(theme music playing) GRAHAM: Good evening and welcome to "P&P Live".

I'm Brad Graham, a co-owner of Politics and Prose, along with my wife, Lissa Muscatine.

We have a very interesting program for you this evening.

"10 Lessons for a Post Pandemic World" by Fareed Zakaria.

Fareed, of course, is familiar to many from the CNN global affairs show he's hosted for a dozen years, "Fareed Zakaria GPS".

And from the column he writes for the "Washington Post".

His writings, on-air, and on-air commentaries have earned Fareed a reputation for incisive clear analysis of world events.

And his new book explores some of the potential longer term effects, the Coronavirus pandemic, taking readers beyond the current preoccupation with infection rates and vaccine development, and instead addressing how a post-pandemic world might look.

In conversation with Fareed will be Samantha Power, another reflective outside the box thinker who served in the Obama administration first as the National Security Council, Senior Official for Human Rights.

And then as US Ambassador to the United Nations, she now holds two professor titles at Harvard, one in the Law School there, and the other in the Kennedy School.

On behalf of Politics and Prose Bookstore, please welcome Fareed Zakaria and Samantha Power to "P&P Live".

POWER: Um, I'm especially delighted to be doing an event for Politics and Prose with Fareed Zakaria.

It's a great honor for me.

You start the book, uh, by describing three seminal crises, uh, in recent memory, all of which remained really salient, I think, in the lives of Americans, uh, first, the immediate crisis of COVID, then you look back at, uh, 9/11, which can feel at times like a galaxy far, far away, but was relatively recent in the scheme of things.

And then of course, the last time we faced, uh, an economic crisis of profound magnitude, the global financial crisis of 2007, '08, '09.

And I wonder if you could just start Fareed, uh, by talking about what those three crises have in common from your standpoint?

ZAKARIA: You know, the way I think about, uh, 9/11 and, uh, the global financial crises is in some ways they were dress rehearsals for COVID.

Um, because if you think about how each one began, one element that they have in common is that they're all asymmetrical by which I mean, they all start with something very small.

Um, 9/11, 19 guys, uh, with box cutters board four planes.

And think about what the effect of it was.

A global war on terror.

The United States goes to war in two different countries, countries around the world, change their security systems.

You have a complete re, your renewal of a kind of battle between radical Islam, moderate Islam, Islam, um, and it takes, and it consumes the life of, of one American administration that eventually ends up toppling a whole bunch of regimes in the Middle East, all out of box cutters on those four planes.

If you think about the global financial crisis, the JP Morgan invented something called the credit default swap.

It was apparently you know a small, uh, uh, kind of a derivative product, uh, introduced by a bunch of bankers, one, one, uh, one quarter, and it slowly became so large that it became a $45 trillion market, uh, almost the size of the global economy.

And then it cratered and it brought down with it the whole house of cards.

And we, I think, remember it well enough, but think about the political effects that, that produced, you know, the rise of populism.

I think it's fair to say without credit default swaps, that's strange insurance on, on, uh, on risky bets.

Uh, Donald Trump would not have been elected.

In fact, Steve Bannon has made that case without the global financial crisis.

There would be no Trump.

And then we get to COVID-19, which is, you know, a viral spec in a bat somewhere in China, uh, that then infects either to an intermediary host or directly human beings.

And now we have what we have.

Um, this one is I think the biggest, I think about this in, in some sense by, I remember talking to a businessman friend of mine in India, small businessman, not, not very large.

And I was asking him what it felt like.

I was just trying to gather a sense of where we were.

And he said, "Well, there's no question.

This is much bigger than anything I've seen in my lifetime."

And I said, "Why?"

He said, "Well, you know, you look at 9/11, 9/11 had really no effect on me.

I mean, it was a US thing affected some Middle Eastern countries.

Yeah.

The travel and tourism industry.

But for most of us going around our lives, it had no impact on us.

Global financial crisis.

You know, I was not...

In India we didn't have those things called credit default swaps.

And in any case, we weren't, we weren't levered in that way.

We didn't have leverage."

He said, "I talked to my counterparts in America, small businesses.

We also didn't need, this was a thing that affected big banks.

And if you were in some way in the real estate business and you had taken on massive leverage, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected every human being on the planet.

Everyone everywhere is in some way, had their lives dramatically changed as a result of it."

And so that's why I called those first two dress rehearsals.

And the point that it made me realize was that we have been living our lives over the last 50 years, um, in a, in a kind of extraordinary fast-paced dynamic way.

And that dynamism has accelerated over the last 20 years in a way that we don't seem to realize we are generating backlashes.

We are generating, uh, kind of detritus all along the way.

So if you think about the, the, you know, the, the, the massive fast-paced move to capitalism, democracy, Western domination that produces a kind of backlash in the Islamic world.

A minority backlash, but a very violent one.

If you think about the reckless rise of deregulated finance, where just like anything goes, um, produces, this house of cards falling down, that was the global financial crisis.

And finally, and perhaps most profoundly, you, you have this the way in which we are living now, the degree to which we, uh, we are destroying, uh, forest and natural habitats of wild animals, and therefore living closer to them, the way we are factory farming and therefore creating Petri dishes for more and more infection, but where we are spewing CO 2 into the atmosphere, producing the largest droughts, the largest fires, the largest hurricanes we've ever seen, it's almost like I write in the book, we're driving a very fast race car.

