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(SINGING) When you walk in the room, do you have sway?
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I’m Kara Swisher, and you’re listening to “Sway.” My guest today is Michael Lewis. He’s written 16 books. And a few of them, like “The Big Short,” have been made into Oscar-worthy films. Lewis likes to think about the big systems that govern our lives, like markets and the federal government. He has a knack for finding characters who show us how these systems work and how they fail us. His most recent book, “The Premonition,” examines America’s bungled response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Spoiler alert — it’s not that we weren’t prepared. It’s that we didn’t listen to the right experts.
Lewis is on a bit of an expert kick lately. His podcast, “Against the Rules,” is out with a new season about the changing role of experts in American life. It’s been a while since he and I have spoken, and I’ve known him for a very long time. And while I was very curious to hear what he’s been up to with his work, there was something much more important to connect on. Lewis’s 19-year-old daughter Dixie was killed in a car accident last spring, so we started there.
I don’t think we’ve talked in a long, long time, Michael.
We’ve not talked in a long, long time.
I’m so sorry about your daughter.
It’s been, it’s been the most extraordinarily awful experience.
I can’t imagine.
But, um, she was great. And she was so brave and so full of life. It’s very hard not to insist on yourself being brave and full of life in her honor. It’s very hard to curl up in a little ball and just be miserable because it’s so out of sync with her spirit. And the other two kids, Walker and Quinn, have been —
How old are they?
Junior in college and a freshman in high school, and Dixie was in the middle.
My son, Louie’s, age.
Is that right?
I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. You know, life deals you things. I never expected to be dealt this. But I’ve been dealt this, and this is the hand I got to play now. And we’re kind of just figuring out how to play it.
Yeah. There’s nothing — you know.
There’s nothing good to say, and there’s no answer.
And that’s exactly right. My grandmother, I don’t think, ever recover when my dad died when he was 34. You know, it stayed with her for every day of her life. Me, too, different way.
Right. One of the things that’s been really striking to me is how particular it is that you actually aren’t joining a club of people who’ve lost children. It’s so different from situation to situation, depending on the relationship you had with the child, how the child died, your relationship to your own emotions. And I watched parents of other children who’ve died find outlets in anger towards something that happened and try to slake the emotion, kind of soothe themselves by satisfying the anger. But you’re not actually addressing the sadness.
And I’m so relieved. I’m so relieved that there’s nobody I’m angry at. I don’t blame anybody. I really don’t. I think it’s possible as a parent to look back on your life and say, I didn’t leave it all on the field, you know, that I wished I’d done this or that. And I really left it all on the field. So I’m just dealing with that very pure emotion. It’s just sadness and loss.
Loss and missing, and missing.
And missing.
I think about my dad every day of my life, and that’s 50 years hence.
And how does he come up in your mind?
I just think about him all the time, every day.
Yeah, but what triggers it?
I just wondered what he would have thought.
Yeah. A hole was blown in your life, and the thing is what you do with that hole. And you can grow things in the hole.
Yeah, 100 percent.
And so you can try to build on the loss in ways that are positive, rather than give up. So and that’s all we’re trying to do. And in what I create and how I go through the day and how I respond to the inevitable feelings of just being crushed and not wanting to get out of bed is just like, OK, it’s a little harder. It’s a lot harder sometimes. But there’s something to build. And I’m still figuring out what it is particularly that I’m going to build just for Dixie. But just the act of like — I mean, it’s a horrible analogy, in some ways, but I think it’s the apt analogy — the rule of improv comedy, you know? You were given something and you —
So yes and.
You have to accept. — yes and. You have to accept it. She died. She was killed in a car crash. I can’t do anything about it. What do I do on top of that? And that’s kind of how we’re all proceeding. I’m really proud of the family. I mean, and she would have been the same way if one of the others of us had died, that it would have been hard and sad, but she would have found ways to fill the hole.
I’m so glad you have such a good attitude about it. You should write about your daughter. That’s the only thing I would say, is that’s how you can honor her. You’re such a beautiful writer, and I think a lot of people would find a lot of comfort because you articulate things so beautifully. Anyway, that would be my suggestion.
I think that’s right. I think I’ve got to get to a different place before I can.
Absolutely.
But anyway, so let’s talk about book and podcast.
OK, right, I know. I want to talk about your podcast, too. We both have podcasts. We have lots of podcasts. We’ve come so far. OK, let’s start first with the book, “The Premonition.” You wrote about America’s botched Covid response. You say, “Trump’s incompetence is only part of the story and maybe even not a big part.”
