# Michael Lewis: The NIH “Murder Mystery,” DOGE, and Our Government Immune System

An episode of [Ground Truths](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1728526108), 6 Oct 2026, 1 h 03 min.

Audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/217874085/b8fe02cd6112174e9ee19d5678e184db.mp3

Michael Lewis is one of the best storytellers of our era. You know and likely have read his books Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side, Flash Boys, Liar’s Poker, and The Undoing Project, to name a few. He has long been one of my favorite authors. This was the first interview that Michael did on his new book, BLOCKERS, published on October 6th, streamed live on Substack Sept 29th. It’s his 21st book and 4 of the last 5 have been about the US government: The Fifth Risk (2019), Premonition (2021), and Who Is Government? (2025). His ability to talk with the silent civil servant heroes of multiple government agencies (the Blockers), members of the DOGE destruction team, and much more from the current US government administration. Here’s a gift link to the exclusive excerpt at WSJ I won’t review all the things we discussed here, but the chapter on the NIH reads like an Agatha Christie murder mystery. We learned a whole different version of what happened that differed from what was previously reported. Thank you jojofinance, Andrew Bowdle, Tracy Paeschke, MD, FACC, Bob Fleischman, Sean Stevenson, and many nearly 500 others for tuning into my live video with Michael Lewis! Join me for my next live video in the app. Ground Truths has 217,000 subscribers from every US state and 214 countries. There are over 300,000 followers of Ground Truths so more than 100,000 folks who can easily convert to be free subscribers. Your subscription to these free essays and podcasts makes my work in putting them together worthwhile. If you’re not a subscriber, please join! If you found this interesting PLEASE share it! The proceeds from all voluntary paid subscriptions go to support our summer internship program. It enabled us to accept and support a record number of 62 summer interns that joined us in 2026! These are high school, college and medical students selected from thousands of applicants. We couldn’t do this expanded program without the funds coming in through Ground Truths. Thank you! Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

## Transcript

[0:00] SPEAKER_01: Well, we are about to get started.
[0:02] SPEAKER_01: I am just so thrilled to have one of my favorite authors,
[0:08] SPEAKER_01: maybe my favorite author with me today.
[0:12] SPEAKER_01: This is book number 21, Michael, is that right?
[0:15] SPEAKER_02: I don't count them.
[0:17] SPEAKER_01: Something like that.
[0:18] SPEAKER_01: It's up there.
[0:19] SPEAKER_01: Anyway, probably the most impressive storyteller of our time.
[0:25] SPEAKER_01: And so it's a real privilege for me to have this conversation with And we're going
[0:30] SPEAKER_01: to get into this new book of his that's coming out October 6th.
[0:34] SPEAKER_01: It's called Blockers.
[0:36] SPEAKER_01: And you may not know what blockers means, but we're going to get into that.
[0:39] SPEAKER_01: It's a derogatory term as far as the government sees it.
[0:43] SPEAKER_01: But at any rate,
[0:46] SPEAKER_01: what's really curious,
[0:47] SPEAKER_01: Michael,
[0:47] SPEAKER_01: is that you've written in the last,
[0:50] SPEAKER_01: since 2019, this is the fifth book, and four of them are about the U.S. government.
[0:56] SPEAKER_01: Did you ever think you're going to move from Moneyball and Undoing
[1:00] SPEAKER_01: and all these other places, new, new thing, to the government?
[1:04] SPEAKER_01: No.
[1:05] SPEAKER_02: And it's, what I can't predict is what's going to trigger my interest.
[1:11] SPEAKER_02: And what happened, Donald Trump is what happened.
[1:15] SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was, and I can tell you the nature of the interest, what happened.
[1:19] SPEAKER_02: And when he won the first time, he clearly, it was kind of the dog caught the bus situation.
[1:27] SPEAKER_02: He wasn't really expecting to, and he got himself in the situation where he won.
[1:31] SPEAKER_02: And he wasn't someone who had any real experience with government,
[1:34] SPEAKER_02: and he was going to be running this two million person civilian workforce.
[1:38] SPEAKER_02: And I When one of his first moves was to fire his 550-person transition team,
[1:47] SPEAKER_02: which was just to go in and get briefings from all the people who were in there
[1:50] SPEAKER_02: to figure out what on earth is going on in this complex operation,
[1:53] SPEAKER_02: and he told Chris Christie that You know,
[1:56] SPEAKER_02: we don't really need that anymore because you and I are so smart.
[1:59] SPEAKER_02: And he said this, he said, it'll take an hour and we'll understand it.
[2:02] SPEAKER_02: I, I had the same feeling.
[2:04] SPEAKER_02: Have you ever been,
[2:05] SPEAKER_02: you ever been in a car with someone who's driving a little too fast and they just,
[2:09] SPEAKER_02: and they're,
[2:09] SPEAKER_02: they're talking to you like this, like,
[2:11] SPEAKER_02: well, and, and your response is all of a sudden you're looking at the road for them.
[2:16] SPEAKER_02: You know,
[2:16] SPEAKER_02: that you're so scared that you just, you,
[2:18] SPEAKER_02: you hope if you look at the road more intently that they will not get in
[2:22] SPEAKER_02: an accident.
[2:23] SPEAKER_02: I had that feeling with him.
[2:24] SPEAKER_02: It's like all of a sudden I was like, what doesn't he know?
[2:26] SPEAKER_02: You know, what is this thing?
[2:28] SPEAKER_02: And that got me on a kind of curious journalistic investigation where I was doing,
[2:34] SPEAKER_02: I was going to places that were supposedly sort of boring places,
[2:37] SPEAKER_02: the Department of Agriculture,
[2:38] SPEAKER_02: and finding not just riveting things that were happening,
[2:42] SPEAKER_02: like really interesting things, But it took me a while for the penny drop.
[2:47] SPEAKER_02: Really interesting characters.
[2:48] SPEAKER_02: Like, oh, these people in here are not who I thought they were.
[2:55] SPEAKER_02: And so, which led to,
[2:58] SPEAKER_02: This piece of stunt journalism we did during the Biden administration
[3:03] SPEAKER_02: where I got six writers I love.
[3:06] SPEAKER_02: I parachuted them into the government.
[3:08] SPEAKER_02: I said, just find a person, tell a story.
[3:11] SPEAKER_02: And the thing just exploded in the pages of the Washington Post and did real well as
[3:16] SPEAKER_02: an anthology.
[3:17] SPEAKER_02: And I thought, well, that just proved the point that it is interesting.
[3:22] SPEAKER_02: And then comes along Trump too.
[3:24] SPEAKER_02: And instead of like, Like not looking at the road.
[3:28] SPEAKER_02: He's intent on the road.
[3:29] SPEAKER_02: He like takes us off road in a completely different direction.
[3:33] SPEAKER_02: And, and it was,
[3:35] SPEAKER_02: he was going to,
[3:36] SPEAKER_02: he was more,
[3:37] SPEAKER_02: he went from being intent on ignoring the thing he was supposed to manage to being
[3:42] SPEAKER_02: so aggressive with what he was managing
[3:44] SPEAKER_02: that he was managing things no president had managed before.
[3:47] SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
[3:48] SPEAKER_02: And, and I just thought, oh, this thing, there's another kind of story to tell here.
[3:54] SPEAKER_02: And I know these characters are good.
[3:57] SPEAKER_02: What is it?
[3:58] SPEAKER_02: And this isn't like a lifetime ambition of mine.
[4:03] SPEAKER_02: I'm going to do other things.
[4:04] SPEAKER_02: I really am.
[4:05] SPEAKER_02: But I just think you got to follow what I do if I'm going to do it well.
[4:10] SPEAKER_02: I've got to follow where I'm genuinely interested.
[4:13] SPEAKER_02: And I just got so interested in what they were doing that it led to this.
[4:18] SPEAKER_02: And I got to say that Writing it was a joy.
[4:23] SPEAKER_02: As disturbing as some of it is, writing it was like total pleasure.
[4:28] SPEAKER_02: And never once did I think, oh, I shouldn't be doing this.
[4:31] SPEAKER_02: I do have a question.
[4:32] SPEAKER_02: I do every time I have a question, is anybody going to read it?
[4:34] SPEAKER_02: But that's a different question.
[4:35] SPEAKER_01: Oh, no, they're going to read it.
[4:37] SPEAKER_01: As we're going to get into, there's parts that you cannot miss.
[4:41] SPEAKER_01: But yeah, so you got going with Trump 1.0 and the fifth risk.
[4:46] SPEAKER_01: And then we spoke at some length about premonition,
[4:50] SPEAKER_01: which was basically you did a CDC complete interrogation.
[4:57] SPEAKER_01: And it was so fascinating to learn about that.
[5:00] SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
[5:01] SPEAKER_01: just last week, the headlines of the New York Times was the CDC has been zombified.
[5:06] SPEAKER_01: A third of the people there are gutted.
[5:08] SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
[5:09] SPEAKER_01: you brought up points that it probably did need a lot of Help,
[5:14] SPEAKER_01: but not quite the way it's being done these days.
[5:18] SPEAKER_01: And then you get the who is government untold story of public service.
[5:23] SPEAKER_01: And so you were really getting into the government,
[5:26] SPEAKER_01: making good contacts, I guess, as a setup for the new book.
[5:31] SPEAKER_02: You know, that wasn't the intention.
[5:33] SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you
[5:34] SPEAKER_02: asked me after the fifth risk, I'd have said, we're done here.
[5:37] SPEAKER_02: But then the COVID came along,
[5:39] SPEAKER_02: then this idea for demonstrating just how riveting some
[5:43] SPEAKER_02: of these government employees are came along.
[5:46] SPEAKER_02: And what has happened is over time,
[5:50] SPEAKER_02: inadvertently,
[5:52] SPEAKER_02: yeah, I get to know lots and lots of people in lots of different places.
[5:55] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[5:57] SPEAKER_02: Can I maybe just set up blockers just a little bit?
[6:01] SPEAKER_02: Oh, please.
[6:02] SPEAKER_02: Because this will take me three minutes.
[6:04] SPEAKER_02: And it's a little abstract,
[6:05] SPEAKER_02: but it'll get us to explain how the, this is how the book happened for me.
[6:08] SPEAKER_02: All right.
[6:11] SPEAKER_02: Right away, it's clear.
[6:13] SPEAKER_02: The Trump operation is intent,
[6:15] SPEAKER_02: and they wouldn't deny this,
[6:16] SPEAKER_02: on seizing more power for the president than anybody has ever seized.
[6:20] SPEAKER_02: It's like even the power of the purse in cases.
