Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday morning. It's not our most admirable attribute, but most of us can relate to staying angry at someone for weeks, months, even years. Simply put, we sure know how to hold a grudge, or in some cases, lots of grudges. And it turns out that these days, holding a grudge can be easier than ever.
So, is there any hope for us to just let it go? We asked Susan Spencer to find out. Ever hold a grudge against someone?
Now more than ever, you are not alone. We're living in a kind of rage culture where outrage is celebrated. Outrage gets you clicks; it makes you popular.
So, this grudge identity. Becomes our persona. The Golden Age of Grudges ahead on Sunday morning. The movie *The Social Network*, which told the story of the founding of Facebook and the rise of Mark Zuckerberg, was a huge success back in 2010. It earned three Oscars, including one for writing, awarded to Aaron Sorkin.
Sorkin is back now with a follow-up film and talking with Joe Linkent. I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. Aaron Sorkin has been examining the truth for decades. We're a corkboard.
We don't control what people pin to it.
Now, in the social reckoning, he comes to terms with what Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have done to it. At the beginning of this conversation, I think I would have objected to the idea that people can't handle the truth, and now I'm coming around to it. Yeah, they can't. They can't. They can't.
Facts and fiction with Aaron Sorkin later on Sunday morning. Seeing Alan Alda on screen usually means something smart and funny is in store. The affable actor seems to find humor in just about anything, even his own health challenges, as he'll share with our Dr. John Lapook. Throughout his long career, Alan Alda has always searched for laughter, even when facing hardship.
What's funny about Parkinson's? I'll be at the computer keyboard writing an email. And Dr. Parkinson is moving my hand all over the screen. I have the mouse, and he's deleting things that I need.
Hello, Joy. Can you hear me? Alan Alda can still find the funny. Coming up on Sunday morning.
Okay. Also ahead. If you saw me online, would you think I'm real? Ted Koppel examines deep fakes, AI-generated images and videos that are becoming increasingly difficult, some would say almost impossible, to distinguish from the real thing. And more on this first Sunday morning of a new month, October fourth, twenty twenty-six.
We'll be right back. Are you holding a grudge, or does a grudge have a hold on you? Susan Spencer on letting go. Journalist Meredith Lapour admits it; she really can hold a grudge.
So, how long does your typical grudge last? I would say five to seven years, or even longer. She felt snubbed when, 12 years ago, friends didn't give her a bigger role in organizing a bachelorette party. I don't think I ever planned a bachelorette party after that. There was too many cooks in the kitchen, and I didn't like that.
In her 20s, she took offense when a roommate yelled at her for locking herself out of their apartment. Are you still mad? I would. Have a drink with her, but I would never call her a friend. But the granddaddy of Merida's many grudges centers around, of all things, a birthday cake.
Back in college, my parents had sent me a birthday cake, so I put the birthday cake in the fridge one night, and then the next morning it was gone.
Somehow we figured out that a boy had taken it late at night. He was like telling people about it and like boasting about it that he'd stolen your birthday cake. Yes, yes, it was a nice cake. You're still mad about? Yeah, I've held that one for a long time.
I think now I'm over it. Laporte says she comes by her grudge-holding honestly. My father, nicest guy, a brilliant doctor, you know, kindest bedside manner. We've always joked that he was going to write a book called Grudges I've Had, you know, just about lifelong grudges. But so this runs in the family.
Yeah, I think it does. Yes. Any other attributes or traits that you have that you think lead you to be more inclined to have a grudge? I am a sensitive person. I think some people are much better at getting like letting things roll off their shoulders.
As a psychotherapist, do you see grudges very often in your patients? Every day, they're incredibly common. One survey found four out of five adults harbor some lingering resentment, with the average holding seven grudges at the same time. It is absolutely remarkable to me how small, small events can become just enormous, poisonous hives inside of someone. And those hives, says psychotherapist Nancy Collier, can buzz for decades.
