Next Question with Katie CouricWhat if the government workers we often overlook are actually heroes? In this eye-opening conversation, Katie sits down with Michael Lewis to explore the unseen work of civil servants who keep our country running—often under relentless attack. They discuss why these jobs have become political targets, what’s at stake when expertise is lost, and how our perceptions of government have been shaped. Drawing from his new book, Who Is Government?, Michael shares eye-opening stories of the people behind the policies—offering a fresh perspective on the critical role they play and why their work matters more than ever.
Hi everyone, I'm Kitty Kuric, and this is next question. I love talking with Michael Lewis. He has this incredible ability to zoom in on one person's story and from there reveals something much bigger about our culture. His books leave you seeing the world differently, and his books about federal workers are no exception. So why has the federal government gotten such a bad rap? Why are the workers often maligned even demonized? After all, they're described with words like the deep state and the swamp. Michael Lewis feels very differently after writing about a group of these civil servants, first in The Fifth Risks and now in a new book of essays called Who Is Government? This time Lewis and a powerhouse lineup of writers turn their attention to people who are some of the unsung heroes of our society actually making government work, even though Elon Musk and his posse of doge dudes made beg to differ. Here's my conversation with Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis, you must have a crystal ball, because Who Is Government? The untold story of public service could not be more timely. Now I know this is a continuation of sorts of your twenty eighteen book called The Fifth Risk. You examined the transition and political appointments of the first Trump administration, But what made you decide to do another deep dive into the federal government?
So there are two reasons. The good literary argument was at the end of The Fifth Risk, I had to go back and write it afterward for the paperback, and I thought to myself that I'd done a lot to describe the functions of government in that book, but I had not really dwell gone deep on a person really, and I thought might be fun to just go deep on one of our old bureaucrats. And I basically picked a name out of a jar. I mean, it's a long story how I picked the guy, but it was just it was kind of random, and the story. He ended up being an oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Department who had had this quite dramatic encounter with the death of a young woman and her and her daughter that it caught, I mean, it was avoidable. Had they under the Coastguard understood how objects drifted at sea, they kind of knew where they had capsized in the Testapeake Bay. They knew like how the currents were and stuff, but they were upside down on a sailboat and nobody had ever measured how a sailboat drifted at sea. This guy, my subject guard Allen, was so disturbed by the fact that they these two people died because they didn't know how the object had drifted since they discovered they were gone, that he went and created basically a whole science of how objects drifted sea. And it was it was such a he was such an amazing story. I mean, it's a movie his story that I thought, like, if I ever come back to this, I want to come back to the people, because because the stereotype of the of the bureaucrat or whatever you are, the deep state or whatever you want to call him, he was such a He was a mission driven, selfless giver of a person who was also ingenious in how he'd solved a critical problem that has saved thousands of lives. So I thought, if I ever come back to this, I'm gonna see what more of this there is in our government. So that was the first the literary reason. It is like this material here because the people, the way people think of these people, they don't they're faceless. They don't put a face to them, so they're easy to knock around in when you're by politicians, by media, by whoever. Uh. The second reason was I was just astonished after especially after Trump won and then neglect of the federal government during that administration, that the Democrats never offered a full throated like defense or even an explanation of like where are taxpayer dollars? Go, like what is it actually doing? And who are these people? That they never kind of came out and said, like, there's a reason we have this government. So no one ever sold the government. So I thought like there was so there are all these stories that just didn't get told. So the idea, So I thought, like the world needs to understand some of these stories, and so they don't think it's just like Michael Lewis bloviating with his views of government, blah blah blah. I'm going to pick six other writers and it's not going to just be me. It's going to be seven really distinctive personalities on the page, and I'm going to just like drop them into the government, say find a story, could you know, find a story and write up and so much of the book ran in the weeks. About seven eighths of the book ran in the weeks running up to the election in the Washington Post. Weird long pieces. I mean, my longest piece is thirteen thousand words, and it was so powerful the effect, but for a very small audience, because it was like the Washington Post and behind a paywall, and it was pretty obvious these things should They were a coherent hole and they should be collected. But of course, having said that, no one had any I did. Donald Trump was going to be the president of the United States and be doing what he's doing to the federal government where we wrote these things.
In fact, in the Washington Post opinion series where the essays in this new book originated, they received four times the session's average readership. And you've said it was like, the country is hungering for an explanation of how government works.
Yeah, where do you.
Think that hunger is coming from? And why do you think the quote unquote bureaucracy, which is often said in a very pejoradaed way, it's so misunderstood.
Well, so remind me to answer the second part of that question, because that's the longer and interesting answer. But the hunger in the first place, we just don't get stories very many stories about the government, or when we get them, they're in the form of some poor civil servants hall in front of Congress to be ritually humiliated for some mistake they made. And I do think I don't know this is true, but I've been told it's true that there has been just to kind of decline in civics education in the country. Like the Civics course you got in the eighth of the ninth grade is not as widely taught anymore, are not taught in the same way. So you know, just like how a bill becomes a law, that kind of stuff just doesn't get into kids' brains.
