-Welcome back.
-Pleasure to be here. I'm happy to talk to you
about this book. This is basically about
how the Trump Presidency and Donald Trump himself
had no interest in maintaining a functioning government
through the transition of the previous
administration, and you've said that,
"Only Donald Trump could make a book about
bureaucracy interesting." -Yes. -Can you just explain that
real quick? -He's electrified the material. So, the way he did it is great. That he did it by starting out
firing the 500 people who were supposed to handle
his transition the day after the election. So, they're supposed to go in and learn how the government
works, and there are people waiting
to explain to them, like, how the nuclear arsenal
is managed or how we stop the ebola virus
from becoming a pandemic, and they just did not show. So, when I realized
I had a book and that this material
was very good -- when I realized I was the first
person to talk to the person who handled the nuclear weapons, that, like, nobody had bothered
to get the stuff. And to this day,
you can wander around, and they've never
taken the time to have the thing
explained to them, because he has no interest
whatsoever in it. And then the question is,
like, what does that mean? Like, what does it mean
if the President, who's supposed to be running
this 2 million person operation, actually does not care, or wants
to dismantle parts of it? And I think was it means is,
like, there are all these risks that the government manages. I mean, some
are really obvious, like you don't want nuclear
bombs going off when they shouldn't go off, and you don't want
viruses spreading, but you don't want, like,
the research that's happening so we can grow food in a
different climate not to happen. And, there's all this stuff,
and so that was -- that was the beginning
of the thing for me. It was, like, these risks
are all more probable because he's not there.
-And you know, obviously, he spends
a lot of time attacking sort of what government means and the people who choose
government as a life, and a lot of these people are -- you know, these are
civil servants. These are bureaucrats. -We saw them in the impeachment
hearings, right? The minute you see them, you
realize, like, the deep state is just people who know what
they're talking about. -Right.
-Right, that's it. That is it.
There's no deep state. -Yeah.
-I promise you. I was there. It's not there. -There's no secret elevator
that goes down? -It's a very shallow state. -You added to this book,
in the paperback version you wrote about Art Allen --
is that the name? -So, that's right.
So, you see -- so, when the government
shut down in the beginning of the year, 800,000 people were sent home
and told they were inessential. So, I asked for a list -- Who are these inessential
government workers? It wasn't a whole list, but it
was a whole big list. I didn't know -- I said, "I want
to find one of these guys." I took the name at the top,
Arthur A. Allen. -This is how it works
as a reporter. You just take the first name. -It's kind of how I roll.
[ Laughter ] -Yeah.
-But I call him up. You know, "You're inessential.
What did you do?" He's the only oceanographer in the Coast Guard
Search and Rescue Department. He got there in the late '70s. He -- you know, he kind of
stumbled into the government. He finds after a few years
that everybody is asking him questions that if he doesn't
know the answer to, like, nobody knows
the answer to, and they're kind of science
questions, like, "How long can someone survive
in the water in a survival suit before they die
of hypothermia?" He starts answering these
sorts of questions, and he goes out and he sees -- he wakes up and goes and watches
a search and rescue, and he sees a storm come across
the Chesapeake Bay, and a boat get lost
with this little girl and a mom on it. And when I was sitting in his
living room talking to him about it, he said, "You want to
know why I do what I do?" And he pulls a clipping out
from his -- like, a yellow newspaper
clipping out from his bookshelf, and it's about this mom
and her daughter who died because the Coast Guard
couldn't find them. And he realizes that
what we don't know, that we need to know,
is how that boat drifts after it's capsized
that these people were on. And he spends his career, and this is what
he's been doing -- and this is, like,
an inessential worker in the minds
of the Trump Administration -- is he spends his career
tossing stuff out into the Long Island Sound and studying how it drifts
depending on what it is. An upside down sailboat, a fat person, a...
[ Laughter ] A person on a life raft,
or whatever it is. And what you need to understand
is that at any given time there's an unbelievable
amount of crap floating on the ocean,
and a surprising amount of it are Americans. Like, Americans have a -- We have a gift
for getting lost at sea. -[ Laughs ] Yeah.
-No, no, no, I'm deadly serious, like 13 people a day on average. Ten get rescued, three die. And a lot of times they die because they don't know
how they drifted. He makes a science of it. And when he teaches
the Coast Guard how you follow an object
that's drifting at sea, they start finding people who
never would have been found. Days after he releases this
information to the Coast Guard, a 300-pound man runs out of his
window of a cruise ship into the ocean, and three hours
later, they find he's gone. They know where he -- They end up finding out
when he went off the ship. That man is dead any other
time in human history, and because of this guy's work, they plucked him
out of the ocean. And this is a guy who,
thousands of people are alive because of his work,
and nobody knows who he is. And he has no impulse to
market it or tell anybody about it. And that's what's
in the government. And that's what we're telling -- you're telling these people
they're inessential? It's crazy.
-And do you think because we have a President
who obviously, you know, is a braggadocio, and these people
have great humility, do you think he values them less
because they're not -- -Yeah, because they don't know
how to sell themselves. -Yeah.
-It's just -- They're almost
the opposite of him. They know how to do things.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
-Right? -Yeah. [ Applause ]
-And they -- And they know things.
-Yeah. -And they're like the key
to the future, but they don't know how
to persuade you that they're important. They don't know how
to tell their story. -Well, it's very nice that
you're telling their story. I'm so glad you added
that to the book, and thank you so much
for being here. -Yeah, a pleasure to be here.
-It's always a pleasure. -Thank you.
Michael Lewis, everybody.