I am working with one person who is holding on to a grudge against a high school friend. This is a person in her fifties. You're kidding, over a scuffle to do with a boy when they were seventeen. She's still furious, still walking around angry. But all of this is counterproductive.
We're lighting ourselves on fire and expecting the other person to die of smoke inhalation. We have this misguided idea that we're punishing the other person. Unforgiveness is essentially like drinking a poison and hoping the other person dies. Doesn't work. Harvard epidemiology professor Tyler Vanderweele says, whether held for a day or a decade, grudges are just bad for us.
Studies indicate greater levels of cardiovascular trouble, higher levels of depression, higher levels of anxiety. Yet we live in an age where brazen airing of a grudge, once frowned upon, now seems almost expected. There are multiple reasons for this change. One of them is the public nature of the grudges that are now possible through social media.
Some of it also is an abandonment of discussions of character and what good character looks like and what good character requires. It also seems to be in fashion politically. Politicians now wear their grudges on their sleeves. It's very childlike. I think also when the people know each other, sometimes they don't want to share because you're going to see that person.
You don't want.
So, how to rid yourself of a grudge? At Harvard's Institute of Human Flourishing, Professor Vanderweel focuses on one word: forgive. Forgiveness is the the letting go. Of of a grudge, it's the replacing of ill will towards an offender with goodwill. It's not all that needs to take place to provide restoration and reconciliation, but I do think it's always appropriate to have goodwill, even when one's been hurt.
Tell me who we see here.
So this is my immediate family. Author Immaculee Ilibeguiza is living proof of the incredible power of forgiveness. I had three brothers, one girl, who were very close family. This is my mom and dad. They were teachers.
Ilabiga lost most of her family to the Rwandan genocide. Tens of thousands of people have died in decades of tribal warfare. She survived by hiding in a tiny bathroom with seven other women for three months.
So, what does it do to someone's spirit to be? Locked up in a bathroom. My goodness! For three months, I was fighting with God. I was asking Him questions.
You were angry. Oh, I was angry. But somehow, she learned to let go of that rage when she realized it was harming only her. I want to quote you something you said about anger. When you are angry, you are married to your enemies.
That's all you can think about from morning to night. What did you mean by that? I thought about my enemies from morning until night. That's why anger becomes like a sickness. It becomes like an obsession.
And if I believe God can change my heart, why can't I believe He can change them? Today, Ilabaguiza, whose experience might justify holding a grudge against all of humanity, instead tours the world preaching forgiveness. Examples like that are. Incredibly profound, and I think demonstrate the power and the freedom that forgiveness can bring.
So, whether large scale like Rwanda or mundane as a birthday cake, Nancy Collier says we must deal with all grudges the same way. Ultimately, your well-being. Cannot rely on anyone else changing or doing anything for you. It cannot, or we're hostage.
So the only way you're going to feel well, find equanimity, is when you take ownership of your own well-being. Get them out of your story. You're listening to a quick ad. You know what else is quick? Selling your car on Carvana.
Just put in your vehicle information, and we'll give you an offer. Done. No hassle. No negotiation. No guy from an online listing lowballing you.
Which means by the time I'm done explaining this, you could have basically done it. Still haven't started? Hey, better late than never. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.
You have part of my attention. You have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing. The founding of Facebook made for great drama in the social network, the Academy Award-winning film written by Aaron Sorkin. Sixteen years later, Sorkin is reckoning with Facebook's global impact in a new film, and talking about it with Jolene Kent.
When you get a sense of writer's block, what do you do?
Okay, I like to drive around and listen to music, and I try to start. Arguments with myself, talking out loud. You go for a drive and you start arguments with yourself. You're making me sound crazy now.
Okay, just the facts. But is that where the best ideas come from? One out of every fifty times. Really? And I'll take those odds any day.
The odds paid off when Aaron Sorkin was working on The Social Network. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook. He'd have invented Facebook.
