Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Michael Lewis on How DOGE Broke the Government About this episode Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, The Big Short, and the new book Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, joins Scott Galloway to discuss what happened when DOGE went after the career civil servants who stood in its way.
He explains why DOGE’s young engineers led with contempt over curiosity, how the IRS’s chief privacy officer fought to keep immigrants’ tax data away from ICE, and why watching DOGE’s leadership up close made him question how the world’s richest man runs his companies. They also explore how prediction markets are upending sports betting, why gambling apps go after their most vulnerable users, and what it’s like to watch a son leave for college.
To order the audiobook or learn more about buying the book, visit Blockers.fm.
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Transcript 10,551 words · 8 speakers
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1:37 Speaker 01 Episode 421. 421 is the International Call and Go for Slovakia. In 2021, Jeff Bezos went to space. Mr. Bezos spent $30 million for 10 minutes in space. For free, I spend 10 hours a day just spacing out. Learn how to budget, bitch.
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2:01 Speaker 01 Welcome to the 421st episode of the Prof G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with Michael Lewis, legendary author of Moneyball, Liar's Poker, The Big Short, and more. We discuss with Michael his latest book, Blockers, which follows the career civil servant Doge pushed out, the young engineers who ran Doge and why their overhaul of the federal government backfired, how Doge's cuts played out inside agencies most Americans never think about, prediction markets are disrupting the sports betting industry. I'm just an enormous fan of Michael. He's done some amazing podcasts. One of my favorite books was Moneyball, and I thought, there's no way this could be turned into a movie, and it was, and we'll talk a little bit about that. But I think he's an exceptional storyteller and just, he just has a nice vibe. He's a great guest. Anyways, with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Michael Lewis.
2:50 Speaker 01 Michael Lewis is the author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, and The Big Short, and the host of the podcast Against the Rules. His 18th Hook, Blockers, Rebels in the Deep State, follows the career civil servants targeted by Doge. Michael, welcome. Where does this podcast find you?
3:06 Speaker 02 A hotel room in Los Angeles, but only briefly. It's like a different city every night. And it's been, I've been struck by how the way you reach a book audience has changed in just the last five, 10 years.
3:21 Speaker 01 Same here.
3:22 Speaker 02 And this, so I just sort of, and I just sort of gave into it. The local media's been gutted. In ancient times, you would go to Chicago and you'd do five shows or four shows and you'd get to Chicago. Those shows don't exist anymore. It's harder and harder to do long-form to a national audience. They just kind of, these shows have vanished. But what has stepped in and replaced it is these big theatrical events. So like 1,500 people in a theater in Pittsburgh, or Miami, or Nashville, or Chicago, or Portland, or Seattle. And I sort of leaned into it this time, and it's been so cool connecting in a 19th century way with the book audience in a kind of face-to-face, warm way.
4:06 Speaker 02 And I know you do, you do live performances of your pod, but what I, instead of doing the usual thing of just sitting on a stage and being interviewed by somebody, I've gotten so into it that it's that they've kind of turned it into a little performance. And, and the audience responds like it's, I mean, I can see that the book tour going forward is going to be this. It's going to be doing what you're doing right now, what I'm doing right now. It's going to be live audiences going to the cities, less media, which is strange. I mean, maybe the media takes a different form. Maybe the people are there taking, making little clips and putting them on social media. But mainly, it's like this personal interaction with the audience.
4:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, we're, we're literally living in parallel universes right now. I might be, as far as I know, you're in the floor below me. I am also in a hotel in Los Angeles, mid, mid-tour for our live pivot tour. And what I have found is that these tours, and I'm curious to get your feedback, I find them stressful and entirely inspiring. Because if a bunch of, if 2,000 people show up and they decided to give up their evening and spend a hundred bucks to come see you, it's not like if the podcast doesn't go well and they can just skip through the ZipRecruiter ads and go listen to the daily, right?
5:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:23 Speaker 01 They took their evening to come see you. And also, live events, there's just so much that can go wrong. You need, you need a great production team. It's like, there's just a million ways to screw up. At the same time, I have found generally, if I want to feel bad about America and the world, I just need to spend more time online. And if I want to feel great about Americans, I just need to go out in the real world and meet them.
5:49 Speaker 02 That's right.
5:49 Speaker 01 People could not be more lovely, more responsive, more polite. I got some hard questions yesterday about my views on Israel, but people were respectful, acknowledged my points, we acknowledged theirs. It just, as opposed to the food fight that the online community has digressed into, at least some of the social platforms I'm on, but it's just, it really is inspiring. So.
6:16 Speaker 02 I feel exactly the same way, and people just behave differently face-to-face than they do online. And it is very encouraging, but it's forced me, I don't know, I don't know how you feel about being on a stage with 15,000 people in the audience. 20 years ago, I would have been paralyzed, isn't the right word. It would have been nerve-wracking to do it. And I thought you had to just force my way through it. Now it's become very comfortable, just walk out on the stage and talk to people. And thank God, because I do think this is the way, it's just, it's a really healthy form of interaction.
6:52 Speaker 02 I don't know, I found it, I found it completely energizing, and I'm surprised. Because normally, you know, the old book tour, after two weeks, I was sick of the book. Like, I hated my own book after like, like talking about it 50 times, and, and I just wanted to be off the road. I've been on the road for five weeks with this thing, and the crap, the actual interaction with the crowds has me feeling almost as fresh today as I felt five weeks ago. And I'm still, I'm still really interested in my book. So it's, it's a, it's been, it's been a curious experience.
