Author Michael Lewis made his name initially writing about the world of finance in such bestsellers as Liar’s Poker, Flash Boys and The Big Short. Since 2016, he has been focusing his interviewing efforts on the ways in which those inside the U.S. Federal Government have responded to a series of challenges to a series of challenges: the chaos of the first Trump Administration (The Fifth Risk), the global pandemic (The Premonition), and now, the return of Trump and the destruction DOGE wrought in his new book, Blockers.
I have long wanted to talk to him because his 2003 book on baseball valuation, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, inspired my own (much less read) research on scouting and scoring in baseball. His book proved a great foil for me in its riveting portrait of those effecting a revolution in baseball through the use of statistical analysis. But his turn to government in his books was initially mystifying to me: after all, government employees are less known for being compelling characters than they are for being stodgy, slow moving embodiments of inertia. The rise of the singular figure of Donald Trump in American politics might have motivated Lewis’s initial interest, but the sustained focus on government employees seemed something worth investigating. According to Lewis, there is a lot more going on in writing about civil servants than you might expect. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Christopher J. Phillips: As an American historian, I’m interested in what I think of as your government series, so maybe you can just start by explaining how you picked the name “Blockers” for the book, which you credit to Elon Musk as a favorite word of his.
Michael Lewis: It came about pretty organically… I was trying to figure out who was going to populate this story. I was looking for the characters. I knew I was looking in kind of functions of government, like the data function, or the science function, or the refereeing function, and I kept bumping up against people who would say “they called me a blocker.” And these were people who [were] very clearly nonpartisan, who had been in their jobs for a long time, who everybody thought were the best at their jobs in the world, and had been run out of the government. And I just thought, “Wait, wait, the people being called this are the people who we actually want there.” And it is such this Silicon Valley thing – they’re searchers and blockers, and, you know, they’re old fuddy-duddies who don’t know how to use their phones, and you gotta get rid of them so you can get to the brave new world, and I just thought, screw that. Like, let’s turn this into a badge of honor, you know?
CP: Ever since The Fifth Risk, and maybe even before that, you’ve started to knock on doors in the government.
ML: That was it. That was the first time.
CP: Okay, so yeah, that’s certainly the first time I knew about it in your writing. And I’m kind of curious as to your process. Do you have a Rolodex of all these great characters built up? Do you have one person in OMB or one person in personnel who you go to?
ML: So there are two answers to this question. The first answer is: There is a treasure trove of material inside a nonprofit called the Partnership for Public Service in Washington. They started out 25 years ago trying to get young people, bright young people, to come work in government. Quickly figured out that bright young people aren’t going to work in government if the government’s broken. They set about trying to fix the government, which sounds insane, but they’ve made real progress. I mean, they’ve created the law that requires a transition. They train civil servants who get put into management jobs. And that I found is a really useful place to start. It isn’t that all the characters in the book were in that database, but all the characters in that book, in this book, were a degree or two degrees of separation [away]. So I’d get interested in someone who was doing something in, I don’t know, the IRS. Actually, better example would be, Office of Personal Management. And they’d lead me to someone, and then that person would say, you know, there is a character who is a Michael Lewis character, and he’s just been run out, and his name is Tim Curry. And that’s how I found him.
But then the second thing is, I have built up a pretty big portfolio of social relationships with people who work in the government, because I’ve just been wandering around it so much. And there are places that are opaque to me. I’ve not really banged on the door of the Pentagon. Not really. I’ve not banged on the door of the State Department, not really. But in kind of half the agencies, I know who to call and ask.
CP: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me that there is a kind of network. I think of it like doctors where you go to doctors to recommend other doctors because everyone quietly knows.
ML: That’s exactly right. And everybody knows who’s good and who’s not good, and where the problems are, and where the excellence is, and they know. And the other thing that The Fifth Risk did for me is that the civil service is skittish. Even now, they don’t really want a spotlight on them, maybe especially now. And it calmed everyone down about me. It sort of sent a bat signal out, and the bat signal kind of said, “He’s not a newspaper reporter. He’s not like that. And he’s doing something different. And if you don’t want to be in it, you don’t have to be in it. Talking to him is not going to get you in trouble.” You didn’t talk to the Washington Post, you didn’t talk to the New York Times, you had a cup of coffee with Michael Lewis. It just softened the environment for me and made it possible to have lots of informal conversations before I had the formal ones.
