Author Michael Lewis (‘The Big Short’) Pulls Back the Curtain

“The Trump administration was betting that if they broke the law fast enough,” writes Michael Lewis, “the law would never catch up to them.” On the heels of his new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State https://www.amazon.com/Blockers-Rebels-State-Michael-Lewis-ebook/dp/B0H1DQWZXB, the bestselling author of Moneyball and The Big Short returns to the show. We discuss how watching Trump’s 2017 inauguration inspired The Fifth Risk, (4:30), the rise of DOGE (9:30), and Elon Musk’s mass firing of public servants (11:00). Then, Lewis unpacks the country’s growing national debt (26:00), parallels to the 2008 financial crisis (29:30), and the attack on non-partisanship in government (35:00). On the back half, we walk through his approach to profiling people (39:39), the criticism surrounding Going Infinite and his proximity to Sam Bankman-Fried (44:10) and the controversy behind The Blind Side (53:45). To close, we talk about how he approaches difficult subjects (1:07:20), finding hope in dark times (1:13:30), and writing through grief following the loss of his daughter, Dixie (1:17:00). Subscribe to our ⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube channel⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. Listen to the ⁠Blockers audiobook⁠ https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobooks/blockers. ⁠Vote for Talk Easy in the Signal Awards⁠ https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2026/limited-series-specials/genre/interview-or-talk-show by October 15, 2026. As always, our email: [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What happened to Talk Easy?

• 0:03Speaker 00

  You're not talking so easy anymore.

• 0:05Sam Fragoso?

  Can I tell you what happened? Time, Michael. Time.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  You're gonna be a cranky old man.

• 0:11Sam Fragoso?

  Time.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  So, so.

• 0:15Sam Fragoso?

  He consults Claude.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  I was at this show, this was a different show three years ago.

• 0:19Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, we're gonna talk about your mother. Relax. We're gonna get. So who hurt you as a kid? We're gonna get there. Don't worry.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm so sorry.

• 0:32Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:48Sam Fragoso?

  Today, writer Michael Lewis. He's the author of several bestselling books, including Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short. His latest is called Blockers. It's a return to the subject he first explored in The Fifth Risk, which is the federal government, and of course, the largely invisible public servants who keep it all running, or at least tried to keep it all running before what Lewis describes as the meteor strike of the second Trump administration. Viewed through the eyes of six workers across several agencies, including the IRS and the NIH, the book uncovers the ways in which the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, briefly led by the inimitable Elon Musk, ran roughshod across the federal government

• 1:31Sam Fragoso?

  and targeted those deemed insufficiently loyal, or pliant, or, you know, blockers. Fittingly, Musk is back in the news with the release of Alex Gibney's new documentary, Musk, and Luca Guadagnino's latest film, Artificial. And so today, we talk about the wrecking ball that was DOGE, mass firings across the federal government, the battle over public and private data, and why the people dismissed as blockers, quote unquote, became the characters Lewis wanted to better understand. Then, after the break, we try to do the same with Michael. How he finds his characters, what past controversies have taught him about reporting, and why, after nearly 20 books, he remains drawn to people working against a grain. Before I turn it over to the episode, I want to say that Talk Easy was recently

• 2:16Sam Fragoso?

  named a finalist for three Signal Awards this year, including Best Host, Interview or Talk Show, and Best Video Podcast Host. I think we're up against Oprah in two of those categories. And so if you want to give us a fighting chance, voting is now open through Thursday, October 15. If you like what we do here and want to support, you can head on over to the link below or go to vote dot signal award dot com. If that all sounds like too much, or, you know, if you want to save your vote for the midterms, the second best thing you can do is subscribe to the show on Apple or Spotify. If you're on Spotify, actually, there's a little bell at the top of your screen. Be sure to click that so that new episodes get notified and pop up at the top of your

• 2:59Sam Fragoso?

  feed. If you want to watch us on YouTube, you can do that. Our page is Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso on YouTube. And of course, if you want to reach out, my email is talk easy pod at gmail dot com. Now, on to the show.

• 3:17Sam Fragoso?

  Michael Lewis.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Sam.

• 3:18Sam Fragoso?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  I didn't think it was possible.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  I thought, I thought you, you picked me over like a, like a chicken in a Chinese restaurant the last time I was here, and then I think there was anything left of me.

• 3:29Sam Fragoso?

  And yet, you remain fully formed?

• 3:31Speaker 00

  I just don't know what we're gonna talk about.

• 3:33Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, I, you know, you, you need not concern yourself.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  I won't, I, I assume that is your problem, but I, I have to say that I have said, I've said this to other people, I'm not just saying this to you. It was one of the most delightful interviews I've ever done. And it was actually, it was interesting about how much you knew about me that, you know, in some cases, I didn't know about myself. And it was, that was, that was an interesting experience. I loved talking about my parents, for example. That was great. It was a, it was a different kind of thing.

• 4:00Sam Fragoso?

  I think this is the third time you've been on the podcast.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  All right.

• 4:04Sam Fragoso?

  And this is roughly the third or fourth book you've written about government agencies and civil servants in the Trump era. Can we go back to where this project began? I think it's January 2017. Inauguration Day.

• 4:21Sam Fragoso?

  And you just had a hip replacement surgery.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:25Sam Fragoso?

  There you are, watching the broadcast.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:28Sam Fragoso?

  High on some drug, I don't know which.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  What was the opioid that caused the epidemic?

• 4:32Sam Fragoso?

  Oxycodone?

• 4:33Speaker 00

  It was oxycodone.

• 4:33Sam Fragoso?

  And yet, through the oxycodone haze.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:36Sam Fragoso?

  You're watching CNN. Tell me what happens. What do you say? What do you think?

• 4:41Speaker 00

  I was watching, everybody will remember this moment, when Trump got out of the limo outside of the White House and bounded up the stairs, leaving Melania behind him to shake hands with Barack and Michelle Obama. And I had this thought, and it was a kind of a drug-induced haze. I just thought, I felt this, he's gonna kill me in some way. He's gonna, he's, all of a sudden, you know, that feeling you have, the risk, the risk in the environment has just gone up. And I had that feeling. And it was a panicky feeling. And so I, I sat with that a bit. And I thought, you know, this could probably be translated into some sort of study, analytical sort of approach to the Trump administration, try to calculate how many people die because he's president.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  That was my, and that was the first thought, it was a crazy thought.

• 5:28Sam Fragoso?

  The first thought was Donald Trump just won He's Going to Kill Me, Michael Lewis, bestselling author.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  It, it wasn't quite as direct as that, but yes, it was that kind of, it was, my, my life just got cheaper. The, the risks to my life just went up.

• 5:43Sam Fragoso?

  It's weird, because you were on oxycodone, but that sounds like someone who took like an edible that was too strong.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the cause of it was, I think probably, a visceral sense of his indifference to my own life. And not, you know, just like, he was so, he's so self-absorbed that all he cares about is himself. And combined with the sense that he didn't have any idea of the, of the instrument he was going to be in charge of, the, the American government. And when I thought about the government, I, I thought of it as a big risk management exercise. So I already knew at that point that he had fired his transition team, which is a 550-person unit, which is, that was the mechanism for getting information about how the government ran to the president.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  And that the Obama team had spent six months and, and, and put 1,000 people on it to create, like, the best, the best course about the American government that could be created to give it to them, so that they could hit the ground running and know what, you know, the Department of Energy did. And knowing that Trump had, had skipped the class, and then later finding out that he turned, he turned to Chris Christie right after the election and said, fire all those people because you and I are so smart, we can figure it out in an hour. That, I, I had the sense that he'd done something like that already. And so I was saying, I think, oh, this risk management device that helps manage the risks

• 7:12Speaker 00

  in my life, where this risk from deadly disease, or war, or whatever, that this thing is gonna be in, in less capable and knowledgeable hands. And he doesn't really care. I think that's, that was where I was coming from, plus the drugs. I mean, it was, it was, it was, that book did start with that spasm.

• 7:35Sam Fragoso?

  So once you come to, that resulted in The Fifth Risk.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:39Sam Fragoso?

  Which was during Trump's first term. Which you described as a story about the price of ignorance and the risk of radical neglect.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:47Sam Fragoso?

  As we move our way to blockers, what's the story to tell about Trump's second term?

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, nobody wants to rewrite the same book twice. And I don't have any interest in it. And I kind of would have imagined that that was that for me in the federal government. But this time, he, they come in, when, after the election, after the inauguration, and there is this plan in the background called Project 2025, which he's disavowed, which is a plan to radically remake the federal government. It was unclear whether he cared about that or not, until he got to the White House. And then he starts, it's kind of almost the opposite story of Trump won. They have planned to sort of seize control of this operation, and even parts of the executive branch that the president doesn't normally control.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  That he went from, he went from not managing at all, to sort of asserting his right to powers that presidents previously hadn't had. And that it was a power, a huge power grab, the president's gonna micromanage everything, and this 2 million persons' civil service, nonpartisan civil service. 2 million people who take an oath, not to a person, but to a constitution, and who, among their other duties, is to tell the president they won't do something if it's against the law.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  All of a sudden, those 2 million people are going to become essentially loyalists in a Trump political operation. And, and that, that, so I'll tell you this, so this, I can't do a book without a frame. It's like, what is the frame of the book?

• 9:18Sam Fragoso?

  People long to have a Michael Lewis elevator pitch.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  It's, but I never, what's funny about that is I don't have to pitch the book. I mean, I have the same publisher I've had for 35 years. But it's pitching the book to myself. It's like, what is this about?

• 9:30Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, so how did you pitch it to yourself?

• 9:31Speaker 00

  This is how I pitched it to myself. I said, look, it's, we are witnessing a transformation of an environment, the government, the, the government, not American politics, the government, and the, the executive branch, the, the 2 million person, person civil service. And then I thought, well, how do you think about the government? What are the things the government does? And how are those things going to be different? Sort of like, everything from public safety to data collection to long-term scientific research that the market won't fund. And then what's happening to the people in those, in those places? So that's what, that was where I started. And I thought of it almost metaphorically, as an environmental shift.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  It's like meteor hits the planet, habitats change, some species, all of a sudden, go extinct. You can describe kind of the new environment by, by what can't survive in it. And, and it's an extinction story.

