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

Speaker 1

What happened to talk easy? You're not talking so easy anymore. Can

Speaker 2

I tell you what happened? Time, Michael.

Speaker 1

Time. You're making me a cranky old man.

Speaker 2

Time.

Speaker 1

So, so.

Speaker 2

He consults Claude.

Speaker 1

I was at the show. This is a different show three years ago.

Speaker 2

Oh, right. So we're going to talk about your mother. Relax.

Speaker 1

So,

Speaker 2

we're going to get. So who hurt you as a kid? We're going to get there. Don't worry. Okay.

Speaker 1

I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2

This is talk easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

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 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 twenty books, he remains drawn to people working against the grain. Before I turn it over to the episode, I want to say that Talk Easy was recently 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 fifteenth. if you like what we do here and want to support, you can head on over to the link below or go to vote.signalaward.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 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 talkeasypod at gmail dot com.

Now, on to the show. Michael Lewis.

Speaker 1

Sam.

Speaker 2

Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1

I didn't think it was possible. 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 I didn't think there was anything left of me.

Speaker 2

And yet you remain fully formed.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

I won't, I, I assume that is your problem, but I, I have to say that I have said, I have 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 love talking about my parents, for example. That was great. It was a, it was a different kind of thing.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

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. And you just had a hip replacement surgery.

Speaker 1

Yes.

Speaker 2

There you are, watching the broadcast, high on some drug, I don't know which.

Speaker 1

What was the opioid that caused the epidemic?

Speaker 2

Oxycodone? It

Speaker 1

was oxycodone.

Speaker 2

And yet through the oxycodone haze, you're watching CNN, tell me what happens. What do you say? What do you think?

Speaker 1

I was watching, everybody remember this moment when Trump got out of the limo outside 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 feeling, he's going to kill me in some way.

He's going to, all of a sudden, you know that feeling you have, the risk in the environment has just gone up? And I had that feeling, and it was a panicky feeling. And so 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.

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

Speaker 2

The first thought was, Donald Trump just won. He's going to kill me, Michael Lewis, bestselling author.

Speaker 1

It wasn't quite as direct as that, but yes, it was that kind of, it was my, my life just got cheaper.

Speaker 2

The,

Speaker 1

the risks to my life just went up.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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 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, that was the mechanism for getting information about how the government ran to the president. And that the Obama team had spent six months and, and, and put a thousand 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, I was sitting there thinking, oh, this risk management device that helps manage the risks in my life, whether it's risks from deadly disease or war or whatever, that this thing is going to 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, I, it, it was, it was, it was, That book did start with that spasm.

Speaker 2

So once you come to, that resulted in the fifth risk, which was during Trump's first term, which you described as a story about the price of ignorance and the risk of radical neglect. As we move our way to blockers, what's the story to tell about Trump's second term?

Speaker 1

Yeah, nobody wants to write 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,

they come in 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 one.

They have planned to Sort of seized control of this operation, and even parts of the executive branch that the president doesn't normally control, that he went from, he went from not managing it 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 going to micromanage everything, and this two million persons civil service, nonpartisan civil service, two 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.

all of a sudden those two million people are going to become essentially loyalists in a Trump political operation. And, and that, that ex- 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?

Speaker 2

People long to have a Michael Lewis elevator pitch.

Speaker 1

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?

Speaker 2

Okay, so how did you pitch it to yourself?

Speaker 1

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 two million person, person civil service. And I, 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? It's 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 I, that was where I started. And I thought of it almost metaphorically as an environmental shift. It's like meteor hits the planet, envir, 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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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 going to get in there and they're going to be people who are already there who want to stop you from doing what you want to do. They, these people are blockers. Find the blockers and get rid of them.

And it was a term they threw around all over the place.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

This is a new term. It's

Speaker 1

a new term, yes, yeah. No, this is like, what is this like? This is an insult that Elon Musk was hurling at them.