We need Schullhouse rock part too.
Yeah, it's something like that. No, it's kind of true. But the second part of this is like these people who work in these jobs are one forbidden from promoting themselves and they don't have time to do it anyway. Two, they're really not the kind of people who tell their own story. They're not self promoters. They're almost the opposite of self promoters. They give you a lit'll tell you a little anc though it's funny. When I went to write that piece about the first the first deep dive I did in a single person. Arthur Allen was his name, the oceanographer of the Coast Guard. I called him up, said I want to come talk to you about what you've done. Without knowing really much about what he'd done, spent three days with him, with his wife, his kids, you know, interviewing people around him, three full days with him. At the end of three days, I was driving back to the airport and he calls my cell phone. He says, says, hey, you're a writer. And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm a writer. Well you think you know? I sit there with a notepad for three days taking notes, and I know. I said I was a writer when I called you. He says, but my son says that like you've written books that have become movies, like you're like big time. And I said, well, don't know if I'm big time, but I am a writer. And he says, you're going to write about this, and I said, yeah, I'm I going to write about this. What do you think I was doing there for three days? And he said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift, And I thought, this is the mind of someone He's so different from like the investment banker you go to interview. He's so oblivious, he's interested in his expertise. He's very narrow, he's not thinking like how he appears to the world. He's open to help people who come to him for help, but not thinking at all, like I was going to turn him into some celebrity and didn't know what to do with it or care that they're that way. So they don't project. So someone has to go project them for us because they won't do it themselves. And there's a built in problem in the government. The politicians and I hate to say, I hate to use that word as a pejorative, but it is just true that people who are campaigning and running for elective office find it very useful to be negative about the civil service and to blame them for their or when problems occur. But there's not really any upside for giving them credit. It's like the politicians want the credit. So the people who are junior class senior class president types who are out there waiving at the crowds, have no real interest in selling the mechanism of the government. And I think we all kind of know, you know, the government we sent in the back of our minds. This government is doing something. You know, it's it's kind of magical. You get you turn on the tap and you get cold water you can drink. You know, that's that doesn't just happen and it comes from like a reservoir from three hundred miles away or that you know, Uh, the weather is predictable seven days out. Used to be not predictable at all. Ah, that happened. It just becomes like the the infrastructure of our lives. And I think until it's threatened, you just it's like your parents. Until they're threatened, you just think, well, they're there, Thank God, they're there. Maybe, but I'm not going to pay much attention to them. But the minute it becomes like, oh crap, they're going to take it away, even if it's just a hint of that, people kind of wake up and go, oh, oh, oh, I need maybe I need to know about this.
You illuminated, Michael, why people don't appreciate the federal government, why they often take it for granted. But it's even worse than that. There's an enduring, an entrenched negative stereotype in our culture about civil servants that they're stupid, and lazy, as you describe it. How did that happen? I know that they're not good at telling their stories or blowing their own rams horns like politicians are. But where do you think this negative perception comes from?
I mean, I think it's a it's a it's like a it's a complicated question to answer, but I mean, most most obviously, they don't do the thing that we value in this culture, which is make money. They don't. They don't have they're not successful people. They're not famous people. They're not you know, they're not there. So they don't have that going for them. They're also they're vulnerable because the enterprise they work for is most complicated enterprise ever created on in the history of the university, the United States government, and they're spending now seven trillion dollars a year there, and they're bound to be problems. You know. It's just sort of like they're bound to be mistakes made, and when they're made, it's sort of it's sort of like it's assumed no mistakes will be made, and when they're made, they get exposed and ridiculed and all the rest. You know, Why else is it this one? I mean, you know, I haven't really thought too much about how this why Ronald Reagan could roll in, you know, forty five years ago or whatever it was fifty years ago and say the most you know, dangerous words in the English languages, I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.
Didn't he also say that the government is the problem.
Yeah, and the government, you know, there's this fantasy you take it away and everything's going to be better, And the truth is, you don't have markets without the government, you don't have an awful lot of our economic growth is driven by government private partnerships. But what you all, you know, this is part of the reason they're so easy to beat up on is a lot of what they're doing is prevention. Like a lot of what they're doing is stopping things from happening. And when you stop something from happening, you don't get credit. You get credit when you come after the bad thing has happened. So there's an awful lot of work that's out there, I don't know, stopping someone from getting a bomb on a plane. Who do you think is doing that? I can tell you who's doing that. There's a lab called a Livermore lab that's like forty miles from my house, where they are constantly experimenting with different sort of chemicals and ingredients to see what you might be able to make a bottom of. And as they whenever they find something new, they program those machines that you put your bag through to detect those things. And you don't see any of it. But if they weren't there, you would notice. You know, the FAA right, your plane doesn't crash if it doesn't, you know, air safety is a you know, a miracle of modern life. It's the government. But you're not getting credit for the plane not crashing, so a lot I think that's also part of it. It's sort of easy to beat up on them because there's a lot of their work is preventive, a lot of it is just keeping us safe. And as I say, they're just not doing the thing that's celebrated in the culture, which is make money.
