Inside DOGE: The people who tried to stop Elon Musk | The News Agents

Trump talked about and Musk talked about as who they saw as the enemy, really, the sort of civil servants from within who were trying to block what they were trying to do. It was way easier to fire the good people, to get rid of the good people than the bad people. What was it about this period of the early Trump administration and Doge in particular? Is Elon Musk a good businessman? Is he someone you would trust to take over a company, an existing company, and make it better? The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. this is a global production i've created the brand new department of government efficiency this is the chainsaw for bureaucracy he's a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs why do they call you big balls i just said it as my linkedin username We'll be dismantling the deep state, and that's what the Doge effort is all about. A hundred million dollars on condoms to Hamas. There's a lot of mystery about how that's going to work and how that outside group is going to interact with you all in Congress. The number of government workers, myself, I know you, other colleagues have talked to, that say that there is anger, there is concern, there is consternation and confusion just to do their daily work. Things are happening a little bit too fast and furiously. And now to add to the confusion, there's a mass resignation, except this time it's Doge staffers who are collectively calling it quits. Twenty one of them signing on to a letter that says Doge is putting the country in danger. Elon Musk's Doge no longer exists. The Department of Government Efficiency was supposed to be in operation until at least July of next year. But Doge this morning is no more. Feels a long time ago, doesn't it? Those early, triumphalist days of the Trump restoration. Doge. The Department of Government Efficiency was such a big player of those first months with that pied piper Elon Musk chainsaw aloft at its head. Of course, it was a phantom, really. Neither a department, nor really part of the government, nor especially efficient. It was a sort of roving frat house of young computer analysts and engineers tasked with making the federal government smaller. It failed. Musk claimed he could save the American taxpayer $2 trillion. Independent analysis suggests he barely reached 10% of that. And then, when associated costs are factored in, probably far less still. Indeed, there were 26,500 occasions where the Trump administration fired people, only to have to hire them back. Eventually, of course, Doge packed up and went home, Musk to fiddle with his rockets, and the Trump bandwagon rolled on. Michael Lewis, author, of course, of Moneyball, in his new book, Blockers, Rebels in the Deep State, tracks the journey of Doge and the inside story of the ordinary federal employees, civil servants, who tried to stop it. But so many questions arise from that time. What can we learn from those days? What was the long-term effect on the powers and capabilities of the United States federal government itself? And what about those blockers? Should a democratic system have to rely on brave, obdurate individuals to do the right thing? And actually, was Musk right? Is it right that employees of the state can block what a democratically elected government, however unpleasant, wants to do? Does it show that after all, there really is a deep state? So on today's show, Doge, it's life and death and how it lives on in the lives of those who faced it down. Welcome to the News Agents. The News Agents. Well, Michael Lewis, welcome back to The News Agents. Thank you. What was it about this period of the early Trump administration and Doge in particular? What is it that caught your interest? It wasn't Doge. I mean, Doge caught everybody's interest. It was the realization that Doge was part of something larger. And the larger thing was this massive power grab by the Trump administration. and they were grabbing for stuff that you know Trump the first time around Trump didn't even want to run the government basically he didn't know what he didn't know about it didn't bother to learn about it all that and it went on autopilot for a long time the second time they came in and grabbed not not just the stuff they were supposed to run but grabbing institutions they weren't supposed to have anything to do with they grabbed the power of the purse and the thing that really caught my attention was they grabbed the federal workforce i mean in our country the two million in-person civil service it takes an oath to the constitution they're supposed to be non-partisan they are supposed to like execute the policies of the president but within the confines of the law and this was this was a hard i mean it's a little known history in this country probably in the u.s now but this was a hard one uh achievement right in the early late 19th century going from a spoil system yes going from the spoils where the president just got to put everybody in the government and like the postmasters changed and all that stuff the more the more complicated the society became the more untenable that was. Thank you, Chester Arthur. Yeah, for good, excellent history. I know, what can I say? I'm on the wrong show. Yeah, you read too much. Correct. So what triggered my interest, it's a kind of abstract thing, and then the characters walked in, but what triggered my interest was, okay, you're going to turn this two million person workforce into a loyalist operation that serves just Donald Trump's interest. Maybe you want that, but how is it going to change how the government works? And I know that Doge and Musk weren't your sort of primary concern with regards to that but do you think that that was do you think that Musk also shared that objective i.e it's clear that Trump wanted to subvert as you say the federal workforce to bend to his will which is you know when people call him an authoritarian i mean that is a classic yes definitional one of the classic kind of um criteria of of of being an authoritarian