Sorkin won an Oscar for screenwriting. This movie is going to be a source of pride for me every day for the rest of my life, and helped define Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and an entire industry. You're going to blame me because you were the business head of the company and you made a bad business deal with your own company. 16 years later, he wonders about the unintended consequences. I remember talking to Jesse Eisenberg, who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, and how.
Distressed he was that teenage boys were coming up to him; they wanted him to sign business cards that said, "I'm CEO, bitch." The way Mark had it, that that Jesse was seeing. Wait a second; these people think Mark is a hero in this story and not a tragic hero. Do you bear any feelings or responsibility for that?
Well, I mean, of course, I'm responsible. It wasn't my intention. And perhaps that's one reason why Sorkin is revisiting Facebook and Zuckerberg in the social reckoning, out this Friday. People can post what they want. We're not the ref.
We're the public square. Jeremy Strong plays a grown-up Mark Zuckerberg, still awkward but far more powerful. The debate is over. The film is inspired by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, portrayed by Mikey Madison. I wanted to find out who radicalized my friend.
And we did. In 2021, Haugen leaked thousands of internal documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horowitz, played by Jeremy Allen White. We have 102 hours to get everything. When I look at Mark, I view a lot of things about his experience of the world as a tragedy. This is the real Francis Haukgen, who's still reflecting on Facebook and Zuckerberg.
So here's a person who rose to power when he was 19 years old. Surrounded by yes men for his entire adult life, he's been able to immediately isolate himself from consequences for 20 years. Facebook wants you to stay on the site for as long as possible. The consequences for the rest of us are depicted in the social reckoning: misinformation, extremism, and division. I'm a free speech absolutist.
I'm not the one who's lying. In 2018, engagement was going down, so they tweaked the algorithm. You said a comment was worth five times as much as a like, an emoji was worth fifteen times as much as a like, and a reshare would be worth thirty times a like. Why is that significant? That is significant because they knew they had done plenty of research showing that the things most likely to be reshared are anything that makes you angry.
Rage bait. That's right, rage bait. That's what they did, and it worked. Right here we are on set in Vancouver. This past July, we saw Sorkin, who's also directing the film, bring his signature rapid-fire dialogue to life.
I get very nervous when there aren't four walls. I've written very few exterior scenes in my life. It is mostly people talking in rooms.
So you've got all this time, game is not without reward. What do you listen for? In a scene like that, well, you use the word "listen," which is what I'm doing. I'm very conscious of the music of the language. My parents started taking me to see plays starting from when I was very little, and I loved the sound of dialogue.
It sounded like music to me—just these great actors saying words that are crashing against each other—and I wanted to imitate that sound. And so, when I'm writing, What a line of dialogue sounds like is as important to me as what it means. We're not frightened of Congress. We're post-government around here. Please, please let me quote that.
The film opens just as Sorkin's first hit, *A Few Good Men*, returns to Broadway. Made into the 1992 hit film. I'd appreciate if he would dress me as Colonel or Sir. I believe I've earned it. It also examines another large institution.
You want answers? Wrestling with the truth. I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. You can't handle the truth.
Right. Also seems to directly apply to. The social reckoning. I think the theme is you're not getting the truth in the social reckoning. I think we can handle the truth, but you know what?
I'm going to take that back. Maybe we can't handle the truth, and that the reason why so many people believe things that are flat out untrue is that the lie is easier to believe. For instance, you can tell people till you're blue in the face that the undocumented immigrant population commits fewer crimes per capita than citizens. They won't hear that. They will only hear that immigrants are the cause of their problem.
Meta, Facebook's parent company, declined to comment on the film. It's repeatedly said it's working to stop the spread of dangerous and harmful content. How hard is it to get powerful people to change something they're doing? The film arrives as Meta faces billions of dollars in settlements and verdicts over claims its platforms harm the mental health of young users, with more cases headed to trial. When you empower people, our lives get better.
