Michael Lewis: Blockers

Author and journalist Michael Lewis – perhaps best known for the Hollywood-adapted The Big Short – appears in conversation about his latest book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, an inside look at the early days of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as told by the public servants it targeted and one of the US’s best storytellers.

This is the story of the unsung heroes at the heart of the most complex and powerful machine ever designed by humankind, who fought back when DOGE, and then even darker forces, wanted to smash it all up.

In early 2025, an army of young men invaded the offices of the US government. Armed with laptops and sleeping bags, a raft of prejudices and a bulletproof sense of mission instilled in them by their new boss, Elon Musk, the tech-bro acolytes of DOGE were on a mission to seek and destroy – by any means necessary.

But once inside, they came up against a group of people whose courage, commitment and, in some cases, lifelong devotion to the nation they served would quickly earn them the wrath of Musk. Musk called these people ‘Blockers’. ‘Find the Blockers,’ he told his band of worshipful young men, ‘and eliminate them.’

Blockers is a thriller about unlikely rebels and power-drunk villains. It is also a cautionary tale that asks: what do we do when the idea of public service becomes worthless, when the things we didn’t even realise we were taking for granted suddenly no longer exist?

Michael Lewis’ global bestselling books lift the lid on the biggest stories of our times. They include Flash Boys, a game-changing exposé of high-speed scamming; The Big Short, made into a hit Oscar-winning film; Liar’s Poker, the book that defined the excesses of the 1980s; and, most recently, The Fifth Risk, revealing what happens when democracy unravels.