Transcript of BLOCKERS: Michael Lewis on the People Who Keep America Running New

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If you're living with PBC or primary biliary cholangitis, your exhaustion is real and you're not alone. About 90% of those diagnosed with PBC are Are women, and more than half of patients experience the most common symptom, severe fatigue, often severe enough to disrupt work, family, and everyday life. If that sounds familiar, it's worth talking to your doctor. Head to realpbctalk.com/fatigue to learn more about PBC-related fatigue. That's realpbctalk.com/fatigue. Hi, everyone. I'm Katie Couric, and this is Next Question. Michael Lewis has an extraordinary ability to help us make sense of this crazy world we're living in. Whether he's writing about Wall Street or Silicon Valley, baseball or behavioral economics, he's just got a way of taking subjects that seem intimidating or opaque And turning them into incredible human stories. His new book is called Blockers, and it takes on the largely invisible world of America's civil service. Through the stories of career public servants, he explores what happens when the federal workforce collides with an administration determined to dramatically reshape it or even obliterate it altogether, as we've seen in Trump's second administration. He says what we witnessed with DOJ during the second Trump term is decidedly different from the first go-round.

Michael's one of the smartest people I know and is the only person who can spin a yarn about government workers that's compelling and propulsive. And yes, he's done it again. Michael Lewis.

Katie Couric.

I'm so happy to see you again.

My pleasure to be here.

And thank you so much for coming in and talking about your new book, It is called Blockers. And when you wrote The Fifth Risk during the Trump administration, Trump won, your concern was that people taking over the federal government didn't really understand how it worked. What a surprise. And in many cases, weren't even interested in learning what it did. So I'm so curious how you would contrast Trump 2.0 from when you wrote The Fifth Risk? Because I know you write in this book, this felt so different. Part of it was the speed at which things started happening in this new Trump administration, relatively new. And part of it, of course, was the guy they put in charge.

Yeah.

Discuss.

Okay. I wouldn't have written another book if it was the same thing. There would have been no point, right? What drew me back was how different it was. And Uh, so the first time, it was this— it was just pure neglect and indifference, right? It was like, this thing doesn't matter. And that was interesting to me because it does matter, and you could just kind of describe what it did to the reader. In this case, they went in with malice, knowledge, uh, and a desire to seize power in a way that really hasn't been seized by a president before. I mean, to, to say this entire thing called the executive branch serves this, the purpose, the narrow interests of one man. And, and that, that isn't what it is. That's not what it has been historically. Historically, it's been a nonpartisan, independent civil service that, um, is kept at some arm's length from the politic— the politicians. And so they went in to disable the independence and turn it into a loyalist operation. It was more than one thing. Yes, they put Elon Musk in charge of this initial kind of destruction. It's almost like random artillery fire into the city, but it was only a piece of it.

And I got interested because when I realized that what the thing was, was to change it from one environment, 2 million people who take an oath to the Constitution, who are engaged in what is often not politically controversial things, you know, collecting taxes or whatever it is, that To change it from that to a 2-million-person personal army of a president, and that changing the environment was going to create a situation where things that had existed before couldn't exist, things we just took for granted couldn't exist. And I thought, a cool way to do this is almost like a negative space story. It's like, what can't— what all of a sudden can't exist in this environment? Like, what gets destroyed? What gets chucked out? So that's how I engage with it upfront. What came in, everybody thinks Doge was just it, but Doge was not just it. Doge was the first assault. And Doge was, in some ways, rhymed with Trump won because the Doge people didn't know anything. It was kind of random destruction. It served its purpose. It served a purpose to make the statement that we have the power. And it's a funny thing.

This seizure of power is such a funny subject. I mean, I don't think it's— I think you kind of smell it that Trump is trying to run all kinds of things that he He wasn't supposed to run the Kennedy Center or whatever it is. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Yeah, but there's this thing about power, how power asserts itself, how power says, I have the power. Orwell has this line and it isn't— you don't know you have power and you haven't displayed your power if people just do what you tell them to do because maybe they just want to do it anyway. The way you assert your power and to yourself and to others and the people you are exerting power over is you create suffering. You cause others to suffer. That's how you show.

That's your Orwellian view?

It's the Orwellian view. And I think that was part— Doge was that. And if you go back to Russell Vought, who is Trump's direct— it doesn't matter what his title is, but he's director of the Office of the Management of the Budget, which creates a kind of— he's a sort of spider in the middle of the web. He's in the middle of all the money and a lot of other things. If you go back to Russell Vought talking about what they were going to do if they got back in power, He has this famous little speech. He thought it was off the record, but someone got it on video. He says, we're going to put the bureaucracy in trauma. We want them to feel traumatized when they come to work every day.

That's so interesting, Michael, because it seems to me there was a certain joyful callousness, and that might be putting it mildly, that characterized the cuts.

It was a joyful malice.

Yeah. The chainsaw. Yeah. All that. The sort of The evil laughter of Elon Musk, the insulting tweets.

Right.

What did you make of that portion of the dismantling process? And why do you think it didn't create more outrage?

This is a really good question. I mean, I think it did create some outrage.

Some.

So to start, the chainsaw, the we're going to cut it, all that, it was a little bit of a distraction because they didn't actually cut federal government. They didn't actually do what they said they were going to do. They said they were going to come in and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, or whatever those are the terms they like to use. And he said he was going to cut $2 trillion out of whatever, a $7 trillion deficit. In the end, even they didn't claim that. They claimed they cut a couple hundred billion dollars, but when the New York Times went through what they actually did, it was a handful of billions of dollars at— and it wasn't just cutting something that nobody wanted. They were cutting stuff people wanted. And on the other side of the ledger, They incurred billions of dollars in costs paying people not to work. I mean, if you look at the big picture, under— in the first 2 years of the Trump administration, the debt, the national debt, has increased by $3 trillion.

Right.

So they've not done anything. They've just the opposite. They did the opposite. So the— so I think the chainsaw and all that stuff is a bit of a distraction to sell the idea to people who— and this is to get to your second question— who think they hate the government. I think the government's the problem, that they were going after the government. And they weren't going after the government. They were happy to have the government be bigger and bigger and bigger as long as they controlled it. As long as they were— it was— they were— they had sole— it was a loyalist operation.

Mm-hmm.

So it created this sort of sense that they had this purpose, but they didn't ever really have that purpose. The purpose was— maybe the purpose for Elon Musk was seize control of NASA. He got his man put in NASA. Maybe the purpose was he was upset with USAID because of stuff they— he thinks they had done in South Africa when he was a boy. I don't know. I don't know exactly what his motive was, but even he has said that this didn't work. So now, why there wasn't more outrage. So you can challenge me on this. You can say I'm just full of it, but here's my take on it. We've been living for a very long time in this country with a narrative that our government is somehow the enemy. It's a bizarre notion in a democracy. It's our government. We're responsible for it. It's not this independent thing that is out of our control. It's, you know, Congress gives it the money to do what it needs to do. It's filled with people— when you get close to the government, it's filled with people who have, you know, taken a pay cut to be there and who— people who are doing things that are amazing.