Um, and we haven't bothered to put on the seatbelts.

We haven't bothered to buy insurance.

We haven't bothered to ask ourselves why the engine keeps exploding every now and then, and maybe this would be the wake up call that makes us realize that, you know, we, this is a very, very risky way to continue to live on all those dimensions.

And that we need to think a little bit more about resilience, about what this kind of these kinds of crises do to the most vulnerable among us, about how we can create a model for growth that allows us to be sustainable, to be resilient, you know, to have maybe trade off a little bit of the dynamism for a little bit more of that kind of safety and security, because my fear is, uh, Sam that, you know, this actually may not be the big one and you talk to virologists and they will tell you, "No, no, no, the real, the really dangerous one is something that is as infectious as COVID-19, but far more lethal."

Uh, and there are, there have been viruses in the past like that, in fact, SARS and H1N1 were both more lethal than, uh, than COVID-19.

So you know, we may not have seen the end of this, not to mention what we are now seeing in, in the West.

I mean, we, you know, we have had 6 million square acres of land burned in the West that is larger than the entire state of Massachusetts.

And so if, if these are the dress rehearsals, I just shudder to think what the, what the actual act is going to look like.

POWER: It really is quite chilling.

I want to, uh, maybe stick with the pandemic if we can.

The book really, I think, usefully takes the pandemic as a, as both a symptom of the, some of these larger forces that Fareed has just spoken about, to what extent are there, these structural forces, you know, this acceleration, this speed, these trends, and then to what extent is there human agency?

I think that tension kind of runs through the book.

So you quote, uh, this Johns Hopkins Global Health Security Index survey back from October, 2019.

So just a couple months before the first cases, uh, appeared in Wuhan and amazingly, and this is an assessment of countries all around the world and their health security preparedness.

And it's an assessment done knowing that Donald Trump is the president, right.

America ranks first overall in October, 2019.

And, and first in four of six categories as well, prevention, early detection and reporting sufficient and robust health systems compliance with international norms, even in October, 2019.

So, and then we have, of course, the, the great bungling, uh, that has occurred and us having, you know, X share of the population and, and, uh, four times that share of, of the number of infections and deaths and you quote Larry Brilliant, um, that the American doctor who played a role in eradicating smallpox, uh, nearly five decades ago saying "outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional."

And I love this quote because it sort of captures the inevitability and then the agency.

So I wonder if you could speak to that in the COVID context of, of structural forces, bats, and trends and overcrowding on the one hand and then human beings who make decisions and, and can mitigate suffering or exacerbate it, uh, in terms of depending on how they use that agency.

ZAKARIA: Gosh, that's such a great way to think of it.

And you're, you're absolutely right.

You know, by the way, just on that, on that, uh, Johns Hopkins report, this is something I think Sam, you would understand well, cause we're both immigrants and you know, America so dominates the intellectual space, uh, internationally that we forget the degree to which there is a kind of home country bias in the way, in which so much of the, uh, the agenda is written.

It's always American institutions that get to judge.

And, you know, when we say American universities are the top 18 of the top 20 in the world, and you always ask yourself, who's ranking them.

And of course it ends up being some American group.

So in that case, by the way, it's, it's an interesting thing to notice.

They overvalue money spent, we spend a lot of money.

They overvalue the most heroic, dramatic, fantastic care in the world, which if you have money, of course, the United States has, they underrate the importance of something simple, like access, does everybody have access to the system?

Do they have easy access and do they have cost-free access so that you don't have to worry about, you know, what you'd have to pay.

If you go for a test, what you have to pay if you're diagnosed positive, all these things that actually create huge problems in the American system.

Um, but to your larger point, I think is, you know, look, of course we are going to have more pandemics because of the kind of structural things I talk about, uh.

Human development, we're deforesting.

We have factory farms, which I think I worry an enormous amount about because you're crowding together thousands of animals in herd-like unsanitary conditions and then viruses hop from animal to animal, getting stronger and stronger, uh, you know, get even more complicated because we tend to select for certain kinds of genetic variations.

So like we like chickens with big breasts.

So what that tends to mean is that there is no firewall that makes the virus unable to jump from, you know, each animal is genetically alike.

So the virus keeps getting stronger and stronger.

And one day when that kind of virus from a factory farm jumps to a human that's, the thing most virologists are very worried about because those vi, those viruses are very, very powerful.

But you know, there is a lot you can do about this stuff.

First of all, we could, we could develop, we could approach development differently.

There are ways to do factory farming that are much more sensible, much more careful about health.

You know, you'd have to do them in slightly smaller ways and things like that.

Um, but even if you just take once it happens.

To me, the most instructive, uh, countries in the world to look at are the countries that really got it best, which is not China, the dictatorship with all its massive police power and repression and all that.

It was Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong.

Taiwan probably gets the gold medal.

Taiwan is 22 million people just off the coast of China.

It gets millions of Chinese tourists.

Uh, you know, so when this was all happening and nobody knew where the cases were and Taiwan manages this without a lockdown, Taiwan never goes on a lockdown.

Why?

