Each week, we bring you conversations about the stories we can't stop thinking about.

Lately, many of those stories have been part of a series called Who is Government?

Basically, we ask seven amazing writers to venture into the federal government and find a story to tell, generally about someone who's been doing something amazing, unheralded, and indispensable.

So for the next few weeks, we're going to be dropping some bonus episodes into your feed.

Each one will be hosted by Michael Lewis.

Michael, the best-selling author of Moneyball, The Big Short, and The Fifth Risk, which is about government, wrote the first story in the series, and is the guy who assembled the star team of writers who ventured deep into the government.

Here's the first one.

We hope you enjoy it.

So this is Michael Lewis.

This week, our writer and my guest is Dave Eggers, who is maybe my favorite living writer.

Also a good friend.

He's the writer's equivalent of a decathlete.

Dave, thanks for being here, and talk to me a little bit about this piece you did.

Hey, thanks for having me here and inviting me to be part of this team.

I was interested in all kinds of parts of the federal government, but I started noodling around what NASA was up to, and came across an upcoming project looking for life on other planets, on planets that are right now hidden by the light of faraway stars.

And I just thought that was so fascinating, and there was something called starlight depression.

So I thought, well, these folks are federal employees.

It's different than working for the IRS, you might say.

But I think we are really still the primary country in the world doing space exploration, especially very speculative and non-commercial space exploration, like looking for life on other planets.

How did you hear about this in the first place?

Well, I go to the NASA website a lot just to sort of see what new photos they have from the various satellites and explorers.

And pretty early on, looking at the website, there was a young woman named Vanessa Bailey, who's a scientist doing research on exoplanets, like planets outside of our solar system.

And she was in this video talking about tools to hide starlight, to suppress starlight, so that you could look beyond or near that star to see planets that otherwise would be invisible because of the brightness of the star.

But those are the planets close to the Sun that are most likely to have life on them, because you need to be in that Goldilocks zone, so it's warm enough and close enough to benefit from the star's warmth.

So Vanessa Bailey was in this video kind of explaining it in a very lucid way.

And I never even took physics or chemistry in high school or college, so whenever I understand something that's otherwise pretty complex, I think I glom on to that person, like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

You know, like he's my hero, because everything he says I understand.

So that's like miraculous, and Vanessa has that gift too.

So I got in touch with the JPL and said, you know, could I learn more about this?

And went down there to their campus in Pasadena and met Vanessa Bailey and met Nick Siegler and met a bunch of other folks working on various tools to look for life on exoplanets.

What were they like as characters?

Vanessa is engaging, but at the same time she's very almost kind of spiritual in her approach to it.

She talks about how beautifully humbling space exploration and the search for life on other planets is.

You know, she said at one point, I like to feel small, meaning like she grew up in South Dakota looking at the stars from, you know, cornfields outside of her house and was just, you know, awed by and humbled by infinite space.

And she's never really lost that.

So she has this like contagious enthusiasm and wonder about the work that she does, even though much of what she's doing is, you know, sitting at a computer, you know, looking at data.

Trying to find exoplanets.

Yeah, you and I wouldn't understand what she's seeing really, and it wouldn't look like some gorgeous nebula in space from Star Trek.

It's not like that kind of thing on a daily basis.

So much of what they do is not exciting every day.

And they work for years and years on these tools, you know.

Yeah.

Does it seem to you kind of boring?

Well, for me, I think that the incredibly delayed gratification would be hard, you know.

Like, I think that they've been working for years on this tool that will go up.

It's called the Roman coronagraph.

And coronagraph is sort of like the sun blocking tool to look beyond these stars.

That's the coronagraph.

It might be 20 years, 30 years before they see like the ultimate culmination of all of their work.

You know, it's fascinating how kind of monk-like in their dedication they are and how humble they all are.

There's something about JPL and NASA in general that just attracts and maintains a kind of agency-wide humility.

They never want to get credit for anything.

Nobody I met would take credit for anything at all.