7:25 Speaker 01 But you said, and I've done seven or eight books, a fraction of what you've done, and mine haven't been as successful as yours, but you're right. The way we used to promote books was we'd go to KCRW in San Francisco with a guy, hopefully reaching some people, or that we'd speak to the San Francisco Examiner, which I'm not even sure still exists, answer the same questions, go through the same thing. We're doing a live event tomorrow in San Francisco, and I just have no idea what to expect. And the energy will just be off the hook. It's just totally evolved. And generally speaking, it, it reflects a shift in the economy. You know, Disney streaming service is a difficult business. The Disney parks have never been stronger. Taylor Swift, recording artists used to make all their money from albums.
8:10 Speaker 01 Now they make all their money in live performances. Since COVID, IRL is where people want to spend, I think a lot, unfortunately, a lot of it is young people are giving up on saving for a house and they're spending money on going to Coachella. So there's some downside to it.
8:23 Speaker 02 Right.
8:23 Speaker 01 But I think people are really excited about hurting and being together in the flesh, if you will. But let's get to, let's get to your, your stuff. You're best known for your bestselling books, Moneyball and The Big Short, but you've spent the last several years writing about the federal government. Your book, The Fifth Risk, looked at what happened inside federal agencies during Trump's first term. Your new book, Blockers, picks up his, in his second term, following the career civil servant. Servants that Doge targeted. Before we talk about Doge, what pulled you back into the federal government from, from baseball or for, or, or from Wall Street?
9:01 Speaker 02 It's a really good question. I, I can't always put my finger on why I got interested in the thing. And I would never have expected to be like the bard of bureaucrats. But, but, I mean, Trump clearly electrified the material. And, and it starts, I can tell you how it starts. It was really pretty simple. Right when he was elected the first time, when he fired his transition team and turned to Chris Christie and said, we don't need to, we don't need to do a transition with the Obama administration. We don't need to go and figure out what the federal government's doing. Because he said, you and I are so smart, we can figure it out in an hour. And I heard that from Christie's lips and I thought, oh my God.
9:43 Speaker 02 I mean, one, this is kind of existential peril. You all of a sudden feel, you, you feel this dread because he's supposed to run the federal government equally, doesn't know anything about it and he's not going to learn about it. So that was, there was that, but there was this, it's literary, pure literary opportunism. It's like, oh, this is kind of cool. I can go and do the transition. I can go into, you know, the energy department and hear how they're managing the nuclear stockpile. And the reader, the reader will know, they know more about this than the president of the United States because he hasn't bothered to figure it out. And that's what got me into it in the first place. And where it's, where it jumped the shark and I wouldn't have come back.
10:22 Speaker 02 I don't think I'd have come back again if he hadn't gotten reelected and, and approached his, his, his government in an entirely different way. But what, what got me really energized about the material was the quality of the characters. Like you, I don't know what you thought, if someone said bureaucrat, civil servant, public servant. Before I went in there in the first place, I'd have said, no, no, thank you. Like I, I just assumed it was kind of risk averse, clock punching automatons that were not characters. And I just kept finding characters, like people I know I could, I could light, light up the page. And they might not want, they might not want to be on the page. They might not want to be my characters. They weren't, they weren't kind of like the kind of people who want fame and fortune.
11:07 Speaker 02 But, but they were great characters. And so I, I knew that if the situation warranted it, if something happened in the federal government, they made it interesting. I knew that there was a cast of characters I could draw on to, to write about it.
11:22 Speaker 01 And one of the things I don't like about some of the people, mostly men, we look to for guidance, specifically the tech brothers. They like to credit their grit and their character for their success and then blame government and bureaucrats for their failures. And I was in municipal, I was on Wall Street like you right out of college, but I was in fixed income and I did a lot of municipal finance. And I was constantly impressed. You meet the CFO of the East Bay Municipal Utility District that's in charge of financing water projects in Oakland.
11:51 Speaker 02 Yep.
11:51 Speaker 01 And this woman has it going on. And what she's decided is after getting her MBA from the high schools, she wants to have more meaning in her life and she wants to work on public infrastructure. I think people are consistently, or at least I have been surprised at the upside around just how fortunate we are to have people who probably could be making more money in the private sector.
12:11 Speaker 02 Yep.
12:12 Speaker 01 But fill a calling to the government. So the title of your book comes from Elon Musk himself, who told his Doge team to find the blockers, if you will, the people inside federal agencies standing in their way and get rid of them. Your book blockers then follows several of them, including an IRS official who guarded America's tax data, a scientist working on how to stop wildfires from destroying neighborhoods, and the man in charge of security at a federal institute Doge tried to take over. How did you, how did you identify these people? And is there any common thread through these characters?
12:47 Speaker 02 Yes.
12:49 Speaker 02 You gotta be prepared to be bored for about three minutes. So.
12:52 Speaker 01 I'm in.
12:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, are you in? Because the boring part is the important part for me with the books. It's like what the frame is. What is this book about? And I decided this book, that this administration was about a power grab. Never mind the details from day to day, that what was going on was a radical seizure of powers for the president that the president normally didn't have. And it ranged from grabbing institutions that normally the president didn't run to grabbing the power of the purse from Congress in, in really important ways, to grabbing a nonpartisan civil service and trying to turn it into a loyalist operation that served the personal interests of a single person.
