Michael Lewis, "The Premonition"

so i think we're good now i can access things okay so we'll go live here in a second and and and after we're live i'm just going to leave allow a few more seconds for everybody to be let in you know so you'll see the participants number start to rise do you want me to turn off my video until you get everybody in no no this is fine you know uh um dramatic reveal yeah or if you want you guys can come up and i'm i'm a little superstitious i think we have you now okay let's go okay bashan you ready absolutely i'm gonna open up the lobby in three two one okay we'll just sit here a few seconds and let people come in if my internet dies just tell people that i'm so intimidated by michael i couldn't handle my nerves your internet couldn't handle it my internet couldn't handle my nerves yeah no you're not it couldn't have it wasn't your internet was intimidated by that so um that kind of power over it michael were so intimidating not not so many people would end up talking to him like they do right all right okay if you guys are ready um good evening everyone and welcome to pnp live i'm brad graham the co-owner of politics and pros along with my wife lisa muscatine we have a great event for you this evening with michael lewis talking about his new book the premonition and we'd like to thank our friends at books and books in miami and harvard bookstore in cambridge massachusetts for partner partnering with us to make this event happen a couple of brief housekeeping notes first though to post a question at any point uh during the uh during the talk just click on the q a icon at the bottom of the screen the chat function won't be available for audience comments this evening but in that column you'll find a link for purchasing additional copies of the premonition michael in the introduction of his new book defines his job as mainly finding the story in the material and he's done that consistently with extraordinary success through 16 books over more than 30 years he's found the story whether the subject has been wall street and liars poker baseball and moneyball football on the blind side fatherhood and home game the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse in the big short high frequency trading and flash boys behavioral science and economics and the undoing project or the hollowing out of the government under trump in the fifth risk just to name a few in the premonition michael addresses the pandemic and as in so many of his previous works he does so through intriguing characters in this case a loosely connected group of doctors scientists and public health experts who attempt to get the u.s government to take the pandemic threat seriously but run up against dysfunction and indifference michael's basic premise is that to understand america's extensive bungling of the crisis you need to look beyond donald trump's own mismanagement to the nation's fragmented underfunded public health system and particularly the failings of the cdc it's a compelling argument told as michael typically does in a propulsive narrative that reads like a thriller michael will be in conversation this evening with maya shunker a cognitive scientist who is google's director of behavioral economics and previously served as an advisor in the obama white house and at the un and she's about to start a podcast called a slight change of plans so michael amaya screen is yours hey michael hey maya it's great to see you i know we've talked several times this week now it's a slightly bigger crowd um so as i mentioned to you this is my favorite book that you've written um and i i think one thing that i really appreciated uh to bradley's point is that very early on you give us a glimpse into your philosophy as a writer right you say that you think your job is mainly to find the story and then let us readers make up our own minds about that story and about the characters but that it doesn't mean that you don't form some sort of opinion about it too so i'm wondering what's your take on what this book is about well so it really is true people never believe me but it really is true that i do think my job is to find the right characters and i and is to find the people through whose eyes you want to see see the world and if i bungle that the book's not going to be any good um and then my job is kind of draw attention to them i'm sort of like i like like i'm like the stripper in front of the cathedral and and but but i won't strip for just any church i'm trying to kind of like say these people are important and you need to listen to them um and when i get excited about stories when there is a situation where there are people who aren't being heard who are important and so so it is not doesn't matter all that much what i think about it it really doesn't um it's it's more um do i feel like i've done justice to these characters in their situation having said that so the story is about what they did and what they who they are uh having said that they're obviously curated and selected for you know for reasons and i think of it as a kind of i thought of it all along as a portrait of a broken dysfunctional system and not just the public health system it's like a portrait of the society and that the way they bounce around the society tells you a lot about what's wrong with it they're drawing us a picture by the things that happen to them and uh and yes it's more narrowly about the health public health system too but that's that wasn't my that was my target my target was like to write a book here's what i thought this was the grandiose ambition this thing is a world historic event it's like the 1918 pandemic it's it's like one of those things that a hundred years from now people are going to want an account of like they'll look what was it really like um and i i thought if i do my job really well it's a little message in a bottle that will describe american society now and and it's uh so that was the hope that was the ambition um but it does lots of other things too and and the other like guiding principle is not what it's about it says my editor star lawrence and norton he's been my editor my entire career it's been my editor since liar's poker um is like mantra is don't bore yourself if you're that keep yourself as interested in the material as you can and the reader will stay interested too so that was the other thing i mean i just found this thing i'm glad you think it's my best book i think it might be my best book it it was an absolute thrill to write like exhilarating to write and um and it was exhilarating right but in the way that it's exhilarating the way it's exhilarating to play tennis against someone who's better than you that you that you're the the material is always on the other side of the net from me and if the material sucks there's only so much i can do i'm not going to play my best tennis but if the material is like roger federer then all of a sudden i look so much better than than i otherwise did and i felt like i had i feel like i had roger federer on the other side of the net in this cave well i also think i mean one of the reasons also this book feels really fresh is that the story is unfolding in real time and by that i don't mean we don't know how the coronavirus is going to evolve by that i mean that your character's work on infectious disease took on new significance against the backdrop of a global pandemic which means they're actively reprocessing and reinterpreting their own past in real time and you're kind of live on this journey with them right in other books i feel like you've interviewed subjects like daniel kahneman for example who's had decades to develop a more stable understanding of who they are and what they've done and for these folks they're like wow maybe i need to rewrite my own understanding of where i fall in history yes well this that's true