00:05:28.780it probably does have the effect of you reaching people you wouldn't normally reach 100 and also
00:05:33.700showing humanity i mean i wasn't i'm not also trying to take people down which is what we do
00:05:38.240on cable i'm like i do that trust me i'm a fighter but i just i wanted to find out what
00:05:42.920their motivations were the humanity and for bannon was interesting i'll never forget that
00:05:46.560conversation because i felt i literally stopped him i said i feel like i'm talking to bernie
00:05:50.000sanders the populism he was arguing at the time against trump's tax cuts for the wealth financial0.93
00:05:56.180crisis that drove him that politicized him it was like saving all the the asses of all these rich
00:06:00.880people it bothered the hell of him and what happened to his dad his narrative is all about
00:06:04.820all working saving the working class yeah exactly i mean it gets more complicated as you dig into it
00:06:10.420but i'm curious i was surprised that they wanted to come on i was shocked and i think it was just
00:06:17.420curiosity particularly i mean and charlie wanted to come in person and we spent a couple hours
00:06:23.500Yeah, it was. I actually did it in Marin County. And he was the first one. So I was trying to get guests. He was the first to say, I'll do it in person. We really wanted someone in person. So he happened to be the first guest. He was one of the first I reached out to. But success leaves clues, right? I mean, he was out there organizing the campuses. I had friends and family that were showing up saying, Gavin, you know, dad or Gavin, my niece's nephews, USC, I had a niece who said, look at the photo of the amount of people that are showing up in Charlie Kirk.
00:06:51.520I'm like, we need to pay some attention to this.
00:07:21.180Yeah. He was, well, he also, he, he, he found some opportunities to be a little more competitive because he knew if his audience wouldn't take it, you know, kind of have to own the lip, you know, and I was not coming in with that mindset. I wasn't trying to take him down. I was honestly trying to understand his motivation and understand what he was doing and make the case what, I mean, I literally asked him, what do you recommend my party do? We just got shellacked.
00:07:43.580right we lost both houses we lost the presidency we lost popular vote yeah um how have you been
00:07:48.820organizing tell me more yeah about what your strategies are what you're hearing what you know
00:07:53.620what to do with that it was interesting it was a little more it was just more personable but
00:07:56.700it's fascinating looking back obviously with the tragedy of that assassination and the fact that we
00:08:01.220had that moment and it was a was a moment because there's been not many moments like that i mean
00:08:06.260you saw what happened to jeffrey's meeting with kushner yeah i mean people just want nothing to
00:08:10.500do with it it's scorched earth and that's just not healthy no no no it's really not healthy
00:08:15.380yeah and you you've got to even if you want to think of them as your enemies you've got to
00:08:20.320understand your enemy thank you you know it's like you have this thing it's a there's a there's a in
00:08:25.660my life there's a version of this and it's um and i and it informs the way i go about reporting the
00:08:32.660books um it was a kid's book called the traveler's tale that i read when i was like six yeah and
00:08:38.360there was a there was a guy walking through a landscape with a cloak and the north wind and
00:08:43.720the sun get an argument about who can get the guy to remove his cloak all right you know open up
00:08:49.700like get to know him and the north wind comes in and blows and blows and blows and the and the
00:08:54.780cloak goes like this right it's like he holds it tighter and tighter and the north wind finally
00:08:58.720gives up sun comes in and bath sunshine on him and he removes it voluntarily that is the to me
00:09:04.280it's sort of like the metaphor right you've got to get people in a comfortable space before they'll
00:09:09.800give it up like whatever it is you're and we're trying to get his understanding yeah what is the
00:09:13.760point of a conversation if you're not going to have some sort of understanding and if you if
00:09:17.840everybody's operating in this defensive crouch or this combative you know you never get anywhere
00:09:22.920it's just like and and so with subjects it's a little different it's not a political thing so
00:09:27.620much it's more that they're a little scared yeah they don't want to get they're worried what i
00:09:31.900might do to them they're worried that they're worried that if they're known that somehow that
00:09:36.920would work against them if the the only way to kind of tease people out is to make them feel
00:09:42.680completely warm and comfortable right nice soft seats nice tour of the mansion you know coffee
00:09:49.460coffee coffee for the machine and milk you know it's just like that's how i mean if you if you