13:34 Speaker 02 And once I thought, once I had that as the beginning of the story, then I thought, oh, all right. Never mind whether you're for it or against it. You've got this government, it's got two million people in it. They've taken, these two million civil servants take an oath to the constitution. They don't take an oath to Donald Trump. They take an oath to the constitution. They're supposed to uphold the law. Mostly they're doing stuff that's nonpartisan, very nonpartisan. What happens when you turn it into partisan politicized workforce? Like what happens in the various functions of the government? So then, so it's all this, I'm not even thinking about who the characters are at this point. I'm thinking about what, who are the kind of people that need to be in this story? And I realized, well, I need people who sort of, who cover the government.
14:17 Speaker 02 Like it's like, it was like the Big Short, very similar as a literary exercise. No one, it was a hairball of a story, like financial crisis, Trump government. No one person had the story. It's an ensemble piece by nature. And in this case, the ensemble in The Big Short was one thing and I cast that. In this case, the ensemble was finding people in different, in the different functions of the government, who could tell the whole story of their function, whether it's a long-term scientific research or data collection or public safety. And so that was the, that's the boring bit. Like I had that frame. So then I went and wandered. I just like went and wandered. It's pretty, it's pretty haphazard. Like I, I meet people who, who introduced me to people, who introduced me to people.
15:02 Speaker 02 And I had a, I had a Rolodex because of the fifth risk. And I mean, I knew people in various agencies and I just wandered. And it was basically, I realized at one point that really what I was looking for were people who were, who had been extremely good at their jobs, like elite level, who had been in them for a while so that they were experts in what they did. And who had been run out, like that all of a sudden they couldn't do their job, even though everybody agreed they were really good at their job in each of these functions. And, and then, then it was like, it was just a matter of, I was spoilt for choice. There were so many. For each one of these people I wrote about, there were five others in the wings. I had, I had a deep bench. You know, at that point, and this is really going to bore you, I know, but this is in the weeds of my process.
15:45 Speaker 02 At that point, I'm thinking, like how, they're, they're like, they're like a choir. You need different voices. That, at that point, I'm kind of like, I'm picking them for how they're going to sound on the page. Like, so they go together in an interesting way.
16:00 Speaker 02 But I, there's so many, there were so many different ways. The, the basic premise of the book was strong enough. Like lots and lots of extremely talented public servants who were there for the right reasons got run out because they, they just couldn't function in what was becoming a politicized partisan workforce. And, and they couldn't take, they wouldn't do things that were illegal. They wouldn't weaponize the government against the citizens, all that stuff. And it was just a matter of like picking the ones that I thought I could make swing on the page.
16:31 Speaker 01 So I don't know your politics. I'm a progressive and I've, I've literally been in a state of trying to process so many overwhelming positive emotions the last 48 hours.
16:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:41 Speaker 01 And I've been thinking a lot about just how down I felt about America at different points over the last 10 years. And one of those moments was I was invited during South by Southwest to a dinner at a CEO's house. And he introduced the most famous member of the Doge team. I think it was a 23 year old. He had, I won't say his nickname, but it was fairly famous. And so I just went over to the table and I just wanted to listen to him for a minute. And I was so profoundly disturbed that this young man, like most young men, I think he was 23, was essentially a boy and, and was deciding if and how deep we should cut HIV medication to women in Africa.
17:22 Speaker 01 And I thought, wow, we have hit a new low, an absolute new low.
17:29 Speaker 01 I hope that was the bottom. Doge is staffed largely by young engineers recruited from Musk orbit, sent into agencies with instructions to cut staffs and contracts. You interviewed about a dozen of them for the book. I would just love to get a sense for, for the people inside Doge who ultimately decided to make these types of cuts that, and, and, and let me, let me go to the, with the punchline here. I thought Bill Gates summarized it perfectly, that the world's wealthiest man is killing the world's poorest people. Talk about the people inside of the engine room here.
18:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's, you're pretty closely in touch with your 23-year-old self, I sense. Like, you're very, you're very-
18:12 Speaker 01 A lot of boys.
18:13 Speaker 02 Yes, and you were, and you were a boy, and you're sensitive to what it was like to be a young man. And, and I remember what I was like when I was 23, too. So I felt some sympathy for what happened. If, I tried to put myself in the shoes of their shoes, and the richest, world's richest man is telling me to go do stuff, and it's someone who I really admire, and I, and I know nothing. And I know nothing. All I know is what they tell me. So that's the caveat to what I'm about to say.
18:41 Speaker 01 Well, to be fair, it's like being drafted into the NBA. Like, how could you say no to that?
18:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, yes, that's right. But that's the caveat to what I'm about to say. What I'm about to say is that there was a pattern to these guys, these young guys. They, they led with cruelty and contempt rather than curiosity. Like, they, they were, they were sure they were the smartest person in the room before they entered the room. And they had a kind of chip on their shoulders. You know, the stereotype to me of this young Doge person is, the person, he didn't get into Harvard, he thinks he sure, he should have gotten into Harvard, and he's telling himself a story he didn't get into Harvard because of, you know, DEI admissions policies, kind of thing, affirmative action, and that he's been not properly appreciated his whole life. Never really played team sports, or
19:29 Speaker 02 sports of any kind. Never really been punched in the mouth, or punched anybody in the mouth. Has hid behind a computer screen for much of his childhood. Is bright, like, and bright in a certain way. Bright in the way that someone who programs, writes software is bright, but, but, but probably couldn't tell you the difference between Picasso and Matisse, or, or knows much about history, or cares at all about the government. Not broad. And they, they were, so they're all very like each other. They're all, almost all white, almost all young men. Very self-reinforcing, like, they, they all thought the others were smart like them. And then they're sent off. They, they, they treat the government like
20:13 Speaker 02 a startup. They move into the General Services Administration's headquarters with Musk, and they all sleep on the kind of cots of the floor there. And they're sent off every day and told to come back with scalps. Come back with people you fired, come back with contracts you've cut. And, and when you're on the receiving, when you see them roll in, if you're a, an excellent civil servant who's trying to do your job, what it looks like is insanity. 26-year-old, 25-year-old showing up with a badge, demanding access to the computers, going about kind of cutting the government in the most insanely arbitrary ways, like just looking at an Arc chart, and circling stuff that you, that sounds
20:53 Speaker 02 bad. Yep, I'll, I'll draw you one little picture. It's seen through the eyes of a Doge guy who actually kind of was uneasy about what he was being asked to do. His name was Sahil Lavingia. Sahil, he's a little older, early 30s. He's different in that he'd actually made his fortune. Most of these guys had not made their fortune. He's asked, he, he comes and joins Doge because, he actually has a purpose. So he's unusual that way, too. He joins Doge because he's obsessed with the fact that the IRS is still sending him paper. He says, why don't I have an app? I can just do my taxes. So he thinks he's going to come and fix that problem. Instead, they send him to the Department of Veterans
21:35 Speaker 02 Affairs. He walks in and finds another Doge guy already there, who's got sweat on his brow and is saying, God, thank God you shut up, because I don't know if I know what I'm doing. And what he's, what this, first Doge guy is doing is cutting contracts for veterans. So money that Congress has allocated to go to various veterans' causes. People have thought about it. People think this is a good use of money. There've been discussions about this. And this kid has got a file of 45,000 VA contracts, and he's just plugging in keywords like bias, or gender, or, or woman, or, or trans, that he thinks might,
22:14 Speaker 02 might flag woke spending. And without even knowing what the contracts are, when he finds the word in the title of the contracts, he just cuts the contracts. So it's that, it's that kind of stuff. It's sort of like, so however bad you imagined Doge to be, like, however irresponsible, however callous, however uninformed, it was worse. And it's going to be really interesting to watch Congress go back over this and see what they actually did, because I just, only bits and pieces have leaked into the public. I only got bits and pieces of the story.
22:50 Speaker 01 We'll be right back after a quick break.
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25:46 Speaker 01 So you said something really powerful there, and quite frankly rattling, and that is, these young men led with cruelty and contempt. And I'll put forward a thesis, and I want you to respond to it. I feel like young men are fairly blank slates. We like to think as parents, we're engineering them, but they've just still got a lot to learn. And I'd like to think that most young people have a bias towards being good people. I hold Elon Musk responsible for this. That effectively, these men were inculcated into a cult that had a large vein of contempt and cruelty amongst their cult leader, and that they took the bait. That this wasn't, and we can talk more about what online is
26:28 Speaker 01 doing to people, isolating them, the contempt that young men find towards other people online when they become extremely online. But I wonder how many of them, I would like to think that a lot of them probably look back and think, I was a member of a cult, and the cult leader was responsible for the contempt and cruelty I displayed. Your thoughts?
26:50 Speaker 02 I think you nailed it. And I think that it had the central feature of the cult, was that the only thing you can't do is, is express any kind of disloyalty to the cause. So this, this, this kid I was talking about, he's not a kid, a young man, Sahil Lavingia, he got fired from Doge. It was so hard to get fired from Doge. Doge members, there were people in Doge who fabricated the college on their, they went to on their resume, and they, they were excused for that. There were people in Doge who were like tweeting all kinds of white nationalist stuff, and they were excused for that. There were people in Doge who had, who were exposed to have a history of sexual assaults. They were,
27:31 Speaker 02 they were excused for that. The cult rallies around them when they get in trouble. So what Sahil did to get fired was, he picked after, after wandering around the VA for a couple of weeks and actually learning about it, he made, he made the mistake of picking up a, a call from a reporter from Fast Company Magazine. And he said to the reporter, you know, I've only been here a few weeks, but the government's not as inefficient as I thought it was. And that's the one thing you couldn't do. That you couldn't, you couldn't break with the, you couldn't question the premise of the cult in any way. And so I think that's right. I think, I don't know if the, right now, those young men are questioning
28:12 Speaker 02 what they did. I suspect they're feeling very defensive, and they still probably want to be very close. They probably are cultivating whatever relationship they had with Elon Musk. They're probably worried they're going to be in legal trouble. They maybe not be, maybe can't afford to think the thoughts they should be thinking about what they did. But one day they will. One day they'll look back and say that I shouldn't have done that. And there is a story to do. I don't know when the time is to do it. But it's, you know, a year from now or more. Where you go back to those young men and you have them reflect on what they did and why they did it. And it's gonna be, it's gonna make an interesting documentary. I think there's so many shocking stories that are gonna come out.
