Hadley Robinson

Michael Lewis

Sarah Vowell

The National Archives might seem like a distant trove of documents and arcane laws for Americans far from Washington. But many of these national treasures are actually relevant to our lives. Author Sarah Vowell found the people inside the Archives who are making sure everybody can access these documents and find their stories.&nbsp; Read Sarah Vowell’s full story here: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/sarah-vowell-national-archives-digitization-records-smartphones/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Equalizer</a> And check out the rest of the “Who is government?” series.<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Canary</a>, by Michael Lewis<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/casey-cep-ronald-walters-the-sentinel-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Sentinel</a>, by Casey Cep<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/dave-eggers-jet-propulsion-laboratory-nasa-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Searchers</a>, by Dave Eggers<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/john-lanchester-consumer-price-index-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Number</a>, by John Lanchester<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/cyber-sleuth/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Cyber Sleuth</a>, by Geraldine Brooks

The National Archives might seem like a distant trove of documents, but many of these national treasures are actually relevant to Americans' lives.

‘I exist because of this piece of paper’

David Shipley:: This is "Impromptu" with Washington Post Opinions, and I'm David Shipley, Opinions editor. We've got another bonus episode for you this weekend that's part of our series "Who Is Government," where seven writers venture deep into the wilds of the federal bureaucracy to bring back fascinating stories from inside the capital. This week, Michael Lewis speaks with the wonderful Sarah Vowell about the Archives and the people there who have devoted themselves to making our national treasures available to all Americans. Enjoy. 

Michael Lewis> It's Michael Lewis here again, author of some books -- "Moneyball," "The Blind Side," "The Big Short" of the movies, and I'm here, to my delight, with Sarah Vowell. Sarah's part of our series "Who Is Government," where we've airdropped six of my favorite writers into the federal government and really just ask them to find a story they wanted to tell. And Sarah's great. She's an actress. She's the voice of Violet in "The Incredibles." She is a historian. She's a nonfiction narrative writer, author of "Assassination Vacation" and "The Partly Cloudy Patriot," and five others, I think, so, Sarah, welcome. 

Sarah Vowell> Thank you. 

Michael Lewis> We haven't really talked that much about your piece. I've been watching from a distance. And I'm curious, like, in the first when -- when you accepted the assignment. 

Sarah Vowell> Which was 11 months ago, almost to the day. 

Michael Lewis> There you go. How did you figure out what to write about? What did you consider? 

Sarah Vowell> Well, I was just looking for someone of distinction. I had a couple of other criteria. One of them was I needed the person to be from west of the Mississippi. Part of that was when I was young, like more than 30 years ago, I was a Smithsonian intern. And, you know, I live in Montana. I grew up in Montana. People out here, the government -- "government" -- "Washington" is a dirty word. And then I got to Washington, and everyone was from somewhere else. There were people from America working there, and I wanted to talk about one of those people who had come to Washington because for me, I took the train from Montana. I arrived. Rabin and Arafat shook hands the next day. It was such an exciting time to be a provincial person in Washington. And my other one was the person had to be a graduate of a public university. 

Michael Lewis> Why? 

Sarah Vowell> I graduated from Montana State. And I noticed around the pandemic a lot of the -- a lot of the governors who are really effective were public university graduates, like Gretchen Whitmer or Larry Hogan or Jay Inslee in Washington. And I think there's something about those universities that make for good public servants because you're kind of between the real world and academia. And I'm also just interested in how -- how mobility happens and how someone from nowhere becomes somebody. 

Michael Lewis> So you did kind of what I did. You decided what kind of pond you wanted to fish in. Then you go fishing. But it's kind of arbitrary who you pull out of it. And you pull this woman, Pam Wright, out of it. 

Sarah Vowell> Mm-hmm. Her title is Chief Innovation Officer of the National Archives and she's from Conrad, Montana, which is a completely different Montana than the one I'm -- I'm from like city Montana, really. And she's from this ranch, from this town of like 2,000 people, you know. But because I grew up in this college town and went to college here, I met a lot of people like her. So I know not to underestimate them, but it does take a while to draw some of them out. She's not a natural braggart. 

Michael Lewis> What interested you about what she was doing? 

Sarah Vowell> I mean, as a -- I write books about history, and I do spend a lot of time in archives. And one thing that appealed to me is -- So, she's in charge of sharing the contents of the National Archives online with the public, and I've spent a lot of time in archives, traveling to archives. There's always a bunch of rules. It's really expensive. That was my main interest. I'm not very interested in the Internet per se, but it's the best way to share the contents of the National Archives with everybody in America, especially people from where she's from, from where I'm from. It's been kind of her life work -- life's work, just to make as many records available as possible to as many Americans as possible. So there was -- that was like a democratic spirit to that and public service in the most basic sense. 

Michael Lewis> What is the hunger appetite for access to the National Archives in the country? 

Sarah Vowell> A lot of it is military veterans who need their service records or their discharge papers. A lot of it is genealogy -- people searching for their families' records, for passenger manifests, and immigration paperwork. 

Michael Lewis> It's personal? 

Sarah Vowell> Yeah, it's personal. 

Michael Lewis> It's personal. And you had your own personal moment. And you play it very tautly in your piece, but I want you to describe it for me, this treaty that you see, I don't want to mispronounce the name of the treaty. 

Sarah Vowell> Oh, yes. Trevor Plant, who is -- He's the guy at the main archives in D.C. who's in charge of all the national treasures. And I hadn't even requested to see that treaty, but he had read one of my books where I talked about being Cherokee, and I had driven the path of the Trail of Tears, which is how my Cherokee ancestors got from Georgia or North Carolina or Tennessee to Oklahoma at the request of the government. And I had read the treaty a bunch of times because it's the treaty that gave the government the reasoning for the Trail of Tears. Like, it was signed by some unauthorized representatives of the tribe. And once the government had this treaty, they started rounding people up and marching them cross-country at gunpoint. Some of them went by water, but he showed it to me. I, you know, recognized a lot of the names. One of them was my great, great-grandfather's commander in the Civil War. And I just immediately started weeping because it was a death warrant. 4,000 people died because of this piece of paper, and I exist because of this piece of paper. All of my relatives exist because of this piece of paper. And it was just incredibly primal to see that paper and see those names. 

Michael Lewis> When you describe that, I thought, "This is happening over and over and over in the country, when people access this archive." People are having this emotional connection to the past. 

Sarah Vowell> I mean, I was honestly very embarrassed to just start [laughs] crying as a reporter. You don't want to do that. But I had no control over it. It was just kind of instantaneous. But I mean, that was another reason that Pam appealed to me because I knew I could tell her story through other documents in the archives. And that's what we do. Like, when I was talking to you about people who went to public universities, we look at the Higher Education Act of 1965. And I had asked her, "Were you a work-study student?" Because she's just from some ranch somewhere and she has this big, fancy job. How do you get from that -- from A to B? 

Michael Lewis> Yeah. 

Sarah Vowell> And because I was a work-study student. We had almost the exact same, you know, experience with that. And she answered, "Yeah." 

Michael Lewis> Explain that. Explain your experience. 

