This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 3rd, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What makes whistleblowers call attention to wrongdoing in government and the corporate world.

It's probably not fame.

People with something to lose in the wake of whistleblowing often work to denigrate and

destroy the careers of people who are trying to raise the alarm.

Author Tom Mueller is author of Crisis of Conscience,

Whistleblowing in an age of fraud.

We spoke this week.

You document a bunch of different whistleblowers and as you were going through chronicling what these people did and why and how they did it, did any kind of taxonomy emerge of who these kinds of people are?

Yes, quite often they portray themselves as rules-based people.

They'll say, you know, I'm a rules kind of girl

or I'm a kind of a black and white individual.

Typically their job has an ethics component to it and sometimes a very serious one like a nuclear safety engineer who is sworn to protect the public good.

They may not be the life of the party, the go along to get

along sort of person. They may be a little prickly, a little bit of an Eagle Scout, but that actually serves the purpose very well because they don't

tend to get sucked up into the mission, into the team, or to obey, you know, an illegitimate authority.

They're independent.

And at the end of the day, they almost always

said the same thing to me.

And that was, I had to do what I did,

no matter how bad the retaliation was going to be. I had to look at myself in the

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