[6:24] SPEAKER_02: And so they were going to turn the executive branch,
[6:28] SPEAKER_02: the two million person workforce,
[6:31] SPEAKER_02: from a group of people,
[6:33] SPEAKER_02: nonpartisan civil service,
[6:35] SPEAKER_02: who take an oath to the Constitution,
[6:37] SPEAKER_02: not to the president when they go to work,
[6:40] SPEAKER_02: That into a pretty narrowly,
[6:43] SPEAKER_02: instead of taking an oath to the Constitution,
[6:44] SPEAKER_02: you were going to take an oath to Donald Trump.
[6:45] SPEAKER_02: It was going to be a loyalist operation.
[6:49] SPEAKER_02: And they were pretty open about that.
[6:51] SPEAKER_02: And the question in my mind was, okay, This is highly consequential.
[6:56] SPEAKER_02: The way our government is going to function is going to change.
[6:59] SPEAKER_02: The incentives of the people who work in it are going to change.
[7:01] SPEAKER_02: It's going to go from doing your job,
[7:04] SPEAKER_02: following the law,
[7:05] SPEAKER_02: all those other things, to pleasing Donald Trump or the Trump operation.
[7:09] SPEAKER_02: How does that affect the different kinds of things the government does?
[7:14] SPEAKER_02: Long-term science project, public safety, risk management kind of thing.
[7:19] SPEAKER_02: It's data collection and dissemination.
[7:23] SPEAKER_02: Refereeing function that the government provides in lots of different ways.
[7:27] SPEAKER_02: Refereeing markets,
[7:28] SPEAKER_02: refereeing disputes, disputes between government workers and political operatives.
[7:34] SPEAKER_02: And it's like, how do all those things get changed?
[7:38] SPEAKER_02: And once I realized that it was like that that was the frame,
[7:43] SPEAKER_02: And that in each of these functions,
[7:47] SPEAKER_02: there were people who had been doing their job for a couple of decades at least,
[7:51] SPEAKER_02: who were clearly like their politics didn't enter into anything,
[7:55] SPEAKER_02: didn't have anything to do with their politics.
[7:56] SPEAKER_02: They were thought to be extremely good at their jobs.
[7:59] SPEAKER_02: And they were being run out by the Trump administration that they no longer,
[8:03] SPEAKER_02: whatever it was that they were doing,
[8:06] SPEAKER_02: You could no longer do in the way they were doing it.
[8:10] SPEAKER_02: It's almost like an extinction event.
[8:11] SPEAKER_02: It's like habitat changes and some species die off.
[8:15] SPEAKER_02: The idea of the book was we're going to tell the story of this administration
[8:20] SPEAKER_02: through what it killed, through the species that die off.
[8:24] SPEAKER_02: And all these people,
[8:25] SPEAKER_02: Elon Musk had said when he came in,
[8:28] SPEAKER_02: He said to his 20-somethings who ran around the government looking to do damage,
[8:33] SPEAKER_02: he said, find the blockers.
[8:35] SPEAKER_02: Find the blockers of people who are going to get in our way and destroy them kind of thing.
[8:40] SPEAKER_02: And he said,
[8:40] SPEAKER_02: and so I thought when I found some of these blockers,
[8:45] SPEAKER_02: most of the time what they were doing is just trying to not break the law.
[8:49] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[8:50] SPEAKER_02: And so I thought there's a way to take Elon Musk's epithet and turn it into a compliment.
[8:55] SPEAKER_02: It's like impressionists.
[8:57] SPEAKER_02: For the impressionist painters, impressionism, that was an insult in the beginning.
[9:00] SPEAKER_02: And they turned it into a badge of honor.
[9:03] SPEAKER_02: So the story is told through these people who got in the way,
[9:08] SPEAKER_02: who lost their jobs,
[9:10] SPEAKER_02: and who kind of describe this new environment by its inability
[9:16] SPEAKER_02: to sustain them anymore.
[9:18] SPEAKER_02: And it's sort of saying to the reader, Get to know this.
[9:20] SPEAKER_02: Get to know this function, these people.
[9:23] SPEAKER_02: And how do you feel about, oh, they no longer belong?
[9:27] SPEAKER_02: So that's the idea of the book.
[9:30] SPEAKER_02: And then it was a question.
[9:31] SPEAKER_02: No, it's a perfect framing.
[9:32] SPEAKER_02: Really perfect framing.
[9:36] SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you, because the framing is, for me, the heart.
[9:39] SPEAKER_02: Once I've got a frame, I'm off and running.
[9:42] SPEAKER_02: And the framing is often the hard part for me.
[9:48] SPEAKER_02: And once I had the frame, the book of mine is most like.
[9:52] SPEAKER_02: It's not most like, ah, The Fifth Risker.
[9:55] SPEAKER_02: The most like The Big Short.
[9:57] SPEAKER_02: Because I had a similar sort of frame for The Big Short, and then I could have chosen...
[10:02] SPEAKER_02: Any number of characters to play the roles, there was an actual kind of casting search.
[10:07] SPEAKER_02: Same thing happened here.
[10:08] SPEAKER_02: There's six people who tell the story,
[10:12] SPEAKER_02: but I could have picked six other people and told the same story.
[10:16] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
[10:17] SPEAKER_02: So there you go.
[10:18] SPEAKER_01: I hope that didn't bore you.
[10:19] SPEAKER_01: And by the way,
[10:21] SPEAKER_01: anybody who has a question for Michael,
[10:24] SPEAKER_01: don't hesitate to put it in the message,
[10:26] SPEAKER_01: the point about out for doing the good thing.
[10:30] SPEAKER_01: I mean, basically,
[10:31] SPEAKER_01: you're going to hear how through this remarkable direct contact with the blockers,
[10:39] SPEAKER_01: you understand what is the immune system.
[10:42] SPEAKER_01: What protects us, these heroes, these silent heroes, civil servants.
[10:50] SPEAKER_01: So you found them and they told their story.
[10:52] SPEAKER_01: And as opposed to the order of the book that you bring them out,
[10:56] SPEAKER_01: and I'm going to go through many of these blockers,
[11:00] SPEAKER_01: but the one, of course, that resonated with me was the Francis Collins story.
[11:07] SPEAKER_01: Yep.
[11:08] SPEAKER_01: Francis Collins comes up after some of the other And Francis is a friend of mine.
[11:13] SPEAKER_01: He was at the NIH for 32 years.
[11:17] SPEAKER_01: He and I were on the faculty at the University of Michigan together
[11:20] SPEAKER_01: when he discovered the cystic fibrosis gene.
[11:22] SPEAKER_01: Oh.
[11:23] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[11:25] SPEAKER_01: And he was 12 years director of the NIH with multiple administrations,
[11:31] SPEAKER_01: both Republican and Democrat.
[11:33] SPEAKER_01: So this is a story that hasn't been told.
[11:37] SPEAKER_01: I didn't know any about it.
[11:38] SPEAKER_01: Francis never told me about it.
[11:40] SPEAKER_01: And he's career murdered in this chapter.
[11:43] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[11:44] SPEAKER_01: And it's a mystery.
[11:45] SPEAKER_01: Who did him in?
[11:46] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[11:47] SPEAKER_00: That's right.
[11:48] SPEAKER_01: Oh, by the way, before I...
[11:51] SPEAKER_01: The way you describe people...
[11:54] SPEAKER_01: Like this, Francis, the sweet calm of Mr. Rogers with the mustache of Captain Kangaroo.
[12:00] SPEAKER_01: This is a classic.
[12:01] SPEAKER_01: This is a Lewisism.
[12:04] SPEAKER_01: By the way, has Francis read the chapter
[12:06] SPEAKER_02: or the book yet?
[12:07] SPEAKER_02: I think he's just got the book.
[12:09] SPEAKER_02: So probably not.
[12:11] SPEAKER_02: Okay.
[12:11] SPEAKER_02: But soon, like any moment.
[12:13] SPEAKER_02: All right.
[12:14] SPEAKER_02: Well, okay.
[12:18] SPEAKER_02: So here's what interested me.
[12:19] SPEAKER_02: So I told you how I started thinking about this.
[12:22] SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that the government has done so successfully for
[12:26] SPEAKER_02: a very long time,
[12:27] SPEAKER_02: since World War II,
[12:28] SPEAKER_02: is fund long-term scientific research that the market will not fund.
[12:32] SPEAKER_02: It's not like the private sector is going to pick it up if the government doesn't do it.
[12:37] SPEAKER_02: It is generated.
[12:37] SPEAKER_02: There are endless studies showing the economic returns from the NIH research.
[12:43] SPEAKER_02: But just like we all know that all diseases that used to kill people don't kill people anymore.
[12:49] SPEAKER_02: And it starts with this sort of this place.
[12:52] SPEAKER_02: And yeah, you can argue that It could be done a slightly different way.
[12:56] SPEAKER_02: But the basic idea of it,
[12:58] SPEAKER_02: Vannevar Bush,
[13:00] SPEAKER_02: who sort of started the big American government science project on the back
[13:04] SPEAKER_02: of World War II,
[13:05] SPEAKER_02: the most important part,
[13:07] SPEAKER_02: I think his most important idea was give the scientists the money
[13:11] SPEAKER_02: and let them decide what they should be researching.
[13:14] SPEAKER_02: Don't let politicians decide what the scientists do.
[13:18] SPEAKER_02: It doesn't mean the scientists are all off a leash.
[13:21] SPEAKER_02: Congress still decides what money they get.
[13:24] SPEAKER_02: They have to justify it.
[13:26] SPEAKER_02: But it's like, let them make the technical decisions because they know best.
[13:30] SPEAKER_02: Anyway, Francis,
[13:33] SPEAKER_02: so I'm thinking this thing is obviously under assault by the Trump administration.
[13:37] SPEAKER_02: It's that they want to seize control of the monies.
[13:41] SPEAKER_02: They want to make decisions about what research gets done and what doesn't.
[13:45] SPEAKER_02: Political people.
[13:47] SPEAKER_02: And they are skeptical and hostile to science in all kinds of ways.
[13:52] SPEAKER_02: So I'm thinking, who's going to be my character here?
[13:57] SPEAKER_02: And I meet Francis.
[14:01] SPEAKER_02: And Francis says in the first meeting two things that just got me.
[14:06] SPEAKER_02: And then the third thing.
[14:07] SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you the three things.
[14:08] SPEAKER_02: First thing he says is...
[14:10] SPEAKER_02: After we're talking a bit, I said, you know, the official announcement was that you resigned.
[14:18] SPEAKER_02: And he said, I didn't resign.