Like you outlined in The Fifth Risk.

And Who Is Government?

All those people.

And another book called Who Is Government? where I had other writers go into this You can't poke one of these federal agencies without finding actually pretty serious literary characters who are— I mean, just in this book, I grabbed one of them because I didn't want to be too repetitive, but there's a guy in the middle of the book that— who is— has invented a fire science, the science of how wildfire goes into communities. So Palisades, Paradise, I mean, the fires we're living with. This kind of fire has not really been studied. And he's invented the science of studying it and is almost single-handedly giving us tools to deal with it. This guy could be making 5 times the sums of money he's making outside of the federal government, inside the federal government. So he's—

it's—

there are people, if you actually get close to it and know it, it's crazy to be angry at it. Just the opposite. Up close, it looks kind of admirable. Why are people angry?

Can I just challenge you for a second? Why can't it be a yes and? Many of these civil servants should be celebrated and appreciated and understood much better than they are. And the government is bloated and often or sometimes inefficient.

Of course. Government's not really designed to be efficient. It's designed to be sort of not make big mistakes. So it can't be lean and mean like a startup. They can't move fast and break things. because when it breaks, it's so consequential. This is true.

Mm-hmm.

And what is also true is we have designed an absolutely insane structure for managing this government. If you just back away from it, you got 2 million people who are nonpartisan civil servants who are waiting to be told what to do by a different boss, not just every 4 years. Actually, the bosses in charge, the political appointees, turn over like every 18 months. Usually people are being brought in to run the, you know, the Department of Energy or the Department of Agriculture. who have very little knowledge of the place, who are friend— they're put there because— not because they're born to run the Department of Energy, but because they want to be close to the president and they're friends with the president. There's no— there's no competency test. It's just like, make sure you didn't sleep with one of— spend nights on Jeffrey Epstein's island. They're those sort of tests they get put through.

Right.

It's crazy. And that in addition, the budgets fluctuate wildly and you don't know what they are year to year, and you're at the mercy of whatever Congress is going to do. It's not structured to run well. We should re— we should think about how we run it. But when you get into the guts of the places, the people are kind of trying to do the best given the situation. That's the general rule. And the idea like they're stealing money or that there's that kind of, that kind of thing going on is, is perfectly insane. They're watched every which way. It's like they have cameras on them with everything they do. You can't— if you try to buy, go— you want to have a fun day, go and try to buy a a cup of coffee or a lunch for a government worker, they freak. Like, can't do that, can't do that. And you look at, on the other hand, you look at what happens in the private sector. I mean, the private sector is way more corrupt than the public sector. Now there's corruption, it's true, Americans, like not government people, are pretty good at stealing from the government in various ways, not paying their taxes, Medicare fraud, all that stuff.

But that's not government workers doing stuff.

So, but it could use some intelligent restructuring.

Oh my God, of course.

And thoughtful kind of reimagining.

This is true. This is completely true.

And why— I remember Al Gore, right? Wasn't he in charge of kind of the bureaucracy and trying to fix it?

Lots of presidents have taken on that.

I mean, all sorts of leaders.

I mean, there should be a— basically every leader should be reinventing government. The change in technology that's going on outside the government— government's not designed to move fast and the society moves fast. Here's a stat. It's a little— I'm doing this from memory, but it's rough. This is roughly right. Just in information technology, just like the people who run the computers in the government, fewer than 5% of the employees in that field are under the age of 30, and more than 50% are over the age of 55. Now, you just, you know, it's how fast, you know, which is saying basically most people in government who are in IT can't know how to use their own phone. You know, it's, it's that— it's, it's, it's nuts. We don't— we haven't refreshed it. This— so yes, and this is true, but they didn't go in to do that. They didn't go in with a plan to restructure the government except we're going to make it all report right to Donald Trump.

Right. And I'm not suggesting they did. I'm just saying someone should.

Someone should. No, I'm hoping for the book— what I hope— they've left these pieces of the government strewn about. What I'm hoping for the book is that it leads to a reevaluation of how this thing is run. And I think it needs to go the opposite direction where it's just gone, a depoliticization. It's like way too many, there are 4,000-something political appointees who come in who mostly don't know what they're doing.

Right. There's so—

They should be 200. They should be, it takes them forever to get appointed because it's such a, so unwieldy. They should be more of an understanding that where the government has worked well, is where it's on a longer fuse, where it isn't— the democracy is not yanking on it all the time. The CDC famously got politicized under Ronald Reagan. And this is another book of mine, but it's sort of like why the American response to COVID was so bad, why the CDC's response was so inept, like not having tests, the tests didn't work, all that stuff.

Right.

You can track it back to the head of the CDC used to be a career civil servant who was there because he knew what he was doing and was often there a long time. And it was the gold standard of public health in the world. To Reagan turned it into a political appointee because he didn't want the person doing something in response to a pandemic that would cost him politically. And that there was a degradation of the enterprise after. The Federal Reserve actually works pretty well. It's worked pretty well because it's at some arm's length from the political process. But I think that there's an argument we move in that direction. The book is not making an argument, it's telling a story. But that, that I think that's one of the things that sort of drops out of the book is that like this politicization of, of these enterprises that are not inherently— I mean, they're only very broadly political. They're like, we all want clean water, we all want food we can eat without getting—

Well, not everybody necessarily, right?

Yeah, but it's these basic functions of the government have to work. We all want to get on a plane and not be afraid it's going to crash. It's like there's— there are a million things the government does.

One of the central ideas, in fact, in both of your books is that government often becomes invisible when it works. And that's why I think the perception of government is so skewed, Michael. For example, when our tax refunds arrive—

You asked me a question you wanted me to answer.

You're right. Planes land safely. You're right. Yes. A pandemic is avoided.

Yeah.

It's a big yawn.

Yeah, that's right.

So is it fair to say that people not understanding really what government government is doing for them, or if things go well, they don't pay attention, is both the greatest achievement of government and also the greatest vulnerability.

This is very well put. Can I steal that?

Yes.