did Musk want the same thing or was he motivated you think by slightly different different different motivations they did overlap they weren't perfectly aligned uh Musk Musk clearly what he got was a friend he got to install a friend as head of NASA so and NASA is is the is the it is the funnel through which government money goes to space contracts and SpaceX is on the receiving end of those i think he probably wanted the investigations of his companies to be squashed uh that was probably a an agenda item i think he probably at some level believed the nonsense he spouted that it was all just waste fraud and abuse he didn't he didn't know the governments they couldn't really know what he was going to find when he went in and and the fact is they didn't you know they had free reign to go find what and eliminate whatever they wanted to eliminate they didn't do very much they they they create a lot of damage but they didn't they didn't actually identify lots of waste fraud and abuse but you know this federal government actually one of the myths about it's actually quite small you know by comparison to america's size and you know equivalent kind of you were the first person to say that and you know is here's an interesting fact is that the federal workforce that has not increased in size in 50 years 45 years something like that it that the in relation to the size of the population has shrunk and at the same time is it the regulatory in some ways i mean the the the regulatory demands upon it in some areas it's shrunk but in some ways particularly in the last 10 or 15 years or so it's expanded hugely and yet the actual workforce itself is relatively fewer and fewer people are asked to do more and more and uh and so and it's a typical thing they just toss more tasks going without giving them more money or more people so that's that's true and it's like it's not that there aren't wasteful things going on i'm sure there are there's it's kludgy in various ways but but i don't so i think the the seizure of the federal workforce by donald trump i don't think that was probably like an agenda item for elon musk it was like fine you know what would it probably not what does it matter uh i mean i suppose it has been his mo hasn't it as well in companies that he's taken over i mean when he took over twitter now x he went in fired a huge percentage of the people involved do you know how that worked out though well indeed it was the website it's been a collapse yes and the as a business is a disaster so it's an interesting question it's like elon is elon musk a good businessman i think it's more like that's an right now is he is he someone you would trust to take over a company an existing company and make it better and i'm not sure that the answer to that's clear he screwed up twitter he screwed up the federal government he's really good at he's really good at he's a good he's a good con man he's a good he's a good front man you think he's a con man well i think he's like a confidence man i think he's like he he's out there and he's a good set you'll put it a nice way he's a carnival barker he's a good salesman he's a good promoter when i've said not even it's anything that explicit or when when you see people say things like that for example um on x i mean i suppose it would be weighted to him now but elsewhere the elon bros descend and they say hang on a minute this guy is literally he's the richest guy in the world he's one of the most successful innovators the world he can do some things i think that he's good at some things but i don't think he's like universe like the universally great manager yeah yeah he just like he's probably not the best manager of large organizations it made me wonder look if all i knew of elon musk was what i saw at twitter and in the government it caused me to wonder who's actually managing tesla like who's actually running tesla ended up asking that question didn't it well but yeah but it's but it would be it's a and maybe that's not fair or maybe there are two elon musk the one from 10 years ago and the one now uh but but it's the just as a as a management proposition what he did what he did in the u.s government was so strange it was it was never it's not like oh that's an interesting idea could have worked it was never going to work he said he was going to cut two trillion dollars out of a seven trillion dollar budget he then proceeded to attack 20 percent just 20 percent of the government so you couldn't you weren't going to do it he was leaving he would love just to set aside left off the table at least because so much of the federal government's actual budget is entitlement spending social and military and military spending which was basically off the table that's right so he so he was never going to achieve what he said was going to achieve and then to just take a handful of of kids age 19 to 28 and send them in and say just cut without really any explicit instructions about how to cut and they didn't know anything about it they did bizarre things and who were these people just people he just were close to him i mean if you saw it you would say that's not possible that could not have happened inside the united states government it was friends of friends of friends it was it was the someone some of them worked at like spacex there were young young people like young computer people programmers but it was sometimes sometimes it was just like someone knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew elon and they wanted to be there and it was a social network it was just it was pure social network and they were sent in these people with no experience of politics or the federal government or anything they were just sent in zero with a single task which was to cut cut the size of the government like fast scorched earth i mean exactly what they would do is go into an agency take pick your agency department of veterans affairs and they say oh they're spending 200 billion dollars a year on veterans things And there were 90,000 contracts. And they didn't go through each one. They'd get