to my uncle. Who's your uncle. His name is Richard Danzig. He was a former US Navy secretary. He said, my uncle's just passionate on this subject of pandemics, and he knows more about it than anybody. So I called him, and Richard Danzig says, no, no, no, no, it's not me you need to talk to You need to meet the Wolverines. Who the hell are the Wolverines. And the Wolverines turn out to be this like secret group of seven doctors who've known each other for fifteen years, who worked in the White House and are positioned all over American Medical society, who turned out to be like the single best group of people whose eyes to watch the event through. So that gets me to Carter Mesher, who's the kind of the Savonne in the Wolverines group. And here at this point, it's sort of like maybe this is a book like I've got Wolverines, I've got Joe Ici, I've got a backstory about how pandemic preparedness came about. All this stuff. They all Joe Ici, three wolverines, and a former member of the Obama administration who I was talking to too, who is helping Gavin Newsom build a computer model to analyze what was going on in California. All said, you gotta meet this woman named Charity Dean because she's she's like, she's the one who knows in the whole state of California. So I sent an email to the California state government and they wrote back and said, Charity Deane has no interest in talking to you. And I took that at face value for about three weeks, and I thought, like, why wouldn't she want to talk to me? You know, that's odd. So I got her cell phone number and she's I got on the phone, she said, who said, I don't want to talk to you? And that that was the beginning of a of a relationship. So that's how the characters fell into my lap. And then the fact that they all kind of come together in some way that was that was Lanya. I didn't plan on that, I must say. When I got to the Wolverines in the book, I was reminded of Mark Twain, who said fiction must be plausible. Truth needn't be that's the advantage. That's why I can't write fiction, because I'm much better with things that seem Why would you? Why would you? Why? You don't need to make it up. But tell us a little bit about Charity Deane and her struggles. So Charity Dean first, the character first, the person she grows up. She's the Taro Westover story, and that she grows up in a evangelical rural community that raises girls to breed children and nothing else. She's pulled out a science classes whenever like evolution comes up. She is told she shouldn't go to college by the church elders. The church runs the family life. She lives in fear of them at the same time, from a very early age, partly because of the biblical passages about the plague, partly because missionaries come from Africa and talk about diseases in Africa, partly just her own curiosity. From like the age at ten, she starts to get obsessed with disease, with communicable disease on her own, like for fun, reading books about the bubonic plague, making like styrofoam models of viruses, and hanging in from her ceiling. She's like on a collision course with an education in microbiology and has to fight to get it. She gets a lot of grief for going to college. She finds a scholarship, She grows with real poverty. She gets basically excommunicated from the church when she does so well in medical school that the husband that the church has wanted her to marry says he's not getting enough of her attention. So she leaves the husband and she continues with the medical degree, and it walks the walk. She goes to Africa and gets malaria while she's treating people, so she ends up in Santa Barbara in her during her residency and discovers this role called the local public health officer, which she didn't actually know existed, and neither did I, but there was. There's this person who has this job to, among other things like you know, making sure we don't get sick in restaurants or in swimming pools, also control communicable disease, and from that moment she's collided with like the things she was put on earth to do. And what interested me about her as a character, Like what kind of like instantly riveted me was when you went to her house, the walls were all decorated with various signs, all trying to remind her of basically who she needed to be, and all of them one way or another. We're telling her you need to be brave person. Now that was a message that she had internalized from time she was very young. But she has to relearn the lesson when she becomes a local public health officer because she's constantly in the position of doing things that cause controversy political or social, that put her job on the line, and she has no backup. The CDC is not there to help. In fact, their CDC is often there to obstruct. Local politicians got their fingers in the wind. And as she said, after a couple of years of doing this job, her model, her mantra became no one's coming to save me. So but at the character thing that was so great and like runs through the book, is that it's not that she's fearless. She's full of fear. Like she has more fear than eight people put together. She fights the fear. It's sort of like this willed bravery. She sees this thing as like bravery, as an acquired trait, and practices it in disease control. The act of having practice it for some long period of time builds these muscle memories