And let me just sort of unpack that because a lot of people have their preconceived narratives about this, even as we’re in it. And I’m just curious, one, why you wanted to write about it right in the middle of it, and then, two, you’re sort of pushing against a narrative that a lot of people who might be fans of yours have, I think.
Yeah, no, it’s interesting. It’s a narrative that I thought I might have adopted myself, and I learned what I learned. So why I wrote about it is, one — “The Premonition,” it wasn’t ever really a pandemic book. I mean, the reason I wrote it when I wrote it is I knew my story ended in May of 2020.
Once it was clear that we’d botched the response, once it was clear that we had 4 percent of the world’s population and 20 percent of the world’s deaths, even though we were meant to be better prepared and better armed and had more knowledge about this and more technology to deal with it, blah, blah, blah, the question was, why? What was it about our public health system? And I kind of teed it up already in my mind in a couple of ways. One was the book before “The Premonition” was called “The Fifth Risk,” and it was about the transition from Obama to Trump and this egregious example of neglect of our government in the Trump administration.
Explain what “The Fifth Risk” is for people who don’t know. It’s a wonderful book.
Sure, so by law and by norm, the outgoing administration is required to prepare to hand over the government to the incoming administration. And the Obama administration had deputed 1,000 people to spend six months to write briefing books about what was going on in the bowels of the Department of Agriculture. And this is not in commerce and the whole federal apparatus.
And this is not an ideological matter. It’s sort of like, how we dealt with the Ebola outbreak or how you stop nuclear weapons from exploding when you don’t want them to explode. It’s sort of like what the government’s doing, what they might have learned, what mistakes they might have made, that kind of thing. And the conceit was I wandered around the government and got the briefings that the Trump administration didn’t bother to get, to try to get a sense of, what are these risks, who are these people? And the takeaway was the risks are terrifying, and the people are extraordinary.
Whatever stereotype you have in your head of a federal worker, it’s probably wrong because they’re very mission driven, deep understanding of complex things, very bad at promoting themselves. They suck at telling their own stories. They’re the opposite of Trump. They’re not out there promoting themselves. And so we, as a society, have been neglecting them, and it’s at our peril.
Because we have a jalopy here run by people who are trying their best to hold it together —
That’s right.
— with chewing gum and baling wire.
And Trump is the ultimate expression of indifference towards the maintenance of the jalopy, but the jalopy has not been maintained for a very long time.
Right.
So it isn’t just Trump. It’s like the problems go way, way back. And what was in my head was, all right, something’s going to happen. I don’t know what it is. So something happens.
The pandemic.
The pandemic.
So it’s focused on the C.D.C., the Center for Disease Control.
Well, but if it had been something else, it would have been focused on something else.
Like the nuclear energy or whatever, which would have been —
Correct.
It can ruin your day, a nuclear bomb, but go ahead.
So I was already sitting there, thinking, I just want to keep following the story. And I rapidly accumulated people who were inside the public health system, one way or the other, who were incredible characters, who could describe to a reader why, if we had a pandemic, it was likely to go wrong. All of them had this sense of dread that something was going to happen.
The Cassandra’s. I mean, I watched “Contagion.” I mean, it’s that idea of people were worried that this was going to happen before this happened.
And they were just wringing their hands, worried. These were people who were in the middle of the public health system. They were actually — you know, I think you can’t write about our public health system without going right to a local public health officer. It’s where the rubber meets the road when there’s a disease outbreak around the corner from you.
So in this book was Charity Dean, the California public health official, forbidden from using the word pandemic in January 2020, and Carter Mescher, the co-author of George W. Bush administration’s U.S. pandemic plan. And obviously, there’s lots of other figures, but this is what you want to talk about, these people who had been talking about that this jalopy was going to fall apart if there was, say, a pandemic that was actually effective.
In part because they had kind of worked on the jalopy, right? They knew what was going on inside the thing. But they, as people, were so interesting to me that I was jazzed about it. I don’t think I’ve ever had all the pieces fall in place so fortunately for a book. This is odd to say about a book about the pandemic. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more joyous writing experience. It was totally a gas to write the book.
Because?
It’s a great question, because. Because the people lit up the page. They were so peculiar. I mean, let’s take Carter Mescher.
Explain who he is for people.