Because they start very early, very aggressively and what they do more than anything else is really serious testing and tracing.

So just so people understand why this is so important, you know, you've got a large number of people, let's say 22 million in Taiwan.

They're very small number of people who are infected, of course, right?

So the key is to figure out who those people are, figure out whom they have been in contact with, who are therefore potentially infectious and isolate and quarantine them.

So what Taiwan really perfected was this contact tracing and isolation.

And it's very important to say that that isolation was a crucial part of it.

Um, we don't have a mass testing, uh, system in place yet today.

We do not have a good mass testing system in place.

Uh, we have almost no contact tracing in many, many states.

There are few states in the Northeast, which do some contract tracing and we have, we have a kind of recommended quarantine isolation process.

The whole system we have is frankly dumb.

And so that's why we need to use a very blunt instrument, which is a lockdown.

Taiwan didn't do a lockdown South Korea didn't do a lockdown Singapore.

And if they did, they did a very selective and short duration ones.

So what that points to is, you know, what, what we have to is to ask yourself, what is the most efficient, most the, you know, the smartest way to go about this?

How do you then really devote yourself to it?

Be early, be aggressive, be intelligent, even the places that got to it a bit later, like Germany, which essentially modeled a model themselves on Taiwan, South Korea have ended up in a much, much better place than the United States.

And so to my mind, that's a perfect example of what the huge, the, the, the issue of human agency is.

Now, when I've said this to people, they'll sometimes say, Oh, these stations, well, they're, you know, they're super competent or they're, you know, they have a collectivist mindset, and this is all cultural stereotyping.

Honestly, these came in South Korea was a basket case, corrupt kleptocratic dictatorship four decades ago.

They learned from their failures, they got their act together.

They are, you know, they don't have, they weren't smug about it.

They actually didn't handle SARS that well or MERS that well, and they learned from it.

So what I'm hoping we can get from, from all this, this is all doable.

You know, we spend a lot more money than most of these countries on this stuff.

We are just not serious about government.

We have denigrated the federal government for decades.

And one final point, because you mentioned Trump, because I think this is something that really, there is a contrast between the Obama administration.

I don't want to get too partisan, but as you know, better than anyone Sam, the federal government is very hard.

American government is very hard because power is distributed among three branches, but then distributed among dozens of agencies, and then really distributed among hundreds and thousands of center, state, local organizations when you're looking at domestic policy.

Corralling, all that together requires that the President and the White House are really on it and are driving that process through as, as the Obama administration did on Ebola, for example, um, and to be fair, as the Bush administration did on AIDS in Africa, you know, you really have to work this and work it hard, and it takes energy and effort and smart people.

And they're sitting there every day saying the President wants this to happen.

You know, so you have to get it done.

With Trump you have somebody who basically doesn't believe government is difficult, doesn't even believe in it.

And you have a Republican party that has spent the last four decades saying that the federal government is evil.

You know, Steve Bannon says the goal of that Trump revolution was to deconstruct the administrative state.

Well, if that's your goal, when the pandemic comes, it's not going to function very well.

POWER: Absolutely.

I would just note that given that the World Health Organization, I think has come out now with, um, some statements about lockdowns that are expressing what some have heard as skepticism, but their point, I think, is, is simply that the lockdown for those countries that were unprepared or less prepared than they should have been, who hadn't gone through SARS and MERS and maybe look back as did at H1N1 and thought, oh, that was much to do about not, not as much as we had expected a lockdown buys you time.

And what's so strange.

I think about the American experience is that it's, we're, we're, we're not quite as bad as we were in the early in March and April, obviously on testing, but it's still, you know, we, we and our members of our family have been tested recently.

It's still four days.

Uh, you know, and it's still, if you actually want to sign up for a test in, in a health facility, drawing on your health insurance, it can be a week before you can get an appointment, or what are people who can't afford to be out of work doing in that week?

And particularly if they're asymptomatic, but if they're symptomatic enough to call and want to test, how is it October?

And this is happening.

And so I guess there is this... ZAKARIA: Just to make one point, you know, to illustrate the point you're making, which is so important.

If you get the test results, first of all, if you can't get the test for a few days, and then the test results a few days later, if you get it anything less than if the whole thing isn't about our 48 hour cycle, it's essentially useless because the whole point of this testing and tracing is to separate people who might be infected.

Now, you are infectious for two or three days around you're most infectious.

So the most important thing is to set, to get you out of the system, as it were to put you into your room, locked up and have people deliver food to your, to your doorstep for those two or three days.

But what you just described is essentially a kind of like a four day, five day point at which you, you get the results of the test by then, you've already infected who, whoever you were going to infect.

So you might as well not have the test.

POWER: So given that this is where we are in October.

And again, put to one side sort of not, not put to one side, but, but recognize stipulating that Trump is anti-science and anti-expert and anti-global cooperation, and that this hit and played on all of those weaknesses.

And so that's obviously a huge part of the American story, but, you know, we may be in a situation where we have a new president starting in January.

You've really, again, drilled into the pandemic to try to understand from it what it illustrates in terms of larger phenomenon.

And I wonder to what extent, if you, if you know, did, did, do you take the packer view of, there just is this kind of systemic rot, which I think you quote at one point in the book, but it wasn't clear if you're there, or do you think this is an example where had this occurred?