CP: One of the things that I got interested in as I was reading Blockers is a question I’ve had really for ten years now, and that is about which institutions and individuals choose to resist and potentially lose their job, and which ones quietly or loudly comply with what they know to be obviously illegal.
What I ultimately am interested in is your theory of why certain people resist and why others don’t, because you’re right, it’s arguably a byproduct of their circumstances. But at this point, I feel like you, as well as anyone else, really has a good sense of who is going to resist and who doesn’t.
ML: So let me back away from that question for a minute and point your readers to a book that I think is invaluable in parsing this kind of question. And it’s Dick Nisbett and Lee Ross’s The Person and the Situation. They’re two social scientists, and they wrote it decades ago. But the thrust of their argument is: Character’s kind of unstable. That we think of people as having character, not having character, bad character, good character, or they’re cowards, or they’re brave, all that. But in fact, the same person is capable of behaving very differently if you just twist the dial on the situation.
So, that’s the backdrop to how I even think about what happens when an administration rolls in and wants to break all the rules. Essentially, what it’s doing is insisting that this federal workforce of two million people, all of whom had previously taken an oath to the Constitution, don’t actually serve the Constitution or the country in some general way. They serve the narrow interests of the President. And you would get no argument, I think, from the White House that that’s what they were doing. They’ve said it, you know? It’s like, “the president has the power.” If you’re not loyal to the president, you don’t belong in this. So, in that situation, someone comes in and says, in this case, to the IRS. And says, we want the home addresses of seven million undocumented workers who’ve been paying their taxes. And you’ve got the most recent home address. And it’s against the law. Very clearly against the law to divulge those addresses. And it’s a sin, because we’ve told that population this would never happen, and they’ve been paying taxes. You know, without getting most of the benefits.
As an example, [IRS agents] Melanie [Walters] and Kathleen [Krause] are interesting, because on the surface, Kathleen was the more vulnerable. She was a single mom. Of a little kid. Who’d been in the IRS for 25 years, who was in charge of privacy. She was in charge, she was the human being, the live body between your tax return and the Trump political operation. And she took it as a sacred duty. Melanie had become the acting commissioner of the IRS. And they had been friends, in fact, Kathleen had been kind of a mentor to Melanie. One could argue, I think this is probably true, that the reason Kathleen resists and ends up losing her place in the IRS — and Melanie at first helps and then panics and reverses course, and says she’s quitting because they asked her to do this – is their circumstances are different. Kathleen’s specific job is to prevent this from happening, and she’s very invested in the specific job. For Melanie, that’s [only] one of the things in Melanie’s portfolio. And she’s trying to massage this relationship so it seems like a more normal relationship, the relationship between the IRS and the Trump administration.
But, it’s not that character doesn’t matter at all, because I do think that the other thing that’s going on is that Kathleen really got imprinted by her father, very young. Her father was like an Atticus Finch character. He was the town lawyer who everybody looked to when they were in trouble. Who didn’t make people pay when they couldn’t pay, who was a quiet leader of the community, who, when he dies, all these people who Kathleen’s never met turn up to thank him. [Her father] kind of instills in Kathleen the idea of service. And that the reason she’s in government — to serve. And so, because she’s got that narrative, [the order] really violates her inner self.
Melanie didn’t want to talk to me. She told me she didn’t want to talk to me. And, she’s complicated, because she managed to get a story planted in the Washington Post saying she opposed this after she helped the Trump administration. But my sense of Melanie is that there was more of a career thing going on. Maybe this is a different way of saying character is partly the narrative you want to live with, the narrative you want to tell yourself.
CP: I do think rule following is a thread that runs through so much of what you’ve been doing in the last ten or fifteen years, at least as I’ve read and listened to the things you’ve produced. I had a question about the blocker or the rule follower in the arc of what you’ve been writing about. So going back to say Moneyball or The Big Short or Liar’s Poker. I didn’t read those as having the kind of persona of the blocker in them. They tend to be about little guys up against kind of corporate giants. So the blocker in some sense might be the sort of Goliath figure that the David in the story is set against. But I’m curious whether, as you’ve shifted from the private sector to the public sector, has your thinking on the role of the David and Goliath stories or the blockers in different settings changed?