Sarah Vowell> What it is, it's in the Higher Education Act of 1965. The most famous of the provisions in that act is the Pell Grant, which is, you know, just free money. But work-study was about giving needy students a way to earn extra money, because a lot of us put ourselves through school, and also to get work experience. And so she was hired as a work-study student at the Mansfield Library in their archives to transcribe oral-history interviews with smokejumpers. They're the wildland firefighters in the West, and that was her first middle-class job experience. It was her first work experience. After she graduated, she started working for a research firm in Missoula, Montana, that would send her to the National Archives. And that's how she ended up at the National Archives. For me, it was at the Museum of the Rockies, also in an archives cataloging photographs of trains. And I ran into my old work-study supervisor last year, and I asked him like, "What was I like, you know?" And he said, because I had had such a blue-collar life with so many blue-collar jobs, he said, "You were really excited to have a job you didn't have to take a shower after." 

Michael Lewis> [laughs] 

Sarah Vowell> I had never had a job where I didn't need a shower after. You know, I'd worked in food service and I was a maid. I was, you know, childcare and I was a waitress. And so that program, I think, gives a lot of working-class kids a chance at imagining a sort of professional life. And that's what happened to her, you know? And me. So, we're standing there, we're looking at Higher Education Act of 1965, and she wouldn't be standing there without that law, and neither would I probably, you know, so there was a kind of circular thing about the National Archives, how all of these random documents and laws and decisions by presidents or Congress, like, go thundering down the ages. And I think every American can find their story there, whether we want to or not. 

Michael Lewis> I understand why you care so much about it. Explain to me why she cares so much. 

Sarah Vowell> I think when she thinks about who she's serving, when she thinks about the taxpayers, she thinks about the people she grew up with. And I think a lot of people with, especially with a working-class background, feel that way. Like, I remember once Bruce Springsteen talking about how he feels accountable to the people he grew up with. That's why he tells their stories. 

Michael Lewis> It's not hard to see why the work is important. 

Sarah Vowell> No, not at all. Some of this stuff is really like live or die, especially the military records. I mean, people who are looking for their discharge papers or service records because they need insurance or they have cancer. You know, some of this stuff is just really basic information that they need to access and they don't know how. I mean, one of the great programs she started is called History Hub, and it's just a pure public service where anyone can type in a question to the National Archives and get it answered. And a lot of those questions are like, "Where are my Air Force discharge papers? How do I find that?" You know, some of them are like really deep questions they ask like, "What were the Founders' intentions?" It's like, whoa. 

Michael Lewis> Is it a human being that's answering those questions? 

Sarah Vowell> Yeah, it's people who work at National Archives, other government agencies. And another one of her great contributions were her volunteer corps. They're called the Citizen Archivists. A lot of them are retired. There's this one guy. His name is Bernard Weintraub. He's a national treasure. He's just a retired zoology professor in California who probably answers more questions than anyone, as far as I can tell. And he's helped thousands of people. And he was just sitting there and, you know, she started these volunteer programs because she actually believes the people of the United States have knowledge and she had a hunch they would want to share that knowledge. 

Michael Lewis> This was great. I hope if you find yourself anywhere near the Bay Area, you will let me know. 

Sarah Vowell> I will. I mean, this has just been such a pleasure, so thank you. 

David Shipley:: Thanks for listening to "Impromptu." We'll link to Sarah's article and all the others in this series in our show notes. This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson, edited by Mili Mitra, and mixed by Emma Munger. And for "Who Is Government" fans, we have one more coming your way very soon -- W. Kamau Bell on the next generation of bureaucratic heroes.


https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/20e2bfdc-eabc-4ab3-8eca-ae67fa5ba23a_6709365aa9100727f00b45cb-transcript.txt

Damir Marusic

Chris Suellentrop

Emma Munger

Eavesdrop on Post Opinions columnists as they have frank, thoughtful conversations about the news and cultural debates on everyone’s minds. 

Impromptu: The conversations before the columns 

The National Archives might seem like a distant trove of documents and arcane laws for Americans far from Washington. But many of these national treasures are actually relevant to our lives. Author Sarah Vowell found the people inside the Archives who are making sure everybody can access these documents and find their stories. 


David Ignatius

Josh Rogin

As tensions between Israel and Iran soar, columnists David Ignatius and Josh Rogin talk with Damir Marusic about the broader forces at play in the conflict, the lack of plans for a stable future and what a Trump victory would mean for the U.S.-Iran relationship. Read more from David Ignatius on this issue:&nbsp;“<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/05/israel-gaza-hamas-oct-7-terrorist-attacks-war/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">What the Oct. 7 attacks didn’t change</a>”“<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/04/trump-iran-assassination-risk/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Trump courts disaster by underestimating Iranian death threats</a>” ﻿Subscribe to The Washington Post<a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> </a><a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.

As tensions between Israel and Iran soar, our columnists discuss the broader forces at play in the conflict. 

Just how bad will the Middle East get?

https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/75ebeb80-a237-492e-9891-4eb1fed58d25_67058c0cc5312347c989da3a-transcript.txt

As tensions between Israel and Iran soar, columnists David Ignatius and Josh Rogin talk with Damir Marusic about the broader forces at play in the conflict, the lack of plans for a stable future and what a Trump victory would mean for the U.S.-Iran relationship.


Geraldine Brooks

The IRS may be one of the most hated departments in the federal government, but it turns out it does more than just collect taxes. Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks got to know the folks in charge of the IRS’s cybercrime unit which investigates criminals who use cryptocurrency. In this bonus episode, Brooks talks with Michael Lewis about what she learned.&nbsp; Read Geraldine Brooks’s full article here: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/cyber-sleuth/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204); background-color: transparent;">Meet the black-belt, tattooed IRS official who saved 23 children from their abusers</a> And check out the rest of the “Who is Government” series.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204); background-color: transparent;">The Canary</a>, by Michael Lewis<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/casey-cep-ronald-walters-the-sentinel-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204); background-color: transparent;">The Sentinel</a>, by Casey Cep<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/dave-eggers-jet-propulsion-laboratory-nasa-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204); background-color: transparent;">The Searchers</a>, by Dave Eggers<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/john-lanchester-consumer-price-index-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204); background-color: transparent;">The Number</a>, by John Lanchester

The IRS may be one of the most hated departments in the federal government, but it turns out it does more than just collect taxes. 

How a cyber sleuth in the IRS takes down terrorists

﻿Geraldine Brooks> ...which is a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes which says, "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." And I've always believed that, too.  

Michael Lewis> As have I. Why do you think our country has so much trouble getting its mind around that?  

Geraldine Brooks> I don't want to be an obnoxious foreigner, but I did grow up in Australia, and I think that there's an almost childish expectation of something for nothing here, that you can have a society that you want where everything works and you have excellence of traffic control and roads and sanitation and all those good things. Somebody has to pay for them, and that's somebody is all of us. And those who've got more should pay more. But for some reason, I think probably stemming from the mythologized early history of this country, people really don't like that tax bite. I stayed here and raised two sons, and both of them were absolutely affronted when they got their first paycheck working their summer jobs, and there was a bite taken out of it.  

Michael Lewis> Hmm. So, before we get to your specific subject, I want to ask you one more question about the IRS commissioner, and that is, was he different in any way than you expected? What kind of -- what kind of dude was he?  

Geraldine Brooks> He's not your pocket-protector accountant kind of guy.  

Michael Lewis> He's not, okay.  