They were always, you know, pushing it off onto somebody else or the overall team.

That cultural humility is kind of remarkable given how exciting I think their work is.

Do you have any sense of why this particular task wouldn't be better done in the private sector?

Is this something that Elon Musk is going to be doing or is doing?

There's no money in it.

There can be no profit pretty much ever in finding some sign of life on another planet hundreds or thousands of light years away.

There's no way to profit from it.

I don't know what you could do.

I don't know if you could sell them Tesla.

I don't know if you could sell some NFC of a picture of a dot on a screen.

You know, like there's just no way to do it.

So this is just pure knowledge for knowledge's sake.

What I love about this, you find this across the government.

These kind of search for knowledge for knowledge's sake that ends up having all kinds of knock-on effects and sometimes commercial effects.

You just don't know what they're going to be.

Yeah, I mean NASA has a whole part of their site and they make sure that they note every time their research leads to some unrelated technology.

Like Velcro way back when was a NASA sort of byproduct.

Right.

And so many of these things, they're always careful to do that because their research is expensive and they are using the best minds in the world to do it.

So when there are these byproducts that the private sector or the public at large can benefit from, they're very careful to note that.

Yeah.

There always are so many.

I mean when you create these telescopes in space, they advance the technology so far that that has benefits for satellites and other sort of terrestrial technologies too.

I have a weird question for you.

Do you care if there's life somewhere else?

Deeply.

Privately and casually, again and again, scientists told me like, well, yeah, in the next few decades we'll probably know a planet that has life.

Your kids will know the name of this planet.

Your grandkids will grow up knowing that there's this planet called, you know, whatever it's called.

And I think that that changes life on our planet to some extent.

Do you have fun doing the piece?

Oh, I had the best time.

Calla Cofield is sort of their media relations specialist who also has a degree in physics because even at the JPL, even the media relations person has an advanced physics degree and she was fantastic.

Yeah, I would go back there.

I would live there for a week if I could.

Every other building has some outrageously interesting thing inside.

The campus is in sort of a very sun-baked canyon above Pasadena.

And the last tour was sort of a kind of a work warehouse run by Kim Aaron, who's been there 40 years, a physicist.

They're working on a different way to look beyond exoplanets called the starshade.

And this would be a giant like 60 meter diameter flower in space basically to mirror the shape of starlight so that a telescope would be lined up maybe as far away as 50, 90,000 kilometers away.

To block the light.

To block the light.

It's like holding out your hand to block the sun so you can see something.

Exactly.

But a 90,000 kilometer difference between the telescope and this giant flower shade.

So he showed me parts of the actual model for it, which was enormous and gold and beautiful.

I mean, it's very photogenic.

But this guy was this brilliant scientist working in a workshop on a hill with some graduate students and kind of, you know, in sort of a mad scientist sort of a way.

And the JPL and NASA has these, you know, brilliant people kind of noodling around on research, self-directed research to, you know, to see all the different possibilities.

But it did present a real difference between some of the coronagraph that I wrote about and Vanessa Bailey worked on.

It's so small.

They have like 3,400 pistons moving this little lens that is no bigger than, you know, your hand.

And then meanwhile, the competing technology, you might think, is 60 meters wide and looks like something from the Apollo era.

NASA is in the inspiration business.

You know, that's a large part of what they do.

So for those of us that grew up kind of fascinated by Apollo and Space Shuttle, everything that you sort of want NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab to be, they are.

You're never disappointed.

They're just doing stuff that's much more fascinating than you thought possible.

And the people that are doing it are much more humble and self-effacing and sincere than you could ever hope for.

So this was great.

Thank you.

Sure.

We'll put a link to Dave's full article about NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and star suppression in the show notes.

And make sure to check out the rest of our series, including the already published articles by Michael and Casey Sepp in the Washington Post.

This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson and edited by Millie Mitra and Allison Michaels.

It was mixed by Emma Munger.

As always, tell us what you think by emailing impromptu at washpost.com.

I'm David Shipley.

Thanks for listening.