What he is at heart is a doctor, a doctor with A.D.H.D., who really has a hell of a time getting through school in a normal way because of that. But the minute he’s in a crisis, he’s engaged sufficiently that he’s at his very best. And he’s not just a doctor who’s good with patients in a crisis, but a thinker who’s really good with systems in a crisis. And then when the Bush administration says, oh, my God, we don’t have a pandemic plan, they find him.
And he, together with another doctor named Richard Hatchett, are asking a question. And the question is what you do between the time of the disease outbreak and the time you have a vaccine. What do you do to minimize death? And the conventional wisdom was, there’s not much you could do. The takeaway from the 1918 pandemic had been social interventions, social distancing, closing schools, all that stuff doesn’t work.
Carter Mescher, doctor, goes back into the history of 1918 with Richard Hatchett and re-examines case by case cities across America and finds that you know, actually, it wasn’t all the same. The death rate in Philadelphia was multiples of what the death rate in St. Louis was. Why? They find that actually, if you intervened early and distanced people, it had huge effects on mortality rates. And they end up writing academic papers, turning the conventional wisdom on its head.
And Carter Mescher spends two years proselytizing this idea. And the whole reason the C.D.C. has a plan is him, him and Richard Hatchett. And that plan spreads around the world. The irony was that Carter would say is that other societies used the plan we created, and we didn’t. And he is, in the very beginning of the pandemic, just one step away from actually running the U.S. response. And he and Richard Hatchett, one really good example of our inability to locate the experts we need when we need them.
Which you said. You said one of the problems is the wrong people have the status. What did you mean by that? Because Tony Fauci does have status and influence. So aren’t there examples of people who deserve status and do have it, or is that not the case?
Of course, there are people who have status and deserve it. What I meant was at any given moment, especially when there’s a kind of an upheaval like a pandemic, the person with the ability to deal with the problem is quite likely not going to be obvious at first. Very broadly, the status of local public health officers was extremely low. They had no social power.
I mean, this is one of the reasons that one of the characters says Trump was just a co-morbidity, was that you go back into the history of the C.D.C., and you see changes that we made in our government that started to neuter the authority of the person who ran the C.D.C. During the Reagan administration, the job of the C.D.C. director was changed from being a career civil servant to being a presidential appointee.
Tony Fauci is a career civil servant. There’s a reason he was able to lock horns with Trump and not get fired, first, as the head of the C.D.C. who used to have that kind of distance from the political process, but from the Reagan administration on, did not. This is, I think, a big source of the problem of management in the government and the problem of social authority in the government, is that over a 40 or 50-year period, lots of jobs that used to be career civil service jobs became presidential appointee jobs.
When that happens, what happens? The person who’s in the job is, one, picked from the pool of people who, you know, are probably from the political party of the president, rather than from the pool of people who are just qualified for the job. Two, can be fired with a phone call, so were looking over their shoulder at the White House all the time and can’t act independently. But three, the average presidential appointee for these top jobs in these government agencies, 18 months. They’re in there 18 months. They have an agency with tens of thousands of people that’s got an incredibly complicated brief. The staff knows that whoever’s coming in is only there for a short time. You’ve got at the top, you’ve got renters, not owners. You’ve got people who have no real hope of building a long-term career at the top of the agency. You’ve got no continuity.
So, in any case, you have this instrument called the Centers for Disease Control that was meant to respond to this threat. And the instrument had slowly been allowed to degrade. And no one had really seen that it had degraded. So Charity Dean, the public health officer, main character of the book, has this lovely story that serves as a kind of metaphor for what happened at the C.D.C. And it’s from her time when she was a medical student at Tulane University.
Recently divorced, living alone on the ground floor of an apartment that had these lovely roses in rose beds on her porch, and everybody thought of her as the lady with the green thumb. And she loved the reputation. And her roses start dying. And so she goes to Michael’s Arts and Craft and starts to buy plastic flowers to replace the real flowers. At first, it’s just one or two. By the time she’s done, the whole porch is plastic flowers, and nobody knows. From the distance, it’s all these beautiful flowers. And she starts to adjust her behavior. She won’t let people into her house because she’s afraid they’re going to see the plastic flowers. And finally, someone finds out and she’s mortified.
But she said she watched the C.D.C. She felt she was watching a similar thing, that once upon a time, they had had an actual ability and the gumption to be kind of battlefield command in a disease outbreak. But over time, they have lost the ability, but were kind of covering up. And she knew because in her outbreaks she was managing as a local public health officer, she had to ban C.D.C. officers from getting involved because all they did was politicize it and make the response less effective. And she had colleagues who were in the same job across the state of California who said the same thing, that they aren’t helpful in an actual battle. If you start to just listen to the war stories of local public health officers, you would have had a sense even before Trump, that if we had a real crisis, it was going to be a problem.
