An Evening With Fareed Zakaria

[Music] welcome i'm will invadin executive director of the clement center for national security and a professor at the lbj school both here at the university of texas at austin on behalf of the clements center the lbj foundation and the straus center for international security and law pleased to welcome you to tonight's conversation with fareed zakaria dr zakaria is the host of farid zakaria gps for cnn worldwide a contributing editor to the atlantic the columnist for the washington post and the author of three new york times best-selling books his latest book which he'll be discussing with us tonight is ten lessons for a post-pandemic world i can also attest that he's one of our most trenchant observers of international politics and his insights into the complex ferment of global affairs exert great influence on scholars and policy makers alike this evening's conversation is moderated by lbj presidential library director dr mark lawrence so please join me in welcoming mark lawrence and farid zakaria well hello everyone and welcome it's such a pleasure to have this opportunity to talk with one of the really great and certainly very influential commentators on international affairs these days fareed zakaria thank you so much for joining us and particularly for this opportunity to talk about this tremendous new book 10 lessons for a post-pandemic world thanks so much mark it's a pleasure to be here i'm i'm a big fan of lbj so i i'm particularly honored that's great great to have you um like a lot of us i've of course spent much of the last 15 years just trying to keep up with the news cycle in connection with kovit uh you know the latest on the vaccines the latest infection rates and so forth what i love about your book is that it steps back from all of that day by day almost hour-by-hour all-consuming detail and enables us to think think big to think about the big takeaways from from the pandemic obviously these implications of the pandemic are going to be with us for a very long time to come and mostly i think very appropriately you focus on the future but and that's where i want to spend the bulk of our time um but but you also spend some time at the beginning of the book sort of capturing the magnitude of the covid pandemic by placing it in the context of the last 20 years or so you make the case in fact that the pandemic is just one of three shocks as you call them that have um that have hit the world in the last 20 years or so could you start off by talking about those those three shocks and and what they have in common absolutely so i mean one way to think about this is to recognize that the world we are living in uh was created in 1991 i mean that metaphorically of course but the collapse of the soviet union ushered in a fundamentally different international system than the one that we'd live in before it was a system in which rather than a bipolar world divided between the united states and the soviet union you had basically a single global system in which every country had decided to participate a single global economy in which everyone was trading buying selling investing and a political system largely undergirded by american power and in this system what we have experienced has been extraordinary growth dynamism extraordinary technological progress this amazing information revolution but also enormous amount of volatility i mean if you just think about the financial crashes alone since we've been in this system you have the mexican crisis the east asian crisis the russian debt default the long-term capital implosion the collapse of the tech market in uh 2000 the collapse of the housing market the the what was often called the global financial crisis and now the pandemic induced financial crisis um and that's all in just 30 years so what i tried to convey was the degree to which we get jolted in this very open fast moving system 911 of course is the great geopolitical joke uh and interestingly like all the other ones it starts from something very small 19 men with box cutters uh boarding commercial airplanes uh which turns into a multi-trillion dollar multi-continent multi-year uh war the global financial crisis which starts with these little things called credit default swaps which nobody even had heard off and then they they they essentially snowball into an industry larger than the size of the entire global economy and then they crash and bring the whole global economy down with them and then this pandemic which starts as a as a virus in a bat in hubei province uh and then has become what we now realize it is i will say the thing about these three crises is they are all asymmetrical they start with something small and snowball into something big but this is the biggest i mean if you think about 911 if you were living in japan or south south africa it meant very little to you um it was largely a west versus middle east conflict uh but global financial crisis if you were not part of that highly technical uh collateralized leveraged world derivatives india indonesia um most of africa it didn't affect you that much this crisis has affected every human being on the planet it will be the the most significant event we will go through in our lifetimes i think given that we're still in the throes of the pandemic in many ways did you have any concern as you were writing the book that not enough time had passed to really draw out the big lessons very much so i mean the way i wrote the book it's funny that you mentioned that you you know you feel like you sometimes get married in the details um i wrote the book right at the start of the pandemic because i wanted to try to understand what was going on and what were the likely consequences really for myself and for my for my show for the column and as i started to think about it i realized that there was there was a value in thinking this through as well as i could and sharing it with others so that we could all try to understand it better place it in historical context look forward into the future so i get up about 6 30 in the morning i wouldn't look at the newspapers i wouldn't look at television twitter nothing because i wanted to not get mired in the details and i would think about the medium i would in a sense fix my eye on the middle distance asking myself what is this going to look like five years from now what are we going