Because that's very well put. And I would, I would add to that because I didn't completely answer your question. One of the things that you find when you start kicking around the government is just the many ways in which the people who work in it are just muzzled that they don't— they, one, they're not the kind of people who are advertising themselves. If you are— if you want fame and fortune, you don't— you don't go to work for the Department of Commerce, you know. And, and so you're interested in economic statistics for some weird reason, and you, and you do that, you know, or, or weather, or weather forecasting, or whatever. But you're not out there wanting attention for yourself. So you're already kind of psychologically not predisposed to saying, Me, me, me, look what I've done for you. But in addition, they're not allowed to. The political class that comes in on top with every new administration really stops the stories from being told. They regard almost any publicity as bad publicity. Like, it's more risk. Like, I'm not going to— we're not going to let some reporter come in and roll around the Department of Commerce to tell the story about how the Weather Service has been improved.

That—

And when those kind of stories do get told, they get told as the achievement of a politician rather than the achievement of the permanent government. So there is this— it's a PR— there's a huge— it's a net— you want to think of it's a narrative problem.

Right.

And it's very easy to tell a really kind of dumb but seemingly persuasive story about the government sucks. It's doing a gazillion things. It's 2 million people. Every now and then it's going to suck. Every now and then it's going to do something wrong. And that story is easy to tell. It's almost impossible to tell a story of, oh my God, it mostly has worked. And wait to see how you feel when it really doesn't work. It's harder to tell that story.

And the narrative has been even solidified more under Trump because you hear the swamp, for example. You hear the deep state. And these things have taken such a hold of the public consciousness. Tell me about why this idea has become so powerful. Is it because it taps into a preexisting narrative and just kind of puts it on steroids?

It's a funny thing when you— I mean, I think I regard the whole Trump movement as kind of the emotion of it is anger. He taps into grievance and anger very naturally. And it is really interesting that, you know, anger needs an outlet. Anger needs a target. A mob needs someone to go lynch. And that when they go looking, that the groups that they have managed to successfully demonize are immigrants, trans people, and federal workers. Like, you can kind of understand given history, immigrants, it happens all the time. They're outsiders.

It's happening globally too.

Yes, right. That you can kind of, I mean, it's horrible, but you can kind of understand when any kind of, used to be gay people, you know, like whenever anybody's pushing some sort of norm, some—

And also when there's economic stress, it's a, it's a real like, you're taking from me mentality.

Well, that's, that's right. But that, that's maybe where some of the anger, where the anger actually should be directed is like, who's taking, who is actually taking it?

The billionaires.

Yeah, whatever. But, but, but that, so this business, but I'm focused on how did you manage to do this to the federal workers? Like turn them into the other, this, this, this group. So no, most people don't believe it. Like, I mean, I think if you polled Americans, you would find like half of them thought the government was okay, 20% didn't care, 30% thought, yeah, Trump's right there. It'd be something like that. But does anybody believe it? Um, and I think it's, it's a, it's comp— it's partly that the government story never gets told. It's like we're all in need of like the experience I've had.

Well, except for by you.

Well, no, no, no, no, no. This is why it's a very odd subject for me to take on. I mean, mostly I'm in arenas of American ambition, right?

Right.

I'm usually with the people who are taking and not the people who are giving. And so I'm usually with a different sort of character. I think there's a whole personal psychology to why I've gotten so interested in these people and this thing. But one of the reasons is it's just literary opportunism. It is so important. And for whatever reason, the stories have not been told. So telling them is I mean, it works. Like, it's important. And it— and they're not— they're not dull. You know, when you get in there, they're not dull. It's hard to tell them because there is this— this Praetorian guard between you and them trying to prevent you from getting to them. Like these political people, like, get out of here. They don't— you're not invited in. You were asking me, like, how— how can he just say these things, deep state, whatever, and people just don't respond? What puzzles me, and I think this is going— I think it's just gonna have to change. What puzzles me is there isn't a reaction from other politicians, not even just the Democratic Party. There isn't a louder reaction from Republicans to people in Congress who are intimately familiar with what the executive branch does because they fund it.

And all of these politicians have pet projects that they're important to them and to the and like the society. That's why they— and when you see when a particular program gets targeted, then, you know, a senator, a member of the House will get up and do something about it if it's their thing.

Right.

But if—

Or if it involves their state.

It means their state, right? They're gonna— yes, that's completely right. You're gonna shut down a military base in Alabama, the senator from Alabama has something to say about it. It's a hard sell to sell The— why you should admire this thing, not hate this thing. And I think that it's like, it's like it's a hard sell. You should be, you should be kind and to trans people, you know, people aren't doing that very much either. It's a hard sell. Immigrants built this society. Once you've kind of demonized one of these groups, you get in trouble if you stand up.

It's like stick your neck out.

You stick it out. You stand up in front of the oncoming mob. and say, no, no, no, no, no, this— you're targeting something that you don't even understand. And, you know, your father was an immigrant, and, you know, your brother's trans. But I think— I do think even though it's a hard sell, someone is going to sell it because it's, it's an existential matter with this. If our government doesn't work, then, then your plane is falling out of the sky. You know, if our government doesn't work, then you can't drink the water. It's, it's, it's If the government doesn't work, we don't know what the Chinese are doing in AI. If the government doesn't work, we don't know what AI is doing. And what— it's just like, it's one—

Well, we don't, which we'll talk about in a few minutes.

Yes, I know, I know. And so can I get back to the book for one sec?

Yeah, yeah, you'll please. Because I wanted to ask you why you called it Blockers, but finish what you wanted to say first.

Well, I called it Blockers. I called it Blockers because Musk, when he went in, he told all the muskrats, his little 20-year-olds who were out there just randomly destroying things, he said, It was like Twitter. He says there were blockers who are trying to stop us from doing things. Find the blockers and get rid of them. And when I heard that, I thought, God, whoever tried to stop this, they must be saints because there was nothing in it for them. They're going to get rolled over. And, and the— and basically what he meant was find the people who are— who took an oath to the Constitution and are living by that oath, as opposed to just doing whatever Elon Musk told them to do, whether it's against the law or not. And so I thought, it's like, I mean, there's a long history of insults or epithets being turned into badges of honor. The Impressionist painters, that was an insult. They turned it into, yes, I'm an Impressionist. The Tories, the Tory Party, that was an insult. Over and over. So I thought, I'm going to turn blockers into a compliment. You're gonna want to be a blocker.

And I don't know, I— look, I'm not making a great claim here, but I thought it was kind of funny. A couple weeks ago, Trump got up in a speech and he said, if the Democratic Party does this after the midterms, if they get control of the House, I'm gonna block them. I'm gonna be a blocker. And I wondered if anybody leaked to him my title. And I thought, already he may be helping me turn this into something. Yeah, be a blocker. But, but When I framed it the way the book frames it, it's a kind of environmental disaster or environment— let's keep it more neutral— an environmental change. We're going to turn the executive branch from one thing into another, from, yes, sometimes inefficient, occasionally wasteful, maddeningly run enterprise that's for the people, funded by the people, that is not politicized. into this narrow political weapon for whoever happens to be president, things are going to change inside of it. People— there are going to be people who can't— who existed before who can't exist. There are going to be functions that were done one way before, they're going to be done another way.