[14:20] SPEAKER_02: I got a call and I got told, pack your boxes.
[14:22] SPEAKER_02: You got to be out of there in 24 hours.
[14:25] SPEAKER_02: Now, this is one of the great giants of American science.
[14:29] SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
[14:30] SPEAKER_02: And he has done a lot for the country.
[14:32] SPEAKER_02: And you can argue about his second response to the second stage of COVID and all that.
[14:38] SPEAKER_02: But he was not running anything at that time except his own lab at the NIH.
[14:43] SPEAKER_02: It's doing important work.
[14:44] SPEAKER_02: We know he's good at it.
[14:46] SPEAKER_02: To treat this man that way is a sin.
[14:48] SPEAKER_02: So that's one.
[14:49] SPEAKER_02: So that interested me.
[14:50] SPEAKER_02: And it interested me that no one knew that.
[14:52] SPEAKER_02: So that was a scoop.
[14:53] SPEAKER_02: The second thing was, he said, I don't know who did it.
[14:58] SPEAKER_02: Like I got whacked and I don't know who did it, but he had a list of suspects in his head.
[15:04] SPEAKER_02: And I thought, oh my God, this is like, this is made to order.
[15:09] SPEAKER_02: It's an Agatha Christie closed room murder.
[15:12] SPEAKER_02: It's six people in a room,
[15:15] SPEAKER_02: lights go out,
[15:17] SPEAKER_02: shot rings out,
[15:18] SPEAKER_02: lights come on,
[15:19] SPEAKER_02: Francis's body is on the floor and there are five people in the room with him.
[15:22] SPEAKER_02: And one of those five did it.
[15:24] SPEAKER_02: And I thought,
[15:27] SPEAKER_02: and when I looked at who those five were,
[15:29] SPEAKER_02: I realized that together as a group,
[15:33] SPEAKER_02: they painted a pretty thorough portrait of the Trump administration's hostility
[15:38] SPEAKER_02: to science.
[15:39] SPEAKER_02: And it isn't all one thing.
[15:42] SPEAKER_02: They're subtle differences.
[15:44] SPEAKER_02: And then the third thing,
[15:45] SPEAKER_02: and this will take your,
[15:46] SPEAKER_02: this takes,
[15:47] SPEAKER_02: which take people's breath away,
[15:49] SPEAKER_02: was that maybe the prime suspect,
[15:53] SPEAKER_02: Certainly one of the top suspects is Russell Vogt,
[15:57] SPEAKER_02: who is seeking to control the actual monies that go to the scientists.
[16:02] SPEAKER_02: He's giving himself veto power over scientific grants.
[16:05] SPEAKER_02: He's director of the Office of the Management of the Budget and sort of the spider
[16:09] SPEAKER_02: in the middle of the web in the Trump administration.
[16:11] SPEAKER_02: Russell Vogt has a daughter who has cystic fibrosis.
[16:16] SPEAKER_02: She is alive and Thank you, Francis Collins.
[16:21] SPEAKER_02: Francis Collins' research led to treatments,
[16:26] SPEAKER_02: pretty new treatments,
[16:28] SPEAKER_02: that enable people with kids previously who had a death sentence
[16:32] SPEAKER_02: to live normal lives.
[16:35] SPEAKER_02: And I thought,
[16:37] SPEAKER_02: have we got to this place in this country where ideology,
[16:42] SPEAKER_02: political identity,
[16:43] SPEAKER_02: tribalism has gotten so vicious that We've lost our basic humanity.
[16:50] SPEAKER_02: That we know Russell Vogt,
[16:52] SPEAKER_02: even if he didn't actually pull the trigger,
[16:54] SPEAKER_02: he could have stopped someone from pulling the trigger.
[16:56] SPEAKER_02: And that he did not feel anything.
[17:01] SPEAKER_02: That just shocked me.
[17:03] SPEAKER_02: And...
[17:05] SPEAKER_02: And so I thought, I'm going to write it as a murder mystery.
[17:08] SPEAKER_02: That's right.
[17:08] SPEAKER_02: It was written as a murder mystery.
[17:10] SPEAKER_01: It's so ripping.
[17:14] SPEAKER_02: You are the first person, except for my editors, who I am talking to about this chapter.
[17:19] SPEAKER_02: I love it.
[17:20] SPEAKER_02: I love it.
[17:20] SPEAKER_02: I mean, I shouldn't have had so much fun writing it.
[17:24] SPEAKER_02: I mean, I told Francis, he said, could you give me a hint what's in it?
[17:28] SPEAKER_02: And I said, you're a corpse.
[17:31] SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry, but your role is dead body on the floor and you have some lines.
[17:38] SPEAKER_01: The word you use of career murder and the trigger and also all the language from the
[17:48] SPEAKER_01: Sopranos.
[17:48] SPEAKER_01: I mean, it just...
[17:50] SPEAKER_01: But, you know,
[17:51] SPEAKER_01: what gets me here is that this firing,
[17:55] SPEAKER_01: which we didn't know about,
[17:56] SPEAKER_01: was by a phone call by this, you know, public, Matt Lomoli or something.
[18:03] SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
[18:04] SPEAKER_01: I mean, he was just put in there temporarily to be, you know, a henchman.
[18:09] SPEAKER_01: He didn't even have a meeting.
[18:10] SPEAKER_01: It was just a phone call, you know, get out of here in 24 hours.
[18:14] SPEAKER_01: It's just stunning.
[18:14] SPEAKER_01: But so you, the fact that you're in Francis's kitchen, right?
[18:19] SPEAKER_01: Visiting with him several times, yeah?
[18:21] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[18:22] SPEAKER_01: And he's telling you the story that's never been told.
[18:25] SPEAKER_01: Now, is that just because of your, like, you just eek it out of people?
[18:30] SPEAKER_01: Or you think he just said he was holding it inside and he just wanted to,
[18:34] SPEAKER_01: you know, get it out, catharsis?
[18:36] SPEAKER_01: Or what do you account for that?
[18:39] SPEAKER_01: I'm a witch.
[18:44] SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
[18:45] SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
[18:45] SPEAKER_01: You get all these people to talk.
[18:47] SPEAKER_01: You're like a lie detector.
[18:51] SPEAKER_02: A true serum.
[18:52] SPEAKER_02: I do think that there is something that is probably seductive about coming
[19:01] SPEAKER_02: at someone with a broad interest rather than a narrow kind of agenda.
[19:07] SPEAKER_02: And I had a broad interest in writing about the long-term science project and his role in it.
[19:14] SPEAKER_02: And I wasn't really looking to scandalize anybody.
[19:20] SPEAKER_02: And he, what is it?
[19:21] SPEAKER_02: I think he probably, my timing was good.
[19:25] SPEAKER_02: I think that by the time I got to him,
[19:28] SPEAKER_02: I think he probably had possibly some regrets about going out so quietly.
[19:33] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
[19:34] SPEAKER_02: I could be wrong.
[19:36] SPEAKER_01: I think that's true, yeah.
[19:38] SPEAKER_02: But on the other hand,
[19:41] SPEAKER_02: because of COVID and the way Fauci has been treated,
[19:46] SPEAKER_02: there's probably a little part of him that thinks, just keep my head down.
[19:50] SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
[19:51] SPEAKER_02: I don't know why he decided to talk to me so openly.
[19:57] SPEAKER_02: I don't think he ever completely lost his wariness about me.
[20:01] SPEAKER_02: I don't feel like he was just giving it all up.
[20:05] SPEAKER_02: But I got enough out of him that I could tell the story.
[20:08] SPEAKER_01: And you didn't use Pentothal or anything like that.
[20:13] SPEAKER_01: No, I'm just kidding.
[20:14] SPEAKER_02: No, not that.
[20:15] SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think he had a cup of coffee.
[20:18] SPEAKER_02: Maybe he had a cup of coffee.
[20:19] SPEAKER_02: And what was ironic of the suspects.
[20:23] SPEAKER_01: Oh, I was just going to say of the five suspects.
[20:26] SPEAKER_01: And by the way, Trump could have been the sixth suspect, but you kind of ruled him out.
[20:30] SPEAKER_01: Yes.
[20:30] SPEAKER_01: One of them was Jay...
[20:32] SPEAKER_01: Babicharia, who became the NIH director, and he also visited Francis in his kitchen.
[20:42] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[20:43] SPEAKER_01: I had no idea about that.
[20:48] SPEAKER_02: Roger Severino,
[20:49] SPEAKER_02: who wrote the chapter in the Project 2025 report about dismantling the NIH and
[20:54] SPEAKER_02: the win after Francis, was one of the suspects.
[20:57] SPEAKER_02: Memoli was one of them, but he was not a very persuasive one.
[21:00] SPEAKER_02: Bhattacharya, who replaced Francis, RFK Jr., and Russell Boat.
[21:05] SPEAKER_02: And Trump had to be considered, but there are reasons why I think it wasn't Trump.
[21:09] SPEAKER_02: And probably reasons why Francis thinks it wasn't Trump.
[21:12] SPEAKER_02: But, um,
[21:14] SPEAKER_02: although Trump's,
[21:14] SPEAKER_02: we can get into Francis's interactions with Trump because they were funny.
[21:17] SPEAKER_02: Because Trump appointed him the first time, right?
[21:19] SPEAKER_02: So, uh, but,
[21:21] SPEAKER_02: but I thought I had the list of people who Francis was,
[21:27] SPEAKER_02: there was nobody else Francis wanted to put on the list.
[21:29] SPEAKER_02: And I go hunting around and trying to determine who might have done it and learn a lot.
[21:34] SPEAKER_02: And at some point,
[21:35] SPEAKER_02: I come back to Francis the third time and he goes,
[21:37] SPEAKER_02: oh, Jay, he was here the other day.
[21:40] SPEAKER_02: And I said, Jay was here the other day?
[21:42] SPEAKER_02: The guy who supposedly might have whacked you?
[21:45] SPEAKER_02: And he says, yeah, yeah, we had a lovely conversation.
[21:47] SPEAKER_02: And I asked him point blank and he said, I had nothing to do with it.
[21:52] SPEAKER_02: That doesn't mean he didn't do it.
[21:54] SPEAKER_02: No, not at all.
[21:55] SPEAKER_02: Not at all.
[21:56] SPEAKER_02: But isn't it?
[21:57] SPEAKER_02: It interests me.
[21:58] SPEAKER_02: Maybe it doesn't interest you, but it interests me how hard it's been.
[22:03] SPEAKER_02: St. Francis wanted to know how hard it is to find out who did it.