Meanwhile, the administration, as you know, I've thought about you often with these DOGE government cuts, but even before DOGE was created, they have not only encouraged this stereotype as bureaucrats or government workers being stupid and lazy and extraneous, if you will, but they've turned it into something more sinister. Let me give you a quote that jd Vance said on a podcast in twenty twenty one. If I was giving Trump one piece of advice, it's fire every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people.
So it's just such a misconception of who these people are in the first place, because it's probably true that the government workers generally probably tilt more left than right, but their politics are very hard to predict. You'd be surprised who they voted for, I think. But the bigger point is most of what they're doing is so nonpartisan. It's like it's it's stuff that the Congress has allocated money for because it's problems that needed to be dealt with, and they're dealing with them. And the list is like endless of what these problems are. But you know, you know about air safety, but like there's all this stuff you don't see. Rural America, for example, is propped up by the Agriculture Department. Like there wouldn't be firehouses and schools and all they would It would be a wasteland without the spending from the Agriculture Department. And that's something you can argue that we shouldn't have, but that argument's been had by Congress, and it's authorized. The money and the people who are the people who are in there working are they're just trying to execute tasks and and like, how is it, how is it partisan to like make sure nuclear weapons don't explode when they they they shouldn't explode. It's just it's such a misapprehendsion of what that enterprise is and what they're doing. It's interesting because what they're doing is accusing the existing workforce of being essentially political, like their deep state. They're out to get us, when in fact that it's not who they are. But what they're trying to do is turn it into something. It's very political. It's out to get the other side. And it's taking fifty thousand jobs and turning them from career civil service jobs to essentially patronage jobs that the Trump administration can appoint not based on expertise, but based on loyalty.
How dangerous is that replacement in your view.
It's dangerous on a couple of levels. It's very dangerous, and it is one it's going to make the government a lot less effective because you're replacing people who actually know things with people who don't and their main qualification is they're just loyal with Donald Trump. That's not a good place to start when you're solving complicated problems. But it's dangerous in another way that if you actually succeed in turning the federal government into what Trump advance say, it is, turning it into this political weapon, it's hard to know. You know, it's from there to like no democracy is a half step, and so it's dangerous on that level too, and it'll have this knock on effect. And this is the knock on effect of a lot of Republican rhetoric is you know, you disable, you villainize this enterprise that's there to serve us all, you make it less effective at what it's supposed to do. And then you could point to it and say, look how ineffective it is, Like the problem is government. Well, no, the problem is how you run the government. The problem is in government.
If you want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot Com. I'm curious how you feel this kind of rhetoric, things like weaponizing or demonizing the deep state, how that erodes the public trust in our government and institutions in general.
I mean, I'm trying to think of some equivalent. Where can you think of a product or a service or that is just all it gets is negative publicity, and it's like there's like a publicity machine designed to undermine it, and that's all people here. I mean, it's just there's no question that public there is this reflexive public opinion, especially on the right, but not just on the right, that like, oh, it's just government's waste, government's fraud. So this would attracted me to somebody in the first place, is I don't have any big stake in government. I just saw that wasn't true because I wanted around the government and saw what was there. And what's what's what's shocking about it is whatever people believe because of what they've heard from casual this kind of casual loose talk. The opposite is kind of true that if you're looking for waste or fraud, you were so much more likely to find it in a private sector company than you are in a in a government agency, especially fraud like that, that the places are on a hair trigger or alert for like people stealing money. You can't you know, you can't you when you're on Wall Street and you wanted to get business, you could, you know, take people to strip clubs and get them front row seats to watch the Mets and all that stuff. You can't buy a sandwich for someone who works in the federal government. That it is. So it is like and there and all around these places are watchdogs whose job is to prevent money from being stolen. And in fact, the first people the Trumpe administation fired were those watchdogs. So that tells you something about how much they care, actually care about the fraud. The waste is more complicated because it's true that, like there are some ways government does things that if you were starting from scratch, that's not how you do them. And there is, for sure ways to go in and make it work work somewhat better. But the way but the way to when that in that case, the way to go in is with an appreciation of why it works the way it is, because you're just gonna end up recreating with what was created. If you don't understand why it got the way it was. It's like, there are reasons, there are reasons. It's like there's analyst bureaucracy around contracting. You know, it's to revent the fraud kind of thing. And it's maddening how it's done because basically there's no trust. You know, it's a low trust environment. And in a low trust environment, it's a very inefficient environment. When you got to sign pieces of paper to get an extra box to take the paper clips, you're going to be less efficient. And if you can just go to the storeroom and take one. So there are problems there, but a lot of the wasteful problems will rise from the mistrust about the institution. It's been sown into the public mind by this rhetoric. I mean, let me ask you a question. You're asking me questions, but I want to ask you a question. Is it not if you just back away from it? Kind of weird that we're in a democracy where we elected people to do stuff, and these things that got done by the government. It's not like some autocrat did it. We the people did it, and that we view the these civil servants, the instruments of our will, as somehow our enemies, somehow like insiders trying to bring us down. It's a really odd thing for in a democracy for people to feel that way about their government. And anyway, I didn't have it, As I said, I came into this, I didn't have any particular view. I'm not like some screaming liberal. I like people who make money and none of that. It was just I could not believe like the heroism basically in the civil service, could not believe the quality of the people that were engaged in such critical stuff, like the society falls apart if they're not there. And I started pulling my hair out when I realized, like, oh, they've been doing this for thirty years and all they've heard is, you know, abuse from the outside. It just like there's something untrue about this. So my question for you is, how do you explain this, Like it just seems really odd.