You know, if, if Secretary Clinton let's say was, was president of the United States, you'd have the same CDC experts, maybe some of them have fled under Trump, but you'd have in, you'd have different leadership of these agencies.

Maybe you'd have the same Tony Fauci.

We know you'd have the same FDA, you know, is this really just come down to 78,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan back in 2016, or does this reveal something more fundamental to you about our system and, and its decay?

ZAKARIA: So I think it's a good, it's a great question.

I think honestly, one would have to say both by which, I mean, clearly Trump massively underperformed.

And I think it's absolutely fair to say that had the Obama administration been in charge had had, uh, Secretary Clinton become President Clinton.

There would, first of all, there would have been better people, even in many of these agencies, if you look at who has ended up being appointed, they're often political hacks, they're not the best and the brightest, but even if that wasn't the case, um, you know, there would have been a much greater degree of coordination.

There would have been much greater energy placed on the idea of effective, energetic government, you know, going forward to try and do something about it.

But, you know, there is a, a broader systemic problem.

So the CDC kits, by the way, that was just bad luck that that would have happened with anyone.

We, we sent out faulty kits, but there is a broader issue, which is that we have defunded and de-legitimized government for so long now.

That it is, you know, people don't realize how much it's been defunded because Medicare, Social Security and the Defense budget have gone up so much that you don't realize that the discretionary budget of things like the State Department or the IRS, for example, the IRS can do half as many audits as it could do 25 years ago.

Um, you know, so it's all these things that are just holding on with, with, you know, a string and, and scotch tape in a way that really, you know, we see the physical manifestation of it.

When we look at our infrastructure and we compare it with what other advanced countries, but there is a similar rot that has taken place in the federal government.

The left has a part to play in it where it overburdens these places with mandates, there are too many, you know, rules and requirements and burdens, and the some of the labor forces are unionized and that has caused anyone who's listening whose kids are in public school.

I have one.

And you know, that the public schools just have had much more difficulty adjusting to the to COVID partly because of union rules that are very strong and very difficult, but the combination has created a scleroticism that is very real.

And that, you know, it's one of the hopes that I have in this book is that we, we stop, we stop the denial.

I mean, you know, the Trump business of like we are doing fantastically and we recognize, you know, you know, we failed at this.

Um, and hopefully out of the denial will come and some, some reflection in some introspection on why did that happen?

What do we need to do?

Maybe the government doesn't need to be as big as it is, but it needs to be more effective and needs to be more efficient.

It needs to be more capable.

Maybe you have to rationalize some departments and, you know, I'm all for reform.

I'm not for saying, let's just go back to the old ways.

But I think not to recognize that there is this fundamental libertarian attack on the Federal government that has taken place since Reagan, that is just profoundly wrong.

We are a society of 340 million people.

We are a GDP of more than 20 trillion.

You are going to have to have a very serious sized government.

I remember somebody very senior at Microsoft once said to me, you know what Microsoft is bureaucratic, because guess what, when you get very big, there is just no way to organize things without having bureau.

And that, you know, that I think we need to understand, it's not a political statement.

It's a statement of fact, the question is, do we get it right?

Or do we continue to denigrate that process by which we have an ineffective crippled, dysfunctional government, um, rather than one that at least performs whatever limited tasks you give it well.

POWER: Um, so I want to get to your idealism.

It'll shock you to hear where you end the book.

I do want to flag that Marina just in light of what you just said, uh, noted, uh, Fareed that with 52 States and 52 governors, uh, the hands of the federal government are tied, uh, how hard to be effective no matter who leads the nation.

So this question of also how national authorities use their convening power, you know, given federalism as a phenomenon, but I want to ask you, um, before we get to the upbeat part of the evening, um, about, I think the darkest dimension of your book, which is kind of crazy to say that it isn't the pandemic or, uh, you know, some, some of the sort of life and death issues that you touch upon.

Um, I mean, it is in so far as they, they end up becoming more likely because of this other dimension that you talk about it, and that is what you call the epistemic crisis.

Uh, you quote, uh, my favorite Stephen Colbert uh, scene ever, you know, where, where he says, what, you know, "Why believe the encyclopedia when you have heart," you know, "When you have your gut that you can count on," um, the idea of truthiness and, and you also in cast, my husband has written about this a lot about the idea of partyism.

Partyism as a predictor of your public policy instincts, because it is like, uh, you know, I think you'd call it like a social club that you're, you're a member of, and you just, you buy the whole package.

And so partyism, which political party you're member of is the best predictor about whether you believe you should wash your hands or wear a mask.

And of course, that has a nexus with the point you made earlier about the libertarian streak, that goes way back, but the rigidity of it, the lack of, um, movement sort of between parties, the shrinking kind of independent base, but also the, the now the number of things that are associated with a party identity, you know, including science and where science falls on the map.

So I just want to ask you, and there's no great answer on this.

I know, but, uh, you know, in this area, like a human agency, you know, one can find one's way to a story by which federalism and those challenges that Marina identifies are dealt with.

You can tell yourself a story about WHO reform and about how the US government and China could act differently within those organizations.

And maybe we'll have time to touch upon that.