it's not unprecedented in my experience moneyball was a bit like that and and like moneyball the thing poured out of me i mean from from from first meeting the characters to delivery of book in both cases was a year um and and didn't feel like i needed another day uh so so i was i because but that's i think that's right i think that's right that they they were all a little um surprised that i showed up on their doorstep and they were like i can't tell you how many times charity dean said like why are you talking to me you know i'm just a local public health officer yeah i say no no you don't understand you're really important uh and carter mesher like don't talk to me i've been invisible my entire career i want to remain in the basement of the veterans administration until i retire and he was just like a little mortified by the whole thing so that that uh it is true that that i think they think of themselves maybe a little differently than they did in the beginning it's also true and that is that was the figuring out who they were and what they were in relation to this event was the trick it wasn't people have asked me like like how do you you know this it's an ongoing event you don't know how we're going to turn out all the rest that was never the problem because um because they define themselves in relation to the event they were basically out of the event by june like it's too late it's over we lost they they knew how it ended in june so there was never an issue with that the issue was like fully processing them that's right yeah yeah and i mean did you ever feel like oh in some sense i'm playing as you're interviewing your subjects do you ever feel like you were taking on a therapist role like you're there are traumatic parts of their childhood and past that you're you're forcing them to engage with always yeah this is not true just for this book all the books are that way if i don't get to that place where they're um where they're talking to me like they don't talk to anybody else that i haven't done my job and i mean so at one point charity dean said to me you now know me better than my two ex-husbands and and she said that i wasn't saying that much at the time but i got way past that i mean i mean i do she thinks i maybe know her better than anybody but her sister and and i know things about her sister doesn't know about her and she just and it's a funny thing i think the basis at the bottom of all my books is a trust between subject and care writer and subject that that it isn't that i'm gonna queer reality in any way in their favor it's that they trust me to really try to understand what the world looks like through their eyes and once that trust is established like magical things happen uh magical things happen you find out all this stuff you get to you get to sort of see the patterns in their lives that they don't see for themselves um you you get to you get to you it almost rises a level where you get to treat them almost like like characters in a work of fiction and they're full fully formed people that you're that you're delivering and delivering an understanding of you can't tell a story like one of the little things one there are a lot of there were moments like this but this was like very a very this book moment um i met charity dean in like early may of last year after pestering the california government to let me talk to her and they told me she didn't want to they lied they didn't want me to talk to her but i found her i found her through back channels and i went and visited her upper house in sacramento we had two really long days together and after the two really long days she was really interested in what i was doing like yeah this book kind of needs to be written kind of thing she had a view of how the system was screwed up and yeah i'm gonna i've decided i'm gonna trust you and i'm gonna help you and when she said that she told me a couple things before she said that she told me that among the more personal things she did every year was to write down her her lit her birthday resolutions at the end of the year essentially new year's resolutions in december the 20th of every year and that she put put these on the back of her grandmother's photograph uh and that she had a dead grandmother who was like a like a north star for her and um and i said so when she said she's going to trust me i said are you trust me let can i just walk around your house leave me in here let me can i look at anything i want to look at you go out back with your boys and i'll just wander around and she kind of went all right so i started wandering around the house sorry i need to i need to pause right there you just you say it very casually nonchalantly this is not normal behavior so who do you give credit to in this interaction are you this extremely um charming disarming character with a nice light southern drawl who's convincing her or is she just an unusual character who's like sure nothing to hide well maya we know each other so if you had spent two full days with me and we got to know each other and then i said i'm going to write about you but i need to walk around your house what would you have said probably not which is why for this group by the way um i i was i'm one of the people who was put on the cutting room floor when it came to potential characters um so maybe that's why i don't have that type of personality for the end project i think you'd have said yes but that's just me and uh i think you'd have said yes because i'd explain why in her case it was i sense that she like she she wanted to tell there were all these things on the walls to remind herself of who she was and that sounds strange but and a lot of things had to do with bravery there are like little post-it notes on the walls and i wanted to inspect all this stuff but anyway i'm walking around her house and in her bedroom her grandmother's portrait the the photograph is hanging by her bed i take it off the wall and they're all her most intimate personal resolutions from the last 15 years written on to the back and it's all stuff that more or less conventional in a sense it's what i'm going to do this year you know i'm going to go to west africa and and and treat malaria or or i'm going to you know learn french whatever it is and i mean this is all why we're telling you where where the trust takes you so i get to look at this thing and on december 20th 2019 the first line on her list is something very personal and the second one is a prediction it says it has started like a tingle went down my spine and i called her back up from the pool and i said what is this and she said i had this feeling that this thing that i'd been waiting for my entire career was about to be upon us and i just put it down and i didn't have any evidence i had no reason she's not a mystic she's like a science she's a doctor yeah but but she's a doctor and a disease hunter who's also tried to hone her instincts because she knows that like there is such a thing as a sixth sense in all this and and that moment i didn't know what i was gonna do with that but i thought this is how this is when i am at my best when i get into their lives so that i see this thing in the first place she was never going to mention it uh she was never going to mention that she like had premonitions in december of 2019 that we were about about to be overrun by a pathogen and i thought so so for me to um i don't know to me to feel like i'm doing what i'm doing properly i need to get them in the place where i can get to their bedroom and pull their grandmother's portrait off their wall and look at see what's on the back i love that so and this maybe leads to another question i've always had which is around how you source these characters i mean in part one of the reasons again this is my favorite book is that the these characters are larger than life i mean