to be thinking when we think look back and i would read i would talk to people i would think i would make notes and i do that till about 11 in the morning so every morning i would do this seven days a week and i did it for four and a half months and that the book is the product of that so it's very much an effort to try to imagine what the world is going to look like and absolutely i worried very much that i'd get it wrong the first thing i had to get right was the science because i wanted to be sure that within about two years we would in fact be in a post-pandemic world and so i had to understand whether the white vaccine was likely remember before this if you had asked somebody when will a vaccine uh you know appear on the horizon most people would have said 10 years but these extraordinary advances in in biotechnology particularly the mrna process gave me a lot of confidence that you know we would we would have a vaccine in the advanced world within a year and a half they actually did it in nine months but that was the the first big bet i had to make and then many others subsequently has the rollout of the vaccine alter your thinking in connection with any of the big conclusions that you come to in the book not the vaccine no for the most part the conclusions in the book have held up pretty well i would say the one big surprise has been the degree to which uh well two things one there's been more variation uh even within groups that i thought i understood so i thought that it would take a certain pattern in the third world which is that you would first it would first affect the most globalized part of the world then it would affect the third world and the third world would be affected uh somewhat uniformly and badly because these were densely crowded uh cities and places like you know nigeria or kenya or india and the odd thing has been some of that has been true much of that has been true there very strangely some places that have not been as affected uh and not as badly uh so right now as you know we're going through a big spike in india but meanwhile pakistan is not particularly affected you're seeing a spike in the philippines but other southeast asian countries are not as affected so and and not all of it is related to government policy the big um place that i would uh i would change the book i'm not you know really don't think it needs changing but uh i'm i'm going to write an afterward to the preface and the big takeaway there is i focus a lot on governments and stay in state and state capacity and who did well and who did badly and that's very appropriate but it turns out you have to look beyond the state you have to look at societies as well so look at a country like germany the state did a very good job crushing the first wave but they experienced a pretty bad second wave why turns out the germans just got fed up of listening to the social distancing and observing it um and come oktoberfest they relaxed they violated the rules french did the same in their august french vacation and so some of this has to do with michelle gelfand the sociologist talks about loose and tight societies societies that are instinctively willing to follow rules and societies that are instinctively ready to defy rules uh you won't be surprised to learn that the us and israel for example are instinctively loose societies in which it took a lot more effort to get them to uh to adopt social distancing rules the west in general is is loose compared to east asia which is tight so that's the one layer i think i missed in the book that that you know the government can tell you to to follow these social distancing rules uh unless you're in china there's still a lot of leeway that people have really fascinating and let me take you now into some of your lessons all of them deserve elaborate discussion but in the interest of time i want to take you to two or three that really jumped out at me and one of them is closely connected to what you were just speaking about your lesson two you conclude that chapter with these memorable words what matters is not the quantity of government but the quality and this might be a lesson that registers especially powerfully in the united states of course where lots of people have resisted health precautions as an intrusion a sort of unwarranted intrusion by governmental authority would you would you talk a little bit about what you mean by the distinction between quantity and quality of government and and how this difference is pivotal to understanding the ways in which different societies have responded to coven i'm glad you asked about that mark because i really do think it's such a central uh such a central lesson for america so when americans think about government first of all when we think about government we think about how to limit it there's a deep anti-status tradition that comes out of the revolution that comes out really the out of the english colonists and their experience with the tudor monarchy so it's a very deep you know something deep in the dna of the country but when we think about it even more more instinctively now in in modern terms we tend to think about the the the great debate of the 20th century where she was about the quantity of government you know if you have a big government it means you're getting closer to socialism if you have a small government it means you're allowing for more freedom and that debate dominated our lives for a long time but it's really not the debate of the 21st century you know the soviet union is dead communism is finished countries are broadly speaking some variety of capitalist countries the real debate is about the quality of government not how much government you have but how well can it function how well does it execute its tasks so that's about do you have a bureaucracy that is well conceived well structured staffed with experts trusted by the public and it turns out that the governments in east asia do that very well by the way on very lean budget so taiwan for example which uh probably gets the gold star gold medal for handling kobit uh spends one-third as much per capita as the united states does on healthcare it's not about quantity it's about quality germany by contrast has a big government but also a very competent government and manages very well uh and what really mattered it was whether or not you were acting intelligently so