Against the Rules with Michael Lewis

My new audiobook, Blockers, is out now! Get the audiobook now exclusively at blockers.fm. And stay tuned for an upcoming Blockers companion series right here on Against the Rules.
In Washington, a blocker became the worst thing you could be. The directive was to find the blockers and get rid of them. And I found six of them. People who devoted their lives to public service, who believed their work mattered, until they were told they no longer belonged.
Blockers tells the story of the people who kept our most sensitive data secure, helped prevent wildfires, and uncovered life-saving research, and who got in the way of a slash-and-burn agenda inside the executive branch.
What fascinated me about it all wasn't politics. It was what happens when a society decides it no longer values the people doing work it depends on.
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With the news of Warren Buffett stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, we are revisiting an episode from our two-part series on Buffet.
Warren Buffett rose from obscurity to become the richest person in the world - and he did it in a unique way. As a boy in Omaha he collected information obsessively - writing down car license numbers and hoarding bottle caps. As a young man, Buffett turned his focus on scouring business accounts to find companies that had hidden value no one else could spot.
We tell the story of young Warren Buffett as he quietly worked building up the expertise and accumulating the wealth that would allow him to become the most famous investor of our age.
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On the 250th anniversary of the United States, Revisionist History, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood, investigates the story of what was, at the time, the biggest secession movement in the U.S. since the Civil War. The Staten Island Problem reconstructs the battle for New York City amidst the turbulent early 1990s — the rise of Rudy Giuliani, the peak of the homicide rate, the Wu-Tang Clan, young Donald Trump, and the first Black mayor of New York — all through the prism of the city’s Forgotten Borough. Staten Island’s secession movement is an early example of the politics of resentment that dominates America today and asks: what do you do when a democracy looks like it’s falling apart? Here’s episode 1. David Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York City, faces off with the borough president of Staten Island, and tries to hold his city together.
Find more episodes of Revisionist History: The Staten Island Problem wherever you get podcasts.
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Here's a special episode from Business History (which even mentions Liar's Poker!). Business History is a show about, you guessed it, the history of business and what we can learn from founders and companies.
John Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage — the trick of buying an asset cheap in one place and quickly selling it for a profit in another.
When he parted ways with Salomon Brothers, Meriwether took his "nerds" to set up a hedge fund. They prospered — making themselves and their clients rich. Two employees even picked up a Nobel Prize. But Long Term Capital Management operated in the real world — where projections and charts and formulas can't protect you from political chaos and economic turmoil.
Find more episodes of Business History on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.
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Exciting news! I have an all new book coming out on October 6th: BLOCKERS. You can pre-order your copy of the audiobook exclusively at blockers.fm. The hardcover is available at michaellewiswrites.com.
A blocker is the worst thing you could be during President Trump's second term—especially if you worked in the federal government and wanted to keep your job. A blocker was a holdover, an impediment, and, most of all, someone who didn’t belong. BLOCKERS tells the story of six people who believed they had a calling, who were convinced they were doing something the country couldn’t do without, and then discovered they were no longer wanted. One kept Americans’ most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands and another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods, another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis.
BLOCKERS is an inside look at the early days of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as told by the public servants it targeted and asks the question: If public servants can’t survive in government today, then what does that say about our country?
Pre-order your copy of the audiobook exclusively at blockers.fm. We'll send you a code for 25% off all Pushkin titles, including mine like Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, through the end of the year.
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