• 10:26Sam Fragoso?

  So a blocker is someone who cannot survive in this new environment. What and who are blockers?

• 10:33Speaker 00

  So that's Elon Musk's term. He said, when he went into the government with his team at DOGE, the same thing he said when he went into Twitter with his team. He said, you're gonna get in there, and there're gonna be people who are already there who want to stop you from doing what you want to do. These people are blockers, find the blockers and get rid of them. And it was a term they threw around all over the place.

• 10:52Sam Fragoso?

  And prior to January 20th, 2025? Was that the name they went by blocker?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no, they went by, they went by like civil servant.

• 11:03Sam Fragoso?

  This is a new term.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  It's a new term. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is like, what is this like? This is an insult that Elon Musk was hurling at them.

• 11:10Sam Fragoso?

  Elon Musk, famous for quality insults.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Yes, famous for quality insults, but he shares that with Trump.

• 11:16Sam Fragoso?

  Do you see him? He likes to use chat GPT at parties to create insult humor?

• 11:22Speaker 00

  I didn't know this.

• 11:22Sam Fragoso?

  This is the thing he said, if you want to have a good time at a party and make a crass joke, instead of coming up with one yourself, because he's a moron who can't.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  What happened to talk easy?

• 11:35Speaker 00

  You're not talking so easy anymore.

• 11:37Sam Fragoso?

  Can I tell you what happened? Time, Michael. Time.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  You're gonna be a cranky old man.

• 11:43Sam Fragoso?

  Time.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  So, so.

• 11:47Sam Fragoso?

  He consults Claude.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  I was at the show, this was a different show three years ago.

• 11:51Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, right. We're gonna talk about your mother. Relax. So we're gonna get, so who hurt you as a kid? We're gonna get there. Don't worry.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm so sorry. Sorry.

• 12:02Sam Fragoso?

  My heart, like many people who like and listen to this show.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:05Sam Fragoso?

  Has been hardened.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:07Sam Fragoso?

  By the exact thing you write about in this book.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  This is right. We're gonna get to that.

• 12:12Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  But so the Elon Musk, he comes in, you're right, the characters in my book, the six main characters, they didn't call themselves blockers. Elon Musk will have, would have described them that way. And mainly what they were just trying to do is not break the law. But, but they, but I thought when I, I found this pattern. These people who would have been described as blockers were actually doing their job beautifully. They were not partisan people. They were, they were, no one would ever accuse them of incompetence. They were dedicated to the country. And I thought, this term, it's like impressionist. That was an insult when they were impressionist painters, they turned it into a compliment. Tories, that was an insult. The Tory party has made hay with it.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  So I think we're gonna, I thought, well, we're just gonna take that term. We're gonna turn it into a compliment. So, and I tell you something, I, I don't know anything. I don't have any like deep source inside the White House. But this, two weeks ago, Donald Trump got up in a speech. And he said that if the Democrats take the House and they try to do stuff.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  I'll be a block. I'll end up being a blocker. I'll block all their bad stuff for two years. It won't be the same, but I'll be a blocker. What can I tell you?

• 13:21Speaker 00

  And I thought, I wonder. I wonder if he's, someone has at least told him the title.

• 13:27Sam Fragoso?

  Maybe he heard the blocker term.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  But he wants to be one, though.

• 13:30Sam Fragoso?

  Right. Now he wants to be one.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  That's, in Elon Musk world, it's the worst thing you can be.

• 13:34Sam Fragoso?

  But, but once we're inside the frame, let's, let's talk about these six people. They're dedicated civil servants, right? They were before they were fired.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Yep. Or quit because they couldn't do the job anymore.

• 13:45Sam Fragoso?

  Precisely. But, but are they anomalies within the system? Because I think a lot of people who, who, who think of, or at least have an assumption about civil servants go, they clock in, they clock out, they don't particularly care about what they do. They have great benefits, vacation, they retire at 60, 65, call it a day.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:05Sam Fragoso?

  Are these people anomalies in the system?

• 14:08Speaker 00

  No. And, and you know, they're so easy to find, I could have, I could have done this book five times over with five different cast of characters. It was sure, it's a 2 million person workforce, sure they're lazy people. Sure, they're people who, who don't have no higher calling. I'm sure, but you can find that in the private sector. What's striking about the federal government is how many people you find who could make twice what they make in the government, outside the government, who are working not 40 hour weeks, not 60 hour weeks, but 100 hour, 80 hour weeks.

• 14:42Sam Fragoso?

  Then why don't they leave? Or why didn't they leave?

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Because the jobs are so meaningful, because they, because there's some purpose, they see the purpose of the job. They see how important it is. And they see they're having all these knock on effects on, on the lives of other people. And it gives them enormous satisfaction. It's people, often people who are interested in a specific problem that only the government's going to address. People with specific skills that will, will address that problem. I mean, it was, it was so easy to do. And it's so easy to do because there are all these untold stories. I mean, that's the story of the government is the story, government does not tell its own story. That the politicians, people conflate politics and government. They, they see politicians and they think that's the government.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  No, there are these people who are there, who are doing things that we all agree need to be done, that the private sector won't do. And they're often there on a mission. And, and they make such good characters. One, because they don't think of themselves as characters. When people think of themselves as characters, they suck as characters. They like, don't be such a character, you know, it's sort of, two, they're, they have obsession. They're obsessed with something they're doing. It's what they're doing is important and they're just not watched. And so that like, they're not used to having their stories told. And all that is, is like, is a recipe for making it swing on the page.

• 16:01Sam Fragoso?

  And all of their stories are changed by the arrival of Doge.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yes. And Doge, and it's not just Doge. Doge is a, one of the prongs in the assault that is the Trump administration. But this administration comes in with malice towards them.

• 16:15Sam Fragoso?

  So let's talk about that. Doge at the time was spearheaded by Elon Musk. Who were the men, women enlisted?

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Almost all men. Very, I mean, the Doge female was a, was a, was a rare.

• 16:29Sam Fragoso?

  Were there any women in Doge?

• 16:30Speaker 00

  There were a couple.

• 16:31Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  But just like, not really.

• 16:32Sam Fragoso?

  But who were these people who were carried out to?

• 16:35Speaker 00

  It was a collection of people, I think, where they probably all shared in common was a desire to be closer to Elon Musk. There were some older people, like people, middle aged people who came out of Musk's companies. People who had, you know, mainly kind of some loose business relationship with Musk. But underneath that, the active ingredient were young men between the ages of 19 and 27, who were, you know, either in college or, or just out of college, who were Musk disciples.

• 17:06Sam Fragoso?

  So they're bound by a general broad sort of nebulous frustration with government writ large.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  I would have, I would say that most of them, they knew nothing at all about the government.

• 17:18Sam Fragoso?

  But they believed it was wasteful.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  They believed what Elon Musk said.

• 17:21Sam Fragoso?

  Which he said it was wasteful.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Waste, fraud and abuse. He said that there was, he was gonna go into the $7 trillion deficit and he was gonna cut $2 trillion out of it and he was gonna find all the crooks.

• 17:32Sam Fragoso?

  So, so you write in the book, no country on earth had ever sought to understand itself as creatively as the United States. The impulse to count, to use numbers to create a picture was present at the country's founding, which is how, of course, we arrive at the census, to determine seats in Congress, the consumer price index, et cetera. But in Trump term too, you write, the impulse to count was being replaced by another impulse. The impulse to remain ignorant. What no one knew, no one could be blamed for. And one of the more serious and timely examples of this, especially considering what's happening at Cornell and the seven fraternity members accused of gang rape, is around the National Crime Victimization Survey.

• 18:18Sam Fragoso?

  Tell me how, how, how they approached that survey and, and did Doge and Trump work in some ways to limit the amount of sexual and domestic violence cases being reported?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  This is in the section on the data, the data collection enterprise. And there are two, you can think of the data the government collects is kind of breaking into two buckets. One is, data it collects that it needs to disseminate so we all have a picture of our, of our society. And that is economic statistics, climate statistics, the census data, this kind of thing. And the National Crime Victimization Survey, of which I am not an expert. But it was, it was created in response to frustration with official police statistics. It's like what, there were some crimes that were clearly going completely underreported. And domestic violence is, is a really good example.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  And so it was an attempt to do by survey what the police reports didn't, didn't capture. So that's one kind of, that's one bucket. The other bucket is like your tax data or your health data, which the government collects by necessity, but it's supposed to keep to itself. What interested me, what got, got me going in this, on that subject, is how when you change the government from what it was to what Trump wants it to be, how you almost invert the, the way these two buckets are treated.

• 19:39Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean?

• 19:40Speaker 00

  So all of a sudden, the IRS tax data, which is supposed to be sacrosanct, can be used as a weapon for the political operation. It can be used to hunt down undocumented workers. It can be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. So all of a sudden, the private data becomes endangered. And the public data gets manipulated for the benefit of the administration, whoever happens to be in the White House. So that if the economic statistics are bad, you change them. Or you hide them. And so they fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because of, I can't remember what it was, inflation or unemployment. Or there was a stat that he didn't like, or you don't like the climate data? Guess what? We're not gonna put it up on the websites.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  And with the Crime Victimization Survey, the reason is two lines in the book, is that the blockers won this time. I mean, the people at the Commerce Department, the data people said, you can't completely do this. It's, it's, and they backed off that thing. And so they polluted the statistics though, because they don't acknowledge in the survey any longer trans people. And so you're not gonna get crimes against trans people. It's one of many examples of taking information they don't want the public to have and just not presenting it to them.

• 20:52Sam Fragoso?

  These kids are, are basically let loose within these different federal agencies.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 20:58Sam Fragoso?

  And they're given strict instructions to go through the bylaws and certain org charts and find, you know, basically command F certain buzzwords.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 21:12Sam Fragoso?

  Diversity, trans.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Women.

• 21:14Sam Fragoso?

  Anything. Women is the one. I was like, wow.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Can I explain what you're saying?

• 21:20Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, please.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  All right. So you're, you, imagine you're a 24 year old muskrat who worships Elon Musk. And you've been told, go into the Department of Veterans Affairs.

• 21:30Sam Fragoso?

  Could you imagine me as a muskrat?