Map that. Map what can't exist. Map— you know, there's a lot of attention placed on Trump all the time, some attention placed on what they are doing, almost no attention placed on what is gone, what got lost. And, and there is a way to draw a picture, and it's a negative space way. You, you draw what's— what, what doesn't belong in it, what's outside of it, and you get the— you get the— you get a different kind of view of the thing itself. And so when I started doing that, it was so much fun because I, I had these buckets in my mind. It was like What— you take the basic functions of government, like public safety or science or the refereeing function. That's a funny way to put it, but regulation, the law, the data, like information collection. What happens to each of these functions and people who are doing those functions when you change it from one environment to the other? And it then becomes a kind of extinction story. And, and it gives the reader a chance to at least ask, do I want it done this way? Like, do I, do I want that person gone?

Why can't that person still be there? What, were they bad at their job? Like, no, no, no, they were great at their job. Why, if they're great at their job, can they no longer be in their job? I just thought— and in each, what made it so much fun is in each bucket like I had in my mind, I was spoiled for choice. Like the— I wrote a book like this once, The Big Short. The Big Short. Like The Big Short, I had buckets in my mind like The people— I knew what the story roughly was, and there were multiple people who could have played each role, been the main character in the bucket. And, um, and so it was— it ends up being a casting search. When I went out into Washington at the beginning of the Trump administration, felt very like going into Wall Street in 2007, 2008. I knew that I, I was not gonna have any trouble finding the people I wanted to write about because There was more than one that could play the part. And so I felt more like a movie director. And that was— it's a fun— I don't want to do that with all my books, but it was a fun way to do a book.

If you're living with PBC or primary biliary cholangitis, your exhaustion is real and you're not alone. About 90% of those diagnosed with PBC are women, and more than half of patients experience the most common symptom. Severe fatigue, often severe enough to disrupt work, family, and everyday life. If that sounds familiar, it's worth talking to your doctor. Head to realpbctalk.com/fatigue to learn more about PBC-related fatigue. That's realpbctalk.com/fatigue. You would think you'd know a scam when you saw one, but today they often look like messages from your bank, your delivery service, your boss, One convincing message, one login page, and someone else is using your identity. CoverOn monitors your credit and personal data around the clock, alerting you the moment something looks off. And if a scam hits, expert recovery support, fraud insurance, and identity theft insurance have your back. Visit coveron.com/katie20 and use the code KD20 for up to 68% off, because recovering from a scam shouldn't be your full-time job.

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Well, let's talk about some of the characters you picked, Michael, because you begin with the story of Colin O'Brien. He is the Chief Security Officer at the US Institute of Peace.

Yep.

I believe that's a building that has a big Trump banner on it, if I'm correct.

That doesn't really narrow it down.

Yeah, I know. That's true.

Find the one that doesn't.

Someone said he had an edifice complex to me the other day, which I thought was so funny. Anyway, Colin tries to stop Doge from taking over the institute one late afternoon in March of 2025. Before we talk about what Colin did, what the hell is the U.S. Institute of Peace?

Great question.

You had never heard of this before either.

Never heard of it.

I thought I heard, but thought The Fifth Risk, I thought I, when I was doing Fifth Risk, I was trying to figure out which, which of the enterprises, which of the agencies to go into. And I had them, I thought I had a manila folder on every agency, and I did. Turns out the Institute of Peace is not part of the— it's not really part of the federal government. That's what was so interesting about it. Congress creates, charters these organizations, funds them. The first it did this with was the Red Cross. But there are lots of places like this that where the, the, uh, Public Broadcasting Corporation. There are lots of these.

Would the Organization of American States be one? I don't know. Remember that?

Don't— yes, maybe.

I don't know. I don't know. But basically they allocate the funding.

You'll quickly get me out of my depth.

They allocate the funding, but they don't have oversight.

That's right. And they set it up so that— and it isn't just— in fact, in the case of the Institute Peace, it was created under Ronald Reagan and it was funded in part by the government, but also by private donations. And the building's owned, it's a nonprofit. The building is owned by the institute and its purpose, I mean, the idea of it goes back to George Washington. George Washington said he, in an early address, we need an institute of war and an institute of peace because basically the best way to wage war is never to have to wage war. And if we study the arts of peace, maybe we'll avoid wars. They ended up creating West Point.

He was a very smart guy, wasn't he?

Very smart guy. They actually have a—

And he refused to run for reelection.

And he refused to run a route, right? Well, yes, but that's— we're going to go down that path.

Don't worry.

But West Point became the Institute for War, and they actually identified some land that is the land where the Institute of Peace ends up being built without anybody knowing the coincidence that they were going to put an Institute of Peace, but Congress never funded it. So it didn't happen way back then. But the idea was—

But then it happened under Reagan.

Under Reagan. And the idea was There are many situations where it's useful to have an organization that is not— that's kind of in and kind of not in the government. It's ambiguous. It can go talk to Iraqi tribal elders without it seeming like the US government is talking to Iraqi tribal elders.

Yeah.

I mean, you don't want to say it's part of like the intelligence gathering operation, but it's kind of part of the intelligence gathering operation. in its history, it has had these great triumphs where it's gone into like the— what was it called? The Triangle of Death in Iraq and managed to bring together all the warring factions in a place where a lot of American soldiers had died and it was costing the American government billions of dollars and actually brought peace to it. And I think David Petraeus wrote him a letter saying, you just like earned back all the money you've spent in the course of your life as an institution Many times over, and you're responsible for saving American lives. So they had— they have— it's not that everything they did worked, but they were— they're an interesting operation. And— but the bigger point is they're not— it's a nonprofit. They own their building. There are people in the government who are on their board. The president appointed the original board, but the people on the board are not, like, removed at the president's will. They're— it's independent, and they don't serve— they serve terms that are asynchronous with the president.

So it's meant to be this independent thing. Colin O'Brien was a security guard designed to his whole— he thought he was just keeping bad people out with guns out of the place. And, and Doge turns up with guns and they turn out first without guns and then they turn up with all— then they manage to get all the guns. They get the— they manage to flip everybody who, who has a gun onto their side and they raid the place and they take the building. And it's all a litigation.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who are these people with the guns?