let me give you the example of taiwan taiwan as i said probably did best right next to china huge numbers of visitors coming back and forth from china in a country of 22 million people taiwan has 10 covet deaths to put that in perspective new york state has 19 million people and we have 40 000 dead i can't remember the number for texas but about the same population um and i think it's i think i'm right into that it's about 20 000 debt so you have you know these extraordinary divergence between taiwan and really most of the rest of the world why they acted early and aggressively early because they recognized having had experience with sars and mirrors and h1n1 that you know it's important to get to these things fast because otherwise you have exponential growth they were aggressive about it because they decided that better on the side of too much rather than too little and intelligent is probably the most important so what the taiwanese did was they said particularly in the early stages very small numbers of people get coveted the most important thing is to isolate those people but really isolate them do contact racing and isolate anyone who's suspected of having coping so in total they did that mandatory 14-day quarantines for 240 000 people roughly sounds like a large number it's one percent of the population so by taking one percent of the population out of circulation they were able to achieve the result i described without a day's lockdown now when i tell americans this they say oh but we could never do this because we're you know we're the land of the free and i say okay so you're saying that you couldn't deprive one percent of the population of their freedom for 14 days but you were willing to shut down the entire economy of the united states put tens of millions of people out of work force businesses to stop operating and that's okay that's not an infringement of people's civil liberties so you know it's like we're just doing it dumb and they're doing it smart that's the way to think about it rather than getting into a debate about big or small government one of the questions you really sparked in my mind is why has the united states fared so poorly in comparison to other countries and i suppose there's a there's an easy answer in a partisan answer which is to say well it's the trump administration it was anti-science it made bad decisions left right and center in the early phases of the the pandemic but you seem to be suggesting that the problem runs much deeper than that really there are political traditions that run through american history even since its inception that limit the ability of the united states to respond effectively to these um societal problems where would you strike the balance um and and perhaps along the way you could reflect a little bit on the specific decisions of the trump administration yeah so i think you you're absolutely right that trump i don't want to let trump off the hook but it's much deeper than trump um trump definitely handled the pandemic badly he denied it was happening he wanted to he wanted to sort of wish it away uh in some ways very similar to what prime minister modi uh did in india for the last few months which is you know to sort of hope that it would go away resume economic activity on the on the theory that it's going to go away and then to be surprised when you're caught with a very big second wave um i think the best way to look at trump's uh uh response though is to look at by comparing to bite with the vaccine when biden comes into office about 700 000 people are being vaccinated every day last week we were up to 4.5 million people being vaccinated every day and this is you know 50 60 days into into biden's tenure you started to see this massive ramp up um it's gone down a little because of the jnj pause but i think it'll be back up we've really we will really basically be the first country to fully vaccinate first large country outside of israel and the uae to fully vaccinate as many people as are willing to take the vaccine which will probably happen within i think two months why because biden believes in government he believes in it you know that there's a way to make it effective he worked with government rather than against it and he put the power of the presidency entirely on this issue and so you had czars you had the chief of staff everyone started looking at this you know from a daily point of view that makes a huge difference now the reason i say it's not just trump is you can't do that with everything you know if the president chooses to take one thing and make it like the moon landing or the manhattan project which is what the biden administration did with vaccines you can do that but the fundamental problem is we have an anti-status country we have a country in which individual liberty is venerated you have a country with massive center state local government variation and you know power often residing with the local government not with the national or even the state government i think there's something like 9 000 different public health authorities in the united states and i want to be clear there are many things for which all this is very good you know for the flourishing of liberty and democracy and autonomy i'm a big fan of of american decentralization uh you know brandeis called called the local government the laboratories of democracy in america all true but it does turn out that there are some things like a public health crisis for which this is very bad because you need uniform standards you cannot have a national lockdown if every state has a different policy you cannot uh you know have national mandates on mask wearing if half the states do it and half the states don't taiwan clearly benefited from the fact that they had a centralized database where they could immediately figure out whether somebody was infected what their status was you know and they have a universal single-payer healthcare system so i'm not even saying that's always a great thing i'm saying in this kind of there are certain kinds of crises where collective action becomes very important and american government is not structured for collective action of that kind uh so i would say when you look at something like public health my own opinion when you look at elections and you see the crazy divergence that happens with you know not just among states but within a