00:09:56.220had had if you had had me in here yeah to take me down this is exactly how you should do it
00:10:01.280because you what you'll do is we haven't even started you would lead me to take myself down
00:10:07.840you know you already exposed myself right uh but you don't do that in your book i mean you've never
00:10:11.500you're not known for taking down your subjects it's i'm not however let's be if we actually go
00:10:18.460through the literature there are a lot of people who are really pissed off about every every book
00:10:22.620every book is that right i mean i mean the liars poker pissed off yeah all of wall street flash
00:10:27.480boys pissed off all of wall street big short they they they were so they they'd been so humiliated
00:10:33.540they couldn't be pissed off but they would have been pissed off moneyball pissed off all of
00:10:38.500baseball all of baseball i was non grata i mean i could not watch espn without people being pissed
00:10:44.280off the blind side interestingly pissed off people who thought there was something wrong about a white
00:10:50.680family taking in a black kid and helping him with his life that it was like you had that dimension
00:10:56.300oh my god it was very it was odd um sam bankman freed story pissed off everybody who wanted to
00:11:01.980be pissed off at sam bankman free but he couldn't really complain he's in jail no he couldn't for
00:11:05.72025 years so the books but but the relationships to the subjects but the subject but themselves
00:11:11.660are not the ones i will tell you this is also true that um i have not had a book where the
00:11:18.800subject was not instantly upset in some way that the end it and it's it isn't it isn't you made
00:11:27.060stuff up about me or i didn't say that it's not that they feel they feel a little violated
00:11:32.200this is a little closer to the bone kind of thing and i mean billy bean billy bean you i mean what
00:11:39.420would you would think now what would billy bean have to complain about thank you he was livid
00:11:43.340livid with me he calls me and he is like this just this loud sound coming out of the phone
00:11:49.800and i say like billy what's the problem and i actually thought maybe the problem was i gave
00:11:55.260away his secrets and that was going to be yeah so that could be but no he says you have me saying0.99
00:12:00.160fuck all the time and i said you do say fuck all the time and he says wait he says my mother's1.00
00:12:05.440going to be so pissed wow and i said i said billy like your mother that's who you're worried about1.00
00:12:10.840I thought you'd be like worried about everybody else in baseball being pissed.
00:12:13.340And he says, you don't think everybody else in baseball is going to read your book.
00:27:30.060It's because no, this is where I had a tactical advantage.
00:27:37.060So, and I asked myself this before I start books,
00:27:40.040why is this book available for me to be written?
00:27:43.400It's a bit like a wall street person asks,
00:27:45.920why is this trade available for me to do?
00:27:48.540there's adverse selection in any marketplace and if if when i'm checking my sense about whether i
00:27:57.460should write a book i want to know there's some reason why i have an advantage writing it because
00:28:02.480otherwise it should have been written already kind of thing maybe i shouldn't write it maybe
00:28:06.260someone else will write it why is it me and i had gotten so deep in the weeds in the government with
00:28:12.880both the fifth risk and then i published an anthology called who is government which were
00:28:17.420where i i brought some writers in to prove my point that if you airdrop writers good writers
00:28:22.640into the government they come away with incredible stories right and that had been a bestseller i
00:28:27.160mean that had sold a lot of copies and so it showed that there was an interest in it but but
00:28:32.200the combination of those two books i had met people all over the government and i had my secret
00:28:39.240my secret agent is a guy named max steyer who runs the partnership for public service
00:28:43.920which created the obligation they're the ones who got the laws passed that required
00:28:48.380presidential transitions max steyer you should say he's someone he's someone you should know
00:28:53.360you really should he he's he's devoted his life to trying in a non-profit trying to make government
00:28:58.500work better love it he starts by he starts 25 years ago by trying to make government a place
00:29:03.360where smart young people want to come to work and he realizes that the only way you do that
00:29:07.260is you get it you make it work better now it's been it's been a sisyphean task yeah it's been
00:29:13.040a hard job i think you numerically what seven percent of people under 30 years old or something
00:29:16.980that's it no it's crazy i mean that's it no it's where it gets really crazy is you start looking at
00:29:21.880like in in information technology like who makes the computers run like 60 of them are over the