Speaker 2

Elon Musk, famous for quality insults.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Do you see him, he likes to use ChatGPT at parties to create insult humor.

Speaker 1

I didn't know this.

Speaker 2

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.

Speaker 1

What happened to talk easy? You're not talking so easy anymore. Can

Speaker 2

I tell you what happened? Time, Michael.

Speaker 1

Time. You're going to be a cranky old man.

Speaker 2

Time.

Speaker 1

So, so.

Speaker 2

He consults Claude.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Oh, right, so we're going to talk about your mother. Relax. We're going to get. Who hurt you as a kid? We're gonna get there, don't worry. Okay,

Speaker 1

I'm so sorry. Sorry, we gotta talk. But no,

Speaker 2

my heart, like many people who like and listen to this show, has been hardened by the exact thing you write about in this

Speaker 1

book. This is right, we're gonna get to that. 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 would have described them that way. And mainly, what they're just trying to do is not break the law, 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, and the impressionist painters, they turned it into a compliment. Tories! That was an insult. The Tory party has made hay with it. So I think we're gonna, I thought, we're just gonna take that term, we're gonna turn it into a compliment.

So, and I tell you something, 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,

Speaker 3

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?

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Maybe he heard, maybe he heard,

Speaker 1

but he wants to be one, though.

Speaker 2

Right, now he wants to be one.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

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.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

Are these people anomalies in, in the system?

Speaker 1

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 two 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 forty hour weeks, not sixty hour weeks, but a hundred or eighty hour weeks.

And

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

their 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. No, they're 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. So 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. All that is, is like, is a recipe for making it swing on the page.

And

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Yes. And Doge and the, 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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

women in Doge? They were a

Speaker 1

couple.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 1

But just like, not really.

Speaker 2

But who were these people who were carried out to, to, to?

Speaker 1

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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

it was wasteful.

Speaker 1

They believed what Elon Musk said. Which he

Speaker 2

said it was wasteful. Waste,

Speaker 1

fraud, and abuse. He said that there was, he was going to go into the seven trillion dollar, deficit and he was going to cut two trillion dollars out of it and he was going to find all the crooks.

Speaker 2

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, the determined seats in Congress, the consumer price index, et cetera.

But in Trump term too, you're right, 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.

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?

Speaker 1

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 down into two buckets. One is,

data it collects that it needs to disseminate so we all have a picture of our, our, of our society, and that is economic statistics, climate statistics, the, the, the census data, this kind of thing. It, 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. 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.

What do you

Speaker 2

mean?

Speaker 1

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 if 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 going to put it up on the websites. 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. 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 going to 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.

Speaker 2

These kids are basically let loose within these different federal agencies. And they're given strict instructions to Go through the bylaws, and certain org charts and find, you know, basically command F certain buzzwords.

Speaker 1

Yep.

Speaker 2

Diversity, trans, anything. Women. Women is the one. I was like, wow.

Speaker 1

Can I explain what you're saying? Yes,

Speaker 2

please. All

Speaker 1

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. Could

Speaker 2

you imagine me as a muskrat?

Speaker 1

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

So the- Is

Speaker 2

that a compliment?

Speaker 1

Yeah, it is a compliment. It's a, it's a very talk easy song, Muskrat Love. You could even play it as your kind of theme song. Old talk

Speaker 2

easy or new talk easy?

Speaker 1

What? I'm, 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, 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 coming to fire everybody who thinks is a Republican, think, fire everybody who thinks he's a Democrat or a Democrat who comes in and fires everybody who thinks, who he thinks is a Republican.

You want to keep politics out of it. There's a reason for the, the protections for the civil service. and the contracts, their 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, they're pardons. You'll get a pardon. Don't worry about the law, basically.

You get a pardon.

Speaker 2

And where do you get that from?

Speaker 1

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 president could give them a pardon if they got in trouble.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

They haven't been prosecuted yet either.