[22:08] SPEAKER_02: I would have thought whoever did it would be like, yeah, that was me.
[22:13] SPEAKER_02: It's kind of interesting that nobody's taken credit.
[22:16] SPEAKER_01: Well, but as you point out in the book, Russell...
[22:20] SPEAKER_01: Who's a prime suspect,
[22:22] SPEAKER_01: who the irony that his daughter survived because of Francis' work
[22:26] SPEAKER_01: on cystic fibrosis.
[22:28] SPEAKER_01: And this guy was a big part of the Project 2025 and has,
[22:33] SPEAKER_01: as you said, cut off funds from the NIH.
[22:36] SPEAKER_01: He doesn't ever leave fingerprints.
[22:38] SPEAKER_01: That's his MO.
[22:41] SPEAKER_01: That is
[22:43] SPEAKER_02: his MO.
[22:44] SPEAKER_02: That's the closest thing to the best argument for Russell Vogt,
[22:49] SPEAKER_02: aside from the fact that he's clearly sensitive to Francis's powers of persuasion.
[22:56] SPEAKER_02: Like, you don't want Francis kicking around on Capitol Hill telling people
[22:59] SPEAKER_02: that they shouldn't be doing this because senators listen to him.
[23:03] SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
[23:04] SPEAKER_02: But the way it was done...
[23:07] SPEAKER_02: That the absence of fingerprints suggests Russell vote.
[23:11] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[23:11] SPEAKER_02: That's what I was thinking.
[23:12] SPEAKER_01: Do you think after your murder mystery investigation, do you think that he's the likely one?
[23:19] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[23:20] SPEAKER_02: And I think he's the likely one because he was...
[23:23] SPEAKER_02: As I say,
[23:24] SPEAKER_02: even if it wasn't his idea,
[23:27] SPEAKER_02: he was in a position to just say, no, we're not going to do that.
[23:30] SPEAKER_02: He would have controlled that.
[23:32] SPEAKER_02: So he let it happen even if he didn't actually say the words first.
[23:41] SPEAKER_02: And so anyway,
[23:43] SPEAKER_02: I hate to aestheticize this because there's a huge moral implications to this thing,
[23:50] SPEAKER_02: but But one of the really interesting things about this book in the creation of it
[23:55] SPEAKER_02: for me was just how it led me to different ways of telling stories.
[24:03] SPEAKER_02: Like each story had its own way it wanted to be told and they connected up in funny ways.
[24:09] SPEAKER_02: So it created a kind of narrative compulsion.
[24:11] SPEAKER_02: I tell you with Francis,
[24:13] SPEAKER_02: When we got to the end of that section,
[24:15] SPEAKER_02: I knew that there was this last piece of the book.
[24:18] SPEAKER_02: I knew that the book ended on a kind of more hopeful note in a funny way,
[24:22] SPEAKER_02: but with one of these Doge kids coming back and doing something useful.
[24:25] SPEAKER_02: But I thought there was another big section after Francis.
[24:29] SPEAKER_02: And when I got to the end of that, and I realized that...
[24:35] SPEAKER_02: At the bottom of this,
[24:36] SPEAKER_02: at the bottom of this movement,
[24:38] SPEAKER_02: to go in and traumatize the bureaucrats,
[24:40] SPEAKER_02: to fire people willy-nilly,
[24:41] SPEAKER_02: to cut their budgets without asking them,
[24:43] SPEAKER_02: at the bottom of it all was this cruel streak, like this just cruelty.
[24:48] SPEAKER_02: And what they did to Francis was cruel.
[24:50] SPEAKER_02: It was unnecessary and cruel.
[24:53] SPEAKER_02: And the cruelty was the point in some way.
[24:56] SPEAKER_02: And that the cruelty was possibly,
[24:58] SPEAKER_02: probably coming from someone whose child had been saved by this man who was
[25:02] SPEAKER_02: the object of cruelty.
[25:04] SPEAKER_02: But you really can't, there's nowhere emotionally to go anymore.
[25:07] SPEAKER_02: It's like it's dark as it gets.
[25:09] SPEAKER_02: And the book just ended.
[25:10] SPEAKER_02: So I finished that paragraph, that last paragraph of Francis's section.
[25:15] SPEAKER_02: I'm pointing to the galley over here.
[25:17] SPEAKER_02: And I thought, This is it.
[25:20] SPEAKER_02: This is the end of the book.
[25:22] SPEAKER_02: So I went from being late with my book to early with my book
[25:24] SPEAKER_02: because Francis's story was so compelling.
[25:29] SPEAKER_02: And there is this thing,
[25:32] SPEAKER_02: and I'll shut up about this,
[25:33] SPEAKER_02: but There is this funny thing about power,
[25:37] SPEAKER_02: that people who want power, I don't know how you are with power.
[25:40] SPEAKER_02: I mean, everybody wants some power, but I don't think about how do I accumulate power.
[25:46] SPEAKER_02: And it's like,
[25:48] SPEAKER_02: how do you know,
[25:49] SPEAKER_02: if you're a power person,
[25:50] SPEAKER_02: as they clearly are, like we want the power, how do you know you have power?
[25:55] SPEAKER_02: And there's this line or two in 1984 in Orwell's novel where he says,
[26:01] SPEAKER_02: you know, it's not enough that you see everybody doing what you want them to do.
[26:06] SPEAKER_02: It's not enough that everybody's just obeying your commands
[26:09] SPEAKER_02: because maybe they'd have done it anyway.
[26:10] SPEAKER_02: You don't know.
[26:11] SPEAKER_02: Maybe you're leading them where they wanted to go anyway.
[26:14] SPEAKER_02: You're not getting that gratification.
[26:16] SPEAKER_02: The way you know is by making people suffer.
[26:19] SPEAKER_02: And that's largely what they've done with the civil service.
[26:23] SPEAKER_02: They've done not very much of this constructive.
[26:25] SPEAKER_02: I'm sure they're bits and pieces where they're bright spots.
[26:28] SPEAKER_02: But they have inflicted cruelty and caused suffering.
[26:34] SPEAKER_02: And I think it's actually a byproduct of this quest for power.
[26:41] SPEAKER_01: Well, that sums up the Doge story and so many other things in this story.
[26:47] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's true.
[27:08] SPEAKER_02: Publisher Pushkin is bringing it out.
[27:12] SPEAKER_02: And the bits I've listened to are just fun.
[27:14] SPEAKER_02: They've just done really good things with it.
[27:17] SPEAKER_02: It's a really good audio version.
[27:19] SPEAKER_02: And that's not always been
[27:21] SPEAKER_01: true of my books.
[27:23] SPEAKER_01: Anna Kay asks,
[27:24] SPEAKER_01: and politicians cut funding of research just like this,
[27:27] SPEAKER_01: when scientists decide what research is needed,
[27:32] SPEAKER_01: isn't this what makes America great, and how can this go on?
[27:37] SPEAKER_01: It's needed for humanity.
[27:38] SPEAKER_01: I guess we all would agree with these points, Anna.
[27:42] SPEAKER_01: Well, before we leave this Collins chapter,
[27:44] SPEAKER_01: which just was riveted,
[27:47] SPEAKER_01: there were three funny parts of the, that is, the meetings of Trump with Collins.
[27:55] SPEAKER_01: One that I just was blown away by was, so Trump is gaussed with Ernie Ells.
[28:01] SPEAKER_01: Right.
[28:02] SPEAKER_01: Who I've met.
[28:04] SPEAKER_01: And one of the great things about Ernie is he's done a lot of work for autism.
[28:08] SPEAKER_01: So now in this meeting, Trump is- Shall I
[28:12] SPEAKER_02: tell him?
[28:12] SPEAKER_02: Please, please tell him.
[28:13] SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
[28:14] SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
[28:15] SPEAKER_02: So- One of the questions I had with Francis with all the suspects was,
[28:21] SPEAKER_02: what were your previous interactions?
[28:23] SPEAKER_02: And with Trump, well,
[28:25] SPEAKER_02: Trump had,
[28:25] SPEAKER_02: he had had a meeting with Trump at Trump Tower before Trump reappointed him.
[28:32] SPEAKER_02: And then he goes back about his business running NIH and he gets a call saying,
[28:37] SPEAKER_02: He gets a call from Jared Kushner telling him Trump wants to see him.
[28:40] SPEAKER_02: And he comes over without telling him what it's about.
[28:42] SPEAKER_02: And just to contextualize this, this,
[28:45] SPEAKER_02: you know,
[28:45] SPEAKER_02: Francis was used to this because Obama used to bring him in
[28:48] SPEAKER_02: to like give him lectures about genomics.
[28:50] SPEAKER_02: You know, it was like, he was thinking science seminar.
[28:57] SPEAKER_02: And instead, Jared is outside the Oval Office and he says to Francis, don't talk about science.
[29:06] SPEAKER_02: He said, no interest in it.
[29:07] SPEAKER_02: You'll just like tune out.
[29:09] SPEAKER_02: He has something he wants to talk to you about.
[29:10] SPEAKER_02: Just listen.
[29:13] SPEAKER_02: And he walks in and Trump says something like,
[29:18] SPEAKER_02: Francis, I've got this buddy, Ernie, who's got a hospital.
[29:24] SPEAKER_02: I need you to send him some money.
[29:27] SPEAKER_02: And Francis had to explain that that's not how the money got sent.
[29:33] SPEAKER_02: And so they couldn't just send money to Trump's golfing buddy.
[29:36] SPEAKER_02: So the next meeting is when there are just the two of them.
[29:41] SPEAKER_02: Jared Kushner calls.
[29:42] SPEAKER_02: Again, no explanation.
[29:43] SPEAKER_02: It's early COVID.
[29:45] SPEAKER_02: Very early COVID.
[29:46] SPEAKER_02: And...
[29:49] SPEAKER_02: And he gets there and Trump's kind of in a good mood.
[29:52] SPEAKER_02: And he's saying, my poll numbers are really good.
[29:56] SPEAKER_02: And he says, but I think they'd be even better if America knew that there was a cure.
[30:00] SPEAKER_02: And Francis is like, yeah,
[30:02] SPEAKER_02: probably would,
[30:03] SPEAKER_02: but he says,
[30:05] SPEAKER_02: my buddy Jack had a bad case of COVID and he took, is it hydroxychloroquine?
[30:12] SPEAKER_02: And it just cured it.
[30:13] SPEAKER_02: And Francis started to say that we've been doing studies and there's no effect.
[30:17] SPEAKER_02: And he goes, wait a minute, get Jack Nicholas on the phone.