like i called you after i first learned about charity dean like two minutes into learning about charity dean i picked up the phone and i was like michael i cannot believe this woman is a force of nature right um and i'm curious to know when it came to her specifically and then i want to ask a few more questions about her um how did you source her how did she ever cross your your desk as a potential and um did you kind of know from the beginning okay this is a done deal like she has everything it takes to be a main character or did it require that moment with the grandmother's thing uh for that to really crystallize um she so she was inevitable she was inevitable because all my other i met all my other characters first and all the other characters pointed to her they all said you know before i got to her five people had said to me you've got to meet charity dean because she's the only one in the state of california government who knows who knows what which we should do she's she's a badass she's like a force and um and they just had a sense that i that it was this if i was going to understand what was going on i needed to spend time with her because it all had the feeling that she had enlightened them yeah um and these were not dumb people these were real these were and these were you know these were important men who might not um typically find themselves enlightened by a younger female doctor right i mean it was i there was a lot of in the air that i just was it was clear she was special before i even met her when i met her i wasn't thinking oh i'm looking for a main character of the book i was i was thinking i'm looking for how to write about this um but she i mean with the penny draw for me was i thought one of the problems the country has is a status problem and it's it's the wrong people have the status that you've got these you've got these bozos who are kind of like a rotating cast of characters on cable news you know who are supposed experts and who actually kind of like just learned about conf infectious disease three months ago but the people who make themselves public to them as experts are usually not the experts and and the people who really are expert in disease control are the people who are controlling the disease and those are local public health officers who are nobodies who are paid like crap who get all kinds of grief but are are they they're they're they are the soldiers on the battlefield and it's a battlefield without really effective generals or the and the or the generals are people often who have themselves never fought in a war so it was clear that this i wanted to do in the structure of the story what the society should do in real life and that is invert the status structure take the person who's the lowest person on the totem pole is actually the most important in this fight and make them the most important in the story once i realized that i thought yeah she's who i want to lean on the most but then there was this other thing reality configured itself in such a way that the other characters were all connected through her i mean that's how i found her in the first place right and so she she she she was the natural connective tissue for in the story she led you she led the reader to the other characters so that was uh that was sort of the other reason she ended up where she was yeah no it felt like i had watched this really skillfully done seinfeld episode where all the characters somehow are in each other's world and you didn't even have to recruit larry david so well done there um so you know one thing that was so fascinating to me about about charity dean is that um being an infectious disease doctor but then public health official um is it feels like she's possessed by this role like she looks in every nook and cranny of what she's capable of doing under this jurisdiction and she just chases after stuff right and um so she oh c might be in our community i'm going to rush there oh i need to extract lung tissue with garden shears sure i'm on that even though all the other um guys are wearing hazmat suits like i have to go up i got to barge in this guy's clinic and tell him he's out of business he can't practice anymore sure i'll do that too like she there's there's very few limits to this person's abilities right and her willingness to contribute and i'm just struck by um you know like i interacted recently with a government employee who was very much not charity dean so i was walking to work and i got bitten by a stray dog okay so i'm scared i'm in the doctor's office i'm about to get a tetanus shot and i'm like oh good um mountain view has an animal control center like they've got it right so i'm on the phone i'm super flustered i'm like hi i've gotten bitten by a dog animal rescue like take care of this and he does everything in his power to avoid having to act he's like no problem just um you know just give me the dog's social security number if you have photo evidence of the dog the dog's birthday um street address i'm like sure i will make sure to chase down this rabid dog next time i see him and ask him all the relevant questions and take a picture while i'm at it and so never gets reported and i see that same stray dog like uh two weeks later right and so exactly to your point i was thinking how do we help solve this problem where we recruit people like charity dean into the system okay well one way is you just find more charity deans people who are possessed by their job and have deep passion and conviction that's hard to do the other alternative is to increase the reverence with which we view these positions right it's like we saw we've been on this mission with teachers for decades now it's like teachers need to be paid more they are the the backbone of our society then this past year essential workers were lifted up all of a sudden we were like the mailman is a very important person or the mailbox right and it's like yeah or like the amazon delivery guy all these folks were elevating and um it would be so wonderful if we elevated especially local officials and i say that also at the vantage point that when i was working in the obama white house as a political i did see this hierarchy form where i'm a political appointee type and there are career civil servants who have worked in the government for 50 years i mean these are the true experts and yet at the table the shiny new object is the political appointee and that's where all the deference goes um and so i feel like even that power system within the government needs to be inverted i think this is totally right i mean that's what i'm trying to do with the book is inverted right i'm trying i'm trying to say this this is the person who who should have status who everybody should know who they are who should have resources to do their job and should be in a position where you don't they don't have to be that brave to take the risks they they take nobody should have to be as brave as charity dean is doing their job and if you have to be that brave you should be paid 10 million dollars a year you know that it's it's not instead of a you know the public servant's wage that was what struck me instantly as being screwed up it wasn't just that she was under resourced and underpaid um and overworked it was that it was that she was expected to take all this risk all the risk in the system found its way to her the cdc wasn't willing to cover for the state of california didn't cover for her she was on her own and you know one of her mantras was nobody's coming to save you she had she said she had to learn that and that when she took the job she said no way you know i did not expect to have to be as brave as i've had to be and what what makes her such a good character is she's full of fear that she's that she is not a fearless person she's a person who's got lots of anxieties and fears deeply