and these six senses about what to do when. So, in a way, at a very local level, is being created the kind of character you would want fighting a pandemic. But she's she's the low person on the totem pole. She says, no status, no one recognizes her. So I could kind of go on and on. Why don't I hit a pause button right there? On Charity Deane, Right, I think you've given us exactly the right level of introduction to be intrigued by her that I do want you to do the same for Joe DREESI, And I'm going to point you at what I would like you to tell. Oh, All right, coming back to Jodoreesi. He hunts viruses wherever they appear, not just in people, and he's been so effective at it. He gets very weird call. He calls his phone, the red phone. It says, like when there's some problem in the world and someone has that no one's figured it out. They usually called the red phone, and the call to the Red phone in this case took the form of a letter he received from a woman who was kind of scantily clad apparently, and had a boa constrictor around her neck. And she said that Joe Ici that her boa constrictor was named mister Larry, and she was now terrified for the life of mister Larry because boas everywhere we're dying of some strange disease. It's a tribute to jod Erici that he didn't just throw the letter away, but it sat on his desk for like six months because he thought it was so strange. And then finally, like one day when he had a moment, he called someone who might know is like a veterinarian or so he knew, and said, is it true that these boas are dying? And he said, yeah, zoos are having problems all over the place. And so thus begins Joe Jice's quest to figure out this snake pandemic. You can take whatever that what I'm about to do say and just poured it right onto human pandemics. But he's created a technology which is now evolved since he created it to take the genetic material from any living creature, separate out what belongs in that creature, its own DNA from whatever happened else happens to be inside, like a virus. To do this, of course, you need to know the genome of the animal. So there is the human genome project that's happened, right, The snake genome project actually never happened, so he had to create this first. He starts by creating the Snake Genome Project and sequencing the genome of snakes so he knows what their genetic material is. Then he goes to the San Francisco Aquarium and gets some boas and some pythons and extracts DNA and then he pulls out he puts it on his chip and he finds, oh lo, and behold, oh my god, these boas have this other thing in them. They both have this other thing in them that quite possibly be causing an incredible illness. It's an adenovirus. My biology is shaky, but it's a virus that he said. It's an ancestor of ebola. It's got Ebola in it. It's kind of a curious thing, he said. It's actually been detected in dinosaurs, so that it's that old a virus, So then he has to prove that this is what's killing the boas. And the way you prove that a virus as there is creating the disease is you get a healthy animal and you inject it with the virus. So he distills the virus and he goes with three post docs into the San Francisco is getting absurd, I know, but this is it gets better. Did the San Francisco aquarium When you tell the story, sis, do you know how you inject a snake with a virus? And I know? He says, well, you have to inject them in the heart because the veins either don't exist or they're hard to find. And the heart. The problem with the snake's heart is it moves up and down the body, so you need a Doppler radar. You need one post doc holding the Doppler radar, other ones holding the snake, which isn't happy, and someone else to plunge the needle into the snake's heart. So they do this with pythons and with boas, and sure enough, the boas get ill and die, just as they're doing around the world. But the pythons survive even though they've got signs of the virus in them when he first tests them. Well, that's where it gets really interesting because he can now tell zoo directors when you get a new boa, you've got to isolate him and test him for this virus. But the question is why are these pythons surviving. They're an older species, and he has the idea that, oh my god, they're surviving this thing that's very like ebola. We've never found the reservoir species of ebola in the way that the like covid has a reservoir species of bats, and the reservour species of species in which the thing replicates it doesn't kill, so it happily survives. He says. They've they've they've exported, you know, zoos of animals out of Africa and tested them for a Bola to see if they can find this species that's harboring abola. He says, maybe it's pythons. So any other human being would have left their research at the point where they find the virus and identify the pandemic. Joe like takes it always tastes it like eight steps further, he calls the Maximum Security US Army Lab in Maryland and says, I want to inject pythons with the live ebola virus and see if they survive and then if the virus then replicates inside them, because I think maybe we've found the reservoir species. And he said, what came back? It was like a bizarre request, but it was from a MacArthur Genius Award winning person at UCSF, so they have to listen to it. They say it takes like months for them to get through