[30:21] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[30:23] SPEAKER_02: Jack Nicklaus is now coming through the speakerphone.
[30:26] SPEAKER_02: And he says like, yeah, I had the COVID.
[30:30] SPEAKER_02: It was bad.
[30:30] SPEAKER_02: And I took the hydroxychloroquine and it just went away.
[30:33] SPEAKER_02: And Trump's like, see, see?
[30:35] SPEAKER_02: And Francis was trying to explain that like bad cases of COVID,
[30:37] SPEAKER_02: they often will usually just go away on their own.
[30:40] SPEAKER_02: And you got to study this before you tell people to take it.
[30:44] SPEAKER_02: But Trump was adamant that this was like proof that And Francis,
[30:48] SPEAKER_02: this is a funny bit,
[30:49] SPEAKER_02: Francis realized,
[30:50] SPEAKER_02: I think he was walking out of there,
[30:51] SPEAKER_02: that he had met Jack Nicklaus before, that he'd been at something at the Vatican.
[30:57] SPEAKER_02: God, I don't know, it was Miracle Cures, who knows what it was.
[31:00] SPEAKER_02: And Jack Nicklaus appears on like a video screen to talk
[31:04] SPEAKER_02: about stem cells being injected into his lower back to cure his back pain.
[31:09] SPEAKER_02: And it was a similar sort of event.
[31:12] SPEAKER_02: And it was,
[31:13] SPEAKER_02: and you see,
[31:13] SPEAKER_02: you know,
[31:14] SPEAKER_02: I remember when I wrote Moneyball,
[31:16] SPEAKER_02: that's ages ago, which is, and I was an art history major.
[31:19] SPEAKER_02: I'm not a scientist,
[31:20] SPEAKER_02: but I get the difference between scientific thinking and the scientific method
[31:24] SPEAKER_02: and how we, most of us go through our lives.
[31:27] SPEAKER_02: And, and Moneyball,
[31:28] SPEAKER_02: you know,
[31:28] SPEAKER_02: one thing it was,
[31:29] SPEAKER_02: was like inflicting science upon baseball or rash,
[31:32] SPEAKER_02: you know, actually testing hypotheses, actually using data.
[31:37] SPEAKER_02: And I thought, like when I wrote that book, I thought, well, It's over.
[31:41] SPEAKER_02: No one's going to argue with this.
[31:44] SPEAKER_02: They've actually generated knowledge.
[31:46] SPEAKER_02: This is what science does.
[31:48] SPEAKER_02: And instead, baseball was furious.
[31:52] SPEAKER_02: They had their view and nothing was going to get in.
[31:55] SPEAKER_02: And I just not...
[32:00] SPEAKER_02: I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't what to say to it.
[32:02] SPEAKER_02: You know, it's like, if you, if you have a brain that does, it's not that you're stupid.
[32:06] SPEAKER_02: It's just, you just don't think like that.
[32:09] SPEAKER_02: You, and you don't accept the idea of large sample sizes of double blind studies,
[32:15] SPEAKER_02: all that stuff.
[32:16] SPEAKER_02: You think that your intuition sort of trumps it all.
[32:19] SPEAKER_02: It's a, it's a, it's a brick wall for a scientist to run up against.
[32:23] SPEAKER_02: And I think Francis, I think Francis spent a lot of his career running up
[32:27] SPEAKER_01: against it.
[32:27] SPEAKER_01: Well, and to his credit,
[32:29] SPEAKER_01: and that's why he's always been a hero of mine for decades, is that he's a diplomat.
[32:34] SPEAKER_01: He's gentle about it.
[32:35] SPEAKER_01: He never is demeaning.
[32:37] SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
[32:38] SPEAKER_01: as you said earlier, he was loved by the Senate and he got the budget up at the NIH.
[32:43] SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I think you mentioned it in the book, he resigned.
[32:47] SPEAKER_01: He was going to just go back to his lab and the senators, Republican senators, wouldn't take it.
[32:54] SPEAKER_01: They said, you know, you have to stay on.
[32:55] SPEAKER_01: And he He rescinded his resignation.
[32:58] SPEAKER_01: So yeah, he's an amazing guy.
[33:00] SPEAKER_01: And by the way, Gretchen Fawcett, one of our people here said, what a travesty and a huge loss.
[33:06] SPEAKER_01: And I think we would agree wholeheartedly about that.
[33:09] SPEAKER_01: Now, There are other heroes and lots of villains.
[33:14] SPEAKER_01: In fact, the ratio on the cover is enough.
[33:20] SPEAKER_01: You have one hero and you only have five villains, okay?
[33:25] SPEAKER_01: There's like hundreds of villains.
[33:26] SPEAKER_01: But what gets me here is that you go, how did we get doged?
[33:31] SPEAKER_01: Now, since I don't know how to tell stories like you,
[33:34] SPEAKER_01: I would have said, okay, let's go through the Institute of Peace.
[33:38] SPEAKER_01: Let's go through the...
[33:39] SPEAKER_01: Office of Professional Management.
[33:41] SPEAKER_01: No.
[33:41] SPEAKER_01: What you do is you find the blocker, the hero, and you got all the intel and you tell the story.
[33:49] SPEAKER_01: And it's masterful.
[33:51] SPEAKER_01: So let's start out with the,
[33:53] SPEAKER_01: I didn't even know about this place,
[33:55] SPEAKER_01: the United States Institute of Peace,
[33:58] SPEAKER_01: renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.
[34:01] SPEAKER_01: Tell us about Colin O'Brien, one of our blockers.
[34:06] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[34:07] SPEAKER_02: This was the moment I thought this may be a book that I had,
[34:13] SPEAKER_02: because of The Fifth Risk,
[34:14] SPEAKER_02: I had on my office floor here all the agencies of the government
[34:19] SPEAKER_02: in manila folders trying to decide where I was going to go.
[34:22] SPEAKER_02: So I thought I knew the entire federal government.
[34:25] SPEAKER_02: And when I read in the paper that the Trump administration has stormed the Institute
[34:29] SPEAKER_02: of Peace, I was like, Why don't I know what that is?
[34:33] SPEAKER_02: I've never heard of that.
[34:34] SPEAKER_02: And you dig a little bit and you realize it because it's not exactly part,
[34:38] SPEAKER_02: it's kind of part of the government.
[34:40] SPEAKER_02: It's a nonprofit.
[34:41] SPEAKER_02: It's a nonprofit that Congress has funded.
[34:43] SPEAKER_02: And that in the beginning,
[34:44] SPEAKER_02: the president does appoint board members, but they serve 15-year terms.
[34:50] SPEAKER_02: And it was designed, it was George Washington's idea.
[34:53] SPEAKER_02: We're going to have an Institute of War, West Point.
[34:56] SPEAKER_02: We're going to have an Institute of Peace, never got funded until Reagan.
[35:00] SPEAKER_02: And it's actually,
[35:01] SPEAKER_02: I mean, they'd hate me saying this, but it's a quasi-intelligence agency, I think.
[35:07] SPEAKER_02: It does a lot of things,
[35:09] SPEAKER_02: but because it isn't of the government,
[35:11] SPEAKER_02: it isn't controlled by American politicians,
[35:14] SPEAKER_02: it's able to earn the trust of possible potential adversaries.
[35:19] SPEAKER_02: It's able to broker conversations.
[35:21] SPEAKER_02: It doesn't cost very much and it's generated hard returns.
[35:25] SPEAKER_02: You can measure,
[35:27] SPEAKER_02: David Petraeus wrote him a letter once saying,
[35:30] SPEAKER_02: what you did in shutting,
[35:33] SPEAKER_02: in quelling the violence in Iraq's triangle of death,
[35:38] SPEAKER_02: kind of like paid for your budget for your whole life.
[35:42] SPEAKER_02: You saved us a lot of blood and a lot of money by going in and just talking.
[35:48] SPEAKER_02: And they're our arts of peace.
[35:51] SPEAKER_02: And they are our soft power kind of instrument.
[35:55] SPEAKER_02: So I'd never heard of them.
[35:57] SPEAKER_02: And all of a sudden, this building's invaded.
[36:00] SPEAKER_02: And I was interviewing George.
[36:04] SPEAKER_02: I went and found the guy around the place.
[36:05] SPEAKER_02: His name is George Moose.
[36:07] SPEAKER_02: And he started telling me about his security guard,
[36:09] SPEAKER_02: the guy who was actually physically blocking the entry of Doge when they showed up.
[36:14] SPEAKER_02: And I thought, I got to meet this guy.
[36:16] SPEAKER_02: So his name is Colin O'Brien,
[36:18] SPEAKER_02: former Army sniper,
[36:22] SPEAKER_02: former Baltimore cop, some bad acts of heroism in his past, wicked smart.
[36:30] SPEAKER_02: He looks like a football linebacker, but he thinks like a college professor.
[36:35] SPEAKER_02: And he has a whole theory of security, like how it works, how to do it.
[36:40] SPEAKER_02: And he was the most successful at beating There were some funny moments
[36:48] SPEAKER_02: where he let people in and locked him in and sealed all the locks.
[36:52] SPEAKER_02: So they became his prisoners.
[36:53] SPEAKER_02: And there's a whole back and forth.
[36:55] SPEAKER_02: But he made the quite serious point.
[36:57] SPEAKER_02: There are two things that come out of that first chapter, I think, that are really important.
[37:00] SPEAKER_02: One is he made the serious point that it is not trivial that these people who came
[37:07] SPEAKER_02: in on us When they came in on this, managed to collect all the guns that they had.
[37:13] SPEAKER_02: The FBI was on their side because the FBI is in the administration,
[37:17] SPEAKER_02: but they twisted the arm of the D.C. police.
[37:20] SPEAKER_02: So the D.C. police became a doge helper.
[37:23] SPEAKER_02: They They blackmailed the private security company that he hired to protect the building.
[37:29] SPEAKER_02: So their own guards turned on them.
[37:31] SPEAKER_02: And it felt like a coup.
[37:34] SPEAKER_02: It felt like nobody got shot, but this operation was very aware, we have all the guns.
[37:43] SPEAKER_02: And Colin was very aware.
[37:45] SPEAKER_02: At some point, you couldn't do anything.
[37:48] SPEAKER_02: The second thing that was so interesting about the story is that when Doge gets in
[37:53] SPEAKER_02: and they get into the computers,
[37:55] SPEAKER_02: Elon Musk starts tweeting stuff that is just blatantly false.
[38:01] SPEAKER_02: And it's like nothing's true.
[38:03] SPEAKER_02: It isn't like, oh, there's some mistakes here.
