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