rooted in a problematic childhood uh and has you know has dealt with alcoholism and among other things and that she has willed herself to be brave in order to do her job yeah and all those things i was looking at around her house it was all courage is a muscle memory you know it was all signs like that telling herself reminding herself to be brave and how screwed up is the world that we have put that we've created that kind of pressure on that role yeah without rewarding it so so that's i agree i think that like like actually the thing in this case so there's great hope in this case because it's such an actually interesting job that if you there's this it's a mystery to me that there has not been a television drama uh built around a local public health official the stories are so they're cinematic and they're riveting and the stakes are high and it's just like it's natural material so because actually what they do is so interesting i would not be surprised if one of the effects of the book is like lots of people kind of think maybe i want to do that like it's it's what an interesting job maybe i want to do that or or i want to pay more i want to know who my local health official is that all of a sudden they have some profile that they didn't have before but that's what needs to happen i think that's absolutely right um it was mystified when i was working on the fifth risk it was mystifying to me this this the status of the political appointee compared to the status of the career civil servant yeah it made it made no sense to me it still makes no sense to me i mean there was a badge color oh i don't have a blue badge so like i've you know i've literally heard people say that you had been who had worked at the office of management and budget for for like 35 years okay they could recite things like hundreds of pages um but they definitely felt that dynamic and it was painful to witness because i always felt deeply at least relative to my own expertise um that they were just you know here and and here i was right um so yeah and it's not and it's not that they're not compelling people there can be they can really usually they're people who are have tunnel vision and are obsessed with their subject and that actually is another aspect of a main character obsession is like that's when you know you have something when you have obsession the combination of obsession with a failure to realize you're a character is gold yeah you know when someone knows they're kind of like a character they lose they lose altitude on the page it just becomes kind of mannered and self-conscious it's these people who are genuinely obsessed but don't think anything is peculiar about themselves i mean charity dean did not find anything peculiar about herself and she was you know she she was a a person who as a kid for entertainment read books about the bubonic plague uh and hung models of viruses from her ceiling and and who was willing to be excommunicated from her church and leave her first marriage in order to pursue a medical degree and she found nothing unusual about it and i think that's true of the other carrot like people like carter mesher and richard right like carter i this was so fascinating to me right he is add right he is struggling to pay attention to anything but then he says that when it comes to critical care medicine it's as though he's being given ritalin um and i just found that so powerful like again another case of being obsessed and then richard has this near fatal accident as a child and is told his whole life you're here for a reason you're here for a reason he's carrying this burden on his shoulders right thinking damn it what is my reason and then finally he stumbles upon this pandemic playbook or whatever and he's like oh i guess this is it okay this is my life's work and so i found you know that so talk about a moment i had chills when i was talking to richard about this um and richard was actually the jungle guide for the book richard is is prominent in the book but not as prominent as carter for for narrative reasons but richard was the one who held my hand through the whole book and is a literary figure i mean richard could i think you know his first ambition in life was to be a poet and he said writing was writing was too hard so he became a doctor and he's a he was an oncologist i mean the way he gets into public service is in itself an interesting story but he he's not self-dramatizing we were talking on zoom he's in england one night and we were talking about a particular moment when they were trying to figure out how to model how to how to build models or use or find models that would enable them to study the effects of very social interventions in a pandemic like social distancing didn't exist these guys invented it right and i reinvented it um it was thought not to work and he said he was sitting there one night in the white house and and he starts he very haltingly starts to tell me the story because he's embarrassed by it because it sounds like a little cheesy like my parents doted on me i and there's this story that's been in my head my whole life i i rolled down this 80 foot cliff hit my head i was unconscious in the water in a stream my father by some by accident had had a pediatric a course in pediatric medicine crit or critical care or something like the week before yeah he resuscitates me and ever since then there was this mythology in the family the southern this alabama family that richard was saved for a reason and this is not a these are not it's not the bible thumping alabama he's he's kind of upper he's yeomanry or maybe upper middle class alabama so it's it's if they don't routinely do the tell these kind of stories so this story lingers in his mind and that it's when he's in the white house facing the possibility that they won't have a solution to a pandemic and that by means solution i mean they were trying to answer the question what do you do before you get a vaccine that you there's going to be a period where disease is going to sweep through the land how do you minimize disease and death that he has this feeling that this is why i'm here this is what my mother was talking about and that he's embarrassed to tell me about it it's just it's kind of incredible right and it's where he lives that's where he lives yeah you know i think another theme emerging from this book is like your richard and the other characters they they kind of quickly realized like it is a fiction to think oh oh someone's got it right like the people whose jobs it is to get this done have got it um and i do like one telling anecdote is charity has this really enraging exchange um with the cdc when she's potentially detecting a meningitis outbreak right um and she's calling the cdc and it it totally falls on deaf ears right they're basically like we don't have your back we think you're wrong but go for it you powerless local health official like have at it you're screwed though and i i still remember the day that i realized that these government bodies that i had revered for so much of my life we're just made of people i mean it's an astonishing discovery to have right it's hard to remember it's hard to remember but it's like these people are prone to the same vulnerabilities and behavioral biases we're all prone to right like fear ego self-protection motivated by incentive structures etc etc and it was akin to my seeing my first grade teacher in the supermarket for the first time i was like wait what mrs fletcher buys food in the same place as us mere commoners like i thought she lived in the school like it it so that's what it felt like to like have the curtain pulled and be like no the cdc like these is now just my colleagues like people so yeah so as charity put it she said she was so disappointed she said i was so disappointed to find that the man behind the curtain