state where some counties use hangar use you know paper ballots and other ones use butterfly and others you there are those kinds of problems in america that are because of american decentralization and the final point i'd make is all this has clearly been exacerbated by a 40-year campaign against the federal government and against government in general the kind of reagan thatcher revolution in which you basically starved almost every government agency you funded the military social security medicare medicaid um but everything else was was left threadbare um and you know it has consequences you you you cannot expect even the cdc or the fda or these places if they're funded poorly disrespected demeaned and overruled to be able to somehow solve a major crisis one of your lessons brings us to the question of popular attitudes towards science and scientific expertise and again you have a very memorable line at the very end of that chapter you suggest that ordinary people would certainly do well to pay more attention to scientific expertise but also you say the experts need to listen to the people what do you mean by that so i was trying to figure out this phenomenon of people being so suspicious of um the scientists the doctors the medical experts the heads of the fda the cdc and and it was clearly much more widespread than any of us expected to see and i realized that it was actually caught up in something much larger which is perhaps one of the defining political features of america right now which is a class warfare you know michael lynn one of the people one of the scholars at your school talks about this very very intelligently what you have in america perhaps more than anything else right now is a bifurcation of the country into two classes and one of which would be described roughly as a somewhat more educated somewhat more urban class and the other side would be a somewhat less educated somewhat more rural uh class that is the big divide electorally if you look at voting for biden over trump over trump overbide in 2020 single biggest predictor is party affiliation so party loyalty still matters second strongest predictor of where you voted was whether you had some college education uh if you did you voted for biden if you didn't you voted for trump third strongest predictor was whether you lived in a metro area if you lived in in a metro area you voted for biden if you didn't you you voted for trump but that doesn't even quite capture because that's like a political demographic divide but there is a cultural class divide you know on the one hand people who go to starbucks and eat sushi and do yoga and on the other side people who live a very different kind of life each one suspicious of the other and perhaps most crucially the rural folk really resenting the sense that the country is being run by these you know educated urban professional class you know there's a wonderful book called white working class which points out working class people don't dislike rich people what they really dislike are professionals people with college education you know postgraduate education lawyers doctors consultants uh people who they think for the most part do nothing you know journalists academics consultants uh but have enormous power within the system and so the the suspicion of that scientific advice was wrapped up with this reality and i think it's on us the people who are more educated the people who do live in these you know urban areas and who do in a sense have more more standing more more more power in the system let's be honest to understand uh and to try to communicate better and to try to be more empathetic and i think we we are we don't do that well uh i think that you know i got it i got a letter or i can't remember exactly what it was right after uh trump was elected by a guy i think he lived in rural mississippi and he was telling me just imagine what my life looks like every movie i see is set in new york san francisco chicago every song comes out of there every tv show comes out of there it's as if we don't exist and i think we need to recognize that more and find a way to communicate the dignity of everybody's life the the importance of honoring every you know uh i mean we we all talk about tolerance and and and you know uh kind of celebrating diversity but we forget that there is also that diversity which we have to celebrate and honor which is people who live in rural areas who may be less educated work with their hands not with them but not with their heads um all of it you know we're all god's children in a sense and we've lost that somehow and until we can fix that and i don't you know i think it's going to be very hard but until we can fix that don't expect miraculously that because somebody with a phd or you know who works at a fancy institute with a fancy with a fancy name uh says you know climate change is real you should wear a mask you know the virus spreads this way the people will just unquestioningly listen they won't there's a lot of suspicion there and we need to work to overcome it and the way to do it is not to just say look i have a phd so listen to me you entitle one of your chapters one of your lessons very bluntly inequality is going to get worse you do some interesting things i think in the book to show that globally if not necessarily within the united states inequality had actually been becoming somewhat less of less striking over recent decades but your the lesson you draw in in the book is very stark inequality is going to get worse what is it about the pandemic what are the specific mechanisms that you think will drive uh widening inequality in the years ahead so there are two fundamental dynamics which i'm making this is probably the most troubling of the consequences of the pandemic the first one is the rise of the digital economy the rise of digital life if you will um and you know we can all see it look uh many of us have been able to continue to work uh despite the pandemic and the essential paralysis that has caused to the physical economy um anyone who know who who manipulates words numbers computer code images symbols uh i think robert reich once called them symbolic analysts all those people are doing fine they're they're working online they're generating the same amount of income roughly that they were before but we have to realize that that's probably 30 or 40 percent