Michael: Alright Kevin, pop quiz. If the U.S. government was a car, what's the one part you'd absolutely, under no circumstances, want to see fall off while you're driving? Kevin: The steering wheel? No, wait, the brakes. Definitely the brakes. You can coast without a steering wheel for a bit, but without brakes, you're just a missile. Michael: That's exactly what today's book is about. It's the story of what happens when the people taking over the car don't even know what the brakes are for, or worse, don't think they're important. Kevin: Oh boy. This sounds like it's going to be a comfortable, relaxing ride. Michael: Not in the slightest. And that story comes from Michael Lewis in his book, The Fifth Risk. Kevin: Ah, Michael Lewis. The guy who can make even the most seemingly dry subjects, like baseball stats or the bond market, feel like a Hollywood thriller. He has a real gift for finding the human drama inside complex systems. Michael: Precisely. And what's fascinating is that he wrote this book in 2018, right in the thick of the political turmoil of the time. He was motivated by a deep concern that the public had no idea what vital work these government agencies do. The book became a huge bestseller, though some critics did call it politically biased. Kevin: I can imagine. It’s hard to touch that subject without getting that label. Michael: True, but Lewis's stated goal was to show the risks of ignoring expertise, no matter who is in power. And he starts this story not with a bang, but with a dumpster. Kevin: A dumpster? What are you talking about?

Michael: I'm talking about the physical, literal trashing of months of meticulous planning for the peaceful transfer of power. Lewis opens with the story of Chris Christie, who, after dropping out of the 2016 presidential race, was put in charge of Donald Trump's transition team. Kevin: Right, I vaguely remember this. Christie, the governor of New Jersey. He seemed like a serious political operator. Michael: He was. And he took the job seriously. He told friends, "It’s the next best thing to being president. You get to plan the presidency." So he and a team of about a hundred experts spent months creating these massive binders. They had detailed plans for every single government department, lists of qualified people for 4,000 key political appointments, everything you'd need to hit the ground running. Kevin: Okay, so he's done the homework. He's the one kid in the group project who actually did all the work while everyone else was goofing off. Michael: Exactly. He’s built the entire IKEA government, instructions and all. Meanwhile, Trump himself was famously skeptical. He told Christie, "Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves." Kevin: Wow. The confidence is just… breathtaking. That’s like saying you can build a space shuttle with a wrench and a good attitude. Michael: And then comes the election night shocker. Trump wins. The next day, Christie is summoned to Trump Tower. He walks in, and Steve Bannon, on what the book says were Jared Kushner's orders, fires him. Kevin: Hold on. He gets fired the day after they win? Why? Michael: According to Lewis, it was a personal grudge. Years earlier, as a prosecutor, Christie had sent Jared Kushner's father to prison. So, the entire transition team Christie built was dismantled. And those binders, all that work? Kevin: Don't say it. Michael: They were literally thrown into a dumpster behind the transition team's office in Washington D.C. Kevin: You are kidding me. All that institutional knowledge, just tossed out like a bag of trash? That's not just disorganized; that feels actively hostile to the idea of being prepared. Michael: That's the core of the first risk. It's willful ignorance. The book introduces us to a man named Max Stier, who runs the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. His whole life is dedicated to making government work better, and he has this killer line: "People don’t understand that a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency." Kevin: That makes perfect sense. If you stumble out of the starting blocks, you're going to be behind for the whole race. But what's the actual, tangible danger here? So they're disorganized. What's the worst that could happen?

Michael: The worst that could happen? Kevin, let's talk about the Department of Energy. And I promise you, it's not what you think it is. Kevin: I'm picturing oil rigs, solar panels, maybe some guys in hard hats. Am I close? Michael: Not even in the same universe. The DOE's primary, and most expensive, mission has almost nothing to do with energy policy as we think of it. Its main job is to build and maintain America's nuclear arsenal. It's also in charge of preventing nuclear proliferation, cleaning up Cold War waste, and securing loose nukes around the globe. Kevin: Wait, what? The Department of Energy is in charge of our nuclear bombs? Why isn't it called the Department of Terrifying Things We Hope Never Get Used? Michael: Because that would be too honest. To give you a sense of the stakes, Lewis tells this absolutely chilling story from 1961. It's called a "Broken Arrow" incident. A B-52 bomber carrying two hydrogen bombs—each one hundreds of times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima—broke apart in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Kevin: Oh, no. Michael: One bomb plummets to the ground and thankfully disintegrates. The other one's parachute deploys, and it floats gently down. As it falls, it goes through its arming sequence. Click. Click. Click. Of the four safety switches designed to prevent an accidental detonation, three of them failed. It was one single, simple, low-voltage switch that stood between the entire East Coast and a radioactive catastrophe. Kevin: One switch. That gives me chills. And who designed that switch? Michael: The government scientists who were the predecessors of the modern Department of Energy. That is the level of expertise we're talking about. Now, fast forward to the 2016 transition. The Trump team shows up at the DOE, and they seem completely uninterested in any of this. They hand over a questionnaire that seems designed to identify and punish employees who worked on climate change. Kevin: So they're not asking, "How do we prevent a nuclear holocaust?" They're asking, "Who went to the climate conference in Paris?" Michael: Precisely. And then, who do they nominate to run this department in charge of nuclear physics and national security? Rick Perry. Kevin: Hold on. Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas? The guy from the presidential debate who famously said he wanted to eliminate three government agencies, but could only remember two? Michael: The very same. And the third agency he forgot, the one he couldn't name? Kevin: Don't tell me. Michael: It was the Department of Energy. Kevin: You cannot be serious. The agency in charge of preventing accidental nuclear armageddon was handed to a guy who wanted to abolish it but couldn't remember its name? That's like making a vegan the CEO of a steakhouse. It's fundamentally at odds with the entire mission. Michael: Lewis quotes a DOE staffer who said of Perry, "He has no personal interest in understanding what we do... He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking." This is what Lewis calls "people risk"—the danger of putting people in charge of complex systems they neither understand nor respect. Kevin: That is terrifying. It's one thing to have a messy office move, like with the Christie binders. It's another thing entirely to be playing with fire, or in this case, with plutonium. Okay, so we have incompetent management as a massive risk. But what if the government does everything right? What if the experts are in charge and they have all the data? Does that solve the problem?