was such a pansy she gets into it and she kind of thinks they're the they're the they're the gods right and and all of a sudden she finds herself actually fighting disease on the streets of santa barbara you know behind oprah's house and it's it's it's you know multi-drug resistant tuberculosis or a meningococcal outbreak on the santa barbara campus or any and they're terrifying these things and she needs backup she needs help in all kinds of ways she needs material help and she needs moral support she needs political cover all that yeah and they don't they don't materialize in fact when they materialize and materialize to basically tell her you could take that risk but if you do you're gonna and you're wrong you're gonna lose your job and we're not gonna support that but then after the fact after she suppresses the meningococcal outbreak on the ucsb campus for which the uscsb um health authorities are eternally grateful and say she did it all on her own without with the cdc instructing her every which way a year later when there's another outbreak on another college campus i think in oregon they asked the oregon people to call charity dean because she knows how to do it and i it's it's mind-boggling right and and that that she gets to a place in her head a couple of years into her job of actually fighting disease where she bars cdc investigators from her investigations because they just interfere they don't bring anything to it it's that's it's crazy and that now what's interesting is that so the local health officials are 3 000 charity deans around the country and they have depending on how they do their job they have different relations with the cdc but the culture is very much they're supposed to be following the cdc's orders but even though they're not orders i mean the cdc has no official power over them but they do they have their budgets they have their money to give them that you're not supposed to anger the cdc but the good what charity would say the good ones were crosswise with the cdc for just this reason and her brave you know the br the ones she thought were brave and great which were usually women not always but almost always women um as opposed to the rich retired doctor who's just looking for a cynical and doesn't want any trouble yeah um the that that though the brave ones found themselves realizing no one's coming to save you the cdc is going to get in the way and the brave ones are who got their heads chopped off in the last year that charity all the people charity admired with a couple of exceptions sarah cody who's your health property you're in santa clara yeah santa clara all right sarah sarah cody sarah cody of santa she should get a presidential medal because sarah cody saw that she needed to shut down the county without backup from gavin newsom or donald trump nothing but grief she shuts down the county probably saves a gazillion lives because she interrupting the early disease transmission and what does she what does she get as thanks every wednesday at sarah cody's house a mob gathers today still to this day and chance insults and obscenities in her and her family i called her like a month ago and she was in the shelter she has around the clock armed guards and she was in the shelter with her teenage daughter because her teenage daughter needed to study for a test the next day and she couldn't do it because the mob was making so much noise outside their house so that's what they get that's what so there's been this selective pressure placed on the public health system by the pandemic to drive the very best of them out and and to let the ones who just said i'm not going to interfere too much i let them stay and that's something we need to correct for yeah definitely i mean they're again to to think back to my my time in government um there's almost an allergy towards innovation and risk-taking right people are petrified of taking risks and i don't mean risk of the magnitude of the sorts of things we saw during covet i mean basic things like running an experiment to see whether a program works well or not i mean that i remember with the department of veterans affairs it took us eight months to get them to run a simple experiment and the reason is that the upside is so low right if they just continue with the status quo don't cause any problems right um there's there's no risks incurred and so that is the easy way forward and i mean yeah it is lightly alarming that it requires people people's willingness to lose everything um in order in order to have a voice like do you have any ideas coming out of these stories about how we can rejigger incentive systems so that we're actually leading to the best kind of problem solving whether it's within academia or like publications are everything or corporations where um it's all about profits from medicine et cetera et cetera was that a question yes i didn't hear that i didn't sorry the tone of this the tone of the voice threw me off i thought it was a statement even in a question i'm just wondering if you have any ideas of how we can rejigger some of the incentive structures that exist within these different sectors so that the end goal of actually making impact is achieved so we need to create a recognition culture in government and that is celebrating government achievement celebrating the risk takers so award shows that the whole country watches the oscars for public servants is a really good idea and there is such there is such a thing it's called the sammy awards to the families yeah and it's slowly gathering steam yeah but it should be broadcast like the oscars the stories are are fantastic so first creating the recognition culture the second is it's a big it's a leadership thing i think the leaders of each of each organization need to create this culture it isn't just like the society does it it's like if you become the secretary of commerce you need in the sec in the department of commerce to celebrate the people who are taking the risks even if it even if it goes wrong right it's the silicon valley thing if you're not if you're not if you're not screwing up sometimes you're not taking enough risk and you need to kind of tilt the other direction so what kind of leaders will do that and i think there's actually a structural change i wonder what you think of this they would have a big effect and it would be to lop off we have four thousand and something political appointees that come in with an administration they are usually typically with but with a couple of interesting exceptions they're just for the tenure of whoever is in the white house at best they might also they might quit they may get fired they may take forever to get confirmed the average the average tenure of these people in these jobs is 18 months to two years that's not a that's not you're not going to create anything in a culture in 18 months or two years nor do you even think to do it because you know you're not going to be able to do it at the head of the gao this is interesting is an exception the general accounting office the president appoints that person but it's a 15-year position and it's not surprising that the people inside that organization when you when they're surveyed rank at the top of the federal government in their answers to questions like i'm encouraged to take risk or i'm satisfied with my i love my job or i think my work is meaningful i think it's because of the way the institution is led we so we need more long-term leaders who have who have the homeowner rather than the home run renter's attitude towards the enterprise they're on top of so how do you do that you get rid of these presidential appointees you get you instead of 4 000 you have and and you are and you sort of institutionalize the leadership in the in the operations and and they're encouraged when you make this change to look to the best practices