all their checklist about what might go wrong, and he says, like on the checklist, it's like what happens is after you have injected the snake with the ebolavirus, if you leave the room and come back and the cage is open and the snake is gone, just says you run like hell, you know it's but they finally do it. They finally do it. Some incredibly intrepid researcher in Maryland gets live ebola, like if he scratches himself, he's a garner, injects it into the heart of a live python, and sure enough the snake lives, and they're just at the moment they have to ask the last question in that snake is the bowl of virus replicating, and at just that moment, the CDC shut down the research project because they said the lab was engaging in unsafe practices, so they never got the final answer. And it bothers Joe immensely. And that it bothers Joe Emsley tells you a lot about what you need to know about Joe. Well, that is the perfect segue from the here I love the way your mind works to the villains of the piece. We'll get back to those villains right after this. Okay, back to the interview. Geraldine just asked Michael about the villains in the book, and there was one line that I don't use highlighter on books. I'm just not that kind of a girl. But if I did, I would have run a highlighter over it. And that was Lisa Coonan at the CDC when she says it had to be so right, it was not wrong. Yeah, this leads us into the failures of the CDC. Can you talk about that. Yeah, Now, Lisa Coonan is a lifelong CDC employee. She's now moved on and has got her own consulting firm, but she was devoted to the institution. So this is this is not a CDC critic who's saying this is just like someone who is observed her colleagues. And what I think all of my characters find just in the course of their leading their lives, is that the institution, whatever it once was, has evolved into something that is not equipped to fight a disease, to control a disease, because controlling a disease is controversial and political, and it also requires a kind of clairvoyance that if you wait until the first person in the United States has died of COVID to announce that COVID's a problem in the United States, in that time, the virus has replicated exponentially and it's all over the place. You need to act before the anybody sees the danger. And that's controversial and requires a kind of leadership. And what Charity Deane first and foremost discovered was whenever she was in a hot situation where there was a decision needed to be made and lives were on the line, and it happened over and over and over again. The CDC is meant to be her backup. They're there to support the three thousand local health officers in the country, but the CDC would come on the line and basically say in so many words, you're fired if this goes wrong. No, no one's ever closed a doctor's clinic because they suspect the needles are dirty. And that's why everybody in Santa Barbara has HEPC. You know, no, no, we won't authorize changes on the campus of UCSB after one kid gets meningitis, even though he's about to lose his legs, because there's no evidence that what you're proposing works, even though it makes a lot of sense. So when she said no one's coming to save me, she met the CDC and she got to the point with them organically, I mean organically, and I said that because when she starts her career, the CDC are kind of like gods to her. She thinks that that maybe her lifetime ambition is to be the head of the Sea DC. But over and over she has these encounters that leader to the position that she has to ban the CDC from her investigations in order to save lives and push their life. She says about the CDC, she said, I was just so disappointed that the man behind the curtain turned out to be such a pansy, and that she just felt they were cowardly when they were dealing with these situations. It's really tragic because I think if you if you look around the wall to where did this go right? You look, I look at Australia being Australian, and you know there's essentially no COVID in Australia and why because the dude who was in charge was trained at the CDC, yes, twenty years ago. He goes he comes back to Australia and he has a pandemic plan that he learned at the CDC, and he jumps into action and he's supported by the political leadership to do it, contact tracing, massive testing, and they shut the disease down in this ja. Yeah. No, So the ironies get richer and thicker the more the more of this story. You know, America eventually especially invented the strategies being used around the world, and the CDC exported them and then didn't embrace them itself. To finish the punchline on almost all of Charity Deane's local health officers stories is that a year after she does all the things she ends up doing to shut down a meningitis outbreak on the UCSB campus, she gets a call from a college health officer in another state saying, we are having an Vanegitius outbreak, and the CDC said to call you because you know what to do. And the problem was that clearly the institution had changed in a direction, and the direction was, let's avoid political controversy. We're on a short leash with the White House, and let's stake our reputation on the quality of our academic work. So everything has to be right. So the problem is is that that's good for academic work, but if you were fighting and