the file, the contracts file, and they'd just start plugging in keywords like gender, bias, trans, woman. And if those words were in the title of the grant, they'd just cut the grant. And so they were doing things like that. The way they cut the workforce, that in a way is the most disturbing. I mean, the grant stuff is preposterous. But they couldn't actually, which you'd want to do, Any kind of sane person would say, of course, there's some people here who shouldn't be here. It's too hard to fire federal workers, all that. You want to figure out from someone who knew the organization, who was good, who wasn't, and work out deals with the people who shouldn't be there. Instead, they saw there was some friction in firing anybody who'd been there more than two years because they had some protection. There was a process for getting rid of them. It was hard. But if you've been there two years or less, you could be fired basically at will. It is a status. It's called probationary worker. and so they just axed all those people and i mean tens of thousands of people now who's been hired in the last two years it's all the young people it's all people who like were brought in for something that needed to be dealt with now it's it's not who you wanted to be getting rid of so they just did that's not the way i mean any no sane person also might be some of the most sort of innovative entrepreneurial energetic parts of the workforce whilst they're older people who And frankly, might just be phoning it in a bit or insulating it. No, what they found out, they learned all kinds of stuff inadvertently, but it wasn't what they set out to learn. One, they learned it was way easier to fire the good people, get rid of the good people than the bad people. Like if you make it miserable for people, the people who have options in the private sector are always going to go to the private sector. And it's the people who don't have anywhere else to go who will stay. So they figured that out. the other thing they figured i think they kind of demonstrated inadvertently was are you had you had total freedom to find examples of horrible government spending to get rid and get rid of it and you and and the and you say you're gonna find two trillion dollars of it you actually found about four billion dollars well i mean you sort to illustrate this don't you because you talk about the character of Sahil Lavinia yeah a software engineer exactly the sort of person that you've you've just been talking about you're the only one who's ever pronounced his name right well there you go as you say i read a lot and he bought into um you know he he's one of my allies he's brought in he goes to work for DOGE in the department you've identified he goes up at the Veterans Administration because actually they spend a load of money on you know on DVA is actually quite a big department in the federal government because lots of veterans for example yeah lots of veterans health care all those benefits and stuff and then he lasts 55 days and then he leaves and tell us what he says well he he was the only one i could find in DOGE who went in and with a spirit of kind of curiosity rather than contempt and he got there and he saw the someone had gotten there before him and who had the file and was cutting these contracts and the guy looks up and says thank god you're here because i like i didn't i don't know what i'm doing and this is i don't know if we should be doing this and so so he walks around and learns he like starts asking questions he spends a few weeks in the place before he does anything getting to know the place and somewhere in the middle of it all he gets a call from a reporter from fast company magazine and he makes the mistake of answering the call and he gets quoted saying you know the government's not quite as inefficient as i thought it was and a lot of these people really like their jobs and they're doing a good job and and their mission sounds like it was all fine you could there you could say or do almost anything in Doge and not get fired you could you could have your your history of sexual assault could be exposed you're like you could retweet white nationalist rantings you could they found guys in Doge just made up their college experience on their cv and in each case the wagon is circled jd vance in one case surprised i didn't end up as press secretary no jd vance intervened to keep these people but if you said the government's not quite as inefficient as i thought it was you were out of there so he got fired so so he got fired now what I loved about him just from the storytelling point of view is when Doge left Doge kind of got fired but when Doge walked out and Elon Musk said it didn't work and it would never work and all that someone calls and brings it back and he actually he is what Doge could have been Doge could have been bright young tech savvy people who were with a little humility who would come in and figure out what this thing was the federal government and fix the tech the tech's a mess I mean it's always a mess in government because it's always slow to catch up and the tech is moving so fast. And what Sahil wanted to do was come into the Internal Revenue, the IRS, and make it possible for everybody to do their taxes on an app. We all get paper. They're faxed. The IRS sends like a billion faxes a year. What are they doing kind of thing? And so he comes back in the end and does it. Like if you pull up your phone, you'll find Sahil's app is now available for you to do your taxes. So he ends up coming back and achieving. But all Doge could have been that. But they didn't do that. that's not what they were there for but he and it comes from your book, he's obviously the exception rather than the rule in terms of the sort of person who's going in there in terms of almost their self-awareness yes do you think in terms of your impression from the conversation with the civil servants you've had and also those with Doge the others who were just to be honest being arsonist i mean it sounds like a sort of governmental version of arson