I think that government workers for as long as I can remember, growing up in Arlington, Virginia, outside DC, where a lot of people did work for the government, I think there was an attitude that there was excess and redundancy and inefficiency in the federal government. And I think it's just been a stereotype that for whatever reason, has been baked in yes to our national consciousness, and that's but of course there are critical jobs. But I think that there has always been the impression, Michael, that there were extraneous jobs or jobs that weren't really necessary. And I think the very word bureaucracy has gotten, you know, has become a dirty word in the public's mind. And with bureaucracy it means unnecessary levels of maloney that you have to kind of get through. So I think all those things have kind of come together to make people feel fairly anti government. And I think to your point, we haven't heard enough stories about civil servants. And I also think there's something about having a job for life. You know, this is all just kind of things that when I was a kid growing up right outside DC, like that some jobs are protected like tenure, when other people are subjected to performance reviews, and there was a feeling of a meritocracy. When you've got in the civil service, you basically had a job for life. Yeah, I think that probably explained some of the negative things that I've heard about government workers.
Right, some of that's valid, and I can understand hostility towards tenure. Basically they don't exactly have tenure. You can fire a civil servant, you just have to have cause. But I think at the I do think at the bottom of this is some false kind of like false ideas that people have in their heads about what goes on inside the places and its relationship to the society. So if you ask people that most I bet most people say government just has been growing out of control. For example, like it has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Now it's true, our deficits have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. That's not the big generals, it's trunk. It's like the civil service, not the military. Fifty years ago was two point three million workers. It's still two point three million workers. The society is you know, forty percent bigger or whatever. So in relationship to the society, it is shrunk. So people can flate like government spending, which is a different thing on the government workforce. That the fact that Elon Musk, when he goes in to say to eliminate, to reduce, to cut two trillion dollars out of the budget deficit, he said, and eliminate all this inefficiency, finds himself cutting so he finds the cutting in such a this he cutting just the civil service. But it's such a small sliver of the actual spending that has almost no effect. I mean, eighty six percent of government spending is either interest payments on the debt, defense, or entitlements, So it's only fourteen percent of the budget that's these people anyway. So but that nobody says, oh, wait, he's doing he's trying to cut a big chunk out of the pie, but he's confined himself to a little slipper of the pie. This is impossible, it will never happen. Instead, people cheer and say, yeah, he's getting rid of all of that, and we're going to get rid of our deficits. It's just it's, I mean, we're ignorant. So here's another answer to your question, like, how did we come to this past? Why are these people so easily distorted by the political process so that people think of them differently than they actually are. The answer is, we've been afforded that luxury that we've lived through a very long period without great existential risk to ourselves. It hasn't been all peace and prosperity, but by world historic standards, a lot of peace and prosperity. We don't wake up thinking our society is about to be invaded by barbarians or we're all going to die because of a pandemic or whatever. So we can afford to take the parents for granted. You know, it's like we've been safe for so long and we don't it's not till something really bad happens that people don't realize why we needed this thing. And what I worry is that's what has to happen, Like something really bad is going to happen, and people are, oh, that's why we had the government'll bring it back, And it's a shame it has to come to that. And the point of the book is, like, you know, just read this seven random profiles from inside the government and see if you can you can you can preserve that bigotry you have about the civil servant, See if you can't, like, see if you can avoid opening up your mind to the possibility that this is actually a useful enterprise.
I want to talk to you about some of those essays, and particularly the person you profile. But since you mentioned Elon Musk, I have wondered, Michael, how you have felt given the fifth risk, and given your interests in profiling the federal workforce, how you have felt watching Elon Musk and his so called doge Bros go in and just wholesale fire tens of thousands of people.