28:55 Speaker 02 But also just the how they, how they process this, how they got themselves in this situation. And the great irony, I mean, there are all kinds of ironies here. I mean, one of the ironies is they call themselves the Department of Government Efficiency. And like, all they did was create inefficiency everywhere they went. But, but the other great irony is they all think of themselves, like their self identification is kind of lone wolves. They're kind of like, I'm the Ayn Rand hero, kind of thing. That I'm, as you say, I'm responsible for my success and no one else is, kind of thing. Nope. And ignoring all the helping hands and the role the government plays and all that in their lives.
29:37 Speaker 02 And yet, they gave themselves over entirely to an organization. Like, they showed no capacity for critical thinking, for independence, for, they were, they're exactly, their behavior was exactly the opposite of their ideal of themselves. And I thought that was curious.
29:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, when I, I read Moneyball, and then when I read it was being turned into a movie, I thought, this doesn't, this just does not work as a movie. And then, I saw the movie, and I'm blowing smoke a little bit here. Outstanding film, outstanding film. And the fact that they were able to take that story and turn it into such a compelling piece of art was just shocking to me. And I see this as an obvious movie called Doge. Talking about the impact it had on Africa, talking about the cult of young men, talking about one of the most interesting characters of our time, Musk, talking about the moment in time. But to me, this just sort of plays out as a really interesting, such an interesting
30:40 Speaker 01 story. What, talk about, did you do much research on the other end of these cuts? Like, what happened when you did a search for transgender and just started canceling contracts? What, what actually, there's, there's an organization of people on the other end of that. Did you do any research into what happened to those folks?
31:01 Speaker 02 You're, you're putting your finger on what's problematic about what I do. Because I wasn't, I wasn't trying to write the definitive history of the Trump administration. I was trying to reveal kind of the, the hidden truths about the Trump administration through a handful of characters. So I basically, once I settled on the people I was gonna write about, I confined my, my work to them. So I did not, it is, it is a great question. I like, I would like to know what happened to the stuff they cut at the Veterans Administration? Did someone, did Congress leap in and say, no, you can't cut that?
31:41 Speaker 02 I imagine it's case by case, that like, sometimes really bad things happen, and sometimes they were, someone behind the scenes said, no, you can't do that. But I don't actually know. I only know what happened in the worlds that my characters occupied. I didn't have a character in the Department of Veterans Affairs. And I know that in their worlds, like, when you follow, when you, when you follow the action through, there were devastating consequences. So, for example, one of the characters is Kathleen Walters, who was the Chief Privacy Officer at the IRS. She was the person whose job, who was, who stands between, who stood between your tax return and the White House. You say something on your podcast that angers Donald Trump, and he says, I'm gonna go after
32:25 Speaker 02 that guy, give me his tax returns. It's Kathleen Walters' office that stops that from happening. And, and she was asked, right after the election, or right after the inauguration, to hand over the tax returns of 7 million people to ICE, to the Department of Homeland Security. Because these were, it was the tax returns of undocumented workers that had their most current home address. So these are undocumented workers who are paying taxes. They paid, over the years, like, hundreds of billions of dollars into the treasury of this population. And their tax returns are guarded by law, like our tax, our tax returns are. And she, it was kind of over my dead body, and they, they got rid of her.
33:10 Speaker 02 They ran her out so they could get to these things. And we know that, as a result of this, ICE was rousting people in their beds in the middle of the night, in apartment complexes through the southwest and south, because they knew where they lived, kind of thing. And it was a violation of the law. It was also appalling, like, we have, we, our government has told that population, pay your taxes, and these, the information you're giving us will never be used against you. It'll be treated just like an American tax return. We turn on them, in a way, Kathleen said about, was the only time in history she can think that the American government did such a thing with populations' data, was during
33:54 Speaker 02 World War II, when they used census data to round up Japanese Americans to put them in term counts. But she says, the difference is that in that case, as appalling as it was, it was at least legal. This was illegal. So, I know that, like, so, in the case of Kathleen Walters' defiance, and failed defiance to prevent this from happening, Doge, I mean, tens of thousands of people, that were exactly the people we probably don't want to throw out of the country, they're paying their taxes. So, real things happened. It wasn't the case that 25-year-old goes in and does this thing, and then some cooler head prevails, and, and what 25-year-old did is somehow reversed or undone.
34:37 Speaker 02 I think that the typical story was, 25-year-old goes in and does something, and it actually stays done. That USAID is dismantled. Those programs are mostly gone. People are dying in Africa. I think that's, that's the truth of it. And I would think, tell me what you think of this. So, I had, I've had a couple of senior people in Congress ask me, would I help design hearings? Would I help, would I, like, choreograph them so that they are interesting, so people want to watch them? I think there is material for massively interesting hearings about what happened in places no, people don't normally look, like, people don't look, nobody knows what's going on
35:21 Speaker 02 inside the Department of Agriculture, or, or the Department of the Interior, or the, but I think you could go around the government and find spectacular stories, and disturbing stories, about what's happened in the last couple of years. And that you could get, you could wheel in the civil servants and make them talk. And they would tell you that, we used to do this, and now we do this. We used to know this, now we don't know this. You know, that kind of stuff? I think there's a market for that. Because I think so much has happened, and so little of it has gotten out.
35:55 Speaker 01 Well, I think they're smart to reach out to, because you're a great storyteller. And this stuff needs to go from C-SPAN to HBO, if you will, in terms of production quality.
36:04 Speaker 02 That's exactly right.