Speaker 1

Right. Now, here's what they do. So it actually

turns out to be very difficult to fire anybody who is,

got the civil service protections. However, there is a group of collection of people in every agency who are called probationary employees. That sounds bad, but what it means is you've only been there 18 months, and there's 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. 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 sign, or they, they say, we're firing you for a car. 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.

Speaker 2

And how much money did that save?

Speaker 1

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 woke, 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 ninety thousand contracts in it. And he, F-9ing, as you said, he starts just typing in keywords, and it's bias, it's gender, it's whatever, Native American, whatever it is.

Speaker 2

And woman.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Because it's woke.

Speaker 1

Because it's woke, because 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 the US government spent, and we'd find things that Are 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 are 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.

Two trillion dollars out of a seven trillion dollar deficit. If you look at the deficit, seventy-five percent 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 two trillion dollars out of the debt just attacking what they're attacking.

And then on top of that, what they actually end up cutting is A few billion dollars, it, it, it doesn't, ends up being nothing, almost nothing. And the costs that they incur by like having to pay people they've laid off for two years, 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, 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.

Speaker 2

Why does that not bother Republicans?

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Of Elon Musk or Donald Trump? Donald

Speaker 1

Trump. I mean, probably both because Musk throws money into these campaigns, but it's, it, 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 a, there comes a moment where, where, oh, it does matter.

Speaker 2

What do you think that is?

Speaker 1

It might be now.

Speaker 2

And that it is what happens. What does that mean?

Speaker 1

What it means is when people buy a treasury bond to lend us the money we need to run our government, they are,

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 all 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,

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.

Speaker 2

But you've imagined it. But

Speaker 1

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

you think it creates a 7% of bad, wait till you see 15%. Wait till you see, like, I mean, it's, it's, here's what I think happens. If it happened now, Donald Trump gets up and he says, enough about 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. 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, 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.

Speaker 2

Are, so are you seeing 2026 the same way you felt or saw 2007?

Speaker 1

More like 2005 or 6. I'll put it this way. I am now, I, 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,

Speaker 2

Beyond it being interesting, does it unnerve you?

Speaker 1

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.

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 the, 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 got to leave the country, but I do feel I need to put some of my money somewhere else.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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. And he prevented a lot of, a lot of disputes from getting out of hand.

He was regarded by both sides, almost 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, oh, Trump people thought he was a Trump person, for Trump won, the Obama people thought he was Obama person, and this one person finally said to me, when I was talking to them about a political person, talking about Tim, and he said, he's the strangest person I've ever met in Washington.

I've spent, I spent a hundred hours in a room alone with him, and I do not know his politics. I have no idea what he thinks. And there's no one I know who I spent a hundred 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 make himself like the singular, uncorruptible ref. In this game, which is the continual friction between political people and the government. And,

Speaker 2

And yet, despite that, that spotless reputation...

Speaker 1

He finds with Trump too, there's no room for a fair ref. The Trump too 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 nonpartisanship. Among Trump's first actions was a flurry 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.

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 would never catch up to them.

If you push 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 Tim, why has it not come up in the fifty 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's 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 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, 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.

Speaker 2

When you were 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, 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.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

And I wondered if, 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.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

I do.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Okay. That's coming up next with Michael Lewis.

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Coming back.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Did you find an answer in the bathroom?

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

By the, 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.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Dulled.

Speaker 1

Dulled. I think that's what's happened. It's like you're 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 I, so I,

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,

and you think, oh, well, what does it matter that he stole my tax returns?

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

That's false.

Speaker 2

And I don't think that's true, 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, 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?

Speaker 1

Well, each subject in the book was a different literary challenge. It's not that hard with Alex Marengidis, who's inventing a fire science to deal with wildland urban interface fires, because it, things hap, are happening. You know, people, communities are burning down. With Kathleen Walters, whose job is to, sits between your tax returns and the, and politicians,

again, would have been very hard, except ICE comes in and demands seven 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.