disease in real time, you can't wait for the data. If you wait for the data, it's over. And so that cover of we're perfect, we don't make mistakes ends up being excused not to do anything. And what happened in this country was one of my main characters. Carter Mesher on Deane January the twentieth establishes to the satisfaction of experts, and he's probably not the only one, but it's kind of amazing he did it that the transmissibility and the lethality of this virus in Wuhan, with its implications for the United States population. But it's not till a month later on February twenty third, that the CDC acknowledges it, and in those five weeks a lot of lives were lost down the road because of that inaction, that inability to stand up and start to explain to the people what's going on. So it's a messy story because you got the CDC's natural inclinations compounded by Donald Trump. It's not just you know that they do have a bit of an excuse, but it's not it's not a good enough excuse. One of the most jaw dropping examples is the people who were evacuated from Moohan. The Americans who are evacuated some unbeliefs. Unbelievable, right, I mean, and I left out stuff, and it's also damning. So it's so Americans are repatriated. They're repatriated to Omaha, Nebraska, which sounds strange, except there's this federal medical facility that specializes in handling weird and terrifying illness. So if you get a bowl, there's a fair chance that's where you land. So there, I don't have any of them, adia of them or whatever it was. They were a bunch of them, and they're housed in the National Guard barracks near this facility. The man who runs this facility is a wolverine, is one of the wolverines. His name is James Lawler, and Lawler reasonably wants to test these people for COVID. He says, there's like no chance there's not COVID in there, and reasonably all of these Americans want to be tested for COVID. But Lawler has to ask the CDC. CDC has the test, the test that they're going to distribute far and wide is doesn't work. But you could send samples to Atlanta and they could give you an answer. So he asked the nearest CDC guy, who bounces it all the way up the chain of command. This request to Robert Redfield himself, director of the CDC, who apparently goes ballistic and says, under no circumstances are they to test those people? And Lawler says, what do you mean, like why? And the answer he gets is, if you test them, it would be performing an experiment on imprisoned persons. Now, that's clearly not the reason they didn't test them. There were clearly must have been other motives and whether it was uncertainty about their test, a desire not to find the disease, because if you found it, it it would just alarm people who knows, like why. But the fact they don't do it is of a piece with the rest of the strategy. I mean people flying in from China back from other parts of China to a whole bunch of other airports. And these were just eighty people. These were thousands of people go through Lax and Atlanta or Chicago or wherever they land, and they're supposed to be checked up on, followed, tested and traced when the local public health officials go to the cd the CDC's managing the events at the airport. When they go to the CDC to ask like, where's Joe Smith, you know who just left Lax they have listed as his residents Lax, they can't find any of these people. So it was I'm not sure how differently you would behave if you were trying secretly to spread the disease in the country. Then the CDC actually behaved, Which is not to say that's what they were doing, but you kind of do something like this, you'd say, all we have a test for it, and nobody else can test even though we've got the most microbiology labs that can spin up into COVID testing centers in three days. No, you're not allowed to do that. You have to use our test. It's coming, it's coming. Oops, it's broken. Nope, we're gonna fix it up. It's coming, it's coming up. It's broken again. Don't wear masks. Yeah. Meanwhile, don't wear masks, but really clean all those surfaces. It's like someone from the various cleaning products companies went to them said, man, let's make sure that that everybody knows it's scary to touch the counter that fomites, but which turned out to be not a thing. So it's it's the bad news bears. So theyre great irony about all this and that institution, which I'm sure is filled with great people. Right, it's a case of institutions screwing up. But is that they were so obsessed with preserving their reputation that they lost their reputation. We'll be back right after this break. So first of all, I want to ask you how did that conversation go when you called up for an interview with the CDC. So it went this way. So here we are two things that happened. First, I had I had a dry run of this with the other federal institutions under Trump. Because I wrote the fifth risk and so I was in I was in a peculiar position because I found that what happened before is if I called and asked just the Trump communication person in the place, they obstructed me. They made it harder for me to get to who I needed to talk to. So I had a mole who was in the CDC, who was at direct connections to the leadership. So instead of going to the Trump communication person, I went to the mole, and the moles the mole guided me to a few off the record conversations