On polarization and this epistemic crisis.

What, where is human agency in that?

Do you think, where could that, where could a difference be made that would move things in a better direction?

And I know it's the hardest question.

ZAKARIA: No, and it's, but it's a great question.

Um, and I also think it's important to point out your answers to some of the other ones, which is you know, look, federalism is tough, but, you know, Lyndon Johnson had to deal with, with governors and mayors and, uh, and you know, Ronald Reagan had to deal with them.

And even, you know, other presidents have, it's not a, it is not a crippling condition.

If you believe in an active, energetic, organized effort, um, look polarization in America has become as lethal as it has for two reasons.

The first one is easy to understand historically, which is we used to be polarized, but within parties, not between parties.

So if you think of the Democratic party of the 1940s and 50s and 60s, it combined Northeastern liberals and Southern segregationists.

You know, if you think about the Republican party combined Northeastern liberals, um, with Western libertarians and the liberals in the North were often big government liberals.

So what ended up happening was the parties had to within themselves find a way to compromise, find ways to have some modus Vivendi that allowed them to move forward.

And that meant that there was some kind of tempering.

Now there was a great cost to it.

You know, the price that was paid by the Democratic party was not to bring up civil rights legislation for decades and decades, but there was a certain kind of stability that was created out of it.

What has happened essentially since the Civil Rights Acts, um, the 1960s as the parties have become ideologically pure.

So this polarization is now weaponized and it's weaponized in a political system that was not meant to have two opposing parties, you know, that, uh, that, that kind of, um, uh, opposed one and other and acted in alternating parliamentary fashion, the American system is meant to be big, broad.

It, you know, it kind of everybody shares power.

And so we're in a dysfunction because we have created this weaponized party system, um, in a, in an American government where you're meant to share power, you're meant to somehow find a way to, you know, to make it all work to through the three branches compromising.

But the second piece, which is the one you were talking about is the one it's less difficult to understand what to do with, which is polarization in America has now become something that involves your social identity, your class identity, and your cultural identity.

So that if you look at the divide, it is now very clear.

The divide is basically not just between Republican and Democrat, but layered onto that is, um, do you have a college education or do you not, do you live in a Metro area?

Do you not?

Do you, you know, does the woman in your family, if I may put it that way work or not, do you have some greater exposure to immigrants or people of color or not, you know, and that has become the great political divide, which is actually a class divide, which is a cultural divide.

And so you could see, you can see it, you know, in the comment of Hillary Clinton, the deplorable's the comment, or so of Donald Trump.

If you listen to some of his, uh, campaign speeches, they're all about this, that he's stoking a kind of class resentment.

They say, you're not an elite.

I think you're the most elite people in the world.

It's, you know, it's all centered around that.

And what makes this, I think so pernicious is that it's very difficult to figure out how you compromise.

You know, if you were, if you think back to the kind of classic 20th century divide, which was economics, the left wanted to spend more money, let's say and the right wanted to spend less money, but that's easy to, to solve, right?

I mean, I want to spend $100 billion.

You want to spend $10 billion.

There's a number in between.

The problem we have now is the divide is really cultural.

And you saw this, you see this right now in this debate, taking place about the stimulus, right?

There are people saying to Nancy Pelosi, why won't you take the Republican party's offer and maybe improve it and say, you know, so they're willing to do 1.8 trillion.

You're saying you want three.

Can't we find a place in the middle.

And she said, on Wolf Blitzer last night, they don't share our values.

But what she's really saying is I cannot, as leader of the Democratic party, make peace with those people, right?

If you listen to people on the Republican side who are talking about why this election is so crucial, I think we're very, uh, an important Senator.

I can't remember who it was said, look, this is simple.

It's a battle between good and evil.

And, and, and he was essentially explaining why it's okay to do voter suppression.

So when the, when the, when the stakes are cultural, you know, abortion, gay rights, it's very hard to compromise.

Uh, when the stakes are economic, it's much, much easier to compromise.

So I don't have an answer to your question, but I, but I worry that unless we can get around this overlapping po, you know, I identity issue, um, I don't quite see how you do it short of, um, you know, kind of very substantial victory by, on one side, but that too will have, um, you know what I mean, I often say to people, even if Biden wins, don't forget, Donald Trump is not going away.

He will still be the most powerful Republican in the country.

He will still be the def...

I mean, look at how the base thinks of him, right?

He will still be the guy raising money.

And by the way, there were a lot of Trumps out there who are going to run for various things from Ivanka to Donald Jr. And so, so we will still be in a polarized, polarized, poisonous climate, uh, unless, you know, Biden and get some kind of FDR-like victory... POWER: I guess the only thing I'd add, maybe response to my own question as I listened to you is I do think that, you know, to some extent, one has to look at this through the lens of optimization, right?

Against the backdrop that you describe.

And so, you know, it's so unfortunate that whether it's on Citizens United or punting on gerrymandering, or really any of the voter suppressive things that various courts have done, you know, those are, those are occasions potentially to move the middle forward, right.

I mean, certainly big money can cut in a couple of different directions, I guess, but, uh, gerrymandering definitely allowing that to stand, just plays to extreme voices.