Well, You have to look closely, but the security company that the Institute of Peace employs, they're paying them millions of dollars to guard the place. And Colin, they're a contractor. Colin supervises them. Doge first gets onto them and says, if you don't flip and work with us, we're going to cut your contracts with the State Department, which is much, a much bigger contract. So they're the only ones with guns in the building. So they get ahold of those. The D.C. police, once they— I mean, from Colin's point of view, when Doge rolls in, they're trespassing on private property. He thinks he's a former cop. He thinks he can just— it's like someone just rolled into my house and said that we're going to take it. The D.C. police get flipped. So then they become part of the Trump— the FBI is part of the operation. And it seems like, oh, I mean, nobody gets shot. So it doesn't seem like a raw power grab, but it is exactly what it is. It's like, why do they even care about the Institute piece? I think they wanted to show we can take whatever we want. And it just established a precedent like this.

Anything that even remotely touches the executive branch, we are going to seize and run, which is kind of the opposite of Trump 1. It was like, I don't care about it. He told Chris Christie, I don't even want to know about it. Fire the transition team. It doesn't Who in this, all of a sudden, it's the, we're going to identify anything that we can plausibly or even implausibly say we control that and we're going to grab it. And Colin was the first blocker. He was the first— he was the best at keeping them out of his building of all the other—

How did he do that if he's surrounded by people with guns, Michael?

Well, first he just turned Doge away, uh, you know, then, then When the security guys came in and they clearly had— they had bad intentions, he locked— he locked down— they got them all. He got them all. He waited till they were all in a room and he locked all the doors. And they— so he trapped them in the building. I mean, it was one— it was a cat and mouse thing that went on. But the bigger point was what was so interesting to me about Colin. He's like salt of the earth guy. He's a former military guy. He's a former Baltimore cop. He's, you know, he's, he did heroic things in both roles. And he was really smart about like how you protect this place. He, watching it unfold, he, he was aware that this isn't just the Institute of Peace. This isn't just this building. That they are trying to establish this power, this illegal kind of power, and they're doing it through force. Even if they don't shoot anybody, they're making sure that they, that all the weapons are on their side. He was very kind of alert to that. And I just thought that, that's a, it was a short opening of the book, but that was the way to open the book because it makes everything else possible.

Right.

The minute you, the minute all opposition has, it becomes impossible, impossible because they have the force and they've established they have the force, then you start to do the other thing.

And here he is, a security guard, right?

He's just a security guard. Fun character.

How did things end for Colin?

He got taken off by the DC police at the end. They released him. I mean, he now works for a private security firm, but he's pissed. I think all these people I've written about, if the government flips, they're the sort of people that a House Oversight Committee should bring before them and say, how do we put it back but put it back better? And he would say, he'd tell them some things. He'd tell them things just under like the level of security of the buildings. Um, but he's employed. But I mean, he senses like our society is in peril. Like, this is not trivial. It's not trivial that they can just seize the property of a private institution and, and let— and knowing the courts may one day overturn it, but by the time it happens, they'll have gutted the place. And the other piece of that story, I mean, that was more than just Colin who was interesting about the story, is that Elon Musk was celebrating this. Uh, we, we took over this place and this place was actually part of the deep state, or this place was actually, you know, it was, it was giving money to the Taliban.

He listed all these supposed scandals they'd uncovered when they, when they went in. And point by point, when you looked at what he said, every one was either a grotesque distortion or an outright lie. And this is something about Musk that interests me, and thus something about Doge. If you talk to people who know Elon Musk, like his closest associates— I didn't talk to Musk. He wouldn't talk to me. Explicitly said he wouldn't.

I can't wait to see the Alex Gibney documentary.

I mean, he's worthy of the treatment. But you talk to people who work with him and are sympathizers, they say with great sincerity, you have to understand, Elon doesn't lie. Elon thinks he may be saying something that's not true, but he believes it's true when he says it. And I don't know what's scarier, that he believes what he said was true or that he just is outright lying. But the effect is the same. He broadcasts things that are really not true really loudly and doesn't ever go back to say— and in this case, an example, which to me in another society would have him being tried for treason. He found in his— the muskrats found inside the Institute of Peace computers some evidence that the Institute of Peace had paid a couple hundred thousand dollars. I had someone on salary who was in fact Afghan, who was— had been working very closely with the U.S. government. Spy's too strong a word, but he had been— he'd even— Trump won, he'd helped the State Department prep negotiations with the Taliban. He was— and he himself had a price on his head with the Taliban.

He—

and he was outside of the country because the Taliban wanted to slit his throat. When Elon Musk publishes his name and the thing and says he's received this money from the Institute of Peace and he's actually a member of the Taliban, the Taliban knows he's not a member of the Taliban. They round up all his relatives in Afghanistan seeing Elon Musk's tweet and torture them. And Musk is responsible for that. And that that just happened. And it's not even— it's barely a news item.

I was going to say, and never held accountable. Yeah.

ProPublica did an excellent piece about just this. But these things, these kind of outrages, it's outrageous. It's outrageous. Women and children and brothers and sisters are being rounded up and tortured because Elon Musk said this thing because he wanted to make a point that was not even a true point. It's shocking. It's like exposing an American asset. It's like, ha, here's one of our spies in China. I don't know why. I just assume justice will eventually be done.

Because he does it with impunity.

He does it with impunity.

It's so maddening.

It's gross.

You know, the Institute of Peace is in the news again. Just last week, they filed an emergency motion in federal court asking a judge to block the Trump administration, quote, from carrying out plans to carve President Trump's name into the facade of the iconic USIP headquarters.

That's funny.

What is it with Trump's compulsion to put his name on everything, to put his face on everything, to have these monuments to himself erected by him. It's insane.

Yeah, it is. I don't— this is going to sound strange. I don't find Donald Trump all that interesting as a person. I find him— I find he's more interesting as like the causes and consequences.

Like as a study?

As a study, as the causes and consequences. of him are more interesting. Like, he's part symptom and he's part cause, but he himself doesn't seem all that interesting to me. I think that there's like some rules that you can use, some rules of thumb to understand his behavior. Like, I mean, one rule of thumb I think to understand Trump— well, obviously it's all about him all the time, so putting his name on things makes him feel good. It's scratching some itch. But the rule of thumb that that to me is the most fun to kind of watch, to use to watch him, is find where there's trust in the society, anywhere there's trust, and he will eventually, like a smog, roll in and undermine the trust. Like he's trying to do with the Federal Reserve, for example. There's trust in the money still. God knows why, but there is. Treasury bonds. He's said a couple of times that maybe we won't pay them all back, but he hasn't said them quite He hasn't said it quite loudly enough or persuasively enough, but that is a catastrophic thing if people think we're actually not good for our— But where there's trust, the justice system, the— he finds a way to go in the media and level it and make everybody doubt, make everybody question everybody else.

Is that so he can be superior to those institutions?