which proved extremely useful in a couple of ways. One with especially with old timers. They could they led me back to the diagnosis of the problem of the CDC that that story back in the eighties where the institution changes, but also led me to the conclusion that all these people are ashamed. They're all embarrassed that the individually they are not happy with their institution. But at the same time, basically they were shut down. The only person I ever got the right to talk to and I did actually, and then they had to go through the official channels to talk to me. Was and this is apropos what you just said about Australia. The CDC director in Cambodia, it took four months for him to get approval. But I had noticed the same thing as Cambodia, as Australia, that they had contained the virus because they had this brilliant CDC guy on the ground there doing what the CDC knew how to do, but not they weren't doing. They were doing outside gotting Michael Kinser and I eventually, you know, way too late, like weeks before the book was going to the publisher, got a chance to talk to him, but only after Trump was out in Biden was in. So I think this all points to like a bigger thing that if the federal government is ever going to reposition itself in the minds of ordinary Americans, the communication strategy needs to change. It needs to be much more open. Because it was virtually I was trying to tell in the end a nice story about what they were doing in Cambodia, and they wouldn't even really let me do that much less get to the guy ahead of the flu division in Atlanta. So it was just it was a story of sneaky reporting and obstruction. So when you were a portioning blame, I saw that you gave thirty seven and a half. Actually it was thirty seven point six. Thirty seven point six, right, And I was just, you know, I don't think what I think is all that interesting on this subject. I think that what my characters think is very interesting. And they led me away from the story that I thought I was going to tell. If my theory of the case was the you could lay this all at the feet of the Trump administration, and even you know, good liberals who were in the middle of disease warfare were saying to me, you'd be an idiot to do that, because if you just look at what we were, where we were before Trump, there has been institutional rot and institutional structure that had made it very difficult to deal with this. It would have been better. You know, you can like maybe two hundred thousand lives belonged to Donald Trump, our deaths, but it's it's not the whole thing, and it's not that if you're going to go about trying to fix it permanently, it's almost a distraction. I mean, let put this. This is how much my mind changed before I even wrote the fifth risk, which was about you know this the mouthfieves so the Trump administration. Partly, I thought, no book is going to make any difference, Like, I'm not going to bother writing the book. I need to find some creative way to get across how threatened we are by this approach to government. And I talked Time Styre, him and his brother Jim, great guys quite like them. They were willing to fund something I was going to call the Trump Death Clock. That was going to be a billboard in Times Square that would scroll the number of deaths that could be attributed to Donald Trump by his mismanagement of the risks that the federal government manages. And this was in twenty seventeen. So my brain was wired to think this is all Donald Trump, and my experience ended up telling me no, my brain is wrong. This is actually much more complicated than Donald Trump. So when asked how much he is to blame, I think that's about the right number. Well, that leads me to the question of was this bad enough to teach us the lessons that we needed to learn. Before I answer it, you answered, I don't think it was. Because of the the nature of this society needs to change. I mean, Charity Deane doing her level best couldn't even keep one tubercular guy in quarantine. So I think we you know, I think we need re education camps. Basically, I'm kind of with you, and I have an idea of what they might look like. They're gonna have to be kind of four star re education camps. They don't have to be comfortable. But it's I thought. Weirdly, I was asked right before the pandemic by a reporter, so it's in print what I thought it would take for the society to change its attitudes, And weirdly, I said, a pandemic in which the rich work exposed equally, where rich and powerful people saw their children die just like poor people, and that it would take that kind of existential threat where people who actually have, you know, some say in how the society is organized, realize the doom they've signed up for if they keep going the way they're going. So this thing happens, and it rhymes with what I said, but it's not the same thing because the rich got to take a basically a pass, not everybody. But it was not terrifying all that terrifying if you could hold up in your mansion and let poor people go to their jobs and expose themselves. It was had it been threatening to children, that might that might have done it right. Yes, it's different. It's easier for people to tell themselves a story that happens to other people. If you had a disease like nineteen eighteen, where it's sweeping through the population and everybody's