And with Meta now competing in AI, whistleblower Frances Haugen worries: Should Mark Zuckerberg be in the AI game? There have been many whistleblowers that have come out of Meta's AI teams talking about the lack of safety. I would pause before rushing into giving Mark the level of power that he's trying to seize when it comes to AI. But it's the power Zuckerberg already wields that's kept Aaron Sorkin writing. If you had a moment with Mark Zuckerberg, face to face, what would you say to him?
You want to make the world a better place. Don't make the truth up for grabs. Don't be indifferent to the truth. And he can do that. In recent weeks, we've been looking at the AI revolution through the eyes of some of the world's most prominent tech executives.
This morning, senior contributor Ted Koppel takes a different approach, posing a question many of us have asked about some of the things we see online: Is it real, or is it fake? Last February, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck an Iranian elementary school, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. President Trump initially suggested that it could have been somebody else's Tomahawk, whether it's Iran or somebody else. The fact that a Tomahawk, a Tomahawk is very generic; it's sold to other countries. But that's being investigated right now.
When Iran put out this video as evidence that it was a U.S. missile, Honeyfereed, one of the world's foremost experts on deep fakes, was contacted by several media outlets to determine if it was real or fake. I'm going to warn you; it's not a fun video to look at. It's a very short thing. Even the sound is brutal.
A professor at Dartmouth College, Fareed, is also co-founder of Get Real Security, a cybersecurity firm. What was difficult about this case is you had very little to work on. We had a very grainy, shaky video. The missile is extremely small, and we had to reason about the physical plausibility of that missile striking the ground. And you have certain things that we know scientifically about sound, speed of sound, and speed of light, and how big a Tomahawk missile is.
And those three things were enough for us to say that this is physically plausible. And this is the important part. All evidence led us to the belief that the video was authentic, and there's been no refuting of that. But that's the world we live in. Reality itself, so perfectly mimicked by artificial intelligence, that even reality is suspect.
Here's the thing that makes me a little crazy, as a scientist in particular, is I don't think. You should be able to go into a court of law and say, "Here is some evidence that is damning enough to put this person to death," and then the judge says, "Well, how do you know it's real?" And I say, "Well, because the computer told me so." This is not an answer. And if I can't explain to you, to a judge, and to a jury what is happening here, why? Because the lighting, because the shadows, because the geometry, whatever it is, that's what we need to be able to do. A case in point.
Alex Preddy, who was killed by an ICE agent in Minnesota. If you remember the scene, it was chaotic. Several ICE agents with guns surrounding Alex Preddy. First of all, this is the very blurry photo that was seems to have been the original.
Somebody took this and enhanced it. You can see. I think it's not arguable. This image lands differently, right? The crispness of it.
It feels more real. But what it also did is, when it enhanced this, it seems to have put a gun in his hand. You go back to this video. The camera's panning a little bit, and what's happening is there's a shadow behind his hand on the street. And what the AI did is it hallucinated this.
When you say the AI hallucinated it, yeah. If AI can hallucinate, yeah, something onto a picture. What are we doing? What are we doing? It's learned that when you see photos like this with three men with guns, everybody's got a gun.
But now, when you do Google searches for events that have happened, shows you that one. By Honey Farid's estimate. Half of the content that's widely viewed on the internet is fake. If you saw me online, would you think I'm real? Basically, a toss of the coin.
Much of it has its own sneering label: AI slop. Help us! You brought it home first. How's that feel? Feels like I wrestled a hurricane, man.
But it sure feels good. Car was steady. Pit crew was lightning, and we kept it together when it counted. AI slop is a broad term that defines people generating content using AI just to grab eyeballs. Video after video after video, driving engagement.
For the most part, Farid limits his examinations to the really serious stuff. The deep fakes. Even so, he's inundated. We're seeing deepfakes being weaponized in many, many different ways, from the creation of child sexual abuse material to non-consensual intimate imagery to full-blown state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. To what the North Koreans have done is to have their IT workers interview for jobs remotely, and they conceal their accent using AI.