Speaker 2

Which they do.

Speaker 1

Which they do.

Speaker 2

A judge says over forty thousand tax violations the IRS committed.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

The database is seven million names. And the, we have promised that population for thirty years that use this number, pay your taxes. And they've generated, they've paid hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes. These are

Speaker 2

undocumented immigrants.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

Who are paying taxes, who pay taxes

Speaker 1

on what they make here. 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, it will help your case towards citizenship. It

Speaker 2

absolutely proves buy-in.

Speaker 1

Yeah, buy-in. That's right.

Speaker 2

They're, they're, they're literally giving their money.

Speaker 1

That's right.

Speaker 2

To a system that won't make them citizens right away, that, that tries to criminalize them, that demonizes them in the news.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

And obviously an imperfect system.

Speaker 1

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 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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

So my pub, 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 you 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 in our fourth or fifth interview, I'm not going to be talking about it. My, my, unless, unless the IRS releases my income tax returns. Which

Speaker 2

it may, evidently. Which it

Speaker 1

may, right.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 1

All right.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

No. I have his cell phone number. I have his cell phone number. Someone gave me his 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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

You're so clever.

Speaker 2

I'm so sorry, Elizabeth Riley. asked with, with nothing but love. You're fine. You, you own, how many homes you own?

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

there's that many, right? There,

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

There's a little cabin off the side. A little

Speaker 2

cabin off the side. Right,

Speaker 1

right. That's very

Speaker 2

good. When we spoke last time, it was around the Sam Bankman-Fried book, Going Infinite. Yeah. A book I, I, I really enjoyed, but that many people, had problems with.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Yep.

Speaker 2

Is what you, is what you called it. 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?

Speaker 1

No. No, I don't think so. I don't think my evaluation of Sam Beckman-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 thirty billion dollars and every venture capitalist wanted to hand him money and every politician wanted to be his friend and all that, 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 there was kind of, there was a person there who was still a very interesting character. You watched

Speaker 2

the whole thing from inside the room?

Speaker 1

As, as close to, I, was it inside the room where- There were

Speaker 2

many times where he was on his computer and you were on that couch. Oh, no,

Speaker 1

totally right.

Speaker 2

I, I remember this so vividly. No, no,

Speaker 1

totally.

Speaker 2

You befriended the parents?

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, no, the, the, I, I, but you, if which, let me tell you how I do what I do. It is not, oh, I'm going to, if I'm going 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- Those

Speaker 2

don't exist.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Those do exist.

Speaker 1

So, but I talk to all kinds of people. I really want to get to know you. So, and,

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.

Speaker 2

To be complicated by the intricacies of being human.

Speaker 1

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.

Speaker 2

were you surprised by how pissed they were?

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

But that's just dumb. It's like my job is to get to know this person. And let, and let, let the, if, put it another way.

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 him 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, 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's a reason why all the politicians wanted to be with him. 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'd like know what happened.

Speaker 2

Do you think you can get too close to a subject? No.

Speaker 1

I mean, you could, I guess you could, but, There's

Speaker 2

no line that you see that would be too close to... What does

Speaker 1

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, honestly, he's not, he's not my friend. And so... When was the

Speaker 2

last time you talked to him?

Speaker 1

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.

Speaker 2

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.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Which you wrote, after writing about John McCain, your friend John McCain.

Speaker 1

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 act- 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 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. 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 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 Hersey, wonderful New Yorker writer, wrote a profile of Harry Truman where...

Speaker 2

It was raised in the bath, right?

Speaker 1

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, 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 what, when I read, I want that experience.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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 the, 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, but I, but I, 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, have everyone cover the campaign.

I went out for 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. 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, 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 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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I have them.

Speaker 1

What are yours?

Speaker 2

You have them. We'll, 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, or compassion for X blinded me to X. As a,

Speaker 1

the, 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 con, there's controversy 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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Yes.