exposed and young people are dying, I think you get a different response out of the society. This is not the ending you would wish for. But I think it's true that I think two things at once are true. One, it wasn't quite what you would need to change the society. It wasn't quite the trauma. On the other hand, it was sufficiently traumatic that I do see some change. I think enough people have had a brush with tragedy that there is a different foot feeling in the air, and you're seeing it in the way Biden's it's the way bow Biden's able to move through the world in the sort of the nature of the resistance on the other side feels a little different to me than it did during the Obama administration. Do you think it's the end of the grovenoquist shrink government to the size that you can drown it in a bathtub era. I do. I do think that. I don't think that's going to play anymore. I think enough people had this like a lesson about that. But I think you're right. We're not going to have a clean solution, and there is a kind of re education that needs to occur. I mean it starts with like reintroducing civics into the classroom. I mean it's hypocritical because I didn't go through it, but if we did it, I'd be willing to do my two years of service. I think we ought to have two years of national service and young people just do it where they get to meet and work with people from different social classes, get to go work cleaning up nuclear waste for the Department of Energy, so they know they know something about what their government is doing, and they know there's valuable and they have a visceral kind of connection to it. I think those things are necessary before the society who starts to really change and stop putting political appointees at the head of the CDC, or put it another way, if you're going to leave them as political appointees, all right, for whatever reason, you can't change that. We're gonna have four thousand and something presidential appointees running the government. How about you change it so that they their terms are ten to fifteen years. General Accounting Office. Oddly, the head of that is a presidential appointee. The term is fifteen years. The surveys of the employees of that operation routinely our returned saying I have extremely high job satisfaction. My work is purposeful, our place is well run. That if you have kind of homeowners rather than home renters at the top of these organizations, you get a different kind of incentive for the leaders. Instead of managing for whatever the crisis might political crisis might be for the next two years, you're managing for the long run, and you get you get a CDC where, look, actually a pandemic might happen on my watch, because my watch is going to be a pretty long watch. You get a different relationship. The leaders know the institution in a different way. So, yes, that would be another reform. So you were saying that you want very good at biology in school, and you didn't take SIVIX, but you you were an art historian. And before we leave this conversation, we look at history backward, and we live it forward, and we write because we know the end of the story, but we don't know the end of our own story. And I'd like you to revisit the Michael Lewis who at Princeton was writing about Donna Tello and the antique and who was going to be an historian, and tell us how you got from there to hear Well. It wasn't until I was writing that thesis that I thought I loved doing this thing called writing, and had never any notion of myself as a writer, like I didn't write for school papers, and no English teacher ever thought I was especially able, just the opposite. But I got absorbed with this particular project, and I first confused that as a desire to be an art historian, I want to write art history books. And my thesis advisor actually said two funny things to me. Said One, you're not going to be an artist storian. That because there aren't going to be hard historians is basically what he said. We're going out of business here. There's no there're not gonna be any jobs. But I asked him during my thesis defense, I what he thought of the writing, because I was vain about it. You know, I'd gotten so absorbed with it. He was a perfect Princeton professor. He had a tweet jacket with patches on his elbow, and a pipe and salt and pepper mustache, and he pulls down his pipe and he says, put it this way, never try to make a living at it. And he didn't. That he didn't dissuade me shows just how much energy I had at that point. At that point, I just went off willy nilly. After I graduated from college, and I didn't care much about what job I had. I just was trying to have experiences and write about them and submit them to magazines. And it took two years before anybody published anything. They were lots of rejections. I did a no idea what I was doing. I didn't know any writers, basically, I mean, I didn't really have any kind of reason to think I should be doing this except I liked doing it. My favorite rejection was I went and spent some months ladling soup at the Bowery Mission and Young Men's Home. I'd do that after I got off of work, and it was just a volunteer job, and I got to know homeless people. They were clearly like different types of homeless people, and I thought how interesting it was, just how kind of cool and smart some of them were. And I started