Geraldine Brooks> He's a guy who has spent a lot of time, I think, reflecting on the issues of of what makes government work. And, you know, he's very, very self-aware. He starts his public presentation with a clip from "The Simpsons," in which Homer and Marge are barreling down Constitution Avenue in a taxi, and Marge sees the IRS building and points it out to Homer, and Homer leans out the window and boos. So he knows that the general American attitude to the IRS is booing, and he is aware that there's been reason for that, because successive governments, for the past decade, have cut the funding and cut the funding and cut the funding until what was left of the organization could not provide the kind of service that anybody should be able to expect, which is your money back, you know, your tax return refund paid promptly. That couldn't happen because as their funding was being cut, the population was growing, the number of tax returns were growing. They had no money to fix the ancient, creaky technology. But that's changed because of the Inflation Reduction Act. And Danny Werfel is the guy who's been tapped to oversee the technological transformation of the IRS.  

Michael Lewis> Did you have the sense that, aside from letting you in to rattle around and find a story to tell, that he had a strategy for repairing or improving relations between the tax collector and the people, or is it just --  

Geraldine Brooks> Oh, yeah.  

Michael Lewis> What kind of things is he doing?  

Geraldine Brooks> Well, it's very much underway because once he got the money from the Inflation Reduction Act, he was able to hire enough people and clear the backlog and start investing in new tech. And I think there was a trial last year of a direct file of tax returns so you don't need to use a tax prep service. And he wants to roll that out for everybody who has a relatively simple return. And then he's, you know, got enough people to go over the absolute scofflaws, like the hundreds and hundreds of people who make over $1 million, who have not troubled to file a return for the past decade because they knew that the IRS didn't have the wherewithal to come after them.  

Michael Lewis> Really? Didn't even file a return?  

Geraldine Brooks> Didn't even file a return. And then, you know, they've got the wherewithal to reach out to I think it's like 6 million Americans who are eligible for the earned income tax credit who don't claim it. So the people who need help and the people who need to, you know, have their fingers smacked and to pay their fair share.  

Michael Lewis> I didn't know that. That's riveting. It's encouraging. Once you're there and you're talking to him, how do you find what you're going to write about?  

Geraldine Brooks> He and his team identified a couple of people, and I landed on Jarod Koopman, who runs cybersecurity investigations for the IRS. So, there's only 3% of the IRS that is involved in criminal investigation, and they are widely pilloried and deeply misunderstood group of people. What they're doing is busting terrorist networks who are money laundering. They are shutting down pedophile rings and rescuing children from rape and abuse. They're in the crypto space so that they're getting back money that was stolen from people in ransomware attacks. They have done absolutely mind-blowing things, and they've returned, in the last 10 years, at least $12 billion to the American taxpayer.  

Michael Lewis> Why are they in the IRS as opposed to, I don't know, the FBI?  

Geraldine Brooks> Because the IRS has had, for a long time, the remit to investigate financial crimes, and they're the best at it. And the guy I profiled, Jarod Koopman, was charged, back when cryptocurrency first became a thing, with spinning up a unit within the IRS that would look at this space of crypto for its problems, in terms of tax evasion, money laundering, sanctions busting. And everybody thought it was completely anonymous and that they would never be caught. Well, that turned out to be incorrect. And it turns out that what crypto provides, if you can do the investigative work to put an identity to the transactions, you can see every transaction that a criminal enterprise has undertaken, where the money originated and where it ended up and every step in between. And you can identify all the wrongdoers that are involved. And it's a fiesta of evidence. And most of the cases that they bring plead out because the criminals are confronted with the record of what they did, and there's really no defense.  

Michael Lewis> Do you think when Jarod got into this, he was aware just what a gold mine crypto was going to be?  

Geraldine Brooks> No, I mean, he talks about coming to understand it. And out of it has come all these amazing cases, like shutting down a pedophile website that was based in South Korea, and they traced the guy who was responsible and went with the Korean police. When they busted this guy, he had a server in his bedroom, and it led to the arrest of 370 pedophiles.  

Michael Lewis> Huh. I want to talk just a little bit about Jarod, but before we do, it's interesting that he's assigned to tackle crypto. And crypto -- I remember when crypto, the story was how you never catch anybody because it's anonymous and untraceable. And of course, it's the opposite.  

Geraldine Brooks> It is the opposite.  

Michael Lewis> Yes, it's anonymous, but it is perfectly traceable. And so you have this backlog of behavior by people who assume no one could ever see what they were doing, and you can go back and just, "Oh, my God." It's like bringing a light into a dark room. You know lots of bad stuff was happening, and now you can just sort of untangle it. I had no idea that the IRS was the place where this happened.  

Geraldine Brooks> Yeah. And the other weird thing about it is, you seize the crypto. And this is such a volatile store of value, that crypto that was seized that was worth a million bucks when it was seized, turns into a billion bucks overnight. And the U.S. government and we, the taxpayer, have benefited from this because when they keep investigating these criminal enterprises, it's the gift that keeps on giving, because you can keep going back and unpeeling another layer. And by the time you do, the value of the crypto is even higher. So it's kind of crazy. One of my favorite cases they did was the Al-Qassam Brigades, which is the military wing of Hamas, was shaking the tin cup on Twitter, as it then was, and asking for funding to buy weapons. And one of Jarod's agents thought that that was very interesting and figured out how to take control of their website. So all the people who were donating, thinking they were buying guns, were actually contributing to the Fund for Victims of Terror.  

[Both laugh]  

So for about a month, the IRS was ripping off the terrorists to the extent of several million dollars. And they used the same technique to take over the websites of ISIS and Al-Qaeda. So that was pretty gratifying.  

Michael Lewis> So let's talk about Jarod just a bit before I let you go. Is he aware that someone might come along and make a movie of his life?  

Geraldine Brooks> I don't know.  

Michael Lewis> Do you think he has a sense of himself as a character?  

Geraldine Brooks> Uh...I think, like most people who are dedicated public servants -- Look, this guy, with the skills he had, could be making a motza in the private sphere, looking after cybersecurity for Goldman Sachs or Salesforce or something like that. He's not. He's looking after it for all of us. He is a very mission-driven guy. And, you know, he comes from a family of mission-driven people. His family have all been in the military or in law enforcement. He's just very dedicated to public welfare, and I don't think he has a lot of ego about what he does at all.  

Michael Lewis> Hmm. Thanks for writing the piece. It's fabulous. And we're going to have to get this band back together one day. It just worked out so great.  

Geraldine Brooks> Sounds good.  

David Shipley:: We'll put links in our show notes to Geraldine's full article and the four others that have been published so far in the "Who Is Government?" series. This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson and edited by Mili Mitra and Allison Michaels. It was mixed by Emma Munger. As always, tell us what you think by e-mailing impromptu@washpost.com. Thanks a lot.  


https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/13df180b-4171-4769-8388-f7a6e3a573b5_66fc445c362af16d23086c3d-transcript.txt

﻿David Shipley:: I'm David Shipley, and this is "Impromptu" with Washington Post Opinions. And this week, we have another bonus episode that's part of a series we've been running called "Who Is Government?" where seven amazing writers find somebody or something in the federal government that's indispensable. Enjoy. 