Speaker 2

And the one after the fact that we have never spoken about that,

I have to tell you, just makes me really sad. The business with the blind side.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

I would like you to explain a little bit. And this, again, for context, Michael Orr, who is a football player, you know, a kid who was in a conservatorship with a man, I think his name is Sean.

Speaker 1

Tui, the Tui family.

Speaker 2

Who you played baseball with.

Speaker 1

Yeah, we grew up together.

Speaker 2

And so much so that when you released Moneyball and you went on book tour and you landed in Memphis, he picked you up from the airport.

Speaker 1

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 a, he had a, 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 to you, 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 English class, you don't write your books. Like, who writes them? And, he just didn't believe it. And we went to his house to talk, and that Michael Orr would have been Michael who they had, they took in. Would've, it would've been just kind of January, February of his junior year in high school.

And I, I just saw, there was this large black kid on his sofa, and he never introduced me. And on the way out, I said, cause he dropped me off at my hotel, I said, who's the kid? And he said, oh, he's at Leanne'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. 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, 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.

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 Tooheys. 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 I never had a movie done in one of my books.

I was surprised the movie happened. But the movie generates something like three hundred million dollars at the box office. It costs nothing to make.

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

Speaker 2

More money for him.

Speaker 1

Yes. Writers for books, they give you something called net profits, and they're never, no matter how much money they get, they're not net profits. So there was something like a two hundred and something thousand dollar advance, which I split with the Tooheys, 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.

Speaker 2

So that would be...

Speaker 1

Oh, nothing. Not very much. Twenty

Speaker 2

thousand. Right.

Speaker 1

But, you know, it 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... So, I get a call, flash forward to now-ish, five years ago, Michael calls me and says, 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 called Sean. I said, you know, Michael wants to go in the world and talk about the book. And, 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. So I watched this. So th-this is the backdrop to,

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

Speaker 2

Because you never made money on royalties or... Royalties,

Speaker 1

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 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 seem to be very false.

The book didn't ever say that they adopted him. They said 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.

Speaker 2

Why did she say that? Because

Speaker 1

it was 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, he sold his business for two hundred million dollars. 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, he like, he gave Michael cars, he gave him, I mean, they, he was just open-handed.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

I'm gonna blow this up. Sell

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Yes, I can't remember what it was. There was, it was millions. Some, he thought everybody made millions.

Speaker 2

And

Speaker 1

they're right, someone made millions. Yeah, the studio

Speaker 2

certainly made a lot of money.

Speaker 1

Yeah, but it wasn't the Tooheys who made millions. But

Speaker 2

the Tooheys had, as you just said, millions. Yes,

Speaker 1

why didn't he just pay him?

Speaker 2

I, I suppose you, you know better than I do, but.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

He felt like he didn't owe him that.

Speaker 1

What did he owe him? I mean, he took, he. What he, they'd done was very generous. The, the idea that, and, but in addition, that it wasn't a, even a, like, to appearances, a financial arrangement.

and Michael had made thirty-eight million dollars in the NFL, and like, it was just seemed like.

Speaker 2

He'd done well, yeah.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Why do you think he didn't?

Speaker 1

If someone comes and threatens you, this may be a Southern male thing, but it's like, screw you. Like, what are you talking about?

I mean, it's just not like a shakedown. I think that's why, and he just wasn't going to do that.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

I know, I have an answer to that. Why did he do this? I can understand why Michael Orr would feel like dollar out of, dollar in my pocket is a dollar out of his. He had an incredibly tough first fifteen or sixteen 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, 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 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, three hundred and twenty pound Fifteen or sixteen 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, that's what the story was about. And it's, I think that's true. And all this is 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.

Speaker 2

It's funny, the process of, of writing these books,

for a time you get so close.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

it's a lot of time. It's

Speaker 1

18 months or whatever it is. Yeah.

Speaker 2

And then, and

Speaker 1

then I move on.

