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ML Michael Lewis Michael Lewis Nonfiction author of seventeen books on finance, baseball and government, including Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Fifth Risk and Going Infinite.

“They treat the government like a startup. They move into the General Services Administration's headquarters with Musk and sleep on cots or the floor. They're sent off every day and told to come back with scalps: people you fired, contracts you've cut. If you're an excellent civil servant, what it looks like is insanity. A 25-year-old showing up with a badge, demanding access to the computers, and cutting the government in the most arbitrary ways, just looking at an org chart and circling stuff that sounds bad.”

Prof G Media · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“They treat the government like a startup. They move into the General Services Administration's headquarters with Musk and sleep on cots or the floor. They're sent off every day and told to come back with scalps: people you fired, contracts you've cut. If you're an excellent civil servant, what it looks like is insanity. A 25-year-old showing up with a badge, demanding access to the computers, and cutting the government in the most arbitrary ways, just looking at an org chart and circling stuff that sounds bad.” — Michael Lewis, Prof G Media

Context

Scott Galloway asked Michael Lewis about the people inside DOGE. Lewis describes how its young engineers worked day to day and how that looked to the career civil servants on the receiving end, arguing that startup methods applied to government produced arbitrary cuts.

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Transcript

Prof G Media
Scott Galloway

Talk about the people inside of the engine room here.

Michael Lewis

Yeah, it's you're pretty closely in touch with your 23-year-old self, I sense. Like you're very bad boys. Yes, and you were, and you were a boy, and you're sensitive to what it was like to be a young man. And I remember what I was like when I was 23, too. So I felt some sympathy for what happened. I try to put myself in the shoes of their shoes, and the world's richest man is telling me to go do stuff. And it's someone who I really admire. And I know nothing. And I know nothing. All I know is what they tell me. So that's the caveat to what I'm about to say. Well,

Scott Galloway

to be fair, it's like being drafted into the NBA. Yeah. Like, how could you say no to that?

Michael Lewis

Yeah. Yes, that's right. But that's the caveat to what I'm about to say. And what I'm about to say is that there was a pattern to these guys, these young guys. They led with cruelty and contempt rather than curiosity. Like they were sure they were the smartest person in the room before they entered…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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