Michael Lewis> I'm Michael Lewis, author of a bunch of books -- "Moneyball," "The Big Short," "The Blind Side" are the movies, and a curator of sorts of this series, "Who Is Government?" in the Washington Post, to which I invited six friends and writers I admire, and Geraldine Brooks is one of them. Geraldine Brooks is a former war correspondent with The Wall Street Journal, who has written all sorts of novels. "March" won the Pulitzer Prize. The most recent is "Horse." Everything she writes, I've just loved. Back in the day when you were a war correspondent, the stuff just jumped off the page. So I thought of you for this series because I thought I'd drag you back. And, Geraldine, of course, had the same experience everybody else did, so, like, we parachute you into the federal government, and you come out with a story. And the story you've written about is the -- Well, why don't you tell me what the story you've written about is? 

Geraldine Brooks> Well, when you said that you wanted to defend government, I thought, "Let's defend the most unpopular branch." So I called up the IRS. 

Michael Lewis> [ Chuckling ] And when one calls up the IRS, I would have thought they'd be a bit wary. 

Geraldine Brooks> The old journalist in me is not buried that deep. And I know if you want to deal with a bureaucracy, you have to get buy-in from the top. So I went right to the commissioner of the IRS, and he turns out to be an incredibly open guy, who understands what he's up against very clearly. And he's very passionate about public service. He's worked in it almost his entire life. He took a brief detour to the cushier private sector. But when he came back for his confirmation hearing, one of the kind of senators said, "You know, there are easier ways to make a living, Danny Werfel." 

Michael Lewis> [ Laughs ] 

Geraldine Brooks> But he is -- he is dedicated to this because he believes what is engraved on the IRS headquarters in Washington, which is a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes which says, "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." And I've always believed that, too. 

Michael Lewis> As have I. Why do you think our country has so much trouble getting its mind around that? 

Geraldine Brooks> I don't want to be an obnoxious foreigner, but I did grow up in Australia, and I think that there's an almost childish expectation of something for nothing here, that -- that you can have a society that you want where everything works and you have excellence of traffic control and roads and sanitation and all those good things. Somebody has to pay for them, and that somebody is all of us. And those who have got more should pay more. But for some reason, I think, probably stemming from the mythologized early history of this country, people really don't like that tax. But I stayed here and raised two sons, and both of them were absolutely affronted when they got their first paycheck working their summer jobs and there was a bite taken out of it. 

Michael Lewis> Hm. So before we get to your specific subject, I want to ask you one more question about the IRS commissioner, and that is, was he different in any way than you expected? What kind of -- What kind of dude was he? 

Geraldine Brooks> He's not your pocket-protector accountant kind of guy. 

Michael Lewis> He's not? okay. 

Geraldine Brooks> He's a guy who has spent a lot of time, I think, reflecting on the issues of -- of what makes government work. And, you know, he's very, very self-aware. He starts his public presentation with a clip from "The Simpsons" in which Homer and Marge are barreling down Constitution Avenue in a taxi, and Marge sees the IRS building and points it out to Homer, and Homer leans out the window and boos. 

Michael Lewis> [ Laughs ] 

Geraldine Brooks> So he knows that the general American attitude to the IRS is booing, and he is aware that there's been reason for that, because successive governments for the past decade have cut the funding and cut the funding and cut the funding until what was left of the organization could not provide the kind of service that anybody should be able to expect, which is your money back, you know, your -- your tax return refund paid promptly. That couldn't happen because, as they were -- their funding was being cut, the population was growing, the number of tax returns were growing, they had no money to fix the ancient creaky technology, but that's changed because of the Inflation Reduction Act. And Danny Werfel is the guy who's been tapped to oversee the technological transformation of the IRS. 

Michael Lewis> Did you have the sense that, aside from letting you in to rattle around and find a story to tell, that he had a strategy for repairing or improving relations between the tax collector and the people or is he -- 

Geraldine Brooks> Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's -- 

Michael Lewis> What kind of things is he doing? 

Geraldine Brooks> Well, it's very much under way because once he got the money from the Inflation Reduction Act, he was able to hire enough people and clear the backlog and start investing in new tech. And I think there was a -- there was a trial last year of a direct file of tax returns. So you don't need to use a tax-prep service. And he wants to roll that out for everybody who has a relatively simple return. And then he's, you know, got enough people to go over the absolute scofflaws, like the hundreds and hundreds of people who make over $1 million, who have not troubled to file a return for the past decade because they knew that the IRS didn't have the wherewithal to come after them... 

Michael Lewis> Really? 

Geraldine Brooks> ...and also to reach out. 

Michael Lewis> Didn't even -- Didn't even didn't even file a return? 

Geraldine Brooks> Didn't even file a return. And then, you know, they've got the wherewithal to reach out to -- I think it's like 6 million Americans who are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, who don't claim it. So the people who need help and the people who need to, you know, have their fingers smacked and to pay their fair share. 

Michael Lewis> I didn't -- I didn't know that. That's riveting. It's -- It's encouraging. Once you're there and you're talking to him, how do you find what you're going to write about? 

Geraldine Brooks> He and his team identified a couple of people, and I landed on Jarod Koopman, who runs cybersecurity investigations for the IRS. So, there's only 3% of the IRS that is involved in criminal investigation. And they are a widely pilloried and deeply misunderstood group of people. What they're doing is busting terrorist networks who are money laundering. They are shutting down pedophile rings and rescuing children from rape and abuse. They're in the crypto space so that they're getting back money that was stolen from people in ransomware attacks. They have done absolutely mindblowing things, and they've returned, in the last 10 years, at least $12 billion to the American taxpayer. 

Michael Lewis> Why are they in the IRS, as opposed to -- I don't know -- the FBI? 

Geraldine Brooks> Because the IRS has had for a long time the remit to investigate financial crimes, and they're the best at it. And the guy I profiled, Jarod Koopman, was charged, back when cryptocurrency first became a thing, with spinning up a unit within the IRS that would look at this space of crypto for its problems in terms of tax evasion, money laundering, sanctions busting. And everybody thought it was completely anonymous and that they would never be caught. Well, that turned out to be incorrect. And it turns out that what crypto provides, if you can do the investigative work to put an identity to the transactions, you can see every transaction that a criminal enterprise has undertaken, where the money originated and where it ended up and every step in between, and you can identify all the wrongdoers that are involved. And it's a fiesta of evidence. And most of the cases that they bring plead out because the criminals are confronted with the record of what they did, and there's really no defense. 

Michael Lewis> Do you think when Jarod got into this, he was aware just what a gold mine crypto was going to be? 

Geraldine Brooks> No, I mean, he talks about coming to understand it. And out of it has come all these amazing cases, like shutting down a pedophile website that was based in South Korea, and they traced the guy who was responsible and went with the Korean police. When they busted this guy, he had a server in his bedroom, and it led to the arrest of 370 pedophiles. 

Michael Lewis> Huh. I want to talk just a little bit about Jarod, but before we do, it's interesting that he's assigned to tackle crypto. And crypto -- I remember when crypto, the story was how you never catch anybody because it's anonymous and untraceable. And of course, it's the opposite. 

Geraldine Brooks> It is the opposite. 

Michael Lewis> Yes, it's anonymous, but it is perfectly traceable. And so you have this backlog of behavior by people who assume no one could ever see what they were doing, and you can go back and just, "Oh, my God." It's like bringing a light into a dark room. You know lots of bad stuff was happening, and now you can just sort of untangle it. I had no idea that the IRS was the place where this happened. 