36:05 Speaker 01 And, and the arc and compelling television. And I'm confident that you and others in your work here is gonna start to bring light to the veterans, to, you know, the civil servants. The story I really hope gets told, because I think it's a more upsetting story. Just as Trump decided to show up with a bunch of alleged mistresses of Bill Clinton, of her husband, at a debate, I would love to see a congressional hearings packed with dozens, hundreds, and thousands of mothers from Africa who lost their kids.
36:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:39 Speaker 01 Because they were denied medication that was costing four cents a day.
36:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:44 Speaker 01 I think that is the reckoning we need here. I think the story around veterans, and some of the civil servants, I think that story will air, because they're voters, and a politician, a local representative, will get animated about it and bring it to light. I hope the story that gets told, and the real, the real, I think, collateral damage here, I, I think has happened, unfortunately, in Central and Sub-Saharan Africa that don't have representation in Congress. But Elon Musk led Doge in the early months of Trump's second term, promising to cut at least $2 trillion in federal spending. Musk wouldn't talk to you for the book, but some of his closest friends did. This guy, I mean, there's so many words you could use for him, and I think a decent one is enigmatic.
37:29 Speaker 01 I don't, you know, there's sort of this good Elon and bad Elon, and do you, can you, by talking to people, what about what they said about this individual surprised you, either to the positive or to the negative? Do you have a better sense for him than you did before you started writing the book?
37:48 Speaker 02 There is something that they said that surprised me. I don't know if I have a better sense of him than I did before I started writing the book. I have a different sense of him. What, what was shocking, when you put your nose right up against the windscreen, and, and saw what he was saying and what they were doing, was how dishonest he was. It wasn't just exaggeration, it wasn't hyperbole, it was outright lying. Now, and I'm not talking about, like, he said he was gonna cut $2 trillion of the deficit, and he didn't cut anything. That's not, that's one thing. What I'm talking about is some things like this. They go into the US Institute of Peace, a place I'd never heard of before, but the US Institute of Peace has delicate, plays a delicate role in US foreign policy, an interesting role in US foreign policy.
38:34 Speaker 02 It's sort of of the government, but not really. It's a nonprofit, they own their own building, they get congressional funding. And, but they, they're able to operate in negotiations with adversaries, they're able, they're able to go talk to the Taliban when we can't go talk to the Taliban, kind of thing. And Elon Musk, this is just one little example, but it's, I think it's very revealing. And a long list of particulars that he accused the US Institute of Peace of, after they went in, and he said they went into the computers and found all this stuff. He lists all this stuff that all of it was false. But, but he said he found that the US Institute of Peace, using taxpayer dollars, was paying a member of the Taliban, like we were giving money to our enemies.
39:17 Speaker 02 What they were actually doing was paying money to an Afghan guy who was hostile to the Taliban, who had been a kind of intelligence asset for us, who had helped our State Department negotiating with the Taliban, who was not welcome in Afghanistan anymore, he'd get his throat slit if he was there. And Elon Musk put his name out on X and said, look, this is the guy who the US Department of Peace, US Institute of Peace is paying. And the Taliban saw this and they knew this guy. They knew he was not their friend. And they rounded up his cousins and his brothers and all his family in Afghanistan and they beat him and tortured him. And this is an act of treason.
39:57 Speaker 02 He essentially is exposing a US asset and claiming he's something other than a US asset, causing, you know, these awful ripple effects in the lives of these, of his Afghan relatives. And it's one of like a thousand examples, but it's, it's, and what's shocking about it is that, once the truth is revealed, I mean, ProPublica wrote about this, Musk never comes back and apologizes, never says I was wrong, nothing. He just moves on and does it again and again and again. So you asked me what was surprising about what his close friends, or I don't know if they're friends, his close business associates say about him. The surprising thing was, as one of them put it, you gotta take this with a grain of
40:41 Speaker 02 salt, but he said, he said, you gotta, what you have to understand about Elon is that he never thinks he's lying, is that he thinks everything he says is true. So even when it's as outrageous as this, and it's obviously not true, Elon himself believes it to be true. What they were describing was a fabulous, it's like this person who's, who's got, you know, such a distorted sense of reality that, that he can just like spew lie after lie after lie and not realize what he's doing. I don't know if I believe that, like, but it's an interesting take on him. So the other thing about him is, so this is the unwritten piece.
41:26 Speaker 02 Like if you said, Michael, you gotta go write about Elon. I don't really want to go write about Elon, but if I had to go write about Elon, I'd write a very serious business piece about whether he's a good businessman. And it sounds preposterous because he's got $400 billion or whatever, but he screwed up Twitter. I mean, he really mismanaged it. He screwed up the federal government. He's obviously got his gifts. I mean, they're, they're particular talents. He's really good at getting people to pay a lot of money for his stocks in his companies. But I can't, I just can't believe this person has any kind of management ability because, because look how, I mean, at least the, the recent iteration of him, he seemed, he cocks up everything he goes into. And it's made me wonder, I'm not saying that this is true, say this is what I'd like to know more about. I'd like to know who's running his businesses.
42:10 Speaker 02 Because that, that person who was in the government or that person who went into Twitter, if that's who's running the businesses, I can't understand how the businesses are functioning. That he seems, he doesn't have, he doesn't really seem to have big institutional management aptitude. He has something else. So that's a, this is a theory of Elon Musk, but I don't know if it's true. But it made me, just watching how he managed this situation, it was, he was so bad at it, that it made me wonder about the rest of his life.