So action versus caution is what you were talking about, that the C.D.C. was governed by caution, and let’s not act, so that’s why it was rotting from the inside from your perspective.
Well, it was cautious because it was rotting from the inside. The effect of insisting on waiting until you have absolute proof of what’s happened is, you are completely incapable of responding to a pandemic. Because by the time you know for sure, it’s too late.
But how do you, then, manage a pandemic at all if that’s the case, if you have sort of an inert government agency, which is, I think, you’re talking about, and crisis all over the country? On top of it, there’s political implications. Is it almost impossible to do so? Or do you just have to act, like you were saying?
So just so this doesn’t sound like Monday morning quarterbacking, at the beginning of the Trump administration, Tom Bossert, who was the Homeland Security director — I can’t remember his exact title — who had watched Carter Mescher and Richard Hatchett create the pandemic plan for the world, basically, for the country, had been so impressed by what he saw way back when, that he called them and said, if there is a pandemic, I want to have you here the next day, so can I badge you in now?
Bossert gets fired when John Bolton is brought in, and everybody forgets about these experts. Carter Mescher was this sort of shadow response. He was sitting in his underwear in his bedroom in Atlanta, watching the pandemic in the very beginning and writing things about what was going on in China from early January. And he has a bead on what’s happening. There are things he wrote January 20 that was a plan of action and was just climbing his walls because for six weeks, the C.D.C. didn’t do anything, didn’t explain how urgent the situation was to the American public.
And this was because they were too political, or they’re too cautious?
Both. It’s like the Trump administration is gumming up their communication and their willingness. The Trump administration clearly has blood on their hands. But the institution itself had lost the ability to fight back. If you talk to the old timers at the C.D.C., former director Bill Foege, he writes this long letter to Robert Redfield, the C.D.C. director, saying, you are squandering the moral authority of our institution. You are presiding over the destruction of the enterprise. You’ve got to stand up in spite of whatever the Trump administration, the White House is telling you to do, and take charge of this.
I think that at the bottom of the failed response is a really bizarre attitude towards our own government. When you actually go talk to the people who know about pandemics, they aren’t in some kind of conspiracy against the people. They’re there because they love the country. They’ve devoted their lives to developing some expertise that they put in the service of their country for a lot less money that they’d make in the private sector because they believe in the mission. So there’s this huge disconnect between what the people think their government is and what it actually is and this striking inability to see that there’s a difference between government politics. People don’t make the distinction.
But this deep state idea is already baked in at this point, so it creates the perfect storm of disaster, in a lot of ways. They can’t fight back because people don’t trust them. Let me go through the premonition itself because you’ve gotten a lot of criticism for some of it. I think people are reading it as a sort of apology of Trump, for example. But I want you to address that.
This is a lightning round, so we’re going to go fast. One of those that you’re making is these unheard of American experts out to be unique, when many people were calling for a rapid response to Covid-19, including the World Health Organization around the world. I’ve heard pandemic worries for a long, long time, and maybe I’m just hanging out with the wrong people.
No, I didn’t pick them because I said they were the only ones who said this is going to happen. In fact, none of them said, this is going to happen because you don’t know. I picked them for the same reason I picked the characters in the middle of “The Big Short,” just as there are lots of people who said that the financial crisis was going to happen, right? I picked them because they had skin in the game and because they could teach the reader about the public health system. I’m sure there are a dozen other people I could have picked, too. These people were just extraordinary characters and extraordinary teachers and were enmeshed with the system in all kinds of interesting ways.
But maybe more importantly, I never thought when I’m writing the book that, oh, if only these people had been in charge, everything would have just gone really smoothly, although I do think we probably would have been much better off had they been in charge. I really thought I found these really interesting people who light up different aspects of the public health problem, who have incredible stories. All I’m going to do is tell their story. You decide what it means. I’m not saying that if only these three had been in charge or these were the only three who said that this was going to happen, nothing like that. I’m not muscling the reader around on this.
Speaking of muscle, some people think you don’t place enough blame at Donald Trump’s feet.
Trump has blood on his hands. It was awful what Trump did. He handled it horribly. The reason we can’t allow ourselves to think this was just Trump is that Trump is gone, and we still have the problems. It is a huge mistake to give — I don’t know — $8 billion to the C.D.C. right now and think, oh, that’s going to solve the problem. The structure of the institution is screwed up. Charity Dean was facing resistance in her attempts to manage disease outbreaks well before Donald Trump was elected president from the C.D.C.