Geraldine Brooks> Yeah. And the other weird thing about it is, you seize the crypto. And this is such a volatile store of value, that crypto that was seized that was worth a million bucks when it was seized, turns into a billion bucks overnight. And the U.S. government and we, the taxpayer, have benefited from this because when they keep investigating these criminal enterprises, it's the gift that keeps on giving, because you can keep going back and unpeeling another layer. And by the time you do, the value of the crypto is even higher. So it's kind of crazy. One of my favorite cases they did was the Al-Qassam Brigades, which is the military wing of Hamas, was shaking the tin cup on Twitter, as it then was, and asking for funding to buy weapons. And one of Jarod's agents thought that that was very interesting and figured out how to take control of their website. So all the people who were donating, thinking they were buying guns, were actually contributing to the Fund for Victims of Terror. 

[Both laugh] 

So for about a month, the IRS was ripping off the terrorists to the extent of several million dollars. And they used the same technique to take over the websites of ISIS and Al-Qaeda. So that was pretty gratifying. 

Michael Lewis> So let's talk about Jarod just a bit before I let you go. Is he aware that someone might come along and make a movie of his life? 

Geraldine Brooks> I don't know. 

Michael Lewis> Do you think he has a sense of himself as a character? 

Geraldine Brooks> Uh...I think, like most people who are dedicated public servants -- Look, this guy, with the skills he had, could be making a motza in the private sphere, looking after cybersecurity for Goldman Sachs or Salesforce or something like that. He's not. He's looking after it for all of us. He is a very mission-driven guy. And, you know, he comes from a family of mission-driven people. His family have all been in the military or in law enforcement. He's just very dedicated to public welfare, and I don't think he has a lot of ego about what he does at all. 

Michael Lewis> Hmm. Thanks for writing the piece. It's fabulous. And we're going to have to get this band back together one day. It just worked out so great. 

Geraldine Brooks> Sounds good. 

David Shipley:: We'll put links in our show notes to Geraldine's full article and the four others that have been published so far in the "Who Is Government?" series. This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson and edited by Mili Mitra and Allison Michaels. It was mixed by Emma Munger. As always, tell us what you think by e-mailing impromptu@washpost.com. Thanks a lot.


https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/13df180b-4171-4769-8388-f7a6e3a573b5_670310b4362af16d23086eae-transcript.txt

The IRS may be one of the most hated departments in the federal government, but it turns out it does more than just collect taxes. Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks got to know the folks in charge of the IRS’s cybercrime unit which investigates criminals who use cryptocurrency. In this bonus episode, Brooks talks with Michael Lewis about what she learned.

Ruth Marcus

Dana Milbank

Karen Tumulty

Subscribe to The Washington Post<a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> </a><a href="https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/acquisition/?s_l=OFFSITE_PODCAST&amp;p=s_v&amp;s_dt=yearly&amp;utm[%E2%80%A6]e-podcast&amp;utm_medium=acq-nat&amp;utm_campaign=podcast-subs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.

In the vice-presidential showdown JD Vance tried to remake himself by being nice, while Tim Walz directed his attacks at Donald Trump. 

JD Vance had nowhere to go but up

﻿Karen Tumulty> Okay. Give me one word that describes what you thought of the vice presidential debate.  

Dana Milbank> Kangaroo.  

Karen Tumulty> Kangaroo?  

Dana Milbank> Oh, you want me to elaborate now?  

Ruth Marcus> Yeah, I want you to elaborate.  

Dana Milbank> All right. So, CBS, in their wisdom, had the debate in the same New York studio where, for years, they filmed "Captain Kangaroo." And there were great, fantastic stories were told in those episodes, and great, fantastic stories were told by one shapeshifting boy named JD Vance last night.  

Karen Tumulty> Okay, Ruth.  

Ruth Marcus> I did not have "Captain Kangaroo" on my bingo card for this event. But my word is going to be somewhat similar, though perhaps less obscure. It's "Oscar-worthy." Dana used my potential other word, which was "shapeshifting." I was most struck by the degree to which JD Vance, with no indication of any twinge of embarrassment whatsoever, just presented himself as an entirely new character in the evolving JD Vance oeuvre.  

Karen Tumulty> This is "Impromptu," from Washington Post Opinions. It's a show where we bring you the conversations about the news that we can't stop thinking about. I'm Karen Tumulty, a columnist, and this week, we're talking about the vice-presidential debate. It's a little over a month until Election Day, and last night was possibly the final chance that Americans are going to get to see two candidates side by side making a big pitch in front of a nationally televised audience. This time, the messengers were Democratic Governor Tim Walz and Republican Senator JD Vance. I'm joined by two of my colleagues to talk about what we learned last night and whether these candidates' performances could sway any voters.  

Dana Milbank> I'm Dana Milbank, columnist for The Post.  

Ruth Marcus> I'm Ruth Marcus, and me, too.  

Karen Tumulty> Ha!  

Dana Milbank> So, Karen, before we go further, could you establish the rules? Will there be fact-checking in this podcast?  

Karen Tumulty> Can Dana's mic be muted at any point? And who has control of that?  

[Laughter]  

Well, so let's start with the most memorable moments. And, Dana, you went right to it.  

Dana Milbank> Yes. It was exactly 30 minutes into the debate, I think, when JD Vance said, "The rules said you weren't supposed to fact-check me." Of course, the rules said no such thing. CBS had said it sort of indicated that they weren't going to do that, and they got a lot of pushback for it. The truth is, I can understand why they might not even want to go down that road, because if you're going to be fact-checking, you'd be doing nothing else. You know, it's just a stream of nonsense. You know, Walz had his share of them, too. But, you know, as Ruth was saying, JD Vance was just -- it was a fabrication and an invention from minute one to -- I don't know -- minute 108 or however long it went.  

Karen Tumulty> Well, so how about you, Ruth? What sticks in your mind?  

Ruth Marcus> Well, what sticks in my mind is the question, "Does all of this really matter?" We are here because we love watching debates, and if we're not going to have another presidential debate, we might as well have a vice presidential one. And I have to say, on one level, this was a relief, to hear somebody who at least sounded rational and at least sounded human. And I'm talking about JD Vance here, in case anybody is confused. And who shook hands unprovoked, who was able to at least to express some empathy, for example, when Governor Walz talked about his son witnessing a school shooting, and to not have the anger and vitriol of the previous encounter. At the same time, honestly, this one doesn't really matter. There's not a lot of minds left to be made up to the extent that people are making up their minds.  

Karen Tumulty> Well, I've got a -- You know, I agree with you, Ruth. I think anybody who actually sat through that debate was probably already a pretty committed partisan. But the moment that really stuck with me, because, I mean, I think if you go on style points, it was not a good night for Tim Walz. But he finally sort of came into his own near the very end when they started talking about January 6th. And I thought it was unfortunate that that was after probably most people even who tuned in had probably already tuned out. I mean, he was clearly more comfortable on domestic policy, on healthcare, but it was really driving that point home about what had really transpired on January 6th, and what JD Vance was trying to gloss over, the violence, you know, the loss of human life. I think that the public would have been served better to have heard that when people were listening.  

Ruth Marcus> But, Karen, are we just dinosaurs? Um...  

Dana Milbank> Yes.  

Ruth Marcus> To continue the animal thing. In other words, we think people experience these debates in a linear fashion, and some of us who weren't paid to stay up and watch might have been asleep by the time we rolled around to January 6th, and it was kind of unfortunate. But because we can slice and dice and, through social media or other avenues, share the clips, maybe the fact that it took him 90 minutes to get his stride doesn't matter as much as the dinosaurs like us think it does.  