of the country there is another group of people probably another 30 to 40 percent of the country who work with their hands you know manipulate physical objects not symbolic objects people who work in restaurants hotels theme parks retail um cruise ships all these people are experiencing the great depression and now it's been cushioned by all these covet payments but the reality is there are no jobs there you can see this the federal reserve after i wrote the book the federal reserve put out a chart where they showed you what effect uh with the effect on unemployment for the top earners income earners and the bottom income earners for the last four recessions very interestingly and i didn't realize this in most recessions the rich and the poor lose jobs at about the same pace in this recession the recession of 2020 by the end of 2020 the top 25 income earners in this country had gained jobs not lost them the bottom 25 percent had lost 30 of their jobs which is equivalent to the great depression that divergence is just so stark and it's probably an acceleration of trends that were happening anyway which is the digital elite are doing better than the non-digital working class in this country and so that trend has been accelerated the second uh acceleration of inequality comes from the fact that there are countries around the world that will be able to issue debt that will be able to borrow money to provide covert relief to uh to their citizens the united states european union britain switzerland china japan but that's a small group of countries most countries will have to borrow at high interest rates in a currency they don't control the us dollar probably and that's a very different uh outlook and for the india's of the world the turkeys the brazil's i think it's going to be a much much rougher ride we are worried about can we take on all this debt but that's a kind of theoretical worry about what might happen 25 years from now for most countries they face a much much more difficult uh scenario and so the greatest good fortune of the last two or three decades which as you say had been the why the narrowing of global inequality as people in india and china escaped from poverty that that mechanism is now in reverse the imf and the world bank have already estimated that about 150 million people fell back into poverty into extreme poverty that's under two dollars a day in 2020 and my own guess is that you will have at least another 100 million people fall back into poverty in 2021 let's talk for a minute about geopolitics something we haven't hit on directly yet i suppose an optimist these days might say that the pandemic is reminding us all that there are more important things than great power rivalries we have these global problems that demand international cooperation and yet we also see at the same time a resurgence of great power rivalries how in your view will the pandemic play into those great power rivalries and i think i take the lesson from your book that it's very likely to make those uh rivalries worse and more enduring but i'd love to hear your thoughts about that well you you present the dilemma very well because i in fact you know the pandemic affects us all we're only going to get out of it if we can solve the problem for everyone if most of the world gets vaccinated large parts of it are not going to be able to produce or buy the vaccine at market prices so you know the recipe is set or the stage is set for a certain amount of international cooperation burden sharing uh you know a recognition that we are all in this together and i think there is some of that there is that dynamic at work i mean you see it in the biden administration's approach now to third world countries particularly india but there is also the reality that it is exacerbating the um the nationalism the narrowness the selfishness of countries because everyone wants to take care of their own and it's um you know you're looking around whenever things go badly you will look around for somebody to blame and if it's you know some if it's a foreigner so much the better i mean if you think about 9 11 right there there is a natural tendency to say there's there's those people out there that did this to us and so the pandemic is exacerbating the rivalry between the united states and china it's exacerbating the great power competition between these two countries and because this is the new defining feature of the international system the bipolar reality of these two powers america and china towering above all else uh it's likely to make things much more tense and you're already seeing that you know i wrote the book before the biden administration came into power but i predicted that you know essentially that the biden administration on this issue would be more like the trump administration than people uh imagined and it's proved to be true because it's a it's a structural reality it's not about personalities so i worry a lot that we are going to end up in a uh in a kind of competitive downward spiral where the two most powerful countries in the world are competing on everything and there are some areas where competition is very good economics things like that but imagine if we end up in an arms race in a space race in an artificial intelligence race and a quantum computing race and a cyber attack race um you know you end up with the less with a less open less dynamic less growth-oriented world in which the chinese are carving out their supply chains and their technologies and we carve out ours every country is being forced to make a decision uh it's back to the cold war except for a very complicated and complicating factor which is during the cold war we traded with the soviet union five billion dollars a year we trade with china five billion dollars every day so you're layering on this competition onto a world that is highly interdependent with these flows of goods investments moving by the second across the world and what will that look like and how disruptive will it be you know this is this is one of the areas where i don't actually think we know what the future will look like you can see you know one one of the things i write about in the book is you know is you people talk about about the future as if it's out there and it's our job to kind of figure it out it's not out there it will be shaped by what we do and nowhere is this more