They can conceal their identity using a deepfake, where they change their identity from eyebrow to chin, cheek to cheek, in real time over a video call. They can conceal their geolocation, and they interview for jobs. I will tell you, just about every single Fortune 500 company has hired one or more of these, whether they know it or not. And now the question you want to ask yourself is, what's next?
Well, so one CEO said, "Okay, no more virtual interviews, no more remote work." That's insane. We're going back. We're going back twenty years. We're going to start flying people across the country. Like that can't be the answer.
I mean, it's exhausting. Let's be honest. I mean, if we're always looking our shoulder over every email, every text message, every voicemail, every phone call, every video call, it's exhausting. I'm exhausted, and I do this for a living. Do you have nightmares about deep fakes?
About reaching a point where the deep fakes become so good? That honey, Farid can't do a damn thing about it. I have nightmares about. Like, I look at content all day long, and usually the things I look at are not pleasant. I'm looking at bad things that involve horrific crimes, and when you view these things over and over and over again, they sit with you, and you can't can't get them out of your head.
And number two is I don't want to be wrong. And five years ago, I felt a lot more confident about our ability to distinguish real from fake. It's gotten harder, and then I worry more. I feel like the ground is constantly shifting. It builds the stress, the pressure.
After seven years on the West Coast, Professor Farid returned to Dartmouth College, where he had previously spent 20 years on faculty. His wife, Emily Cooper, is also a professor there. The two of them bought a rural property in neighboring Vermont, where Farid mows acres of meadows and cuts enough wood to feed their stoves through the winter. It's enough mowing and cutting to rinse some of those disturbing images away. It's isolated.
There's no mail delivery, no garbage pickup, but it's peaceful. Certain work-related issues linger.
Social media, Fareed loathes it. You can look. At social media, at online platforms, and say there is measurable harm coming to young kids, to adults, to seniors across the board. And I think we have been so mesmerized by these products, which are by design meant to be addictive. I think we didn't experiment on an entire generation of these young kids coming up, putting these devices in their hands, and now we've woken up and we're like, "My God, this is terrible." This generation right now has.
Lower learning outcomes than any generation in history. Go to Palo Alto at the fanciest private schools where all the tech billionaires send their kids. There's no devices in those classrooms. They know that $17 billion settlement that Meta reached a few weeks back includes some safeguards, like a two-hour time limit for users under the age of 18. Aniforid thinks that's a start.
But not nearly enough. What's the darkest vision you have? The darkest vision I have is that everybody lives in their own information ecosystem, and nobody knows how to talk to each other anymore. On platforms where algorithms prefer fake to real content, Fareed thinks all of us should stay off social media, or at the very least take those apps off our phones to resist the temptation. As for those websites that promise to detect AI fakes.
He says it's not that simple. Here's what I think is next, and by saying next, I mean in the coming year, which is most of the deepfakes that we are seeing today have a human somewhere in the process.
Somebody's hands are on the keyboard. There's still a human in the loop. But what's going to start happening is AI agents are going to start creating their own fakes. What's an AI agent?
So what is an AI agent? An agent just has more autonomy, and what we have started to see is that when you give it a problem to solve. It will find creative ways to do it, including creating a fake identity to interact with a human to get a human to do something, and then it will lie about it. AI agents have been in the news recently for going rogue in testing trials, intensifying the global debate over AI safety and the very course of humanity. These are issues Honeyford grapples with every day.
I think there is a near future where people will have an AI agent that they grow up with, and it will know them better than anybody else knows them. And I think that thing. Can live on forever. My wife and I have been talking about this. She's younger than I am.
We've been talking about should we be incorporating into an AI agent my voice, my likeness, how I think, how I talk, the type of questions I ask her in the morning, how I respond to her when she's sad, how I respond to her when she's happy. Do I think AI can mimic that to near perfection? Yes. Let me rephrase that question for you. Let's say that it could.