Karen Tumulty> Yeah, I think that is true. I mean, my understanding is, they are already -- both campaigns are already cutting ads on basic little slivers of this debate.  

Dana Milbank> The constant refrain we have throughout this campaign is "Nothing matters." And if even the presidential debate, where, you know, Trump really flopped, I don't think that changed the contours of the race.  

[Notification sounding]  

Ruth Marcus> Sorry, guys. Alexa's telling me it's time to deal with my challah.  

[Laughter]  

Dana Milbank> Mazel tov.  

Ruth Marcus> It's true. I had a massive -- I had a massive challah fail, and I had to make a whole new batch of four more challahs this morning, so I apologize to all the listeners, but happy New Year.  

Dana Milbank> Are you running a bakery over there?  

Ruth Marcus> I am running a -- Sorry we haven't invited you over, Dana.  

Dana Milbank> I know. I love my challah.  

Ruth Marcus> All right, guys, it is safe to resume.  

Karen Tumulty> Okay. I never really trust these early polls coming out of debates, but it does appear, from a couple of them, that both of these candidates saw their public approval rise significantly after this debate. I think this was a especially steep hill for JD Vance to climb, given how rocky his rollout as the vice presidential nominee has been. Do you think he helped himself?  

Dana Milbank> Well, it may be a steep hill, but in another sense, there's only one direction to go, and that was up, since he's so poorly and, you know, just avoiding talk of childless cat ladies. So, yeah, I mean, I suspect it probably helps him at the margin. Vance, I think it's been sort of widely acknowledged, sort of won on technical points as a debater. Walz -- I mean, he was fine, but, you know, I was kind of surprised. I thought he was a better debater than that. Maybe that was my own failure to pay attention. He was just really a stumbling along. And, I mean, it was even fairly late in the debate when he said that, you know -- what was it? -- some of his best friends are school shooters. So it was certainly not a great night for him.  

Karen Tumulty> Well, the other point is that JD Vance has been spending a lot of his time in interview settings, including in hostile interview settings. And I think that that builds up your self-confidence and your surefootedness. And that showed last night because the Harris-Walz campaign has been kind of keeping the vice presidential nominee away from interviews, away from these sorts of settings. And so you could just see how nervous he was, from the very moment.  

Ruth Marcus> He was incredibly nervous. The interview started out on the question of the Mideast and the Iranian strikes, and that was where it needed to start, given the news of the day. But it was also the worst place for Tim Walz to have it start. If a vice presidential debate is about doing no harm, I think Walz did not do himself harm, and Vance did himself some good, to the extent that it's possible to do and that it matters. But I think Walz -- you used the word "fine," Dana, but then you kind of undercut the fineness by going on to criticize it, and I agree with the criticism of his performance. He just left a lot of opportunities on the table. I was really missing -- I was like, "Bring me the prosecutor who was there in the form of Vice President Harris at the presidential debate." I wanted more prosecutor, less schoolteacher, more -- You know, you can do it in a Minnesota nice way, I think, but he just, for most of the time, did not jab back at Vance on the, you know, "What about when you said this? What about when you said that?" I don't think it changes the outcome. I don't think it harms Walz. But it was an opportunity squandered that probably overstates the seriousness of it. And I think, Karen, to your point about how the campaign has kept him kind of bubble-wrapped and her kind of bubble-wrapped, as well, the Harris-Walz campaign, that's true, but you go to the campaign with the vice presidential nominee that you have. And we have one who is a adept, used to being cold-called at Yale Law School, a debater type, and one who's a middle school teacher and football coach. And they have different skill sets and different ways of appealing to people. And I think -- I don't know if it's advisable for the Vance campaign to be putting him out there so much, tangling with reporters, but I think it is probably advisable for the Harris-Walz campaign to minimize the opportunities for slip-ups as much as possible.  

Karen Tumulty> And I think the other thing is, that split screen was brutal to Tim Walz. Somebody on Twitter said he -- you know, as he kept putting his head down to take notes, he looked like he was taking the written test at the DMV.  

[Laughter]  

And, you know, you compare that to how effectively Kamala Harris used the split-screen with Trump.  

Dana Milbank> That is true. Maybe what happened in Tim Walz's case -- not so much the bubble wrap, but I think maybe a case of overpreparation. He was holed up and cramming too much for the debate. And I think he probably had too many things in his head and lines he had memorized and words he wanted to get out there. And I think he probably just froze as a result of having all those things in his head at one point.  

Karen Tumulty> I want to get into whether we actually learned anything new about these candidates and how they talked about the issues. First, let's take a quick break.  

Megan McArdle> Hi. This is Megan McArdle. I'm a journalist and opinion columnist here at The Post. And today I want to recommend the podcast called "Reflector." "Reflector's" team and I recently did three episodes where we dove deep into America's political history of making claims that a U.S. election was stolen.  

A lot of Republicans believe that the election was stolen, and they want Nixon to fight. And Nixon doesn't. He concedes.  

Pres. Richard Nixon> Once the decision is made, we unite behind the man who was elected. I want to --  

[Crowd shouting]  

Megan McArdle> I know that many listeners are always on the hunt for a new podcast, and "Reflector's" not only a place to find great stories, they're also committed to fairness, independence and nonpartisanship, and their coverage of even some of the thorniest issues facing our society. To listen, just search "Reflector" in whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. And thanks.  

Karen Tumulty> Welcome back. I'm Karen Tumulty, and this is "Impromptu." So, did you all learn anything new last night about either the candidates or what their campaign strategies are as they go into these final weeks before Election Day?  

Ruth Marcus> I would say that it's not learning something so much as reinforcing something we've known for a while, which is the degree to which the abortion issue is just scaring the heck out of Trump and the Republican Party. What it must take for JD Vance to do what he did on abortion, to have, really, the gall to say "We're going to solve the issue of abortion" by simultaneously taking away women's choice while pretending we're going to give them more choice, that "I'm going to say I never supported an abortion ban because I'm going to recast --" and we've seen this move from him before. "Well, when I say ban, I don't -- I don't -- I mean, absolute 100% complete ban." They will say or do anything to try to defuse it before suburban women take out their ire on Republicans in the election.  

Karen Tumulty> I was also struck by JD Vance bringing up that personal story of the friend of his who he said had an abortion because she didn't have options. There was a strange kind of logic through that that wasn't logic.  

Dana Milbank> Throughout that abortion answer, or answers, I wanted to see Tim Walz jump in and say, "No, that's not true," and he did say, "Not true," but then he would say, like, "They fact-checked that in the last debate, and, you know, they did that then." But, you know, just, man, if only he had it at his fingertips and he can go and explain why, "No, actually, you know, I did not legalize infanticide in Minnesota."  

Ruth Marcus> And I would say, one thing I did like about Tim Walz, and I thought he did pretty well on abortion, to say something nice about him, since we've been criticizing him, was that instead of this unnamed dear person dear to him that JD Vance referenced, Tim Walz mentioned actual human beings who we've heard from before. He named the names of people like Amanda Zaworski, who were deeply harmed by the delay in obtaining necessary medical care, like Amber Thurman, who died because of Georgia's new abortion law when she could not get the help she needed in time to treat her sepsis. I thought he really humanized that while Vance was kind of faux-humanizing things.  