And then the question of tech, which you have a whole chapter, one of your lessons, of course, on the digital world and just where this is going well beyond where we are now, but that's, self-selection around our preexisting biases and preferences.

And the fact that in our echo chambers would become more extreme version of ourselves.

You know, I mean, again, it's not going to solve the problem, but certainly some, some messing with the algorithm, uh, as a, as a first port of call, you know, wouldn't be the worst thing in the world just to, to make us see each other more in those venues where we're spending more and more time.

Um, I want to bring in a couple of questions from the Q and A, if we can, can, and please others pile on, uh, Susan Davis, just ask, cause this can all feel, I think remote from citizens' lives and what, what any individual can do.

What are the lessons a regular person can use out of what you've distilled here and learned in writing this book, uh, besides voting, which I think we citizens, especially this year, feel a great attachment and conviction about.

Um, but what else, uh, Fareed should a citizen take from, from what you've learned?

ZAKARIA: Um, to me, the, the, the thing that I've, I've spent a lot of time thinking about is, um, you, the, the way in which this pandemic is hurting people unequally, you know, I think about my life and I have to be honest for me, the pandemic has meant that I spent a lot of time with my kids.

You know, I have three kids, one in college, one in boarding school in one, um, who goes to public school as I mentioned.

And, you know, all of a sudden I was seeing a lot more of them perhaps more than they would have liked to see of me, but that was a joy.

And it ended up being an unexpected pleasure.

Um, I was able to do my work with some difficulties and interruptions, but basically, uh, pretty much as, as I was.

POWER: You wrote a book, Fareed.

You were productive it's safe to say.

You wrote a book.

ZAKARIA: But that gave me the time in a way, you know, I mean, all of this, the travel, you know, so by the way, one lesson is you, you ask yourself, what were you doing in your life that was, you know, maybe not as necessary and not as productive.

All of a sudden, all of that travel cut out.

That's really Sam, where I got the time I suddenly realized I had all this time on my hands.

I'm a, you know, I'm an, I'm a worker bee.

And so I thought to myself, well, I'm thinking about these issues.

Why don't I start putting them down on paper?

And, you know, so that process all, you know, it was great and I like working.

So it wasn't a, it wasn't a problem.

And then I would think about all the people whose lives have been just devastated by this, right?

I mean, the many of whom by the way, are the people who had to work so that I could stay at home.

The people who, you know, keep the lights on, the water running, all that, but then who's the people at restaurants and hotels.

And you can see this effect in, in the data.

There's a, there's a fascinating set of charts.

We're looking at the last four recessions, top 25%, bottom 25% past three recessions.

They lose jobs at roughly the same rate.

Right now, the top 25% have actually gained jobs.

There has been job growth in the top 25%.

The bottom 25% have lost 30% of their jobs.

Um, and, and the previous numbers were like 2 and 3%.

So it's an order of magnitude worse.

So I think to myself, you know, like those of us who have managed to be, to get through this, okay, you really, we really have to understand this is not what it's like for a lot of Americans.

This is not like what it's like for a lot of people in the world.

And it's made me have a lot of respect for essential workers, a lot of empathy for people who are out there doing things I've tried to in various ways, help as much as I could.

Uh, and I wanna, you know, and I'm trying to sound the alarm on things like federal government helping more, you know, I understand I have a platform, but it's really also made, it's humbled me in realizing, you know, just what a privileged life one has, how it can all go like this, because you know, these people through no fault of their own, they're now, you know, they don't have jobs.

They're unemployable in many cases and this condition is not going away anytime soon.

So to me, that was one piece that, that really came at me.

The other was it really made me, I'm trying to be nonpolitical for a moment.

It made me think about technology because we are really spending so much time on technology.

And at the same time, we are now being surrounded by our closest family.

So it's a very odd connection, right?

Like you have at one level, your closest human relationships are there with you and everything else is virtual.

And so it, it, you know, it sort of makes me, it's made me think about what's important to me in life, what, what relationships are.

And it's made me realize, you know, the, the deep friendships, the, you know, those things it's made me recognize the degree to which there is an emotional connection that comes from physical contact that, you know, so I've been trying.

So I try to recreate that.

I go on walks with people.

I try to meet people outside.

I, I do not, I'm not a huge fan of Zoom.

I think you lose a lot.

I think you spend social capital when you are in, in situations like this, you don't build social capital.

Um, and you build social capital by actually engaged with human beings, with all the complexity and nuance that, that involves.

So, you know, it's been, it's been things like that, that I've, that I think we all probably reflect on a certain amount, but look, as, as citizens, what, what we can do is, you know, vote, contribute, act.

To my mind this one is a simple one because there's such a stark choice on almost every dimension in this election that, uh, it really, uh, you know, really and I'm not a super partisan person, but it seems to me that this is one where we will really regret if, uh, if we do not take all the, the, um, the energy we have and put it into this, this November 3rd ballot.

POWER: So let's stipulate, Biden wins.

Um, you know, what are the international steps, uh, that the United States in particular should take as it relates to the pandemic out of the boat to learn from the pandemic, but to deal with, to deal with the pandemic that's on the doorstep, and then to think about institutional reforms.

The inevitable question about, you know, whether the United States can regain trust again, trust for competence, trust that there won't be another Trump.

Again, I think somebody, somebody poses the question in that way.