vandalism arson um did they have much sense of the potential cost of what they were doing and did they much care I think there's another post-mortem to do when everybody's a little more relaxed about it. And you'd find that some of them did. That they were 22 years old. They thought Elon knew what he was doing. Must have been heady as well. Heady to go back every night and sleep on the floor with Elon in a government office building and have him tell you how great you were. I'm sure that was very heady. But I think also it was a little unsettling to go into these agencies and find they weren't exactly what you thought they were. that you didn't really know what you were doing and there were like glimpses like that that there were glimpses there were examples there were examples of the 22 year old leaving to go back to college and turning to one of the civil servants and saying i'm sorry if i can ever do anything constructive just let me know or there was a kid who was brought into the IRS and he was he was of the he was the ruder more obnoxious variety but even he he was sitting there kind of sweating over he had to go back to Elon and say what he'd cut and he was looking for the first for the first time at the organization chart of the IRS and he was just x-ing boxes off the chart based on the name and someone walks in the room and he's x'd off the chart i think it was like communications and outreach because he thought it sounded like a bs name and the and so the person walks in the room says you know that's all of our congressional liaison that's all all of our communications with Congress and the American people you just cut and he goes oh and he kind circles that no we'll keep that i mean there was they were clearly out of their depth and they i think that they weren't so stupid they didn't know it at some point we've talked a little about the people who made up DOGE when we come back we're going to talk about the blockers after whom this book is named right after this now time to thank our partner HSBC UK so what actually makes a bank account premier well an HSBC premier account gives you exclusive access to plenty of perks that make you feel extra special, including offers and rewards across travel, dining, shopping and experiences. That sounds great, but I'm particularly intrigued by the experiences bit. Yeah, through Premier Lifestyle, customers can now enjoy priority access and exclusive ticket allocations for major music tours, sports events and theatre productions. Nice. So it's not just about what your bank account does for your money it's about the extras it can do for you too exactly everything's Premier when your bank account is HSBC Premier at HSBC UK you're backed by the current account switch guarantee so Michael the book is to say is called Blockers because what it's actually about is a series of people and vignettes and stories of the people actually Trump talked about must talk about as who they saw as the enemy really the sort of civil servants from within who were trying to block what they were trying to do yeah and indeed you open with the story of Colin O'Brien who's the security chief at the U.S. Institute of Peace um quite interesting you start with him just tell us about this particular blocker yeah there was a reason i started with him so he was Colin O'Brien former army guy he was a sniper in the army former DC Baltimore cop If you met him, you'd think he was a football player, an American football player. But what interested me about him was, one, the situation he was thrust into, but also his take on the situation. His job was to guard this building. It's a beautiful building. I'd never heard of it, the U.S. Institute of Peace. The reason I never heard of it. He's probably got rid of it now. No, it's actually now called the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. Of course. Of course. But this is what actually caught my eye in the first place. I thought, why have I not heard of this? I've written about the federal government. I've studied the federal government. I've never heard the name before. It turns out it's not really in the federal government. It's a nonprofit that Congress gives some money to. They own their building like you own your house. So the idea that anybody's going to march in and just take it didn't really occur to them. And Doe shows up right after the inauguration and says, this is our building. We're claiming this on behalf of the president. and uh and so the the story is calling sort of this cat and mouse thing where he's trying to keep the building out of the hands of the administration stopping the Trump from stealing his house physically stopping physically stopping them and as he pointed out if unless you're really thinking about the way he was thinking about it you might miss a couple of the big points here and one the one the how of it one the why of it however it was they actually went to some lengths to make sure they had all the guns now there were no shooting no one was getting it didn't but but they were aware that first there was a private security detail with lots of guns in the basement they got the private security company to flip by telling them they were going to pull all their government contracts if they didn't get out of the way or help then once so Colin is actually first invaded by his own security team and once they're inside it becomes kind of Home Alone he locks them in a chamber he hits a button on his phone and they're hermetically sealed in a place in the building and they're and furious and banging on windows and calling their mothers and all the rest and Colin then thinks well i've got them i'm gonna call the DC Washington DC police is this a long-term plan Colin yes he is you know he thinks the Washington DC police are going to come and arrest them for trespassing but when the DC police come they arrest Colin instead because they flip too and that would so the Trump administration had actually gotten these all the people who are armed to flip and Colin said that was not a trivial thing that was and that was an important