Sam Fragoso

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso · Author Michael Lewis (‘The Big Short’) Pulls Back the Curtain

• Why Does Michael Lewis Say the IRS Could Not Fix a Water Fountain?

  Michael Lewis says the water fountain was more like the Internal Revenue Service's technology, and a lot of what remained of the US government, than like the apps an employee had created. Forces beyond the control of any one person governed the fountain. It existed inside a web of rules and beneath layers of authority, and it required a certain kind of person to make sure it worked.

  A plumbing-looking man heard about the fountain on the fifth floor and said the working one was on the seventh floor. The employee said he worked on the fifth floor. As the elevator doors closed, the man shouted that a fountain was also on the fifteenth floor. Every day, the employee checked the fountain and pre

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• How Does Michael Lewis Keep His Daughter Present?

  Michael Lewis says the way to make something useful of his daughter's death is to keep her present. Keeping her present is the opposite of moving on or getting through grief. She is still part of his life.

  It took a while to click in as a father: her coach, then her consultant and helpmate when she was 19 and a college softball player, then her student. He is still learning from her. She had more courage than he did. She was extremely brave, morally brave and physically brave, and she gives him nerve. He talks about her all the time, is not shy about the subject, and has written about her. Lewis thinks a lot of people would benefit from feeling liberated from the rules of grief. People are

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• Why Does Michael Lewis Say Berkeley Resisted Fire Resistant Homes?

  Michael Lewis says wooden fences running through a community are the way fire moves from house to house. Protecting a community against fire requires a collective approach, much like a collective approach to disease and very similar to a pandemic. A community is only as strong as the weakest link.

  In Berkeley, California, up at the top of the hill where the town meets the forest, the law already makes people make their homes fire resistant, because if one goes up, they all go up. Even in Berkeley, the rule caused blowback. Sam Fragoso calls the place liberal, woke Berkeley, and Lewis repeats the label. Lewis says Americans do not, as a society, do collective stuff. The country is highly ind

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• Why Does Michael Lewis Say Cutting Two Trillion From the Deficit Was Impossible?

  Michael Lewis says the stated goal is to cut the deficit by two trillion dollars out of a seven trillion dollar deficit. Seventy-five percent of the spending is either interest payment on the debt, the military, or entitlements, and none of the interest, the military, or the entitlements is being addressed. Cutting two trillion dollars out of the debt just by attacking the remaining spending is mathematically impossible.

  What actually gets cut is a few billion dollars, which ends up being almost nothing. Paying people who have been laid off for two years ends up probably costing more than the amount cut. He says the result has not been good business.

  Seen from Mars the way Elon Musk would

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• Why Does Michael Lewis Say Federal Civil Servants Stay for Less Pay?

  Michael Lewis says dedicated federal civil servants are not anomalies. They are easy to find inside a two million person workforce, easy enough that the book was available five times over with five different casts of characters.

  Lazy people work in government, and Lewis says the same kind of people show up in the private sector. What strikes him about the federal government is how many workers can make twice their government pay outside it and still stay. They work not forty hour weeks, not sixty hour weeks, but a hundred or eighty hour weeks. Sam Fragoso asked why they do not leave. Lewis says the jobs are so meaningful. They see the purpose, they see how important the work is, they see kn

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• Why Did Michael Lewis Turn Blocker Into a Compliment?

  Michael Lewis says the people Elon Musk called blockers were doing their job beautifully. They were not partisan, no one would ever accuse them of incompetence, and they were dedicated to the country. Blocker was a new insult. Before January 20th, 2025, they went by civil servant.

  When Musk went into the government with his team at Doge, he said the same thing he had said when he went into Twitter. People already there will want to stop you, so find the blockers and get rid of them. The six main characters in his book never called themselves blockers. Musk would have described them that way. Lewis says they are mainly trying not to break the law. He lines the word up with impressionist and

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• How Did Michael Lewis Pitch Trump's Second Term?

  Michael Lewis says he has no interest in writing the same book twice. The Fifth Risk, his book on Trump's first term, was a story about the price of ignorance and the risk of radical neglect, and he had imagined that book was the end of his time in the federal government.

  The second term arrived with a different plan. After the election and the inauguration, Project 2025 sat in the background, a plan to radically remake the federal government that Trump had disavowed. Lewis says it stayed unclear whether Trump cared until he reached the White House. Then the story reversed. Trump went from not managing the government to asserting powers presidents previously had not had. Lewis calls the mov

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