• 21:32Speaker 00

  No, you, I can imagine you in the song Muskrat Love, but I can't imagine you as a muskrat.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  So the

• 21:41Sam Fragoso?

  That's a compliment.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is a compliment. It's a very talk easy song.

• 21:45Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Muskrat Love. You could even play it as your kind of

• 21:48Sam Fragoso?

  Old talk easy or new talk easy?

• 21:49Speaker 00

  What? I'm still getting my mind around the idea of new talk easy. But, but it's, so you are sent into one of these agencies, Department of Agriculture, Energy, IRS, wherever, and you've got, you're given a mission. Without any information, you don't know anything. You don't know anything. Like you know, less than you and I know, sitting here. And, uh, and it's, and you're told, cut the people. Get rid of people and, and cut contracts. Now, both are problematic legally because the civil service has protections. You can't fire them without cause. And the reason for that is you don't want to be president, come in and fire everybody. He thinks he was a Republican, think fire everybody who thinks he's a Democrat or a Democrat who comes in and fires everybody thinks, who he thinks is a Republican. You want to keep politics out of it.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  There's a reason for the protections for the civil service. And the contracts, they're money, that's money that Congress has authorized. Congress has the power of the purse. They're told also, but this is a whisper, this is sub rosa, this is their pardons. You'll get a pardon. Don't worry about the law, basically. You get a pardon.

• 22:52Sam Fragoso?

  And where do you get that from?

• 22:54Speaker 00

  Several of them. I interviewed like a dozen of the Doge people. They were feeling as if they could do whatever they wanted. The richest man in the world and the president of the United States were behind them. And the, and the president, the president could give them a pardon if they got in trouble.

• 23:07Sam Fragoso?

  But it wasn't just a feeling, it was true.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  That's how they behaved. That was a feeling and it was, well, maybe it's true. Maybe they won't get a pardon. They, nobody's been given, none of these people have been given pardons yet.

• 23:17Sam Fragoso?

  They haven't been prosecuted yet either.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Right. Now, here's what they do. So it actually turns out to be very difficult to fire anybody who is, he got the civil service protections. However, there is a group of, collection of people in every agency who are, who are called probationary employees. That sounds bad, but what it means is you've only been there 18 months. And there is a period after you get hired to work in the federal government, where they want to watch you work for 18 months before they give you these protections. And who are these people? These are young people and these are people who've been brought in to deal with some immediate problem that they needed someone for. So it's exactly who you don't want to fire. They fire all the probationary workers. They aren't really allowed to do that.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  It's, there's a rule that you're not supposed to fire them without cause. So they get someone to sign a document or they say, or they, they say, we're firing you for cars. So they basically tell, you know, tens of thousands of people, young people, idealistic people, many of whom are doing great jobs, that you suck at your job and you're fired.

• 24:18Sam Fragoso?

  And how much money did that save?

• 24:19Speaker 00

  None, nothing. They, they were still being paid, a lot of them, for, for not coming to work. The second thing they do is to cut contracts. They're told, get the, there's all this woke spending. And so in, for example, in the Department of Veterans Affairs, a young man goes in. He knows nothing about it. He asked for the file that contains all the contracts. It's got 90,000 contracts in it. And he, F9ing, as you said, he starts just typing in keywords and it's bias. It's gender, it's whatever, uh, Native American, whatever it is.

• 24:49Sam Fragoso?

  And woman.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  And woman and, yeah, and, uh, and he just cuts them without even knowing what they are.

• 24:53Sam Fragoso?

  Cause it's woke.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Cause it's woke. Cause he thinks that it's just all waste. Now, I'm sure, I mean, beyond sure, that you or I could go through every contract, every dollar of the US government spent, and we'd find things that were objectionable to us. But the, the bigger principle is the way that spend, the way those programs happen, doesn't happen because some bureaucrat is creating them. Congress creates them from, because of pressure from the people. So the way you're supposed to do this is you go to Congress and say that you shouldn't be funding this. They're just doing this out of, they're just essentially taking the power, seizing the power of the purse. The bigger point is, what do they say they're doing? They're going to cut the deficit. $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion deficit.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  If you look at the deficit, 75% of the spending is either interest payment on the debt, the military or entitlements. They're addressing none of those. It's mathematically impossible to cut $2 trillion out of that, just attacking what they're attacking. That, and then on top of that, um, what they actually end up cutting is a few billion dollars. It, it doesn't, ends up being nothing, almost nothing. And the costs that they incur by like having to pay people they laid off for two years, uh, end up probably being greater than what they cut. So it was, it's not been good business. And if you just back away and look at it from, from Mars, as Elon Musk would,

• 26:21Speaker 00

  that you, you see in the first two years of the Trump administration, the deficit is, the national debt has increased by three and a half trillion dollars.

• 26:27Sam Fragoso?

  Why does that not bother Republicans?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  I mean, they're scared of him. It's, the simple fact is they're scared of him.

• 26:32Sam Fragoso?

  Of Elon Musk or Donald Trump?

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Donald Trump. I mean, probably both, because Musk throws money into these campaigns, but it's, Musk would, Musk himself seems to be genuinely upset with what's happened with the deficit. But Trump doesn't, obviously doesn't care about that at all. And this is, you know, this is, as we speak, it's the sort of thing we've been living with forever. Oh, we just, our debt just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it, maybe it just doesn't matter at all, except there's a moment. It comes, there comes a moment where, where, oh, it does matter.

• 27:05Sam Fragoso?

  What do you think that is?

• 27:06Speaker 00

  It might be now, in that it is what happens.

• 27:09Sam Fragoso?

  What does that mean?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  What it means is, when people buy a treasury bond to lend us the money we need to run our government, they are, uh, they're taking a risk. They're taking a risk that we won't pay them back. And the price that investors have been demanding to take that risk has gone up and up and up very fast in just the last few months. So interest rates have gone up and up and up. What that does is it raises the cost of, of, of paying the interest on the debt.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Causing the investors to think, wait, their, their finances are getting even worse because people are lending to them in worse and worse terms. And you start this vicious cycle and you get Greece in 2008. How that plays out here is, it's kind of hard to imagine.

• 28:02Sam Fragoso?

  But you've imagined it.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  But I've imagined it. And it's, it's

• 28:05Sam Fragoso?

  It looks like what?

• 28:05Speaker 00

  It's like, uh, you think interest rates at 7% are bad, wait till you see 15%. Wait till you see, uh, like in, I mean, it's, it's, here's what I think happens. If it happened now, Donald Trump gets up and he says, enough of that all this talk about the debt. We don't, who do we owe that money to? Like all these foreigners who've been cheating us in trade deals. So we're not going to pay, we're not, we're going to, we're going to have a, effectively a workout situation here. And what he'll have done is completely destroy the trust that has been built up over generations in the American government. It's still there. It's like people will still lend us money, still people still hold dollars because they think it's the best currency to hold.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  That trust is under siege and the cost of that trust going away is huge. It has, it has huge long-term effects on the economic growth of the country. That we pay a price for, for, for not being trustworthy. And he's not trustworthy. He's turning us into him. You have ructions in the, in the financial markets that are really unusual. And unlike the financial crisis, when the reason that the whole crisis could be calmed was there was trust in the American government, they could come in and assume all the bad debts. There's no person to come in, no entity, institution to come in and sort of backstop the whole thing.

• 29:27Sam Fragoso?

  So are you seeing 2026 the same way you felt or saw 2007?

• 29:32Speaker 00

  More like 2005 or six. I'll put it this way, I'm now, I'm, my antenna are up for another financial book because I think there's a chance there's going to be chaos in the financial markets. And that's when it gets interesting. And I, because, because of the way they're managing the finances and

• 29:54Sam Fragoso?

  Beyond it being interesting, does it unnerve you?

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Well, I moved money, some of my own money into Euro because I didn't trust the dollar as much. And into gold. So yes, I've actually taken action.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  I, I, I would, I think the dumbest thing you could do is buy like a long-term treasury bond. Like long-term debt, I don't know why anybody holds it. I think in the, the truth in the end is that the country is so financially obsessed that when it gets bad, that it's the end for Trump. He's like, really the end, that all of business will flee to and leave him high and dry. And that there'll be some reckoning with how we, there might be some way we bounce back in an interesting, positive way. That it's not just decline. But, so I don't, I don't feel like, oh, I gotta leave the country. But I do feel like I need to put some of my money somewhere else.

• 30:50Sam Fragoso?

  So this erosion of trust, it extends, of course, to the presidency. But, but I want to bring it back to civil servants for a second. Can we read a section from the book?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  We can. Are we going to do it or am I going to do it?

• 31:03Sam Fragoso?

  You're going to do it. Before you read that, who is Tim Curry?

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Tim Curry. Worked inside of an obscure agency, but extremely important agency called the Office of Personnel Management, along with two other agencies, the General Service Administration and the Office of the Management of the Budget. It's sort of like, it's sort of like the engine room of the entire government. His agency touches all the people who work for the government. So if you want to come in and start bossing the whole federal government around, it's the place you do it. And Tim's job was essentially, this is putting it a little crudely, it was essentially to be the referee between whatever political people came in to run the government and the government.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  And he prevented a lot of, a lot of disputes from getting out of hand. He was regarded by both sides, singularly, as a fair ref, like everybody trusted him. And what was so cool about him was everybody thought secretly he was on their side. And this goes back to like, the Clinton people thought he was a Clinton person, the Bush people thought he was a Bush person, the, the, the Trump people thought he was a Trump person, for Trump won, the Obama people thought he was Obama person. And his one person finally said to me, when I was talking to them about a political person, talking about Tim, he said, he is the strangest person I've ever met in Washington. I've spent, I spent 100 hours in a room alone with him, and I do not know his politics. I have no idea what he thinks.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  And there's no one I know who I spent 100 hours with, I don't have any idea of their politics. So he's managed to keep himself out of it, and he's sort of like, the society needs, like, like games need referees that aren't corruptible. He's managed to made himself like, the singular uncorruptible ref in this game, which is the continual friction between political people and the government.

• 32:57Sam Fragoso?