So you got to just take that into account when you’re thinking about what we do to fix the system. And the weakness of the system itself enabled the political creation of Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump doesn’t exist in the vacuum. Our society had gotten to the point where it was willing to put into the White House a man who did not know or care about the government he was meant to run. So can I say something else about this book that —
Please do.
— it’s been his misread as any book I’ve ever written. People wanted it to be one of two things.
Trump or the deep state.
Yes, exactly. I think all that’s nonsense. I think that’s a lot of people screaming at each other on cable news, and I’m not interested. I’m interested in how this thing works.
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We’ll be back in a minute. If you liked this interview and want to hear others, follow us on your favorite podcast app. You’ll be able to catch up on “Sway” episodes you may have missed, like my conversation with Patrick Radden Keefe, and you’ll get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Michael Lewis after the break.
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Can I move to social media here? Of course, I would. How do you assess their role?
Social media? It cuts both ways, right? I mean, “Against the Rules,” the podcast that I do, this season is about experts. And I thought about doing one of the episodes about social media, but when you look at it, like, it’s not all bad. Look at the war on the Ukraine right now.
Right, it works here.
There’s great information on Twitter. I mean, I’m sure you got to parse it, but and there are people — Trent Telenko, who, he’s a Ukrainian tire guy. He’s an American former Army logistics guy. He’s looking at the tires of Russian vehicles and explaining why the convoy’s stuck.
And that expertise would have a hard time surfacing itself in old media environment. It would take forever for Trent Telenko to find some journalist who would write about, oh, there’s this guy. And in addition, the pictures would never reach Trent Telenko’s desk, so he wouldn’t be able to see it. So, on the one hand, social media enables people who actually know stuff and who are basically buried in our society and invisible to express that knowledge. That’s a really good thing.
OK, but in the case of Covid, not so much.
In the case of Covid, it does allow people to choose their own story, to create different stories and so people can choose their own story. I mean, and it’s not just doctors that you across these professions, where the expertise is essentially probabilistic, where, yeah, you get the vaccine, and you’re much, much, much less likely to get seriously ill. But there will be cases of people who have the vaccine who get ill, and there would be a lot of cases the people who don’t get the vaccine who never even get Covid. So there are lots of stories out there where you can arrange another narrative that is really different from, basically, the truth.
And is that dangerous, though? You seem to be like, oh, well, that’s the way it is. That’s the oxygen we’re living in.
It’s obviously not good. The question is, what you do about it.
Did it have an impact on the C.D.C. in this case? Being pummeled all day, Redfield can’t have liked that, and Trump lived in that environment, in the Twitter environment, and used it as a battering ram against the C.D.C. or whoever he wanted to attack at the time. It was highly effective.
I think it’s hard to blame social media for the early inaction of the C.D.C. I think that was a separate thing. There’s a more general thing than just Covid going on here. It’s that people aren’t scientists. People have trouble with numbers. People have trouble with probabilistic thinking. They have trouble with authority. And when you’re dealing in these situations where there are true stories that contradict the expert advice, you’re going to get this kind of response. And I can’t think of another answer to it. The only answer to it is that you have respected authority at the top of, say, the C.D.C. that people listen to.
But Fauci has become a demon to the right. He’s a hero, probably too much of a hero to the left. It’s all online, and there are memes. He himself is involved in it.
No, no, I agree. You’re arguing with someone who doesn’t disagree with you.
OK.
It’s a mess. When you choose your news, you choose your sources of information, you don’t check against people who disagree, and you don’t really think like a scientist, you can end up in weird places. You know, it’s funny — I have friends, close friends, who are actually quite reasonable in their lives, who think the vaccine is a hoax. And when you ask them, how do you think that? Look at the data. Look at the scientific papers, all that. They have a story of a friend who got sick from the vaccine. And it really did happen. We’re identifying here is a kink in the human mind. And what happens on social media exploits that kink in the human mind.
So in that vein, you’ve done a podcast. Why are you doing a podcast? Is that in order to do that, to tell stories?
I think I did a podcast before you did yours.
No, I doubt it. I doubt it. I don’t think you did, Michael. I think I’m —
So, “Against the Rules,” this is our third season.
Eight years.