00:29:28.140age of 55 and they can't use their phones and it's not it's not fair you know right but max is
00:29:35.040attacking these problems yeah and he attacks them sincerely and in a non-partisan way and as a
00:29:41.060result the partnership has become this hub for the civil service he trains civil servants he gives
00:29:46.920there's an award ceremony he created called the sammy's awards where he hands out awards to people
00:29:51.200who've done extraordinary interesting things and so he's got a database of thousands and thousands
00:29:56.560of civil servants and um and i started with him i started introduced me to some people interesting
00:30:03.420and he ran through dozens of people for me to interview who had who had come out of various
00:30:08.240parts of the government and i think in no case did he actually introduce me to someone who became
00:30:13.520a subject of mine but the people i interviewed led me to people who led me to people and finally
00:30:18.340got it so i and i had a choice with every category but when i got to the person i i almost in every
00:30:26.320case i thought oh my god yes this is the this person enables me to to describe to teach to
00:30:33.280dramatize the general problem in the best possible way these different people who are strung together
00:30:39.940like circus elephants in the story these different people are different they're different enough from
00:30:44.580each other that nobody will feel there's a redundancy they'll realize they're with a
00:30:50.580different person and they speak to each other in odd ways so i i was i i cast it and um and in no
00:30:59.920case did i have anybody say i don't want to do this meaning when you reached out they the civil
00:31:06.500service is in such a state of despair that they've dropped their pose of we don't i don't talk to
00:31:11.240journalists that normally yeah right normally they're like i'm not i'm not the subject normally
00:31:17.020they're like go away i or i got you go talk to the press secretary yeah exactly in this case
00:31:22.340they were our society's falling apart what i've come what why i the i'm questioning the whole
00:31:31.400reason i went to go into public service in the first place i i need therapy no no really
00:31:38.380i want to talk to someone i need to talk to someone so so they were all open to it and i
00:31:44.980gotta say i'm probably done with the government now as a subject but i gotta say that this little
00:31:49.780detour in my career has been among the most delightful uh that it's that it is it's there's
00:31:57.840something about these people people who've selected people who could have gone into the
00:32:02.840private sector and made a lot of money who've found some problem they want to attack want some
00:32:08.400purpose greater than themselves want to serve in some way there's something so moving about them
00:32:14.500and there's there's there's a between the lines of all the stuff i've written about them i feel
00:32:19.100like that they are also sort of teaching us how to lead meaningful lives that they that these are
00:32:25.040people none of my none of these characters unlike some of my wall street characters none of these
00:32:30.100characters are people who on their deathbed will have regrets about how they led their lives i love
00:32:34.520that they'll say nice i did what i was supposed to do i did my best i left it on the field that's
00:32:39.340if they feel like people who've left it all in the field and it's so it's i don't know in these
00:32:45.020case in this case it's fun it's a fun the casting of the book is a fun it's a fun challenge but
00:32:50.260these are blockers michael they're blockers the pejorative have you ever heard that term uh i mean
00:32:55.500every conceivable pejorative uh for a civil servant and for the civil service uh yes yes
00:33:02.500yeah all right so elon musk had this thing he used it at twitter like find the blockers and
00:33:08.160clearly the people the evil people who don't see the future yeah like go in and go in and get rid
00:33:13.860of them yeah and he said this to the to all the muskrats he brought into washington to go to go
00:33:19.120and clear out this in the with doge yeah go find the blockers yeah so i just thought that that was
00:33:26.300the frame of the book is like yeah i'll find the blockers i'll show you who they are the rebels in
00:33:30.900the deep state yeah the people there are people who are actually if they're blocking you they may
00:33:35.220be blocking the only reason they're blocking you is you're asking to do something against the law
00:33:38.540That it's that they are not serving their understanding of their job. They aren't there to serve the personal interests of Donald Trump. They're there to serve the Constitution. They take an oath to the Constitution that they're not allowed to break the law. They're not allowed to do they're not allowed to weaponize the IRS, you know, the IRS data. They're not allowed to this and that. Right. They're not allowed to be a rig ref. They're not allowed to be a dishonest referee.
