Long time listeners of the podcast know that we never miss an episode. In fact, until now,

we hadn't missed a single episode in 15 years. So it was not an easy decision for us to

suspend new recordings of the podcast during the COVID-19 crisis. On the bright side,

this is an opportunity for us to revisit some of our favorite episodes from the archives.

Michael Lewis has been a guest on the podcast twice for two different books. In this episode,

he talks about a book that feels especially timely right now during a moment of government crisis.

Here he is in an episode from October 12, 2018, talking about the fifth risk.

Michael, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. So you have covered very exciting topics

before Wall Street is exciting. Sports is exciting. The Department of Agriculture is not generally

considered exciting. How did you decide to turn to this? So it wouldn't have been exciting before

Trump. I think Trump's electrified all the material. So how it would happen. Several things that

once happened. I just finished a book about Danny Kahneman, Amos Diversky, two Israeli

psychologists who studied the way people sort of misvalued risk, mispriced risk. And one of

their insights was that if you take a catastrophic risk, something that's like one in a million

chance of happening and make it a one in 10,000, it's still very remote, but you know,

increase the likelihood 100 times, people don't feel it. And I had this sense when Trump was

elected and the way he was approaching governing that he was doing that across a big portfolio of risks

that I thought of the fact you one way to think of the federal government is a manager of a giant

portfolio of risk many of them catastrophic. And that people weren't feeling it exactly.

And I was stewing on this and I'm out how to write about it when he made Rick Perry the secretary

of energy. Of course, Rick Perry had said that he thought the Department of Energy should be eliminated

when he was on stage in a debate, but he couldn't remember the even the name of the place.

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