Karen Tumulty> So, both of you think that nobody was really persuaded by either candidate last night. That was the last big sort of programmed event before the election. Kamala Harris is going to have an interview on "60 Minutes" coming up. President Trump, Donald Trump has declined the invitation. What can possibly shake up this election in the next month? Or is this just going to be a 48-48 slog to the end?  

Dana Milbank> It may well be, but who could have predicted all of the things that would have happened over the last month or the last couple of months? I mean, who knows what's going on in the head of Donald Trump? Does he say, "Wait a second. JD Vance got all these rave reviews for last night. I better go back and have another debate." I mean, who the hell knows? He might attempt something like that. But at the same time, yeah, it is going to be a slog, and it always was going to be just because of the way our politics is set and polarized. But what we don't know is, you know, does the situation in Israel and Iran erupt into something much -- you know, God forbid, much, much worse? You know, do gas prices go through the roof? Is there some other thing that we don't know right now that's going to happen over the next -- what are we down to -- 34 days?  

Karen Tumulty> Well, with that, I want to thank you both for joining me for another episode of "Impromptu."  

Dana Milbank> It was a pleasure, Karen, and may Ruth's challah rise to perfection.  

Ruth Marcus> I'm going to go braid it right now. And thank you for your indulgence.  

Karen Tumulty> Before you go, here's a quick word from our humor columnist Alexandra Petri.  

Alexandra Petri> The vice presidential debate was Tuesday on CBS. It was very polite. There was no name-calling. Well, not of the people in the room. Hannibal Lecter did not come up a single time. It turns out that if you subtract Donald Trump from a room, you can actually have something that sounds like a normal conversation. But I'm not sure, actually, that all that politeness was good. I agree, in general, it's good to be polite. When you walk past someone on the sidewalk, you want that person to make room for you, not reveal that their umbrella's a shiv and stab you in the eye. There are plenty of times when you politely agree, even though what the other person is saying doesn't strike you as true. Sometimes you're having coffee with a friend, and the friend launches into a story about their terrible ex, in which it becomes more and more apparent that your friend is, in fact, the villain. And then you can say something or you can think, "No, no point. Let's have a nice afternoon. We're not here to argue." But there are some times when you are there to argue, and I would say that maybe the debate with Donald Trump's running mate is one of those times. So if your opponent says, "Boy, we're really seeing eye-to-eye. If only it weren't for my pesky running mate, we'd be in total agreement." Uh, well, that is why you're here, though, and it's not actually rude to point that out. Just as yelling is generally rude, but if what you're yelling is, "Duck! Here comes a projectile!", it's actually politer to yell. This is Donald Trump we're talking about. Donald Trump has taken people's reproductive freedom away. Even if JD Vance says he was just trying to give women more options, it's not rude to say, "That doesn't sound like more options." Donald Trump is not a normal political figure. He did not exactly accept the results of the election. I, for one, think that's extremely rude. And if you can't point that out without being impolite, well, there are more important things than politeness.  

Karen Tumulty> This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson, edited by Damir Marusic, Chris Suellentrop, and Allison Michaels, and mixed by Emma Munger. Chris Rukan designed our art. And special thanks to Mili Mitra and Deirdre Byrne. Thanks for listening to "Impromptu." We love hearing from you. E-mail impromptu@washpost.com. And if you like the show, leave us a review or tell your friends about us.  


https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/fe226458-057a-4d25-a7bd-8ef8bec374c1_66fda9e8c94eee2373933848-transcript.txt

In the vice-presidential showdown JD Vance tried to remake himself by being nice, while Tim Walz directed his attacks at Donald Trump. Columnists Karen Tumulty, Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus discuss the Jan. 6 moment and what Vance’s soft talk on abortion says about Republicans’ fear of how the issue will hurt them at the ballot box.

John Lanchester

The skittish inflation number that flies across headlines might feel arbitrary; in fact, it’s anything but. To arrive at that number, it takes millions of calculations into granular details such as the chemical composition of turkey meat and the flavor notes of olive oil. In this episode, John Lanchester chats with Michael Lewis about what the government counts and how tracking these things tells us a lot about what a country values. Read John Lanchester’s full article here: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/john-lanchester-consumer-price-index-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">This number has shaped political debate and determined the fate of presidents&nbsp;</a> Check out the rest of the “Who is Government” series.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Canary</a>, by Michael Lewis<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/casey-cep-ronald-walters-the-sentinel-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Sentinel</a>, by Casey Cep<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/dave-eggers-jet-propulsion-laboratory-nasa-who-is-government/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">The Searchers</a>, by Dave Eggers

The skittish inflation number that flies across headlines might feel arbitrary; in fact, it’s anything but. 

What’s a government for? Let me count the ways.

﻿David Shipley:: I'm David Shipley, and this is "Impromptu" with Washington Post Opinions. And this week, we have another bonus episode that's part of a series we've been running called "Who Is Government?" where seven amazing writers find somebody or something in the federal government that's indispensable. Michael Lewis, author of "Moneyball," "The Big Short," and "The Fifth Risk," recruited these writers and is talking to all of them about the stories they discovered. Today's conversation is with John Lanchester, author of "Fragrant Harbour" and "Capital" and other wonderful works. And it's not about a person, but a thing -- inflation. Enjoy. 

Michael Lewis:: This is Michael Lewis, curator of this series, "Who Is Government?" And my guest today is John Lanchester, old friend, glorious writer, who instantly sprung to mind when this series was conceived because I love everything he writes. He's one of these writers who can kind of make nonfiction sing on the page, but also is a wonderful novelist. Anyway, he's written a piece for us, and here's John and I talking about it last week. 

John Lanchester> Hey, how are you doing? 

Michael Lewis> Well, the series has just gone boom. 

John Lanchester> Oh, great. 

Michael Lewis> So I call you and ask you to participate in this quixotic project, and you didn't even really hesitate very much, and you said yes. And you're the only one who's writing in this series who's not writing about his own country. Why'd you bother? 

John Lanchester> It was such an immediately appealing idea. I think I've always been fascinated by structures and systems and the difficulties of telling stories about them. It really struck me as a thing about the modern world, that we're not very well equipped to deal with the idea, because we think in terms of heroes and individual agencies and stories about people. But a lot of the big, big stories aren't really about people -- they're about systems. And that's why I was so immediately tempted, because the idea of writing about these big structural forces mediated through government is, you know, interesting, both in and of itself and also as a kind of technical challenge. 

Michael Lewis> Tell us just a little bit about your piece, what the idea of it is. 

John Lanchester> The idea of it is that -- that the hero of the piece is a number. The hero of the piece is the CPI-U, which is the consumer price index for urban consumers. And it's the -- it's the number that's plugged into all sorts of federal government benefits and calculations. And it even turns up in things like divorce settlements that are, you know, are rated linked to the CPI-U. It's an incredibly important central number. And I just got really interested in it as a way of writing about all the different things that government does, all the varieties of life, really. You get compressed and squeezed and modulated and try to reduce summed up in one single number, and I really tried to tell the story of this one sum, this one number. 

Michael Lewis> When did you become aware of just how much the United States government counts? 

John Lanchester> I think, really, it came out of the pandemic. You know, one of the things that happened in the pandemic, when states did well and less well, I think, you know, you were very conscious of, you know, and it was in the -- mediated in the most basic, starkest way possible by bit -- by how many people were dying, how many people were living, how many people were getting treatment. 