00:34:04.360so that they what doge hit when it went in were these people who were principled and who in the
00:34:13.400end ended up sacrificing their career for their principles right like there was an option to just
00:34:17.800suck up to doge and some people took that option if there was a these this kind of vichy moment
00:34:22.860where you could decide which side you're on and the people i chose to profile were the people who0.98
00:34:29.120said no i'm not going along with this like it's it's i guess i'm a blocker kind of thing so you
00:34:35.300were you so was the inspiration for this bottom obviously there's a through line here with the
00:34:39.920multiple books and going back to trump 1.0 trump 2.0 and this this notion of being present in the
00:34:46.1202.0 frame versus indifferent in the 1.0 frame uh but was this i mean were you just sitting back
00:34:52.440watching all these headlines with doge this ready fire aim construct and just going in and you know
00:34:58.120it was that the impetus i knew enough so there i i actually had a brief moment where i thought
00:35:04.880this the elon musk thing could work out because it was you were i was hopeful i was like i kind
00:35:09.900of thought very time for someone to take on the bureaucracy it wasn't thin it out what that wasn't
00:35:14.760what it was what was it was the big there is a big problem in technology problem in government
00:35:20.440yeah government is slow government is not well suited to an environment with rapid technical
00:35:26.280technical change we live in an environment with lots of technological change and it's slow to
00:35:32.840upgrade yeah it really needs to be our government needs to be upgraded and i thought he was going
00:35:37.640to attack that problem because that's the one he's qualified to attack and instead he attacked
00:35:42.500entirely different problem he framed it as a different problem is the whole thing is waste
00:35:47.420fraud and abuse and so i unfortunately i knew too much already i spent way too much time actually
00:35:53.700going and finding out things and yes there's waste of course there's waste it's it's trillions
00:35:58.480of dollars and two million people and there's always better ways to do things yep much of the
00:36:03.180waste is institutionalized it's system if it's wasteful it's because congress makes them do it
00:36:08.140this way it isn't that they're wasteful people yeah what there isn't the idea that the idea that
00:36:14.200you're going to find a lot of fraud like people stealing in the government stealing right is
00:36:19.220insane they're watched every which way it is true that we americans have some talent for stealing
00:36:25.040from their government like not not people who work for the government defrauding medicare or
00:36:30.260something like that sure you might find that yeah but the idea that these people are kind of corrupt
00:36:35.320in some way you can't buy them lunch they there's so many rules around them and they're so they're
00:36:41.120phobic about violating those rules if you want to find fraud go to a wall street firm you know go to
00:36:46.240private go to go to a private sector firm there you go for sure that you'd find much more of it
00:36:51.260there and it's not that it's not really so they're not going to be a lot of stories about civil
00:36:57.080servants stealing from the government and so that i knew that was already kind of a weird approach
00:37:03.780and and then what what lit so what lit me up was when he said he was going to save two trillion
00:37:09.080dollars out of the deficit and he didn't even start to talk about medicaid or medicare or
00:37:13.300social security or and it was literally two trillion that was the promoted that what he was
00:37:18.300attacking was there wasn't two trillion there yeah so it and and i knew how starved of resources
00:37:24.740parts of the things that we really want to be done were so i knew he was he was going to try
00:37:31.820to starve something that was already maybe being starved too much so then i started watching and0.97
00:37:37.400it was you know it was a shit show right he didn't know i always assume people know more than i do0.98
00:37:42.680i'm not an expert type right i don't i'm a writer type right i go in i learn what i need to know0.98
00:37:48.400to tell us to try to tell an accurate story a story that will grip people about a thing that
00:37:54.960interests me and then i'm out and i forget about it i bathtub flushes new story comes in i'm i i'm0.97
00:38:00.900not so i'm always assuming that the people in charge know all the shit that i don't know he0.82
00:38:06.660was so obviously less informed than i was it shocked the hell out of me yeah and then he0.72
00:38:11.740started making stuff up yeah and he's just lying yeah now what was odd about that is i tried to
00:38:17.760talk to him he didn't he didn't want to talk to me uh but i talked to some of his closest friends
00:38:22.620and they were kind of adamant elon never lies oh god i know no no no their line was this is
00:38:30.560different from it's different no even trump's best friends wouldn't say trump never lies
00:38:34.240but but they say elon believes what he's saying is what it okay and then i start right okay but
00:38:40.740But I started watching what he was saying, and I just thought, there's no way he could believe that.
00:38:47.040And the things, very quite damaging lies.
00:38:49.860I mean, one of the things that set me off was when, in the very beginning, they started invading various pretty peripheral institutions in the federal, small ones, not places where you're going to find trillions of dollars.
00:44:20.960Thank you. So this was, I had, that was my first thought when I thought, David, I read a headline, Doge Invades, U.S. Institute of Peace. And I thought, that's what I thought, what the hell is the U.S. Institute of Peace? And I thought, how do I not know about it? Because when I was working on The Fifth Risk, I had gotten the org chart for the entire federal bureaucracy.
00:44:41.740You went deep on commerce, deep on ag, deep on energy.
00:44:45.140You knew before the former energy secretary under Trump 1.0 that actually it includes nuclear as well.
00:44:50.360I knew all kinds of things they didn't know.
00:44:52.060But more importantly, for the purposes of my story, I had on my office floor every government agency.
00:44:57.720And I was thinking about which ones, where do I go?