in the private sector and ask what do we do to make our employees at the department of agriculture uh as excited about their jobs as the people at you know microsoft or google or wherever it is and it's i don't think that's that hard i mean i know it sounds just radical and crazy but i don't think it is out radical and crazy especially when we've now seen what happens in an institution like the cdc when you don't have this and especially when you frame it as this is no longer like is government a little more efficient or a little less efficient it's it's a mat this is an existential matter of the the existence of the society that we're only as good as our government so so i think we're talking about the federal level but you do the same you can do the similar things at local levels and and so that's that's sort of like that's that's one fix that's one fix and i think i mean one comment there i think i do think it is a good idea to lob off some fraction um but it really is a matter of degree because one thing that the political appointee position is solving for is allowing people even like a carter mesher character who have gigs elsewhere that are often afforded short stints to bring fresh ideas into government right and so we do see these academics like cass sunstein and others who are like look harvard's willing to give me a few years off let me come in and revamp yeah yeah no i agree it's a matter of balance but it's also it's a matter of the but if you are if i say maya you are um the new head of the cdc and you're only there but you're only you know you're probably only gonna last to the end of my administration and then if right you're probably going to have two good years versus maya you're you're the new head of the cdc and you're probably going to have it for 15 years you're much more likely to bring in cass sunstein if you're going to be there for 15 years yeah you're much more you're much more likely to play to churn to look for innovation if if you're going to have to live with what you got eight years from now i think so i think that i don't think these two things are mutually exclusive yep yeah i mean that's fair i i think the the only other point i'd make is i did sense a fierce sense of urgency among political appointees to get stuff done because they knew the clock was ticking and that can have really positive psychological effects i remember i wrote once to a department of ed official it was 2014 and she reassured me that in 2017 they would make sure to try to implement my change okay so this person's human unit of time was like three years so i do think that balance but think about why that person is that way that person is that way because they're led by someone they know will be gone but and you'll be and you'll be gone whereas if that person is led by someone who's going to be around and make sure they do what they're supposed to do and that person is that slow they'll just be fired you know that that you that one of the consequences of good leadership will be the organizations we'll get rid of people who don't who don't function and you won't and this whole business of slow walking stuff because you know the boss isn't going to be around in 18 months uh that that'll go away i just think clearly our institutions need a refresh yeah it isn't just the cdc yeah it sounds like i'm coming from the political appointee lobbyist organization i actually don't i promise you i have no idea political power but but there is a tension there right right there i agree i agree that you could tilt too far in the other direction i agree i agree and and and you know after all the president is held accountable for the functioning of the federal government and if he doesn't have any any ability to have any effect on it then that gets a little silly yeah uh but um but yes i agree okay so it's i i need to make sure we have time for q a you know we're supposed to let people ask a couple exactly um i just wanted to end with one fun question which is i remember when my husband and i were visiting in berkeley a few years ago you told us that when you're writing a book you create a music playlist and you play it on loop like over and over and over again so one i'm impressed that your brain doesn't desensitize to these songs or just get tired of them but two um i'm wondering if you could share a few songs from the premonition playlist uh let me see i mean i got it here so while while you're looking at questions i'll tell you what they are but i mean it's really like my my writing playlist this is not curated for musical excellence i i mean i know i'm an idiot with music right so i don't i don't pretend to have song picking ability i'm not a dj it it's kind of like it's kind of like a a musically idiotic spin instructor looking for because i'm looking for stuff that's up usually yeah but not always but sometimes there's just things i like to write to but here's romeo and juliet mark knopfler and emily emmy lou harris suspicious minds dwight joachim uh may i have this dance francis and the lights fix you kelly clarkson i mean stuff that i i asked charity dean what her favorite song was and she sent she sent it to me and i thought that's so curious i'm putting it on the playlist oh nice and it was kermit the frog rainbow connection wow and she does not think she's unusual that is definitely chasing cars snow patrol so it's just like you know some of it's kind of cool and hip and some of it is distinctly not cool and not hip uh but it it gets me going and it becomes pavlovian if i'm in the grocery store and i hear that a song i look for like a pc to start writing words i'm meant to be writing now you know great what a nice behavioral hack yeah um okay so so peggy wants to know michael how do you decide what to write about and once you do what do you do next p.s she loves your books oh um little peggy it's a groping this is the truth and it sounds not true after every book i do ask myself should i still be doing this and i try to give myself a space where i could actually answer no so i usually go and do something else like a podcast or write a script or just take whatever and i don't say oh i've got to write another book i take i start from the position possibly no book will ever need to be written by me again that way i'm called to the book rather than i force myself on the book so i have to feel like i'm called to the story like the story needs me to the point where i feel a sense of obligation to tell it and how i get there to with any particular subject really has depended on the subject in this case it was cheap and dirty i mean i'd written the fifth risk saying something bad is going to happen and the trump administration is going to mismanage it because of the way they're handling the transition and something bad happened so i kind of thought i had a duty to poke around and i and it yielded such goal right away in the form of these characters that i was off and running um but sometimes it's like i don't going to write a book i'm just answering a question why are the oakland a's winning games without any money and the answer is so breathtakingly interesting it just mushrooms into a book but it's always there always fits i have the same conversation with my editor i've had it 16 times where i say star his name is starling lawrence great name star um i don't know does this interest you i'm really interested in this but i'm not sure and and we spent three months pondering my uncertainty and and at some point i think no i've learned so much about this and i care so much about this and nobody else is going to do it i got to do it so this is this will rev this is slightly revealing maybe um um while i was working on this i had this secret group of doctors who were influencing policy all over the united states because they had a privileged view of the pandemic carter messer sitting