42:42 Speaker 01 We'll be right back after a quick break.
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45:17 Speaker 01 We're back with more from Michael Lewis. Yeah, you, I've read enough of your work to know that you have a, you have an instinctual understanding of brand. And one, I can't imagine anything, there are a few things worse for the American brand globally, maybe with the exception of the Iran War than Doge.
45:35 Speaker 02 Yep.
45:36 Speaker 01 To, let's assume they saved all $60 billion. I just think the damage and the loss of what was a key brand association for America is like, they get it wrong, but generally speaking, they're the good guys, or I'd like to think that's been our brand. It was pretty, this was a pretty big dent in that, that, oh, these people are heartless.
45:54 Speaker 02 You really can't trust us, is that, is what, is what.
45:57 Speaker 01 Our commitments don't mean anything.
45:59 Speaker 02 This is a, this is a slow rolling story. I don't know about you, but I felt like the financial crisis, the, the role of the American financier in the financial crisis left a lot of people, non-American financial people, feeling burned by us. And, and that we had created this system, this doomsday machine, and inflicted it upon foreign financial institutions. And at the back end of that, like, there was a, a new wariness towards us. Like, can we trust these people? And I, so I think that's been a growing doubt, a cloud in the minds of people who are supposed to be our friends. And this, what's just happened, it's impossible to defend it.
46:41 Speaker 02 It's impossible to go to Germany or England or France and say, yeah, yeah, we're still, you can still trust us. Because I don't trust us. I mean, it is, we behaved in very untrustworthy ways. And so true, what you said, whatever it was.
46:59 Speaker 01 There you go. So I want to talk a little bit about something that impacts a lot of young men, and that is sports betting.
47:06 Speaker 02 Yes.
47:07 Speaker 01 The last time you were on the show, it's been two years since, you spent a season of your podcast investigating sports betting, and you compared its slow building social costs to the opioid epidemic. And the market has grown exponentially since then.
47:20 Speaker 02 Yep.
47:21 Speaker 01 What's changed since you last looked at sports betting? And what's playing out the way you expected or didn't expect?
47:27 Speaker 02 Well, the big change is the prediction markets. When I was, when I was doing the podcast, FanDuel and DraftKings were sitting in the, it looked like they were sitting in the middle of this, of this new industry. And they had, for historic reasons, they were positioned to just rule the world. But they were, they were fighting, they were engaged in hand-to-hand combat at the state level. They were getting, persuading states to legalize sports gambling. And they failed with Texas and California. So they weren't getting to the whole population, at least legally. And then what happened was, Kalshi, the prediction market, got itself regulated as a commodities exchange by the CFTC, which meant the states and may, and are making the claim and behaving as if the states have no right to regulate them at all.
48:12 Speaker 02 So Kalshi, you can make the bets all, everywhere. So Kalshi would say that they're less predatory than FanDuel or DraftKings.
48:24 Speaker 02 Because what FanDuel and DraftKings, and we talked about this, are doing is they're identifying people with problems and mining them.
48:31 Speaker 01 At their weakest moment.
48:32 Speaker 02 Yes, and then on the other side of it, that they are, they're banning anybody who knows what they're doing. So if you were a smart, actually an edge player, they figured it out right away and you just can't get your bets down. Kalshi would say this, we're just, we're just the arms dealer, that we're not on the other side of the bets. It's more complicated than that, but so there is that wrinkle. But what's happened is it's becoming normalized. I mean, it was already kind of normalized when I did the podcast, but it's, I have a 19-year-old son. He is, he reports back that all around him, the boys his age are just-
49:14 Speaker 01 It's everywhere.
49:14 Speaker 02 It's everywhere. And, you know, there's just math here. If every 19-year-old boy is doing it, 8% of them or 10% of them, or whatever, are going to have a real problem, it's going to destroy lives. What's amazing to me is that when I was trying to get out with the podcast, I was trying to get an idea across that if you are a VIP at FanDuel or DraftKings, or if you are like a VIP at Kalshi, because you're betting so much on sports, this is not a badge of honor. This is a sign of idiocy. Like, if someone finds out, you should not want anybody to know that you're in this situation, because it's a sign you don't know what you're doing.
49:57 Speaker 02 That if you have been embraced by this industry, it's because you're bad at it. I told a group of, I had an audience, an audience of like pension fund managers and that sort, who, people who hire money managers. And they asked me, what question would you ask a potential money manager if they were coming into the room and presenting themselves as like their services to you, to us? What would you ask to see if like you trust them with your money? And I said, ask them if they're a VIP on a sports gambling platform, because if they are, they should never be managing your money. It's a bad sign. So I was hoping to kind of create this badge of dishonor thing, and I failed utterly.
50:40 Speaker 02 That idea has not gained any traction, that it is like, you're more of a man, you're more of a guy, if you're betting on sports, is still, that idea is still very much alive.
50:51 Speaker 01 Well, it feels like, I mean, states that legalize gambling see an uptick in bankruptcies of 30%.
50:57 Speaker 02 Yep.
50:58 Speaker 01 Gambling, more than any other addiction, it has the highest suicide rate. My mom used to tell me that, she was a docent at the Bellagio, because you can get in so deep. If you were a meth addict, you and your family, or your family and your friends would figure it out and try and weigh in and intervene.
51:11 Speaker 02 Yep.