00:50:55.180I could see, you know, I kept trying to enter the point of view of Trump world, like why
00:51:01.960they were so frustrated or why they thought they needed to do this.
00:51:05.740And the best story they could tell is a story they sometimes try to tell is we had this
00:51:11.420great agenda the first time that these people yeah but they didn't have an agenda no the whole
00:51:17.120point is they didn't have an agenda they didn't try to these people didn't know what they were
00:51:20.560supposed to do mostly so they carried on doing whatever they were doing and a lot of it was not
00:51:25.000most of it's not partisan most of it is stuff everybody would agree there's a reason it's being
00:51:30.260done so that's the false story it's not a true story but it's a story they peddled you need to
00:51:36.740get rid of this, the deep state. The deep state, there isn't really a deep state.
00:51:42.680The clay layer of bureaucrats that are stopping any progress whatsoever, a world that's rapidly
00:51:47.640changing. We need government that recognizes that. What is true is that if you want to seize
00:51:53.040total control, these people do get in your way because they are abiding the law, not you. And so
00:52:00.280over and over they're going to be they're going to be irritants at at minimum and so it is true
00:52:07.180that you need to decapitate that that part of it that you need to get rid of the impulse to serve
00:52:13.160the constitution rather than than a person and that that runs right but when you do that you're
00:52:19.720fiddling with the basic functions of government and it's the thing's going to be done differently
00:52:22.860than we've worked i give you one example that where this the penny dropped for me the first
00:52:26.720time was when i was just thinking about how the data story plays out the information government
00:52:30.940is such a it's such a wild story because we sort of take for granted the census and the weather
00:52:36.120service and all maybe that that my story moneyball about baseball it's a story about what people do
00:52:44.840when they have data that that they're you once you have data you can change the way baseball is
00:52:49.640played government is moneyball all over the place government's chock-filled with data that people
00:52:55.320use or don't use you got it and there you can break the data down into a couple of buckets
00:53:00.300for the purposes of this story and one the giant pool of the bigger bucket is is data that the
00:53:08.660government collects and the public really needs and needs to be made accessible to the public
00:53:12.720so weather data climate data economic data so on so forth that that bright people can come along
00:53:19.440and used for all kinds of interesting purposes the smaller bucket but is a critical bucket is
00:53:25.040data the government necessarily collects but it's meant to be intensely private because it can be
00:53:29.240weaponized uh tax returns health care data that census data yep yep now in the former world in
00:53:38.920our old government world uh it's understood that the private data it's taboo to touch the private
00:53:44.060data yes and there are all these safeguards around it and you know however inefficient or
00:53:49.500ineffectually it's done there is an attempt to get the public data out to the public as on websites
00:53:55.160or wherever so the public can make by the way very intentional i mean obama moving to open data
00:53:59.060initiatives i wrote a book called citizenville on this government as a platform making machine
00:54:03.920readable all this treasure trove of data and allowing people to be you know to come up with
00:54:08.660their own apps and come up with their own design and sort of focus 100 legit yeah but then on the
00:54:14.040flip side and this is then when you but if so you wave a one so this is like okay you america maybe
00:54:19.720you want this yeah we're not going to we're not going to make any value judgments here but if
00:54:24.460we're now in this operation that's a pure loyalist operation and everything including the data is
00:54:30.040meant to serve a person what happens well in the big pile of data a lot of data is going to be
00:54:36.220implicitly threatening to someone who's sitting at good economic data good inflation data when
00:54:43.340inflation's going up bad but you know good economic data when the economy isn't doing so
00:54:49.060great yep uh climate data when you don't want to know thank you when you stick your head in the
00:54:53.220sand so all of a sudden data sets start to disappear over here and that's what's happened
00:54:58.260the head of the the i think was the bureau of labor statistics the woman who is in charge of
00:55:04.500that gets fired because he doesn't like the i feel like that was 20 years ago thank you for
00:55:08.800remind me but that's right it's systematic right thank you in this pool of data it's going to be
00:55:13.920parsed by the loyalists to make sure no data that reflects poorly on the person we're supposed to be
00:55:21.060loyal to is out there never mind how valuable it is to be out there on the flip side the private
00:55:26.760data that can be weaponized against one's enemies is instantly weaponized and so the story in the