Michael Lewis> Yeah. 

John Lanchester> It made me think a lot about, well, actually, at the most basic level, what states are for, you know? The simplest thing it has to do is to deliver a better quality of life for its citizens. If you're not better off living in a state than outside of it, why -- why do we have states at all? To be honest, I'd never really thought much about, you know, what can the state do? What are the limits of its abilities? And that thing about counting was really thrown into relief, I think, by the pandemic. That thing about, you know, it actually became very important to know, actually, how many people do have this thing? Where are they? What are the outcomes when they get sick? Who is the one, the people who are getting sick? Who are the people who are recovering? And also, bluntly, critically, what does it cost? All of those things, from being a kind of -- a kind of very boring thing that we could very happily never think about suddenly became, not metaphorically, matters of life and death. And that -- that, for me, was when I got interested in this thing of, you know, just what -- what states count. 

Michael Lewis> You point out at the beginning of the piece that this act of counting isn't just sort of incidental to the United States government -- it's actually central to the founding of the country. 

John Lanchester> Yes, right. The Enumeration Clause of the Constitution. I think the US, I mean, apart from being, I think, the first written constitution, it's also, I think, the only one that has -- certainly, the first one that has counting actually built right into it because of the way that Congress is set up. Counting isn't some footnoted thing that the US government does -- it's actually part of what the US government is. It's the entity that counts its citizens and lots of other stuff, too. 

Michael Lewis> And even compared to other governments, we count quite a bit. 

John Lanchester> It's actually nuts when you start looking into it. You know, I got -- [ Chuckles ] The point where I had to sort of sit down and turn away from the screen was selenium content in wild turkey meat for two different types -- white and dark, raw and cooked. And I remember thinking, "Wow. You know, those feds -- they really do count quite a lot of stuff," you know? 

Michael Lewis> [ Laughs ] 

John Lanchester> And, you know, flavonoid contents and olive oil and, you know, average and median wages for all sorts of jobs in all sorts of different states. And the amount of information that comes through from the federal government, I think -- I think it just has absolutely no precedent anywhere in the world. 

Michael Lewis> You have written wonderful novels and wonderful works of nonfiction. How do you decide, when you're approaching a subject, which way you're going to tilt with it, like whether this is a work of nonfiction or this is a work of fiction that you've got? 

John Lanchester> Usually, if I can explain why it's interesting, it's nonfiction. Fiction is the stuff that you kind of can't stop thinking about and sort of stays with you and you can't quite explain it. And nonfiction journalism, you know, the whole point is to shed light and make it open and to tell the story. And if when there's something interesting about the world that I want to communicate, that seems much more naturally to be a nonfiction thing. I think it would be challenging to write a novel about the consumer price index. 

Michael Lewis> [ Laughs ] I mean, where would the romantic interest be? 

John Lanchester> Yeah, exactly. 

Michael Lewis> There'd be conflict with other statistics, but it's unclear whether there'd be attraction. 

John Lanchester> I wrote a nonfiction book about the -- about the credit crunch and the financial crisis was -- I was writing a novel set in London at that point, and I sort of accidentally found out quite a lot about the workings of finance and all that stuff. And, you know -- And while I was writing it, the world blew up and all that stuff happened, and I wrote a nonfiction book about it, partly to quarantine all the research, because I realized, otherwise, if I wasn't careful, I'd be having to, you know, "As Nigel looked over towards the lights of the Financial District gleaming in the distance, he struggled to remember the definition of a collateralized debt obligation." 

Michael Lewis> [ Laughs ] 

John Lanchester> You know? I  -- And I wrote the nonfiction to kind of quarantine and -- and preserve the reader from that kind of explanation, because you can do a lot of things in fiction, but you can't really explain. 

Michael Lewis> So, last question -- you refer to the Darkening at the end of your piece. What is the Darkening? 

John Lanchester> You know, the last few years, I've been more and more struck by this thing about -- sometimes called the post-truth moment. There was a kind of grounding in a collective understanding about what's true and what isn't, that there was a commonality of, you know, what facts are, what's real and what isn't, and that we're losing some traction with that, that our societies are slipping away from the idea that, if you're caught in a falsehood, that -- once upon a time, if you were caught lying in public, you couldn't have a career in public life. We seem to have lost that, and it seems to be accompanied by an increasing tendency to just simply reject things that are inconveniently true. And I wonder if what one of the things that looks like is the sort of end of an Enlightenment moment, because you can't demonstrate objective truth, but you can keep looking for it. That's one of the things that the CPI is for. It's an impossible number, but the -- the work to make it is what's important. And if you abandon the idea that you can establish these sort of independent, factually grounded truths, you -- it is a turn in human history, I think, and I chose to call it the Darkening as a sort of parallel to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment gets a lot of criticism now, correctly, for the ideas that it's grounded in, you know, norms that erase all sorts of important truths about cultural differences and racial differences and kind of hierarchies of race and power. At the same time, there is something very important about that idea that you can live better by knowing better. And that's why it's something I call the Darkening that I think we're starting to see these alarming signs of and that don't really have a historic parallel, I don't think -- the idea of a society collectively abandoning the idea of truth and then snapping out of it. And I think we have to hope that's -- that's what's going to happen now. 

Michael Lewis> On that note, John Lanchester, I want to send the audience off to read your piece. It's wonderful, and like everything you write, makes my heart go pitter-patter when I -- when I see the words on the page. It's just great. 

John Lanchester> Well, thank you so much for asking me to do it, Michael. It was -- You know, it was a privilege. 

Michael Lewis:: We'll put links in our show notes to John Lanchester's full article and the three others that have been published so far in the "Who Is Government?" series. This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson and edited by Mili Mitra and Allison Michaels. It was mixed by Emma Munger. As always, tell us what you think by emailing impromptu@washpost.com. Thanks a lot.


https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/fdf3b107-07dd-44f4-bc6f-d8c27e299a42_66f6c901c94eee23739335f6-transcript.txt

The skittish inflation number that flies across headlines might feel arbitrary; in fact, it’s anything but. To arrive at that number, it takes millions of calculations into granular details such as the chemical composition of turkey meat and the flavor notes of olive oil. In this episode, John Lanchester chats with Michael Lewis about what the government counts and how tracking these things tells us a lot about what a country values.

A little-known secret: Washington Post Opinions columnists like talking to one another. They don’t always agree, of course, but they are in almost constant conversation – testing their ideas, refining their thoughts and sometimes changing their minds. Now you can listen in on some of those conversations. Each week on “Impromptu,” Post columnists go beyond hot takes and have personal, candid conversations on the latest topics in news and culture that we can't stop thinking about. Listen in on the conversations that happen before the columns are written. New episodes every Wednesday. 

Washington Post Opinions columnists offer frank commentary in conversation about the latest news moments

Impromptu podcast from Washington Post Opinions

A little-known secret: Washington Post Opinions columnists like talking to one another. They don’t always agree, of course, but they are in almost constant conversation – testing their ideas, refining their thoughts and sometimes changing their minds. Now you can listen in on some of those conversations. Each week on “Impromptu,” Post columnists go beyond hot takes and have personal, candid conversations on the latest topics in news and culture that we can't stop thinking about. Listen in on the conversations that happen before the columns are written. New episodes every Wednesday.

Frank, thoughtful conversations on the news and cultural debates we can’t stop thinking about, from Post Opinions columnists.

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