Why Presidential Transitions are so Important with Michael Lewis

The Marianne Williamson Podcast

Marianne Williamson

News, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2020

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Lewis takes the most left brain issue and gives it right brain impact. That’s exactly what he does in one of Marianne’s favorite books, The Fifth Risk. The book has been called “a love letter to federal workers” by the Washington Post. In this episode, Michael and Marianne explore why a presidential transition, or lack thereof, is so critically important. The book’s major theme is that “a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency,” a particularly important issue as Trump continues to withhold vital information from the incoming Biden administration.

Marianne and Michael discuss the more shocking parts of the 2016/17 transition, and why its lessons are so important for us now and going forward. Following the interview, Marianne answers a question from a concerned citizen.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Miriam Williamson, and thank you for joining with me on the podcast. A few months ago, my daughter had flown back home to London.
0:23.3	And when she got there, she called me and she said, Mommy, you have to read this book called the Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.
0:29.4	She said, it's unbelievable. I read it on the plane. I couldn't stop reading it. You have to go get it immediately.
0:35.1	Michael Lewis, I said the same Michael Lewis who wrote the book that the big
0:38.7	short was based on. She said, yeah, it's the same guy. I had heard of him. I knew he had written
0:43.9	Moneyball. I knew that he had written The Blind Side. And I loved the big short. I loved the way it
0:49.3	explained the economic crisis of 2008 in a way that I had not really understood before.
0:55.4	But because my daughter told me to go get the fifth risk, I did just on her recommendation.
1:01.7	And that book blew my mind. That book explained things to me that I hadn't understood
1:07.8	before, not really, and explained things to me that seemed to me to be so key
1:12.2	to what not only was going wrong in the Trump administration, but what needed to be made right
1:17.6	once the Trump administration was over. In 1980, Ronald Reagan became president, and one of his
1:23.3	most famous lines was that the most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the
1:28.3	government and I'm here to help you. He began this process of demonizing government, really making
1:34.6	people think that everything the government did was wrong. Everything the government did was inefficient.
1:39.3	Everything the government did was inept. And in fact, not everything the government does is inefficient or
1:45.1	inept in ways that most people don't realize government agencies are doing things every single day
1:51.4	that keep the road safe and keep airplane safe and keep cars safe and keep food safe and keep water
1:57.0	safe. And in many ways, some of the ways in which we are protected, whether it has to do with
2:02.4	disease, whether it has to do with health, whether it has to do with anything else. The government's
2:07.2	job is to advocate for the safety and the well-being of the people when there are other interests
2:11.7	that would actually undercut our good. Many years ago, I was speaking in a congressman's office in Washington, D.C., and a young
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