Right in the very beginning, there was a little part of me that was hopeful. And the little part of me that was hopeful was it is true that the government has been kind of starved young talent for a long time. People, young bright, young people have not been encouraged to go into government service, and particularly in the tech world, because you could get paid so much better just going and work for a Silicon Valley startup. And the idea that he might channel some of this talent into the government and actually fix some old and broken systems, that was a I thought, maybe there's hope there, like, but then when then they started doing what they were doing, which is like cutting agencies, you know, like without explanation exactly, and going in and randomly cutting seemingly big chunks of the federal workforce without a whole lot of explanation about why, except to say that they were cutting fat out of the out of the budget. But so then I became puzzled because what they said they were doing was clearly not what they were doing. The first thing they said they were doing was going after fraud. And when they got rid of all the inspector generals at the agencies, those people, they're not deep state bureaucrats who are there to help fraud happen. They're there to point out fraud to Congress. They are the refs, the cops on the beat. So they got rid all the cops. So that's not what you do. If you're trying to catch the crooks, you don't get rid of all the cocks and then the cops who know the most. So it was an odd thing to do. So I thought, they're not going after fraud, that's not what this is about. And when with a waist, it was like, are you know the fat? They were dealing with such a small part of the government. They were never going to make that much of a dent. So it was not about that they're not going to like get the bud get rid of the budget deaf as they're doing what they're doing. They're not going to cut two trillion dollars like they claim they might. They probably got to cut a hundred billion dollars it's like they're dealing with rounding errors and so like, if they're not doing what they say they're doing, or they're doing it so badly, they might as well not be But I don't think they're that dumb. Like, what is the motive? And so far as I can tell, the motive is to turn this enterprise that's supposed to be serving the entire society and it's filled with these exquisite human beings doing extremely complicated and important things. Is to turn this into an instrument of personal political power for Elon Musk and Donald Trump and so turn it into something that just doesn't get in their way whenever they do whatever they want to do, whatever that might be. And it's hard to know how the size is going to react to this, because it's been told for so long that this government is so awful they mighty might just let him get away with it. I'm not sure of that. But so now I'm just sitting watching, like how are we going to react? How upset are people going to be? How much of a stand are they going to take? Will Republicans in Congress have the nerve to stand up and actually argue against this when they know it's wrong or bad, and I just don't no. But I've become, you know, in the course of the first six weeks of the Trump administration, pretty cynical about them because I don't see a whole lot of reason to it. Like I don't see them doing things that I think, oh, that's going to make us stronger. I see them doing things that they're going to make them more powerful, but at our expense. And I have this feeling. It's a visceral feeling. I have a feelings. It's a feeling you have when the risk in your life has just gone up. It's a feeling that like, oh, we're all always kind of playing Russian Roulette. They're always risks, but they're just sticking Willy Nelly more bullets in the chamber of the gun. That and we're now playing Russian Roulette with greater risk of fatality. And I feel that So that's agitating because it seems like wholly unnecessary to be inflicting this risk on the population. You know, you go in and you start firing air traffic controllers, or you start firing people whose job it is to monitor the the cleanliness of the wader, or you fire people whose job it is overseas to monitor and control disease that might find its way to our shores, or you fire the nuclear the people in charge of the nuclear weapons. I mean, sometimes they've done this and then they've said, oh, we made a mistake and we're going to bring them back. But there's been an awful lot of mucking around with the mechanisms for controlling existential risk, and that makes just makes me really uneasy. Like so I don't don't I don't really feel good about it. I wrote a note. I mean, I don't know where you got it. I wrote elon muskin. Note said, like, if you're so sure this is right, I'd love to come to sit and watch and you can explain to me why this is. This is smart. I've spent a lot of time inside this institution, a lot more than you. Happy to come and like talk to you about it. And I didn't get a response.
I was going to ask if he wrote you back, but you just told me it seems like the whole tech adage of moving fast and breaking things right, being complete disruptors is what is at play here. Well, what strikes me is it doesn't seem that this is being done reducing government in any kind of thoughtful way, and if anything, it is so insulting and demoralizing and demeaning to some of these public servants who have dedicated their lives to their area of expertise. And not surprisingly I just read that many of them are dealing with some serious mental health issues. They're also getting abused online, and these are people who were not seeking out attention. I don't understand why this is being done with a sledgehammer and not a scalpel, but maybe this is just not Elon Musk's m O.