And it did. Yeah, and you get hit by a truck. Yeah, your wife is left. Yeah, with an exact replica. Yeah, of honey.
Yeah, can't do the physical stuff. Can't do the physical stuff. Can't make love to her, but everything else. Yeah, is that adequate? I think that's the right question to ask, and I think the answer is clear.
No, it's not. I think it is not, but I think for my generation, the answer is probably no. But the next generation, the generation after that, that will think about these things differently, I don't know. We have liver or fish. It's inhuman to serve the same food day after day.
The Geneva Convention prohibits the killing of our taste buds. I simply cannot eat the same food every day—fish, liver, day after day. I've eaten a river of liver and an ocean of fish. Alan Alda has been making audiences laugh for decades. Turns out now, laughter is helping him get through his greatest challenge ever, as he tells Dr.
John Lepouk. Is it even possible to choose your favorite Alan Alda character? This is about winning. How about Senator Arnold Vinick on The West Wing? If I can win California, I can win the country.
Or lawyer Jack Burrows in The Four Seasons. Nobody can do what you do. My God, you're perfect. How dare you call me that? And of course, Hawkeye Pierce, the sarcastic Korean War combat surgeon.
Our radar. All the nurses have heard about sex. I know I've been spreading the word. Shut your face! Kiss me.
And the winner is Alan Alda, Mash. For his work on Mash, Alda won five of the six Emmy awards for acting, writing, and directing. Has Hawkeye Pierce led anybody to become a doctor? I have doctors coming up to me on the street all the time, telling me that seeing me in the show made them want to become a doctor. Not a single one said it made them want to become an actor.
Long before playing Hawkeye Pierce, Alan Alda, now ninety, was on the other side of the stethoscope. You had polio as a kid, right? Yeah, I had polio before there was a vaccine. How old were you? Seven.
Oh boy, my father had just gotten his first part in a movie, playing George Gershwin. And about a week after we started shooting, I got polio. Wow! And he and my mother had to administer the treatment, which was almost scalding hot packs of wool on every limb.
So they're practically torturing their kid. Very. I remember thinking that it was hard on them. As a boy, Allen studied his father Robert Alda's performances in vaudeville and burlesque, and also when he starred on Broadway in the original cast of Guys and Dolls. Luck, if you've ever been a lady to begin with, luck be a lady tonight.
He stood in the wings and watched that every Saturday. But Lady Luck dealt the family a difficult hand. His mother Joan, a former beauty pageant winner, was troubled. My mother was mentally ill, had schizophrenia and was paranoid.
So sometimes the communication would be about the crack in the wall, was where they had a camera taking pictures of us. Oh my, I think that contributed a lot to tools I later had, trying to figure out what's real and what's not real. I'd have to pick one reality and try to stick with that. Do you think that affected the throughline of your life, if there is one?
Well, it made me more observant, and I think it even helped. I'm just realizing this for the first time in this moment. I think it made me a little more curious. He's been especially curious about human connection, something he fostered on the set of Mash. I can't imagine what this place would have been like if I hadn't found you here.
We didn't go back to our dressing rooms between shots. Was this like an hour or two hours where they light a new set? We stayed in our chairs in a circle and made fun of one another and laughed. And that connection that we had, we carried with us onto the set, which had a huge impact on viewers. More than a hundred million people saw that last episode.
They think 106, but I think it was probably more. Not that I'm greedy. I think communication is part of science. For years, Alda has been concerned that scientists and healthcare professionals often use technical language that's hard for the general public to understand. With that in mind, in 2009, New York Stony Brook University founded the Allen Alda Center for Communicating Science.
And when they got better at it, back in 2013, our own Tracy Smith watched Alda use methods from his own acting experience, including improvisation. Improvisation really puts you in touch with the other person, and that's when I realized the value. Of connection. Connecting is one of Alan Alda's superpowers. This is clear and vivid.