So, so just maybe just pulling them together, Biden going forth in the world after this four years with pandemics in mind, but not only with pandemics with the bipolar world that you write about also confronting him with China, not being at all the China that Biden left the President Xi, that Biden's spent all that time with in, in Sunnylands that President Xi is, is not the President Xi that we have now, as you write about in the book, uh, powerfully.

So, so what advice would you give Biden?

Do you think if he was setting forth, given the trust deficit given Xi and given the need to strengthen international responses to things like this?

ZAKARIA: Yeah, it's a great set of questions and you, you wove them together very well.

So I guess I would say this, the easy part from Joe Biden is going to be the first thing he will do, which is a re-embrace of allies.

That's easy because that's the low hanging fruit.

Trump, you know, bizarrely, I mean, he doesn't like the world and he doesn't like other countries much, but he has a particular ire directed at America's closest allies.

And that's easy to fix.

You go to the Europeans, you, you reconnect.

Um, you do things that, that reassure them, that the United States is, is in a sense recommitted to its international engagement.

The more difficult piece of this is if you really want to strengthen the international system, we are in a new world, and it's not just China.

It's the, India's the, Brazils the Turkeys, it's the Europeans themselves all feeling a much greater sense of independence.

I mean, think about this.

The global financial crisis was the first financial crisis since the, since the 1920s in which the United States did not play a lead economic role, uh, internationally.

Uh, so for example, in Europe it did nothing, right, the Europeans are rich.

The Germans can, can afford to do what they want.

They did.

So we're in a, it is a different world that way.

And part of that reform institutionally has got to be that if we want other countries to commit to a rule based international order, we have to commit to it.

So we are in the extraordinary position, Sam, as you know of accusing China of defying the Law of the Sea Treaty, when it goes about its activities in Southeast Asia, while we are not ourselves signatories to it, we hold it against countries when they engage in war crimes, uh, when we are not signatories to the International Criminal Court, uh, and this goes on and on, and, you know, why is the WHO so weak?

The WHO is weak and cannot insist on a representation or information from China because the United States, which utterly dominates it, has written its mandate in that way, because we don't want the WHO nosing around in US, domestic affairs and demanding, uh, you know, things from the United States.

So that hypocrisy will have to end if we want a genuinely robust international order.

And the final one is what to do about China.

And I think you put it very well.

It's a different China.

Um, and one of the, I'd say the fundamental strategic question we have not asked ourselves.

Um, and this is true for both sides of the aisle.

What is an acceptable level of influence for China to have in the world?

It is the second most powerful economy in the world.

It is now more powerful, larger than the next four economies put together.

It is the second largest military in the world.

Again, larger than the next four put together.

What would be an appropriate?

You often hear Americans say that President Xi is doing too much.

He's aggressive.

He's expansionist that Chinese have gone in here.

What would be okay?

You know, we were not even in the top 10 economies in the world, when we proclaimed in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine, we said to the entire European, all European... the entire Western hemisphere is off limits.

So I'm, and I'm not suggesting by that, that we appease China.

I'm just saying we have to have some way of accommodating and integrating China into an international order that recognizes that it is the second largest.

It is the neck, the other superpower.

Um, if we don't, China will freelance, it will slowly erode the existing system.

And it will build an alternative regional system probably for itself.

That is a suboptimal outcome for everybody involved.

So it's enormously in our interests to find some way to bind them in, but binding them in, as I say, is going to have to be, they're not going to, you know, they're not going to be done.

They are going to require some special space.

And I don't think we have given a lot of time thinking about it.

We've gone very quickly into the competitive dynamic, which is inevitable, but there also needs to be some kind of cooperative dynamic.

If we want to address global warming, if we want to deal with cyber-attacks and cyber war, if we want to prevent a nuclear arms race, if we want to prevent a space race.

So I would hope we could find some balance there.

POWER: Are you surprised by just how aggressive Xi has been, especially post pandemic?

ZAKARIA: Yeah, it does surprise me.

Um, and I think that it's counterproductive, it's causing countries like India and Japan and Vietnam, and even the Philippines to become more anti-Chinese or at least wary of China than they were, I guess.

You know, so I've been, trying to think, is there some explanation that it's just Xi, and, you know, he has a particular, uh, uh, world view.

I think there's also, we are in a moment.

Look, it's, it's not Xi Putin, Erdogan, uh, Trump, uh, Bolsonaro in Brazil, all these guys are populist nationalists who have a kind of tough guy approach in which they say to their constituents we're tough.

It's a mean world out there.

We're going to take care of you.

We're not going to back down, right.

That, that is the mode right now.

And that is partly a, I think, a reaction to the global financial crisis to globalization, to immigration and people shouldn't be surprised.

China is not hermetically sealed from the world.

And China is not some black box of dictatorship.

It's a very complicated society.

And as you say, Chinese nationalism plays well, some of this aggressive foreign policy plays well just as it does here, you know, don't forget they have their dynamics as well.

So maybe, maybe that's part of the answer, but the short answer is, yeah, I was surprised.

POWER: Question from the audience is from Rex and it came in right at the beginning, but "At a time when the world itself is struggling for survival, is there a place for art?"

So that's question one, and then you can weave these together, however you see fit.