  And yet, despite that, that spotless reputation.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  He finds with Trump 2, there's no room for a fair ref. The Trump 2 doesn't want fair refs. It doesn't want refs at all, except the refs it's rigged. So, so I'm going to read you this passage. And this is, this is Tim after he's seen Doge for the first time. What troubled Tim in a new way was Doge's assault on non-partisanship. Among Trump's first actions was a flurry of late night emails firing the neutral third parties introduced by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. By removing the inspectors general from most of the bigger agencies, Trump rid the system of the one place a whistleblower could safely blow a whistle.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  By removing a Democrat from the merit systems protection board, he turned what was meant to be an apolitical process into an overtly partisan one. In the same spirit, Trump issued an executive order that stripped the rights from all but the Republican-leaning unions, Border Patrol, firefighters, and police officers. It was hard to see how any of this could be legal, but in some new way, the law no longer mattered. The probationary workers had all been fired for poor performance, because it, because it was illegal to fire them for anything else, when many of them hadn't had much chance to perform, and many of those who had performed had done extremely well. The Trump administration was betting that if they broke the law fast enough, the law

• 34:29Speaker 00

  would never catch up to them. If you pushed them to explain themselves, as Tim now did, they'd float the novel argument that the entire system of due process for civil servants was unconstitutional. If due process is unconstitutional, asked him, why has it not come up in the 50 years since the Civil Service Act? So this is, I mean, he's, I thought of Tim when I met him, because he is deliberately so bland, he like, doesn't want you, he, he was like, there's a Kaiser Soze quality to him. Like, you saw, you spent two hours with him and you couldn't describe him after the two hours. He just like, was trying to hide himself in the name of higher principle. And how this person could not find a place for himself, no matter how hard he tried,

• 35:13Speaker 00

  inside this new, this new administration. And it took him about three weeks before he had physical breakdown, like he thought, I'm actually going to die if I stay. Heart rate screwed up, blood pressure screwed up, and he was telling us something. He was telling us that fairness, the idea of fairness, no longer has a place in the government. It's a loyalist operation that serves the purposes of a single person.

• 35:37Sam Fragoso?

  When you're reading that, and I felt this way during the book, I kept writing, as you can see, note after note, about neutrality being under attacked, that there was no place for non-partisanship. And I kept writing in my notes, and I guess I just want to say it to you, I kept writing, why is this assault on something I believe in, which is neutrality, non-partisanship? Why is it producing so little in me? Like, I, I was not stirred in the way I should be.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:15Sam Fragoso?

  And I wondered if you had felt any of that in the reporting of this book, because I, I kept going, I know this is bad, I know this is wrong, but something has changed in me. I don't know what that is.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  That's interesting. Can we pick that up after the break? Because I can think about it during the break.

• 36:38Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, you think you'll find the answer in the bathroom?

• 36:40Speaker 00

  I do.

• 36:41Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Or you might. But yes, yes, let's do that after the break.

• 36:45Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, that's coming up next with Michael Lewis. Last month, I traveled to New York City to moderate a gallery event and host a couple tapings of Talk Easy. I stayed over in Chelsea, and going to New York in September, it's just the perfect time of year to be in Manhattan. The summer heat is starting to break, but it's just warm enough to spend most of the day outside. And in between work, I'd walk around the High Line or head to Greenwich Village to get some work done at a cafe, because working in a hotel room, eh, who wants to do that? I even caught a friend's concert in Brooklyn. It was nice to spend a few days getting reacquainted with New York, and it made me think about how much of traveling is about experiencing the everyday rhythms of a place, the restaurants, shops, parks, and neighborhood spots that make a city feel like itself.

• 37:29Sam Fragoso?

  That's why, when I find myself leaving my home in LA for any stretch of time, I think it could be a good idea to list my space on Airbnb. That way, someone can enjoy my city the way I enjoy the ones I get to visit. It's a practical way to make use of my space when I'm already gone, plus, the extra income can help offset some of my future travel costs. If you've got upcoming travel plans, your home could be working for you. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com/host. I think the best clothes you own are probably the ones you spend the least amount of time thinking about. They're just there when you need them. The sweater that goes with everything, the perfect pair of pants at the tee you always reach for first. That's what I've always liked about Quince.

• 38:14Sam Fragoso?

  They focus on everyday staples, made with premium materials like organic cotton, merino wool, and 100% Mongolian cashmere. Their cashmere sweaters start at just $60, and everything is designed to be versatile enough to work with what you already own. And now that the temperatures are starting to drop, they also have premium down jackets and classic wool outerwear, easy layers that can carry you through the fall and into winter. I've had a few of their merino wool all-season tees for just over a year now, and they've really become my go-to in my wardrobe. The quality was the thing that surprised me when I first tried them out. They're comfortable, easy to layer, and after a year of wearing them regularly, they've held up remarkably well. I use them all the time and would absolutely recommend them.

• 38:59Sam Fragoso?

  Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, which allows them to price everything 50 to 80% less than similar brands. So you're paying for the quality of the materials rather than a big brand markup. It's not just clothing. Quince brings that same approach to hotel-quality bedding and bath, kitchen essentials, and thoughtfully designed furniture, well-made pieces for everyday living. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. You can get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Talk Easy. It's really the best way to support the show. Enjoy.

• 39:44Sam Fragoso?

  MUBI is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world and to you. Everything at MUBI is handpicked, with an emphasis on visionary filmmakers and movies worth discovering. One new movie is called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, from writer-director Jane Seanbrun, who made the film I Saw the TV Glow. The film stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. It follows a young director tasked with resurrecting Camp Miasma, a once-beloved slasher franchise that after years of sequels has fallen out of favor. Looking for inspiration, she visits the reclusive actress who starred in the original film. But what begins at an attempt to revive the franchise soon pulls the two women into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.

• 40:28Sam Fragoso?

  It's a world-expanding, genre-bending movie from one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com/TalkEasy. That's MUBI, M-U-B-I dot com slash Talk Easy, for a whole month of great cinema for free.

• 40:52Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:54Sam Fragoso?

  Did you find an answer in the bathroom?

• 40:56Speaker 00

  I did. I was thinking about it because it's an interesting observation.

• 40:59Sam Fragoso?

  By the way, that was a really good ESPN like tease, like coming up next. Why Sam felt a little apathy reading Michael Lewis's book. I sound like Colin Cowherd or something.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  I think because your reaction is coming against the backdrop of so much outrageous stuff going on that your, your, your senses have been sort of numbed.

• 41:19Sam Fragoso?

  Dulled.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  Dulled. I think that's what's happened. It's like you've been overstimulated and that, but that the nice thing about a book is you can sit down quietly with it and think about it. And so I,

• 41:32Speaker 00

  I can understand how, you know, like he's ripping his name, he's ripping the Kennedy's name off this Kennedy Center, putting his name on it, you know, ripping down the East Wing of the White House, bombing Iran. It's like one thing after another. And, um, and you think, oh, well, what does it matter that he stole my tax returns?

• 41:50Sam Fragoso?

  It's more that the larger feeling that animates this moment.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:55Sam Fragoso?

  Is a kind of, yeah, dulling and apathy, a feeling as if nothing can change.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  That's false.

• 42:04Sam Fragoso?

  And I don't think that's true.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:06Sam Fragoso?

  But I want to talk about how you profile and how you do this work because one of your subjects, Colin O'Brien, who was a security guard at the US Institute of Peace, has this line that I think captures a little bit of what we're talking about, which is, uh, you can't really measure prevention. When something bad does not happen, there's no clear way to prove why. When it works, nothing happens. And I was thinking, as you're writing this book, and even The Fifth Risk, you have to make drama out of nothing happening. How do you do that?

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Well, each subject in the book was a different literary challenge. It's not that hard with Alex Maringides, who's inventing a fire science to deal with wildland urban interface fires, because it, things have, are happening, you know, people, communities are burning down. With Kathleen Walters, whose job is to, who sits between your tax returns and the, and politicians, again, would have been very hard, except ICE comes in and demands 7 million tax returns of undocumented workers so they can go arrest them in their homes in the middle of the night because they've got the most recent addresses on them.

• 43:14Sam Fragoso?

  Which they do.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Which they do.

• 43:16Sam Fragoso?

  A judge says over 40,000 tax violations the IRS committed.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Probably a radical underestimate. Uh, that, that's what they, that's what they've admitted to.

• 43:25Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  The database is 7 million names and the, we have promised that population for 30 years that use this number, pay your taxes, and they've generally, they've paid hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes.

• 43:39Sam Fragoso?

  These are undocumented immigrants.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:41Sam Fragoso?

  Who pay taxes. Who pay taxes on what they make here.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  On what they make here. It's kind of an odd thing because they don't get, often don't get benefits in the same way. So they're, it's a bit of a raw deal, but there's this assumption that it will help your case towards citizenship.

• 43:57Sam Fragoso?

  It absolutely proves buy-in.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, buy-in. That's right.

• 44:01Sam Fragoso?

  They're literally giving their money.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 44:03Sam Fragoso?

  To a system that.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:04Sam Fragoso?

  Won't make them citizens right away, that, that tries to criminalize them, that demonizes them in the news.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:11Sam Fragoso?

  I don't know anyone who just gives money that they make from work.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:17Sam Fragoso?

  To a system like that, that they don't want to be part of and believe in.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Correct. And that we have told that population for 30 years, the IRS has, that this is treated, your information is as sacred to, and is, and will be as protected as the, as the information of American citizens.

• 44:32Sam Fragoso?

  And obviously an imperfect system.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Yes. And there's a broader point here. You're asking me a question, how all this stuff gets electrified, how you can make it swing on the page. Donald Trump is the answer. I wouldn't be writing books about the government if Trump hadn't come in and first like radically neglected it and then attacked it with malice. And then all of a sudden, it's made it interesting. I mean, I, in some ways, I should be writing Donald Trump a check, like he has made this stuff. And maybe one of the effects of Donald Trump is going to be to turn us all into better civic students, that we're going to pay more attention to what, what goes on.

• 45:04Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. You said in a couple of interviews, at some point, I'm going to have to write Donald Trump a check. I wondered for how much?

• 45:12Speaker 00

  So my, my publicist has told me not to talk about how much money I make from books and things. She said, you just, she just, you just alienate people when you do that. I actually believe in being, in kind of being open about this stuff. It's like, why shouldn't people know? Like, you should know. At least know how much money you make from books and all that. But I've been told not to talk about it. So Sam, until I get to know, until we're there in our fourth or fifth interview, I'm not going to be talking about my, my, unless, unless the IRS releases my income tax returns.