at the center of it no one in the world so far as i knew knew who they were and i was all in the new york times discovers one of carter's emails and he's briefly in the news he's a front page of the new york times they got a they got a tiny sliver of the story and i called richard and i said i don't think i'm gonna write the book now because i don't need to write the book because it's now in the new york times and i waited for the for all of it to kind of emerge what i knew and it didn't so i came back to it i kind of put it i said no no need to do it anymore it's already in the newspaper so it it is this feeling that it's if i don't do it it won't get done and it should be done that's the important feeling and how the stuff gets found is like it's just accident it really is accident you sound like your characters i care about a lot and if i don't do it nobody else will well that's true well that's so that's that's true that's true yeah interesting so maybe you have that same obsession okay uh satish wants to know michael which of your own books is your favorite the honest answer is like asking me which of my own kids is my favorite and if you have more than one child you'll tell us which of your kids is your favorite michael right here it's just you and me i know who it is that it's not it's it it doesn't completely compute the question um but but i make we'll make critical judgments of them and the and but the way i judge them is the way um olympic dives are judged it's not just the quality of the dive but the difficulty of the dive so the undoing project was an incredibly difficult dive where i made some splashes going into the water liar's poker was an unbelievably simple dive that was no splash at all uh is it the the money moneyball pretty simple dive not much splash um this one this one was a pretty complicated dive and i don't think there was a whole lot of splash if i had to rate them so no so it isn't like it's my favorite it's not that's not i wouldn't put it that way but if you said michael you got to put one of your books up in a writing competition 10 years from now to compete against you know other writers who's the best writer i'd put this one up um helen wants to know what was the most surprising discovery that you made when interviewing researching and writing the premonition can you describe your writing process the most introduced discovery in the material or in my writing process is it is it's what i what did i discover that just blew my doors off let's go with that one because i'm not that that was easy that was easy on the ground with charity dean in santa barbara where i was for two weeks and retracing her steps following the boulder path of the of the montecito mudslide where she'd been rescuing people and going through all the living her drama i felt like i walked into a netflix show and i thought how come i didn't know about this person not this person but this role it blew my socks off the the right behind it uh are the other two characters it's joe we haven't talked about joe theresa but you know this guy is like is like solving pandemics in pythons yeah and in parents you know viva brain eating amoebas no no it's like the most badass virus hunter you've ever seen and and then and then these people who completely rethink what happened in 1918 in order to create a national pandemic strategy i mean that blew my doors off so those were to be those three things um in the process there was one thing that kind of excited me that was new and that was in a very self-conscious way for the first time with a book i just said i'm gonna go where the characters go this is about these characters and i don't know what the story is yet and that proved to be a very f in this case maybe not in every case a very fertile way to write the book yeah it's similar it's like i remember asking um someone like a friend of mine the day that i was getting married i was like hey you have any advice for me he's like you already did that part it's about marrying the right person and so it's like oh if you find the right characters then you know the story will unfold right and that's yes you're building you're building your house on the best foundation yeah and so if some of the building materials end up being not quite up to up to code you're still okay um okay krista wants to know what do you view as the biggest mistakes made by the cdc in response to covid19 um we don't have two hours but please choose one well the the testing failure is the biggest it i mean that's the simplest and the biggest that you couldn't control anything if you can't see it and they they not only failed to provide us with the flashlights um they shut down people from providing their own self-made flashlights and together with the fda and made it essentially blinded us when they're supposed to enlighten us so that was shocking and catastrophic and cost i don't know how many lives um but the other thing i would say is is is different it's not a one thing it's a drift in the institution to the point where it was unable to stand up to donald trump it just caved and and so um it and put out and so became a mouthpiece for lots of false stuff it became it it um it lost it the process by which it lost its ability to be brave is the other side of this yeah and i love that you point out too like these problems didn't start with trump and i think that's such an effortless narrative to have um and you say no no this stuff is deeply entrenched and it began long before um okay so hopefully we can do maybe two more but if molly wants to know if you could redo an interview in your career what would it be we had this conversation two days ago about hating the idea of reinterviewing but go for it so if i could if i could redo some part of my career no no if you could redo an interview in your interview what would it be oh redo an interview i have ver i don't have those kind of regrets i just don't have them i don't i i nothing comes to mind with an interview because no one interview is ever that important it's it's it's a relationship uh charity i mean i have to spend not not days but months with someone before i can really get them so one there's no there's no great risk from any one interview um and i can't one potential mistake be that maybe you for a moment make them feel like oh no i share too much or you say slightly the wrong thing like have you ever encountered that moment that felt like i never lost i've never lost a fish you know i've never every fish i've hooked i've landed and so i've never had the problem with someone just saying oh no you just scared me off the story i don't want to be with you anymore i don't want you writing about me anymore with one exception but it wasn't an interview the mistake i made it was with george soros 20 years ago when i i was gonna write a book about him and i flew all over eastern europe with him and it was there was a there was a masterpiece in him there was a masterpiece um and it would have cut across the financial markets and government and i made the mistake of writing a cover piece about him for the new republic that offended him and he had previously agreed to just let me be his writer and he then said no he didn't trust me anymore so that was i think he made a mistake but uh that was a mistake on my part to write that thing i should have just shut up um okay let's do one final one uh unless can you go over a few minutes michael i don't know how this system is yeah okay there's some really great questions in here um what do you read or listen to for fun i read all kinds of stuff so right now i'm reading kazuo ishiguro's novel clara and the sun uh he's like how can you win the nobel prize and still write so well i mean it's just not it's not fair it's just it's it's so good um i saw i read fiction the non-fiction i tend to read is usually work related it's usually