And — OK, you’re ahead of me, all right. But it’s a different kind of podcast. For me, it was taking essentially my magazine life and turning it into an audio magazine life. And the satisfaction I get in this is from a couple of places. One, the ear. It’s a different mechanism.
Yes, it is.
Much more emotional. You get to people in a different way than you get with the printed word. I do feel like that between the print works, it’s a really good muscle for me to exercise, to write for the ear. So I really like that. I think it has a good effect on my writing. It’s a workout. It’s cross training. The second is there are subjects that I can attack that I might not bother with, but I’m interested in. I can graze more freely with a podcast than I can with a long magazine piece. It just gets me out talking to lots of people I might not otherwise talk to. The third is the audience I get to. And you must notice this.
Yes, indeed.
Not everybody reads.
No.
And there are a whole crowd of people who listen to things who don’t read. And so it’s just a way of getting to those people.
Why do you pick experts? Because this book is about the failure of experts, but the correctness of some experts. Are experts dead in this tech environment, where everybody is an expert? Or how do you get back to people trusting experts? Because they don’t want to anymore.
If we’re going to describe it in this way, I would say “The Premonition” is about a decay in the relationship between the experts and the rest of the society. So it isn’t that the experts are getting worse. In fact, in many cases, experts are getting better, as the people perceive they’re worse, that you have very weird phenomena. Let’s take a really simple example, because we do it in the podcast — weatherman. Your weather forecast 40 years ago was primitive. And we talked to weathermen. I talked to old weathermen, and they’re very funny. They say, in the beginning of my career, I was instructed to stand up and utter with total certainty a forecast that was probably wrong and certainly not express it in probabilistic terms. And 40 years ago, like the 10-day forecast was no better than just guessing. The improvements in 40 years in weather forecasting are astonishing. The weatherman himself sounds less certain because he’s very aware of the probabilistic nature of his forecasts, but he knows a lot more. And you talk to them, they say, the amount of grief I get for bad weather forecasts now is so much higher than the grief I got 40 years ago. And it’s not just because of social media, though social media doesn’t help.
So you don’t think that it’s the tech impact on it, the amplification and weaponization of information?
That’s part of it. It’s certainly part of it. But part of it is a failure of the audience to appreciate probabilistic expertise. And so when the weatherman says there’s an 80 percent chance it’s going to be sunny tomorrow, 20 percent chance of rain, and it rains, people say he’s an idiot. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. They don’t think, well, two out of 10 times, it was going to rain. And that happens across disciplines.
At the same time, I think tech has gotten so powerful. They’re the richest people in the world. I think you should get back to writing about tech, Michael, by the way. We need you over here.
So can I ask you a question about that?
Sure.
All right, I give you go-like powers over my career. Where would you send me in the tech world to write my next book?
Crypto.
I’m there.
Because it’s what’s happening now, but worse in a way, and we’ve got to see it before it happens again because it has so much more power. It also meets your two areas of expertise — financial, which is your first book, “Liar’s Poker,” that got you so famous, and technology and experts. They want to get rid of experts, but they really don’t.
So I’m probably going to make your dream come true.
Oh, fantastic.
I’m interested — that’s actually — I am now marinating in the world of crypto. And I’m finding the story.
And beyond, Web 3, the decentralization of power and the decentralization of governments. And so my last question, I think, is, do you think the government, with all its flaws that you’ve laid out, has any chance of winning in a world where everyone’s an expert, everyone has control, and there’s a lack of trust of any kind of central authority?
So you really shouldn’t mistake me for a big thinker. I really am just a storyteller. But I do think the closer I got to the people who were actually in the government doing the mission critical stuff, the more hopeful I felt because it was so obvious. I felt like if people knew the truth, if the average American could be put in a room with this person they think of as the deep state, they would change their mind in about eight minutes.
So what we have is not a truth problem, we have a communication problem. And that’s fixable. So I did find myself feeling extremely hopeful about where we might end up. It’s just like, I would have thought, an existential threat, like Covid, something that killed a million Americans. Would it have been enough to cause Americans to rally together and behave cohesively as a team? It wasn’t. There will be some other existential threat out there that will frighten people into seeing the way the world really is as opposed to the way I imagine it is.
I think Ukraine, I have to say.
I agree, it’s possible. It’s totally possible. But so I think it’s going to take some pain, and that when you get cornered and we actually have to function as a team, that we will, but that it’s going to be painful to be cornered.
Well, let’s end on that note, hopeful and painful at the same time. Michael, thank you so much. I appreciate this long and complex discussion.
Total pleasure.
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