[38:06] SPEAKER_02: It's just grotesque distortions and grotesque lies.
[38:09] SPEAKER_02: And the one The one that I just had my jaw on the floor was he tweeted that the U.S.
[38:16] SPEAKER_02: Institute of Peace was giving money to a member of Taliban who was an American enemy
[38:23] SPEAKER_02: in Afghanistan and put the guy's name on X.
[38:28] SPEAKER_02: Um, the guy was actually an American asset and he was not in, in, uh, Afghanistan.
[38:34] SPEAKER_02: He'd been, cause he was too dangerous for him to be in Afghanistan.
[38:36] SPEAKER_02: He was Afghani and he had been in the middle of sensitive negotiations between
[38:41] SPEAKER_02: the state department and the Taliban.
[38:43] SPEAKER_02: He had been helping us every which way.
[38:45] SPEAKER_02: And there was,
[38:47] SPEAKER_02: he was suspected by the Taliban,
[38:49] SPEAKER_02: I think of being an American asset, but they didn't know.
[38:52] SPEAKER_02: And when they read Elon Musk's tweet, ProPublica published this.
[38:56] SPEAKER_02: This wasn't my scoop.
[38:59] SPEAKER_02: They rounded up his cousins, his relatives, tortured them, beat them.
[39:05] SPEAKER_02: And that's treason.
[39:10] SPEAKER_02: And I'm amazed that we as a country have allowed this to go so far.
[39:15] SPEAKER_02: I'm amazed that there is not a call for a trial, that you can't.
[39:21] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[39:21] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[39:21] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[39:37] SPEAKER_02: And Colin was just such an interesting eye on it.
[39:42] SPEAKER_02: It's a short opening session,
[39:43] SPEAKER_02: but I just thought it was short and sharp, and it was the way to open the book.
[39:47] SPEAKER_01: Well, and it gives us a preview of the measures that were taken with a forged letter
[39:52] SPEAKER_01: to get entry, using the Intercon contract, blackmail, $460 million.
[39:59] SPEAKER_01: I mean, whatever it took to be deceptive and destructive terrorists,
[40:04] SPEAKER_01: Finn Johnson says, is it cruelty for cruelty's sake?
[40:09] SPEAKER_01: That's his question.
[40:10] SPEAKER_02: Well, as I say, I think the cruelty is a byproduct of the need to feel power.
[40:15] SPEAKER_02: And the ability to inflict the cruelty is the signal that you want to project.
[40:22] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[40:25] SPEAKER_02: So I think that's it.
[40:27] SPEAKER_02: What Colin would say,
[40:28] SPEAKER_02: the other thing he said that was very interesting,
[40:29] SPEAKER_02: because my other question I had was, why bother?
[40:34] SPEAKER_02: Nobody knows this place even exists.
[40:35] SPEAKER_02: Yes, it gets some congressional funding.
[40:37] SPEAKER_02: It's trivial.
[40:38] SPEAKER_02: It pays for itself many times over.
[40:40] SPEAKER_02: But why bother invading this place?
[40:44] SPEAKER_02: What is it?
[40:44] SPEAKER_02: What's going on here?
[40:45] SPEAKER_02: And Colin's take on it was, Because it was private.
[40:49] SPEAKER_02: Essentially, they were taking it.
[40:51] SPEAKER_02: It was a nonprofit that owned its own building.
[40:53] SPEAKER_02: So it's like them coming to your house and taking your house.
[40:55] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
[40:57] SPEAKER_02: By showing they could take it, they were basically asserting they could take anything.
[41:02] SPEAKER_02: And he thought It was a symbolic act.
[41:05] SPEAKER_02: Like, get that place because we can show that if we can get that place,
[41:09] SPEAKER_02: there's nothing we can't get.
[41:10] SPEAKER_02: And it's still in litigation.
[41:12] SPEAKER_02: It's still in the D.C. court, what happens to this building.
[41:14] SPEAKER_02: But they took it and they stuck Trump's name on the outside.
[41:18] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[41:19] SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
[41:20] SPEAKER_02: So I thought it was – it's one of those stories – I mean,
[41:25] SPEAKER_02: it's fun when you find a story that looks like a little story that's a big story.
[41:28] SPEAKER_02: And that is a little story that feels like a big story.
[41:32] SPEAKER_02: It's getting at the essence of the thing, even though nobody's ever heard of it.
[41:39] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's go to the next.
[41:41] SPEAKER_01: There's so many of these great stories, literally.
[41:45] SPEAKER_01: Tim Curry, he heads up the Office of Personnel Management, which has...
[41:52] SPEAKER_01: There are two million federal employees.
[41:54] SPEAKER_01: Somehow this is like the motherboard or something.
[41:56] SPEAKER_01: And he tries to be the blocker to keep OPM intact, right?
[42:04] SPEAKER_02: Well, he was the...
[42:07] SPEAKER_02: He was the most challenging literary character I've ever had,
[42:10] SPEAKER_02: but he was also like a Dickens character.
[42:11] SPEAKER_02: He was wonderful and difficult at the same time.
[42:14] SPEAKER_02: But he was, so Tim, let me tell you, he didn't head Office of Personal Management.
[42:19] SPEAKER_02: He was in charge of the box on the org chart.
[42:22] SPEAKER_02: And OPM is a small agency, and it's one of these meta agencies.
[42:25] SPEAKER_02: It's like the Office of Management Budget or the General Services Administration.
[42:30] SPEAKER_02: The Office of Management Budget,
[42:32] SPEAKER_02: where Russell Vogt is installed himself, it touches all the money.
[42:37] SPEAKER_02: OPM, the Office of Personal Management, touches all the people in the workforce.
[42:41] SPEAKER_02: They sort of help the people who help the people who help the people.
[42:44] SPEAKER_02: And the GSA runs all the buildings.
[42:46] SPEAKER_02: And Musk knew enough,
[42:48] SPEAKER_02: probably because Russell Vogt gave him a short course,
[42:51] SPEAKER_02: that when he came in,
[42:52] SPEAKER_02: this is where he sees,
[42:53] SPEAKER_02: he was actually sleeping in the General Services Administration with his team.
[42:59] SPEAKER_02: Many of them were badged as Office of Personnel Management people.
[43:04] SPEAKER_02: They were kept out of OPM because that was Russell Vaux's territory.
[43:09] SPEAKER_02: And so what they knew coming in was that if you want to do anything with
[43:14] SPEAKER_02: the entire workforce,
[43:15] SPEAKER_02: the entire civilian two-million-person workforce,
[43:18] SPEAKER_02: the touchpoint, point of contact was that OPM.
[43:23] SPEAKER_02: And Tim Curry, so who's Tim Curry?
[43:25] SPEAKER_02: Tim Curry...
[43:27] SPEAKER_02: Tim Curry, so what would people say about him?
[43:30] SPEAKER_02: He's been in that job for a long time, many administrations.
[43:33] SPEAKER_02: 35 years.
[43:34] SPEAKER_02: No one knows what he believes.
[43:37] SPEAKER_02: He is like the quintessential NBA referee.
[43:42] SPEAKER_02: Nobody can tell whose side he's on, and everybody thinks he's on their side.
[43:47] SPEAKER_02: The Clinton people thought he was a Clinton person.
[43:51] SPEAKER_02: The Obama people thought he was an Obama person.
[43:53] SPEAKER_02: The Trump people thought he was—the Bush people thought he was a Bush person.
[43:56] SPEAKER_02: He never tips—he's like—I mean,
[43:58] SPEAKER_02: he's hard to draw because it's hard to write a colorful piece about a referee.
[44:02] SPEAKER_02: But his job was to referee essentially—I mean,
[44:06] SPEAKER_02: this is putting it simply—to referee The disputes between
[44:10] SPEAKER_02: the two million person workforce and the politicals who come in to run it.
[44:16] SPEAKER_02: And that border is a naturally fractious border because these people are nonpartisan.
[44:22] SPEAKER_02: They have tasks.
[44:23] SPEAKER_02: They have to obey the Constitution.
[44:25] SPEAKER_02: The political person comes in the IRS and says,
[44:28] SPEAKER_02: I want to get Eric's tax returns so I can blackmail him.
[44:32] SPEAKER_02: The job of the IRS person is to say, no, you can't do that.
[44:37] SPEAKER_02: It isn't to say, you're my boss, here are his returns.
[44:41] SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of things like that.
[44:43] SPEAKER_02: Tim sits in the middle of it all,
[44:45] SPEAKER_02: and a lot of his job is just preventing conflict from escalating.
[44:49] SPEAKER_02: Again, so much of government is preventative, and he was that in spades.
[44:54] SPEAKER_02: What was so interesting about him is He was such a neutral.
[44:58] SPEAKER_02: He was so born to be in this role.
[45:00] SPEAKER_02: He was so insistently bland while being quite funny secretly,
[45:05] SPEAKER_02: but publicly kind of bland and couldn't see what he thought.
[45:08] SPEAKER_02: And everybody trusted him or both sides trusted him so he could sort out problems.
[45:13] SPEAKER_02: And he was able to do it in the most extreme environments.
[45:17] SPEAKER_02: But when Trump too happens, all of a sudden he can't.
[45:22] SPEAKER_02: And all of a sudden he can't because he can see that Fairness,
[45:26] SPEAKER_02: which is his job to sort of provide.
[45:30] SPEAKER_02: His job is to make everybody feel this is a fair environment.
[45:32] SPEAKER_02: Like a ref's job.
[45:33] SPEAKER_02: The game's not rigged.
[45:35] SPEAKER_02: Fairness was not going to be possible.
[45:37] SPEAKER_02: That the game,
[45:39] SPEAKER_02: that the president had called the ref and said,
[45:42] SPEAKER_02: you're going to call the game for the American soccer team.
[45:44] SPEAKER_02: You know, that there was a finger on the scale that was unlike anything he'd ever felt before.
[45:52] SPEAKER_02: And what was one of the many interesting things about Tim to me was he was such
[45:56] SPEAKER_02: a kind of repressed character, like he was never about himself.
[45:59] SPEAKER_02: That when he got stressed and the only other time he had this kind
[46:04] SPEAKER_02: of physiological response was after 9-11 when he had been in the Pentagon.
[46:08] SPEAKER_02: It was supposed to be where the plane hit the Pentagon.
[46:11] SPEAKER_02: He should have been dead.
[46:13] SPEAKER_02: And then the last minute change and he had this kind of physiological.
[46:17] SPEAKER_02: He had the same physiological reaction to Doge.
[46:22] SPEAKER_02: It was like, I can't be me.