00:55:33.000book is the kathleen walters was in charge of privacy at the irs yeah and it was her body was
00:55:39.880between your tax returns and the trump political operation there is a very sensitive uh database
00:55:47.640inside the irs called itins i didn't know about it but for undock you know about this intimately
00:55:53.760okay and we assure those that sign up that that data will not be shared correct so people came
00:56:01.040under that auspices that they didn't have to concern about that yes to give as a mechanism
00:56:06.360for for undocumented workers to pay taxes so they pay uh to establish their good intentions and
00:56:13.420their all the rest and hundreds of billions of dollars have been collected through this
00:56:17.720you know they didn't have social security numbers they needed something so they could file tax
00:56:21.600returns and if you go into any place where there are lots of undocumented workers living there'll0.98
00:56:25.960be a big sign from the irs saying how you file your taxes using an itin and no one will ever
00:56:31.840use this information against you 100 and we've been telling them that for 30 years uh so it is
00:56:38.880a sin that the moment that the trump administration takes over the department of homeland security
00:56:44.760requests the seven million person database because they don't have reliable home addresses for
00:56:51.820undocumented workers and this is the the most recent tax return is the most likely place
00:56:57.180where they're living and kathleen walters says no in the end it costs her her job yeah she's
00:57:04.760one of the heroes of the book but but it's the um you think about this you think about the state
00:57:12.560of our soul that we've let this happen you i asked myself and other people like when in american
00:57:19.120history did we did we betray people a population in the same way the same answer always comes back
00:57:27.020japanese americans world war ii the census bureau but there's a difference the census data which
00:57:34.420had been you know people had by the way another occupant of this mansion earl warren who was
00:57:39.280interning the japanese we forget brown versus board of education oh warren yeah we forget about
00:57:43.660that earl warren that's right interestingly yeah yes so so the census data was used to figure out
00:57:52.260which zip codes japanese americans were concentrated in and a lot a lot out here and
00:57:56.740rounded and used to round them up and and put them in concentration camps the the difference
00:58:03.600then between then and now is that it was actually even though it was gross and awful and people are
00:58:09.740kind of embarrassed by it in retrospect. At the time, it was actually legal for the Census Bureau
00:58:14.900to do that. This is illegal. What they've done with the IRS data, there is a law that forbids
00:58:21.380them from this data for being used in this way. So the law is being broken. And the point that
00:58:27.600Kathleen Walters made to me that lit up the sky for me was there is a direct connection between
00:58:34.900protecting this private data and the ability of the government to collect the data it needs to
00:58:41.100understand the society because if people know that data the government collects is going to
00:58:47.600be weaponized against them they are not going to give them the information and we're not going to
00:58:52.140know how many people live in the country where they live thank you it's going on anywhere that
00:58:55.840we're not essentially we're not going to have a reality anymore we're going to have we're going
00:58:59.020to have and in this case they won't be paying their taxes right well yeah that's and they won't
00:59:03.080be paying their taxes so it's um i find so the question i had it so i when i start a book i did
00:59:11.740there's so much luck involved there's so much luck involved like i don't i know roughly how it's
00:59:16.960going to go but i when i started that story i thought i'm never going to be able to prove
00:59:22.500i can prove they asked for the i this data the dhs asked for this data i can eventually prove
00:59:30.200that they got little bits and pieces of it in spite of her efforts but i can i really prove
00:59:35.940that they used it and i was i was weirdly speaking at a conference a housing conference
00:59:41.580and the guy i was off stage before the conference with a guy who i'd never met who is about who was
00:59:47.880going to interview me and he introduces himself as antonio marquez i said well what are you doing
00:59:52.100he says well i have all these housing units across the south and the southwest and um and they and
00:59:58.100And mainly it's like a lot of undocumented workers, but it's a huge Latino population.
01:00:02.800Turned out Antonio's dad had come to America as an undocumented worker and built a billion dollar business building Mexican grocery stores and became became a citizen.
01:00:11.340Huge success. Antonio is the son of that fortune. And he wants to do things for this population.
01:00:16.060And so he has housing units across. And I said so I said to him, you know, I have an odd question for you.