51:12 Speaker 01 You can lose your mortgage, your kid's saving, everything, and nobody knows, and you decide there's one way out. A couple thoughts, because I don't have moral clarity around this. One, it seems like state regulation of gambling makes sense, but how do you infant, I'm not sure you can prohibit it, because you're infantilizing young, I buy and sell options.
51:35 Speaker 02 Yep.
51:36 Speaker 01 That's gambling. I'm smart enough and self-aware enough to know that it's gambling, and I try and modulate it, and I think I'm hedging my portfolio. I'm not, I'm looking for a DOPA hit. I'm fascinated with predictions market data, not the sports data, I don't care, but the ele-
51:54 Speaker 02 Right, election data.
51:55 Speaker 01 I lean on Kalshi, and to a lesser extent, Polly Market for election data, and so far, I think they're 100% on predicting interest rate, Federal Reserve movements.
52:06 Speaker 02 So let me ask you this, it's interesting, because I found myself, tonight, on election night, I didn't even look at the, at the cable TV, I was just looking at what Kalshi said. And it was, I mean, all the information is getting into those markets in a much more intelligent way. So I'm fascinated by them too. I'm with you on this. So you know, I don't think you want to ban them. I don't think that's, I don't think that's the solution. My approach was to, to create a kind of embarrassment around, around the activity.
52:37 Speaker 01 Well, a red flag.
52:38 Speaker 02 A red flag.
52:39 Speaker 01 It's like, oh, my boyfriend, he's a club promoter, red flag. Like you said, right? It's just, there's certain things.
52:47 Speaker 02 Yes.
52:48 Speaker 01 You know, he's, he's planning to move out of his parents, red flag. It's just, I do find the gambling apps more predatory, because they wait till someone has been away, and then they give them 100 free dollars.
53:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:01 Speaker 01 Right? They have AI figuring out who's at their weakest, who's at their most vulnerable, who's trying to kick the habit. It's like when cigarette companies got banned from media advertising, so they, we legislated the tobacco companies into becoming the best marketers everywhere.
53:16 Speaker 02 Right.
53:17 Speaker 01 We got, we banned them from TV, just as TV effectiveness was going down, they went to local marketing and signage and bodegas, then we got rid of that, then we put them in sports venues, which had huge ROI, and then we forced them to develop databases of every smoker, and they could track when someone was trying to quit, and they'd send them free coupons for, you know.
53:34 Speaker 02 It's moneyballing addiction, is what it is, right? It's like, and that, and the gambling, at least FanDuel and DraftKings, have gotten extremely, extremely good at identifying how to maximize profits from other people's problems. And it's just, it's precisely targeting the people who are most likely to lose. So it is problematic, it's predatory. It's shameful, right? It's basically shameful. It doesn't mean it should be illegal, but it needs to be, everybody needs to understand it's shameful.
54:09 Speaker 01 So I just want to, in our remaining time here, we both have 19-year-old sons, and I would just love to hear your thoughts on observations around being a dad, the emotions you went through, good and bad, when your son's out of the house, and what your relationship is like with him now as a freshman in college. I literally, just before I got on the phone with you, was talking to my son. Any thoughts on, on being a recent empty nester, or when the son kind of leaves the nest, if you will?
54:43 Speaker 02 Yes. He and I have always been close. And I let him lead on how close he wants me to be now he's left. And following his lead, I'm still very much in his life. I mean, it's, so I'm hearing all the, all the things that are going on in his life in college. I have not, I mean, this is a, he's only been gone for a couple of months. I don't think I've completely internalized what it means to have a house without kids in it, because I've been basically on the road pedaling a book the whole time. I haven't been in the house. But I think it's going to be a very different feeling. I've been in denial about it, because I loved having him around.
55:25 Speaker 02 But I gotta say, I don't know how you feel about this, but I get such pleasure out of watching him flourish, like, when I sense that things are going so well, and they're going just very well for him, he's like hit college and he just loves it, and he loves the people, and he loves the classes, and he's interested in everything, and his biggest problems are not problems at all. I have such a sense of well-being about it, that I, that whatever pain I feel because he's not there is just more than offset by that.
55:55 Speaker 01 I love that, and I think it's a great way to say it, and we're both blessed, because you do hear stories about kids that have trouble when they hit college, and you have that fear that your kid's going to be one of those kids that gets, just has trouble adjusting. And I can't figure out if I'm getting so much reward for it, from it, because I just love watching him flourish, or to be blunt, it's sort of a small, low-rent version of reliving my college years through him. And I think the answer is yes, but it's just, it's made it so much easier. I was really in a weird place around losing my purpose. My purpose has always been to raise men for others, but I'm, yeah, I agree with you. It is so incredibly rewarding.
56:37 Speaker 01 Michael Lewis is the author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, and The Big Short, and the host of the podcast Against the Rules. His 18th book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, follows the career civil servants targeted by Doge. He joins us as he's on his book tour in Los Angeles. Michael, always really enjoy speaking to you. Thanks for your time.
56:56 Speaker 02 Thank you, Scott. See you soon.
56:58 Speaker 01 See you soon. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez, Laura Janera, and Asher Schwartz. Our video editor is Bianca Rosario Ramirez. Kami Reek is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Prof G Pod from Prof G Media.
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Previous Is Therapy Overrated? ft. Psychologist Jonathan Shedler Page updated November 13, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