[46:24] SPEAKER_02: I don't exist anymore.
[46:25] SPEAKER_02: I can't function in this environment.
[46:27] SPEAKER_02: And he said it was going to kill him if he stayed.
[46:29] SPEAKER_02: He thought he was going to have a heart attack.
[46:32] SPEAKER_02: So that was,
[46:34] SPEAKER_02: after the guns,
[46:35] SPEAKER_02: this was the next sort of precondition for everything else that happens in the book.
[46:39] SPEAKER_02: You eliminate all the independent refs.
[46:42] SPEAKER_02: You get rid of the inspectors general.
[46:44] SPEAKER_02: You queer the Justice Department.
[46:45] SPEAKER_02: You make sure that there's no neutral,
[46:47] SPEAKER_02: the Merit Systems Protection Board that adjudicates disputes between
[46:51] SPEAKER_02: the civil service and the politicals when they escalate past him.
[46:56] SPEAKER_02: You get rid of all the neutrals and you put the refs on the payroll and you make
[47:01] SPEAKER_02: the refs your guys.
[47:03] SPEAKER_02: And then all of a sudden, what happens?
[47:06] SPEAKER_02: What have you done?
[47:07] SPEAKER_02: You've basically eliminated the nonpartisan civil service.
[47:11] SPEAKER_02: That's what you've done.
[47:13] SPEAKER_02: And that is a profound change.
[47:16] SPEAKER_02: That is a weaponization of a very powerful instrument.
[47:23] SPEAKER_02: And that's what's going on.
[47:26] SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's much messier than that.
[47:27] SPEAKER_02: And there are a billion lawsuits and there are a billion stories,
[47:30] SPEAKER_02: but that's the essence of what's going on.
[47:34] SPEAKER_02: And Tim was there to preserve the old, the essence.
[47:38] SPEAKER_01: David's made a lot of comments,
[47:39] SPEAKER_01: but one he put in was totalitarianism is defined by a destruction
[47:44] SPEAKER_01: of civil society institutions.
[47:46] SPEAKER_01: I think that's very clear.
[47:50] SPEAKER_01: So now one more blocker,
[47:53] SPEAKER_01: and then I want to get kind of the roundup of the overview, bigger picture.
[47:58] SPEAKER_01: Kathleen Walters, she's a chief privacy officer, IRS.
[48:03] SPEAKER_01: She kind of touched on the IRS.
[48:05] SPEAKER_01: And they want to get The tax forms for all these 700,000 undocumented immigrants.
[48:14] SPEAKER_01: How does that go?
[48:16] SPEAKER_02: So she's the person between your tax return and a political person who wants to do you damage.
[48:24] SPEAKER_02: And she's got the law on her side.
[48:27] SPEAKER_02: And what happens is, this is interesting.
[48:30] SPEAKER_02: There's a subtle thing here.
[48:31] SPEAKER_02: Because this book just isn't about, it isn't just about Doge.
[48:34] SPEAKER_02: It's only a third about Doge.
[48:35] SPEAKER_02: There are other things.
[48:37] SPEAKER_02: Doge is this blunt force instrument that doesn't do anything like what it says it's going to do.
[48:43] SPEAKER_02: It doesn't end up saving any money, probably costing money.
[48:45] SPEAKER_02: And it doesn't make anything more efficient.
[48:48] SPEAKER_02: None of that.
[48:49] SPEAKER_02: But it does traumatize the workforce.
[48:52] SPEAKER_02: And for what purpose?
[48:53] SPEAKER_02: And there was a purpose.
[48:55] SPEAKER_02: There were people who wanted to do things that a non-traumatized workforce,
[48:59] SPEAKER_02: an empowered workforce, would not have allowed happen.
[49:02] SPEAKER_02: And someone,
[49:03] SPEAKER_02: probably Stephen Miller,
[49:05] SPEAKER_02: had instructed the Department of Homeland Security was getting frustrated
[49:12] SPEAKER_02: in its ability to round up every undocumented worker.
[49:15] SPEAKER_02: And they found that they had dated addresses for them.
[49:20] SPEAKER_02: Couldn't find them.
[49:21] SPEAKER_02: And the IRS has had, since the 1990s, this program.
[49:24] SPEAKER_02: It's called the ITIN file.
[49:28] SPEAKER_02: Individual, taxpayer, whatever number.
[49:31] SPEAKER_02: But if you're an illegal immigrant here and you're working,
[49:36] SPEAKER_02: This was a way,
[49:37] SPEAKER_02: a mechanism so that you could pay taxes and start to demonstrate your good faith,
[49:41] SPEAKER_02: right, to the society.
[49:42] SPEAKER_02: You didn't have a social security number.
[49:44] SPEAKER_02: You need to have one of these.
[49:45] SPEAKER_02: And this database in the IRS has got 7 million names in it and
[49:50] SPEAKER_02: the most current home address of the undocumented worker.
[49:56] SPEAKER_02: And DHS came at Kathleen,
[49:58] SPEAKER_02: first came, tried to go around her and tried to get her to hand over her.
[50:05] SPEAKER_02: So that they could send their cops in the dead of night to
[50:09] SPEAKER_02: the carpet complexes around the country and round people up.
[50:14] SPEAKER_02: It was such a violation of the law, and not just the law, the spirit of the law.
[50:18] SPEAKER_02: Because IRS had been telling this population for 30 years that trust us.
[50:25] SPEAKER_02: We're going to treat your information the way we treat this information of a citizen.
[50:29] SPEAKER_02: They've paid hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes.
[50:33] SPEAKER_02: You know what's interesting about this situation is the undocumented population
[50:36] SPEAKER_02: that pays taxes, pays taxes often without getting many of the benefits.
[50:40] SPEAKER_02: Like they don't get, they're not eligible
[50:41] SPEAKER_01: for an entitlement program.
[50:43] SPEAKER_02: So out of a raw deal.
[50:48] SPEAKER_02: So we have told them,
[50:50] SPEAKER_02: we've given the word of our country to this population that,
[50:53] SPEAKER_02: yeah, it's a gray area relationship.
[50:55] SPEAKER_02: It's a messy relationship.
[50:59] SPEAKER_02: But we've told them, this won't be weaponized against you.
[51:03] SPEAKER_02: And in the history of our country,
[51:06] SPEAKER_02: the only kind of analogous situation is The census information being used
[51:12] SPEAKER_02: in World War II to round up Japanese Americans.
[51:15] SPEAKER_02: And the difference between those two cases is that it was actually legal to use
[51:20] SPEAKER_02: the census information, that that wasn't breaking the law.
[51:22] SPEAKER_02: It was just the spirit of the thing.
[51:24] SPEAKER_02: This was breaking the law.
[51:26] SPEAKER_02: And so...
[51:29] SPEAKER_02: So Kathleen puts her body between that pile of information and ice and she has to go.
[51:39] SPEAKER_02: And this is a career that she was
[51:43] SPEAKER_02: Devoted to.
[51:44] SPEAKER_02: Nobody in the area says anything but nice things to say.
[51:46] SPEAKER_02: That she was really good at her job.
[51:48] SPEAKER_02: She'd taken it over after the most scandalous incident of tax returns leaking,
[51:54] SPEAKER_02: which was that contractor who leaked Donald Trump and a lot
[51:57] SPEAKER_02: of rich people's tax return.
[51:59] SPEAKER_02: She took over from that.
[52:01] SPEAKER_02: She's clearly who you want the job.
[52:04] SPEAKER_02: And so she got wiped out.
[52:05] SPEAKER_02: And the question is,
[52:06] SPEAKER_02: for me, is it's easy for us to sit here and say, oh, well, they're undocumented.
[52:12] SPEAKER_02: Too bad.
[52:13] SPEAKER_02: And people were getting around up in the middle of the night
[52:16] SPEAKER_02: and dad's being pulled out of homes and kids left crying and all that.
[52:21] SPEAKER_02: And it is brutal and cruel.
[52:22] SPEAKER_02: But we say to ourselves, what happened to me?
[52:26] SPEAKER_02: Just wait.
[52:28] SPEAKER_02: Just wait.
[52:29] SPEAKER_02: And it's like, yeah,
[52:31] SPEAKER_02: once the principle has been established and once the principle has been violated,
[52:35] SPEAKER_02: it's a slippery slope.
[52:36] SPEAKER_02: And so...
[52:39] SPEAKER_02: She's a good example of a blocker.
[52:42] SPEAKER_02: She was told she was a blocker.
[52:45] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, really.
[52:45] SPEAKER_02: There was a moment when there was a 24-year-old Doge guy running around inside
[52:51] SPEAKER_02: the IRS to fire her, but he had to find her first.
[52:54] SPEAKER_02: And she was playing hide-and-seek with him.
[52:56] SPEAKER_02: And she got the keys to this dark conference room and locked herself inside
[53:00] SPEAKER_02: and spent all day sitting there quietly while it's got footsteps running up
[53:04] SPEAKER_02: and down outside the hallway.
[53:08] SPEAKER_02: It's...
[53:09] SPEAKER_01: There's another notable thing here is you got a hold of these Doge people,
[53:13] SPEAKER_01: some of them, to tell their side of the story about their path of destruction.
[53:18] SPEAKER_01: I thought the name I loved best during all this was Big Balls.
[53:23] SPEAKER_01: That was Edward Corstein.
[53:26] SPEAKER_01: He wasn't in the book,
[53:27] SPEAKER_02: though, right?
[53:27] SPEAKER_02: No, he didn't personally collide with any of my characters.
[53:31] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's a 19-year-old, another of the villains out there.
[53:36] SPEAKER_01: So it was amazing that the villain sat down with you and told,
[53:40] SPEAKER_01: you know, what the F was going on there, you know?
[53:42] SPEAKER_01: But as you said, yeah.
[53:44] SPEAKER_02: Well, they had good feelings about it.
[53:46] SPEAKER_02: I mean, not all of them felt the same way about it.
[53:48] SPEAKER_02: They got into something.
[53:49] SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't know what you were like when you were 19 or 22,
[53:53] SPEAKER_02: but if the richest man in the world had called me and said,
[53:56] SPEAKER_02: man, you're the best, come and join me.
[53:58] SPEAKER_02: And here, the government's awful and they're wasting your money and they're probably crooks too.
[54:01] SPEAKER_02: They're probably stealing it.
[54:03] SPEAKER_02: And you read Ayn Rand and Ayn Rand's all right and go get them.
[54:07] SPEAKER_02: And you know nothing.
[54:08] SPEAKER_02: And you know nothing.
[54:10] SPEAKER_02: Especially if you're a 19-year-old guy.