writing thing about the homeless and about destitution on the Bowery, and I looked through magazines about where you could submit things and you might get published if you weren't a published author, And apparently at that time in flight magazines like for Delta and American Airlines that it was like that was where you went. So I sent this thing about destitution and poverty in New York City, and I got these letters back from like the editor of Delta in Flight magazine saying, you know, it's really interesting, but which to get people to go to New York not So it really isn't for us. You know. The next experience you went in search up was working on Wall Well, so that and yeah, so that's it was kind of like I just there was a whole lot of accident in a period of a few years that ended with me with this job at Solomon Brothers and on Wall Street. And I started writing about Wall Street and that Delta in Fight magazine want to hear about that? Uh So that was the beginning of the career. I mean that really was the beginning of the career. Well, I'm very grateful to you for once having a long discussion with my son wanting him not to go to Wall Street. It only sort of worked, yes only, so, yes, that's the second one. It will work better. So how much of how much of your imagination do you attribute to having grown up in New Orleans? A lot, particularly since I grew up in a privileged in household. I think privileged elsewhere might have been a lot more deadly. Privilege to New Orleans was very messy in that it was the society was all mixed up, and I wasn't just spending lots of time with other rich people all the time, and I was with lots of different kinds of people, and not just economically but racially oddly, And the culture of New Orleans was such as it's not a literary culture. It's a verbal culture, but it's a storytelling culture, and there is some obligation when your mouth is open for it to be delivering something that's entertaining to the other person. Nobody really wants to hear about the weather, or they don't. They don't, They wouldn't even occur to them because the level of the expectations are so high about the pleasure that's going to occur between people when they interact, that you just do better. And I think that muscle of having to do better when you encounter someone is a very powerful thing. And I think it's kind of what happens when I sit down and write. I feel like I have to do better here than talk about the weather. I have a here's an odd New Orleans story that just popped into my head, and I remember thinking, when it's an anecdote. Two anecdotes about New Orleans, can I do this all right? One is I remember flying home. I was maybe like late twenties, and every time I flew home, I felt this like I'm going home. I mean, this is I love this place. It's just different. The people on the plane from Atlanta to New Orleans to just differ from all the other people on earth. They're a bunch of a lot of New Orleanians and there's just a festive atmosphere, and three guys walk in carrying like six phone books each, Like New Orleans just generates stories, like there's no explanation for why they have six phone books. They take all the overhead bin space with phone books, so there's no overhead bin space. So right behind them, I'm sitting down watching them come in. About right behind them, another dude comes and he's kind of a youngish guy. He looks up at the phone books and he looks at me and he smiles. He goes, he goes. Not much of a story, but it's got lots of characters, and it was he was a New Orleanian, and I thought, that's such a New Orleans moment, and it's also such a description of New Orleans. The other New Orleans story was right after Liar's Poker, my first book came out. I was all over national television, like David Letterman in a national television and all of a sudden is being recognized all the time on the streets. And I spent about a week or so doing having this happen to me. When I went home to New Orleans, and I got to my parents' house, still on the book tour, just staying with them, and my mother says, could you run over the Laginstein's and get this to hand me a grocery list? And so I went over the grocery store and it's a little local grocery store and I got a cart and I was pushing it down the aisle and there was a little old lady coming the other way and she starts to point, and I didn't recognize her, and I thought she saw me on Letterman or whatever. And she comes up right up close to me and she says, you're Malcolm and Rose grandson. And I said, yeah, how'd you know? She said, I saw it in your eyes. Those eyes are your grandfather's eyes. And that recognition, and it's the recognition that famous people get in a cheap way with their celebrity. New Orleanans get it in a very deep way because of the smallness and interconnectedness of the society. Like everybody's a celebrity. Everybody's kind of on stage, and that being on stage all the time, that's another muscle that's useful. Well, may you always stay on stage. And Michael Lewis's new book is called The Premonition. You can buy it wherever books are sold. Season three of Against the Rules will be out in the fall. Against the Rules as a production of Pushkin Industries. Sign up for Pushkin's newsletter at pushkin dot fmp de. Find more Pushkin podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.