thing it's that it sort of lays the groundwork for everything else that happens it's like a partial coup but the other thing he said that was so interesting to me was why like why us nobody's ever heard of us it's no money basically we've done some really good things you can show that we're we're worth the money that congress has spent on us but never mind that no one's ever heard of us and it's it's so explicit in our charter it was created this thing was created during the Reagan administration uh that we are not to be be the an extension of the presidency we don't have any the president is not controlling this thing um and he said i think they did this and i think he's right about this i think they did this to show they could that that we were on the very outer fringes of what the president would Trump could possibly claim for himself and if he could claim if he could get our get us he could get anything get the federal reserve he could get so it was establishing a kind of principle the show of power there's a show of power and i and i do think that is the story of the really simple story of this administration is this grab of this this power grab the blockers you you talk about i mean you talk about them often sort of um uh exemplifying expertise authority you know experience because most of them have been in the federal government at one point for a long time yeah um what do you think they had in common? I mean, do you think they were being motivated by similar impulses and principles or instincts? Some people might say, was it just, they just didn't like Trump and a different president, they would have acted differently. I mean, for example, it's hard to imagine, say a Democrat president acting in this way, but if there were to be a Democratic president who was more authoritarian or doing things that they didn't like, do you think they would have acted in a similar fashion? I do. And they didn't, none of them had any trouble with the Trump during the first administration it wasn't trump in fact in fact one of them in particular was was taken by the Trump people as a great Trump fan so that they are all they what they have what they feel in their core is is this non-partisanship thing that it's anathema it was anathema to them to think in terms of i'm a democrat or i'm a republican or i'm in favor of these policies or these policies They all had the sense that their job was to execute within the law whatever the president was trying to do. The problem they all had was this visceral reaction to being asked to break the law. It was as if they knew what they were being asked to do was illegal. Give some examples in what way, do you think? The most dramatic was probably what happened in our inland revenue in the IRS. Kathleen Walters was the chief privacy officer. She was like the body, the human being between my tax returns and the Trump political operation to prevent information in my tax returns from being weaponized and used against me. And then these laws around that right after the inauguration, the the Department of Homeland Security, which is where the immigration issues are dealt with, came to her and and demanded the the database of seven million tax returns of undocumented workers. And they wanted it because it had the most current home address of the worker. and and like i didn't know that i didn't know that undocumented workers paid taxes but this there was a program that was created in the 90s um to generate revenue it's generated more than 100 billion dollars in tax revenue and the irs had been telling these this population for 30 years that your tax returns are like the tax returns of an american citizen pay your taxes and this information anything it's not going to be used against you in fact it will be used for you if you want to apply for citizenship later so and these these this database is covered by the same laws as all the other tax returns. So grabbing this, I mean, it struck at the very core of the laws around the IRS. And not only that, it's unprecedented, just about unprecedented in American history. She said the only time in history that anything like this has happened is when the census data was used to round up Japanese Americans in World War II to put them in concentration camps. The difference was that was actually legal. It was appalling, but it was legal this was illegal and it was appalling and so there is another cat and mouse game where she's literally hiding in offices and turning out the lights and locking the doors so they can't find her where she's she's trying to keep this stuff out of the hands of of the DHS of the of the ICE officers she loses they all lose they're like this i mean they none of them really have a chance but she draws it out for a couple of months but that is i mean that's just like It's obvious. I mean, it's this and their lawsuits, the lawsuits that are winding their way through the courts and eventually that there will be some judgment rendered. But meanwhile, tens of thousands of people have been rousted from their beds in the middle of the night and ejected from the country. The information actually moved. The book is a powerful, a powerful endorsement of the principles of the people that you're talking about and their bravery. I mean, there's no question when you've got the sort of full, the full power of your own employer, the federal government basically ranged against you and you're standing for a particular set of principles or the law. And obviously that is a brave and very worthwhile thing to do. I suppose in a way, though, your book also demonstrates a theme or points to a theme which we've been talking about a lot in the last few years, which is the weakness of the American political system, political order itself. Yeah, because over the long term, I mean, Colin's a good example. You know, he trapped those guys in the in the room hoping that help was on the way. But it wasn't. And trapping those guys in the room was obviously not a long term solution. A long term solution would have been the institutions making sure the Trump