• 45:42Sam Fragoso?

  Which it may, evidently.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  They may. Right.

• 45:44Sam Fragoso?

  This would just be a check to Donald Trump. Do you think six, seven figures?

• 45:52Speaker 00

  You're asking the question in another way. I, I'm just not that dumb. I mean, I'm dumb. I do things that I shouldn't do all the time, but I've just said, I'm not going to do it.

• 46:01Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  All right.

• 46:02Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. So you haven't written him a check yet?

• 46:05Speaker 00

  No. I have his cell phone number. I have his cell phone number. Someone gave me a cell phone number just a couple of weeks ago. And I, and I'm told I can just call him and he would pick up once.

• 46:15Sam Fragoso?

  So if he sent you a Venmo request, say. What would be the appropriate amount?

• 46:21Speaker 00

  You're so clever.

• 46:22Sam Fragoso?

  I'm so sorry, Elizabeth Riley.

• 46:26Sam Fragoso?

  Asked with, with nothing but love. You're fine. You own, how many homes you own?

• 46:30Speaker 00

  I don't know. I can't, I don't.

• 46:33Sam Fragoso?

  There's that many, right?

• 46:34Speaker 00

  There's, there is a home, there's a nice home in Berkeley, a modest writer's home.

• 46:39Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  There's a little cabin off the side.

• 46:40Sam Fragoso?

  A little cabin off the side.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Right. Right.

• 46:42Sam Fragoso?

  Very good. When we spoke last time, it was around the Sam Bankman-Fried book, Going Infinite.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:48Sam Fragoso?

  A book I, I really enjoyed, but that many people had problems with.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:53Sam Fragoso?

  There was a lot of, I think you called it, there was an assault on the book early on.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 46:57Sam Fragoso?

  Is what you, is what you called it. Um, one of the critiques is that your sympathy or empathy for, for Sam Bankman-Fried, or any of your subjects, that your closeness to him, the proximity. Made it difficult for you to have or create a clear-eyed evaluation. Is that a fair critique?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  No. No. I don't think so. I, I don't think my evaluation of Sam Bankman-Fried was, was any different from my evaluation of any of the other subjects. I think the difference was, in his case, in his case, people had such, not everybody, but people had such strong, had established such strong opinions of him, you know, on Twitter, and that he, he became, he went from being everybody's favorite crypto boy toy to being everybody's favorite villain. And he went from being like the it kid, who was worth $30 billion and every venture capitalist wanted to hand him money, and every politician wanted to be his friend and all that,

• 47:59Speaker 00

  to being, oh, he's a crook. And it embarrassed a lot of people. All the people who were previously had his, their hands in his pockets, all of a sudden needed to distance themselves from him. And I had watched the whole thing and I thought that was kind of, there was a person there who was still a very interesting character.

• 48:15Sam Fragoso?

  You watched the whole thing from inside the room?

• 48:18Speaker 00

  As close to, I wasn't inside the room.

• 48:19Sam Fragoso?

  There were many times where he was on his computer and you were on that couch.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Oh, no, totally right.

• 48:23Sam Fragoso?

  I, I remember this so vividly.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  No, no, totally.

• 48:25Sam Fragoso?

  You befriended the parents?

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the, the, but if, which, let me tell you how I do what I do. It is not, oh, I'm going to, if I were to write about Sam, say I'm doing you. I get to know you for a while. I watch you. I, we spend some time together. I do things with you. I watch you do things. I, I come in to your studio and all this. I interview all the people who work for you. I find people you fired and I talk to them. I.

• 48:51Sam Fragoso?

  Those don't exist.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  Those might not exist. I found people you've had problems with in the past. I find people who taught you in school. I found, so.

• 48:58Sam Fragoso?

  Those do exist.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  So, but I talk to all kinds of people.

• 49:02Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  I really want to get to know you. So, and, um, it doesn't, the, my job is, is, is to allow the reader to get to know you. And now if the reader comes to the book with a very superficial understanding of you and they hate you, it's going to irritate them to get to have to get to know you.

• 49:25Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. To be complicated by the.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Complicated by the.

• 49:28Sam Fragoso?

  Synchesies of being a human.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Right, a human. And so what happened with that book, but it's, it's all good. The book did great and the book's going to be a movie. And the book is, I'm so proud of that book. I'm so proud of that book. It's the bravest book I ever wrote because I knew it was going to happen. Like I knew people were going to be pissed.

• 49:44Sam Fragoso?

  Were you surprised by how pissed they were?

• 49:46Speaker 00

  It's just gotten so loud. It's, it's louder. It just keeps getting louder. But no, it's just more people have megaphones.

• 49:55Sam Fragoso?

  But they didn't. They made critiques of, of how you do your job.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  That's just dumb. It's like, my job is to get to know this person. And if, put it another way.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  If, if the person I drew, I'd have to distort him to draw him this way. If, if I had to, if I drew this grotesque caricature that sort of encouraged the people who hated them the most to, in their views of him. It would, it would fail to explain how he happened in the first place. If someone came to me and said, look, you left all these facts out about him that the reader needs to know to understand him, I'd be more receptive to the critique. If the, but when the critique is, oh, you're too nice to him. Like, I'm just describing him. There's a reason why all these people gave him money. There's a reason why everybody wanted to work for him. There was a reason why all the politicians wanted to be with him.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  And so you need to feel that in order to feel, that's why the story's so shocking. I don't start writing that book until he's in jail. I like know what happened.

• 50:58Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think you can get too close to a subject?

• 51:00Speaker 00

  No. I mean, you could, I guess you could, but.

• 51:03Sam Fragoso?

  There's no line that you see that would be too close to.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  What does that even mean? It's like, do I, is it, could I get, could I get to know them too well? I don't have, I'm not that, I'm not close to Sam Bankman-Fried at all. I mean, he's not, he's not my friend. And so.

• 51:18Sam Fragoso?

  When was the last time you talked to him?

• 51:19Speaker 00

  You can't talk to him, he's in jail. He sends out, he, I'm on an email list that he writes a prison diary and there are a whole bunch of people who get the prison diary. But you, you have to be, I get the prison diary, but I, so I haven't spoken to him in ages, I mean, years.

• 51:31Sam Fragoso?

  This approach, you have been doing this work for a long, long time. I want to read from something here. This is an essay you wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1999 titled, I Like a Paul.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:44Sam Fragoso?

  Which you wrote after writing about John McCain, covering John McCain.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Yes. It was, and this is making a similar point. Because the context for this is, I watched him, got to know him, wrote him from the inside, the way you'd write a character in a novel, and it didn't actually, actually the effect of it was massively positive. People, because most people liked him, there wasn't a lot of animosity towards him. He once told me that the piece I wrote about him was the most important thing that had ever been written about him. Because it changed, it sort of, it, it opened eyes in the press corps about who he actually was. But be that as it may, this is, I guess, from my New York Times Magazine piece.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Most of what was written about Clinton, like most of what was written about other big time politicians, was written from a strange distance. I say strange because the reporters appeared content with their bleacher seats. From the bleachers, you can analyze and prognosticate and pour boiling oil and doubt onto the players below. And a scalding skepticism is obviously extremely useful to have inside the political arena. But political journalists as a class seem to have given up the hope that they might write another sort of journalism, that they might come to know the players intimately and convey their points of view to a reader. The first unwritten rule of political journalism when I got to Washington was, keep your distance from politicians. It's okay to talk to them, as a Washington Post reporter put it to me, you're just not

• 53:14Speaker 00

  supposed to like them. But if you weren't supposed to like them, you were unlikely to get very close to them. And if you never got close to them, you were never going to draw them well. So this was interesting to me because some of the best things I ever read when I was like a kid, George Plimpton, he becomes a member of the Detroit Lions to write Paper Lion. Hunter Thompson, he becomes a Hell's Angel to write about the Hell's Angels. Further back, John Hershey, wonderful New Yorker writer, wrote a profile of Harry Truman where.

• 53:47Sam Fragoso?

  This is where he's in the bath, right?

• 53:49Speaker 00

  They go to steam room naked together. And you, when you're reading the things, you're actually getting to know the character. You're not in this, from this, you're not in this weird distorted sort of journalistic distance from the thing. You're just describing how they are and putting the reader, it's the experience the reader would have if they were with them, basically. And this is why the books work. This is why, this is why the books all sell, is that people want that experience. And that's why, when I read, I want that experience.

• 54:16Sam Fragoso?

  But there does come a point in John McCain's life.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:20Sam Fragoso?

  That you feel you're no longer able to write about him. That there is a line that you said that you crossed.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that wasn't that, that wasn't the line. That wasn't why I couldn't write about him. The line was, the, the problem was that, in that when he ran for president the second time, 2007, you know, with the 2008 election, I went out with him for a couple of days and I'd been out of touch with him for a few years. Like, we weren't the best, we weren't best friends or anything like that. We, but, but I'd, I'd spent a lot of time with him. And I went out with him and he was giving me a hall pass, like he'd just cover the campaign, everyone covered the campaign. I went out with 36 hours and he, his, the Republican Party had pulled him in this direction where stuff coming out of his mouth on stage, I knew he didn't believe.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  He was not the guy I'd left behind. And I started listening to Obama and I thought, I prefer him. Like, I, like, I prefer him. And, and I, I felt so, I thought, this is going to be so unpleasant to be around this operation, that I just didn't even want to, if I physically don't want to be there, I can't write it. So I just said, I went in, I went into his car and I said, I'm, I'm out of here. And that was the last time, really, I spoke to him.

• 55:38Sam Fragoso?

  I guess what I'm getting at is, we all have blind spots.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:43Sam Fragoso?

  I have them.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  What are yours?

• 55:45Sam Fragoso?

  You have them? Well, we'll get, we'll get to those. But I, I have to think, is there a moment with, with the Sam Bankman-Fried story or another one where you go, God, you know, my sensitivity or compassion for X blinded me to X?

• 56:02Speaker 00

  As, with the books? Nothing pops to mind. Nothing big pops to mind. I mean, all the books, if they're any good, all of them generate controversy when they come out. You don't, you, you're, you're sensitive, more sensitive now than people would have been 20 years ago to a book with those controversies because it took the form of a few newspaper articles as opposed to explosions on Twitter. But like, the vitriol that accompanied Moneyball was incredible.