Michael: That's the 'fifth risk' Lewis is getting at. It's the risk you don't see coming, the one that isn't about project management or political appointments. And for that, we go to a different department: the Department of Commerce. Kevin: The Commerce Department? What do they do, count widgets? This feels like a step down from nuclear bombs. Michael: You'd think so, but inside Commerce is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. They run the National Weather Service. They are the ones with the satellites, the supercomputers, the data. And their story brings us to a town called Joplin, Missouri, on May 22, 2011. Kevin: I remember the Joplin tornado. It was devastating. Michael: Horrific. One of the deadliest in U.S. history. But here's the thing Lewis uncovers. The government did its job perfectly. NOAA issued a tornado watch hours in advance. The local sirens in Joplin went off a full 17 minutes before the tornado hit the town. The warnings were clear, timely, and accurate. Kevin: So what went wrong? With that much warning, people should have been able to get to safety. Michael: They should have. But a post-disaster report found that the majority of residents didn't immediately seek shelter. They hesitated. They went outside to look. They called a relative. They thought it would miss them. By the time they realized the danger was real, it was too late for 161 people. Kevin: Wow. So you can have the best science in the world, but it's useless if you can't solve the human psychology problem. It's not just about predicting the storm; it's about predicting us. Michael: Exactly. This is where the book gets really profound. It introduces us to people like Kim Klockow, a social scientist hired by NOAA to study this exact problem. Her job is to figure out why we, as humans, are so bad at assessing risk. She found people have 'optimism bias'—the belief that bad things happen to other people. Or they have 'confirmation bias'—they look for evidence that the storm isn't a threat. Kevin: That’s fascinating. It’s like when your car's "check engine" light comes on. You know it's a warning, but your first instinct isn't to go to the mechanic. It's to hope it just turns off by itself. Michael: It's the exact same psychology. And the Trump administration's nominee to run NOAA, the agency in charge of all this life-saving data and research? Barry Myers, the CEO of AccuWeather, a private company that had spent years lobbying Congress to prevent the National Weather Service from communicating directly with the public, because it competed with their business. Kevin: Let me get this straight. The guy whose company profits when government data is harder to get was put in charge of the government's main data agency? The conflict of interest is staggering. It's like the whole book is a series of these unbelievable, almost satirical, appointments. Michael: It really is. And it ties all the risks together. You have the political chaos, the unqualified leadership, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the mission, which in this case, is not just collecting data, but saving lives by understanding human behavior.

Kevin: When you lay it all out like that, it's a pretty damning picture. It feels like a cascade of failures, one leading to the next. Michael: It is. And that's the ultimate power of The Fifth Risk. Lewis connects the dots for us. He shows how the first risk—the willful ignorance of the transition—creates the second risk of putting unqualified people in charge of vital systems. That, in turn, exacerbates the third and fourth risks, which are the massive, complex problems the government is supposed to manage, like nuclear security or natural disasters. Kevin: And the fifth risk is the one that ties it all together? The one we don't even think to name? Michael: I think the fifth risk is the one that's hardest to confront: the risk of our own apathy. It's the risk that we, the public, don't know and don't care what our government actually does, leaving it vulnerable to mismanagement and decay. The book is a wake-up call. It argues that the biggest threats aren't always from a foreign enemy or a natural disaster. Sometimes, the most dangerous risk is the one we create ourselves by undervaluing knowledge, competence, and the quiet, dedicated work of public servants. Kevin: That’s a powerful thought. It’s not about one administration or another, really. It’s about whether we as a society value the boring, difficult, essential work of keeping those brakes on the car. It makes you wonder, what are the 'fifth risks' in our own lives? The crucial things we're choosing to ignore because they're complicated or unpleasant? Michael: A perfect question to end on. We'd love to hear what you think. What are the invisible systems holding things together that we take for granted? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. Kevin: This has been a sobering but incredibly important discussion. A reminder that competence is not a political issue; it's a survival issue. Michael: Well said.