Speaker 2

You move on.

Speaker 1

Yeah. And the book changes people's lives. No, it's the book, the book, the book has a limited ability to change people's lives. When a movie gets made about you, it, it, what happens is you become the character on the screen to the world around you, and that changes their lives.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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, this accident, an accident that they've become, some of them have become movies.

Speaker 2

Accidents with your consent?

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Once you sell it. I mean, I've

Speaker 1

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. It's 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. It, so that's the, 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, 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, that it, it, it doesn't seem to have much effect.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

True.

Speaker 2

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.

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That's article dot com slash talk easy for fifty dollars off your first purchase of a hundred dollars or more. That's article dot com slash talk easy.

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?

Speaker 1

Sure. I mean, why not? But with Obama, I had a... It was more complicated than 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, the Harry... John Hersey 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 what it's like, why he's doing what he's doing. We sort of like... Take our half-formed understandings and inflict it upon him. And I, and with the, and as a result, there's a lot of like unnecessary hostility. So I thought, I wrote to Obama's press people and I said, you know what'd be really cool is if you just 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, from his press secretary and Jay Carney. And he says, hey, like, we might want to do this. And I went, whoa, like, really? He said, I said, you want to do this? He goes, I don't want to do this.

He was like, Jay 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 I, and what I did is I moved in to write that story. And that was the story. With Trump, Like you could do a similar sort of thing, but you'd be, you'd want to, that, you, you got to build the right frame.

I didn't think about what the frame is. A profile, I'd be dumb, just a profile, like what is there to find out?

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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 there's probably what it is, if you put a gun to my head and said, what the, 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.

Speaker 2

Well, what was allowed in, in 2025 were these young kids as, as you listed, from Doge.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

One of them is Gavin Kleiger, 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. In looking at, kids like this who came in and, and now are using that experience, quote unquote, to their benefit, Elon Musk has also been financially remunerated for, for his time, especially with SpaceX.

What was this all about?

Speaker 1

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 always fraud and abuse and he was going to find it.

But I think it's probably more likely that he had his own agenda. If you draw a pie chart of his agenda, probably the biggest slice is his business interests, and that would be capturing NASA. And he put his friend into running NASA. 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. 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 that, so there's this ossified tech with these awesome older people, and an infusion of young tech talent would have been great, but they didn't actually go after the tech.

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

Speaker 2

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 the Doge has been sunset, and there's a year distance.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Where does that leave us? Well,

Speaker 1

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, they're clearly problems.

Speaker 2

So some of that diagnosis was right.

Speaker 1

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.

Speaker 2

They didn't seek to understand them in the first

Speaker 1

place. Exactly. They didn't seek to understand them in the first place. So there, 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.

Speaker 2

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.

Speaker 1

Yep. So this is just odd that one of my characters, Alex Marangidis, 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 fire, the community to protect itself against fire, it requires a collective approach, much like a collective approach to disease, very similar to a pandemic.

And that if, that, 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, the forest, there is a program that, that has been actually mandated by law, that people have to make their,

make their homes fire resistant, because if, if one goes up, they all go up. And it, it's, even in Berkeley, it's caused blowback.

Speaker 2

Liberal, woke Berkeley.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Why?

Speaker 1

We are an highly individualistic countries, like my home is my castle, as Alex Maranghiti 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. Yeah,

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

That's right.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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 going to have to think hard about essentially How we live together to take care of each other. And that, that's the big thing.

Speaker 2

Or if we even want to. Or

Speaker 1

if we even want to. That's right. I

Speaker 2

don't know if we do.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

What do you mean?

Speaker 1

I mean, like, I don't think the nastiness and the cruelty and the tribalism is how people live their lives. I, I just think it's, we're, 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're, 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.

Speaker 2

It's funny, cause like, if, 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.

Speaker 1

Yes.

Speaker 2

Which for you has been writing 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?