Since 2018, he's been interviewing guests like Paul McCartney. What often happens is you'll do that first line, it'll develop into a verse. Michael J. Fox. Honestly, my first reaction was you've made a mistake.
Noah Wiley. Kind of got me to where I am now. Hello, Joy. Can you hear me? And recently, Joy Behar.
You were teaching kids in a, in a rough neighborhood. Yes. What was that like? They'd do something horrendous, and then they'd send them to me to teach them the difference between who and whom. To Alda, connecting with people means being clear and honest, which is why he will openly discuss his Parkinson's disease.
I had a symptom which, at the time, was not that well known. What was that? Acting out your dreams. I had a dream that somebody was attacking me, and I picked up a sack of potatoes and threw it at him. What I was really doing was throwing a pillow at Arlene, my wife.
Oh gosh, I had no twitch, no no tremor, no problems with my voice. He was 79. A few years later, Alda decided to reveal the diagnosis. I haven't said in public until now. That I've been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
I really think reality is my friend. I don't want to wish it away. I can't wish it away. I can't hope for a better future. I gotta accept what is.
There's currently no cure for the neurological disorder, but there are medications and other treatments. I don't let Parkinson's define me. It's not who I am. It's just a hobby.
Some hobby you chose. You couldn't pick up rock collecting, which brings me to sense of humor. How important has that been? Very important because the best way to deal with anything that's a little bit of a problem is to find out what's funny about it and laugh at it. What's funny about Parkinson's?
I'll be At the at the computer keyboard, writing an email, and Doctor Parkinson is moving my hand all over the screen. I have the mouse, and he's eliminating things. He's deleting things that I need.
Now you could react to that with frustration and even anger. Yeah, once in a while I get frustrated, but I find what makes me laugh about, and then I go tell Arlene. Arlene, all does that just off camera. Laughing first brought us together. How so?
We were invited to dinner at a friend's house, and Arlene was sitting at one end of the table, and I was sitting at the other end. And I noticed that she was laughing at my jokes.
So already, I was smitten. In March, we'll be married seventy years. They have three daughters and eight grandchildren. I'll make you laugh. I hear okay.
Your hair's great. Alan Alda says he feels really good. You look great. Even if Arlene has to help button his shirt in the morning, I hate this. Of course, I feel that from time to time.
I do hate it. But the only thing that's helpful is what haven't I tried? And pretty soon you get the feeling. If I keep looking for new ways to try this, I'll get a solution. It's a puzzle.
Will I be able eventually to put my socks on? The last time I put my socks on was a tremendous, was a moment to celebrate. In his new book, author Michael Lewis turns his attention to Washington D.C. Center stage, those career civil servants who stood up to Elon Musk, Doge, and the Trump administration not all that long ago. Michael Lewis is in conversation with Robert Costa.
I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.
So help me God. Civil service oath of office, U.S. Code 3331. Do you believe most Americans know that civil servants in the federal government take this oath? No.
No, I didn't know. I I don't think I knew even after I'd written a whole book about them.
So I assume not. For author Michael Lewis, pursuing knowledge is a calling, and he has conjured up bestsellers and box office hits out of deep dives into data, from Wall Street to the NFL. To baseball, we're trying to solve the problem here, Billy. Not like this. You're not.
You're not even looking at the problem. Challenging assumptions is a running theme for Lewis, including those about the occupants of Washington's federal buildings, government workers, sometimes derided as faceless bureaucrats. That's the stereotype. Many Americans think like that. That's right.
Faceless bureaucrats. They don't like the government. Right. They don't like the government. They think they don't like the government.
They think they don't trust the government. But in fact, they just don't know how much they trust the government. They take the trust for granted every time they drink water out of the tap, or fly on an airplane, or eat food, or put dollars in their bank account. They're trusting the government. And I thought, who are these people?