So he's not at a disadvantage. So he's so dishonest himself, right? He's like— I don't even think that's an insult. Right. He just lies all the time. He lies so much that when he says something that's true, it's kind of shocking. The way he's moved through life, bankrupting companies and not paying back debts and stiffing contractors, all that stuff, and lying all the time and not apologizing for the lies, it means he's untrustworthy and everybody just kind of understands that. He's not at a disadvantage if everybody else is also untrustworthy. And he's— in fact, he's an advantage because he's brazen about his untrustworthiness, that he is at a huge advantage if someone is playing the game, if he's in the game. And if we're in a room and we're doing business and there are 8 of us and Trump's one of them and we all trust each other, he's instantly spit out like a bad seed because we don't trust him. We'll do business with each other. But if we— if he can make us all not trust each other, then he's playing a different game. And so he creates untrustworthiness wherever he goes. And where I, where I've tried, if you're kind of trying to predict where he's going to go, look where trust might get in his way in any way.

And that's where he goes. And he's really good at undermining it. He's really good at undermining it. And he did it. So one of the things he's done, I mean, this takes us to part 2 of the book, uh, is he attacked instantly. this time, the refereeing function. Like, there are all these refs in the government. There are financial regulators or refs.

The inspectors general, for example.

Right. Their job is— they're like the guys in, in the, in the zebra suits in NBA basketball games. You're not supposed to know who they are. They're supposed to be wildly, um, independent, nonpartisan, fair-minded. They don't know— they don't always live up to that, maybe, but they're there for that. And they're put at a distance from the political process so that You know, you can't buy the ref. You can't screw up the game by rigging it. And he—

they—

that's the first thing they did is they whacked all those people. Trust. World Cup. Nobody's even thinking these games are rigged during the World Cup until Trump calls that guy and says, you know, rethink the penalty on the American player. All of a sudden, he's poisoned the environment, right? He does that over and over and over. But he did that right away inside the government. And I think because people don't know how the government works, They don't realize the consequences of getting rid of all the refs. You get rid of the refs, what happens? You get rid of the refs in an NBA game and LeBron James just gets his way. That the stars get their way, the powerful players get their way. You— the rules don't govern the game anymore. It becomes more of a power relationship. And so he's done that right across the government, and the consequences will take a while to be seen. But there will be consequences. It's a— it's a— it's, uh, it's not long— no longer a place where fairness is possible.

Well, corruption is his middle name, right? If you don't have inspector general to monitor—

That's right.

And police these agencies and make sure people are held accountable, then it obviously is rife for corruption. You come into some of these blockers in an interesting way. One is this story of Saul Hill, Lavangia. Did I pronounce that correctly?

Sohail Lavangia.

Sohail Lavangia. So he is kind of an eager young Doge warrior, right?

Yes.

Who is deployed to the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Yes.

And he basically is told to straighten it out. Was he one of these young tech bros, 20-something kids who was—

Slight— so the slightly different because the 20-something kids mostly had not really done much in with their careers yet. Mostly they're hoping to get to Elon Musk. You know, they had jobs as engineers in companies, but they hadn't made their fortunes.

Right.

Sahil had actually made his fortune. He is the— he was— and he's a little older. He was in his early 30s. But he dropped out of USC when he was 19 to be the first employee of— or the second employee of Pinterest and the first engineer. He got stock in that. He created another successful company called Gumroad. So he had some many— I mean, not hundreds of millions, but tens of millions of dollars. And He came in, he actually came in for a reason. It was interesting, his reason. He knew somebody who knew somebody. The Doge was just a social network. It was somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Musk or knew one of Musk's associates, and you were a tech person, you were allowed to show up. So, Solvay had been bothered for years by the fact that he got paper from the IRS. It bothered the hell out of him that he couldn't just do his taxes on his phone. Like, they're— and he's right. It's like, we're— the government is years behind in tech. And it bothered him especially that he'd gotten a refund check sent to an old address.

Why am I even getting a check in the mail? Is that— was his view. I want to go fix that. They didn't put him into the IRS at first anyway. They put him into the Veteran Department of Veterans Affairs. He goes and he finds another Doge guy who's gotten there a couple of weeks earlier. And the other Doge guy This is literally what he's doing. He's been told cut contracts in the VA without that, without knowing, knowing less about the VA than you or I know about the VA, knowing nothing. He goes in, he gets a list, a file with all the contracts, and it's like 90,000 contracts. And he just plugs words like gender, trans, bias into the search and just cuts without even seeing what they are. the contracts that have those words in them. It is bizarre. He's— and Saul sees this, he goes, this is bizarre. And the guy looks up and goes—

Not surprising though.

And the guy looks up and says to him, I know it's bizarre, but I don't know what else to do. Like, they told me to cut the contracts. I'm so glad you're here. Could you help me find a better way to do it? And Saul says, like, maybe we should think about what these are before we cut them, kind of thing. Maybe get to know the place a little bit, that kind of thing. And so he's instantly a little off-put by what Doge ends up being. It's different from what he thought it was going to be. He thought he was going to go make the government more efficient, and that's not what they wanted him to do. They wanted him to just create damage and cut stuff willy-nilly. And he gets himself in trouble because he's kind of—

He's trying to be thoughtful.

He's trying to be thoughtful. He also lives in his head a bit. He's sort of a little— he would say he must be on the spectrum in some way. He gets a call from a reporter, who somehow gets his number from Fast Company and in the court and gives him an interview, which he shouldn't have done, like, but he did it. And in the course of the interview, he says, so far I've been here, I've kind of been surprised by how efficient the government is. And it gets him in trouble with Doge. Like, you can, you can post Nazi stuff on Twitter, you can have, you know, a history of sexual abuse, you can do anything in Doge and still be in Doge. You can't say the government's sort of efficient. The whole premise of the thing. And so he's already in bad odor with Musk when other things happen and he gets fired. He gets just run out. And what I loved about him was, I don't think Doge had to be all bad. I think Doge could have been great if it'd been done a different way, in a different spirit. I love that he came in to try to fix something.

That Sawhill came and tried to fix something. They didn't let him do it. They didn't let him make the government more efficient. I love that he just kind of almost accidentally got— I think he was the only one to get fired from Doge. It was hard to get fired from Doge. And I love that after Doge washes out, it's when Doge ends, he's still out there. And when someone calls and says, hey, I remember you wanted to fix something. Would you like to come back and try to fix something? He comes back. Now, I don't want to spoil the story, the ending of the story about what happens when he comes back, because it's wonderful and interesting and tells you all about problems in the government too. But I love that in spite of everything that happens, that spirit is alive. That spirit, I want to do something that's more than just about myself. I've made a bunch of money. At the end, he tells his wife, going and fixing something in the government that's important is going to— might take 10 years. We have to agree that I'm going to go work for the IRS as opposed to making millions of dollars in my tech company.