ML: Well, in this case, all these characters are Davids. The Goliath is the Trump administration. In The Fifth Risk, it wasn’t really a character-driven book, it was me wandering around trying to figure out what Donald Trump was ignoring, because I was just curious, like, what the is this thing he has no interest in? It was more fun that way. So, I just think each story has its own frame, and the David and Goliath frame is maybe true of some of my books. It’s not really useful for Liar’s Poker. Certainly useful for Moneyball. It’s like, how’s the little guy gonna compete? The Big Short, it just so happens, it’s a weird symptom of the situation that the people who figured out what was going on inside the financial system in the run-up to the financial crisis were all these kind of oddballs on the outside of it, not the people sitting in the middle of the big firms. So, I don’t frame it that way. I think more about whose point of view do you want to inhabit? To best understand the situation.
So, the point of view of the people who were being destroyed in this case, the people who the new hostile force was coming in on. That was the point of view that interested me, and it interested me for a whole bunch of reasons. And, it is true that one of their features is that they cared about the law. Like, they didn’t want to break the law, but that shouldn’t sound so controversial, but it all of a sudden became very controversial. But that’s not their only feature.
In this case, I knew that the Trump administration coming in was going to change the environment, that everything the government did, they would now do differently, because it was a loyalist operation. There were these buckets of what the government did, public safety, long-term investment in scientific research, gathering information, gathering data, the refereeing function. I couldn’t pretend to exhaust them all, but I think I sort of framed it in a way I captured most of the government, if not all of it. And I said, okay. Who are the characters in these buckets who are going to be most affected by this change? And I set out the same way, to cast it, given even more spoil for choice, because in each bucket there were people who had been traumatized, run out of the place, blockers. And so, it had a similar sort of floral arrangement quality to it, the construction of the narrative, and it felt very close to that book [The Big Short]. And that’s how I thought about it. David and Goliath didn’t cross my mind in either case.
CP: Interesting. That’s fascinating. It’s really wonderful to hear about the craft component, and I found it striking that in the coda to blockers, you have a kind of dropping of the fourth wall moment, where you talk about…
ML: …how you tell a story.
CP: Exactly, how to tell a story, and all the characters that are [left] on the cutting room floor as a test to the veracity or the power of the story. What went into that decision?
ML: So I did it twice. If you look at the book, I broke the fourth wall with a reader twice, once in the prologue and once in the coda. Once when I’m explaining to them how this book came about and what it is. And once when I’m asking them to evaluate the book; how [do] you evaluate a story when you can cherry-pick characters to make anything seem true? I wanted to explain when there’s a population of two million federal workers, you can go find someone who is wasteful. You can go find someone who’s probably even stealing, though that really is rare, I think, in the government. You can find people who aren’t showing up for work. You know, you can find anything. You can find that in a big corporation. But what I’m saying with the book is that, no, these people are representative, and I regard it as the test of the validity of a story: When you’re done with it, if someone comes in with some other piece of information that’s not in the story, it’s sort of explained by the story in some way, that you’re not caught out, you know. You’re not caught out justifiably being accused of having distorted the material. And I want the readers to know I’m operating in that spirit.
I mean, we live in a time where people are just very mistrustful, right? And you know that no matter what I write, I could write that the Earth goes around the sun. And there’d be ten people on Twitter saying I was a liar. And that that happens all the time. So, you want to be as open and straight with the reader and let them know where you’re coming from. Because you want them to see, the whole point of the book is for them to see this world as it is, rather than as it comes to them through the funhouse mirror of politics. And, and so that you’ve got to just say, look, I’m sure I made mistakes, but broadly, I think I’m doing my best here, and broadly, I think this is right. And, and this is how you can tell if it’s right…I just thought it was important to have that conversation with the reader.
CP: I was struck by the way the very end of the book is actually about a broken water fountain. Can you speak a little about how, in the midst of all the death and destruction and corruption — the dark moments of the book — why you then end on a rusted water fountain? I know you thought about this.
