Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. For years, literally years, people have been

pitching me their excellent books on climate and policy and energy and democracy. And I love all the books and I

never have time to read them and do reviews. And I feel terrible about it. So we're changing that

over here at Drilled. We've launched a series called Drilling Deep, in which we will be talking to

authors about their books. And the hack here is that it won't

always be me. In fact, it might never be me, even though I do really enjoy reading them and

learning more about them. This week, Adam Lewenstein, who is doing most of these interviews

for us, talks to Casey Michelle, author of Foreign Agents,

how American lobbyists and lawmakers threaten democracy around the world.

The book was actually published last year, but Michelle just wrote a really interesting

piece in the Atlantic that kind of updates the thinking from the book for the second Trump administration.

Just one quote, America has never seen corruption like this.

Michelle's book explored the web of lobbyists, PR gurus, and former politicians who are paid to

influence the U.S. government on behalf of foreign regimes.

And no surprise here, one of Trump's first moves in office was an executive order

stopping enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Adam had a great conversation with Michelle. I hope you enjoy it.

Check out the book. We'll link to both the book and

the Atlantic piece in the show notes. And it's about

the politics of science and research. So very tied into all the things that we are talking about this

season and that we talk about a lot on this podcast. Their new season is called Green Dreams.

Each episode tells the story of a utopian thinker and their dreams for

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