And he says, I promise I'll generate at least $1 million in passive income from our portfolio for the next 10 years. And she says, fine, that's all we need. We don't need any more than that. And I'll go work at whatever salary they would pay me. And they install him alone in an office in Manhattan. I mean, it's an adventure story at that point, but I needed— I needed to say to the reader because I said I thought it was true that in spite of all of this, we are not a selfish people. Like, we are not complete— that we are not a cynical people. We are— we— that, that there are a lot of people in this society who, if you create the frame for them, they will come and they will help. And we just need to create a better frame. We just need to have a frame which people can come and help. And that doesn't mean putting it back exactly the way it was. I mean, Sahil finds that out quite quickly, but it means us paying attention and learning how this thing works so that people like him want to come do it and make that sacrifice.

And then we appreciate what they do and don't, don't like crap all over them because they're government workers and government workers are evil, you know? And so that's— that was the importance of him to me.

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We have to talk about Francis Collins before you leave the studio because first of all, he's one of my personal heroes. He is a central figure in your book. He's not. some obscure—

He's the only one who's not— he's the only one you would have heard of.

He, he's, as many know, he directed the NIH under 3 presidents. He led the Human Genome Project. And, and why did you decide to include him? And by the way, this question I'm going to ask you after this, it made my head explode.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

I know. Well, all right.

First, why you chose Francis?

So Francis is an odd character in the book because, as I told Francis, You're not really alive in the book. Everybody else is alive. You're a corpse on the floor.

Oh, that must have made him feel great.

No, because I was thinking, how do I demonstrate what is happening to the science? The long-term future part of the government, these investments we make that don't pay off forever. So what happens to that?

Or maybe never.

Or maybe never, but every study of the NIH, by economists show that every dollar we spend yields $3 in economic returns, never mind that you can now cure some kinds of cancer and all that. So Francis, I went to see him in the first place because I knew that Russell Vought, who was at the center of the, of this web—

The author of Project 2025, the head of OMB.

Trump's—

Dr. Evil, in my view. I'm sorry.

Yes. Yes. That, that, that's all. He is a horrible horrible person. So this is what I knew, and I can't tell you how I knew it. I knew he had a child with cystic fibrosis who was going to live a normal life only because 35 years ago Francis Collins found the gene for cystic fibrosis in, in an act of scientific ingenuity and heroism.

Which paved the way for a drug.

Which paved the way for the drug. eventually. Yes, you wouldn't have. And so, and I knew that there was a chance that Francis Collins had been fired. Nobody actually knows that. The press release to this day, this is a scoop. Francis Collins officially resigned. But Francis, I knew that Francis Collins had been fired. I can't tell you how I knew that. I didn't know Francis Collins. And I thought, oh my God, the guy who possibly fired him has a child who was saved by him. How dark— how much darker can it get? How much, how much can ideology intrude on a human, on humanity, that, that, that's even possible? And so I went to see Francis Collins, and it wasn't the first thing out of his mouth, but it was the 4th or 5th. Um, I got to tell you, nobody knows this, but I was fired. And, and he starts to cry, and he, he was in his lab All he was doing was more research to cure the next thing, to find the next thing that would— that dizzy— he was working on diabetes and an aging disease called progeria, which is—

Oh, I know. I know that disease. It's an heartbreaking disease that rapidly ages somebody. Yes, I did a whole story about that, and I know the people.

And it's not hard to imagine—

Sam, Sam, who they—

anyway. Yes, it's not hard to imagine—

So horrible.

That if you come to understand this disease, you might understand some general things about aging that everybody would benefit from. It's not just a narrow thing anyway. Even if it was just a narrow thing, someone should be doing it. But Francis Collins has a gift for this kind of research. What— like a world-class gift. He's got a world-historic career as a researcher. Someone fraud— that they— that he gets— that an order comes down from somewhere in the Trump administration, get that guy out of there tomorrow. Have him throw his stuff in a box and get him out of there. You know, basically humiliate him. And he— so he starts to cry when he talks about how he had to leave his lab. He was packing up his stuff. He says, the odd thing is, I don't know who did it. I was like, oh my God, you don't know? You really don't? And I said, well, we do know— do we know who the suspects are? He goes, yeah, I can— there's a list of 4 or 5 people who I think might have been responsible, but I can't get anybody to tell me who did it.

And right then I realized I had a closed-room murder mystery. I had an Agatha Christie-like story, and that Francis Collins was the corpse, that it's where there's 6 people in a room. The lights go off, a shot rings out, the lights come on, Francis Collins is dead on the floor, and the 5 other— one of the 5 others did it. And I realized that in writing the murder mystery, it almost didn't matter who had done it. Their motives for— that they could have done it and their motives were painting collectively a portrait not just of hostility to Francis Collins, but hostility to science. And that I could— it's a comp— it's not just, I don't know, religion. It's— or a hostility towards research using fetal tissue, or, you know, the various things that have come in at— on science. There are a bunch of reasons that this administration is hostile to it and coming at it from different directions. And together, the suspects sort of painted the full portrait. So I hate to say this, I— this happens to me as a writer. Sometimes the material's so good that I get so excited about writing the story, I forget about what it all means, that it's just an interesting literary challenge.

And, but it was, so that's what, there were other people I could have used to have written the story about what's happening to science. But when I heard his situation, I thought, oh my God, I can engage a reader in a really interesting way. And, um, And tell a story of, I mean, I do tell the story of Francis Collins a bit, but I've told Francis, like, you're going to get disappointed because you're, someone should write your biography. And this isn't your biography. This is a story of your murder. And, uh, and there's some biographical details that people need to know to know why someone might have killed you, but it's a limited portrait of him.

But getting back to Russell Vogt, I mean, how in the world, uh, let me read a paragraph you wrote, Michael.

I haven't reread it, so it'll be interesting to hear.

As he considered his child, Vaud had to know and might have allowed himself to care that he owed her life— this is his daughter who had cystic fibrosis— to Francis Collins and more broadly to work sponsored for 50 or more years by the NIH. He chose not to let that truth in. He might not have put an end to Francis Collins' career, but he could have stopped whoever wanted to. And he hadn't. The deeper why of it was the mystery. The black box would remain closed, its contents undisturbed and unknown, even to Francis himself. He'd solved one of the great mysteries of human existence. He was able to get his mind around so much. He'd finally collided with the thing he would never fully comprehend. Cruelty. That just made me So sad.

It gets back to Orwell's definition of power. You know you have it if you can make other people suffer. And that's cruelty, right?

But the fact that Russell Vogt's daughter is alive today because of Francis Collins' research and he didn't give a rat's ass.