01:00:22.360and i started to tell him he goes oh my god he said in the last couple of months all across our
01:00:28.560our housing projects ice is turning up in the middle of the night and they know the exact
01:00:33.000address and we can't figure out why so the end of that story the punchline is me with antonio
01:00:39.100one of his housing in austin texas like it's happening that they have the somehow they got
01:00:44.980the addresses and we know how they got the addresses they raided this file in the irs
01:00:48.700so it's um the larger point is illegally the courts rejected that and they still went for it
01:00:56.920yeah and they still rejected yes um the larger point is is that okay you may think you like
01:01:06.120you may think this new form of government that he's hatching is a better form of government
01:01:10.780more efficient trains run on time or whatever i don't know what you think but you're going to get
01:01:15.520a different outcome and this is what the outcome is going to look like uh you know you can now
01:01:21.440decide but it's going to be different the rate data is going to be handled and collected it's
01:01:26.360going to be different and the size will become opaque to itself correct effectively that's the
01:01:30.260direction we'll be taking it's already happened the chilling effect's already real we're seeing
01:01:33.760that in terms of benefit programs you are not seeing it in the state at scale oh because people
01:01:40.680are not reapplying for benefits using their i-10 people are not even seeking those benefits
01:01:47.760because they can't trust the federal government how they use the department of motor vehicles
01:01:51.240same thing they're trying to raid those the databases all across the country we've been
01:01:55.020continue to litigate and the trump administration continues to vandalize all those those databases
01:01:59.880it's not healthy for the society fundamentally not healthy because what happens it's all it's
01:02:05.320around transparency. It's about safety, not just about security in the context, also about
01:02:11.060resources. But ultimately, we'll have, I mean, it's the erosion of that trust has already impacted
01:02:18.180states at scale, our state, unlike any other state in the country. Right.
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01:41:36.100But to go after public spiritedness, it's just dark.
01:41:42.680Because if we lose it, if we just become a cynical place where everybody's just out for themselves and we can't trust nobody, why go into that?
01:41:52.260Because you're just going to attract the ire of the people in power.
01:56:29.680But how quickly this flamed out from my humble perspective.
01:56:34.700I mean, just that said, how consequential the things that didn't flame out, the USAID,
01:56:41.960A lot of the things that were foreign, not domestic, there wasn't a lobby necessarily to stop domestically some of this damage and the reversion and the essential workers that were shifted back.
01:56:52.900So there's a lot of vandalism done domestically that I think we can, as the spirit of Isaiah, could be repairers of the breach.
01:57:00.900but as it relates to the larger issues here the meta issues the truth and trust
01:57:06.280and trusting institutions trust trusting those referees and those independent arbiters of facts
01:57:12.600i mean the judicial branch more broadly even more you know that's a sort of separate right and above
01:57:17.140question no i that's going to take some time so i build that scaffold i give you some my random
01:57:21.600thoughts now on this question yes sir several random thoughts yeah your rhetorical question
01:57:25.980let's hear it it's called boomer asking i'm asking your question so you were asking so you
01:57:31.360ask it because i really because really i want you to ask me yes so uh it's one of the things
01:57:36.440it's one of the things people hate most and other people followed only by exceeded only by humble
01:57:42.360bragging you don't want to do that god such so unfortunate how many girls like me yeah exactly
01:57:48.420yeah no i just hate people who do that better to lie better to lie i work just too yeah right
01:57:53.060I burn out too easily because I'm so productive.
02:01:32.640So, I mean, there are just a million things.
02:01:35.180And I do have things I want to write about that are not this.
02:01:37.520But I actually think that this is just, there is an inefficiency in the storytelling market about the federal government.
02:01:46.460And that when you tell the true story, and you do it as cleanly as you can, you're not trying to, like, warp the story in any way, that you hit people with it, they think again.
02:01:56.880And I hope that something like this happens, that the Democrats, because the Republicans can't because of Trump, but the Democrats take back the House and whoever is in charge of the House Oversight Committee calls me and says, I want to have a weird sort of hearing.