• 56:33Sam Fragoso?

  It's true. There is controversy almost around every book you write.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:37Sam Fragoso?

  And, and the one after the fact that we have never spoken about, that, I have to tell you, just makes me really sad, the, the business with the blind side.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  Can I tell you what happened? Do you know what happened?

• 56:49Sam Fragoso?

  I, I would like you to explain it a little bit.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 56:52Sam Fragoso?

  And this, again, for context.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:54Sam Fragoso?

  Michael Orr, who, who was a football player, you know, a kid who was in a conservatorship with a man, I think his name is Sean.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  Tui, the Tui family.

• 57:03Sam Fragoso?

  Who you played baseball with.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we grew up together.

• 57:06Sam Fragoso?

  And so much so, that when you released Moneyball.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:11Sam Fragoso?

  And you went on book tour and you landed in Memphis.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:15Sam Fragoso?

  He picked you up from the airport.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  I was writing something about our high school baseball coach, it became a little book called Coach. And I happened to be going to Memphis and to, to talk about, about Moneyball. And I thought, Sean's in Memphis and he had, he had a paternalistic, his, the coach, Sean's father had a stroke when we were in high school. The coach came in and replaced his dad. He and the coach had this special relationship. I just wanted to bounce thoughts about the coach off him. When I told him that, he said, I want to talk, I'll, I'll talk to you about that. And he picked me up at the airport and said famously, when I got in the car, he says, so who writes, who writes your books? And, and I was like, I was like, Sean, I write my books. He goes, no, like you're a dumbass like me who sat in the back of English class, you don't write your books. Like, who writes them? And he just didn't believe it.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  And we went to his house to talk and that Michael Orr would have been, Michael who they had, they took in, would, it would have been kind of January, February of his junior year in high school. And I, I just, there was this large black kid on his sofa and he never introduced me. And on the way out, I said, because he dropped me off at my hotel, I said, who, who's the kid? And he said, oh, he's at LeAnn's project that she got him off, she was like on the streets. He goes to the kid, our kid's school and he didn't have a bed and so we've just taken him in. So I didn't think anything of it, so that's unusual. What happened was, Moneyball gets me inside of other sports.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  I'm talking to the San Francisco 49ers front office about analytics in football and they start showing me the history of salaries across positions on a football field. And it jumps out that this position, the left tackle, who, who, who guards the quarterback's blind side, has gone from being the lowest paid person on the field to the second highest. And I thought, that's an interesting story. And then about nine months later, Sean calls me and says, and I kind of followed a little bit what was going on with Michael. Michael's been identified as a left tackle and, and everybody's going crazy. So the things sort of came, kind of came together. It was a very odd book. The publisher didn't, didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for it.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  It did less well than all my other books when it came out of the gate. It was a risky book to write because it was unknown people, family drama and all this football strategy. Anyway, I go, I stay in touch with Michael and the Tuis. Like, Michael, Michael loved the book when it came out. It was like, no problem, everything's great. Then the problems start when the movie comes out and it is a huge hit. Because there, I never had a movie done on one of my books. I was surprised a movie happened. But the movie generates something like $300 million at the box office. It cost nothing to make.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Michael starts to get upset that there's not more money there.

• 1:00:08Sam Fragoso?

  And More money for him.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  Yes. Writers for books, they give you something called net profits and they're never, no matter how much money they make, they're not net profits. So there was something like a 200 and something thousand dollar advance, which I split with the Tuys, which is a little weird at the time. I just said, you can have half of it. And they signed away their rights and they got half of that. And Michael got a piece of that, got his share of it. They split it into five, four shares or whatever it was.

• 1:00:32Sam Fragoso?

  That would be

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Oh, nothing, not very much.

• 1:00:34Sam Fragoso?

  20,000.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Right. But you know, what was odd, the NCAA was all over them. It was like, you couldn't give Michael money. It was like, there was a wall between the players and, and so I get a call, flash forward to now-ish, five years ago, Michael calls me and says, I, I would like to make some more money out of this. You want to go on the road and talk about the book? And I said, I'll do it. But you know, the time has sort of passed. And I call Sean, I said, you know, Michael wants to go on the road and talk about the book. And Sean said to me, we'd be getting weird emails from him saying, or texts from him saying that if he doesn't, we don't give him money, that, that he's going to destroy our reputation.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  So I watched this. So this is the backdrop to, there's now a lawsuit where Michael is suing them for, the first accusation was that he'd stolen his movie money. And because it was my contract, I knew how much money there was. And I know they didn't steal any of it.

• 1:01:34Sam Fragoso?

  Because you never made money on royalties.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  Royalties, tiny drips and drabs have started coming in the last few years since Michael started making this noise. So I don't know if there's any connection, but, but not huge, not big sums of money. When it became clear that that isn't what had happened, he then started to accuse them of stealing his name, image and likeness, because they have on the back of the movie, given talks for money. And he could have just as easily done it too. And that, that's a bizarre notion, but we will see. There's a going to be some sort of trial, maybe in, but it's been, this has been percolating. But in the process, a couple of things have happened that seemed to me very false. The book didn't ever say that

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  they adopted him. They say they took, he lived with him, he took him in and the conservatorship happened. Leanne Toohey, in public talks, would refer to her, him as her kid. And they, to all appearances, that is what it was. I mean, he was in the Christmas card, he was, he was in their family like this. It's incredibly sad. It is true that whenever she said that they adopted him after the movie, she only said after the movie came out, that she shouldn't have said that.

• 1:02:43Sam Fragoso?

  And why did she say that?

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  Because shorthand, she was like, I don't know. She didn't think of it. She, he was in the, he was in their will. The other thing is, Sean is like worth, he's, he's a poor boy growing up, but he sold his business for $200 million. He gives money to all these charities. He's like, the idea of Sean taking someone's money is insane. It's insane. And Sean, you know, he gave Michael cars, he gave him, I mean, he was just open-handed.

• 1:03:08Sam Fragoso?

  Knowing that, when, when Michael sends us texts and says, hey, if I'm not paid, I'm gonna

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  I'm gonna blow this up.

• 1:03:17Sam Fragoso?

  Sully, your reputation. Was there an amount of money he wanted?

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Yes. I can't remember what it was. There was, it was millions. He thought everybody made millions. And they're right, someone made millions.

• 1:03:27Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. The studio certainly made a lot of money.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. But it wasn't the Tuys who made millions.

• 1:03:31Sam Fragoso?

  But the Tuys had, as you just said, millions.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  Yes. Why didn't he just pay him?

• 1:03:36Sam Fragoso?

  I suppose you know better than I do, but

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  I think Sean just got his back up. It was like, wait, wait, what? We, you know?

• 1:03:44Sam Fragoso?

  He felt like he didn't owe him that.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  What did he owe him? I mean, he took, he, what they'd done was very generous. That the idea that, and, but in addition, that it wasn't even like, to appearances, a financial arrangement. And Michael had made $38 million in the NFL and like, it was just seemed like

• 1:04:05Sam Fragoso?

  He'd done well, yeah.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Maybe the easy thing would have been just to pay him some money.

• 1:04:09Sam Fragoso?

  Why do you think he didn't?

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  If someone comes and threatens you, this may be a Southern male thing, because like, screw you. Like, what are you talking about? I mean, it's just felt like a shakedown. I think that's why. And he just wasn't going to do that.

• 1:04:23Sam Fragoso?

  And why do you think, because you, you got to know, Michael.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  I know. I have an answer to that. Why did he do this? I can understand why Michael would feel like dollar out of, dollar in my pocket is a dollar out of his. He had incredibly tough first 15 or 16 years. And I just don't know. I don't have an answer to that. And I don't have an answer to that. And I don't, it's not really my place to answer it. It's, it's sad because in the moment, it was so beautiful. It was so beautiful to watch people just seem to love each other and to be, have it work out so well. That story, when you ask me what it's about, it's about the character and the situation. It's about, we tend to

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  attribute to people what really is really about a situation. And that you change his situation and his whole future changes. And if, if a six foot, five inch, 320 pound, 15 or 16 year old kid, who is born to play left tackle in the NFL, can be missed by the world, like who can't be missed? Like you move this kid from direst poverty to, into extreme privilege with all that entails, including two surrogate parents who are fighting for him at school and all that. And all of a sudden, all the outcomes start to change. And so that, that's what the story was about. And it's, I think that's true.

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  And all this has just muddied it. And that's just too bad. I can't do anything about it. Like, you know, eventually people are going to lead their lives and the characters you write about are going to go have other experiences and can't do much about it.

• 1:06:05Sam Fragoso?

  It's funny, the process of, of writing these books, for a time, you get so close.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  Hmm. It's not a little time either. It's

• 1:06:15Sam Fragoso?

  It's a lot of time.

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  18 months or whatever it is. Yeah.

• 1:06:18Sam Fragoso?

  And then

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  Then I move on.

• 1:06:20Sam Fragoso?

  You move on.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the book changes people's lives. We know the book, the book, the book has a limited ability to change people's lives. When a movie gets made about you, it, what happens is you become the character on the screen to the world around you. And that changes their lives.

• 1:06:36Sam Fragoso?

  Does any of this change how you do your job? Or can you, can you set that aside?

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  You know, I still, I don't write books that can, so that they will become movies. I just never have thought that, that way. It's just accident, an accident that they've become, some of them have become movies.

• 1:06:52Sam Fragoso?

  Accidents with your consent?

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Of course. But I've sold, you know, they all get sold to the movies. They just never make them. So I just, I just assumed, I'd assumed

• 1:07:00Sam Fragoso?

  What'd you sell it?