ML: Oh, I clearly thought about it. I loved that one of these DOGE kids who was sent out to destroy by Elon Musk looked around a moment before he started to destroy and realized what he was being asked to do made no sense. And he got himself in all kinds of trouble when he got quoted in a magazine saying, you know, “The government’s not as inefficient as they said.” And he gets fired by DOGE. So one thing you couldn’t do in DOGE is suggest anything here was useful. And then after DOGE is gone, someone had seen that he was operating in a useful spirit, and he had real technical skills, and he had something he really wanted to fix. He really wanted to fix the IRS technology. And his name is Sahil Lavingia. He’d made his fortune in tech. I mean, “fortune.” He made $10 million. Wasn’t a billionaire, but he’d made enough money to not have to worry about money. And he told his wife, “This isn’t, like, a three-month assignment. This is a ten-year assignment. I’m going to work for the IRS.” And she’s like, well, as long as we have a million dollars in, like, passive income, you could do it. And it’s a really quixotic thing to do. He could be off making fortunes. And he rolls into this unbelievably decrepit office building in New York. I did get in there. And, like, the second day, he finds out, he figures out, that the water fountain on his floor doesn’t work. And he’s a little ADHD, he, you know, gets obsessed with things. And he gets obsessed with a water fountain. He’s like, in what world is it right for someone in a government office building not to be able to get a drink of water on their floor? And he goes on this odyssey, this incredible journey to fix the water fountain, which is one part depressing, because it shouldn’t be so hard to fix a water fountain, but it shows you how hard it is to fix anything in the government, which suggests all kinds of things we do need to fix about our government, which DOGE didn’t think about at all.
On the other hand, [he’s] unbelievably uplifting, because he’s so serious about it, and so intent on it, and he gets it done. And how he gets it done is so fun that I just thought, you know, this is who should be in government. And this is the spirit of that. And something got fixed. And so I wanted to end on that note, because I do think you never know where this country’s gonna bounce. And it would not surprise me if there is a renewed appreciation — I mean, that’s the point of this book – [that] gets in the bloodstream of the country. The renewed appreciation of what this institution does, that it is necessary, that we can’t ignore it. So I chose that story to end on, because I myself — even though it is a story that caused you to pull your hair out and scream at the ceiling and all the rest, for most of the book — I don’t feel not hopeful. The people who are the main characters make me feel hopeful. Those people still exist.
CP: That’s great. It is a fun ending, and there is a kind of old school scrappiness to fixing a water fountain.
ML: Did it surprise you when you got to it?
CP: It did because I thought it was going to involve [Sahil’s] app or [his quest for] more efficiency. And then you just kept coming back in that coda to the water fountain. And so then it was like, oh, I see what he is doing now. On the one hand, it’s a reminder of how many IT tickets need to be filed for this kind of thing. And all the people who are absent from the positions that could have helped. … But on the other hand, you know, it is something that can get fixed.
ML: And water is sort of a symbol of life. Exactly. And so it was just lovely and simple, I thought. So I hope Sahil becomes an American hero. I hope so because he’s not someone who is looking for lots of attention, but I love it when he just starts talking about why he’s doing it, how satisfying it is to fix something that affects other people. He really cares about that. And there are a lot of people like that.
CP: My last question’s a little bit selfish, which is that I’ve long thought about the expert. And, you know, running through your podcast, your books, you talk a lot about the role of the expert. In fact, at one point, I think you say the expert is a type that’s hardly present in any of the great literature throughout the ages. And so, as you’re thinking of trying to write literature or literary nonfiction, what have you learned or what have you come to appreciate about trying to make these stories that experts tend to hide or downplay when they ignore the importance of what they do?
ML: There’s the why of it. It’s pretty simple. Why they are doing what they’re doing. There’s always a reason. It isn’t just, oh, I just stumbled into this. That to become an expert requires a certain obsessiveness, and the obsessiveness has some deep reason, something deeply rooted in the person. So Alex Maranghides, who is in the middle of this book, he invents a fire science. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as fire science, but he invents the science of wildland-urban interface fires, which is the fire [risk] we’re all talking about, and those fires move differently and need to be studied differently than indoor fires or a pure wildfire. That was all news to me. But the intensity of his career demands an explanation. Like, why are you doing this? And they forget that. They don’t even think about it. They’re just doing it. Mostly, they need therapy, you know? Mostly they don’t even think to explain it. And sometimes the answers are wild. So that’s what gives the thing a beating heart, is you’ve figured out the why, and it’s between the lines the whole way through.
He’s one little character in the biggest function, but the biggest function our government serves is safety, public safety. All of a sudden, [you] really care how fire moves through a suburb. You care about the role of wooden fences and railroad ties and kids’ swing sets and all that stuff that I just would never have thought would matter to me. So that’s the key to it. It’s all about the why.