02:02:16.820it's not going to be gotcha it's not going to be we're going to score points against the
02:02:21.420republicans it's going to be we're going to dramatize and make it really fun for the american
02:02:26.480people to understand what's going on inside the civil service and we want your characters pick
02:02:31.440some of your characters even people who are on the cutting room floor and you can guide us like
02:02:35.340come and just like be the emcee like help us help them teach us what we need to know you could come
02:02:43.020in and like set it up by it by describing who tim curry is and why we need to listen to him
02:02:47.360then we'll wheel tim curry in we'll have cameras on the situation and and and and there'll be a
02:02:52.940like a referee with a whistle on the side and whenever anybody says anything that's particularly
02:02:57.240partisan like trying to get everybody whistle blows game stops this is the point of this is
02:03:03.420to educate it's like we're just trying to learn here we've clearly failed to understand our own
02:03:08.480government something i would love for something i so i talked to jamie raskin about this and he is
02:03:13.960not going to be the head of the oversight committee anymore but he was game he thought that was a good
02:03:18.560idea so i just think we need to take a breath and understand this mechanism because if it really
02:03:25.340gets screwed up we're doomed and it's really we're really juvenile in the way we view it it's like
02:03:31.200we view the relationship between the american people and the american government has devolved0.76
02:03:35.600to this place where it's sort of like 12 year old boy and mom mom's to blame for everything mom mom
02:03:41.800mom why did you do this why did you do that and but you don't survive without mom right so you
02:03:46.860better learn to treat mom a little better do you blame the person who used to be the occupant of
02:03:51.640this exact room we're sitting in ronald reagan for a lot of this oh in terms of contemporary
02:03:56.460his rhetoric was not helpful right uh and he oddly you know he did you know what i blame him
02:04:05.460for? He politicized the CDC. When I think of the specific thing, he turned the head of the CDC
02:04:10.700from being a permanent career professional, chosen from among experts because the experts
02:04:18.280understood who would run the place well, at arm's length from the political process so he could do
02:04:23.680unpopular things. He whacked that guy and changed it into a presidential appointed job who lives,
02:04:31.160who is now on a on a string from the white house so that i mean our response to covid you could
02:04:38.260you can trace the inept american the cdc response to covid to that decision by ronald reagan
02:04:44.920interesting he politicized i think it's a big mistake to politicize the government and uh so
02:04:51.560i i mean i wasn't hostile to reagan at the time i voted for him once uh i kind of liked
02:04:58.720i liked it he was a sunny sunny optimism optimism i was i'm a sucker for that yeah
02:05:04.080i remember at age 20 or wherever it was i i remember thinking spending the soviet union
02:05:12.200into oblivion seemed like a good strategy that i like that idea like that seemed to work we're
02:05:16.860just gonna like they're gonna collapse because we're gonna outspend them we can do that so i
02:05:20.860was for all that but the government stuff at the time i didn't know enough i didn't think one way
02:05:26.480the other about it but i it is really easy to demonize this workforce and that's your question
02:05:33.960for you it's it's curious to me but when when an administration comes to power and the emotion that
02:05:42.100has lifted them to power is anger what they have done is cultivated it and pointed it in certain
02:05:47.860directions right it needs it needs targets for grievance yes and this administration found
02:05:54.240targets for grievance in in immigrants trans people and federal workers yeah now i i it no
02:06:06.000one should be targeting immigrants or trans people but there's a history of that kind of thing i get
02:06:10.820that right right but federal workers so how to do how did federal workers get on that list
02:06:15.320is what so my question my question is how did that even happen i guess elon didn't get a contract
02:06:20.180or something yeah seriously so there's something like i mean honestly i think a lot of it was part
02:06:24.120of that though i do think reagan had a lot to do with it i mean just either the worst language
02:06:27.580you know i'm here from the government to help or something you know they're sort of all that i mean
02:06:31.700he had his own he had his own reinvent government thing that didn't go so well that's correct that's
02:06:35.900correct so i think one of the reasons you can do that is the federal workers are essentially
02:06:41.540uh are essentially gagged they don't they they're they're trained to do whatever they're told to do
02:06:50.120and they're trained never to be in the press never to tell their story they don't think of
02:06:55.320themselves as characters if they thought of themselves as great big characters they wouldn't
02:06:58.680be in the federal workforce they so that they we've got a kind of it is a storytelling problem
02:07:04.520that they don't they're incapable you get to pummel them because they're incapable of defending
02:07:10.580themselves and the people who do the pummeling have figured out that yeah and so the purpose of
02:07:18.000this book is tell these stories so that you can't just pummel them as a straw man i love it i remember
02:07:24.800you know going back to my first job in government was parking and traffic commissioner i was the
02:07:30.000president of the parking and traffic that's a huge thank you by the way i know you're really
02:07:33.600popular i'm willing to write you know i can use this pen if you want an autograph i'm happy to
02:07:38.180provide um and uh i'll never forget i was as a kid uh but we used to have parking control officers
02:07:44.380There were meter maids back then that would come in because I'm parking traffic commissioner and there would be issues with with with meter maids.
02:07:51.940And there was a sort of they started showing us a bunch of the tickets and the racial epithets they would get on the tickets.
02:07:58.500They were starting to express the grievances that they had received and how difficult the job was.
02:08:03.120And I remember just the notion of meter maid and nothing about this felt like maid or meter.
02:08:08.460This was a much broader job. So we changed it to parking control officers.
02:08:11.880But we started to do a, I'm so proud we did this.
02:08:15.240We started to recognize some of the heroism of our parking control officers.