Why it's being done with such malice is that it's malicious, right, and there is there's a there's a point to there's a point to be made here about like his MO, how he how he operates. I'm sure most people think Elon Musk is like an incredibly smart guy, and in some ways, I'm sure he is incredibly smart, but that doesn't mean he's like universally smart, doesn't mean he's like good at everything. And he's actually not demonstrated that he's all that good at managing a large institution. He's really good at products like peddling products. He's but he looked he took Twitter, which was, you know, whatever it was, it was a successful issue business. He bought it, and he's reduced its value by more than half. I mean, anybody who invested alongside of him has lost sixty percent of their money. And he did it much the same way he ran, and he came into this existing institution. I'm so smart. All you all are fired unless you can prove that you belong here. Humiliated everybody, and that doesn't seem to have worked out very well. And I'd like to hear You're not hearing any of these voices because everybody's scared of Donald Trump. But I'd love to hear with people who are genuinely gifted running big, complicated institutions, like people who run big corporations. Think of this as a management style. It's not something you see in successful it's successful big companies. The CEO doesn't run insulting the employees, telling them how valueless they are and all the rest. It's that's that's not historically been like a recipe for success. Why would it work here? And on top of it, maybe that maybe in some weird corporation might work, but it's definitely not going to work in a workforce where you can't actually pay people very much like that. They're working there. They're not there for the money, they're not there for the fame. They're there if they're the best people for the mission. And so if you're going to come in and like undermine their sense of selves and undermine the mission, I mean, that's just got to be just especially toxic in a in the government environment. So I think, you know, I suspect that it's going to all end so badly that we'll look back and say, how do we let that happen? And we'll go to fix the things he broke. But you never know, because we have a world where people believe all kinds of stuff that isn't true, and people will be being told that this was a big success even if it's a big failure. My biggest fear in a funny way in the back of my head right now, and I'm thinking about, like what if I write something else, what purpose would it serve. My theory is the bad thing happens because of something they've disabled in government. The mechanism for preventing the bad thing, whatever the bad thing is, was disabled, and the bad thing happened, and it can be traced by a rational person directly back to what Elon Musk and Donald Trump have just done, but that after the bad thing happens, a narrative of war follows and their side gets to make up all kinds of facts and say that, no, we didn't have anything to do with the bad thing. The bad thing was the response with the responsibility of the deep state, which we haven't rooted out, or however they frame it. I'm trying to think, how do you vent them from being able to do that? How do you make sure that when the bad thing happens, everybody understands it was their fault. I am groping towards like what the next literary response is to this this book. It's funny. The timing of this book is so funny, just because like if everybody read it, you put it in the hands of just red state people and made them read it, and so you can think whatever you think about it, but you got to read it. I do think a lot of people would say, yeah, I know, good people work in government. Yeah it's not as simple as like it, but it's just like that's not what they hear every day. And so I do think there's some hope of changing shifting the narrative a bit.
Michael, I'm wondering if you have found it hypocritical that Elon must praises private sector led in a but a lot of these breakthroughs come from NASA and the Department of Energy, and he couldn't do what he does without them.
It's sinister because it's not just typic critical. He's claiming credit for stuff he doesn't deserve credit for. Not that he doesn't deserve credit for some stuff, but like he says, he was the founder of Tesla and the founder of PayPal, and he wasn't someone else founded the company. He came in. Tesla. Isn't just the triumph of the private sector that Tesla does not get off the ground without a four hundred and fifty million dollar loan, our loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. At the time, he said this saved us, and other people at Tesla said we just wouldn't exist without this. It was like a little bit of a moonshot technology, and the Department of Energy has a little has two a couple of programs that back moonshot technologies, and they've had astonishing success with it, and it's true of a lot of our economy. It's that it especially a lot of innovation, it starts with some public private partnership. So to try to pitch people on the idea this is all a bunch of smart guys in Silicon Valley who'd be even who'd be doing even greater things if the government wasn't in their way, is a complete misreading of what has happened. But also it's very self serving. It's like, now I'm on top, I'm gonna I'm going to disable this mechanism for like people coming up from beneath me to challenge me, and and I'm gonna I'm a swarm around telling the story that I'm basically responsible for all this.
Not a big fan of Blon, must are you?
I mean less and less? So I didn't have a view. I didn't I wasn't born with the animist towards him. But I think he's been very, very bad for the country and any It's just to tell when someone is lying all the time, it's just like when they're putting lies out constantly, it's just that this this underlying rot and they'll they're all these lies about what they've achieved in the government when they haven't achieved them. There are lies about other people and the other thing's offensive about him. He's a bully. You know, He's got this platform and he'll and he can turn his fans against anybody at any time, and does it routinely, you know, outing civil servants by name disgusting. I mean, it's just disgusting. And so I think, you know, I think he's a bully, and I don't react. I just don't react very well to bullies.
Getting back to your book, Who Is Government, The Untold Story of Public Service? You, as you mentioned, got a number of great writers to profile different government workers, and you picked someone named Christopher Mark. You met him, I guess, via something called the Sammy's when you described as the Oscars for Public Service. Out of the five hundred fifty names on that list, what made you stop in your tracks when came across Chris Mark?