And we live in a society that is largely focused on personal ambition. It's a it's a free market capitalist society, and people are really interested in money and fame. You've chronicled it more than most. I've chronicled a lot of it. To find these people who are some of the most valuable people on the planet, who are interested in neither money nor fame, but have found some other purpose, who have a sense of public spiritedness, who are not, who basically not selfish, and the government is a place where you can really do stuff that makes a difference, and attracts these people, and thank God for them.
Lewis's latest book, Blockers, profiles workers confronted by DoGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, championed by President Trump and his megadonor billionaire Elon Musk. Musk promised massive savings.
Well, I think we can do at least two trillion. Yeah. What is a blocker? It's not meant as a compliment. No, it's an insult.
But a blocker is a—it's a phrase that Elon Musk—a word that Elon Musk likes to toss around. He told all the twenty-year-olds who came to work for him in Doge to go find the blockers—the people who would get in the way of doing what he wanted to do—and get rid of them. Are you a blocker? I mean, if you want to say I was blocking people from violating the law. Then I guess that's a fair term.
A central character in Blockers is Kathleen Walters. Once a top executive in the Internal Revenue Service, she was responsible for protecting taxpayers' personal information. This is an order creating and implementing the Department of Governmental Efficiency, known as DoGE.
Okay, that's a big one. Executive orders are normal, and as long as they're lawful, our job is to administer them.
So you weren't trying to block executive orders? No, no, no, no, no, no. I've been in the government for every administration since Bush, so I've worked for them all, and that's normal. But after DoGE's arrival. Nothing seemed normal to Walters.
This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Walters says immigration and customs enforcement, ICE, began asking for information on undocumented workers who had been paying taxes to the U.S. Treasury. ICE would later specify in a memo they were only seeking information on individuals under criminal investigation. They came out and said, "Well, we're thinking approximately, probably seven million." Seven million.
They wanted the tax information for seven million people. That's right. And I questioned in my head. I did not believe there could be seven million active criminal investigations going on. Walter says she resisted for months, and ultimately she resigned.
After I left, the IRS handed over the data. The Treasury Department's Inspector General has since found that ICE did not meet safeguarding standards, and federal courts have ruled that privacy rights were violated. The Trump administration continues to argue it has acted within the law.
So you tried to stop the law from being broken, in your view, and when you couldn't stop it, you left. I did. How tough of a choice was that for you? In one respect, it was a simple choice. But simple isn't easy always, and it was challenging because I'd been there almost twenty years.
I was twenty-three days shy of qualifying for early retirement, and I'm a mom to an elementary-aged child. When your daughter saw her mom struggling, what did you tell her?
Well, she's a smart little kid, and I told her high level that I was asked to violate the law. And I couldn't do it, so I left. And then later that week, I went into my bedroom, and there was a ten-dollar bill on my shelf. She said, "Mom, I just want to help out at home." And she wouldn't let me give it back, so I had to sneak it. Hopefully, she doesn't see this.
Had to sneak it into her piggy bank again. And and so I know she's proud, and she understands why I did what I did. And so again, I can sleep at night, well knowing that my decision was the right one, even though it was hard. As for Doge, there is intense debate over its impact. The Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan federal watchdog, found in an audit that Doge overstated its savings or could not verify them, and fell far short of its goals.
The Trump administration's Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which manages the federal workforce, praised Doge in a statement to Sunday Morning, calling it a catalyst for reforms now being institutionalized throughout the government. But for author Michael Lewis, this story is about more than numbers or budgets. It's about people. Do you want someone who's skeptical of government to read this book? Oh my God, yes!
That's my favorite. Would be my favorite reader. Why do so many people not see government the way you see? Because they don't pay. They haven't spent the time to get to know it.
I mean, this isn't something. This isn't knowledge I was born with. If we don't see that these people who don't make any money and aren't famous and don't like to talk about what they do, but are working their tails off for us, have value for our society, we're in trouble. And that's the message that I'm trying to get across. Thank you for listening.
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