And I, I, I'm struck by how often you write in the book just as you spoke about the pandemic, but about in a digital world and in a fast paced world and what do we need to buckle up, but just this longing for meaning that people feel.

Uh, and so I think, uh, the, the question about already, even though it's not addressed explicitly as something that's would be very much in the spirit of this book.

Um, but the second and final question I have for you, uh, Fareed, maybe you could just wrap it all up is, you know, you end the book saying, um, how do you put it again about realists and idealists?

"The greatest realists are the idealists."

Um, and which of course, uh, you, you're one of the people who inspired me to write my book, "The Education of an Idealist", and to just own the moniker.

Uh, but I would like you to share with the audience kind of what you mean by that.

Um, as in, in a sort of closing sermon over to you.

ZAKARIA: Sure, there's always room for art because art is not, I think something that, uh, we need to solve a particular practical problem.

Art, I think comes out of the deepest expression of, of, of being human.

We produce art, we consume art because, you know, without sounding too corny because it nourishes our soul, um, and it elevates us and it makes us think of ourselves as greater beings.

It's something that has existed in the darkest days of the Soviet Union.

It, you know, it flourished in, uh, in, in the worst periods of, uh, of human history in the 30s.

I mean, think about the Bubonic plague in Europe, you have the Bubonic plague in the 14th century, what happens in the 15th century, the Renaissance, right?

So, and, and, and sometimes these things are actually inversely correlated.

The tougher, it gets, the more you need a release, the more you need some kind of, um, some kind of, you know, hope and, and only art sometimes can give you that hope.

And only art can reveal something that we don't understand.

I, you know, and I am not trying to be corny about it, but there's something, you know, the greatest art speaks to us at any rational, in an irrational place.

When we hear great music, um, when we see a great painting, we don't know why there's something it's stirring in us.

And I think that's where the place for great artists.

So the more the confusion, the more the, the complexity, the more, I think it plays, it plays that really important role, um, to the, to your question, that what I've been trying to think about, you know, it all in some ways often starts with Trump because you think to yourself, he has this extraordinarily narrow, selfish, uh, view of America.

You know, this, this view that everybody's out to screw us, everybody's ripping us off.

We have to get the best deal we can.

People in the past have been, have been suckers.

They've been dupes.

I'm the smart, tough realist, right?

I'm the guy who understands how to cut the good, the good deals.

And in some ways that has been the, the, the reaction that the pandemic has caused everyone has turned inward.

Everyone has sort of tried to be a little more narrow and self-centered because you know, we're in this crisis right now.

We can't think about global cooperation.

And I was thinking about the period after the World War I, the Great Depression, Hyperinflation, the rise of fascism World War II, and the leaders that came out of that world in the 40s and 50s and how incredibly idealistic they were.

So Franklin Roosevelt before the United States has even begun to win World War II, has already determined that he is, going to insist that there be a New World Organization and a New World Order.

And that it's going to be one in which we try to keep the peace.

And we, we end this process of nationalist and imperialist conquest, and he, he's very tough on the British and French on their colonial possessions, even then, by the way, one of the great, what ifs in history if he had lived, um, is, is that, you know, that process, but then you have Truman who comes after him was, you know, I pointed out, even though he was seen as a smart, tough realist, he was deeply imbued with these idealistic ideas, had had a poem of Tennyson's, which talked about, you know, the importance of a, of, of a world harmony world, world peace and the "Parliament of Man" that he kept in his wallet.

Um, until the day he died, you'll have Eisenhower who saw the Wehrmacht, the German army fight to the bitter end.

I mean, we remember the Battle of the Bulge.

They come in right at the end, when the Americans are gonna win, they know the Americans are going to win and they lose something like 500,000 troops in that, in that last battle.

Um, and what do all these guys say?

They say, we have to build an international system of peace.

We have to try cooperation.

We, I mean, if you read Eisenhower's speeches today, there's Bernie Sanders could not get away with giving those speeches.

He would be regarded as a wild-eyed idealist, but it's precisely because these people went through the worst that they knew how important it was to try for the best.

And in doing that, they created a world that has endured in peace and prosperity for 75 years.

So I look at that and I worry so much that we are, we are squandering this precious legacy rather than revering it and building on it and asking ourselves, okay, what is the next stage of idealism, which is really what we should be thinking about.

It's, it's, you know, what your first book was all about, but, you know, not to look back and say, well, in the past things have, but to look and say, what are the big breaks?

Where have we actually moved up where we move forward and how can we sustain that?

Because I do believe we will.

And I believe, I believe we can, uh, you know, if we were to take this as a challenge and say to ourself, uh, we, we have the opportunity to make sure that the next time something like this happens, we get out of it together.

We use it to build it together.

Human beings, biologically have survived as well as they have because of a strange mix of competition and cooperation.

We need enough competition to bring out the best in us, but we've always needed cooperation to survive.

And I think we need that more than ever.

POWER: Alright Fareed, what a great way to end.

GRAHAM: Great, great moderating, Samantha, and Fareed as usual, you're a step or two ahead of the rest of us in analyzing the present and framing how to think about the future.

Thanks to all of you for tuning in, from us here at Politics and Prose stay well.

And well-read.

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