true than in the u.s china you know we could imagine a world of competition but also cooperation and a certain degree of an effort to keep a global system together we could also imagine aspiring downwards to a new cold war which by the way could also turn into a not so cold war i mean there are flash points where there could be military uh crises such as over taiwan and and you know and no neither side would want to back down and so that could you could go down a very dark pathway you anticipated where i wanted to go uh with with with my next question um one of the things i love about your book is that each of the lesson seems to contain within it choices the world can choose to respond to the consequences of the pandemic in this way or that way and sometimes there are more than two choices and you're very careful in your conclusion to say that all of these options are open nothing is determined nothing is set in stone and you memorably uh uh tease out this this theme with some of your most striking uh passages i think a question that's that's on my mind and also frankly came to me from a number of the members of the friends of the lbj library who are invited to submit questions in advance is on the whole what is your level of optimism that we as a national society or as a global society will choose the more constructive paths that you sketch out so nicely well i'm an immigrant so by nature i'm optimistic i mean i came to this country to make a better life for myself um i think of this country as the land of the future and the land of opportunity so i i tend to be optimistic and i tend to be optimistic in general so what i guess what i'm saying is you know color this with a little bit of that uh of that uh innate optimism but the way i think about it is this um one of the great tragedies of the pandemic is that it has caused huge disruption right but one of the great benefits of the pandemic is that it has caused huge disruption it is very hard to change except when your back is against the wall except when things are you know already in disarray there's very good studies of countries that have to go through serious economic reform uh so-called structural economic reform and they all conclude that countries only do that when they're in a crisis when things have gotten really bad when you know their backs are against the wall i mean that's why we have the phrase nobody fixes the roof when the sun is shining right there is something there that it's easy to continue business as usual to be a little complacent if you're not facing a crisis so the great virtue of this pandemic is it has created this enormous disruption it has created an enormous uh and it's not just the disruption but it's also given us in a weird way time to reflect on society time to reflect on our own lives i think you know i i think it's not an accident that the black lives matter stuff uh boiled over during this pandemic it's you know it has allowed societies to think about how do how are we organized how should we be organized if you're shutting down the whole economy anywhere if you're providing relief anyway what should what are we trying to make happen uh how do we build back better right so i think that provides in it within a seat of a real opportunity and i think to give the biden administration credit you're seeing that right we are we are making more ambitious efforts than we've ever made i mean look the the uh these two bills that biden has put forward in my time in the united states i came here in 1982. every major fiscal effort of the united states government since my uh my time in america 30 37 38 years uh has been either tax cuts for the rich or a war this is the first time you have major fiscal efforts really since the johnson administration that are largely directed towards the poor or the lower middle class the the covet relief bill contains within it a child credit proposal that most experts believe will cut childhood poverty in the united states by half in one year so think about that and think about what it means it means we always had the capacity to cut childhood poverty in half in the united states we never used it you know we're we're a rich country that acts poor and so you could imagine many such changes not all of which are that expensive uh you know if we could imagine investing in the future whether it's green technology we could imagine investing in cities and finding ways to allow people who are at the very bottom of the scale to move up this is the greatest tragedy in america right now which is that social mobility economic mobility is stronger in northern europe than it is in the united states it's stronger in canada than it is in the united states and this is the greatest tragedy because after all what is the american dream the american dream is that you can do better than your parents that there is this escalator or this ladder of opportunity and that has stopped functioning in the united states so if we have to spend a couple trillion dollars to get that restarted to rebuild those that ladder of opportunity i think it'd be it would make a huge difference you know because this is an incredibly productive society incredibly dynamic we still dominate the world economically all the technologies of the future america is a cutting edge on geopolitically yes china is you know a new competitor but look put it in perspective we have 59 3d allies in the world china has two uh sorry one china has one north korea we have 800 bases in the world china has three uh you know we have 11 aircraft carriers china has one and a half we're doing fine what we need to do is to is to invest in the future to ensure that the next generation of americans have the same opportunities have the same abilities as possible and it's particularly true for you know minority uh particularly black uh americans i mean johnson uh president johnson has that wonderful memorable line where he says you can't suddenly take the chains off people and say to them you're out you know you're at the starting line now just run like everybody else you've got to help them equip them so that they can run that race i think that's what we've gotten very bad at we haven't been able to help people run this race in the meritocracy that we've created and i support the meritocracy but i think we need to understand that it isn't functioning and the way for it to function