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  I mean, I've been doing that for years, decades before this happens. And so, there is a thing that enters in my mind that I don't like, and I try to bat it to one side. And that is, I actually don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about the consequences for the people I'm writing about. I try to get, just get it down on the page. I'm not like thinking, oh, how is this going to play? I'm thinking, is this true to my experience of the person and the situation? And it does sometimes enter my mind, oh, this person's going to have to live with this. And, and so that, I try to bat it away because I think my responsibility is to the reader. And that's just it. It's a really simple responsibility

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  to my feeling that what I'm doing is I'm getting the truth as clearly as I can down on the page for, so the reader can evaluate that. So that's, that little voice is probably a little louder than it used to be. Like, what are the consequences of this thing I'm going to write? And the other way it cuts is when I go into the situation in the first place, it's just everybody's on more, on higher alert. It gets me in everywhere. I can, I can open every door, but they've groomed themselves before I, the door is opened. But then if you hang around 18 months, they can't, the pretense falls away pretty quickly. It's like, it just goes away. I mean, after a few months, it goes away. So you, once they, once the subject has a sense that they can run, but they can't hide, that it, it doesn't seem to have much effect.

• 1:08:28Sam Fragoso?

  Well, civil servants never really had much of an interest in having their story told.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  True.

• 1:08:33Sam Fragoso?

  And you somehow found a way in this book blockers. So why don't we come back to that after the break? That's coming up next with Michael Lewis. This year, I've become a little bit more particular about the things I bring into my house. I don't just want something that fills a space or works for right now. I want pieces that feel well-made, look beautiful, and that I can imagine keeping for a long time. My new bed from Article has been one of those very pieces. It has this beautiful felted fabric. And after living with it for a couple of months, I'm still struck by how substantial it feels. The frame is sturdy. The upholstery has held up beautifully. And the sculpted shape gives the bedroom a warmth that my old wooden bed frame never really had. That

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• 1:10:13Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back, for Vanity Fair, I think at the end of 2012, you wrote a profile of President Obama. And in thinking about this new book, and of course, the president who presides over it, would you profile Donald Trump?

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  Sure. I mean, why not? But with Obama, it was more complicated than I'm profiling Obama. What happened is I had a couple of glasses of wine late one night, and I thought, what would be a cool story? And I thought of that story, John Hershey writing about Harry Truman. I thought, he got into the shoes of the president. He actually put the reader in the position of the president. And we live in this world where we're all sort of objectifying the president. We're not really imagining why he's doing what he's doing. We sort of like, take our half-formed understandings and inflict it upon him. And as a result, there's a lot of unnecessary hostility.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  So I thought, I wrote to Obama's press people, and I said, you know what'd be really cool is if you let me hang with the president for six months, not to write a profile, but to write about, a profile of the job, like what this is like. So the next morning, I wake up, and I think, God, that was like, I shouldn't have had that second glass of wine. And that was dumb. But I get a call from his press secretary, and Jay Carney. And he says, hey, like, we might want to do this. And I went, whoa, like, really? I said, you want to do this? He goes, I don't want to do this. He was like, no, I don't want to do this. I said, well, who wants to do it? He goes, he wants to do it. So Obama thought, that's a cool idea. And what I did is I moved in to write that story. And that was the story.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  With Trump, you could do a similar sort of thing. But you'd want to, you got to build the right frame. I didn't think about what the frame is. A profile, that'd be dumb, just a profile, like, what is there to find out?

• 1:12:06Sam Fragoso?

  I like when you have two glasses of wine. It can result in a great piece or a book. I mean, I'm noticing a trend here. The blockers is from OxyContin, this is from wine. Do all your good ideas come from an altered state?

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, caffeine. I don't think I have an idea without caffeine. But it's, but there's, sure, if Trump would let me into his world, I think that's probably what it is. If you put a gun to my head and said, what is the piece about? It's about the world more than him. It's like, what is around him? Like, what is, what gets, what is, what's allowed in? What's allowed in? That's, I'd be curious to know.

• 1:12:43Sam Fragoso?

  Well, what was allowed in, in 2025? Were these young kids, as you listed, from Doge?

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:12:50Sam Fragoso?

  One of them is Gavin Kligger, who is now the chief data officer at the Department of War, having recently launched a cybersecurity startup called Cathedral, which is founded by four former Doge staffers and very quickly raised $160 million. And looking at kids like this who came in and now are using that experience, quote unquote, to their benefit. Elon Musk has also been financially remunerated for his time, especially with SpaceX. What was this all about?

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  It's a really good question. They didn't do what they said they were going to do. They didn't cut anything out of the deficit. So why were they there? He's not a stupid man. What was he there for? Now, it's possible he just really believed his own bullshit, and that like, the government was all waste, fraud, and abuse, and he was going to find it. But I think it's probably more likely that he has his own agenda. If you draw a pie chart of his agenda, probably the biggest slice is his biggest business interests, and that would be capturing NASA. And he put his friend into running an ass, so that worked. Another piece of the pie chart is attention. I think he's an attention junkie, and he can't keep off X. And he got to get all this attention, being in the White House, being out there with his chainsaw, all that stuff. So what was it all about? I think it was different for different people, but there was a lot of self-interest.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  Not totally, though. I mean, there were some of these kids who I think, when they came in, had a kind of idealism, like, I'm gonna help fix the country. It wasn't all bad. And properly directed, they really could have helped. In information technology and the government, something like 8% of the employees are under the age of 30, and 50% are over the age of 55. It's crazy. It should be just the reverse. And so there's this ossified tech with these older people. And an infusion of young tech talent would have been great. But they didn't actually go after the tech. That's not what they did. And so, what was it all about? I think it was a mixture of attention, and a need for attention,

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  a feelings of self-importance, and narrow business interests.

• 1:14:57Sam Fragoso?

  When Elon Musk was trying to do damage control, he went on Fox News and said, quote, "I mean, any given company, any given organizational name is kind of the opposite of the title." Now that Doge has been sunset, and there's a year distance.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  Doge is the opposite of the title. Yes, it introduced inefficiency, not efficiency. Yeah, that's funny.

• 1:15:21Sam Fragoso?

  Where does that leave us?

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  With a lot of pieces to pick up and figure out how to put it back together. And I think, I mean, as the story is told in the book, I'd be disappointed if people put it down and said, oh, it was all fine before. That it was clearly, there are clearly problems.

• 1:15:36Sam Fragoso?

  So some of that diagnosis was right.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  The idea that things, there were things to fix, is right. They did not seek to fix them. So that creates a kind of confusing picture.

• 1:15:47Sam Fragoso?

  They didn't seek to understand them in the first place.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  Exactly. They didn't seek to understand them in the first place. So where it leaves us is, with enough, possibly enough of a mess, that there could be a serious reconsideration of how this machine should work. I think that's, I think that's right.

• 1:16:05Sam Fragoso?

  Despite my previously noted apathy or frustration or not being moved, I was moved, obviously. And one part that left me a little hopeful, and I want to emphasize a little, is right in your backyard, Berkeley.

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  Yep. So this is just odd, that one of my characters, Alex Marangiti, invents a fire science, and it's the science of how, of wildland urban interface fires. It's the fires we all talk about. It's paradise, it's campfire. It's fires that might be coming to the East Coast anytime soon. And one of the things he figures out, when he's studying these fires, for the, really, for the first time scientifically, is how interconnected we all are. That you can't just protect your home. That if the neighbor doesn't protect their home, the protection of your home is pointless. And that we're interconnected all sorts of ways. Like, wooden fences running through a community are going to be the way the fire moves through the community. And so for the community to protect itself against fire, it requires a collective approach, much like a collective approach to disease, very similar to a pandemic.

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  And that we're only as strong as the weakest link, kind of thing. And in my backyard of Berkeley, California, up at the top of the hill, where the town meets the forest, there is a program that has been actually mandated by law, that people have to make their homes fire resistant. Because if one goes up, they all go up. And it's, even in Berkeley, it's caused blowback.

• 1:17:38Sam Fragoso?

  Liberal, woke Berkeley.

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  Liberal, woke Berkeley. We do not, as a society, do collective stuff well.

• 1:17:44Sam Fragoso?

  Why?

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  We are in highly individualistic countries, like, my home is my castle, as Alex Marangiti says. It's not going to cut it anymore. It's like, my home is my castle is not right. It's my community is my castle, kind of.

• 1:17:55Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, he says in the book, "We're asking Americans to take a completely different approach to living in or besides wild space." He said, "We need to change the story from my home is my castle to my neighborhood is my castle."

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:18:08Sam Fragoso?

  That mantra, that refrain, could be applied to so many pockets of society.

• 1:18:12Speaker 00

  That's completely right. What I'd say about this story, like, this part of the book, is that it gets at, it isn't just Trump. Trump is like, both cause and symptom. And that we're gonna have to think hard about, essentially, how we live together to take care of each other. And that's the big thing.

• 1:18:32Sam Fragoso?

  Or if we even want to.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  Or if we want to. That's right.

• 1:18:36Sam Fragoso?

  I don't know if we do.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  I do think our politics has gotten way out of touch with the culture. I don't think that's, I don't think our politics looks like how we really are.

• 1:18:44Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean?

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  I mean, like, I don't think the nastiness and the cruelty and the tribalism is how people live their lives. I just think it's, we're famously philanthropic. We are famously kind of capable of building communities. That, I think we've been misled. I think we just had, that we got a situation where we got weak leaders. And then at some point, the hope is, it gets so bad that we bounce. Like, it takes a crisis. And this might be it.

• 1:19:17Sam Fragoso?

  It's like, if the backdrop is crisis, the thing that's consistent about you, that's consistent in all these characters, is basically a commitment to producing and making work that is meaningful to you. And I think if you read in between the lines of The Fifth Risk, but especially Blockers, it's almost a manifesto on how to lead a meaningful life.

• 1:19:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:19:44Sam Fragoso?

  Which, for you, has been riding for a long, long time. And I want to play a clip from our first conversation together, where we talked about this. Can we do that?

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:19:53Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 1:19:56Speaker 00

  One of the things that I mean is different from my life and my children's lives is they have forced upon them enormous anxiety to like you're supposed to achieve and no one even no one ever suggested that to me that I was supposed to achieve something.

• 1:20:13Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think you forced it on them?

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  I've tried not to, but I try to explain to them that that the success should just be thought of as like, whatever, it's a byproduct of doing something I really love doing and the goal is to move through life in a way that you don't you don't miss the thing that you really love to do, that you don't walk away from it by mistake, that you that you're alive to it when it walks in the front door. And we shall see if I've succeeded in getting that message across.

• 1:20:42Sam Fragoso?