administration got back to its box. And that didn't really happen because Congress has been completely uninterested in many of these matters. So that's the and the courts, as you say, are at best slow and at worst ossified. Trump, this administration has exposed the weaknesses in the system and how much it was dependent on norms as much as laws. And the source of the weakness, I mean, the immediate source of the weakness is the congressional Republicans being so afraid of the president that they won't take any action against him. That he is basically usurping their authorities and they're not doing much about it. So, that's who saw it coming. But that's what's happened. And that's something that, you know, obviously Americans talk all the time about the founders and their wisdom. That's just something they didn't consider. They just didn't think that the first branch of government, i.e. Congress, would be willing to cede its power so comprehensively to a quasi-tyrannical president. And there was this feeling in the very early days, and Doge was, I think, part of what the purpose of Doge from the point of view of the people who are actually orchestrating Trump's government campaign, and it's mainly a fellow named Russell Vought, but part of the usefulness of Doge was to just see what they could get away with. It's like, see how far it could be pushed and see what would cause a kind of backlash or reaction in Congress. And I wonder, you know, when when the dust settles on this, when you go, if you could have a private conversation with Russell Vought, if even he was surprised by how far they could go, that no one really no one really stepped in to stop them or to question it very much. so but that's going to change right the in after the midterms the house is certainly going to change hands and probably the senate and there's going to be an opportunity for congress to seize back its powers and to invest trump will allow them oh you mean you think he'll let the election happen well no i don't mean that i mean more that you know um will hit the trump administration comply with subpoenas from congress or will he just pardon everybody involved you know he's not going to feel to me it's not going to be like it won't be as simple you're right it won't be as simple it won't be as simple but what he's done you know that much of what they've done is the opposite of what they said they're doing that they in the in the in this with the supposed rooting out of waste fraud and abuse at exactly the same time they were eliminating all the real mechanisms for finding waste fraud and abuse that that we had there were people in all the agencies called inspectors general who were independent who were there for whistleblowers after watergate That's right. I suspect we're going to have a reaction much like after Watergate, that Congress is going to figure out how to create more guardrails and hem in the president in various ways. Because I don't think, you know, the risk is, you know, what people say and what a political pundit would say to you right now is this thing is over, that Trump having seized the powers, no one will ever give it back. No Democrat will want to give it back. but there's this moment now where the democrats will have congress and i don't think the democrats in congress are going to want to have the same relationship to a democratic president that the republicans in congress just had with trump it was a really unpleasant situation just finally in terms of the long-term impact of doge i mean as you say it sort of fizzled away I had all this energy to begin with Trump and must sort of fall out we know what some of the legacy of it is particularly in the international sphere because they gutted USAID I don't think there's any doubt that people around the world will have died as a result of that. I mean, like a million people. Yeah, a huge number of people. Maybe 10 million people. Indeed, a huge number of people. In terms of UK, its impact on the federal government domestically and some of the hollowing out of that expertise and so on, and what the federal government is able to do, what do you think its long-term legacy will be if it has one? I think a little metaphor for the problem is this food safety issue. I don't know if you followed it, but the lettuce went bad in America. A lot of people got sick. and if you there was a recent poll of americans asking them how they felt about the safety of their food and it's it's collapsed it's been it's it's interesting i think that i think that feeling that the erosion of the of the sort of preventative mechanisms that government usually usually are usually there because of the government that things that keep us safe everything's going to feel a little less safe and people going to feel it uh whether that gets whether that finds that feeling finds a political expression i mean i think it will it's it's pretty visceral uh but it hasn't yet like there's nobody out there actually arguing for government no one's found that voice but but when enough bad things happen then i think i think you'll have i think that marketplace will develop could be wrong i either the marketplace remember why some of these regulations that's why we built this place thing in the first place it's like you lose it and then oh that's why we had it i think that's where we're headed Michael Lewis an absolute pleasure to talk to you thanks for having me well Michael Lewis's book Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State is out now thanks as ever to our own band of production Blockers Shane Fenley Michaela Walters Natalie Inge Jess Williamson Mikey Bags Martin Crozer and Lizzie Ward our executive producer is Louis Dagenhart our editor is Tom Hughes The News Agents is presented by me Lewis Goodall John Sopel and Emily Maylis and remember to join me on LBC on Sunday from 10 till 12 for the best political interviews and analysis to kick off the new political week. We will be back on Monday. Have a lovely weekend. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This has been a global production.