is for us to really equalize opportunity if we could do that i think we'll be able to do a lot and and if we can do that and america is confident we'll we'll we'll lead the world and we'll set an agenda for the world as we have for the last 75 years where we have an enlightened self-interest where we do things that are good for us but they're also good for others in the world we never had that much coercive power what we had was the power of ideas you know and we we could come up with an idea that worked for us but also kind of helped help helped others out people looked at it and said yeah that's a good idea and we and we've got to be the organizer in chief the agenda setter in chief and that's how we've built this open international system uh you know not through brute force but through the power of ideas the power of example so i i still am very hopeful and i think that the key to it is we've got to be confident you know we need to run fast but we don't need to run scared another question that came from our audience and i think perhaps a fitting place to end much as i'd love to keep talking with you all day is what can ordinary people do you write so eloquently about governments and broad trends but some of our listeners i think would love to know what they can do in their day-to-day lives that could point in at least small ways toward these happier outcomes that you sketch um probably the first is take democracy seriously i think that we don't do that as as citizens get involved for the vote but not just for the at the national level you know they're the american government happens at the local level and you have to take it seriously at the local level and you have to figure out whether you have good people who are in charge uh representing you if not you've got to find good people you know it's it's it's a there's a more active aspect that everyone needs to take than than happens right now because when you don't do that what happens is the most fanatical minorities dominate that's what's really happened to america politically in the last 30 or 40 years uh is you have the the the primary electorate and it's not even just the primary electorate now it's a sliver of the prime primary elect electorate you know if you will that the active users of twitter are dominating and defining american politics and just so people understand what we're talking about is probably five percent of the electorate dominating and defining and shaping uh american politics that is and and that five percent is the most extreme the most uh confrontational the the you know the people who really want to burn the other house down that's a terrible place for it to be and it's happening largely because the vast majority of us are too silent too passive uh and and don't get involved you know and we we have to the second i would say is you know use the pandemic as a way to think about yourself as well in the book i talk a lot about the kind of external supports and external changes that need to happen to build resilience into the system to create better structures of of of society you know maybe that that's sort of the in the great western tradition of political commentary which is how can we dominate our external surroundings and shape them to make us happy maybe you know because i grew up in india there is also another important equally important task which is what are the internal supports uh that we need to make ourselves internally more resilient more mindful more uh happy you know what what is this dynamic taught each of us about who we really are what we really need for me certainly it's made me much more profoundly aware of how important family and close friends were to me how many of the things that i did day to day were just not that important and i've invested too much of my time and energy and ego in you know a a business meeting here a lunch meeting there dinner meeting there that the things that gave me real joy were deepening the connections with the people closest to me uh recognizing finding ways to be more at peace with myself not by constantly doing but by being and reflecting you know so and for each person it's going to be different for some people it's going to be you you know you it's family for other people it's going to be meditation for others it'll be you know running for 10 miles a day whatever it is i think it's an opportunity to you really is a blessing that allows us to say what makes me happy what makes me fulfilled uh and to take the rest of your life uh and to use those insights to to create a more happy more fulfilled life for for the however however much longer we have because it it's very rare for something like this to happen where you have a literally a kind of pause where you can sit back and say all right let me let me really try to figure this out and and i think i think a lot of people are doing that fareed zakaria thank you so much for those eloquent words and for the time you've taken out of your busy schedule for this wonderful conversation and thank you most of all for this fabulous book 10 lessons for a post pandemic world really appreciate your time thank you mark thank you for having me it's an honor i'm mark up to grove the president and ceo of the lbj foundation and i want to thank you for joining us and thanks to our sponsors the moody foundation and st david's healthcare copies of freed zakaria's book 10 lessons for a post-pandemic world are available at lbjsstore.com we depend on your membership support to produce our programming if you aren't currently a friends of the lbj library member or simply haven't renewed your membership please do so at lbjfriends.org you'll be doing so at a great time on may 22nd the lbj library will celebrate its 50th anniversary on may 20th we'll feature a program on the library's archival crown jewels the lbj telephone tapes featuring presidential historian michael beschloss and others then on may 22nd we'll offer a video on the library's 10 most memorable moments of the past half century from lbj library director mark lawrence in june you'll be able to enjoy programs with pulitzer prize-winning author annette gordon reed and former u.s senator and virginia governor chuck robb thanks again and i hope to see you again soon

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Length: 49min 20sec (2960 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021