So, Chrismak cannot want any award. When I met him, it was just a list of nominees, right, And what made me stop was he was the one nominee where there was some trace of personal information, some trace of a human being that the way the nominations were laid out. It was a couple of sentences, and it was like Joe Schmoe from the FBI discovered and disrupted a child sex trafficking ring. And then they moved on not telling you anything about Joe Schmoe. And it got the Christopher Mark and it said, Christopher Mark inside the Department of Labor has solved the problem of coal miner whos collapsing on the heads of coal miners, a problem which killed fifty thousand coal miners in the last century. And then it said Christopher Mark is a former coal miner. And I thought there's a story here. I mean, there's probably a story everywhere, but like, how does a former coal miner get himself in the position of solving was probably a really tech and a complicated problem. And I had assumed that, like he had a personal mode, he did have personal motivation, but I assumed the wrong one. I assuming he like grew up in West Virginia and his dad had been killed by a falling roof for something like that. So that's what got me to him. But then the story ended up being wildly different and even more interesting than I expected.
He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. He wasn't from West Virginia at all, No, he was.
He grew up in an upper middle class family, child of a Princeton professor, and had rebelled against his father kind of it was a kind of lefty rebellion against his bourgeois father in the late sixties early seventies and set out to become be a working man rather than go to Harvard or Princeton, which he could have done. And what then I find all this out like the first thirty minutes, and this just blew me away. His dad had become famous as a civil engineer for building technology that analyzed kept the roofs of Gothic cathedrals from falling. And he was so good at it, I mean Robert Marcus's name, you can go. There were like TV shows made about it. But he's so good that he could like predict where in the Sharps Cathedral the stones would be crumbling because the designers made a mistake. And so it was like he was answering question everybody has who goes to those gorgeous buildings, like what keeps the roof off? And the son said, put a middle finger in the air of the father when he was seventeen years old, left home, went away and started working in factories and warehouses and ends up working in a coal mine, thinking I'm not going to have anything to do with what my father did, and then realizes the roof step fall and killed me and goes and he's very clever, and the intellectual journey's wild. But how he figures out how to keep roofs from collapsing on cole Myers is his own story. But what's even wilder is when I get him and I hear this story, I say, wow, you rebelled against your dad and then you kind of like went in your dad's line of work. You all about it keeps the roof up, and he goes, that is not true. What I did had nothing to do with my father. She was like, nope, no, no, And I said, this is a character. He's got a little bit of himself. He doesn't fully understand. And I know he's great. I mean, he was really great fun to write about.
And theirs similar stories are very inspiring stories by all these other writers in the book. Can you just tell us some of your favorites.
It would take a long time to go there all of them, but I'll tell you who the writers are, because it's an illustrious class. It's John Lanchester, Dave Eggers, Sarah val Casey Spp, Geraldine Brooks, and camal Bell and Casey Sepp in the New Yorker young writer. She's going to be very famous one day. She's a little famous already. She I'll tell you her story. She found a guy inside the Department of Veterans Affairs. I don't know if he's still there. They've goutted it, but his name is Ron Walters, and Alters had walked into a job that is a kind of sacred duty. It's caring for the national cemeteries. It's it's providing the experience for the families of veterans when they bury their dead. And when he comes into it, and this is like twenty years ago, the customer approval rating is not great. It's kind of eh. And he sets about attacking the problem with such panache that kind of a decade. In the surveys that the Universe in Michigan does of customer satisfaction across the economy, and they measure satisfaction of government agencies as well as with like private companies, so Amazon and the Department of Agriculture is in these surveys. By the time Round Walters is done, this National Cemetery's burial program has the highest customer satisfaction of empty institution in our country. And nobody knows who he is. He doesn't he's not out there telling people how to manage businesses because he's a genius manager, though he obviously is. All he cares about is this sacred duty we have to our veterans. It's a moving story. I mean, it's like who this guy is and why he did what he did, and then he did what he did and all I mean, I think she just kind of scratched the surface in some places, because I do think that the Harvard Business School should go figure out what he did, because it's an amazing transformation like the private, public, whatever sector to do that with a very delicate problem. But you never hear about it that happened, and you never hear about it, Like if that had happened in one of Elon Musk's company or got amazing Donald Trump's companies, Donald Trump would be telling you how he took the company from here to there, and you'd be celebrating Donald Trump as a manager, and you know, but that's different personality.
I'm wondering if you're hoping that this book will inspire more people at this terrible time for government workers to become public servants, because even now, people younger than thirty represent only seven percent of a full time civil service, despite being twenty percent of the overall US labor force, and sixty eight percent say they'd never consider pursuing a non military federal job.
