Oct 4, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min · 12 segments
Michael Lewis, the New York Times bestselling author of "Moneyball" and "The Big Short," stops by the studio to talk to Lovett about "Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State," his latest book on the…
Michael LewisGuest
Jon LovettHost
I want to come back to this idea of private sector versus public sector because it's like, that's just laziness.
At root, that is, I don't want to do the hard work work of going through and meeting with managers, talking about individuals as individuals, what's working, what's not.
So, I mean, and the amount of disruption, I mean, in the extreme case, what does a spy do? he gets that email what does someone who is is in the sensitive part of the irs and looking at people's tax returns do what do they what do they do there were stories i mean just to the irs like some huge number of people are at the irs don't have a computer so the stories of in irs center you know processing centers like lines forming at the computer terminal and you have to wait three hours to answer this question It was, people took it seriously.
They were told to take it seriously, except in a couple of places where Trump's appointees said, don't answer.
And, but Tim, you know, he knew the whole workforce and he knew just how much trouble that was gonna cause, how counterproductive it was.
You can imagine a completely different version of Doge where there's a team and over a few weeks they go and they meet with department heads and they get, you know, they go department by department.
And they say, hey, like, you know, your last report said that your workforce is 99.9% effective.
I don't support doing it this way, but you would get like- Much better way to do it.
I want to come back to this idea of private sector versus public sector because it's like, that's just laziness.
At root, that is, I don't want to do the hard work work of going through and meeting with managers, talking about individuals as individuals, what's working, what's not.
So, I mean, and the amount of disruption, I mean, in the extreme case, what does a spy do? he gets that email what does someone who is is in the sensitive part of the irs and looking at people's tax returns do what do they what do they do there were stories i mean just to the irs like some huge number of people are at the irs don't have a computer so the stories of in irs center you know processing centers like lines forming at the computer terminal and you have to wait three hours to answer this question It was, people took it seriously.
They were told to take it seriously, except in a couple of places where Trump's appointees said, don't answer.
And, but Tim, you know, he knew the whole workforce and he knew just how much trouble that was gonna cause, how counterproductive it was.
You can imagine a completely different version of Doge where there's a team and over a few weeks they go and they meet with department heads and they get, you know, they go department by department.
And they say, hey, like, you know, your last report said that your workforce is 99.9% effective.
I don't support doing it this way, but you would get like- Much better way to do it.
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