Smash Notes
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, 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…
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Notes
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Michael Lewis says he has no interest in writing the same book twice. The Fifth Risk, his book on Trump's first term, was a story about the price of ignorance and the risk of radical neglect, and he had imagined that book was the end of his time in the federal government.
The second term arrived with a different plan. After the election and the inauguration, Project 2025 sat in the background, a plan to radically remake the federal government that Trump had disavowed. Lewis says it stayed unclear whether Trump cared until he reached the White House. Then the story reversed. Trump went from not managing the government to asserting powers presidents previously had not had. Lewis calls the move a huge power grab: the president would micromanage everything, and the two million person nonpartisan civil service, people who take an oath to the constitution and who are supposed to refuse an illegal order, would become loyalists in a Trump political operation.
Lewis has kept the same publisher for 35 years, so the pitch was to himself. The book watches a transformation of the government and the executive branch, the two million person civil service, across public safety, data collection, and long-term scientific research the market will not fund, plus what happens to the people who do the work. He pictures an environmental shift: a meteor hits the planet and habitats change.
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Michael Lewis says the people Elon Musk called blockers were doing their job beautifully. They were not partisan, no one would ever accuse them of incompetence, and they were dedicated to the country. Blocker was a new insult. Before January 20th, 2025, they went by civil servant.
When Musk went into the government with his team at Doge, he said the same thing he had said when he went into Twitter. People already there will want to stop you, so find the blockers and get rid of them. The six main characters in his book never called themselves blockers. Musk would have described them that way. Lewis says they are mainly trying not to break the law. He lines the word up with impressionist and with Tories. Impressionist was an insult, and the painters turned it into a compliment. Tories was an insult, and the Tory party has made hay with it. He decided to take blocker and turn it into a compliment.
Lewis says he has no deep source inside the White House. Two weeks before he said so, Donald Trump got up in a speech and said that if the Democrats take the House and try to do stuff, he will end up being a blocker and block all their bad stuff for two years. Lewis wonders whether someone has at least told Trump the title.
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Michael Lewis says dedicated federal civil servants are not anomalies. They are easy to find inside a two million person workforce, easy enough that the book was available five times over with five different casts of characters.
Lazy people work in government, and Lewis says the same kind of people show up in the private sector. What strikes him about the federal government is how many workers can make twice their government pay outside it and still stay. They work not forty hour weeks, not sixty hour weeks, but a hundred or eighty hour weeks. Sam Fragoso asked why they do not leave. Lewis says the jobs are so meaningful. They see the purpose, they see how important the work is, they see knock-on effects on other people's lives, and the work gives them enormous satisfaction. Often they care about a specific problem only the government is going to address, and they bring the skills for it.
Lewis says government does not tell its own story. People conflate politics and government, see politicians, and think the politicians are the government. Civil servants do work everyone agrees needs doing, work the private sector will not do, and they are often there on a mission. They make strong characters because they do not think of themselves as characters. When people think of themselves as characters, they suck as characters. They are obsessed with important work, they are not watched, and they are not used to having their stories told. All of it is a recipe for making the story swing on the page.
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Michael Lewis says the stated goal is to cut the deficit by two trillion dollars out of a seven trillion dollar deficit. Seventy-five percent of the spending is either interest payment on the debt, the military, or entitlements, and none of the interest, the military, or the entitlements is being addressed. Cutting two trillion dollars out of the debt just by attacking the remaining spending is mathematically impossible.
What actually gets cut is a few billion dollars, which ends up being almost nothing. Paying people who have been laid off for two years ends up probably costing more than the amount cut. He says the result has not been good business.
Seen from Mars the way Elon Musk would look at it, the national debt has increased by three and a half trillion dollars in the first two years of the Trump administration.
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Michael Lewis says wooden fences running through a community are the way fire moves from house to house. Protecting a community against fire requires a collective approach, much like a collective approach to disease and very similar to a pandemic. A community is only as strong as the weakest link.
In Berkeley, California, up at the top of the hill where the town meets the forest, the law already makes people make their homes fire resistant, because if one goes up, they all go up. Even in Berkeley, the rule caused blowback. Sam Fragoso calls the place liberal, woke Berkeley, and Lewis repeats the label. Lewis says Americans do not, as a society, do collective stuff. The country is highly individualistic, and the line that a home is a castle is not going to cut it. The community is the castle. Fragoso reads from the book that Americans living in or beside wild space are being asked to change the story from my home is my castle to my neighborhood is my castle. Lewis agrees.
Fragoso says the mantra could be applied to many pockets of society. Lewis says that is completely right.
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Michael Lewis says the way to make something useful of his daughter's death is to keep her present. Keeping her present is the opposite of moving on or getting through grief. She is still part of his life.
It took a while to click in as a father: her coach, then her consultant and helpmate when she was 19 and a college softball player, then her student. He is still learning from her. She had more courage than he did. She was extremely brave, morally brave and physically brave, and she gives him nerve. He talks about her all the time, is not shy about the subject, and has written about her. Lewis thinks a lot of people would benefit from feeling liberated from the rules of grief. People are uncomfortable around someone who has lost a child. They do not want the parent too sad or too traumatized. After a while the parent is supposed to have gotten over the loss. They do not want the parent too happy either, because happiness makes them uncomfortable. The parent is expected to play a certain role. The play tries to liberate the audience from the role so they can experience an awful, traumatic loss in an original way, put their own words to it, and come to terms with it differently.
He loved her. She was brave and she was loved. He pieced his own understanding into a piece of writing called How to Be Lucky.
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Michael Lewis says the water fountain was more like the Internal Revenue Service's technology, and a lot of what remained of the US government, than like the apps an employee had created. Forces beyond the control of any one person governed the fountain. It existed inside a web of rules and beneath layers of authority, and it required a certain kind of person to make sure it worked.
A plumbing-looking man heard about the fountain on the fifth floor and said the working one was on the seventh floor. The employee said he worked on the fifth floor. As the elevator doors closed, the man shouted that a fountain was also on the fifteenth floor. Every day, the employee checked the fountain and pressed anyone even remotely connected to the issue. He pinged his manager and the CIO of the IRS. No one followed up, even though he always follows up with people who get in touch with him and always asks what he has to do to fix the water fountain. At the facilities management office, a different man said they had fixed a filter, but it was a fountain on another floor.
The employee said some activity actually happened, and he described the result as how a person thought when actually trying to fix a thing instead of profiting from its brokenness.