Speaker 1

Yep.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 1

One of the things that, I mean, is different from my chil- my life and my children's lives is it, they are forced upon them enormous anxiety to, 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.

Speaker 2

Do you think you've forced it on them?

Speaker 1

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, 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, in the front door.

And we shall see if I've succeeded in, in getting that message across.

Speaker 2

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, your daughter passed away. Is that right?

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

her name was 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.

Speaker 1

It took me a while after Dixie died, to even try to make sense of anything.

it was this, it felt like this being 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 to say that meant anything to me, that it was my situate, that what I was experiencing, there no one, 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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

you're going to have an opportunity to see the notes because what I, 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 is a story of a, a man who

went from being her, first her kind of observer to being really her father. Took me a little while to click in as a father, to being her coach, to being essentially her help, her consultant and helpmate when she got to be 19 and was a college softball player, to me being her student, that she was an extraordinary character, and I'm still learning from her.

And I have 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, it's, like the, the opposite of a moving on or a go, getting through or a, and I've managed to keep her pre, very present. So she is like part of my life still.

Speaker 2

What have you learned?

Speaker 1

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, more of than I did was courage. She was extremely brave, morally brave, physically brave. She gives me nerve. She, I, I get a lot of nerve out of, out of just her presence. And so I keep her around.

I talk about her all the time. I'm not shy about the subject, and I've written about her. And,

and that, I found for me, that's helped a lot. But the bigger point, I mean, the, the, I think that, I think a lot of people would benefit from feeling liberated from the rules of grief. I think the 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, 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 behave, you 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 way. You just come to terms with it in terms of a different way. I loved her so much. She was, 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.

Speaker 2

What's the title?

Speaker 1

How to Be Lucky.

Speaker 2

You could have given me A million guesses?

Speaker 1

That's good.

Speaker 2

Why is it called that, and who, and who's playing you?

Speaker 1

Can't tell you that.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 1

it's, but, but.

Speaker 2

you, you said previously that it was Jason Bateman.

Speaker 1

Probably not Jason Bateman, but that, but, but I don't know.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 1

This is actually, it's gotten so, it's.

Speaker 2

It was supposed to be Jason Bateman.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so it is.

Speaker 2

He said he was in.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

Is it Will

Speaker 1

Arnett?

Speaker 2

Oh God, am I close?

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

With absolute love. A pit bull with love.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

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.

Speaker 2

Why is it called How to Be Lucky?

Speaker 1

It's about a, a person coming to terms with the role of accident in life, and, and he had a pre, 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?

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

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, 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. But then he said Doge. Was the most meaningful thing that he could do to help effect change within the government.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

paper. Yeah, all those

Speaker 1

faxes and all that.

Speaker 2

Yes. And so he, he, he joins, then gets fired.

Speaker 1

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

Speaker 2

In an article for Fast Company.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

After all the Doge washes out, but someone in Doge is still there. Yes. And saw how earnest he was and thought, we're going to fix some things now. An empty

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

That's right. And his name is Sawhill. And Sawhill of India. And Sawhill has come back and he, he gets to the office and he's all hot and bothered about, he's going to finally get, 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.

Speaker 2

And he goes, he

Speaker 1

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 eight different ways and eight, failed eight different ways to fix this water fountain 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 Sawhill. The elevator doors opened, and the 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 pinged my manager, he said. I pinged the CIO of the IRS. No one will follow up with me on the water fountain issue, but I, but I, 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 facilities 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 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 apps Saul Hilli 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.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Thank you.

Speaker 2

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

Speaker 1

Total pleasure, Sam.

Speaker 2

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 have a minute to vote for Talk Easy in the Signal Awards, we'll include the link below in the description.

You can go to vote.signalawards.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 Dishel. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. Video graphics come from Will Tutttenham, photographs by Emile Rovello, social media by Lucy McGraw.

This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Higher Ground Media, and I'm Sam Fregoso. 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.

Speaker 3

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