Yeah. Yes. And it was a— it couldn't get darker. It couldn't get more upsetting. It's also part of a larger pattern of the perpetrators of this attack on the institution being oblivious to personal connections they have with, or indifferent to personal connections and debts they have with the thing they're attacking. So, I mean, we haven't talked about him, but Alex Marangitis, who invents the fire science, he's the one who figured out how the World Trade Centers fell in the 9/11 attacks. He did the big fire experiments and showed that it was— how the fire could have done it. He thus explained why Howard Lutnick, Commerce Secretary's firm brother, died.

Right.

Hundreds of people connected to Howard Lutnick.

Cantor Fitzgerald.

And Howard Lutnick is the Commerce Secretary who has worked to put Alex Marangidis out of business. He doesn't— I bet he doesn't even know that what he's put out of business is the thing that has explained what happened.

Is it just ignorance? Like, did Russell Vogt know what was happening? And do you think that— you point out, even if he wasn't directly responsible, he could have stopped it.

He could have stopped it. He had the power to stop it.

Do you think that it was just this broader agenda, this ultimate goal, this amassing of power trumped literally everything, including moral decisions, including personal gratitude?

Yes. I think that the pursuit of power and the politicization of everything just warps morality. It gives you a reason to ignore whatever value system you were raised with. You know, it gives you a reason to behave in ways you just wouldn't otherwise do. I mean, this is— it's not just us. This has happened throughout history. You create this kind of tribalism, you create this political identity, this ideology, and it becomes an excuse to do all kinds of monstrous things. And ignorance is a feature, that it's easier to do it if you don't know. So I wouldn't be surprised if— that one of the things that is the beauty of Trump is that he doesn't know anything about anything, and it makes it easier for him to do the things. That if someone actually informs him, he has— you have to wrestle with that a bit. So ignorance is a feature of the movement. But these particular personal blind spots, they're interesting. And as I said, I cast the book. And one of the things I was casting for was personal relationships between the antagonist and protagonist. That the thing coming in bore some relationship to the thing on the receiving end of the attack.

It wasn't just impersonal government or political forces. Something personal was going on.

And therein lies the drama.

That's right.

Before you go, I know Anthony Fauci isn't in here, but I'm just so fascinated at— fascinated and distressed, honestly, how many people have turned against Anthony Fauci.

Yeah.

Now, I'm not saying he is without flaws. I think he got too big for his britches, as my mom would say.

Yeah.

A little too enamored with celebrity.

Yeah.

And this sort of instantaneous fame he experienced. But do you see the dynamics of what has happened to, to really a dedicated public servant for decades emblematic of kind of this bigger picture or even a sort of a microcosm of it?

I do. I think it's shameful how he's been treated and that he's, you know, it's— you rewind the tape and you put anybody in the position of having to manage a pandemic with Trump as president, They're going to— you're going to make some mistakes, but it was all done. It was all done to help us. Here's how I think about it. The story of the pandemic is a story of a society that fails to take care of its people, and that we have 4% of the world's population and 20% of the deaths 4 months or 5 months into it, when we're supposed to be the best-equipped society and the wealthiest society on the planet. It's awful. And the— it is sort of— sort of makes sense that in that society, in the end, they turn on the doctor who is trying to take care of people. That somehow we've lost— the society has lost this sense that we're supposed to take care of each other. And it— the role of the doctor all of a sudden is undermined. And other narratives get told about the doctor, and nobody believes the doctor is just trying to help you.

And it's, you know, it's like one— so I do think that that's— that is Anthony Fauci's part of this story. He's not as interesting to me to write about, uh, as Francis Collins.

Well, also there was a mystery about Francis and kind of this secondary story.

That's right, that's right. But he would have been another way to do this. That's completely right.

What's next for you? Are you gonna be writing Sam Altman's biography, or is that gonna be done by ChatGPT?

So I've spent— I've been here for the week. I've been here for the week because I have written a play that's opening at the Cherry Lane Theater.

Really?

In early— sometime next year, first half of next year. Ed Norton read it on Thursday, and a Broadway actor came in and performed it on Friday so I could see it. And, uh, Tommy Kail, the director of Hamilton, is directing it. And, uh, good Lord. And it's, it's, and it's, it's been such a move. It's been, it's been such an exciting experience. This book was an exciting experience, but I've had back-to-back exciting literary experiences.

So what is this play about?

It's about Dixie. It's about the death of my daughter. Oh, it's a one-man show. It's— but it's not that. You're not gonna feel that way when you come out of it. It's an— it was a really interesting attempt to describe grief, but it's— or describe the particularity of grief. And so that's what I'm working on. I mean, I gotta be on the road for this book for a month and then I'm gonna do that. And I have another idea. I have another book idea. It's not a Sam Altman. It's a completely different thing. But I'm not gonna come back to that till the new year. The play has to be done so we can go.

Wow. I would love to see it.

Come over.

I would love to see it.

Uh, you would. It's— it was so exciting watching it. Oh my God, I'm in such good hands. And it's, um—

Is Ed Norton gonna be—

No, I don't think so. I don't know. That's above my pay grade, but I just, I just don't know. It's, it's, uh, that's to be determined, but it, it's, it's happening.

Well, please let me know when I can come see it.

It's happening as soon as Tommy Kail is free to— his schedule is open.

Wow.

So it's called How to Be Lucky.

How to Be Lucky. That's interesting.

You're just gonna be surprised. It's not what you expect, whatever you would expect.

That sounds so exciting and amazing, and I can't wait to see it. And I'm sure that people are gonna be buying this book. And you're, I think, the only person on the planet, Michael Lewis, who can make government work interesting.

As long as I'm not doing it.

No, I don't think you think that. I think you— I think that there are a lot of jobs in here.

I'm way better writing about it than I would be doing it. It's hard. Yeah, it's not my kind of thing, but it's hard to do. I admire the people who do it.

Well, thanks for coming in.

Thanks for having me.

Next Question is a production of Katie Couric Media and Acast. The executive producers are me, Katie Couric, And Courtney Litz. Our producers are Adriana Fazio and Julia Lewis, and our production coordinator is Alyssa Horowitz. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode or to sign up for my newsletter Wake Up Call, visit us at KatieCouric.com and follow me on Substack and all the other social media platforms. If you're living with PBC or primary biliary cholangitis, your exhaustion is real and you're not alone. About 90% of those diagnosed with PBC are women, and more than half of patients experience the most common symptom, severe fatigue, often severe enough to disrupt work, family, and everyday life. If that sounds familiar, it's worth talking to your doctor. Head to realpbctalk.com/fatigue to learn more about PBC-related fatigue. That's realpbctalk.com/fatigue.

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