Yeah, now you wonder why, right, because all they hear is what they hear. So this is what I hope for. I hope that young people read the book or read these stories somehow, some way, and they don't rule out the possibility that they'll be called to serve. That they will develop their skills and whatever feel they choose. But if there comes a time when those skills clearly are needed by the country, they don't just turn up their nose at the federal government because they think the federal government is all a waste. That they realize it's just the opposite, that this is the place where you can have the greatest impact with those You won't make a lot of money, and then you won't just make money, but you will change lives save lives, and if that idea is still kind of alive, there's hope. You know, it's like and it is alive. It's very clearly alive. These are role models we're writing about. And it wasn't rigged that way. It wasn't like I didn't tell the writers, go find a role model. I said, go find a story. And this same kind of story just kept presenting itself because it's there, you know, It's just it's right there on the surface, waiting to be described.
You wrote a book called Going Infinite, the story of billionaire Sam Bankman Free who's now serving time, and I'm curious how you feel about his latest interview with Tucker Carlson and reports that their efforts from his family and allies to receive a pardon from Donald Trump.
I mean, if you had to ask me the moment Trump was elected what the Bankman Freeds were going to do, I'd have told you they're going to seek a pardon from Donald Trump. That doesn't that part doesn't surprise me. And there's even a kind of a weird sort of narrative path to it because the judge that's sentence Sam Bangman freed to twenty five years in jail. It was also the judge in the Egen Carroll case, so there will be some natural hostility Trump would feel towards that judge. It's sort of the rule in life that wherever Sam Bangman freed is, even when it's jail, gets way more interesting because he's there than it ever was before. So I was wondering when he went to jail, like, what's going to happen here? It's going to generate story because everywhere he goes he generates story, and we're kind of spoiled for choice. Now he's given secret interviews to Tucker Carlson from his prison cell without the Bureau of Prisons knowing. He's got p Diddy in the next bunk. Luigi passed through for a nano second. It's like, I mean, his life is like a sitcom wherever he goes, and I just think it's like, that's just who he is. It's what attracted to me, me to him as a subject. In the first it's like where we win. It was funny, but there is some if this happens. There is some irony in the fact that the idea of Trump pardoning a guy who is trying to pay him five billion dollars a year not to run for president. Sam Bangfree was trying to pay Donald Trump not to run for president four years ago, and that Donald Trump getting him out of jail. I mean, somehow that feels like the end of.
A story, right, at least a Michael Lewis story.
Yeah, that's right.
The other question I wanted to ask you quickly and then I'll let you go. What do you think of Jeff Bezos's new attitude toward the opinion pages of the Washington Post. Your essays originally appeared in those pages, and now he has said that alternative points of view that aren't focused on I guess liberties right, personal liberties and free Marcus will not be welcome at the paper. There are other places to read those kinds of things. What do you think of Jeff Bezos's attitude now, a new edict towards opinion writers at the Washington Post.
It's gonna kill interest in the Washington Post. I mean, it already has. And the editor of this series, David Shipley, left because of this decision of Bezos'. So I think it. I could see why he did it. I can see why people feel they need to suck up to Donald Trump. I don't. I don't think this was it's it's it's a particular shame in this case because I think I kind of like Jeff Bezos. I think he's a good guy. I mean, just as a guy. I don't feel the way I feel towards Elon Musk towards Jeff Bezos. But the thing that's so disturbing is that there are not many places in the country where if you write something, all the Democratic legislators and all the Republican legislators read it. They don't all read the New York Times. They the media has gotten so polarized. But the Washington Post still had this kind of like it was the industry towns newspaper, and you could get to everybody through it. And if you had a party that the Washington at the Washington Post, Republican senators would turn up. You know, it wasn't it Obviously it leaned left, but it was it was a way to speak to the the industry, to the politicians. And he's now abandoned. It's not. Now it isn't and now it's it's lost, it's lost. Its appeal to me is a place to write. I won't write. I'm not going to. I have a piece that the last piece of this book appears on Thursday in the Post. It's another long piece about a civil servant. But I wrote it a couple of months ago, and I won't write for it in its current incarnation.
Again, I'm sure a lot of government workers, whether they're still employed or have gotten the acts, will be so grateful for this book and for someone actually celebrating the work that they do if they get it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that wasn't the real purpose in my mind. The purpose in my mind was to sort of attack the stereotype, like I just to make it, make people's minds more interesting, Like get off this kind of weird, this weird picture you have of the federal bureaucrat and get to something a little more real. That was the goal. But one side effect maybe makes people feel better, that would be all right.
Well. The book is called Who Is Government? The untol Story of Public Service, and Michael, it really is kind of an addendum to your previous book, The Fifth Risk, which paints a very different picture of the men and women in our federal workforce. I always love talking to you Michael, Thank you, Thank you, Katie, thanks for listening. Everyone. If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world, reach out send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app, or visit us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