  I went back to the tape this morning. The air date was May 16th, 2021. And then I looked at an email you sent me a couple of days after. And I think it's just just a week before your daughter passed away. Is that right?

• 1:21:01Speaker 00

  It's five days. She was killed in a car accident five days later.

• 1:21:05Sam Fragoso?

  Her name is Dixie and I I wonder when you hear that, it's been five years now, where it lands with you and how you've made sense of it, how you've put the pieces back together in the way that you have.

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  It took me a while after Dixie died to even try to make sense of anything. It felt like just being in an emotional storm that was chaos. And it took me a while to in one of the chief sort of feelings was like, I was just, I was too tired to do anything. I didn't want to get out of bed. And I think what was happening was I was erasing a map in my head of what the future looked like and replacing it with another map. Everybody has loss. It's not original to lose a child. But I didn't feel like anybody had anything

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  to say that meant anything to me, that it was my situation, that what I was experiencing, the words had not been generated to describe it. And I started to make little notes about it. And the little notes went into a drawer. And at some point, there was a kind of break when I realized that if I'm going to get through this, I've got to do it originally. Even if it's not original, I need to, I need to put my own words to it and my own feelings to it. I can't just accept an off the rack description of grief and just the stages of grief, the whatever. None of that seemed to apply.

• 1:22:38Sam Fragoso?

  And do you remember some of the notes that you took down?

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  Well, you're gonna have an opportunity to see the notes because what I concluded was, I'm essentially a character in a one man play. And I've now written that play. And it opens at the Cherry Lane Theater in April in New York. And the, the writing of it has been cathartic, joyous. It's almost like I'm in a partnership with her again, and we're doing it together. It is a story of a father and a daughter. It's a story of a father's love. And, and it's a story of a man who went from being her first, her

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  kind of observer, to being really her father. It took me a little while to click in as a father, to being her coach, to being essentially her consultant and helpmate when she got to be 19 and was a college softball player, to me being her student, that she was extraordinary character, and I'm still learning from her. And I've found that the way to, the way to make something useful of her death is, is to, is to keep her present. It's like, it's like the opposite of a moving on, or getting through, or a, and I've managed to keep her

• 1:24:06Speaker 00

  very present. So she is like part of my life still.

• 1:24:09Sam Fragoso?

  What have you learned?

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  I had things about me that she wanted, that she wished she had about her. And she had things about her that I wished I had more of. And the thing she had more of than I did was courage. She was extremely brave, morally brave, physically brave. She gives me nerve. She, I get a lot of nerve out of, out of just her presence. And I keep her around. I talk about her all the time. I'm not shy about the subject. And now I've written about her. And, and that I found for me, that's helped a lot. But the bigger point, I mean, the, I think that, I think a lot of people would benefit from feeling liberated

• 1:24:52Speaker 00

  from the rules of grief. I think they're kind of rules. And, and one of the rules, an odd rule, is people don't want you, people are uncomfortable around someone who's lost a child. They certainly don't want you to feel too sad. They don't want you to be too traumatized. After a while, you're supposed to have kind of gotten over it. They don't want you too happy either. It makes them uncomfortable. That there's, you're expected to play a certain role. And what the play does is try to liberate the audience from the role. Try to give the audience, empower the audience to experience this thing that is awful and traumatic in an original way. And in the experiencing it of an original way and putting your own words to it, you, you come to terms with it in a different

• 1:25:37Speaker 00

  way. You just come to terms with it in a different way. I loved her so much. She was, she was brave and she was loved. So I just, you know, I've pieced together my own understanding of it and turned it into something I do, which is, you know, a piece of writing.

• 1:25:51Sam Fragoso?

  What's the title?

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  How to be lucky.

• 1:25:53Sam Fragoso?

  You could have given me a million guesses.

• 1:25:58Speaker 00

  That's good.

• 1:26:01Sam Fragoso?

  Why is it called that? And who's playing you?

• 1:26:04Speaker 00

  Can't tell you that. But

• 1:26:08Sam Fragoso?

  You said previously that it was Jason Bateman.

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  Probably not Jason Bateman. But, but I don't know. This is actually, it's gotten so it's

• 1:26:17Sam Fragoso?

  It was supposed to be Jason Bateman.

• 1:26:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it is.

• 1:26:19Sam Fragoso?

  He said he was in.

• 1:26:21Speaker 00

  There's a whole story. There's a whole wonderful story, but I can't tell that yet. But it's, all I can say is that

• 1:26:28Sam Fragoso?

  Is it Will Arnett?

• 1:26:29Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:26:30Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, God, am I close?

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  No, you're so funny. You're so funny. You're relentless. You used to talk so easy, and now you just come at me like a pit bull.

• 1:26:42Sam Fragoso?

  With absolute love. A pit bull with love.

• 1:26:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, pit bull with love. A pit bull like licks you before he bites you. But the but

• 1:26:49Sam Fragoso?

  Kind of makes it worth it. Doesn't that make it all okay?

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  I think we'll leave the rest to the imagination of the audience because I think it is, it's, it is among the most exciting experiences I've had. And she's present every moment. And it's a joy.

• 1:27:06Sam Fragoso?

  Why is it called How to be Lucky?

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  It's about a person coming to terms with the role of accident in life. And, and he had a, he had an old understanding, which was that it always broke his way. And then, and then the worst possible thing happens. And how does he come to terms with it?

• 1:27:25Sam Fragoso?

  Hearing that voice, because we never met in person at that point.

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:27:30Sam Fragoso?

  It was over Zoom. And hearing that person five years ago, that even this, even something as incomprehensible, that even this, you found a way to have her live through the work, I think is proof that you have done this thing over and over again, that life, that writing has given your life meaning. And to close, I thought maybe you'd want to read from the end of the book of Blockers. This is a kid who was in Doge, who came to being part of the government kind of earnestly. I mean, this is a kid who in 2016 was going door to door for Bernie Sanders.

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:28:15Sam Fragoso?

  But then he said Doge was the most meaningful thing that he could do to help affect change within the government.

• 1:28:22Speaker 00

  He had a very specific thing he wanted to do. He wanted to fix, he drove him crazy. He got paper from the IRS. He thought he could fix the IRS's technology. So you could just do it all in there.

• 1:28:31Sam Fragoso?

  Eliminate paper.

• 1:28:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, all that faxes and all that.

• 1:28:33Sam Fragoso?

  Yes. And so he joins, then gets fired.

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  Because he says the government's more efficient than he thought.

• 1:28:39Sam Fragoso?

  In an article for Fast Company.

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:41Sam Fragoso?

  And, and then months later, when, when the fall of Saigon, quote unquote, happens, he's asked back.

• 1:28:48Speaker 00

  After all the Doge washes out, but someone in Doge is still there.

• 1:28:52Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 1:28:53Speaker 00

  And saw how earnest he was and thought, we're going to fix some things now.

• 1:28:55Sam Fragoso?

  An empty IRS office this man walks into in the middle of New York City.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  That's right. And his name is Sahil. And Sahil Lavingia. And Sahil's come back and he, he gets to the office and he's all hot and bothered about, he's going to finally be given the, the ability to fix something. And he, and he goes over the water fountain to fill up his bottle and the water fountain doesn't work. And he, he just goes, he goes crazy. He's just like, in what world is it okay for the, for not to have water on the floor? I'm going to fix this water fountain. And he goes, he goes on this journey that goes on and on. It's the end of the book. But when this is a little piece of his journey. He's, he's tried 18 different ways and failed 18 different ways to fix this water fountain

• 1:29:40Speaker 00

  over months. And it's a story of government dysfunction and someone coming in and sort of overriding it. Then Sahil caught what felt like a break. He was riding the elevator alone when it stopped and a man with a tool belt stepped inside. He was definitely a plumbing looking guy, said Sahil. I'm like, this is fucking perfect. He began to fill the guy's ear about the water fountain on the fifth floor. The guy just looked at him. Seventh floor, he finally said. No, no, this is on the fifth floor, said Sahil. Seventh floor, the guy repeated. It was a bit weird. Seventh floor, said Sahil. What do you mean? I mean, there's a working water fountain on the seventh floor, said the guy. Yeah, yeah, but I work on the fifth floor, said Sahil. The elevator doors opened and the

• 1:30:24Speaker 00

  guy, and hope, exited. But as the doors closed, the guy turned around and shouted, also fifteenth floor. Every day, Sawhill checked the water fountain. He pressed anyone he thought even remotely connected to the issue. "I ping my manager," he said. "I ping the CIO of the IRS. No one will follow up with me on the water fountain issue." "But I always follow up with people who get in touch with me. I always ask, what do you know about what I have to do to fix the water fountain?" He returned to the facility's management office, where a different guy told him that they'd fixed some filter on a water fountain, but it turned out to be a water fountain on another floor. "So there's some activity that actually happened," said Sawhill, "which is how a person thought if he was actually trying to fix a thing, instead of profiting from

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  its brokenness." The water fountain wasn't just a water fountain. The water fountain was more like the IRS's technology and a lot of what remained of the US government than it was like the app Sawhill had created. The water fountain was governed by forces beyond the control of any one person. It existed inside a web of rules and beneath layers of authority. To work properly, the water fountain required a certain kind of person to make sure that it did.

• 1:31:37Sam Fragoso?

  And it takes a certain kind of person to get it down like that.

• 1:31:42Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:31:43Sam Fragoso?

  So, as always, Michael Lewis, thank you very much for the time.

• 1:31:47Speaker 00

  Total pleasure, Sam.

• 1:32:01Sam Fragoso?

  Thank you for watching Talk Easy. If you enjoyed today's episode with Michael Lewis, be sure to subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can leave us a review on Apple, drop us a comment on Spotify, or follow us across social media at Talk Easy Pod. If you haven't been to vote for Talk Easy in the Signal Awards, we'll include the link below in the description. You can go to vote.signalaward.com. Voting is open through October 15th, and we're nominated for Best Host, Interview or Talk Show, or Best Video Podcast Host. Our producer is Caroline Reebok. This episode was edited by Alex Dishal. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. Video graphics come from Will Tuttingham, photographs by email Rovello, social media by Lucy McGraw.

• 1:32:46Sam Fragoso?

  This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Higher Ground Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and I'll see you back here next Sunday with Jason Sudeikis. Until then, stay safe, and so long.

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

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