[54:13] SPEAKER_02: I think that this is a made-to-order task for young males.
[54:19] SPEAKER_02: And these young males did a great deal of destruction,
[54:22] SPEAKER_02: I think, not knowing what they were doing.
[54:24] SPEAKER_02: And some of them still have great conviction about what they did.
[54:27] SPEAKER_02: But some of them have called later and said, I want to do something constructive.
[54:34] SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of sorry.
[54:36] SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, but I get your point about them, like potentially they saw it as a noble mission.
[54:43] SPEAKER_01: But at the same time,
[54:44] SPEAKER_01: they hadn't seen that they were crossing the line and this was unethical,
[54:49] SPEAKER_01: leading to cruel, egregious stuff.
[54:52] SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know.
[54:53] SPEAKER_01: But your point is well taken that,
[54:55] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[54:55] SPEAKER_01: maybe they saw they're idealistic and maybe they were mesmerized by
[54:59] SPEAKER_01: the great Elon Musk.
[55:00] SPEAKER_02: Now, they're also led to believe they'd all be given pardons.
[55:04] SPEAKER_02: Oh, right, right.
[55:05] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
[55:08] SPEAKER_01: Now, as you said,
[55:10] SPEAKER_01: the book isn't only about doge,
[55:11] SPEAKER_01: but most of us remember that first year about the country getting dozed.
[55:17] SPEAKER_01: Right.
[55:18] SPEAKER_01: You're pretty good about getting to all these different pieces in a very clever way.
[55:25] SPEAKER_01: But now that we have a program that was a bust, it didn't save any of the $2 trillion.
[55:33] SPEAKER_01: As you said, it might even cost money.
[55:35] SPEAKER_01: We've also done destruction that's unprecedented probably in American history
[55:40] SPEAKER_01: from all this, not just intra-US, but outside the US.
[55:44] SPEAKER_01: We've got people dying around the world of HIV and all sorts of things because of
[55:49] SPEAKER_01: the abandonment and loss of soft power in various places in the low-income part of
[55:56] SPEAKER_01: the world.
[55:57] SPEAKER_01: Now, what's the hope for the future?
[56:00] SPEAKER_01: Can we get a country back?
[56:03] SPEAKER_01: Can we get What used to be a sound, solid democracy, can it combats?
[56:11] SPEAKER_02: Well...
[56:12] SPEAKER_02: There's no reason I have any better answer to that than anybody else.
[56:17] SPEAKER_02: So this is like me talking out of the wrong part of my body,
[56:22] SPEAKER_02: but I will,
[56:25] SPEAKER_02: I kind of,
[56:25] SPEAKER_02: my hunch about the country,
[56:28] SPEAKER_02: my feeling about the country is that our politics are not reflecting us right now.
[56:33] SPEAKER_02: It's become detached.
[56:35] SPEAKER_02: That's why people are so turned off by it.
[56:37] SPEAKER_02: And that Probably they're always a little turned off,
[56:40] SPEAKER_02: but the detachment seems greater than usual.
[56:42] SPEAKER_02: And I spend a lot of time with a lot of different kinds of people.
[56:46] SPEAKER_02: And it's a very philanthropic country.
[56:49] SPEAKER_02: It knows how to build teams.
[56:50] SPEAKER_02: It knows how to fix things.
[56:51] SPEAKER_02: It's also capable of extraordinary acts of self-reinvention, like the people in the country.
[56:57] SPEAKER_02: It's very protean.
[56:58] SPEAKER_02: And so I, I just a stupid country to bet against.
[57:02] SPEAKER_02: I just wouldn't, when I, when I say this, oh, it's all falling apart.
[57:05] SPEAKER_02: We should all move to Ireland or whatever.
[57:07] SPEAKER_02: I just, that just, that just seems dumb.
[57:09] SPEAKER_02: And, uh, I think that if we stay, if you fight for it, it's, you know, it's worth fighting for.
[57:15] SPEAKER_02: And that I think it is possible.
[57:19] SPEAKER_02: And I don't know what the probability is, but it's possible.
[57:22] SPEAKER_02: It is possible and not crazy to think.
[57:25] SPEAKER_02: That this is the event that shocks the country into thinking a bit more
[57:31] SPEAKER_02: about how it governs itself and taking the time.
[57:34] SPEAKER_02: It's not like it was all hunky dory before.
[57:37] SPEAKER_02: The reason this happened is that the government was It had its problems.
[57:42] SPEAKER_02: And the people had gotten out of touch with its government,
[57:46] SPEAKER_02: like not paying attention to what it did.
[57:47] SPEAKER_02: Because anybody who's paying attention would be outraged by a lot of what happened.
[57:52] SPEAKER_02: And so I think we might have people's attention.
[57:56] SPEAKER_02: I could imagine.
[57:57] SPEAKER_02: So I talked to a prominent congressman before I wrote the book.
[58:02] SPEAKER_02: And he was in a position to maybe do this,
[58:05] SPEAKER_02: that after the midterms,
[58:08] SPEAKER_02: You have hearings with all the television cameras, and it's not gotcha hearings.
[58:12] SPEAKER_02: It's explanatory.
[58:13] SPEAKER_02: It's bringing the characters of the book and explain how this needs to be structured
[58:18] SPEAKER_02: so it works better.
[58:20] SPEAKER_02: And I think there's every possibility that the thing could...
[58:27] SPEAKER_02: It needs refreshing.
[58:29] SPEAKER_02: It wouldn't be okay just to go back to the way it was.
[58:33] SPEAKER_02: I mean, the premonition is about that.
[58:35] SPEAKER_02: It's like the politicization of the CDC had this slow corrosive effect.
[58:41] SPEAKER_02: Ronald Reagan turning that position of running the CDC from a career position on
[58:47] SPEAKER_02: a string with the White House where you could be hired or fired at will.
[58:51] SPEAKER_02: They're on a longer string from the democracy.
[58:54] SPEAKER_02: They aren't responding in knee-jerk ways to what happens.
[58:56] SPEAKER_02: The Fed works pretty well.
[58:57] SPEAKER_02: It's because the president doesn't have the power to go in and just do stuff on a whim.
[59:13] SPEAKER_02: And I think these,
[59:15] SPEAKER_02: we have to think about just how politicized the agencies have become and think
[59:20] SPEAKER_02: about maybe depoliticizing them to the extent they can be.
[59:24] SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, in a way,
[59:26] SPEAKER_01: the book Premonition about the CDC was a prelude on a much larger scale to blockers.
[59:33] SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
[59:34] SPEAKER_01: Because you basically showed the erosion of that agency and how it malperformed during COVID.
[59:42] SPEAKER_01: The other point you made aptly,
[59:45] SPEAKER_01: it wasn't just Trump 1.0,
[59:47] SPEAKER_01: 2.0, it's been gradual increase in executive power, which is not a democratic thing.
[59:53] SPEAKER_01: You know, there's been more and more executive orders and executive power.
[59:57] SPEAKER_01: And of course,
[59:58] SPEAKER_01: now we see it amplified to the highest level with the Supreme Court and the immunity
[1:00:03] SPEAKER_01: and all this other stuff.
[1:00:05] SPEAKER_01: But, you know- That's all true.
[1:00:07] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Tom Snodgrass asks about Well, how do you expect democracy?
[1:00:11] SPEAKER_01: We're actually a democratic republic.
[1:00:13] SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah,
[1:00:14] SPEAKER_01: but we're trying to be democratic and,
[1:00:17] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[1:00:18] SPEAKER_01: have the populace of the 330 whatever million people somehow factored into what
[1:00:22] SPEAKER_01: the hell is going on.
[1:00:23] SPEAKER_01: I think you made it clear that the 330 million people are not necessarily
[1:00:27] SPEAKER_01: the United States at the moment.
[1:00:30] SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, what have I missed?
[1:00:32] SPEAKER_01: I know we can't cover everything.
[1:00:33] SPEAKER_01: The book is fabulous.
[1:00:36] SPEAKER_01: I just, you know, I probably read not all 21, but probably 10 or 11 of them.
[1:00:42] SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
[1:00:42] SPEAKER_01: I really,
[1:00:43] SPEAKER_01: this one really hit home because of the NIH chapter that is just,
[1:00:47] SPEAKER_01: you know, Agatha Christie of the NIH thing, you know.
[1:00:51] SPEAKER_01: But what if I missed it?
[1:00:52] SPEAKER_01: I think just sum up on this.
[1:00:55] SPEAKER_02: Nothing.
[1:00:55] SPEAKER_02: You've missed nothing.
[1:00:56] SPEAKER_02: I mean, there are a lot of things in the book we didn't talk about.
[1:00:58] SPEAKER_02: We shouldn't talk about the whole book.
[1:01:01] SPEAKER_02: This has been fun.
[1:01:02] SPEAKER_01: Oh, I really enjoyed it.
[1:01:04] SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed it.
[1:01:05] SPEAKER_01: Your writing is, you know, It's one of a kind.
[1:01:10] SPEAKER_01: And storytelling, if I could only tell a story a tenth as good as you, oh my goodness, right?
[1:01:18] SPEAKER_01: Well, and you haven't started working on your next book yet, I take it.
[1:01:23] SPEAKER_02: No, oddly, I've written a play that opens in New York at the end of March.
[1:01:27] SPEAKER_02: And I'm in the middle of that.
[1:01:29] SPEAKER_02: But what I'm really in the middle of for the next month is the book comes out next Tuesday.
[1:01:32] SPEAKER_02: I'm about to go do a lot more of this.
[1:01:36] SPEAKER_02: But I think I know what the next book is, but I won't be sure for another few months.
[1:01:41] SPEAKER_01: And tell us what the play is
[1:01:42] SPEAKER_02: about.
[1:01:43] SPEAKER_02: So...
[1:01:45] SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay.
[1:02:09] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's great.
[1:02:11] SPEAKER_01: Until next time.
[1:02:12] SPEAKER_01: Until next time, such a great chance to visit with you.
[1:02:15] SPEAKER_01: And I hope everybody, we had about 430 plus people join.
[1:02:20] SPEAKER_01: We couldn't get to all the questions, but a lot of good ones.
[1:02:23] SPEAKER_01: So thanks everybody for joining.
[1:02:24] SPEAKER_01: And thanks especially to Michael,
[1:02:26] SPEAKER_01: not just for joining, but for putting together this book, which is just amazing.
[1:02:32] SPEAKER_00: So thanks.
[1:02:32] SPEAKER_00: You take care.
[1:02:33] SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
[1:02:34] SPEAKER_00: Bye-bye.

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