stuff i need to know about i i don't i seldom pick up it's not true sometimes i'll read biographies but it's it's i i tend to read more fiction than non-fiction for pleasure okay there's a tendency there um and was it was it was what i listened to or was it was that what do you listen to for fun what's your favorite podcast um well uh there's this new one called a slight change of plans that is just i mean mind-blowing right yeah i don't know what to do about i can't i mean i don't want to write anymore it's so good i just want to listen to yeah the host is so charming the host is so charming but i um i i mean i listen to all of malcolm gladwell's podcast because he he kind of led me into the business um this is so this is like this is damning i'm not a big consumer of culture i'm a big consumer of of fiction i'm a sort of consumer of some kinds of non-fiction i watch i do get hooked on tv shows i'm now watching uh mayor of what is it east town the the the kate winslet detective story it's a soap opera but it's a i ca you can watch i could watch you know kate winslet open an envelope it's just so good yeah uh and i i there i get i get hooked on things i i'm a i'm not a systematic consumer of culture um this stuff kind of appears before me and i eat it uh but but tending towards fiction and tending towards television you know good television drama um okay peggy wants to know given your last book on federal federal bureaucrats the fifth risk and all that happened during the trump years do you ever circle back to the folks who you featured to find out what happened to them and what they thought thought about what i wrote i think that's yeah i think that's the name oh always i mean i can't i mean almost always a lot yes um yeah because you know a lot of them just are totally oblivious to what's going to happen when they're written about in the book i'll tell you one i'll tell you what's funny arthur a allen who ended up being the afterward to the paperback of the fifth risk in 8 000 words uh who basically created the field of of the beca it was the world's expert in how different objects drift at sea enabling him and the coast guard to rescue all kinds of people who otherwise would have just been lost at sea because they didn't know that they didn't know how an overturned 18-foot sailboat moved in the waters they couldn't predict where the thing had gone he develops a prediction machine for all these different objects author so this is a story of me and my subjects this is not a it's a funny one but it's not it sort of captures the spirit of it i called author a allen to write about him but because i picked him off an alphabetized list of government workers who have been fur who've been furloughed as inessential as inessential and and i just thought hmm i wonder what he does that's so inessential only saved like 8 000 lives but never mind uh and i called him i said i want to come i'm michael lewis i i'm i'm i got this book that i'm want to write up afterward to and he he obviously didn't listen that closely he said sure come on come on i fly out to connecticut from california and i'll spend time with you and he spent three full days with me i mean full days i interviewed his wife his children we went to his old office we went out to the long island sound where he'd floated all these objects to figure out how objects drift he had cried before me remembering a woman he hadn't saved it got very emotional three days later i'm on my way back to the airport and i get a call from arthur a allen and he says you're a writer you're like an author and i said yeah i did i told you that when i called you he said no i didn't really hear that he said i thought you i said what did you think i was doing flying to connecticut to spend three days with you and do all these interviews he said i thought you were just interested in how objects drift i said no i'm interested but not that interested and he's so uh i got an email from arthur a allen today because he just read the premonition and he now knows i'm an author and we are like friends like so i don't just stay in touch because they they to tell them how you know to get their feedback about the book and all this i stay in touch because we've become friends and uh so i know if the first thing that happens is i hear how what kind of feedback they got or what they think about what i wrote but it go that gets to that becomes water under the bridge and we move on to having a relationship um so so keith wants to know if this book dings the cult of fouchy oh you know i really like anthony fauci and i don't want to ding the cult of falci um if you wanted to go if you wanted to use it as a weapon if you're the kind of person who wanted to do damage to anthony fauci i wouldn't approve of you but and you wanted to use my book as a weapon against him you'd say huh if you're so smart how come you didn't know as much as carter messer did in january the 20th you know it was it was he was saying everything was kind of not that big a deal it was like okay and they were watching it um when carter was explaining why you shouldn't say it's okay and they're you're watching it but anthony fauci's operating with constraints that carter measure isn't he he needs to stay to stay um copacetic with trump enough that he can get up and talk to the american people so he's playing a political game at the in the same time he's doing his very best to save lives so i really admire him and i would hate it if somebody took this to as a as kind of something to use against him yeah no he he was kind of the man last year so yeah okay well we this will be the final one from aaron that's a great question so after everything is back to normal what do you think about the possibility of people not having any interest in reading watching listening or compute consuming anything that is pandemic related as we have been living this for this 24 7. yes thank you for writing it look forward to reading it so no it's people will have that um prejudice i might have that prejudice i wasn't that worried about that prejudice because the pandemic we don't get to the pandemic till page 180 in my book i mean and and i told my editor the joke of this book is i'm skipping the pandemic that it's going to be done so briefly because the only interest to my characters is the very beginning of it that you don't have to you're not taking on this forced march through a dreary event uh that's not it wasn't what the story was about it was about all the things around the pandemic that led to what happened during the pandemic and the reader and so in some ways it's not even a book about the pandemic yeah i think that some ways it's about something yeah so i wasn't that worried about oh people won't read a pandemic book because it isn't one it is and it isn't yeah i'm thinking if you were to control place replace like covet or pandemic or even infectious disease but just about anything else these same stories would hold like for these main characters that is really interesting yeah okay all right well this is super fun we done we're done all right you did a great job thanks you did too all right great great moderating maya and michael um i don't know why maya won't let you roam around her place but you can come over to mine anything and make me i'm starting to feel a little creepy everyone watching thanks very much for tuning in uh this is michael's best book yet so be sure to read it and in the chat column you can find bookstore links for purchasing additional copies of the premonition from all of us here at politics and prose as well as from our friends at harvard bookstore in cambridge and books and books in miami stay well and well-read

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 21,377

Keywords:

Id: eOgTZjoZqps

Length: 67min 21sec (4041 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021